Alright, I run a MYSQL database at home for my little crappy web server which no one visits because pictures of me visiting Mexico isn't exactly worth typing a number into your browser. All those details aside, why should I switch to either Microsoft's SQL Server 2005, Oracle 10g or DB2?
The answer probably is that you shouldn't. MySQL or PostgreSQL are just fine for you. They're probably fine for any shop which just needs a DB for moderate use with no expectation that your DB requirements will grow upwards.
Where the free databases wouldn't be fine is if you're a big outfit who runs hundreds of thousands of transactions and for whom database integrity, performance, scalability etc. are the primary concerns. For them, they'll pay the zillion bucks for a database which has 24/7 onsite support and which runs on every piece of hardware & OS under the sun.
Having said that, then why would anyone use a cut-down "free" version of a commercial DB? Well I can't speak of DB2 / Oracle since I don't use them. But I do use MS SQL Server. I don't particularly like it, but it does more or less what its meant to do. One program I maintain works in networked and standalone mode. In standalone mode it stores stuff in a local MSDE database. In networked mode it talks to SQL Server. Since MSDE is just a cut down SQL Server it means that we can run the same code with either configuration and be reasonably sure it will work. Since MSDE is a free redistributable, we can ship it with the app and the customer can decide which mode to run in. Also, if you're a developer, the cut down version means you can play around with a local copy of the data without screwing up anyone else.
That's the benefit. Though seriously I don't think our app is exactly demanding. Some deployments can have > 1 million rows of data and has some pretty hairy queries, but we don't really need a commercial DB. I feel in my gut that we could move over to PostgreSQL and it would perform as well with that. The reason we don't port is because the risk involved in porting five years of spaghetti to another DB is simply not worth it. I know from experience when it was ported from MS Access the weird and hellish ways that DBs can differ.
Being the head of state (i.e. being the queen) means nothing for the day to day governance of the UK. The position is ceremonial. Prime ministers are required to brief her but she has absolutely no power of veto over the policies her government chooses to implement.
As it happens, religion barely even registers most of the time in UK politics. Politicians might go to church or worship but no one makes a big song and dance about it and it barely plays any part in normal life. THANKFULLY. It would be a sad day if UK politics went the way of the US where stating your belief in Jesus seems to be the main policy for many politicians. It's actually quite terrifying if it were true.
What more is there to say. The US may have a groundswell of fundamentalist nitwits, but ignorance and stupidity are human traits no matter where you live on Earth. People believe weird shit wherever they live and their own lack of critical facilities means they'll cling tenaciously to bizarre notions no matter how much evidence you fling at them that says otherwise.
Hackers discover vulnerabilities and someone creates malware ( Worm, Trojan, Attack kit or Virus ) that screws with the BIOS settings effectively turning your DRM restricted system into a useless brick.
It's already happened. Bricking is commonplace in the PSP homebrew scene and at least one trojan has done it on purpose.
So where does the DRM come into it? Whichever format they choose most porn studios are going to throw the switches to reach as large an audience as possible.
Do you want your government telling you when you can turn on and off lights? Screw that. The freedom to be ignorant is as important as the freedom to conserve here. The idea is to convience the people to conserve not force them to.
In my suggestion, the government isn't telling you, the individual when to turn on or off lights. It is telling businesses that if they waste power they'll pay for it.
All the lights are on in every aisle. What's the point of that?
None. Motion activated sensors would know if someone is in there who shouldn't be. I expect that local government could slash energy consumption by enforcing some kind of "out of hours" energy tax aimed at lights, computers etc. being left on over night. Companies would certainly enforce a turn off policy if it was hitting them in the wallet.
Firstly, who says you need heating? Most countries are warm or hot for much of the year. Secondly, just because it generates heat doesn't mean it generates useful heat. I'm sure spiders living in the corner of the room might appreciate the warmth of your PSU but humans over the other side wouldn't notice at all.
Example: I drive a car with a small engine and a catalytic convertor. It therefore is (relatively) environmentally friendly, no? Except my previous car had a larger engine yet consistently achieved better fuel efficiency. I suspect the larger engine wasn't being thrashed just to get to 30mph is much of the issue - an engine being driven hard is never as efficient as one idling.
A catalytic converter doesn't make your car more fuel efficient. It reduces harmful emissions such as carbon monoxide. Therefore it is environmentally friendly, especially to people, animals who have to breath the air and plants who don't have to deal with "acid rain". Catalytic converters undoubtedly save tens of thousands of lives. It doesn't reduce all emissions though and pumps out CO2 which while more "benign" than some emissions is still a greenhouse gas.
Besides which, it is your own damned fault if your new vehicle is less fuel efficient than your old one. You should have read the specs. As a general rule, smaller engine size does equate to better fuel economy but there is obviously going to be overlap.
Example 2: I don't have double glazing. Oh dear. Well, I don't have cavity wall insulation either. 30% of heat is lost through the wall, 10% through the window. Priorities, eh?
I fail to see your point here. Are you implying that we shouldn't strive to save energy in one way simply because there are ways that energy can be wasted? If we were to follow that logic, nothing would ever be done.
Example 3: I buy the majority of my food through the local supermarket rather than the local farmers' market. You seen the prices at my local farmers' market? It's a special treat, I simply don't have the money to buy everything I eat there.
I have no idea what you're talking about here. I'll guess that you're inferring the supply chain is longer in a supermarket, and therefore it's less eco-friendly. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps your farmer's market is ripping you off. Perhaps you should be buying local produce from your supermarket where the choice is available and talking to the manager when it isn't.
All of which is irrelevant to whether TVs should burn power in standby for 8 hours a day as they undoubtedly do in most households.
Some perspective please. Turning your TV on or off with a physical switch is hardly the biggest hardship in the world. A TV which physically turns itself off after (for example) a few hours on standby is not a hardship. It might even reduce power brown outs, smog, respiratory diseases, global warming and of course your electricity bill.
Make all of the staff turn off their computers at night. Rather than having 10, 20, 30, 100+ computers and their monitors whirring away doing absolutely nothing at all. Simple I know, but it's amazing that practically no company insists on it. Perhaps it needs their local government to impose some kind of "out of hours" energy tax on them to encourage them.
Steve Jobs said that he was talking about the processors being faster...
Which is all well and good until you visit apple.com and see on their very front page the new Macs being touted as "4x faster (wishes do come true)" and "2x faster. Twice as amazing". Deceptive advertising in other words. I'm sure apologists will say "ah but if you click a few times, and read the small print that they're talking about some specific tests". Never mind that you'd have to be technically minded to even understand what those tests are or why they are total BS for real world comparison purposes.
The question is: How could this get so far? I think, because of the ignorance and stubbornness some of the wikipedia people in Germany...
I think this is silly. Whether the parents like it or not, the life and death of their son is part of the public record. It would be absurd for Wikipedia to remove his surname to spare their feelings, or even to help them in a court battle.
Besides which, you can't spin an entire book out of a single wikipedia article. If they have a problem with the author, they should take it up with the author and not with short and mostly impartial report into their son's life.
It is straightforward if notice all the places on the apple site touting the new Mac as "2x faster" without a mention of benchmarks or their likely real world performance which will be nowhere near that. It's outright lying. Apple got in trouble in the UK for deceptive advertising when they claimed the tower G5 to be the fastest personal computer when it wasn't. I expect they'll do so again.
My point is that the story write-up makes it sound like SJ is lying, and he's not. He's just presenting the best set of benchmarks he can, which is pretty much what I expect from the CEO of the company...
Proudly stating in large graphics all over the spiele that your new machines is "2x faster" when it isn't *is* lying. Or does Steve Jobs now think all his customers are so tech-literate as to read the small-print where the 2x faster boast actually only applies when running a specific benchmark test and not indicative at all of its actual real-world performance?
Assuming it works as designed, this Freecom FSG-3 storage gateway looks like an answer to most home user's needs. It does webserving, SMB, email, network printing, firewalling and more out of the box. It even runs Linux, which assuming on how open they make it might even allow you to make it run a Subversion server or other esoteric things. It's not RAID though it does have USB ports so perhaps you could attach one.
Yes I do use VMWare. And performance is pretty bloody awful even when you have the VMWare tools installed. Not Bochs awful or QEmu awful but just barely tolerable.
Of course I have VMWare 4. I suppose some miracle may have happened in 5.x but somehow I doubt it.
Heh, I'm not American. And it doesn't require a course in Latin to realise how stupid it is to produce a site few people are going to remember let alone spell properly.
The more interesting possibility for many users will not be directly booting or dual-booting Windows XP, but rather running Windows XP at essentially the full speed of the underlying hardware in a virtual machine, right alongside Mac OS X.
Short of Microsoft implementing some kind of virtualization technology, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of XP running full speed alongside Mac OS X. You only have to look at the likes of VMWare et al to realise that you'd be lucky to get a 1/5th the native performance and it certainly wouldn't be any CPU intensive operations for video, games etc.
As I said, it would be different if there were some Xen like system for Windows - and perhaps some day there may be - but I wouldn't hold my breath just yet. Even if the Mac folks in MS could do something funky using Virtual PC, I wonder if they would be allowed to.
Flash sucks on Firefox, at least on Windows anyway. Saturation advertising plus 10 or so tabs causes Firefox to sometimes peg my CPU at close to 100% as it deals with Flash. I guess this may be a Firefox bug since there should be an option to suspend plugins when they are effectively inactive (such as with tabs) but the net effect is I now use Adblock to control the situation.
I'm not talking about being platform independent, robustness or things directly related to merits of some programming language or enviroment, but more about how many potential people have access.NET technology.
I interviewed 5 people for a.NET position recently. Some of them had put VB.NET or ASP.NET on their resumes and (surprise) turned out to be utterly clueless when asked simple questions such as "what is reference counting", "what is garbage collection" etc. I find asking such questions a good way to gauge someone's competence.
For example, VB programmer may with some training be able to move his old VB code's business logic to.NET server.
I wouldn't let a VB programmer within 20 yards of a server. I'm sure you could train them to VB.NET but I don't believe they have the suitable background discipline to be a natural or even easy fit. In my experience, the best programmers you can get are those already grounded in Java or C++ (with Win32 / COM) experience and therefore fully versed with most of the principles of.NET. I think I'd even pick PHP, Python or Ruby experience over VB.
Even some big manufactures make it fairly simple to unlock the region encoding on their devices. I bought a Philips DVD player (from Tesco in fact) and was able to unlock it with a few codes on the remote. The player also plays DIVX so all in all its really quite a nice player.
If you're prepared to go with unheard of players you'll find virtuall all of them are region unlockable and often contain a slip of paper telling you how to do it.
Region encoding is a farce anyway. It's hard to see why studios are so worked up about it.
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The answer probably is that you shouldn't. MySQL or PostgreSQL are just fine for you. They're probably fine for any shop which just needs a DB for moderate use with no expectation that your DB requirements will grow upwards.
Where the free databases wouldn't be fine is if you're a big outfit who runs hundreds of thousands of transactions and for whom database integrity, performance, scalability etc. are the primary concerns. For them, they'll pay the zillion bucks for a database which has 24/7 onsite support and which runs on every piece of hardware & OS under the sun.
Having said that, then why would anyone use a cut-down "free" version of a commercial DB? Well I can't speak of DB2 / Oracle since I don't use them. But I do use MS SQL Server. I don't particularly like it, but it does more or less what its meant to do. One program I maintain works in networked and standalone mode. In standalone mode it stores stuff in a local MSDE database. In networked mode it talks to SQL Server. Since MSDE is just a cut down SQL Server it means that we can run the same code with either configuration and be reasonably sure it will work. Since MSDE is a free redistributable, we can ship it with the app and the customer can decide which mode to run in. Also, if you're a developer, the cut down version means you can play around with a local copy of the data without screwing up anyone else.
That's the benefit. Though seriously I don't think our app is exactly demanding. Some deployments can have > 1 million rows of data and has some pretty hairy queries, but we don't really need a commercial DB. I feel in my gut that we could move over to PostgreSQL and it would perform as well with that. The reason we don't port is because the risk involved in porting five years of spaghetti to another DB is simply not worth it. I know from experience when it was ported from MS Access the weird and hellish ways that DBs can differ.
As it happens, religion barely even registers most of the time in UK politics. Politicians might go to church or worship but no one makes a big song and dance about it and it barely plays any part in normal life. THANKFULLY. It would be a sad day if UK politics went the way of the US where stating your belief in Jesus seems to be the main policy for many politicians. It's actually quite terrifying if it were true.
What more is there to say. The US may have a groundswell of fundamentalist nitwits, but ignorance and stupidity are human traits no matter where you live on Earth. People believe weird shit wherever they live and their own lack of critical facilities means they'll cling tenaciously to bizarre notions no matter how much evidence you fling at them that says otherwise.
It's already happened. Bricking is commonplace in the PSP homebrew scene and at least one trojan has done it on purpose.
So where does the DRM come into it? Whichever format they choose most porn studios are going to throw the switches to reach as large an audience as possible.
In my suggestion, the government isn't telling you, the individual when to turn on or off lights. It is telling businesses that if they waste power they'll pay for it.
None. Motion activated sensors would know if someone is in there who shouldn't be. I expect that local government could slash energy consumption by enforcing some kind of "out of hours" energy tax aimed at lights, computers etc. being left on over night. Companies would certainly enforce a turn off policy if it was hitting them in the wallet.
Firstly, who says you need heating? Most countries are warm or hot for much of the year. Secondly, just because it generates heat doesn't mean it generates useful heat. I'm sure spiders living in the corner of the room might appreciate the warmth of your PSU but humans over the other side wouldn't notice at all.
A catalytic converter doesn't make your car more fuel efficient. It reduces harmful emissions such as carbon monoxide. Therefore it is environmentally friendly, especially to people, animals who have to breath the air and plants who don't have to deal with "acid rain". Catalytic converters undoubtedly save tens of thousands of lives. It doesn't reduce all emissions though and pumps out CO2 which while more "benign" than some emissions is still a greenhouse gas.
Besides which, it is your own damned fault if your new vehicle is less fuel efficient than your old one. You should have read the specs. As a general rule, smaller engine size does equate to better fuel economy but there is obviously going to be overlap.
Example 2: I don't have double glazing. Oh dear. Well, I don't have cavity wall insulation either. 30% of heat is lost through the wall, 10% through the window. Priorities, eh?
I fail to see your point here. Are you implying that we shouldn't strive to save energy in one way simply because there are ways that energy can be wasted? If we were to follow that logic, nothing would ever be done.
Example 3: I buy the majority of my food through the local supermarket rather than the local farmers' market. You seen the prices at my local farmers' market? It's a special treat, I simply don't have the money to buy everything I eat there.
I have no idea what you're talking about here. I'll guess that you're inferring the supply chain is longer in a supermarket, and therefore it's less eco-friendly. Perhaps you're right. Perhaps your farmer's market is ripping you off. Perhaps you should be buying local produce from your supermarket where the choice is available and talking to the manager when it isn't.
All of which is irrelevant to whether TVs should burn power in standby for 8 hours a day as they undoubtedly do in most households.
Some perspective please. Turning your TV on or off with a physical switch is hardly the biggest hardship in the world. A TV which physically turns itself off after (for example) a few hours on standby is not a hardship. It might even reduce power brown outs, smog, respiratory diseases, global warming and of course your electricity bill.
Make all of the staff turn off their computers at night. Rather than having 10, 20, 30, 100+ computers and their monitors whirring away doing absolutely nothing at all. Simple I know, but it's amazing that practically no company insists on it. Perhaps it needs their local government to impose some kind of "out of hours" energy tax on them to encourage them.
Which is all well and good until you visit apple.com and see on their very front page the new Macs being touted as "4x faster (wishes do come true)" and "2x faster. Twice as amazing". Deceptive advertising in other words. I'm sure apologists will say "ah but if you click a few times, and read the small print that they're talking about some specific tests". Never mind that you'd have to be technically minded to even understand what those tests are or why they are total BS for real world comparison purposes.
I think this is silly. Whether the parents like it or not, the life and death of their son is part of the public record. It would be absurd for Wikipedia to remove his surname to spare their feelings, or even to help them in a court battle.
Besides which, you can't spin an entire book out of a single wikipedia article. If they have a problem with the author, they should take it up with the author and not with short and mostly impartial report into their son's life.
I demand that Red Hat immediately hand over all their private keys!
It is straightforward if notice all the places on the apple site touting the new Mac as "2x faster" without a mention of benchmarks or their likely real world performance which will be nowhere near that. It's outright lying. Apple got in trouble in the UK for deceptive advertising when they claimed the tower G5 to be the fastest personal computer when it wasn't. I expect they'll do so again.
... than being elevated hundreds of feet into the air inside a steel box using unproven, fireprone technology.
Proudly stating in large graphics all over the spiele that your new machines is "2x faster" when it isn't *is* lying. Or does Steve Jobs now think all his customers are so tech-literate as to read the small-print where the 2x faster boast actually only applies when running a specific benchmark test and not indicative at all of its actual real-world performance?
Assuming it works as designed, this Freecom FSG-3 storage gateway looks like an answer to most home user's needs. It does webserving, SMB, email, network printing, firewalling and more out of the box. It even runs Linux, which assuming on how open they make it might even allow you to make it run a Subversion server or other esoteric things. It's not RAID though it does have USB ports so perhaps you could attach one.
Of course I have VMWare 4. I suppose some miracle may have happened in 5.x but somehow I doubt it.
Heh, I'm not American. And it doesn't require a course in Latin to realise how stupid it is to produce a site few people are going to remember let alone spell properly.
No one is going to have the foggiest idea how to type quero, queero, quato, kumquat, kuato or whatever the hell it is into their addrees bar.
Short of Microsoft implementing some kind of virtualization technology, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever of XP running full speed alongside Mac OS X. You only have to look at the likes of VMWare et al to realise that you'd be lucky to get a 1/5th the native performance and it certainly wouldn't be any CPU intensive operations for video, games etc.
As I said, it would be different if there were some Xen like system for Windows - and perhaps some day there may be - but I wouldn't hold my breath just yet. Even if the Mac folks in MS could do something funky using Virtual PC, I wonder if they would be allowed to.
Flash sucks on Firefox, at least on Windows anyway. Saturation advertising plus 10 or so tabs causes Firefox to sometimes peg my CPU at close to 100% as it deals with Flash. I guess this may be a Firefox bug since there should be an option to suspend plugins when they are effectively inactive (such as with tabs) but the net effect is I now use Adblock to control the situation.
I interviewed 5 people for a .NET position recently. Some of them had put VB.NET or ASP.NET on their resumes and (surprise) turned out to be utterly clueless when asked simple questions such as "what is reference counting", "what is garbage collection" etc. I find asking such questions a good way to gauge someone's competence.
For example, VB programmer may with some training be able to move his old VB code's business logic to .NET server.
I wouldn't let a VB programmer within 20 yards of a server. I'm sure you could train them to VB.NET but I don't believe they have the suitable background discipline to be a natural or even easy fit. In my experience, the best programmers you can get are those already grounded in Java or C++ (with Win32 / COM) experience and therefore fully versed with most of the principles of .NET. I think I'd even pick PHP, Python or Ruby experience over VB.
If you're prepared to go with unheard of players you'll find virtuall all of them are region unlockable and often contain a slip of paper telling you how to do it.
Region encoding is a farce anyway. It's hard to see why studios are so worked up about it.