Hi Malhar, the reasons given by your 'DB' guy are lame, but that does not necessarily mean he is wrong, or that you're right. The easiest way is to come up with a simple test script to performance test both data-types. Anyways, I do not think that just because a column is a 'bit-field', SQL-Server will use an exact bit to store it, the bit is stored as part of a byte anyway. You would get lesser storage only if you have more than one bit-field column, where SQL-Server coalesces bits of other bit-field columns also into the same byte. But this coalescing of multiple columns into bytes can get expensive if your application is OLTP, and these columns are frequently updated. You also have the complications of NULLs - are the columns in question NULLable ? And if a bit-field column is NULLable, it couldn't still occupy only a single bit, could it ? :)

So true, they really were "The Incredibles". Chilling to read the gruesome inventory Lisa Nowak had on her person when approached by police - CO2 BB pistol, steel mallet, 4" folding knife, rubber tubing, plastic garbage bags...

Really sad, I'm a big fan of Burt Rutan. And yes, this could seriously slow down the private space initiative...

You've got to read this... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot\_Flight\_593 :omg:

Doogie Howser was a prodigy of sorts wasn't he ? Perfect SAT scores, & a Princeton graduate at age 10 or something ? I used to like the short journal entries at the end of each episode. But this 'record attempt' is just a parlor trick, the kid's no genuine medicine man ! :mad:

And let's not forget the next gen consoles ! You need HD to really appreciate the current crop of 360 & PS3 games.

I may be off topic but it seems to me that even what we consider "low-end" machines have plenty of power left in them. I'm still amazed every time I play Halo 2 on my XBox, which is essentially a 733 MHz PIII PC ! Think of all those polygons, all those 3D matrix transformations, the physics, collision detection - and yet, smooth frame rates ! It just blows your mind ! And do I even have to talk about Half-Life 2 ? Are we as developers today, stopping short ? Not delivering the best the hardware can deliver ? Are we looking at just delivering functionally correct code, and pointing fingers at the hardware when it comes to performance ? How many of us have really bothered to tune the code we spew ? Incidentally, I'm a big fan of Micheal Abrash & his code optimization books, really good reads. Anybody remember 'Graphics Programming Black Book' ? :)

Yup, coming from a driver background I agree completely with what you're saying. It's not that we did a shoddy job of testing our stuff or anything, but it's REALLY impossible to test for everything under the sun ! I've always felt guilty that MS got bad press for something they were not really responsible for. But I wonder, if the PC platform had been tightly controlled (like the Mac), would it be as dominant ?

Hi, try using 'taskmgr.exe' (TaskManager) to identify the process which is responsible. You can do this by adding the 'I/O Reads' & 'I/O Writes' columns, you can also add the 'I/O Read Bytes' & 'I/O Write Bytes' columns. Once you've nailed down the process responsible, you can use 'filemon.exe' (from www.sysinternals.com) to log the file-system calls that the process is making. Best Regards, Srini

Hi, I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 6400 Notebook, but from the Indian web-site. 1. No, the customization page did not provide an option of not having an OS pre-installed. 2. Yes, the laptop came with a comprehensive collection of DVDs & CDs for all the products you choose - Vista, Office, Roxio (which was free), etc. Not sure regarding the Vista-XP thing... My purchase was a birthday gift for my wife, so I opted for Vista Home Premium & the MS-Office pack. The service was great, Dell had somebody call me up & "advise" me on the options available, & the laptop was delivered on time. They also had a support engineer visit me a couple of days later to ensure that the laptop was fine. Everything was sooo hassle-free ! Thinking of getting one of their 22" LCD monitors next ! :) Have a nice day, Srini

Nice one this :laugh: Really had me chuckling :-D And the uninitiated of middle earth say we programmers have no sense of humor ! Ever wonder why our tribe and our culture is not represented at all on the telly (barring Discovery & NG) ? We have lawyers, doctors, teachers, the police, repo men & for heaven's sake, even undertakers in our cables :mad: Anybody else got Joel's 'Aadvark' DVD ? Didn't really like it that much myself, thought it was too layman-ly. The DVD didn't really capture the blood, toil, sweat & tears (not to mention adrenaline & caffeine) involved in producing good code :(

Hi, try the following... Go to www.publicproxyservers.com, choose a proxy list (from the LHS pane). From the list of proxy servers, choose one & set it as your proxy server's IP & port. Note, choose a server whose port is not 80. Some proxies are faster than others & they also have short shelf-lives, you might have to change them once a week or so. I use FireFox as my 'legal' ( ;) ) browser & have my IE use a public proxy - happy browsing !

Hi ! :) I'm developing a SDI application using CHtmlView. Java applets which contain TextAreas emit beeps although they do accept & relect the characters - this problem does not occur in Win2000 however ! IE too is able to successfully side-step this problem. The underlying MSAWT_Comp_Class seems to be receiving a WM_GETDLGCODE message ! I tried the CMyView::PreTranslateMessage fix suggested by the MS Support site but it hasn't helped ! Has anybody else come across this problem ? Thanks for everything...