Apple is the established competitor in this market. It's nice to want to beat Apple (as a secret wish), but Creative needs to focus on making a better player. From the start, this means making it painless to use Creative's product instead of Apple's. Creative needs full compatibility -- plug-in accessories for iPod should work with Creative, and CERTAINLY the iTunes AAC format should work. On the former, remember that cars are now shipping with controls and ports for iPods. Creative needs to be able to plug in to anything an iPod can.
Everyone here talks about the music format (AAC, MP3, Ogg, WMA, etc.), but most people just don't care. Apple does not sell the iPod as an "AAC Player", yet Creative sells an "MP3 Player". These are music players. Quit selling a format. Sell a player.
Creative needs to make a product that gets the stellar reviews of the iPod. When I was considering alternative players to my iPod, including Creative, I was amazed that Creative's players had a significant number of complaints among all the reviewers at places like Amazon. No one wants a player that sounds iffy. If I buy an iPod, I know it'll work.
Two final points: Where's FireWire? USB 2.0 High-speed is supposed to be as fast, but many say it just isn't. Also, will Creative offer incentives on their product? Apple's "Jam and Cram" rebate this past fall meant many people picked up 20 GB iPods for $69 (after $200 rebate, received when buying an iPod with a laptop).
Creative, just focus on what your player does, caring about Apple only as much as you make your product easy to interoperate anywhere an iPod does.
It all depends on the arrangement. If you're working as a direct contractor, on a 1099 basis, then you've got to budget a lot extra for the self-employment tax and your benefits, plus the headache of quarterly tax payments. If you're a W-2 employee of a "body shop" type firm, then it's all pretty easy for you. You'll be just another piece of meat, but that can work to your advantage. Make sure your pimp pays on time, though.
The stability of "permanent" W-2 employment is a myth any more. I've watched downsizing go on for a solid decade now, and it hasn't let up. I've seen 20-year veterans get the axe, just like the newbies. What happens is that the bean counters tend to cut EITHER contractors OR employees, since they often come from different budgets and with different approval requirements. If it's employees, the contractors will often be left completely safe. And vice vera.
I tend to boil it down to a simple monetary calculation. Figure out your total compensation for both arrangements (permanent versus contract), assigning a real monetary value to benefits or deducting appropriately from contractor payments, and adjusting for vacation and the fact that, as a contractor, you'll likely be paid for ALL the hours you work (not just 40 per week). Once you've got an idea of the cash, figure out the value of the experience each arrangement gets you. (Does the employer pay for further education and skills development. REALLY? Many places promise it, but few deliver.) What does it cost you to pay some for your own education, if you do it yourself? Will you do more interesting or career-enhancing work one way or the other? Finally, figure out how much less you're willing to accept because you're part of the team, not some "prostitute". Also figure out how much not having an annual review (as a contractor) is worth to you.
For what it's worth, I took a contract assignment near the bottom of the dot com bubble. It was supposed to last six weeks. Three and a half years later, still going, at a rate based on a short six week assignment.
According to Duke's website, it now costs in excess of $40,000 per undergraduate year at Duke. And all they have to do to get people to commit to that level of insane cost is to give away network access and iPods? If that's the case, look for every two-bit program in the country to be loading students up with $2,000 in "freebies", just before tuition goes up $5,000. Of course, college students today are mostly on the public dole in the form of grants, government-insured loans (many of which are defaulted upon, passing cost to the taxpayer), and federal aid to their school. So what do they care? This is even better than the sleazy "finance guy" at the car dealership, who is all too willing to sell you the $2,000 car warranty, rolling it in to your 7%, 6 year balloon note.
As the poster above has pointed out, contributors to campaigns have to identify their employers. This doesn't mean the COMPANY is involved in any way.
In this case, it looks like an individual giving money, not the corporation. Ms. Williams certainly appears to have strong political interests, but so what? The MoveOn crowd's not upset that George Soros and dozens of celebrities are deliberately using their money or public standing to stump for a candidate. How's Bruce Springsteen's political tour any different from Patricia Williams?
Maybe so. But the developers I've worked with were MIT comp-sci grads proud of their credentials. Greenspun's comments are dead-on, it would seem. There are too many other languages out there that perform well while making database access straightforward and efficient for both app and database.
I even have it on good authority that the client-server giant of the mid 90s, PowerBuilder, is making a comeback built upon the failure of Java applications to get delivered working and on-time.
To my mind, seeing "Java Powered" on something elicits a response of "Run, Forrest, Run!" If it's a client application, it'll have a sluggish and clunky user interface and so-so performance. If it's running on an application server, it'll have a complicated J2EE structure that'd make Rube Goldberg envious, along with mediocre performance and abominable database access methods. If it's an applet, I can get the worst of both worlds!
The NEA paper doesn't take into account the growing popularity of listening to books. With commutes getting ever-longer, especially in the United States, it's getting more and more popular. I know I took it up in my commuting days, listening to the great works, various lectures, etc. I think Audible (or its successors) has a great future.
Finally, you have to ask why the NEA has any kind of interest in this. Could it be a "justify our existence" move to expand another bureaucracy, especially one that finds itself under regular attack? naw....
Any profession has a basic problem that, at some point, it becomes a job. The bigger question is how to keep it in balance. I'd encourage you to develop hobbies that are not related to computers; I took up woodworking and woodturning. You're married (and presumably not all that long), so it's worth thinking of cultivating your marriage and spending time with your children (once you have any, if you don't have any yet). Working for charitable causes is helpful also, especially in that it helps you see the value of your own career. (There's always someone worse off than you are.)
That having been said, some jobs simply are not conducive to this. Bad hours, bad boss, tedious work, etc. I stand by my oft-stated assertion that working with a good team of people (defined as coworkers you enjoy working with) is worth a LOT of money. In that case, look around for a position that's better for your soul. But even then, it'll become work some day.
In any case, there is a bigger picture to be kept in mind. I cannot speak for other faiths, but from my vantage point as a Christian, there is a lot to be said for developing an understanding of vocation. Your abilities are not purely of your own doing. What you have been given (money, ability, etc.) should be used for a greater purpose, as the parable of the ten talents (Matthew 25:14-29) shows. When viewed with this attitude, it's easy to see the "job" as the grunt work that provides for the real, but unpaid, task of giving time, money, or ability elsewhere. Speaking from experience, the stress becomes bearable as you realize that you tolerate it for a reason.
This article provokes a knee-jerk reaction against John Ashcroft, but the man has been quite fair in his carrying out of the laws of the United States, regardless of his personal beliefs. If you don't like anti-porn laws, fine. But then please work on your congressmen to deal with Title 8, Part I, Chapter 71 of the U.S. Code, at a minimum.
Much of the porn for sale in the United States is being sold solely because law enforcement has looked the other way. Nonetheless, the sale of the stuff routinely violates national, state, and local laws. You can't blame the attorney general when he devotes resources to battling clear violations.
Personally, if porn is the mark of an enlightened Western society, I'll take a little less enlightenment.
Re:I am impressed. The HCL is alot bigger
on
Solaris 9 x86 Review
·
· Score: 2, Informative
My only concern about solaris is lack of package managment. Do I have to build things by source with it? I love the ports of FreeBSD and Gentoo.
See the docs for pkgadd and its friends pkginfo, pkgrm, and several others.
Every so-called reviewer of Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and now Solaris x86 out there seems to think that the installation process is the essence of an operating system.
There's little, if any, mention of things that would be useful for evaluating an OS that claims to be oriented for enterprise class environments:
Installation, configuration, management of a typical web-based application environment (web server, database, application code). Where isn't there any investigation of Sun ONE, especially having mentioned the recent Netcraft report?
Installation and management of a commercial
database application (Oracle, Sybase, DB2, etc.).
Volume management. This is important, especially in conjunction with databases. What, if any, are the file system and volume management options?
Directory server.
Linux compatibility.
As it is, this "review" is nothing more than an extended rant with nothing in the way of substance.
The JBoss/Core Developers situation seems unusual in that it's an open source project. What about all those big projects managed by PHBs that AREN'T open source?
You and your coworkers get hacked off, leave, and then what? You can continue working with them, sure, but what are the odds you'd have a common project to develop? You can't very well take the code you worked on for The Man with you, since, according to U.S. law at least (unsure of others), "works for hire" means the hireR owns it, not the hireE. If you DID take it with you, be sure you can spell lawsuit, since you might be facing one.
So, you leave with your coworkers (who are perhaps your friends) and your big ideas. In 1999, you could find a big bucks Venture Capitalist looking for a way to quickly lose a few million. In 2003, probably not. Now what?
That warm, fuzzy feeling you got giving the news to the boss gets cold and prickly fast.
I said neither good nor bad things about vacuum. It's just there, and it's a fact of life.
PostgreSQL benefits from being created in an era with comparatively cheap RAM and disk space. Oracle's roots go back to the very late 70's, when "wasting" disk space, even for a little while, was not cost-effective. Thus, they made choices at that time that affect them even now. It doesn't mean the decision were bad, it simply complicates it for them now. While, it seems that (theoretically), PostgreSQL could be made to do flashback queries (as Oracle 9i does), Oracle's implementation makes it more straightforward. There are tradeoffs both ways.
I've no beef with PostgreSQL at all. I like it. Its MVCC is why I would choose it over SAP-DB. I simply took issue with the response to my original response that said Oracle could NOT do MVCC. It can. It has for a long time.
Actually, Oracle has used MVCC from the beginning. It's a different implementation from PostgreSQL's, but it's still MVCC. Oracle uses its undo logs to "read around" pending (uncommitted) writes to the database. This is not at all new in 9i. You can read Oracle's 8.1.7 (8i) documentation to see that this is so.
PostgreSQL essentially creates new database blocks when fulfilling write requests. When those are committed, the old ones aren't needed -- hence the requisite vacuum process in PostgreSQL. More or less, it's a form of database garbage collection.
This announcement is a bit sad, in that I can no longer just download the latest Solaris without knowing relevant support contract numbers.
However, this isn't all bad. Every Solaris 9 system can be both a directory server and a J2EE application server. This isn't bad. It's very possible to argue that Windows NT/2000 has made its inroads on the back of the fact that it can do directory services (even as crummy as the old NT domain stuff was, and now, of course, there's Active Directory) and serve Active Server Pages out of the box. Once you bought NT, you had everything but a database.
Now these Solaris 9 machines can do directory services (better than NIS can) AND serve J2EE applications. This may hurt BEA more than anyone, since I'd expect that people at least LOOK at the Sun server before forking over their $10,000+ for WebLogic.
It's odd that the competitive upgrade rebate only applies to fairly recent versions of the competitors' products. SuSE 7.3's not that old, neither are the Mandrake versions they're allowing. Some incentive.
The decline in tech support is nothing new. For quite some time,
I've argued to management and coworkers that the only kind of
technical support worth having is per-incident support, where the
company providing support gets paid only if the
issue is resolved successfully. "Gold" and "Platinum" support contracts (where you can get help as much as you want) still
send you through the same tedious process of explaining your
problem, receiving instructions whereby you, the customer,
spend even more time diagnosing the problem, following up
to the company, receiving still more diagnosis instructions,
ad nauseam. Personally, I'm sick of bothering to isolate
a test case, telling the company the version of their software I'm
using, only to be told to mindlessly upgrade to a newer version that
allegedly fixes the problem. The last time I was told this,
I asked the company in question if they could try my problem scenario
in their environment with the proposed new version. They
said "no". Their expectation is that I will take half a day setting
up an environment, installing a new version of their software, setting
up my test case, and making a determination. Paugh!
I'm willing to bet that if the support vendor got paid when and
only when my problem was resolved that I'd have received very different
answers and a willingness to actually solve my problem.
The idea that only big companies with high-priced products can
offer good support is stupid. The company I've spoken of sells a
very expensive database product with even more expensive support. If
the support isn't per-incident, there's simply no incentive to do
better.
Certainly lots of sites link to Amazon. Amazon knows about more
titles (and other merchandise) than any other single site, with the
possible exception
of Barnes & Noble. They've got LOTS
more reader reviews than any other site including B&N.
Their return policy is favorable to purchasers (that is, it's
comparable to most brick and mortar bookstores). They frequently
reduce shipping and offer coupons. What's not to like? Assertion
of the one-click patent and their privacy policy changes (claiming
they own the records of what you've purchased) are about it. Yeah,
the privacy policy thing stinks, but even the brick and mortar
stores track what you're buying. If you want privacy, pay cash.
Personally, if Bookpool has what
I want in stock, I'll buy it from them. The prices are nearly
always less than Amazon's. BUT, Bookpool only sells technical books,
and nothing in the way of Christian theology (my other big reading interest).
Barnes and Noble throws in free shipping with two or more books in an
order, but the prices are usually higher.
People flock to Amazon because it's simply a valuable service.
I hate to see an outfit like Mandrake go, but we have
too many distributions of Linux. They're all using the Linux
kernel, but the differences between them make third-party product support nearly impossible. Each distribution is dividing finite developer
resources. To what effect? The value of choice is hopelessly
overstated if, by "choice," we refer solely to choosing
among the decisions of capricious developers (where files go in the
file system, what desktop to use, etc.). There is no "value add"
in such things.
Yes, I think Mandrake suffers from the "it's pretty, but doesn't really take us anywhere" problem. In my experience, both RedHat and SuSE make products
that are as usable as Mandrake, but with real reasons to use them.
RedHat has nearly universal support from third-party vendors.
SuSE is doing a nice job on enterprise functions. (In contrast,
Mandrake's "upgrade" from 7.0 to 7.1 left me with a completely
unusable system.) Perhaps it's time for Mandrake's efforts to get
rolled into one of these other distributions.
That should be "There's not a thing in the law's prohibitions against renting/selling videogames with strong ratings to minors that's objectionable." Doh!
The bill in question doesn't prohibit the sale or rental of the games involved to everyone, just to minors.
A person commits an offense if the person sells, rents, or otherwise provides for use
for a charge any video game to a minor which contains scenes or depictions of graphic violence as
determined by the Entertainment Software Rating Board.
If I wouldn't let my hypothetical 10 year old watch Saving Private Ryan or Pulp Fiction, why can the local Blockbuster store rent them the latest splatter videogame without my consent? Maybe such games cause violence in kids, maybe they don't. But that's not the only consideration. Maybe I consider graphic violence to be immoral. Maybe it gives the kids nightmares. Maybe I simply find such things sinful. It doesn't matter. I'm the kid's parent, and discretion in these matters is both traditionally and legally given to me.
There's not a thing in the law's prohibitions against renting/selling videogames with strong ratings to minors. (Their data may be flawed, such as when they say, "As confirmed by current scientific data, the repeated exposure to graphic violence and participation in violent interactive games may contribute to violent behavior by our youth and
desensitizes them to acts of violence," but the conclusions are fine.)
Why does the ability check mail from any number of devices mandate a virtual machine like Microsoft 's CLR? That's what protocols are for. Remember those? Things like IMAP (or even POP3) and SMTP. All the stuff that Microsoft manages to "embrace and extend" to the point that a simple mail client that can talk only IMAP and SMTP becomes a novelty.
Microsoft writes a new form of Java, with a focus on multi-language support (something the JVM can do, but not spoken of much), and everyone thinks this is equivalent to Java. You can just bet that Microsoft's CLR, when run on a non-Microsoft platform (the few there will be), will always be just a little bit behind, just to give you that incentive to switch to Windows.
Re:I thought the Osama South Park episode was bad.
on
Message from Kabul
·
· Score: 1
Amen, brother. It's always good to know how "pop culture" is always the cause worth fighting for. What drivel.
As distributions like SuSE continue pushing ahead with high-end features (like logical volume managers, which SuSE already has), usage of these products on Linux will undoubtedly increase. Part of the situation here is cost. When Oracle Enterprise Edition costs $40,000 per CPU, plus another $8,000 or so per year for support, who cares about spending a little more for high end Sun or IBM systems?
Also, Oracle 8i, while supported on Linux, did not offer a couple of features found in Oracle 8i for other systems. In particular, full interMedia support for full-text searches of all sorts of documents (especially from software made in Redmond) was not available in the 8i Linux version. The new 9i does support this feature under Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple is the established competitor in this market. It's nice to want to beat Apple (as a secret wish), but Creative needs to focus on making a better player. From the start, this means making it painless to use Creative's product instead of Apple's. Creative needs full compatibility -- plug-in accessories for iPod should work with Creative, and CERTAINLY the iTunes AAC format should work. On the former, remember that cars are now shipping with controls and ports for iPods. Creative needs to be able to plug in to anything an iPod can.
Everyone here talks about the music format (AAC, MP3, Ogg, WMA, etc.), but most people just don't care. Apple does not sell the iPod as an "AAC Player", yet Creative sells an "MP3 Player". These are music players. Quit selling a format. Sell a player.
Creative needs to make a product that gets the stellar reviews of the iPod. When I was considering alternative players to my iPod, including Creative, I was amazed that Creative's players had a significant number of complaints among all the reviewers at places like Amazon. No one wants a player that sounds iffy. If I buy an iPod, I know it'll work.
Two final points: Where's FireWire? USB 2.0 High-speed is supposed to be as fast, but many say it just isn't. Also, will Creative offer incentives on their product? Apple's "Jam and Cram" rebate this past fall meant many people picked up 20 GB iPods for $69 (after $200 rebate, received when buying an iPod with a laptop).
Creative, just focus on what your player does, caring about Apple only as much as you make your product easy to interoperate anywhere an iPod does.
It all depends on the arrangement. If you're working as a direct contractor, on a 1099 basis, then you've got to budget a lot extra for the self-employment tax and your benefits, plus the headache of quarterly tax payments. If you're a W-2 employee of a "body shop" type firm, then it's all pretty easy for you. You'll be just another piece of meat, but that can work to your advantage. Make sure your pimp pays on time, though.
The stability of "permanent" W-2 employment is a myth any more. I've watched downsizing go on for a solid decade now, and it hasn't let up. I've seen 20-year veterans get the axe, just like the newbies. What happens is that the bean counters tend to cut EITHER contractors OR employees, since they often come from different budgets and with different approval requirements. If it's employees, the contractors will often be left completely safe. And vice vera.
I tend to boil it down to a simple monetary calculation. Figure out your total compensation for both arrangements (permanent versus contract), assigning a real monetary value to benefits or deducting appropriately from contractor payments, and adjusting for vacation and the fact that, as a contractor, you'll likely be paid for ALL the hours you work (not just 40 per week). Once you've got an idea of the cash, figure out the value of the experience each arrangement gets you. (Does the employer pay for further education and skills development. REALLY? Many places promise it, but few deliver.) What does it cost you to pay some for your own education, if you do it yourself? Will you do more interesting or career-enhancing work one way or the other? Finally, figure out how much less you're willing to accept because you're part of the team, not some "prostitute". Also figure out how much not having an annual review (as a contractor) is worth to you.
For what it's worth, I took a contract assignment near the bottom of the dot com bubble. It was supposed to last six weeks. Three and a half years later, still going, at a rate based on a short six week assignment.
According to Duke's website, it now costs in excess of $40,000 per undergraduate year at Duke. And all they have to do to get people to commit to that level of insane cost is to give away network access and iPods? If that's the case, look for every two-bit program in the country to be loading students up with $2,000 in "freebies", just before tuition goes up $5,000. Of course, college students today are mostly on the public dole in the form of grants, government-insured loans (many of which are defaulted upon, passing cost to the taxpayer), and federal aid to their school. So what do they care? This is even better than the sleazy "finance guy" at the car dealership, who is all too willing to sell you the $2,000 car warranty, rolling it in to your 7%, 6 year balloon note.
As the poster above has pointed out, contributors to campaigns have to identify their employers. This doesn't mean the COMPANY is involved in any way.
In this case, it looks like an individual giving money, not the corporation. Ms. Williams certainly appears to have strong political interests, but so what? The MoveOn crowd's not upset that George Soros and dozens of celebrities are deliberately using their money or public standing to stump for a candidate. How's Bruce Springsteen's political tour any different from Patricia Williams?
Maybe so. But the developers I've worked with were MIT comp-sci grads proud of their credentials. Greenspun's comments are dead-on, it would seem. There are too many other languages out there that perform well while making database access straightforward and efficient for both app and database.
I even have it on good authority that the client-server giant of the mid 90s, PowerBuilder, is making a comeback built upon the failure of Java applications to get delivered working and on-time.
To my mind, seeing "Java Powered" on something elicits a response of "Run, Forrest, Run!" If it's a client application, it'll have a sluggish and clunky user interface and so-so performance. If it's running on an application server, it'll have a complicated J2EE structure that'd make Rube Goldberg envious, along with mediocre performance and abominable database access methods. If it's an applet, I can get the worst of both worlds!
The NEA paper doesn't take into account the growing popularity of listening to books. With commutes getting ever-longer, especially in the United States, it's getting more and more popular. I know I took it up in my commuting days, listening to the great works, various lectures, etc. I think Audible (or its successors) has a great future.
Finally, you have to ask why the NEA has any kind of interest in this. Could it be a "justify our existence" move to expand another bureaucracy, especially one that finds itself under regular attack? naw....
Any profession has a basic problem that, at some point, it becomes a job. The bigger question is how to keep it in balance. I'd encourage you to develop hobbies that are not related to computers; I took up woodworking and woodturning. You're married (and presumably not all that long), so it's worth thinking of cultivating your marriage and spending time with your children (once you have any, if you don't have any yet). Working for charitable causes is helpful also, especially in that it helps you see the value of your own career. (There's always someone worse off than you are.)
That having been said, some jobs simply are not conducive to this. Bad hours, bad boss, tedious work, etc. I stand by my oft-stated assertion that working with a good team of people (defined as coworkers you enjoy working with) is worth a LOT of money. In that case, look around for a position that's better for your soul. But even then, it'll become work some day.
In any case, there is a bigger picture to be kept in mind. I cannot speak for other faiths, but from my vantage point as a Christian, there is a lot to be said for developing an understanding of vocation. Your abilities are not purely of your own doing. What you have been given (money, ability, etc.) should be used for a greater purpose, as the parable of the ten talents (Matthew 25:14-29) shows. When viewed with this attitude, it's easy to see the "job" as the grunt work that provides for the real, but unpaid, task of giving time, money, or ability elsewhere. Speaking from experience, the stress becomes bearable as you realize that you tolerate it for a reason.
This article provokes a knee-jerk reaction against John Ashcroft, but the man has been quite fair in his carrying out of the laws of the United States, regardless of his personal beliefs. If you don't like anti-porn laws, fine. But then please work on your congressmen to deal with Title 8, Part I, Chapter 71 of the U.S. Code, at a minimum.
Much of the porn for sale in the United States is being sold solely because law enforcement has looked the other way. Nonetheless, the sale of the stuff routinely violates national, state, and local laws. You can't blame the attorney general when he devotes resources to battling clear violations.
Personally, if porn is the mark of an enlightened Western society, I'll take a little less enlightenment.
My only concern about solaris is lack of package managment. Do I have to build things by source with it? I love the ports of FreeBSD and Gentoo.
See the docs for pkgadd and its friends pkginfo, pkgrm, and several others.
Every so-called reviewer of Linux distributions, FreeBSD, and now Solaris x86 out there seems to think that the installation process is the essence of an operating system.
There's little, if any, mention of things that would be useful for evaluating an OS that claims to be oriented for enterprise class environments:
As it is, this "review" is nothing more than an extended rant with nothing in the way of substance.
The JBoss/Core Developers situation seems unusual in that it's an open source project. What about all those big projects managed by PHBs that AREN'T open source?
You and your coworkers get hacked off, leave, and then what? You can continue working with them, sure, but what are the odds you'd have a common project to develop? You can't very well take the code you worked on for The Man with you, since, according to U.S. law at least (unsure of others), "works for hire" means the hireR owns it, not the hireE. If you DID take it with you, be sure you can spell lawsuit, since you might be facing one.
So, you leave with your coworkers (who are perhaps your friends) and your big ideas. In 1999, you could find a big bucks Venture Capitalist looking for a way to quickly lose a few million. In 2003, probably not. Now what?
That warm, fuzzy feeling you got giving the news to the boss gets cold and prickly fast.
I said neither good nor bad things about vacuum. It's just there, and it's a fact of life.
PostgreSQL benefits from being created in an era with comparatively cheap RAM and disk space. Oracle's roots go back to the very late 70's, when "wasting" disk space, even for a little while, was not cost-effective. Thus, they made choices at that time that affect them even now. It doesn't mean the decision were bad, it simply complicates it for them now. While, it seems that (theoretically), PostgreSQL could be made to do flashback queries (as Oracle 9i does), Oracle's implementation makes it more straightforward. There are tradeoffs both ways.
I've no beef with PostgreSQL at all. I like it. Its MVCC is why I would choose it over SAP-DB. I simply took issue with the response to my original response that said Oracle could NOT do MVCC. It can. It has for a long time.
Actually, Oracle has used MVCC from the beginning. It's a different implementation from PostgreSQL's, but it's still MVCC. Oracle uses its undo logs to "read around" pending (uncommitted) writes to the database. This is not at all new in 9i. You can read Oracle's 8.1.7 (8i) documentation to see that this is so.
PostgreSQL essentially creates new database blocks when fulfilling write requests. When those are committed, the old ones aren't needed -- hence the requisite vacuum process in PostgreSQL. More or less, it's a form of database garbage collection.
This announcement is a bit sad, in that I can no longer just download the latest Solaris without knowing relevant support contract numbers.
However, this isn't all bad. Every Solaris 9 system can be both a directory server and a J2EE application server. This isn't bad. It's very possible to argue that Windows NT/2000 has made its inroads on the back of the fact that it can do directory services (even as crummy as the old NT domain stuff was, and now, of course, there's Active Directory) and serve Active Server Pages out of the box. Once you bought NT, you had everything but a database.
Now these Solaris 9 machines can do directory services (better than NIS can) AND serve J2EE applications. This may hurt BEA more than anyone, since I'd expect that people at least LOOK at the Sun server before forking over their $10,000+ for WebLogic.
It's odd that the competitive upgrade rebate only applies to fairly recent versions of the competitors' products. SuSE 7.3's not that old, neither are the Mandrake versions they're allowing. Some incentive.
The decline in tech support is nothing new. For quite some time, I've argued to management and coworkers that the only kind of technical support worth having is per-incident support, where the company providing support gets paid only if the issue is resolved successfully. "Gold" and "Platinum" support contracts (where you can get help as much as you want) still send you through the same tedious process of explaining your problem, receiving instructions whereby you, the customer, spend even more time diagnosing the problem, following up to the company, receiving still more diagnosis instructions, ad nauseam. Personally, I'm sick of bothering to isolate a test case, telling the company the version of their software I'm using, only to be told to mindlessly upgrade to a newer version that allegedly fixes the problem. The last time I was told this, I asked the company in question if they could try my problem scenario in their environment with the proposed new version. They said "no". Their expectation is that I will take half a day setting up an environment, installing a new version of their software, setting up my test case, and making a determination. Paugh!
I'm willing to bet that if the support vendor got paid when and only when my problem was resolved that I'd have received very different answers and a willingness to actually solve my problem.
The idea that only big companies with high-priced products can offer good support is stupid. The company I've spoken of sells a very expensive database product with even more expensive support. If the support isn't per-incident, there's simply no incentive to do better.
Certainly lots of sites link to Amazon. Amazon knows about more titles (and other merchandise) than any other single site, with the possible exception of Barnes & Noble. They've got LOTS more reader reviews than any other site including B&N. Their return policy is favorable to purchasers (that is, it's comparable to most brick and mortar bookstores). They frequently reduce shipping and offer coupons. What's not to like? Assertion of the one-click patent and their privacy policy changes (claiming they own the records of what you've purchased) are about it. Yeah, the privacy policy thing stinks, but even the brick and mortar stores track what you're buying. If you want privacy, pay cash.
Personally, if Bookpool has what I want in stock, I'll buy it from them. The prices are nearly always less than Amazon's. BUT, Bookpool only sells technical books, and nothing in the way of Christian theology (my other big reading interest). Barnes and Noble throws in free shipping with two or more books in an order, but the prices are usually higher.
People flock to Amazon because it's simply a valuable service.
I hate to see an outfit like Mandrake go, but we have too many distributions of Linux. They're all using the Linux kernel, but the differences between them make third-party product support nearly impossible. Each distribution is dividing finite developer resources. To what effect? The value of choice is hopelessly overstated if, by "choice," we refer solely to choosing among the decisions of capricious developers (where files go in the file system, what desktop to use, etc.). There is no "value add" in such things.
Yes, I think Mandrake suffers from the "it's pretty, but doesn't really take us anywhere" problem. In my experience, both RedHat and SuSE make products that are as usable as Mandrake, but with real reasons to use them. RedHat has nearly universal support from third-party vendors. SuSE is doing a nice job on enterprise functions. (In contrast, Mandrake's "upgrade" from 7.0 to 7.1 left me with a completely unusable system.) Perhaps it's time for Mandrake's efforts to get rolled into one of these other distributions.
That should be "There's not a thing in the law's prohibitions against renting/selling videogames with strong ratings to minors that's objectionable ." Doh!
If I wouldn't let my hypothetical 10 year old watch Saving Private Ryan or Pulp Fiction, why can the local Blockbuster store rent them the latest splatter videogame without my consent? Maybe such games cause violence in kids, maybe they don't. But that's not the only consideration. Maybe I consider graphic violence to be immoral. Maybe it gives the kids nightmares. Maybe I simply find such things sinful. It doesn't matter. I'm the kid's parent, and discretion in these matters is both traditionally and legally given to me.
There's not a thing in the law's prohibitions against renting/selling videogames with strong ratings to minors. (Their data may be flawed, such as when they say, "As confirmed by current scientific data, the repeated exposure to graphic violence and participation in violent interactive games may contribute to violent behavior by our youth and desensitizes them to acts of violence," but the conclusions are fine.)
Why does the ability check mail from any number of devices mandate a virtual machine like Microsoft 's CLR? That's what protocols are for. Remember those? Things like IMAP (or even POP3) and SMTP. All the stuff that Microsoft manages to "embrace and extend" to the point that a simple mail client that can talk only IMAP and SMTP becomes a novelty.
Microsoft writes a new form of Java, with a focus on multi-language support (something the JVM can do, but not spoken of much), and everyone thinks this is equivalent to Java. You can just bet that Microsoft's CLR, when run on a non-Microsoft platform (the few there will be), will always be just a little bit behind, just to give you that incentive to switch to Windows.
Amen, brother. It's always good to know how "pop culture" is always the cause worth fighting for. What drivel.
As distributions like SuSE continue pushing ahead with high-end features (like logical volume managers, which SuSE already has), usage of these products on Linux will undoubtedly increase. Part of the situation here is cost. When Oracle Enterprise Edition costs $40,000 per CPU, plus another $8,000 or so per year for support, who cares about spending a little more for high end Sun or IBM systems?
Also, Oracle 8i, while supported on Linux, did not offer a couple of features found in Oracle 8i for other systems. In particular, full interMedia support for full-text searches of all sorts of documents (especially from software made in Redmond) was not available in the 8i Linux version. The new 9i does support this feature under Linux.
Actually, didn't Palm announce they were moving to the StrongARM CPU a few months back?