The fact is that the technology exists. Its a BAD idea, but someone is going to do it. The thing we need to establish are the ground rules. Either the data should be sealed and accessible only with a court order, records should not be kept in the first place, or the data should simply be in the open (after all if the argument is you're in public then it is simply public information). Having discussed this with people involved in some of these programs it's pretty clear that different law enforcement agencies ARE right now using this data to 'coordinate'. Nobody will say exactly how this happens, but they ARE tracking people right now. Clearly if the data exists this kind of thing is going to happen. Again, the wise thing to do is establish comprehensive rules and make sure they are audited and enforced rather than debating whether or not the activity is going to happen in the first place since that's already a done deal and will simply happen covertly if it isn't happening overtly.
let me know, lol. 1/3 of the human race lives on less than $3 a day in case you hadn't noticed....
The problem is if you had a $100 bn investment that had a reasonably high probability of success and a clear economic case in favor then sure it is a BIG project but quite possible. In this case there's no realistically viable economic argument and the risk premium is probably well over 10x. Your cost of financing is going to be something like 30% a year. So unless you can come up with a scenario under which you're generating a cashflow on the order a $1 tn/yr you have no business. The entire space industry isn't worth that much, so clearly this is utterly infeasible from a business standpoint.
Don't get me wrong. I think it would be very cool and a great adventure. It is simply so many orders of magnitude from any kind of economic viability that basing a business on it is pure fantasy. I realize Shackleton has convinced themselves otherwise, but people are quite good at doing that. Sadly reality is going to squish them, probably LONG before they even launch anything.
"To make this ambitious plan possible, the company this week said it had begun its initial fundraising campaign via a company called RocketHub which defines itself as a crowdfunding outfit that helps raise money for a variety of entrepreneurial pursuits."
In other news, I have decided to build a robot army to take over the world and build fusion power plants, donations welcome! lol. In the aerospace industry without funding you're just another in a LONG list of dreamers with a bunch of untried concepts. Maybe the Shackleton people are less utterly vapor than some, but the chances of anything like this getting off the ground are 1000's to 1 against. I think the business plan is vastly overoptimistic in its cost analysis, and the question still remains who would be the customers for all this rocket fuel? Truthfully, having been in the business of building rockets, this stuff is way harder and way more expensive than even most of the people in the industry are wont to estimate when it is their own project.
Not that I don't hope they can pull it off, but they're going to need 50-100 billion to do it, and I'm pretty much doubting they're going to crowdsource the GDP of most of sub-saharan Africa... Good luck to them though.
Exactly. In my business sometimes I just have to be able to use RAdmin because some client insists on it, so it can be inconvenient that there's no Linux client. I agree though, this is not really about any specific OS, it would equally inconvenient if I were using Windows and someone needed me to use some Linux app, it is just a lot less likely to happen.
Oh, I don't disagree. Photoshop also does MANY things that GIMP doesn't, and is generally a lot easier to use for more complex projects. Still, the OSS equivalents are generally pretty useful for many of us. I can use GIMP and Inkscape to do graphics for my own non-professional game and related illustration projects. If someone handed me licenses to the commercial equivalents I'd be sorely tempted to use them. My brother does commercial artwork for a living. I seriously doubt he'd even contemplate using OSS graphics apps, it would cost him time and money.
Honestly I would say that the one area where Linux is really clearly superior is in the area of development tools. As an enterprise application developer I have no need or desire to touch commercial tools, the OSS stuff and Linux are clearly superior. Even so I need to run a Windows VM now and then to use specific commercial tools like MSVS for certain jobs.
That depends on how your definitions. If I say "there is no RAdmin client for Linux" and your response is "there's a program that does something equivalent" that's a difference in definition. If I need an RAdmin client then there's no acceptable Linux software for that purpose. If you say "there's a program I can use for remote access, that's what I need to do" then you have software that is acceptable to you.
I'd just note that there are MANY classes of application in which the open source/cross platform/Linux specific application(s) ARE inferior to the alternatives that are available on other platforms. GIMP for instance is a perfectly good piece of software. OTOH for a professional commercial artist doing digital artwork GIMP is NOT a substitute for photoshop. GIMP lacks many highly useful functions that photoshop posesses and many of the functions it does have are more limited, harder to use, and produce inferior results. For ME, as someone who's needs in a graphics application are fairly modest and who doesn't rely on it for an income GIMP is a great thing. My brother on the other hand wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole because it would at best cost him a lot of time and money to work around the things it can't do and for him time is money. Likewise my friend who does electronic music and I have had this discussion many times and from what he says the Linux audio tool suite is likewise drastically more limited and harder to use than equivalent Windows applications (at best).
Yes, but the point is it is usually someone else who's deciding what they're going to use, and they generally could care less about cross-platform or platform-neutral applications.
Agreed, but that doesn't stop clients of mine insisting on using Radmin and expecting that you can log into their systems, happens pretty frequently. Same with things like go-to, people just expect you to be able to use it and they aren't inclined to switch to something else, though there are certainly some very nice alternatives. Given that most of the world doesn't even know or care that Linux exists I seriously doubt that windows-only stuff is going anywhere in the foreseeable future either.
And yes, thankfully Silverlight is probably dead. Thank dog for small favors...
Yeah, I personally haven't witnessed a non-trivial.NET app written for windows that worked in Mono. In any case my reading of the tea leaves is that Mono is likely to be moribund here pretty soon. Given that there's little advantage to building a Mono app vs just building a Java app I don't honestly even see the point in Mono. I guess there's a small corner case for porting an app to Linux, but I can see zero arguments for targeting Mono specifically otherwise.
lol, yeah. It is amusing since a bunch of my clients insisted on developing SL based front-ends on their own. Ah well, they'll be back begging me to sell them my Java based stand-alone one pretty quick... Honestly, SL never was that great. Not BAD, but I never could see much advantage to it over either flash on the one hand or Java/Mono/.NET on the other hand.
There are just lots of things that are available on Windows that aren't available on Linux. Try to access a server using RAdmin from Linux. Try to get into a go-to meeting. Try to run any arbitrary Silverlight or.NET application. There is just a ton of software that is available on Windows and there's no corresponding Linux application. Linux has a nice variety of applications in some areas, but in MANY others it is a giant wasteland. You can try to get stuff to work in WINE, but it is at best highly problematic and 70-80% of Windows apps simply won't work acceptably, if at all. On a daily basis I don't need Windows, but you really cannot live without it if you do a lot of different stuff.
Eh, yeah, I'm not "doing this because I'm a zealot". It is more like this. I can install Linux on my workstation and it keeps working properly without any screwing with things for 2-3 years at a time until I have to update just to get patches and the newest versions of things. I got REAL tired of windows years back. Its update mechanisms are crap, half the time MS patches would toast the whole OS and require a complete reinstall. I'd say windows installs last maybe 3-6 months tops before they're trashed. It was just a huge waste of time and energy. Then you stack on top of that the crappy tools MS supplies and it is no contest. Cygwin is fine, but why should I have to go through all the gyrations to install all that stuff when it should be part of a routine install (and IS a part of my routine install)? I think I've done a total of maybe 3 mandated OS reinstalls since 2003 and a couple more where it was just easier to reinstall after hardware upgrades than to twiddle with things. It isn't that Windows is BAD really, it is just that Linux is vastly less of a time-suck and does most of what I personally need. OS-X might be fine too, but I see no reason to pay too much for hardware and then pay again for every significant OS update.
Eh, I do a pretty fair amount of stuff with GIMP and Inkscape. Photoshop definitely has its pluses and if it were open source there'd be no reason not to switch, but it sure as heck isn't worth what they ask for it unless you're making money off it, that's for sure. Even if I WAS running Windows I'd still be using the free stuff.
In my world the only thing missing on Linux at this point is.NET/SL (No, Moonlight doesn't count, it's worthless). Now and then someone trots out some other obscure piece of software that I can't run without booting up the old VirtualBox. Overall though, nothing has kept ME on Windows, I ditched that turkey for good 10 years ago and Mandriva has suited me fine ever since (sadly that seems to be melting down now, but ah well, there's always openSUSE...).
Clearly though application availability is Linux's desktop achille's heel, as ever. In any way you can measure my system runs better, is more stable, and more secure than what I see people running with either OSX or Windows.
Yeah, I don't know which RackSpace you're talking about. I've run stuff on their platform. It ain't VMWare. OpenStack presumably. It is the same platform as Amazon EC2 basically. Now, maybe RS also offers some other VMWare based solutions, I don't know, but it isn't anything we ever looked into. Mostly I'm suggesting that for the smaller organizations going with a cloud based solution is likely to be more cost-effective and that would be in the end the vast majority of solutions. Of course MS is presumably using some form of HyperV in their cloud offering, but again the vast majority of users are on either RS or EC2 and AFAIK using Xen at this point.
Sure, VMWare is dominant in business virtualization. It has great features and if you're going to do some server consolidation inside a single facility it makes great sense. So there are 1000's of corps out there invested in it. Now, look at the really big virtualization facilities like RS, Amazon, etc and they're never going to touch it with a 10k foot pole. It has its niche, and as long as that niche remains relevant VMWare will probably dominate it. The real question is whether in 5 years anyone really gives a poop about that market segment anymore. Beyond that what's going to happen with Xen/KVM/etc. It is out there getting hammered on everyday in huge web-scale facilities. At a certain point can VMWare compete with that any more than IIS was able to compete with Apache? IIS is AROUND, and not even irrelevant, but it is still basically a bit player. The same thing is likely to happen in the longer term. Nor do I think HyperV is going to be relevant in the longer term. It might eat VMWare's lunch some day? Yeah, by which time nobody will care.
OK, yes, in a more nuanced sense I'll go along with you. The problem really is the whole concept that the answer to any practical real-world problems comes out of some hard-and-fast set of ideological rules. Look around the world. The societies that are ACTUALLY achieving success are doing so on the basis of practical utilitarian problem solving, not narrow ideology.
It is always tempting to construct these intellectual houses of cards, but there's only one real world out there and thermodynamics doesn't give a crap if you believe people have 'rights' or not or what you believe they consist of or to what or whom they apply. Likewise with economic theories, etc.
Frankly I think a whole bunch of people need to be dropped naked into some nice 3rd world country and allowed to receive a REAL education. Spend a few months trying to survive in Kibera or somewhere like that, you'll be cured for life of all this ideological nonsense, lol.
the influence of Jobs. Beyond that if you heard a radio piece about Henry Ford inventing the car, you'd scoff. Jobs, and Ford before him, were sharp people who were able to recognize when a product could be repackaged in a way that would make them the main purveyor of that product. I'd say Ford was actually quite a bit more influential, but in both cases the things they did would have been done anyway by someone. Perhaps tablets wouldn't have become popular until 2015 and maybe cars would have taken 5 more years to get cheap and affordable, but it still would have happened. Honestly I don't put a lot of stock on the whole 'Great Man' theory of history. Individuals may well influence the details of what happens and maybe change the timing slightly, but tablets existed before Jobs, and someone would have made one like the iPad (I'd consider Amazon for instance) eventually.
lol, Al Gore? What does Al Gore have to do with anything? Claiming that he said he invented the Internet is just as lame as claiming that Steve Jobs invented the mouse. As for AGW and Al Gore, the man at least stands up for something. He might be rather overly hyperbolic about it, but at least he's being dissed for something he actually did.
I wasn't actually so much criticizing 'the masses', but more specifically idiotic infotainers that call themselves reporters and can't even get basic facts straight. Jobs was just another CEO, albeit one with a great talent for PR and retail industrial design. I don't really get what all the hype is about personally. Eh, in a month or two it will all have faded and in 20 years nobody will remember Steve Jobs (or Al Gore either). There will always be celebrities I suppose...
It got a bit pathetic with people running around talking about how Steve Jobs invented the mouse, the personal computer, the smartphone, the media player, the tablet, and practically sliced bread. The guy was an excellent product designer with a good eye for where the market was going to go next. He was no more instrumental in shaping 21st century society than any other fashion designer. And yay, he was yet another ruthless capitalist, yawn!
Sorry, years of experience trumps statements by random/. posters. Years of running large line-of-business applications has clearly taught me that admin of pgsql is a pain in the ass, and the way many features are implemented in MySQL is simply more straightforward and easier to support. Nor have I ever witnessed any of the mysterious "doesn't do it right" nonsense. MySQL just works. It works in a way that is clearly designed to make administering it as easy as possible. PGSQL OTOH seems to have some other agenda. Its command line client is horrendous for instance. It is overly difficult to move databases around, restore rarely manages to recreate exactly what you had before, etc. For every hour I've spent running around doing a task on MySQL I spend 3 doing equally routine tasks using PGSQL. There's just no comparison. PGSQL is a perfectly fine database engine, it is simply not better than MySQL in any definable way that translates to an actual advantage in production. There will be cases where one will provide some little handy feature that is easier to use than the other, or perform some specific type of work more easily or more quickly, but that cuts both ways IME. Hands down I'll pick MySQL by default. If I have to use PGSQL for some specific reason, well, OK, so be it, I can live with that, but I'd usually prefer not to.
Seriously, that's the issue with PGSQL. There's almost no comparison, having maintained both RDBMS for extended periods of time. For simple bulk indexed storage tasks with very high read/write ratios like most webapps have it just isn't worth the pain of dealing with the idiosyncracies of PGSQL. MySQL 'just works', is a lot easier to automate, requires less maintenance, and tasks like migrating to another server or making a simple replica is trivially easy. They are both good database servers, MySQL is just 5x easier to deal with.
lol. Really, if you're going to need a small amount of current, then a small replaceable NiMH battery that the fuel cell can recharge would make LOTS more sense than something you have to maintain like this? I don't get it...
Any new layer of software like this will be complex enough to be hackable and has to be maintained, so it has to have ways to get into it. Even with TPM or some similar scheme there are ALWAYS weaknesses, timing attacks, back doors, bad implementation, etc.
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The fact is that the technology exists. Its a BAD idea, but someone is going to do it. The thing we need to establish are the ground rules. Either the data should be sealed and accessible only with a court order, records should not be kept in the first place, or the data should simply be in the open (after all if the argument is you're in public then it is simply public information). Having discussed this with people involved in some of these programs it's pretty clear that different law enforcement agencies ARE right now using this data to 'coordinate'. Nobody will say exactly how this happens, but they ARE tracking people right now. Clearly if the data exists this kind of thing is going to happen. Again, the wise thing to do is establish comprehensive rules and make sure they are audited and enforced rather than debating whether or not the activity is going to happen in the first place since that's already a done deal and will simply happen covertly if it isn't happening overtly.
let me know, lol. 1/3 of the human race lives on less than $3 a day in case you hadn't noticed....
The problem is if you had a $100 bn investment that had a reasonably high probability of success and a clear economic case in favor then sure it is a BIG project but quite possible. In this case there's no realistically viable economic argument and the risk premium is probably well over 10x. Your cost of financing is going to be something like 30% a year. So unless you can come up with a scenario under which you're generating a cashflow on the order a $1 tn/yr you have no business. The entire space industry isn't worth that much, so clearly this is utterly infeasible from a business standpoint.
Don't get me wrong. I think it would be very cool and a great adventure. It is simply so many orders of magnitude from any kind of economic viability that basing a business on it is pure fantasy. I realize Shackleton has convinced themselves otherwise, but people are quite good at doing that. Sadly reality is going to squish them, probably LONG before they even launch anything.
"To make this ambitious plan possible, the company this week said it had begun its initial fundraising campaign via a company called RocketHub which defines itself as a crowdfunding outfit that helps raise money for a variety of entrepreneurial pursuits."
In other news, I have decided to build a robot army to take over the world and build fusion power plants, donations welcome! lol. In the aerospace industry without funding you're just another in a LONG list of dreamers with a bunch of untried concepts. Maybe the Shackleton people are less utterly vapor than some, but the chances of anything like this getting off the ground are 1000's to 1 against. I think the business plan is vastly overoptimistic in its cost analysis, and the question still remains who would be the customers for all this rocket fuel? Truthfully, having been in the business of building rockets, this stuff is way harder and way more expensive than even most of the people in the industry are wont to estimate when it is their own project.
Not that I don't hope they can pull it off, but they're going to need 50-100 billion to do it, and I'm pretty much doubting they're going to crowdsource the GDP of most of sub-saharan Africa... Good luck to them though.
Exactly. In my business sometimes I just have to be able to use RAdmin because some client insists on it, so it can be inconvenient that there's no Linux client. I agree though, this is not really about any specific OS, it would equally inconvenient if I were using Windows and someone needed me to use some Linux app, it is just a lot less likely to happen.
Oh, I don't disagree. Photoshop also does MANY things that GIMP doesn't, and is generally a lot easier to use for more complex projects. Still, the OSS equivalents are generally pretty useful for many of us. I can use GIMP and Inkscape to do graphics for my own non-professional game and related illustration projects. If someone handed me licenses to the commercial equivalents I'd be sorely tempted to use them. My brother does commercial artwork for a living. I seriously doubt he'd even contemplate using OSS graphics apps, it would cost him time and money.
Honestly I would say that the one area where Linux is really clearly superior is in the area of development tools. As an enterprise application developer I have no need or desire to touch commercial tools, the OSS stuff and Linux are clearly superior. Even so I need to run a Windows VM now and then to use specific commercial tools like MSVS for certain jobs.
That depends on how your definitions. If I say "there is no RAdmin client for Linux" and your response is "there's a program that does something equivalent" that's a difference in definition. If I need an RAdmin client then there's no acceptable Linux software for that purpose. If you say "there's a program I can use for remote access, that's what I need to do" then you have software that is acceptable to you.
I'd just note that there are MANY classes of application in which the open source/cross platform/Linux specific application(s) ARE inferior to the alternatives that are available on other platforms. GIMP for instance is a perfectly good piece of software. OTOH for a professional commercial artist doing digital artwork GIMP is NOT a substitute for photoshop. GIMP lacks many highly useful functions that photoshop posesses and many of the functions it does have are more limited, harder to use, and produce inferior results. For ME, as someone who's needs in a graphics application are fairly modest and who doesn't rely on it for an income GIMP is a great thing. My brother on the other hand wouldn't touch it with a 10' pole because it would at best cost him a lot of time and money to work around the things it can't do and for him time is money. Likewise my friend who does electronic music and I have had this discussion many times and from what he says the Linux audio tool suite is likewise drastically more limited and harder to use than equivalent Windows applications (at best).
Yes, but the point is it is usually someone else who's deciding what they're going to use, and they generally could care less about cross-platform or platform-neutral applications.
Agreed, but that doesn't stop clients of mine insisting on using Radmin and expecting that you can log into their systems, happens pretty frequently. Same with things like go-to, people just expect you to be able to use it and they aren't inclined to switch to something else, though there are certainly some very nice alternatives. Given that most of the world doesn't even know or care that Linux exists I seriously doubt that windows-only stuff is going anywhere in the foreseeable future either.
And yes, thankfully Silverlight is probably dead. Thank dog for small favors...
Yeah, I personally haven't witnessed a non-trivial .NET app written for windows that worked in Mono. In any case my reading of the tea leaves is that Mono is likely to be moribund here pretty soon. Given that there's little advantage to building a Mono app vs just building a Java app I don't honestly even see the point in Mono. I guess there's a small corner case for porting an app to Linux, but I can see zero arguments for targeting Mono specifically otherwise.
lol, yeah. It is amusing since a bunch of my clients insisted on developing SL based front-ends on their own. Ah well, they'll be back begging me to sell them my Java based stand-alone one pretty quick... Honestly, SL never was that great. Not BAD, but I never could see much advantage to it over either flash on the one hand or Java/Mono/.NET on the other hand.
There are just lots of things that are available on Windows that aren't available on Linux. Try to access a server using RAdmin from Linux. Try to get into a go-to meeting. Try to run any arbitrary Silverlight or .NET application. There is just a ton of software that is available on Windows and there's no corresponding Linux application. Linux has a nice variety of applications in some areas, but in MANY others it is a giant wasteland. You can try to get stuff to work in WINE, but it is at best highly problematic and 70-80% of Windows apps simply won't work acceptably, if at all. On a daily basis I don't need Windows, but you really cannot live without it if you do a lot of different stuff.
Eh, yeah, I'm not "doing this because I'm a zealot". It is more like this. I can install Linux on my workstation and it keeps working properly without any screwing with things for 2-3 years at a time until I have to update just to get patches and the newest versions of things. I got REAL tired of windows years back. Its update mechanisms are crap, half the time MS patches would toast the whole OS and require a complete reinstall. I'd say windows installs last maybe 3-6 months tops before they're trashed. It was just a huge waste of time and energy. Then you stack on top of that the crappy tools MS supplies and it is no contest. Cygwin is fine, but why should I have to go through all the gyrations to install all that stuff when it should be part of a routine install (and IS a part of my routine install)? I think I've done a total of maybe 3 mandated OS reinstalls since 2003 and a couple more where it was just easier to reinstall after hardware upgrades than to twiddle with things. It isn't that Windows is BAD really, it is just that Linux is vastly less of a time-suck and does most of what I personally need. OS-X might be fine too, but I see no reason to pay too much for hardware and then pay again for every significant OS update.
Eh, I do a pretty fair amount of stuff with GIMP and Inkscape. Photoshop definitely has its pluses and if it were open source there'd be no reason not to switch, but it sure as heck isn't worth what they ask for it unless you're making money off it, that's for sure. Even if I WAS running Windows I'd still be using the free stuff.
In my world the only thing missing on Linux at this point is .NET/SL (No, Moonlight doesn't count, it's worthless). Now and then someone trots out some other obscure piece of software that I can't run without booting up the old VirtualBox. Overall though, nothing has kept ME on Windows, I ditched that turkey for good 10 years ago and Mandriva has suited me fine ever since (sadly that seems to be melting down now, but ah well, there's always openSUSE...).
Clearly though application availability is Linux's desktop achille's heel, as ever. In any way you can measure my system runs better, is more stable, and more secure than what I see people running with either OSX or Windows.
Yeah, I don't know which RackSpace you're talking about. I've run stuff on their platform. It ain't VMWare. OpenStack presumably. It is the same platform as Amazon EC2 basically. Now, maybe RS also offers some other VMWare based solutions, I don't know, but it isn't anything we ever looked into. Mostly I'm suggesting that for the smaller organizations going with a cloud based solution is likely to be more cost-effective and that would be in the end the vast majority of solutions. Of course MS is presumably using some form of HyperV in their cloud offering, but again the vast majority of users are on either RS or EC2 and AFAIK using Xen at this point.
Sure, VMWare is dominant in business virtualization. It has great features and if you're going to do some server consolidation inside a single facility it makes great sense. So there are 1000's of corps out there invested in it. Now, look at the really big virtualization facilities like RS, Amazon, etc and they're never going to touch it with a 10k foot pole. It has its niche, and as long as that niche remains relevant VMWare will probably dominate it. The real question is whether in 5 years anyone really gives a poop about that market segment anymore. Beyond that what's going to happen with Xen/KVM/etc. It is out there getting hammered on everyday in huge web-scale facilities. At a certain point can VMWare compete with that any more than IIS was able to compete with Apache? IIS is AROUND, and not even irrelevant, but it is still basically a bit player. The same thing is likely to happen in the longer term. Nor do I think HyperV is going to be relevant in the longer term. It might eat VMWare's lunch some day? Yeah, by which time nobody will care.
OK, yes, in a more nuanced sense I'll go along with you. The problem really is the whole concept that the answer to any practical real-world problems comes out of some hard-and-fast set of ideological rules. Look around the world. The societies that are ACTUALLY achieving success are doing so on the basis of practical utilitarian problem solving, not narrow ideology.
It is always tempting to construct these intellectual houses of cards, but there's only one real world out there and thermodynamics doesn't give a crap if you believe people have 'rights' or not or what you believe they consist of or to what or whom they apply. Likewise with economic theories, etc.
Frankly I think a whole bunch of people need to be dropped naked into some nice 3rd world country and allowed to receive a REAL education. Spend a few months trying to survive in Kibera or somewhere like that, you'll be cured for life of all this ideological nonsense, lol.
Typical ideologue nonsense. Luckily he's got about the same chance of being elected as an iceberg has of showing up at the equator.
the influence of Jobs. Beyond that if you heard a radio piece about Henry Ford inventing the car, you'd scoff. Jobs, and Ford before him, were sharp people who were able to recognize when a product could be repackaged in a way that would make them the main purveyor of that product. I'd say Ford was actually quite a bit more influential, but in both cases the things they did would have been done anyway by someone. Perhaps tablets wouldn't have become popular until 2015 and maybe cars would have taken 5 more years to get cheap and affordable, but it still would have happened. Honestly I don't put a lot of stock on the whole 'Great Man' theory of history. Individuals may well influence the details of what happens and maybe change the timing slightly, but tablets existed before Jobs, and someone would have made one like the iPad (I'd consider Amazon for instance) eventually.
I had a DECStation 5000 for years, complete with the giant Big-Mac sized round mouse.
lol, Al Gore? What does Al Gore have to do with anything? Claiming that he said he invented the Internet is just as lame as claiming that Steve Jobs invented the mouse. As for AGW and Al Gore, the man at least stands up for something. He might be rather overly hyperbolic about it, but at least he's being dissed for something he actually did.
I wasn't actually so much criticizing 'the masses', but more specifically idiotic infotainers that call themselves reporters and can't even get basic facts straight. Jobs was just another CEO, albeit one with a great talent for PR and retail industrial design. I don't really get what all the hype is about personally. Eh, in a month or two it will all have faded and in 20 years nobody will remember Steve Jobs (or Al Gore either). There will always be celebrities I suppose...
It got a bit pathetic with people running around talking about how Steve Jobs invented the mouse, the personal computer, the smartphone, the media player, the tablet, and practically sliced bread. The guy was an excellent product designer with a good eye for where the market was going to go next. He was no more instrumental in shaping 21st century society than any other fashion designer. And yay, he was yet another ruthless capitalist, yawn!
Sorry, years of experience trumps statements by random /. posters. Years of running large line-of-business applications has clearly taught me that admin of pgsql is a pain in the ass, and the way many features are implemented in MySQL is simply more straightforward and easier to support. Nor have I ever witnessed any of the mysterious "doesn't do it right" nonsense. MySQL just works. It works in a way that is clearly designed to make administering it as easy as possible. PGSQL OTOH seems to have some other agenda. Its command line client is horrendous for instance. It is overly difficult to move databases around, restore rarely manages to recreate exactly what you had before, etc. For every hour I've spent running around doing a task on MySQL I spend 3 doing equally routine tasks using PGSQL. There's just no comparison. PGSQL is a perfectly fine database engine, it is simply not better than MySQL in any definable way that translates to an actual advantage in production. There will be cases where one will provide some little handy feature that is easier to use than the other, or perform some specific type of work more easily or more quickly, but that cuts both ways IME. Hands down I'll pick MySQL by default. If I have to use PGSQL for some specific reason, well, OK, so be it, I can live with that, but I'd usually prefer not to.
Seriously, that's the issue with PGSQL. There's almost no comparison, having maintained both RDBMS for extended periods of time. For simple bulk indexed storage tasks with very high read/write ratios like most webapps have it just isn't worth the pain of dealing with the idiosyncracies of PGSQL. MySQL 'just works', is a lot easier to automate, requires less maintenance, and tasks like migrating to another server or making a simple replica is trivially easy. They are both good database servers, MySQL is just 5x easier to deal with.
lol. Really, if you're going to need a small amount of current, then a small replaceable NiMH battery that the fuel cell can recharge would make LOTS more sense than something you have to maintain like this? I don't get it...
Any new layer of software like this will be complex enough to be hackable and has to be maintained, so it has to have ways to get into it. Even with TPM or some similar scheme there are ALWAYS weaknesses, timing attacks, back doors, bad implementation, etc.