Halo 4 and Hadoop

  • Comments posted to this topic are about the item Halo 4 and Hadoop

  • I don't have an XBox nor do I play console games, but the concept of collecting data on how users actually use an application is interesting, and one that I believe is currently massively under-exploited. You could measure ease of navigation by looking at how much people blunder around looking at things without doing anything there before finding what they actually want. Knowing where users spend their time helps focus on where optimisation effort should be concentrated.

    Similarly, it is possible to measure how an application performs - which parts perform well, which parts are slow. The know-how to do this has existed for many years, yet it is rarely done. There is always pressure to get code out of the door, and these measurements are very much seen as expendable 'nice-to-haves'. Even applications where specific performance requirements have to be met usually don't have the means to measure that performance built-in.

    I recall doing an analysis of where an application spent its time back in the 80's. The application was an automatic test system for a telephone exchange. We found that it spent most of its time in the relay driver routines, which like the rest of the application were written in Fortran 4.

    We recoded the relay driver routines in assembly language. They were 10 times faster, and lifted overall performance enough for us to achieve the performance we needed.

  • I always turn off the "Send usage data to Microsoft" setting when installing SQL Server, but if they offered some kind of incentive for opting in, hey maybe I would change my mind and leave it checked once in a while!

  • Randy Rabin (3/28/2013)


    I always turn off the "Send usage data to Microsoft" setting when installing SQL Server, but if they offered some kind of incentive for opting in, hey maybe I would change my mind and leave it checked once in a while!

    Same here.

    Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
    _______________________________________________
    I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
    SQL RNNR
    Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
    Learn Extended Events

  • SQLRNNR (3/28/2013)


    Randy Rabin (3/28/2013)


    I always turn off the "Send usage data to Microsoft" setting when installing....

    Same here.

    I have turned it off in everything MS, and 99.9% of all other applications. I've also have steadily dropped off of doing surveys.

    From what I can tell M$ has not listened to anyone in any fashion. The office suite went to the ribbon in 2007, continued it in 2010, and I believe it is in 2012. The ribbon has not worked for me and I can't foresee a way that it ever will.

    Then at the OS level, I glanced at Win 8 but will not use it. I have Win7 as my primary OS now, but I hack it back to as close to XP as I can. AeroGlass just frustrated me for a long time.

    Probably the reason that Halo 4 has succeeded is because their head of the department told Steve Ballmer when it came to game design and backed it up with facts.



    ----------------
    Jim P.

    A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.

  • Jim P. (3/28/2013)


    SQLRNNR (3/28/2013)


    Randy Rabin (3/28/2013)


    I always turn off the "Send usage data to Microsoft" setting when installing....

    Same here.

    I have turned it off in everything MS, and 99.9% of all other applications. I've also have steadily dropped off of doing surveys.

    From what I can tell M$ has not listened to anyone in any fashion. The office suite went to the ribbon in 2007, continued it in 2010, and I believe it is in 2012. The ribbon has not worked for me and I can't foresee a way that it ever will.

    Then at the OS level, I glanced at Win 8 but will not use it. I have Win7 as my primary OS now, but I hack it back to as close to XP as I can. AeroGlass just frustrated me for a long time.

    Probably the reason that Halo 4 has succeeded is because their head of the department told Steve Ballmer when it came to game design and backed it up with facts.

    MS shouldn't listen to you. They should listen to large trends, and that isn't necessarily you. I hear lots of SQL power users thinking MS doesn't listen to them, but it seems they're often confusing listening with doing what you want.

    Win 8 is Win 7 with a different menu. I was hesitant to switch, but it works and acts like Win 7, except it boots faster. Don't get caught up in that start screen. You'll never use it outside of a tablet, and the whole tile thing fades to the background.

  • MS shouldn't listen to you. They should listen to large trends, and that isn't necessarily you. I hear lots of SQL power users thinking MS doesn't listen to them, but it seems they're often confusing listening with doing what you want.

    I'd like to think they listen to the occasional Connect request, but can't vouch for that personally.

    Win 8 is Win 7 with a different menu. I was hesitant to switch, but it works and acts like Win 7, except it boots faster.

    Not to get sidetracked but I'll second that with my own experience. OTOH if they ever turn Mgmt Studio into a Modern App I may have to move to Ora ... those other guys 😀

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/29/2013)


    MS shouldn't listen to you. They should listen to large trends, and that isn't necessarily you. I hear lots of SQL power users thinking MS doesn't listen to them, but it seems they're often confusing listening with doing what you want.

    Win 8 is Win 7 with a different menu. I was hesitant to switch, but it works and acts like Win 7, except it boots faster. Don't get caught up in that start screen. You'll never use it outside of a tablet, and the whole tile thing fades to the background.

    You're right. They shouldn't listen to me. They also shouldn't listen to the million other Office users. They also shouldn't listen to thousand of DBA's that disagree with their decisions because we're all wrong and the MS developers are always right.

    Win 8 is Win 7 with a different menu.

    Do me a favor -- delete an icon off the desktop and then get it back without a reinstall. 😀



    ----------------
    Jim P.

    A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.

  • delete an icon off the desktop

    Off the desktop or off the start menu?

  • Randy Rabin (3/29/2013)


    Off the desktop or off the start menu?

    Desktop (and for grins, try both).



    ----------------
    Jim P.

    A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.

  • Jim,

    You can dislike it, but that doesn't mean you're right or wrong. That was my point. There are hundreds of millions of office users. Lots of them like the changes, especially non-technical ones. The ribbon makes lots of work easier. It's annoying for some of us in technology, but it's not the end of the world.

    Not sure what you mean about deleting an icon. I can remove things from the start menu and put them back. I can do the same with the desktop. If there's a specific bug, and there may be, I'd be interested in knowing what it is.

  • You can dislike it, but that doesn't mean you're right or wrong. That was my point. There are hundreds of millions of office users. Lots of them like the changes, especially non-technical lazy ones.

  • Steve Jones - SSC Editor (3/29/2013)


    Jim,

    You can dislike it, but that doesn't mean you're right or wrong. That was my point. There are hundreds of millions of office users. Lots of them like the changes, especially non-technical ones. The ribbon makes lots of work easier. It's annoying for some of us in technology, but it's not the end of the world.

    Not sure what you mean about deleting an icon. I can remove things from the start menu and put them back. I can do the same with the desktop. If there's a specific bug, and there may be, I'd be interested in knowing what it is.

    You're right. I don't have to like it. I can try to get some other software.

    More times than I can count I have been handed heaps of data with messy delimiters, extraneous lines and have to put it in to some format that can be used in a database. In Word using search and replace and a modified Tables menu bar I can do it in minutes. There is no easy way to do the same thing with ribbon.

    Thank you for clarifying this for me. I guess when the prior versions no longer work, it's time to dump Office.

    -- Not sure what you mean about deleting an icon.

    I had a coworker who has played with Win8 a little. He was saying that without the Start Bar add-on app, there was no way to add an app icon back to the desktop. I don't have the details, but he is at the sys admin level to my DBA level.



    ----------------
    Jim P.

    A little bit of this and a little byte of that can cause bloatware.

  • A desktop icon is a shortcut. Easy-peezy for me to add one back.

    It's not a one click, and I certainly think not having a "create a shortcut" option from the start menu is slightly annoying, but you don't do this often.

    http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/426-73-make-shortcuts-desktop-win8

  • Jim P. (3/28/2013)


    SQLRNNR (3/28/2013)


    Randy Rabin (3/28/2013)


    I always turn off the "Send usage data to Microsoft" setting when installing....

    Same here.

    I have turned it off in everything MS, and 99.9% of all other applications. I've also have steadily dropped off of doing surveys.

    From what I can tell M$ has not listened to anyone in any fashion. The office suite went to the ribbon in 2007, continued it in 2010, and I believe it is in 2012. The ribbon has not worked for me and I can't foresee a way that it ever will.

    Then at the OS level, I glanced at Win 8 but will not use it. I have Win7 as my primary OS now, but I hack it back to as close to XP as I can. AeroGlass just frustrated me for a long time.

    Hah! I'm with you there except that I'll probably learn to use Windows 8 just so I can buy new hardware without having to foot for Windows 7 copies. There are already start menu replacements to get some familiar functions back so its not a big deal killer for me. A positive for Windows 8 from what I hear is that Microsoft is finally not expecting Moores law to continue, and they are paying some more attention to resource usage, so that will help offset the irritating UI some, at least for me.

    I know I didn't like Unity on Ubuntu, and many Gnome changes, but ultimately I'm trying to be more accepting of change. Its going to happen, and if you want to stay current with your computing, change is part of it.

    Probably the reason that Halo 4 has succeeded is because their head of the department told Steve Ballmer when it came to game design and backed it up with facts.

    Having the Steve Ballmer's around is probably just something companies have to do, ie., a cost of doing business is that you have to have some "suits" to allow the techies to ship product. Folks don't have to like it, but they probably have to accept it.

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