After succumbing to peer pressure, I've decided to do the e-Test.
Here's the results
your e-score: 88
your e-group: e-expert
your e-ranking: 381/9664
Try it yourself ...
Contrary to the opinion given
in this article, I believe its important for us to realize that habitual contraction of words is in fact a phenomenon which degrades our language. In linguistics, the concept of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) shows that a person finds it more difficult to learn the basics of a language when the language structure becomes more simplified than their first language.
As English is not the largest spoken language (
http://www.aneki.com/languages.html), it is only apparent that more people need to learn English to communicate in it. After all - English does power most of the worlds computers. So why is it so important to keep contracting the language?
Soon, if we followed the advice of Brian, our majestic British English will become like the following quote:
Source: http://www.qarxis.com/EuroEnglish
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The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of Europe, rather than German, which was the other possibilty. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish":
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with " f ". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the 4th yar, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with"z" and "w" with "y". During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaing "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leteres. After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no more trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer.
ZE DREM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!!!!! (Und zen ve vil take over ze vorld!!!!!)
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Another update in the war between custom single-developer written software and SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) implementation at the enterprise level.
These MIS systems are critical to business processes and as most executives say, critical for competitive profit. However, when the process of implementing and maintaining MIS and Decision Support Systems (DSS) becomes paramount, keeping middle managers updated with latest tools that follow industry best practices becomes a burden on the IT department. This is what happens when the IT department fail to see their vision...
For some time now the Large Data Types has been trumpeted around as the next best thing in the T-SQL world. There is a great entry about it on Fotia
(See here: http://www.fotia.co.uk/fotia/DY.13.VarCharMax.aspx)
However, when you try to do a PRINT command in SQL Management Studio, you will only print out the first 8,000 characters. I still haven't figuired out why that is the case, but perhaps it is a limit on the text-box in SQL Management Studio. Anyway - hopefully you won't need to spend hours trying to find out why your VARCHAR(MAX) local variable is not holding more than 8,000 characters.
A quick test is the function "datalength" which will return the 'intelligent' length of the character sequence.
Hey All,
Today I was purchasing a cake for my brother for his birthday, and it needed to be done by Friday. The checkout girl said the earliest would be by about Sunday. Anyway - I had a digital image which I scanned from the image that was to be the icing on the cake. So I asked to send it to them digitally.
They said that it would be fine, but a 2Mb limit. It was a huge A4 size poster, so I informed her that it would be a little bigger than that. Luckily the Regional Manager for Northern NSW was there - one of the top honcho's of Michel's. He rang up a friend back in the admin side of things and got the thumbs up for me to host the image.
I had to get the image in by 4:30pm. Got back to my computer in the office at about 4:12pm, and then had a call from the NSW Bakery Operations Supervisor who asked how things were as he had not got my image yet.
To cut a long story short, this amazing guy took it on himself to get my order all ok. It was incredible. I am REALLY impressed with their customer service. Looks like I'll get my brothers cake tomorrow, all because some guys cared about their customer.
So anyone of you who are going through a shopping centre and see Michel's Patisserie there - stop and buy a coffee or a slice of cake. They are really worth it.
Remember my scathing comment about the FSF foundations BadVista Campain?
Well, here is something that somewhat redeems FSF in my eyes. Ironically, it comes from the Open Source camp.
This article describes how a group of individuals gave out Open Source Software that ran on Windows machines. Ie, they made the impression that Open Source was not just GNU/Linux.
This is an initiave to educate users into using applications which are available in GNU/Linux, in essence future-proofing those users.
Recently I was on the FSF browsing about when I found quite an interesting website:
According to this article [CNet News, in new window] a new start-up company has created a piece of software for ISP's. This software detects if a user is going to a known phishing site, and shows a warning, along with ads from Yahoo, and other sources.
So we are creating a good anti-phishing campaign with unsolicited advertising (spam). I don't know my stance on this yet, but why is every little bit of screen real-estate is being used for advertising.
There needs to be an Internet governing body for controlling the advertising on reputable sites. (Seen yahoo recently?)
I work as a systems developer at a large food manufacturing firm in Australia. Recently we have been fighting with Microsoft's Analysis Services about a certain cube we were wanting processed.
The quick details -
Database size: 25.6Gb
Dimensions: 9
Storage Model: MOLAP
The data was the entire set of sales figures for the years 2002 to present in weekly installments. We had to process this cube during off-peak hours as the server it was running on was a high-demand corporate server. Taking this into account we set it to run at 5:30pm (when most of the people using the server had gone home for the day) and were expecting it to be processed in the morning.
Arriving in the morning we saw a large red cross and a clever error message: "Error: General network error!"
Well - after a few weeks of fiddling and trying to process it we made it to the "Successful" stage - process time: 50 hours.
No way could we run it at that, so we started cutting things down. In the end we removed 3 unnecessary dimensions and culled the data up to 2005. Then switching to ROLAP for better aggregation of older data we doubled the size of the database with the aggregations. That failed miserably, so we took it back to MOLAP.
These are the statistical differences between the two methods:
Old Cube Setup
ROLAP
At 50% performance gain, 235 aggregations @ 3,434.6Mb
At 75% performance gain, 351 aggregations @ 16,509.7Mb
At 100% performance gain, 3624 aggregations @ 258,271.7Mb
MOLAP
At 50% performance gain, 235 aggregations @ 1,412.2Mb
At 75% performance gain, 351 aggregations @ 6,562.4Mb
At 100% performance gain, 3624 aggregations @ 99,826.5Mb
New Cube Setup
ROLAP
At 50% performance gain, 120 aggregations @ 1,052.9Mb
At 75% performance gain, 189 aggregations @ 5,700.9Mb
At 100% performance gain, 2079 aggregations @ 91,681.4Mb
MOLAP
At 50% performance gain, 120 aggregations @ 546.6Mb
At 75% performance gain, 189 aggregations @ 2,921.8Mb
At 100% performance gain, 2079 aggregations @ 45,820.4Mb
Astounding results on a 25 Gb database aren't they?
Well - the intricacies of MOLAP vs. ROLAP are well documented. However here are some empirical results which actually outline the size difference between the two storage models. For more information on Molap and Rolap data, see ROLAP and MOLAP data
As closure, the new cube processes in about 12 hours and query performance is reduced from 16 minutes to about 1 - 2 mins.
Recently becoming a reader of this interesting website I urge all of you to see the curious perversions of technology!
http://www.thedailywtf.com is where you want to go!