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Sun Buys MySQL
Krow alerted me that MySQL has been bought by Sun. Right now there is only a brief announcement but it discusses what the acquisition will mean for the core developers, community etc.
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mysql license is real mess, it can be interpreted in so many ways.
I have worked at a lot of big banks. Open Source has been slowly finding its way in, but it is incredibly difficult to deploy an open source database like MySQL or Postgres. The banks says they want safety and security - and you answer that your database isn't enterprise critical so why pay for Oracle? Management then says, ah well, how about MS SQL Server....
See my journal, I write things there
Sun is the 2000 version of Bell Labs.
Google just makes beta applications.
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Spoken like someone who doesn't work in IT. I get request the day stuff is suppose to start with the users IDEA of what should work. Not requirements or information and what needs to be done then I get weeks of little issues tiring to make this Square Peg fit into a round whole until I figure out what is going on and replace it with something that works. The problem is IT is the last step in the process not the 1st step and that will always cause issues. Sometime we just can't do what the user thinks is simple. Just this week I had a issue with someone deciding that email made a good real time alert system from an external customer. Problem email isn't real time and/or reliable. So every hick up in email is an issue. If IT was consult we could have either a)set the expection or b)developed sometime that was real time and reliable they could use.
Actually, from my experience as a programmer I'd much rather have someone come with a spreadsheet he worked with for a year, and very specific requirements such as "we want some people to be able to see these fields, some people to be able to edit these columns" and so... than to have someone with a vague notion of what he needs and then turning that into a relational database. Even if spreadsheets seem awful, a year's user experience with a fast prototyping tool (i.e. the spreadsheet) is priceless.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
Who needs meaningful filenames and directories when you have grep?
Actually, he has a point.
One of the best features, to my taste, of gmail is that I can quickly find an email with a specific content regardless of the subject. Same thing with files if they are full content indexed.
And that is the way that humans naturally work: "I know what I am looking for, I just don't know where I put it (nor I care where it was)". The folders and file names paradigm is an emulation of the paper archival model. Classes are tough on how to create a mantain one (bookeeping, library, secretaries).
You see, this "order" force us to keep to pieces of information in our head: What is it and where is it. And to use one to get the other.
Of course anyone can create a simple filing system, but it requires some level of self disipline to keep it.
And is not intuitive.
I know what I want... just fetch it!
Actually there is stil an immense use for Excel in data processing. As a mathematician, I find Excel excellent for very-short-term data analysis projects. If you need to put the data in a database... you can always dump the whole spreadsheet.
Excel generates graphs very quickly, has quite a powerful set of numerical analysis functions and just works.
Databases aren't the answer when you want fast results.
Couldn't stand the weather