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Linuxworld Fun
The Linuxworld Expo is now in full swing, and there's a variety of news. The BBC has an overview. Microsoft has a booth at the Expo in the section intended for "new, up-and-coming companies". Sun is rolling out servers running Linux. And VA Software - Slashdot's owner - is moving Sourceforge.net to IBM's database software.
I'm just waiting for someone to start defacing the Microsoft booth. This will make us look REALLLY good to the corporate world.
Damn, I never thought I'd see this graph go upwards again!
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
At some point... every single linux geek in the entire place is going to collectively turn to and point at the Microsoft booth, and then in unison, laugh their asses off, when one of the machines bsod's.
"Just please don't ignore us."
For how many years did they pretend like they ignored us while plotting certain death?
Until that booth has "MS Office TUX" I have no desire to see them at the Expo.
when all the people at the show know about Microsoft software, and that's why they're running Linux?
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
Houston said.
"Just please don't ignore us."
I didn't know Microsoft was in that bad a way.
Doesnt Linux-world bring images of children going on rides with huge fluffy penguins.
And wearing penguin ears? hmm maybe not penguin ears.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
While some may scoff at such a question, even the most basic DB2 documentation stresses the importance of keeping transactions short, due to limited resources for row-level locking and the dire effects of lock promotion on concurrency.
Conversely, Tom Kyte in his first book stresses that Oracle provides an unlimited number of row-level locks (by storing the locks on disk), and never promotes a lock.
Now, obviously, people have gotten DB2 to scale, since it powers some very large databases. I have an interest (and certifications) in both systems, but I can't help but wonder what sort of tricks must be played with the database to overcome concurrency issues with memory-based lock structures - does this require a 64-bit address space even for a moderately-sized db?
"Tell us what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong"
Well.. this is going to take a while.
~ kjrose
Now, I'm no real Microsoft Affectionado, but this is probably the single most insightful thing I ever heard from a Microsoft representative. People don't want to fiddle with anything on their computers, just use the standard apps. Heck, most users don't even change their background nor their colours (God help them, the day they get XP!).
I know this is going straight against the mantra on slashdot "choice-is-good", but normal users have no base on what to make a "choice", and there inflexibility is good: it makes the normal user feel "good" about his (non)choice. How many times have I told people to switch from Lookout Express to a better email client (especially when they just got infected by the virus/worm of the day), but it doesn't help: they are familiar with it, it comes with the computer and everyone uses it. That's infexibility, and the users are inflexible, hence they need inflexible software. Sad but true.
From the linked BBC article:
>Linux is gaining corporate fans is because it is
>cheap, easy to maintain and much more secure than
>Microsoft software.
You can't buy advertising like that.
Anyone remember that scene from the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" where there was an Apple booth and the company MS worked with at the expo. Everyone ignored the other booth and went over to the Apple booth. When Bill tried to talk with any of the Apple reps, he was ignored.
:-)
wouldn't that be great if that happened here. The entire MS booth is barren while everyone is busy doing what they came to a _Linux_ expo for. To look at _Linux_ products, not Windows products.
just a thought.
~ kjrose
It's also possible that IBM will get to use SourceForge On-Site at no or low cost.
Not that I've heard anything, just idle speculation...
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
since the representative said that he thinks all users want is ease of use "out of the box" and not flexibility, then porting, say, microsoft office to linux would make some people happy, and at the same time not harm microsoft, because linux is supposedly NOT easy to use out of the box.
obviously, i disagree. i have had enough fun with windows video drivers that don't work causing the screen to be black, but since EVERYTHING is gui, i can't do anything about it, which means i need to reinstall. can i switch back to vga? NO. but that is besides the point. frankly, linux comes with far more out of the box than windows ever will. but that is besides the point.
if microsoft is bold enough to say that their operating system is easier to use, and then appear at linuxworld, i think they should at least be bold enough to port some software (as a software vendor not, operating system creator) to prove their point. it seems they are kissing up to linux geeks to pull some PR move or some other unpredictable stunt.
QED
BSD is for people who love UNIX. Linux is for those who hate Microsoft.
From Netcraft:
The site www.linuxworldexpo.com is running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on NT4/Windows 98.
What are they giving out? I like to give any Microsoft T-shirts i get to homeless people. Puts them to a good cause :)
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
For those of you that use sourceforge for their free software projects, it looks like it's time to move to savannah.gnu.org.
In case you're wondering, the gnu.org in there does not imply that your project needs to be under the GPL/LGPL --- any Free Software projects are welcome.
Why would you want to move? Well, from what I hear, extracting some of your meta-data is already hard/imposible from Sourceforge --- this seems like a trend that is likely to continue, so perhaps you should get out while you still can.
At least you can be sure that the Free Software Foundation won't pull any similar tricks.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
Despite the immediate speed increase which could come from migrating to a real database which supports grown-up DB features like subselects, etc, I don't see it happening on Slashdot anytime soon.
Not to flamebait here, but if you've gone through Slashcode source, you know that it's a pile of spaghetti. It doesn't lend itself to a redesign of the database access methods to take advantage of an industry-quality DB's featureset, at least not without redesigning much of Slashcode itself.
The resulting weblog software could be really badass, but seeing as this site's gone since 1998 without a significant redesign (Slash 2 is Slash 1 with lipstick on), I don't see it suddenly happening now.
quite simply, VA is preparing to be bought out by IBM.
four-oh-four
Speaking as someone who's worked with another RDBMS which uses memory based locking (Ingres) for over 10 years, I can say that this can scale and scale very well.
Your application designers need to have concurrency issues in mind - but then that tends to make for better applications anyway. There's more to concurrency than simply the number of locks available in the system.
Ingres has always used memory-based locking and has only been extended to 64-bit addressing in the last couple of years. There are people using Ingres with databases in the hundreds of Gb or higher and with thousands of concurrent sessions.
I guarantee that any system of that size Ingres, Oracle, DB2 or Bob's own DBMS would need to consider concurrency pretty carefully regardless of how locking is implemented.
And VA Software - Slashdot's owner - is moving Sourceforge.net to IBM's database software.
I think this is a much bigger story then linux kernel 2.34.56 is released, yet its a one liner? Next time you wanna bury a story throw it into a slashback or a jon katz story.
four-oh-four
No, they want to have the corporate version of sourceforge run on DB2 and WebSphere. My guess is that VA Software won't be migrating sourceforge.net. Like you said early sourceforge.net handles a ton of activity, and it does it with PostgreSQL and PHP. Migrating to a totally new technology would almost certainly cause problems, and the last thing that IBM wants is for VA Software to switch sourceforge.net from Free Software to their expensive commercial software and have the new setup be buggy or have performance problems.
The corporate accounts paying for the commercial version of sourceforge are undoubtedly dumber than a box of rocks. They would rather purchase a reimplementation of sourceforge.net on a different technology base than download the software that is good enough for sourceforge.net for free and learn to set it up themselves. Heck, they could even pay someone else to set it up for them (the folks at savannah.gnu.org have some experience in setting up sourceforge). In my opinion these are precisely the type of customers to target. It is almost trivially easy to make money from people who have more money than sense.
from the article:
"This isn't about trying to get people to move from Unix to Microsoft products, it's about offering ways for both systems to peacefully coexist," Houston stressed.
Then why aren't the office formats open?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak