Quality of new items seems to be lower than it used to be. I own tons of consumer electronics devices, way more than the average person, I'm sure. The things I buy now don't last as long. I've been through 3 dvd players in 4 years, and they were all over $150. Yet I have a set of speakers that are 12 years old (!) and still work perfectly.
There's also no point in fixing any of these items, everything is soldered onto one PCB board. If one trace comes loose... Time for a new unit.
You'll find a pair of these in pretty much any club in the entire world. The design hasn't changed at all in over 20 years. It's a beautiful piece to behold, it's built like a tank. It weighs 26 pounds. And every single component, motors, tonearm, etc -- can all be replaced. These things are built to last.
This is how things used to be built. I can't think of anything new that I own that has the build quality of my turntables. And that's sad.
There are many differences, the main one being that TiVo records video/audio data as an MPEG file which can then be played back, whereas Sky+ records the actual satellite bitstream and then decodes on playback.
Some TiVos do exactly that: The ones with DirecTV tuners built right in. They used to be called DirecTiVos but now they're something like "DirecTV with PVR built in".
I have one, it rocks, records 2 bitstreams at the same time (2 channels) while watching either one or a third show that you've previously recorded. Can't be beat!
I have seen lots of comments about House music, but not a lot of information about the VARIETY of house music available. I'm a house DJ myself (still spin vinyl, as most old-skool DJs do) and House Music is all about VARIETY.
House can be very moody and soulful, and I would categorize most of what I play as either dance-oriented or soulful electronic. Disco-style house, very dancy, is still very popular and a lot of people, myself included, will tell you that Disco never died, it just became House. The disco-style house that exists today is actually very sophisticated and the girls on the dance floor LOVE IT, so I play a good bit of it. Happy club girls = happy club owners = more gigs and money for me!
The particular sub-genre of house that I do most is called "Deep House", which brings in vocals, interesting samples, tribal beats w/ congas... All kinds of variety!
For the ultimate in deep soulful house, there's no one better than Dubtribe Sound System, from San Francisco, who have been doing live House and electronica for about 10 years. Their album Bryant Street, which came out I think in 1999, is still one of my very favorite house CDs and it rarely leaves the changer in my car. It's soulful and beautiful, moving and primal, and it's something that you can't hear on the radio hardly at all.
Deep house is still a very underground type of thing, and here in Atlanta, GA, where I live and play, the underground House movement is very very popular. We in the ATL are trying very hard to bring it more mainstream, as deep house is WAAAAY more accessible to your average music listener. It's more song-oriented and somewhat less repetitive than hard house, trance, d&b...
TiVo is indeed very tolerant of 'hacking' the units. There are even TiVo employees who regularly participate in the discussions on the www.tivocommunity.com bulletin board.
TiVo knows that they have a killer app, but they also know that they are struggling. They need happy customers, but more than that, they need advocates for their products and their technology. That's us!
Personally, I love my TiVo the way that I used to love my Macs -- I have never seen an outpouring of love for an electronic device since I used to hang around with other rabid Apple Mac users. TiVo is a wonderful thing and I don't EVER want to go back to living without it.
A regular old cd already produces more sound than the human ear can detect...
This claim is absolutely false.
Go into any recording studio, record an analog source (acoustic guitar or a grand piano, for example) at 16bit/44.1KHz, then at a much higher resolution (say, 24bit/96KHz). Then play those back through a studio monitor sound system.
You can ABSOLUTELY hear the difference. Well, maybe you can't, but some people can.
I can tell the difference just recording vinyl through a DJ Mixer into my sound card... The quality difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96 is really staggering, especially in the very high and very low end... Of course, I can't burn a CD at that quality, and dithering the sound back down to 16/44.1 makes the sound worse than just recording it at 16/44.1 in the first place.
But the point is, there IS a difference, and it's noticeable.
Maybe I've just had a long day, but the first line from the story: "Red Hat and Jim Henson have teamed up..." gave me quite a chuckle.
I mean no disrespect; Jim Henson was an amazing man and created some of the most memorable moments of my young (and older) life via The Muppet Show. When I went to college in the late 1988, me and my dorm buddies used to sit around and drink beer from 6:30 to 7:00 and watch reruns of The Muppet Show, then rush off to the dining hall to grab dinner before they closed at 7:30. Those are some of my fondest memories of college.
I also just recently re-watched "The Dark Crystal" on DVD, remastered, and it's even more beautiful seen as an adult.
I've been an Oracle developer and DBA for 8 years. And let me tell you, I STILL don't understand Oracle's licensing. It makes no sense, and I think that they keep it that way on purpose to confuse buyers.
Go to http://oraclestore.oracle.com/ and try to buy a database. You'll see "Named User" licenses and "Processor" licenses. And you need a minimum of 10 named user licenses for each processor that the database runs on. Think of it as "connections" to the database. Most Oracle licenses require far more "named user" licenses than 10 -- on an 8-processor Sun machine, you need to purchase licenses for no less than 80 named users. It's confusing, but no where in the article does it actually say that the licenses are "per seat". That's implied in the editorial content at the top of the Slashdot posting.
Also, it wouldn't only be state workers that were connecting to and using the databases. What if the DMV set up Oracle databases with an external web interface that all the citizens of California could use to register motor vehicles?
Oracle is not meant to be used on a per-seat basis anyway. It's meant to be used as the third or fourth tier (back-end data repository) in an n-tier application environment, not installed on a PC on every worker's desk.
This is an excellent point. What cell phone, radio, 802.11b signals, will this interfere with?
I'm already having issue with my 802.11b network at home that won't go through 2 freakin' walls. I imagine this stuff will wreak havoc with all sorts of electronic communications.
Use your PC if you want; I'll stick with my DirecTV/TiVo combo unit. Here's why.
1) Picture quality is exceptional. My DirecTiVo pulls the MPEG2 steream directly off the satellite and records it to the HD. No decompress/recompress cycle is necessary. The picture quality is exactly the same as watching the satellite signal directly. Plus, I can record 2 channels at once while waching a third program. Try that with your PC.
2) TiVo has ease-of-use that is orders of magnitude simpler than using a PC-based solution. My non computer educated friends, people who can't even use a simple text editor, people who don't know what a network is -- those people can sit down and use my TiVo, not only to watch stuff it's already recorded, but to pick new things too. It's very easy.
3) A PC in my living room isn't going to happen. That's pretty much the way 95% of people feel as well.
4) By the time you buy the TiVo and the lifetime subscription, you've spent $350-ish U.S. dollars. How much will a decent PC with TV capture card cost? More than that. You're paying for the monthly satellite or cable feed either way.
No contest. I'll take my TiVo or equivalent over the PC-based solutions.
I'm curious as to whether the motivation is financial or some other reason... Maybe in the wake of all this terrorist bru-ha-ha about encryption and anonymity, someone (or more likely, some government entity) approached them and they, ahem, decided to stop.
Take the day off today! You'll be glad to know that we, Company X, will now be providing you with a virtually unlimited amount of vacation and personal days. Acceptance of this policy is mandatory and paychecks will stop being deposited in your bank account starting today.
Please stop by your vacation advisor's desk on your way out so that we may guillotine your finger off in case we need to retrieve any of your files and documents.
These layoffs are the latest move in Carly Fiorina's brilliant plan to run HP into the ground so she can have an excuse to leave and get a golden parachute on the way out and retire to the Bahamas. The last move she made was to buy Compaq.
Damn she's good!
In today's environment, it doesn't really matter if she's good. These executives sit in their offices and make decisions for people that they've never met and whose jobs they know nothing about. She says she can do it, HP's board of directors let her try until it gets so bad that they have to oust her, then she'll get her parachute and some other moron will say that they have the magic beans and that they'll make everything better. And for some reason, people always want to believe it.
Killing HP/UX probably isn't a bad move anyway. Killing TRU64 probably isn't a bad move, either. Is anyone still buying and using significant numbers of these things? When I worked for MCI Worldcom 3 years ago, they INSISTED on using Digital UNIX instead of Solaris or Linux... Man, I bet that Manager/Director is real happy now... Actually, I bet he got promoted out of his job before the shit hit the fan.
That's the way it works: Do your worst, and then get out before the shit hits the fan. This is why I'll always be an engineer and I never want to manage, ever again.
If Publishers of Books AND Music AND Movies...
on
Why Nobody Likes E-Books
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If the publishers of books and music and software and movies would get ONE, just ONE, only ONE, point through their head, we'd all be better off.
If you publish something, anything, in digital format, it can and will be reproduced. PERIOD.
All this mess, all this money spent, all this pointless effort. Nothing you can do will stop it, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much money you have, no matter how many stupid laws you get passed. And I think that everyone who reads Slashdot knows that it's futile.
I used to work for a very large US telecom, and one day out of boredom we ran a password cracker on our NT domain controller. Now, out of about 75 people in our department, there were only 2 passwords that could not be cracked... One was mine, the other one was our receptionist's.
I think we laughed for weeks about that one. But it was also kind of shameful that a group of engineers had such weak passwords.
First, I wholeheartedly agree that suing a company for choosing another service over yours is reprehensible and Gracenote ought to be taken out back and beaten senselessly about the head for doing it. It's crap like this that clogs up our legal system and makes it as bad as it is.
Second, after reading their letter, I don't totally disagree with their reasoning for charging developers to use their service. Let me explain.
It's not just data, it's a service
This I agree with completely. They have pay for a very expensive network, databases, servers, and the like. They may have collected the data with our help, but I know they munge the hell out of that data to make it usable.
Example: I used to work for a now-failing dot-com that, as part of our core business, had a very large database of (pretty much) all the lawfirms in the US. Our users (mostly law students) and their law schools did most of the data entry for that data. But let me tell you -- that data is generally USELESS until you do a lot of work to clean it up. And the more people who submit data, the harder it is to get it cleaned up. I spent an enormous amount of time writing complex pattern-matching and search & replace functions to clean up that vast amount of data. It's a lot of work, and maintaining that list and keeping it accurate required staff, money, and time.
So sure, Gracenote needs to keep the litigation in their freakin' pants, but I agree with them that the raw data they collect(ed), by whatever means, isn't what this is about. They need to be allowed to make money too, and if a developer or and end-user doesn't like those terms, they can always go to someone else. It's a free world!
they could use the web based interface to Outlook which looks damn near identical to the "real" Outlook
Which is all well and good, except that the web interface to Outlook is riddled with security holes. Where I work (Bellsouth.net), they just turned off Outlook web access because of the security risks. Our security was being audited and we were told we wouldn't pass while leaving that Outlook web interface running...
Too bad for all the UNIX engineers who couldn't get their mail (no POP or IMAP access to our corporate Exchange server, either). The UNIX engineers have had to get laptops running Windows just to do corporate communications.
That's efficiency for you -- buying $2500 laptops for employees who don't even WANT to use Windows, just to do e-mail and have group scheduling. [sigh]
But, we all still have jobs. And right now, that's looking pretty damn skippy!
Certainly, he should be able to demand whatever he wants for the domain name, should he even choose to relinquish it at all, which is and should ever be his right
Absolutely right. It's his, rightfully so, and let him do whatever he wants. Maybe he'd sell it for a reasonable offer (he doesn't say on theos.com). They never even asked. They just had a lawyer threaten him. And don't try to make it seem nice because the lawyer used nice language... Any letter from a lawyer has teeth, as my lawyer is so fond of telling me. Getting a letter from a lawyer or law firm is a threat, it's meant to intimidate, and most times it does.
Maybe Theos Software could have offered Theo the few thousand dollars they spent in legal fees to handle this and all parties would have been happy. But as an earlier poster commented... Companies just don't think with that mentality. In the old corporate world, no one would ever just say, "here ya go, I don't need it." But in our world, that happens every day, we expect it, and our lives are better than theirs for it.
I do think the Open Source movement needs some legal help, and we'll need much more as time goes on. The more publicity we get, the more exposure we get, the more weaseley (sp?) infrastructure we'll have to support. But "lawyering up" should still be the last resort. Let's not become what we were bucking against in the first place.
Sorry, can't say that I have. There are inherent problems with trying, at least for me, because I tend to use low- to mid-end Linux hardware (basic PC stuff, sometimes SCSI, sometimes not) and higher-end Solaris and Digital Stuff ($20,000+ servers w/ 9+ physical disks, etc).
Benchmarking database performance on a single hardware platform is difficult, because there are so many variables that come into play. How well your database is designed, how it's laid out across physical disks, and whether it's generally a CPU-bound application (lots of calculations) or an I/O bound application (lots of data moving around on the network and across the hardware bus) or both... All these factors and more make it very hard to benchmark on a single hardware platform, much less across multiple platforms.
What I do know: Barring hardware problems, I find the Oracle for Linux product to be AS STABLE AS SOLARIS on Sparc. Don't bother doing Solaris x86 because it pretty much bites. I've tried and I hate it. Stick with Linux on the x86 hardware.
Example: I ran a development DB at work (MCI Worldcom) on a low-end Linux box I brought from home (don't ask... cheap bastards!). It had a paltry 2 GB of disk, 800 MB or so were taken up by our data tables. I switched our development DB to this box because our Oracle/NT box crashed 5 to 6 times A DAY. I didn't tell anyone, I just made the changeover and let it run. It ran, non-stop, 24/7, for 5 MONTHS with not a single crash. I had to extend the tablespaces a couple of times, but that's a common problem on machines with not enough disk space for your applications. The hardware? A basic P166 motherboard and only 32 megs of RAM. More would have been better, but it ran pretty well. IDE disks (2 1GB). And this was the Oracle for Linux Beta (alpha?) that they sent me to test.
I know for a fact that Oracle for Linux beats NT, AND Solaris.
I'm not so sure about this. Certainly Oracle for NT sucks and they ought to be ashamed that they even release the product and call it an enterprise solution. Between Solaris and Linux... I use both (and Oracle on Digital UNIX) and it's a tough call. I can't really pit Oracle for Linux up against my Sparcs because it's hard to draw a hardware comparison that's truly fair.
I do think that the Linux solution is just as good for mid-volume applications. And it's definitely cheaper. But, Solaris scales up WAY past what you can currently do with Oracle on Linux. As Oracle continues to support Linux, you may see that change. But for now, Oracle for Linux remains my first choice for personal projects, and Oracle for Solaris remains my first choice when I need a very-high-volume-and-uptime solution. And when spending a large corporation's money.
Great comment, backed up with lots of very understandable and informative facts. Armed with this, I think I'm going to my boss and suggest that we dump all our Oracle-based applications here at MCI and use... What?
Yes it's expensive, but it's very scalable, very reliable, and it's [GASP] portable! I can run my apps on something like 20 different hardware platforms without changing a single line of code. Try that with SQL Server.
Slashdot Mirror
adzapper.sourceforge.net
Filters ads at the proxy level, works great, unobtrusive.
Quality of new items seems to be lower than it used to be. I own tons of consumer electronics devices, way more than the average person, I'm sure. The things I buy now don't last as long. I've been through 3 dvd players in 4 years, and they were all over $150. Yet I have a set of speakers that are 12 years old (!) and still work perfectly.
There's also no point in fixing any of these items, everything is soldered onto one PCB board. If one trace comes loose... Time for a new unit.
Check out a Technics turntable...
Technics SL-1200 MK2
You'll find a pair of these in pretty much any club in the entire world. The design hasn't changed at all in over 20 years. It's a beautiful piece to behold, it's built like a tank. It weighs 26 pounds. And every single component, motors, tonearm, etc -- can all be replaced. These things are built to last.
This is how things used to be built. I can't think of anything new that I own that has the build quality of my turntables. And that's sad.
We've turned into a disposable society.
There are many differences, the main one being that TiVo records video/audio data as an MPEG file which can then be played back, whereas Sky+ records the actual satellite bitstream and then decodes on playback.
Some TiVos do exactly that: The ones with DirecTV tuners built right in. They used to be called DirecTiVos but now they're something like "DirecTV with PVR built in".
I have one, it rocks, records 2 bitstreams at the same time (2 channels) while watching either one or a third show that you've previously recorded. Can't be beat!
Why do you think every PVR device (DirectTV, UltimateTV, Replay, etc etc) all PAY Tivo for use of their patents?
Could you provide some data/links to prove this? I am not at all sure that it's true.
I have seen lots of comments about House music, but not a lot of information about the VARIETY of house music available. I'm a house DJ myself (still spin vinyl, as most old-skool DJs do) and House Music is all about VARIETY.
House can be very moody and soulful, and I would categorize most of what I play as either dance-oriented or soulful electronic. Disco-style house, very dancy, is still very popular and a lot of people, myself included, will tell you that Disco never died, it just became House. The disco-style house that exists today is actually very sophisticated and the girls on the dance floor LOVE IT, so I play a good bit of it. Happy club girls = happy club owners = more gigs and money for me!
The particular sub-genre of house that I do most is called "Deep House", which brings in vocals, interesting samples, tribal beats w/ congas... All kinds of variety!
For the ultimate in deep soulful house, there's no one better than Dubtribe Sound System, from San Francisco, who have been doing live House and electronica for about 10 years. Their album Bryant Street, which came out I think in 1999, is still one of my very favorite house CDs and it rarely leaves the changer in my car. It's soulful and beautiful, moving and primal, and it's something that you can't hear on the radio hardly at all.
Deep house is still a very underground type of thing, and here in Atlanta, GA, where I live and play, the underground House movement is very very popular. We in the ATL are trying very hard to bring it more mainstream, as deep house is WAAAAY more accessible to your average music listener. It's more song-oriented and somewhat less repetitive than hard house, trance, d&b...
Give it a try!
Dubtribe Sound System -- Bryant Street
deephouse.com
My latest demo [RealAudio]
TiVo is indeed very tolerant of 'hacking' the units. There are even TiVo employees who regularly participate in the discussions on the www.tivocommunity.com bulletin board.
TiVo knows that they have a killer app, but they also know that they are struggling. They need happy customers, but more than that, they need advocates for their products and their technology. That's us!
Personally, I love my TiVo the way that I used to love my Macs -- I have never seen an outpouring of love for an electronic device since I used to hang around with other rabid Apple Mac users. TiVo is a wonderful thing and I don't EVER want to go back to living without it.
A regular old cd already produces more sound than the human ear can detect...
This claim is absolutely false.
Go into any recording studio, record an analog source (acoustic guitar or a grand piano, for example) at 16bit/44.1KHz, then at a much higher resolution (say, 24bit/96KHz). Then play those back through a studio monitor sound system.
You can ABSOLUTELY hear the difference. Well, maybe you can't, but some people can.
I can tell the difference just recording vinyl through a DJ Mixer into my sound card... The quality difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96 is really staggering, especially in the very high and very low end... Of course, I can't burn a CD at that quality, and dithering the sound back down to 16/44.1 makes the sound worse than just recording it at 16/44.1 in the first place.
But the point is, there IS a difference, and it's noticeable.
The company that provides all the data is Zap2it.
www.zap2it.com
Maybe I've just had a long day, but the first line from the story: "Red Hat and Jim Henson have teamed up..." gave me quite a chuckle.
I mean no disrespect; Jim Henson was an amazing man and created some of the most memorable moments of my young (and older) life via The Muppet Show. When I went to college in the late 1988, me and my dorm buddies used to sit around and drink beer from 6:30 to 7:00 and watch reruns of The Muppet Show, then rush off to the dining hall to grab dinner before they closed at 7:30. Those are some of my fondest memories of college.
I also just recently re-watched "The Dark Crystal" on DVD, remastered, and it's even more beautiful seen as an adult.
As long as I can hack MS Passport to say that I'm Bill Gates, I think that this is a GREAT idea!
I've been an Oracle developer and DBA for 8 years. And let me tell you, I STILL don't understand Oracle's licensing. It makes no sense, and I think that they keep it that way on purpose to confuse buyers.
Go to http://oraclestore.oracle.com/ and try to buy a database. You'll see "Named User" licenses and "Processor" licenses. And you need a minimum of 10 named user licenses for each processor that the database runs on. Think of it as "connections" to the database. Most Oracle licenses require far more "named user" licenses than 10 -- on an 8-processor Sun machine, you need to purchase licenses for no less than 80 named users. It's confusing, but no where in the article does it actually say that the licenses are "per seat". That's implied in the editorial content at the top of the Slashdot posting.
Also, it wouldn't only be state workers that were connecting to and using the databases. What if the DMV set up Oracle databases with an external web interface that all the citizens of California could use to register motor vehicles?
Oracle is not meant to be used on a per-seat basis anyway. It's meant to be used as the third or fourth tier (back-end data repository) in an n-tier application environment, not installed on a PC on every worker's desk.
This is an excellent point. What cell phone, radio, 802.11b signals, will this interfere with?
I'm already having issue with my 802.11b network at home that won't go through 2 freakin' walls. I imagine this stuff will wreak havoc with all sorts of electronic communications.
-jason
Use your PC if you want; I'll stick with my DirecTV/TiVo combo unit. Here's why.
1) Picture quality is exceptional. My DirecTiVo pulls the MPEG2 steream directly off the satellite and records it to the HD. No decompress/recompress cycle is necessary. The picture quality is exactly the same as watching the satellite signal directly. Plus, I can record 2 channels at once while waching a third program. Try that with your PC.
2) TiVo has ease-of-use that is orders of magnitude simpler than using a PC-based solution. My non computer educated friends, people who can't even use a simple text editor, people who don't know what a network is -- those people can sit down and use my TiVo, not only to watch stuff it's already recorded, but to pick new things too. It's very easy.
3) A PC in my living room isn't going to happen. That's pretty much the way 95% of people feel as well.
4) By the time you buy the TiVo and the lifetime subscription, you've spent $350-ish U.S. dollars. How much will a decent PC with TV capture card cost? More than that. You're paying for the monthly satellite or cable feed either way.
No contest. I'll take my TiVo or equivalent over the PC-based solutions.
I'm curious as to whether the motivation is financial or some other reason... Maybe in the wake of all this terrorist bru-ha-ha about encryption and anonymity, someone (or more likely, some government entity) approached them and they, ahem, decided to stop.
I truly hope that's not the reason...
Dear employee:
Take the day off today! You'll be glad to know that we, Company X, will now be providing you with a virtually unlimited amount of vacation and personal days. Acceptance of this policy is mandatory and paychecks will stop being deposited in your bank account starting today.
Please stop by your vacation advisor's desk on your way out so that we may guillotine your finger off in case we need to retrieve any of your files and documents.
Thanks, and have a great vacation!
-management
-Company X
In today's environment, it doesn't really matter if she's good. These executives sit in their offices and make decisions for people that they've never met and whose jobs they know nothing about. She says she can do it, HP's board of directors let her try until it gets so bad that they have to oust her, then she'll get her parachute and some other moron will say that they have the magic beans and that they'll make everything better. And for some reason, people always want to believe it.
Killing HP/UX probably isn't a bad move anyway. Killing TRU64 probably isn't a bad move, either. Is anyone still buying and using significant numbers of these things? When I worked for MCI Worldcom 3 years ago, they INSISTED on using Digital UNIX instead of Solaris or Linux... Man, I bet that Manager/Director is real happy now... Actually, I bet he got promoted out of his job before the shit hit the fan.
That's the way it works: Do your worst, and then get out before the shit hits the fan. This is why I'll always be an engineer and I never want to manage, ever again.
If the publishers of books and music and software and movies would get ONE, just ONE, only ONE, point through their head, we'd all be better off.
If you publish something, anything, in digital format, it can and will be reproduced. PERIOD.
All this mess, all this money spent, all this pointless effort. Nothing you can do will stop it, no matter how hard you try, no matter how much money you have, no matter how many stupid laws you get passed. And I think that everyone who reads Slashdot knows that it's futile.
-jason
www.dangercrew.net
I used to work for a very large US telecom, and one day out of boredom we ran a password cracker on our NT domain controller. Now, out of about 75 people in our department, there were only 2 passwords that could not be cracked... One was mine, the other one was our receptionist's.
I think we laughed for weeks about that one. But it was also kind of shameful that a group of engineers had such weak passwords.
First, I wholeheartedly agree that suing a company for choosing another service over yours is reprehensible and Gracenote ought to be taken out back and beaten senselessly about the head for doing it. It's crap like this that clogs up our legal system and makes it as bad as it is.
Second, after reading their letter, I don't totally disagree with their reasoning for charging developers to use their service. Let me explain.
It's not just data, it's a service
This I agree with completely. They have pay for a very expensive network, databases, servers, and the like. They may have collected the data with our help, but I know they munge the hell out of that data to make it usable.
Example: I used to work for a now-failing dot-com that, as part of our core business, had a very large database of (pretty much) all the lawfirms in the US. Our users (mostly law students) and their law schools did most of the data entry for that data. But let me tell you -- that data is generally USELESS until you do a lot of work to clean it up. And the more people who submit data, the harder it is to get it cleaned up. I spent an enormous amount of time writing complex pattern-matching and search & replace functions to clean up that vast amount of data. It's a lot of work, and maintaining that list and keeping it accurate required staff, money, and time.
So sure, Gracenote needs to keep the litigation in their freakin' pants, but I agree with them that the raw data they collect(ed), by whatever means, isn't what this is about. They need to be allowed to make money too, and if a developer or and end-user doesn't like those terms, they can always go to someone else. It's a free world!
-jason
Which is all well and good, except that the web interface to Outlook is riddled with security holes. Where I work (Bellsouth.net), they just turned off Outlook web access because of the security risks. Our security was being audited and we were told we wouldn't pass while leaving that Outlook web interface running...
Too bad for all the UNIX engineers who couldn't get their mail (no POP or IMAP access to our corporate Exchange server, either). The UNIX engineers have had to get laptops running Windows just to do corporate communications.
That's efficiency for you -- buying $2500 laptops for employees who don't even WANT to use Windows, just to do e-mail and have group scheduling. [sigh]
But, we all still have jobs. And right now, that's looking pretty damn skippy!
The Buggles did "Video Killed the Radio Star", which was the very first video ever shown on MTV.
Am I showing my age here???
jason
Certainly, he should be able to demand whatever he wants for the domain name, should he even choose to relinquish it at all, which is and should ever be his right
Absolutely right. It's his, rightfully so, and let him do whatever he wants. Maybe he'd sell it for a reasonable offer (he doesn't say on theos.com). They never even asked. They just had a lawyer threaten him. And don't try to make it seem nice because the lawyer used nice language... Any letter from a lawyer has teeth, as my lawyer is so fond of telling me. Getting a letter from a lawyer or law firm is a threat, it's meant to intimidate, and most times it does.
Maybe Theos Software could have offered Theo the few thousand dollars they spent in legal fees to handle this and all parties would have been happy. But as an earlier poster commented... Companies just don't think with that mentality. In the old corporate world, no one would ever just say, "here ya go, I don't need it." But in our world, that happens every day, we expect it, and our lives are better than theirs for it.
I do think the Open Source movement needs some legal help, and we'll need much more as time goes on. The more publicity we get, the more exposure we get, the more weaseley (sp?) infrastructure we'll have to support. But "lawyering up" should still be the last resort. Let's not become what we were bucking against in the first place.
...Linux and Solaris both x86 or Sparc?
Sorry, can't say that I have. There are inherent problems with trying, at least for me, because I tend to use low- to mid-end Linux hardware (basic PC stuff, sometimes SCSI, sometimes not) and higher-end Solaris and Digital Stuff ($20,000+ servers w/ 9+ physical disks, etc).
Benchmarking database performance on a single hardware platform is difficult, because there are so many variables that come into play. How well your database is designed, how it's laid out across physical disks, and whether it's generally a CPU-bound application (lots of calculations) or an I/O bound application (lots of data moving around on the network and across the hardware bus) or both... All these factors and more make it very hard to benchmark on a single hardware platform, much less across multiple platforms.
What I do know: Barring hardware problems, I find the Oracle for Linux product to be AS STABLE AS SOLARIS on Sparc. Don't bother doing Solaris x86 because it pretty much bites. I've tried and I hate it. Stick with Linux on the x86 hardware.
Example: I ran a development DB at work (MCI Worldcom) on a low-end Linux box I brought from home (don't ask... cheap bastards!). It had a paltry 2 GB of disk, 800 MB or so were taken up by our data tables. I switched our development DB to this box because our Oracle/NT box crashed 5 to 6 times A DAY. I didn't tell anyone, I just made the changeover and let it run. It ran, non-stop, 24/7, for 5 MONTHS with not a single crash. I had to extend the tablespaces a couple of times, but that's a common problem on machines with not enough disk space for your applications. The hardware? A basic P166 motherboard and only 32 megs of RAM. More would have been better, but it ran pretty well. IDE disks (2 1GB). And this was the Oracle for Linux Beta (alpha?) that they sent me to test.
Not bad at all.
I know for a fact that Oracle for Linux beats NT, AND Solaris.
I'm not so sure about this. Certainly Oracle for NT sucks and they ought to be ashamed that they even release the product and call it an enterprise solution. Between Solaris and Linux... I use both (and Oracle on Digital UNIX) and it's a tough call. I can't really pit Oracle for Linux up against my Sparcs because it's hard to draw a hardware comparison that's truly fair.
I do think that the Linux solution is just as good for mid-volume applications. And it's definitely cheaper. But, Solaris scales up WAY past what you can currently do with Oracle on Linux. As Oracle continues to support Linux, you may see that change. But for now, Oracle for Linux remains my first choice for personal projects, and Oracle for Solaris remains my first choice when I need a very-high-volume-and-uptime solution. And when spending a large corporation's money.
Oracle is trash.
Great comment, backed up with lots of very understandable and informative facts. Armed with this, I think I'm going to my boss and suggest that we dump all our Oracle-based applications here at MCI and use... What?
Yes it's expensive, but it's very scalable, very reliable, and it's [GASP] portable! I can run my apps on something like 20 different hardware platforms without changing a single line of code. Try that with SQL Server.
SQL Server is trash. [GRIN]