Write something interesting or helpful and get a chance to win a game of your choice (#2)

As we are transitioning towards buying digital copies of music, movies, games, and books we must remember that even companies that seem like they will never fail have failed. This means that if the company holding your music shuts down you won't be able to download of the music anymore. You may even lose all of your music because the device that you had the music on broke and you didn't have a back up or the music stored on another device. If we still had all of our music on CDs, then we could re-download the music even if the company we bought it from went out of business. We must remember that data on a server can be lost because of a hard drive failing. Servers are not perfect, they are only computers that are designed to send and receive data between itself and the web service user. They use similar parts as to what is in your laptop, desktop, and mobile device. I am not saying that buying digital copies of things is bad; I am saying you should always have a back up of an item. The older way to back up you games, music, and videos was included in the purchase. The CD was a backup in case your electronic devices broke and could not be repaired. Today, we still can back up our digital purchases (no you don't have to burn everything onto CDs). You can download the digital files onto a hard drive dedicated for backing up content you don't want to lose and this can include all of the data on your hard drive. The best thing would be to store the hard drive disconnected from your computer so the data can't be attacked by a virus or the drive broken by a power surge, but it wouldn't have to be.
That's my little helpful/insightful tip. This does not count as an entry in the giveaway. I am still level zero and won't be able to level up anytime soon. Enjoy!

Bananas are yellow fruit, you peel them and then you eat them.
They grow on banana trees, they aren't vegetables.
Things you could do/make with bananas:
1-Fruit cocktail.
2-Banana juice. ?
3-Fried chopped bananas. This is actually a real thing...
4-Pretend that it's a gun and re-live your childhood.
5-Make banana flavored ice cream. It's not that tasty.
6-Plant bananas in the ground to grow new banana trees and have more bananas.
7-Kill people. You know... put it on the ground infront of a lava pit and let the victim step on it.
8-Feed monkeys.
9-Pretend that it's a rare kind of corn and sell it for the hungry people around the world. ??? profit.
10-Finally, eat it to get all that delicious potassium.
11-One more, bananas would make you slip as soon as they touch you.
For example, if someone threw a banana on your elbow, you'd fall as well.
However, If someone threw an elbow on a banana.. JUST DON'T. Okay?

View attached image.

Go see how big the world is, before you find out how small it can become.

I am not an adventurous spirit. Sure, I've climbed my share of trees during my childhood, and I've ventured beyond the reaches of my town on occassion to take in the sights and sounds of our capital city. Every year for the best part of my youth I went with my parents in our caravan to such faraway places as France with it's traffic jams and a million campinggrounds, or Croatia and it's beautiful coastline, before and after the war. During those trips my world never really got that much bigger, just the surroundings changed. You drag your live along in this box on wheels, you eat a baguette or some cevapcici, get more than tipsy on some local brew, but a feeling of security, familiairity, is never far away.

When I finished highschool I had to make some big decisions, one big decision, what would my future hold for me? All I was sure about was that I did not know. I was 18, legally an adult, but I had no idea what I wanted, how to shape the next 47 years of my life till I got to retire from whatever carreer would come of this one decision. I had always been told I was smart, by my school, my parents, my friends, they all saw me as intelligent, the one with the right answer. Could they really be so wrong? I had never felt dumber, more insecure, more alone, I was totally clueless and so scared to disappoint.

I put Uni off for a year and got a job, nothing special, but I liked it and my collegues were nice. Life was simple once again.
One year became two, two became five and before I knew it my collegues, some faces the same, but older, others long gone and replaced by a new face more than once, were congratulating me on my tenth year at the company. Ten years...ten years since I got scared and fled into the bliss of having no responsibilities beyond the obvious. Ten years before my ten years started I remember standing on top of a mountain with my father. We were in Slovenia, en route with the caravan to the Croatian coast, and decided to climb a mountain. My brother and mother had to turn back halfway, my brother, my big brother. I had never felt more proud of myself at that age, and I've never felt more proud since. We were on top of a mountain, a glacier shining in the summer sun, slowly melting, disappearing, perhaps forever.

I made a decision that day. That day on the mountain, and that day at work, holding a bottle of wine with a custom label that read "Here's to the next 10 years". That was not the last mountain I was going to climb. A promise to myself that I had almost forgotten, almost not kept, but I remembered now.
Not much later I watched one of the many movies I owned, my other escape from the realities and responsibilties of life. From minute one it just clicked, that guy on my monitor, the one between me and my own reflection, that could be me. I was watching someone else do what I had always wanted, an adventure. Until now I had always ran away from responsibilities, but I ran towards mediocrity, I swam towards the shallow end of the pool, simple, easy, boring. Here was a guy that was also running away, towards a life with fewer decisions, but also towards adventure, towards the unknown.

Five years ago I started my journey, my own adventure, to see the world, another world. I am on the other side of the world now, experiencing life, love, hapiness. I am still scared sometimes, that is something you can never fully banish from life, but I come well prepared now and am ready to face whatever life throws at me. My world was small, it became larger than life, and now I'm ready for it to become smaller again, not as small as it was, although, we might buy a caravan.
I've climbed mountains and I'm ready for more.

Go see how big the world is, before you find out how small it can become.

Once upon a time, in a far far away universe there's a legendary mom
Her name is S.Kate
It all began with a single cruel king in her universe
His name is Derp Varthder
His special weapons are glowsticks, he makes people who oppose him blind with his glowsticks (if you buy two now, you'll get free green one.. But it now!)
But she's smart enough to dispel the blind effect with her blindfold
Once she put it on she become invincible
Her nickname is Anti-Wizard
But there's one side-negative effect, she can't see anything
That's why when the war with the King began, she's the one that fall first
The war ended with the King's victory
The king was really happy, so he put off his mask
When she saw his face, she's really shocked (Fall first but not not dead yet)
Immediately when he noticed her, he made her disappear

But that's not ended just like that
She has a son
Her son name is John
He knew that Derp Vathder is his mom's killer
So he want his revenge
Years after years he swear on his mother's name to get the revenge and make the cruelty ended
After he prepared enough, he began the invasion
"IT'S A TRAP" He heard that voice right after he began the invasion and suddenly
An arrow hit his left leg and he couldn't run away
But
He couldn't go back after he comes this far
Everyone except him still run into the fortress, but he can only walk slowly with his right leg
Everything was fine until *bam
Everything turned into snow, included all of his friends
To commemorate this
He named himself as John Snow (Psst he knows nothing)

He still don't want to give up
So he charged the Derp Vathder's fortress alone
In that place Derp Varthder's is the only one there
"I'm waiting for you" said Derp Vathder
"I'm waiting for this too" said John Snow
Immediately both of them draw their glowsticks and clang ssst pang dung
Not long after that the Derp Varthder lost to John Snow
Before he died he revealed his true face
"N-No it can't be... NOOOOOOOO"
He was his mother afterall
Derp Varthder sent her othrt self to the other dimension to become Derp Varthder too
John now is sad, now he had a choice..
Kill yourself
Or become a character in Stanley Parable
Ohh it's because Stanley can't obey what I said
John just suicide and lost 600G
".....Noob" *facepalm

Then I woke up
Well that was obviously a dream!! xD

(Sorry my english just messy when I wrote long story xD)

View attached image.

When architecting a database, you first need to determine exactly what your needs are. A reporting data-warehouse requires a drastically different design strategy than a transactional database. This ignores other database types, such as OLAP, NoSQL,Vertical. Some unstructured database can work with millions of differently structured forms. Websites like Allrecipes use NoSQL databases like Couchbase to serve millions of requests.

When people talk about "*illions of rows" to describe the volume of their data, they forget how meaningless that phrase is now. A well designed table, with partitions and indexes, should reduce the actual number of row "reads" to a few thousand. Reporting database developers will often talk about Kimball versus Inmon as the overriding design strategies, however the two models can coexist. Kimball's star schemas does work well as a basis for most modern reporting systems.

Different databases have different strengths and weaknesses. DB2 has powerful windowing functions that mimic OLAP functionality, but like all IBM software it can be a bit obscure. Oracle Exadata has an incredible optimizer and can return results incredibly quickly, even if the table isn't optimized. Oracle does suffer from being Oracle (see the I Hate Oracle club) - they don't exactly follow SQL standards and there are a lot of quirks. The Oracle bulk loader starts suffering with vasts amount of data - after 200k rows per second it can hiccough, leading to data consistency issues. Databases like Netezza or Greenplum excel with large amounts of data. Even considering my previous comment about the illions of rows, Greenplum is designed to work with datasets exceeding a terabyte. Microsoft databases are relatively cheap, at under $10k for a license. MSSQL is generally a standard and perfectly acceptable engine, but it's essentially vanilla. You get what you pay for, it works as needed but is useless for very large projects.

Business Intelligence is a growing field, and people who know how to deal with data are in great demand. There is a great deal more to post about, ETL, OLAP, effective visualizations, even reporting software, but that's a post for a different day.

I'm amazing.

Thanks for writing something interesting, insightful or helpful. The winning game voted by the majority of users is the The Stanley Parable. To those of who don't have it, you now have (almost) a day to join the giveaway:

http://www.steamgifts.com/giveaway/sfieD/the-stanley-parable

May the best man or woman win!

If you write "happy bird day" in google and translate it to Spanish, like "Happy Birthday" it appears (in Spanish) :P

Happy cake day

You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.