MySQL is the database powering MultiMania, one of the largest content and hosting sites in France. Our user database has 400,000 records and most of the other tables are of similar scale. MySQL has a superb track record here - very little downtime, perfect integration with the rest of our platform (Apache, PHP), and as near to zero administration as one could wish for.
Nevertheless, I happen to agree with most of the comments in Ben Adida's article, expect, that is, for the accusations of dishonesty on the part of the MySQL team in the follow-up.
MySQL doesn't have those properties which Adida deems "critical". It isn't a "real" RDBMS. All true. But neither does it claim to be anything more than it actually is; a database system that is designed with "speed, robustness and ease of use" as primary goals. And its cake *does* have a relational icing, which makes it extremely useful for a variety of tasks that do not require a full-fledged relational database.
As usual, the proper question is whether the tool is suitable for the task, and black-and-white distinctions such as "critical" vs. "non-critical" data are of little use in such assessments. If you are handling billing records, then you definitely don't want to entrust that data to MySQL, for precisely the reasons outlined in Adida's article. Likewise if your project involves complex relational data structures. Otherwise, most database-driven Web applications can largely benefit from MySQL's ease of use, and will get done faster, run faster, and scale better.
And of course, there isn't any law that an information system can't use both MySQL *and* a slower, more powerful product such as PostgreSQL or Oracle, entrusting different types of data to one or the other as appropriate.
IMHO and as far as I can tell from reading between the lines of the story on OpenACS' site, the real reason OpenACS isn't using MySQL is that ACS was written for Oracle, and makes use of stored procedures, which MySQL doesn't provide. PostgreSQL is more similar to Oracle in terms of features, so would be a more 'natural' candidate for porting a system originally based on Oracle. If it had been written for (say) mSQL, it would have been ported to MySQL.
I would say that Adida rationalizes after the fact the motivations for choosing PostgreSQL (contingent, historical constraints) as noble architectural principles - something of a "sour grapes" attitude, again IHMO.
Also, people seem to think that taxes get taken by the government and then thrown out the window. Tax dollars started the ARPA net, provide education, and, if you live in a halfway civilized country, free health insurance.
It's not 'free' though if you pay for it in tax dollars, to start with. Or, in my instance, in tax francs - I happen to live in one of those partially civilized countries that have decent health insurance infrastructures (not too much taken out of my monthly check, and I never worry about illness or accident).
For all that, do I clamor for my government to levy more taxes ? I don't - I would much prefer it to use what it already takes from me more efficiently. (And I think of myself as leftist, very much so...)
I like to think that the hubbub over taxing Internet sales is more of a case of the US govt saying 'whatever we can't control should be banned, taxed, or declared bad for your health'.;)
Knee-jerk reactions aside - you can have one for either side of the issue - a more considered analysis yields two insights.
Fighting fire with fire makes sense insofar as it furthers a *practical* objective : to highlight the obstacles that patent law as applied to software puts in the way of software innovation. Patents held by individuals, if effective in preventing large commercial concerns from capitalizing on "obvious" ideas, would have more economic impact than the reverse situation... The ideal outcome would be Company X (insert name of your favorite monopoly) actively seeking to knock down patents on the principle of the thing.
From a broader perspective though, some arguments against applying patent law to purely abstract 'inventions' go well beyond the practical, such as some ideas being so 'necessary' in the context of a given problem that allowing such ideas to be patented amounts to loading the dice in favor of corporations who can afford to patent everything in sight.
We should definitely be worried about undermining our own position in the patent debate by appearing to discard moral or philosophical objections to patenting software too easily in favor of a below the belt, practical attack against the patent system.
Hmm, my first post went up before I read through all the comments; it's encouraging to see other 'big site' posters out there speak up with their own XML success stories.
But after reading all this, I'm getting this odd feeling again - like the one you're supposed to have with a severed finger that still itches even though it's been gone years - not that I would know about that; anyway, there's *something* missing in the picture and it makes it all wrong.
That something is of course a database that "naturally" represents, stores, and serves XML. With a usable XML database you wouldn't need SQL; you can express the same semantics, and a huge superset of them, in XML. You wouldn't need an OODBMS; XML-Data bindings would do the OO part, the data store the dirty persistence work.
Current tools in this area are few and incomplete (see the XML-Server list at eGroups for links and discussions), I hope to see some major new Open Source efforts concentrating in that area in the future.
MultiMania's site has most of its content stored in XML. The main HTTP servers are Apache+PHP; we have a JVM running the SAXON stylesheet processor, and a MySQL database with "glue" data, telling the system which XSL stylesheet to apply to wich XML document to generate which HTML page. Some neat hacks and some smart caching even let us deliver 'semi-dynamic' pages - content stored as XML, interpreted as PHP on delivery.
XML rocks. You don't need to stuff your head full of theoretical debates about namespaces, general entities, etc. All you need is vi (or Notepad) and Saxon. To learn XML syntax, just write XML files by hand and feed them to SAXON until it no longer reports XML errors. To learn XSL, just write XSL files until you get SAXON to actually spit out some HTML. Lots of examples are available to accelerate the trial and error process.
When you are finally ready to integrate the whole shebang into actual applications, there are tons of open-source tools to choose from. Look at the list above again - Apache,PHP,MySQL,SAXON - cost zero - this combo drives one of France's most popular Websites.
The Web is shrinking for exactly the same reason there are ever fewer car manufacturers, large media empires, or foodstore chains.
The market today is gung-ho on a concentration trend; only the biggest few of *anything* attract enough attention and approbation from Wall Street people (resp. any other major stock market) to compete effectively in a world where Wall Street's nod means life or death.
I suspect there is, fortunately, a counter-trend at work in the Internet, which is one of the few places where diversity generates immediate value and stagnation immediate penalties. Which of the two trends will win out might be one of the most interesting things to watch for in the century to come.;)
Readers have been quick to point out the "been there, done that" aspect - and I definitely concur; from either a conceptual or a technological viewpoint, there's nothing new here, check out Nomic, MUDs such as Shattered World, and countless others.
However... I'm dismayed at the knee-jerk "this is a scam" reflex. The reference to "former Yugoslav citizens" is particularly interesting in the context of recent events in that region; I can well understand the desire to create "from scratch" a nation based on hopefully saner principles.
For the skeptical and/or cynical, Greg Egan's novel Distress has an interesting digression at one point about how an 'artifical' nation, in the novel the island Stateless, is more likely to succeed in ensuring that democratic ideals flourish than an 'accidental' nation formed by the tortuous contingencies of history and geography; the people who move there want it to succeed.
Granted, the "Algorithm of the Social System" bit sounds silly and gimmicky, but hey, to succeed on the Internet you need a minimum of that. Meanwhile, I urge readers to judge the experiment on its own merits; its proclaimed intentions are, IMHO, beyond reproach.
Oh, yet another one of *those*. What does it actually *mean* to create an organism "entirely from genes" ? More precisely, how is the old-fashioned way of creating organisms different (i.e. *not* "entirely from genes") ? AFAIK I'm purely and entirely a product of various genes.
Five minutes' searching produces this abstract of the relevant article from the NAS Proceedings.
The abstract says that "Human embryonic kidney cells were transfected with eight plasmids [bits of DNA strands, right ?] [...] flanked by the human RNA polymerase I promoter [...] and viral polymerases". That doesn't sound so different from the previously discovered methods for cloning of larger organisms, where you inject DNA into an embryonic cell.
What sounds more interesting is the "reverse genetics" reference - which is mentioned as the technique whereby the resultant virus is a hybrid of two different strains. Anybody have informative pointers regarding that ?
...isn't so different from traditional news, I'm afraid. I found the original article a bit murky - it sidesteps such questions as, how much would it cost to convert all existing driver's licenses to a version with an embedded microchip, for instance, and who would pay for it.
One thing I would expect from online articles about regulatory and legislative issues is links to relevant online documents; a few minutes' searching sufficed to turn up the fact that the "1996 law" alluded to appears to be "23 CFR Part 1331 (State-Issued Driver's Licenses and Comparable Identification Documents)". Having access to the actual texts that the article refers to would be a great first step toward letting individual readers conceive an informed opinion on the issues involved.
A great resource for those who are inquisitive enough to want to see actual texts is FindLaw. (Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the full text of the abovementioned text; either it's not available online, or it's not indexed at FindLaw. If anybody knows where to find an online version, please post ! I should add that I'm not a U.S. citizen - but I'm fascinated, in a quite amateurish and non-lawyerly fashion, with U.S. laws and legal structures.)
Sadly, Slashdot's own spin on this kind of news is no better than Wired's; all we see is the 'juicy' bits extracted from the original article, with a "this is scary" appended. I love Slashdot, but I'm concerned to see you guys give in to sensationalism a bit too often in recent days; IMHO, what digital news is all about is avoiding spin, and letting readers check out the (published) facts.
You thought Quakers were addicts...
on
Linux Q3Test 1.07
·
· Score: 1
...well think again; apparently not all of them are fragging away all the time. Check it out. I guess everybody does have to sleep from time to time, contrary to popular geek wisdom. Or is it that Quakers' CPUs are so brawny that they can run SETI@Home and Q3A concurrently without problems ?
The true nerd's PDA of choice is, of course, the Palm IIIx. Shall we count the ways... It has 4MB of RAM, so you can load it up with countless useless things (like IRPing to fool around with IR printers), flashable OS means you can run Linux on it if you are so inclined...
Let's not be fooled, dudes - a nerd doesn't use a PDA because it's useful, as in managing your shopping list (you order on-line from your local mart anyway) or keeping track of your appointments. We have them because they're way cool - in other words, we have an intuition that they represent a new paradigm, one where bloatware is refreshingly unwelcome.
The IIIe is obviously a ploy to scrounge a bit more market share - but I say, more power to 3Com if it succeeds. Meanwhile, if you're a self-respecting nerd, get a IIIx.;)
Ooo, this together with the soon-to-be ubiquitous availability of the JVM for palmtops, plus wireless connectivity means... Yes ! Soon we can donate to worthy causes the idle CPU cycles of our PDAs as well. Another great step forward in conspicuous power consumption ! (What's that you say ? Depleting the batteries ? If you're a true geek your Palm runs on rechargeables and stays docked all the time anyway - it's not as if you were leaving home that often...)
This seems to be against the main trend these days, which is toward 'intimist' technology - mobile, wearable, personal... wireless.
The phonecos understand that they stand to gain a great deal by pushing that trend; for them the traditional business of fixed phones meant incurring a responsibility to ensure that all phones worked properly, and all locations had access to phone service.
With mobiles it's almost the reverse - it's expected that the user, not the phoneco, will do whatever is necessary to improve a bad connection; e.g. move out of a building. And users are generally willing to pay a higher per-minute fee if the operator gives better coverage. IOW, good phone service is no longer something you can take for granted - you want it, you'll have to pay for it.
This side of the Channel, France Telecom recently announced a surcharge on prepaid calling cards to "cover phone booth maintenance costs". I'd bet good money that this is only the first step in a process which will eventually result in the disappearance of phone booths altogether.
There's something strange about that decision; maybe someone at Slashdot should ask someone at Boutell for a statement. Consider : Wusage outputs GIFs - in fact, it appears to have the GD library statically linked. One would think Boutell either does have a license from Unisys to distribute GIF code with Wusage - in which case one would expect that they would have been clear on what the score is with respect to GIF,RLE and LZW copyright and/or patent issues for some time now - or they do not, in which case why discontinue GD but keep distributing Wusage (or MapEdit, which reads GIFS...) So; what brought this on ? Inquiring minds want to know.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.codepoetry.net/2006/07/07/verizon_reall y_bad_at_math
Do pinball sims qualify ? I'd like to nominate Pro Pinball, just to be perverse. ;)
MySQL is the database powering MultiMania, one of the largest content and hosting sites in France. Our user database has 400,000 records and most of the other tables are of similar scale. MySQL has a superb track record here - very little downtime, perfect integration with the rest of our platform (Apache, PHP), and as near to zero administration as one could wish for.
Nevertheless, I happen to agree with most of the comments in Ben Adida's article, expect, that is, for the accusations of dishonesty on the part of the MySQL team in the follow-up.
MySQL doesn't have those properties which Adida deems "critical". It isn't a "real" RDBMS. All true. But neither does it claim to be anything more than it actually is; a database system that is designed with "speed, robustness and ease of use" as primary goals. And its cake *does* have a relational icing, which makes it extremely useful for a variety of tasks that do not require a full-fledged relational database.
As usual, the proper question is whether the tool is suitable for the task, and black-and-white distinctions such as "critical" vs. "non-critical" data are of little use in such assessments. If you are handling billing records, then you definitely don't want to entrust that data to MySQL, for precisely the reasons outlined in Adida's article. Likewise if your project involves complex relational data structures. Otherwise, most database-driven Web applications can largely benefit from MySQL's ease of use, and will get done faster, run faster, and scale better.
And of course, there isn't any law that an information system can't use both MySQL *and* a slower, more powerful product such as PostgreSQL or Oracle, entrusting different types of data to one or the other as appropriate.
IMHO and as far as I can tell from reading between the lines of the story on OpenACS' site, the real reason OpenACS isn't using MySQL is that ACS was written for Oracle, and makes use of stored procedures, which MySQL doesn't provide. PostgreSQL is more similar to Oracle in terms of features, so would be a more 'natural' candidate for porting a system originally based on Oracle. If it had been written for (say) mSQL, it would have been ported to MySQL.
I would say that Adida rationalizes after the fact the motivations for choosing PostgreSQL (contingent, historical constraints) as noble architectural principles - something of a "sour grapes" attitude, again IHMO.
A good point - that taxes are not evil per se.
;)
Also, people seem to think that taxes get taken by the government and then thrown out the window. Tax dollars started the ARPA net, provide education, and, if you live in a halfway civilized country, free health insurance.
It's not 'free' though if you pay for it in tax dollars, to start with. Or, in my instance, in tax francs - I happen to live in one of those partially civilized countries that have decent health insurance infrastructures (not too much taken out of my monthly check, and I never worry about illness or accident).
For all that, do I clamor for my government to levy more taxes ? I don't - I would much prefer it to use what it already takes from me more efficiently. (And I think of myself as leftist, very much so...)
I like to think that the hubbub over taxing Internet sales is more of a case of the US govt saying 'whatever we can't control should be banned, taxed, or declared bad for your health'.
Knee-jerk reactions aside - you can have one for either side of the issue - a more considered analysis yields two insights.
Fighting fire with fire makes sense insofar as it furthers a *practical* objective : to highlight the obstacles that patent law as applied to software puts in the way of software innovation. Patents held by individuals, if effective in preventing large commercial concerns from capitalizing on "obvious" ideas, would have more economic impact than the reverse situation... The ideal outcome would be Company X (insert name of your favorite monopoly) actively seeking to knock down patents on the principle of the thing.
From a broader perspective though, some arguments against applying patent law to purely abstract 'inventions' go well beyond the practical, such as some ideas being so 'necessary' in the context of a given problem that allowing such ideas to be patented amounts to loading the dice in favor of corporations who can afford to patent everything in sight.
We should definitely be worried about undermining our own position in the patent debate by appearing to discard moral or philosophical objections to patenting software too easily in favor of a below the belt, practical attack against the patent system.
Hmm, my first post went up before I read through all the comments; it's encouraging to see other 'big site' posters out there speak up with their own XML success stories.
But after reading all this, I'm getting this odd feeling again - like the one you're supposed to have with a severed finger that still itches even though it's been gone years - not that I would know about that; anyway, there's *something* missing in the picture and it makes it all wrong.
That something is of course a database that "naturally" represents, stores, and serves XML. With a usable XML database you wouldn't need SQL; you can express the same semantics, and a huge superset of them, in XML. You wouldn't
need an OODBMS; XML-Data bindings would do the OO part, the data store the dirty persistence work.
Current tools in this area are few and incomplete (see the XML-Server list at eGroups for links and discussions), I hope to see some major new Open Source efforts concentrating in that area in the future.
MultiMania's site has most of its content stored in XML. The main HTTP servers are Apache+PHP; we have a JVM running the SAXON stylesheet processor, and a MySQL database with "glue" data, telling the system which XSL stylesheet to apply to wich XML document to generate which HTML page. Some neat hacks and some smart caching even let us deliver 'semi-dynamic' pages - content stored as XML, interpreted as PHP on delivery.
XML rocks. You don't need to stuff your head full of theoretical debates about namespaces, general entities, etc. All you need is vi (or Notepad) and Saxon. To learn XML syntax, just write XML files by hand and feed them to SAXON until it no longer reports XML errors. To learn XSL, just write XSL files until you get SAXON to actually spit out some HTML. Lots of examples are available to accelerate the trial and error process.
When you are finally ready to integrate the whole shebang into actual applications, there are tons of open-source tools to choose from. Look at the list above again - Apache,PHP,MySQL,SAXON - cost zero - this combo drives one of France's most popular Websites.
Since mod_php3 has already been nominated, let's add mod_rewrite as an outstanding candidate.
where the last few words actually mean "the so-called Crypto API" (and are short for "die sogenannter Crypto API"). This is translated by BabelFish as
which is in fact a very quite appropriate translation, even if it is right for the wrong reason...
One assumes "sog" is the past perfect conjugation (sp?) of a verb that actually means "to suck" in a more or less literal sense.
The Web is shrinking for exactly the same reason there are ever fewer car manufacturers, large media empires, or foodstore chains.
;)
The market today is gung-ho on a concentration trend; only the biggest few of *anything* attract enough attention and approbation from Wall Street people (resp. any other major stock market) to compete effectively in a world where Wall Street's nod means life or death.
I suspect there is, fortunately, a counter-trend at work in the Internet, which is one of the few places where diversity generates immediate value and stagnation immediate penalties. Which of the two trends will win out might be one of the most interesting things to watch for in the century to come.
Readers have been quick to point out the "been there, done that" aspect - and I definitely concur; from either a conceptual or a technological viewpoint, there's nothing new here, check out Nomic, MUDs such as Shattered World, and countless others.
However... I'm dismayed at the knee-jerk "this is a scam" reflex. The reference to "former Yugoslav citizens" is particularly interesting in the context of recent events in that region; I can well understand the desire to create "from scratch" a nation based on hopefully saner principles.
For the skeptical and/or cynical, Greg Egan's novel Distress has an interesting digression at one point about how an 'artifical' nation, in the novel the island Stateless, is more likely to succeed in ensuring that democratic ideals flourish than an 'accidental' nation formed by the tortuous contingencies of history and geography; the people who move there want it to succeed.
Granted, the "Algorithm of the Social System" bit sounds silly and gimmicky, but hey, to succeed on the Internet you need a minimum of that. Meanwhile, I urge readers to judge the experiment on its own merits; its proclaimed intentions are, IMHO, beyond reproach.
Oh, yet another one of *those*. What does it actually *mean* to create an organism "entirely from genes" ? More precisely, how is the old-fashioned way of creating organisms different (i.e. *not* "entirely from genes") ? AFAIK I'm purely and entirely a product of various genes.
Five minutes' searching produces this abstract of the relevant article from the NAS Proceedings.
The abstract says that "Human embryonic kidney cells were transfected with eight plasmids [bits of DNA strands, right ?] [...] flanked by the human RNA polymerase I promoter [...] and viral polymerases". That doesn't sound so different from the previously discovered methods for cloning of larger organisms, where you inject DNA into an embryonic cell.
What sounds more interesting is the "reverse genetics" reference - which is mentioned as the technique whereby the resultant virus is a hybrid of two different strains. Anybody have informative pointers regarding that ?
Uh-uh. It's only SPAM if they don't include a note stating that an alien may reply to the message asking to be removed from their mailing list. ;)
Seriously though... This raises the ages-old question once again : is there intelligent life on Earth ?
Etc, etc, ad nauseam...
...isn't so different from traditional news, I'm afraid. I found the original article a bit murky - it sidesteps such questions as, how much would it cost to convert all existing driver's licenses to a version with an embedded microchip, for instance, and who would pay for it.
One thing I would expect from online articles about regulatory and legislative issues is links to relevant online documents; a few minutes' searching sufficed to turn up the fact that the "1996 law" alluded to appears to be "23 CFR Part 1331 (State-Issued Driver's Licenses and Comparable Identification Documents)". Having access to the actual texts that the article refers to would be a great first step toward letting individual readers conceive an informed opinion on the issues involved.
A great resource for those who are inquisitive enough to want to see actual texts is FindLaw. (Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the full text of the abovementioned text; either it's not available online, or it's not indexed at FindLaw. If anybody knows where to find an online version, please post ! I should add that I'm not a U.S. citizen - but I'm fascinated, in a quite amateurish and non-lawyerly fashion, with U.S. laws and legal structures.)
Sadly, Slashdot's own spin on this kind of news is no better than Wired's; all we see is the 'juicy' bits extracted from the original article, with a "this is scary" appended. I love Slashdot, but I'm concerned to see you guys give in to sensationalism a bit too often in recent days; IMHO, what digital news is all about is avoiding spin, and letting readers check out the (published) facts.
...well think again; apparently not all of them are fragging away all the time. Check it out. I guess everybody does have to sleep from time to time, contrary to popular geek wisdom. Or is it that Quakers' CPUs are so brawny that they can run SETI@Home and Q3A concurrently without problems ?
The true nerd's PDA of choice is, of course, the Palm IIIx. Shall we count the ways... It has 4MB of RAM, so you can load it up with countless useless things (like IRPing to fool around with IR printers), flashable OS means you can run Linux on it if you are so inclined...
;)
Let's not be fooled, dudes - a nerd doesn't use a PDA because it's useful, as in managing your shopping list (you order on-line from your local mart anyway) or keeping track of your appointments. We have them because they're way cool - in other words, we have an intuition that they represent a new paradigm, one where bloatware is refreshingly unwelcome.
The IIIe is obviously a ploy to scrounge a bit more market share - but I say, more power to 3Com if it succeeds. Meanwhile, if you're a self-respecting nerd, get a IIIx.
Ooo, this together with the soon-to-be ubiquitous availability of the JVM for palmtops, plus wireless connectivity means... Yes ! Soon we can donate to worthy causes the idle CPU cycles of our PDAs as well. Another great step forward in conspicuous power consumption ! (What's that you say ? Depleting the batteries ? If you're a true geek your Palm runs on rechargeables and stays docked all the time anyway - it's not as if you were leaving home that often...)
This seems to be against the main trend these days, which is toward 'intimist' technology - mobile, wearable, personal... wireless.
The phonecos understand that they stand to gain a great deal by pushing that trend; for them the traditional business of fixed phones meant incurring a responsibility to ensure that all phones worked properly, and all locations had access to phone service.
With mobiles it's almost the reverse - it's expected that the user, not the phoneco, will do whatever is necessary to improve a bad connection; e.g. move out of a building. And users are generally willing to pay a higher per-minute fee if the operator gives better coverage. IOW, good phone service is no longer something you can take for granted - you want it, you'll have to pay for it.
This side of the Channel, France Telecom recently announced a surcharge on prepaid calling cards to "cover phone booth maintenance costs". I'd bet good money that this is only the first step in a process which will eventually result in the disappearance of phone booths altogether.
A PR stunt is all this is, IMHO.
There's something strange about that decision; maybe someone at Slashdot should ask someone at Boutell for a statement. Consider : Wusage outputs GIFs - in fact, it appears to have the GD library statically linked. One would think Boutell either does have a license from Unisys to distribute GIF code with Wusage - in which case one would expect that they would have been clear on what the score is with respect to GIF,RLE and LZW copyright and/or patent issues for some time now - or they do not, in which case why discontinue GD but keep distributing Wusage (or MapEdit, which reads GIFS...) So; what brought this on ? Inquiring minds want to know.