So even though there exist at least 25 million web servers serving at least 1.3B web pages (i.e. html documents), html is still a "total failure"? We must be using different dictionaries, 'cause I'd call that a pretty successful technology. Again, I'd ask that you share your special definition of "total failure" with the rest of us. Hint, it's not the same thing as "imperfect."
Believe me, I agree that HTML's day has passed, but it is not a "total failure", in fact it has done a huge amount of good for the computer industry, and will be regarded by history as a tremendously successful (albeit imperfect) technology.
I'm somewhat at a loss of how to respond to someone who calls the most successful, most widely deployed computer technology of the last 10 years a "total failure." I guess there were people who considered the Model T Ford a "total failure" because it didn't have a lot of horsepower, or very good brakes, or come in any color other than black. There were certainly better, more technologically sophisticated vehicles at the time, but it's hard to argue that any was more successful. The same is true for HTML. There are more "pure" markup languages like SGML which have been around for years and been successful in niche applications without making a substantial impact on the industry as a whole. HTML is far from perfect but it's simple, cheap, and the closest thing to a lingua franca that this industry has.
You seem to like XML, but let's face facts here: XML wouldn't exist today if not for HTML. We'd have SGML as a niche technology in high-end applications, and we'd have some proprietary "file format" (remember Blackbird?) for the masses.
Let's try this: if HTML is a "total failure" then what, Frodo, do you consider to be a success?
I'm a big fan of pgsql, but I doubt that these tests really help the cause. In relative terms they're pretty good. In absolute terms, they suck.
Quad Xeon machines are doing around 25,000 transactions per minute on the real tpc tests (here) so for a 2-cpu machine to do 300 per minute is not terribly impressive. I think it's probably the trivial hardware that was holding those test back, though, rather than postgres per se.
With only two disks the tests were almost certainly disk-bound, which would explain the striking similarity in the TPC-C results for all three vendors. I doubt any of the database systems really got a chance to hit their stride.
So the bottom line is that we still don't know what postgres can do given reasonable HW, by which I mean at least 4 CPU's, 2GB memory, and 16 disks.
> First question you ask them(before you sign anything): Which OS do you prefer? > Favored response: Whichever is best for the situation.
I doubt I'd trust any consultant that gave me such an evasive non-answer. Your implied point is valid, i.e. you don't want to hire religious zealots, but it's actually good for people to have a personal preference (it shows that they care), and you want to know up front what it is. The last thing you want is someone who hides behind pretend impartiality.
Perhaps a better approach would be to ask what her preference is, and then ask her to describe a case where she implemented something other than her preference and why.
I worked in a lab in 1986-7 that did a lot of analog circuit design using SPICE. We had a 6MHz IBM AT and bought a cute little board that fit nicely on the back of the machine and plugged into the crystal socket (IIRC). It had a knob on it that allowed you to control the clock speed.
8MHz was easy to get, 10MHz was unreliable, and sometimes you could run up to 9MHz.
Boy, it's a pretty sad feeling to be old enough to tell "back-when" stories.
But the "free beer" (kind of an offensive, pre-judging term to me) software, is like giving free hammers to try out before you buy, and giving them free to the students and poor people who are using them for non-commercial purposes. I think it's extremely admirable.
I agree that it would be cynical to suggest that the companies giving proprietary software away are trying to get people hooked, but how is what they're doing different than giving free cigarettes to people so they'll come to appreciate tobacco's smooth mellow flavor and full rich taste and then become "lifelong consumers"?
You should be very wary about starting to use any proprietary software, especially software that purports to be "free". That's not to say that you should never use it, just that you should consider the long-term costs to you.
The core issue isn't really the software per se, it's the amount of your time that you would spend if you had to switch to another package. For example, let's say that "Moose and Squirrel Compilers, inc" chose to release a C compiler in binary-only form. As long as you don't use too many of their proprietary hooks then you're probably OK since the bulk of the data that you spend your time creating is in a data format ("C") which can easily be moved over to another compiler if need be.
Now let's consider a CAD program. Since you're likely building your CAD models inside the program, and the program likely has a very proprietary data model, you would almost certainly be screwed if you tried to change to another CAD program. Sure, your new program might claim to import your old program's data files, but it would be unlikely to do it well.
Office suites probably fall somewhere in the middle. They use proprietary formats by default but you can usually save in something (HTML, RTF) that can be read reasonably well by other tools.
Now, let's turn the proprietary software FUD back against itself. When the software that you paid nothing for fails, "who you gonna sue?" Even if you could sue Oracle or Microsoft if you paid them a lot of money (ha!), what would you do when the software that they gave you for free didn't work? It's worth what you paid for, right?
So from a support perspective you're in the worst place imaginable: the vendor isn't really incented to give you support (what's in it for them?), you have zero leverage with your vendor, and you can't go anywhere else for support.
The difference between "free beer" software and free software is the difference between "buyer beware" and "don't look a gift horse in the mouth." The "free beer" software is an attempt to sell you something, the free software is a gift from the developers to you.
Good luck!
Re:Hmm.. how does PHP work with Postgres?
on
Why Not MySQL?
·
· Score: 1
Yup, that's true.
I'd also point out that phplib has a nice abstract database interface that wraps the pg_ functions with ones that will work with both mysql and pgsql (and others). I've seen a couple of cases recently (bookmarker, webcalendar) where apps which were written using phplib and mysql were easily ported to pgsql.
Let's see: by my calculations 99.99999% uptime (which the industry would call "seven nines" uptime) would correspond to 3.1536 seconds of downtime per year.
The industry SOTA for Unix machines in a high-availability configuration (HP MC/Serviceguard, Sun Solstice HA, IBM HACMP, etc) is about four nines, and is moving to five, but only as end-to-end certified solution stacks that go all the way from environment (power, cooling, earthquake, etc) up through the application.
Tandem and IBM may be able to claim seven nines with their proprietary big iron, and maybe VAXclusters can get close, but I doubt that they'd guarantee it, and if they do they would never agree to liquidated damages so the "guarantee" wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on.
Bottom line: when your system goes down at 3 am you will be on the hook to figure out how to work around the problem. You cannot count on any vendor to bail you out. Again: you're on your own. If it turns out that the problem is due to a bug in the database (which is unlikely - it's probably flight crew error) then maybe they'll fix it, maybe not. But my experience with Oracle and Sybase is that they're no more or less helpful than the community around pgsql and mysql. (OK, in Oracle's case, probably less). Each product has plenty of technical features that make them more appropriate for large-scale OLTP than mysql and pgsql, but having someone to call ain't one of them.
The Navy has contracted with the small Minnesota firm of
Nonvolatile Electronics Inc. to develop the technology to produce the devices on a commercial scale. The company was founded in 1989 by James Daughton, who pioneered the field with Honeywell, and it has already carved out a sizable market for magnetic sensors and other devices based on similar technology.
This is solid-state storage, not a new type of hard disk, so it's square inch of silicon rather than square inch of disk surface.
This appears to be the latest in a long line of "hard disk killers". Remember bubble memory? E2PROM? FLASH? Who knows, maybe this one will be more successful than those. I'm not holding my breath...
I saw their farewell tour in Philadelphia around 1983 and they were old and boring even back then. Just picking up the paycheck and going through the motions. Add 15 years and a few pounds around the middle and we'll all wish they had the smarts to just pack it in when they were on top.
But I guess the upkeep of english manor houses must be really steep these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Believe me, I agree that HTML's day has passed, but it is not a "total failure", in fact it has done a huge amount of good for the computer industry, and will be regarded by history as a tremendously successful (albeit imperfect) technology.
You seem to like XML, but let's face facts here: XML wouldn't exist today if not for HTML. We'd have SGML as a niche technology in high-end applications, and we'd have some proprietary "file format" (remember Blackbird?) for the masses.
Let's try this: if HTML is a "total failure" then what, Frodo, do you consider to be a success?
Quad Xeon machines are doing around 25,000 transactions per minute on the real tpc tests (here) so for a 2-cpu machine to do 300 per minute is not terribly impressive. I think it's probably the trivial hardware that was holding those test back, though, rather than postgres per se.
With only two disks the tests were almost certainly disk-bound, which would explain the striking similarity in the TPC-C results for all three vendors. I doubt any of the database systems really got a chance to hit their stride.
So the bottom line is that we still don't know what postgres can do given reasonable HW, by which I mean at least 4 CPU's, 2GB memory, and 16 disks.
Hello, Great Bridge?
pot()
{
kettle( black);
}
> First question you ask them(before you sign anything): Which OS do you prefer?
> Favored response: Whichever is best for the situation.
I doubt I'd trust any consultant that gave me such an evasive non-answer. Your implied point is valid, i.e. you don't want to hire religious zealots, but it's actually good for people to have a personal preference (it shows that they care), and you want to know up front what it is. The last thing you want is someone who hides behind pretend impartiality.
Perhaps a better approach would be to ask what her preference is, and then ask her to describe a case where she implemented something other than her preference and why.
I worked in a lab in 1986-7 that did a lot of analog circuit design using SPICE. We had a 6MHz IBM AT and bought a cute little board that fit nicely on the back of the machine and plugged into the crystal socket (IIRC). It had a knob on it that allowed you to control the clock speed.
8MHz was easy to get, 10MHz was unreliable, and sometimes you could run up to 9MHz.
Boy, it's a pretty sad feeling to be old enough to tell "back-when" stories.
But the "free beer" (kind of an offensive, pre-judging term to me) software, is like giving free hammers to try out before you buy, and giving them free to the students and poor people who are using them for non-commercial purposes. I think it's extremely admirable.
I agree that it would be cynical to suggest that the companies giving proprietary software away are trying to get people hooked, but how is what they're doing different than giving free cigarettes to people so they'll come to appreciate tobacco's smooth mellow flavor and full rich taste and then become "lifelong consumers"?
semis,
You should be very wary about starting to use any proprietary software, especially software that purports to be "free". That's not to say that you should never use it, just that you should consider the long-term costs to you.
The core issue isn't really the software per se, it's the amount of your time that you would spend if you had to switch to another package. For example, let's say that "Moose and Squirrel Compilers, inc" chose to release a C compiler in binary-only form. As long as you don't use too many of their proprietary hooks then you're probably OK since the bulk of the data that you spend your time creating is in a data format ("C") which can easily be moved over to another compiler if need be.
Now let's consider a CAD program. Since you're likely building your CAD models inside the program, and the program likely has a very proprietary data model, you would almost certainly be screwed if you tried to change to another CAD program. Sure, your new program might claim to import your old program's data files, but it would be unlikely to do it well.
Office suites probably fall somewhere in the middle. They use proprietary formats by default but you can usually save in something (HTML, RTF) that can be read reasonably well by other tools.
Now, let's turn the proprietary software FUD back against itself. When the software that you paid nothing for fails, "who you gonna sue?" Even if you could sue Oracle or Microsoft if you paid them a lot of money (ha!), what would you do when the software that they gave you for free didn't work? It's worth what you paid for, right?
So from a support perspective you're in the worst place imaginable: the vendor isn't really incented to give you support (what's in it for them?), you have zero leverage with your vendor, and you can't go anywhere else for support.
The difference between "free beer" software and free software is the difference between "buyer beware" and "don't look a gift horse in the mouth." The "free beer" software is an attempt to sell you something, the free software is a gift from the developers to you.
Good luck!
I'd also point out that phplib has a nice abstract database interface that wraps the pg_ functions with ones that will work with both mysql and pgsql (and others). I've seen a couple of cases recently (bookmarker, webcalendar) where apps which were written using phplib and mysql were easily ported to pgsql.
Let's see: by my calculations 99.99999% uptime (which the industry would call "seven nines" uptime) would correspond to 3.1536 seconds of downtime per year.
The industry SOTA for Unix machines in a high-availability configuration (HP MC/Serviceguard, Sun Solstice HA, IBM HACMP, etc) is about four nines, and is moving to five, but only as end-to-end certified solution stacks that go all the way from environment (power, cooling, earthquake, etc) up through the application.
Tandem and IBM may be able to claim seven nines with their proprietary big iron, and maybe VAXclusters can get close, but I doubt that they'd guarantee it, and if they do they would never agree to liquidated damages so the "guarantee" wouldn't be worth the paper it's printed on.
Bottom line: when your system goes down at 3 am you will be on the hook to figure out how to work around the problem. You cannot count on any vendor to bail you out. Again: you're on your own. If it turns out that the problem is due to a bug in the database (which is unlikely - it's probably flight crew error) then maybe they'll fix it, maybe not. But my experience with Oracle and Sybase is that they're no more or less helpful than the community around pgsql and mysql. (OK, in Oracle's case, probably less). Each product has plenty of technical features that make them more appropriate for large-scale OLTP than mysql and pgsql, but having someone to call ain't one of them.
This is solid-state storage, not a new type of hard disk, so it's square inch of silicon rather than square inch of disk surface.
This appears to be the latest in a long line of "hard disk killers". Remember bubble memory? E2PROM? FLASH? Who knows, maybe this one will be more successful than those. I'm not holding my breath...
right on, and are there any cool embedded freedos reference projects, such as microwaves, mp3 players, network-enabled toasters, etc on the market?
I saw their farewell tour in Philadelphia around 1983 and they were old and boring even back then. Just picking up the paycheck and going through the motions. Add 15 years and a few pounds around the middle and we'll all wish they had the smarts to just pack it in when they were on top.
But I guess the upkeep of english manor houses must be really steep these days.
Does anyone else see the irony in the fact that this is a New Hampshire company? The very same state whose motto is "Live free or die."
How about doofus?
I don't think that's Latin, or even atlinay.
It's more correct to say that Ellison paid other people to sail his 80 foot maxi-boat, even in races where the owner was required to sail.
Ellison is a wimpy dilettante, not a sailor. Contrast with Steve Fossett - super-rich *and* balls of steel.