With the recent string of power outs we've been having one
can't help wondering if things are going downhill or not. I just hope its not a
sign of even worse things to come. Is it the lack of interest on the government
side? Is it that politics is more important than looking after the people of
the country? Or is it simply that no-one noticed that we're running so
dangerously low on resources that it takes one 'accident' to cripple a whole
province?
I'm sure we haven't felt the financial impact of this crisis yet. How many
businesses lost hours or days of work? People cannot be paid. These people
cannot pay their bills at the end of the month. They have to scale down or take
extreme measures to survive. They still have to pay taxes (to the government) and
that money is not used to look after them - instead it is used to fly
politicians on holidays to foreign countries or pay for corruption or rape
cases committed by their members....hmm
It would seem that we have lost more than just electrical power in this
country...
You can bet for who I 'won't' be making my cross on election day...
First comment I have on this is: THIS SUCKS!
Why can't we not have Halo 2 on WinXP? Yes, I know it should use DX10. This is just a Microsoft marketing scheme to get people to splash out and buy Vista! The biggest problem is hardware. In order to play/use Vista properly you will need an up to date machine which probably mean a 50GHz processor machine with 2 TB memory! Ok, that was just a joke but you get the message.
I've been waiting to play this game for a long time and now it's even going to be longer and harder to get. Anyway here is the *cough* slashdot article on it.
http://games.slashdot.org/games/06/02/09/2010238.shtml
This morning I discovered my gmail account has been 'Chat' enabled. I tested it and it works really great (don't tell the network admins about it...)
The best thing about it is simply that you require no software to be installed extra to use it. Just plain old Firefox (or IE) works fine! Ok, it might not have all the bells and whistles like msn messenger but who really use them anyway? I like this simple, straight to the point interface.
If you have a gmail account go and check if you can use chat as well!
Good one google!
Every now and then a bad thing happens that shocks us into
silence and reminds us that we must cherish the friends we have. Today we heard
of a colleague and friend of some of the people I know at work that was
brutally murdered yesterday while walking home.
People like Angie and Hannes are affected directly since
they worked with her and knew her well.
My thoughts are with you guys.
It sucks...
Nah, just joking but there are a couple of irritating things I discovered so far - and I've only started playing with it.
The installation went 'ok'. At least I did not have to reboot or do any too weird things. I chose the most default settings except for some minor things like under which account the services run etc. Why they have to install 6 different Windows services to run this 'express' version only they would know.
Then the biggest (so far) thing that really is stupid is that a database name can only be 8 characters long. In this 'modern' age why are they still stuck on this stupid limitation? Even Microsoft evolved beyond this restriction they helped to create...
Creating a new database is a mission - compare to other DB systems like Access, MySql and SQL Express. You have to use a wizard to set up a number of things. The whole process takes some time and you get the feeling you're back in the old day of doing a lot of manual set up. Obviously it must be easier than it use to be but not compared to the other 'express' or small database systems. Keep in mind the target purpose of these systems. In a full blown enterprise environment it might be acceptable.
Creating just a blank empty database already takes up 34MB of disk space! Yes, these days we have hard drives of gigabyte sizes but again, think of the purpose of what this database system is suppose to do. I tried setting the database file size settings smaller the first time but then the wizard failed and could not create the new database. Error messages did not help much (is this where Microsoft inherits their weak/useless error messages from or vice versa??)
Then there is the matter of the management front end. It's written in Java... Almost enough said. It really looks 'cheesy' and is slow. I'm sure most Java developers would not be proud of such a UI.
'Case' does not seem to be a thing they respect. Table field names all automatically get changed to upper case for you. So much for descriptive field names.
This is all stuff about just setting it up.
One good thing is that they automatically include a data provider library for .Net (and several other platforms)
The sheer number of options the admin tool give you is overwhelming. There are things I have no clue what they mean but it sounds cool!
Another cool thing I just saw a menu for is that it seems you can expose your database via web services. This is built in.
Well, I still have to set up my test database and do some performance tests. Wish me luck.