I know somebody who runs a fax list. He's very religeous about getting you off his lists right away if you want off, but he's more liberal than I would prefer about what constitutes "opt in"...
It works.
He's getting business - lots of it. In his own words, he's "on a roll". It's cheaper and more effective to send junk faxes than to post legitimate ads in the trade magazines!
He's not selling penis pills or anything like that - just an independent broker promoting his services, which services he otherwise competently provides.
He'll continue this until the money runs out, like anybody else in his position.
If it were carrying unprotected nuclear materials, then there is a danger of it raining down and causing several cases of cancer. However, I can't think of any reason for the shuttle to do this. Even if it did, the shuttle's trajectory takes it over the ocean so that the likeliness of human injury is as low as possible.
Phatbot is insanely well-written. A while ago I read a web page about what Phatbot can do:
Well written != capable. It's perfectly possible that this is just a bunch of exploits strung together, but that doesn't necessarily make it cohesive or "well written"..
My $0.02 - well written or not, it's a nasty bugger.
This has to be the most controversial post I've ever left on slashdot.
I mean, a post that complains about people not living a "real" life, getting modded to a range between +4 and -1 in a 24 hour period.
Wow.
You'd think that "living a real life", you know, with real people, real acomplishments and all, would be a desirable thing. But, instead, my post in favor of such is now moderated "0 Flamebait".
I guess there are lots of people on/. who would rather live boring lives bereft of real meaning, moderated by the likes of a TV or an MP3 player?
Certainly seems to be the majority since my karma gives +2 to posts.
Really. Given the choice between 90% of users being able to use the net, or 100% of users being unable to use the net, which do you choose?
It's perfectly reasonable to block certain types of packets during times of need. Is it desirable? No - but it's also not desirable to have worms, viruses, trojans, and other malware in the first place.
Get over it. Idealism on the 'net ended when it became a commercial entity. Now pragmatism is the rule of order.
If your ISP blocks ICMP during a ping storm (as the grandparent examples) in order to preserve some semblance of service, and you are offended by that, get another ISP.
And while you are getting over it, get real, too. Freenet is cool, but it's not going to save mankind, and not everybody in favor of pragmatic use of private resources is a fan of the Record Industry Association.
Just thinking out loud here... A Slashdot Channel would actually be pretty informative, covering lots of different aspects. Maybe even have guest Slashdoters invited to cover stories not covered already on the front page.
If you want to have this idea stepped on; if you want to ask yourself "WTF was I THINKING!?!?!"; if your desire for self respect has just vanished...
They'll be able to render new skin on Ron Jeremy rather than having to shave his shoulders and back every couple of days?
There's something just plain wrong with knowing the names of various porn stars, and then throwing them out as if you "should know". Rather than knowing the finer details of Ron Jeremy's shoulders, you should know the finer details of your partner's shoulders!
Wrong. Just plain wrong.
Wrong in the same way as the fact that the "Lifestyle" section in USA Today is mostly about what's on TV.
Is your lifestyle dictated by the TV? If you unplug the TV for a week do you get antsy, not knowing what to do?
Most people here listen to music, how many have struggled, worked, and practiced a song enough that they've experienced the exhileration of performing in a band or choir and feeling the music flow through? The euphoric high of that?
Instead, we bootleg mp3s, and call it "music appreciation".
Wrong. Just plain wrong.
(sigh) - goes back to work updating shell scripts on servers while listening to (legal) MP3s....
Any tendency to optimize prematurely ought to be avoided, at least until after v1.0 ships.
Assuming there is a second version, which there may not be because potential customers found that the performance of v1.0 sucked.
I wrote an application not too long ago. Being that PHP is my language of choice, and being that PHP-GTK was available, I wrote it in that language.
The software manages paperwork for schools. There are about 1,000 courses in files in the program. The user selects courses, gives assignments to students, grades the results, and prints it off.
I initially paid no attention to performance - and performance sucked. It would tie down a P4-2000 badly in places.
So, I spent a week or two optimizing performance. I discovered a few things about what really slowed down the computer, and built indexes in memory rather than reading from disk anytime you "want to know".
Bottom line is that it's a terrible performer for performance. Just pitiful. It's also completely irrelevant since the average user has about 800 Mhz system, on which it performs just fast enough to never appear slow.
And, in a few years, it'll be "lean and mean" compared to whatever else is out there.
Oh, and version 1 (called 4.0 for largely historical reasons - it's a rewrite of an earlier, fundamentally broken codebase) has been quite successful, and I'm in the middle of pounding out version 2 as quick as I can.
Successful Cosmonaut: Hi, I successfully piloted to outer space and back. I'm here for my 10 million.
X Prize Review Board Member: Uhh...sorry, you have to be in good health.
Cosmonaut: What? I'm in perfect health. The mission went off without a hitch.
Board Member: No, you definitely look a little peaked. And let me feel your forehead...Ah, yes, you're burning up.
Cosmonaut: No, I'm fine, I've never felt better.
Board Member: You're at death's door. No prize for you.
I thought of this. Couldn't help it. (ducks, prepares for loss of karma)
Bring out your dead! CUSTOMER: Here's one. CART MASTER: Ninepence. DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead! CART MASTER: What? CUSTOMER: Nothing. Here's your ninepence. DEAD PERSON: I'm not dead! CART MASTER: 'Ere. He says he's not dead! CUSTOMER: Yes, he is. DEAD PERSON: I'm not! CART MASTER: He isn't? CUSTOMER: Well, he will be soon. He's very ill. DEAD PERSON: I'm getting better! CUSTOMER: No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment. CART MASTER: Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations. DEAD PERSON: I don't want to go on the cart! CUSTOMER: Oh, don't be such a baby. CART MASTER: I can't take him. DEAD PERSON: I feel fine! CUSTOMER: Well, do us a favour. CART MASTER: I can't. CUSTOMER: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long. CART MASTER: No, I've got to go to the Robinsons'. They've lost nine today. CUSTOMER: Well, when's your next round? CART MASTER: Thursday. DEAD PERSON: I think I'll go for a walk. CUSTOMER: You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do? DEAD PERSON: [singing]
I feel happy. I feel happy.
[whop] CUSTOMER: Ah, thanks very much. CART MASTER: Not at all. See you on Thursday. CUSTOMER: Right. All right.
[howl]
[clop clop clop]
Who's that, then? CART MASTER: I dunno. Must be a king. CUSTOMER: Why? CART MASTER: He hasn't got shit all over him.
It is really cool that this can be done at the application layer, because it will allow applications to be developed to take advantage of it with out even changing the drivers for your wi-fi card.
But, what happens when product X that you totally depend on applies this at the application layer, and then product Y, which your business is "betting the farm" on, requires that it be applied at the protocol layer?
Does implementing it twice at different places in the software heap cause problems?
An example of this at work could be tunneling IP over IP. It all works fine, as long as there is *no* packet loss. As soon as a packet is lost at the protocol layer (not the virtualized protocol layer) you end up with a cascading set of timeouts that cause total failure. See Why TCP Over TCP Is A Bad Idea.
So, sounds good. Obviously, nobody's going to complain about 2x the performance. But, can this technology actually withstand the real world?
Really, though. For my needs, it's AWESOME. I use Fedora C1.
X works out of the gate, as expected. CHECK
Sound works with the base install, as expected. CHECK
Network card works immediately, as expected, at 1 Gb. (w00t!) CHECK
CD-Burner works immediately, as expected. CHECK
DVD works simply by updating/etc/yum.conf with the offshore repositories that have decsslib. CHECK
ACPI power management and CPU throttling (with cpudyn) works easily. (had to google to find that I had to put "acpi=force" on the linux line in grub.conf) CHECK
USB stuff works as expected in the base install. I've hot swapped my mouse and a digital camera - both work instantly and easily. CHECK
What's left?
1) The modem is a funky broadcom chipset that's not supported by linmodem or pctel drivers. I have an old 33.6 3com pcmcia modem card that works fine. =/
2) Wireless with the Intel 2200 BG chipset is spotty, if at all. (so far, unable to confirm operation using ndiswrapper) =/
3) I haven't yet gotten it to see my Verizon Cell phone as a modem to use it for anytime/anywhere/slow service in those rare cases it's needed. For now I'll boot into WinXP when this is needed. =/
Given the problem - that of allowing me to retain the functional capacity of my 2 Ghz Athlon Desktop system in a laptop, it's a resounding success, allowing me to retain my productivity just about anywhere.
Would I *LIKE* wireless? Would I *LIKE* modem w/o card? Sure I would - and I'm still not convinced that wireless won't work.
But the primary issue for me is productivity - not necessarily having every last bell and whistle.
Oh, and I did use 9 of the 60 GB of disk space to keep the copy of XP Home running in those rare cases that I really do need it. (Hello wireless)
As the standard K-12 school system has deteriorated into a simmering bath of babysitters, many parents have taken notice.
I can't speak for other locations, but in California, the home-school and charter-school movement has been mushrooming.
Go to a local karate studio or gymnastics stadium, and you find probably greater than 75% of everybody is involved in some form of alternative educational system.
Parents really do want the best for their children, and a surprising number have decided that the standard school system is just no longer good enough.
In California, there's a very powerful teacher's union which largely has a deadlock on what's done in public schools. This has crushed California's once dominant educational system into something despised by intelligent adults.
And the jail break is on, in full force. I see it every day - my company now works with dozens of charter and alternative education schools to facilitate 100% funding of these alternative programs.
It's exciting, exhilerating, and loads of fun - and every night I sleep with the peaceful satisfaction of knowing that thousands of children across my state have an improved education due, in some small part, to my efforts for the day.
I am terrified of the implications of the declining scientific and educational standards amongst my people, and I'm doing what I can to help.
How well does apt-get for RPM compare with apt-get for Debian?
Are they really comparable?
As a user of yum on FC1, I'd really like to know. Why did I choose yum? Mainly because somebody I know used it and liked it, so I tried it, and liked it so much I set up my own yum repository mirror.
Does using apt-get really offer any benefit over yum? Doesn't apt-get simply mine the same RPM repositories surveyed when doing updates with yum?
Any intelligent response would be highly appreciated.
I've been a RedHat user since RH 5.2, and I really don't know what to say about apt.
But, I've been playing around with yum on Fedora Core 1 - and it's damned impressive.
I can point to any number of yum repositories that contain packages for my particular system. As updates come out to these packages, I can have them all updated and applied with simply
yum -y update
It's damned impressive to consider that binary packages from several (I've had up to 8) sources work together so simply and so easily.
With excellent security, too - all these packages are signed by the appropriate certificate authority, and it's a simple 2-step process to get and install a certificate for a particular yum repository.
WOW!
I was impressed with the Red Hat Network - this blows that away because it's open to the public. (up2date may have been, as well - I never bothered to find out and nobody ever mentioned it to me)
Privacy concerns? Not really. Paedophile concerns? Yes.
It's posts like this that will probably bring to life a new abbreviation:
RTFP: Read The F---ing Post
I mean, sheesh. I can understand not RTFA but not even reading the text in front of you?
Perhaps, when you post, there should be a "I'm feeling lucky" option where your post is inserted randomly into any article that's currently on the home page?
What about the good old days when knowledge belonged to the world, and people put out their works for everyone else to use?
You know the good ole days weren't always good And tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems -Billy Joel
Those "good old days" were the days when your parents worked their asses off to provide stuff for you to use.
Patent disputes have been going on as long as there have been patents - Hollywood was founded in California because IP law wasn't strictly enforced in California, (like it was in New York) and so the MPAA could get around patents on the film camera.
However, in Florida, each and every vote was worth a LOT!!! Only a few votes either way in this state could swing the election! Maybe the next time, it will be YOUR state which is close, and YOUR vote will be worth it's weight in gold (I know, paper does not weigh much, it is a metaphor!)
And you say this... as though it were good. Why should a Floridan's vote count any more than somebodyy from Utah?
In Utah, (a VERY conservative state) there is basically no point to having 25% of the population voting their liberal viewpoint, because the Electoral College system means that only one victor will count.
Since you *know* that you are in the minority, why bother?
This polarizes politics and exacerbates voter apathy.
But, what if your vote could be counted to offset another's vote, anywhere?
This levels the playing field to an extent against the dominant party in one's state. This would *hopefully* serve to decrease voter apathy, and would work as a force against the two-party system that has a stranglehold on the dynamics of US Politics.
The electoral college was devised as a way to offset the inherent inability to quickly and accurately vote across the entire US. It's time has come, and it needs to "go away".
Wouldn't that only limit performance on a Windows system, which relies so heavily on threads due to the incredibly inefficient forking process?
Since I use Linux servers, this shouldn't be much of an issue.
Also, I tend to focus on providing services where performance isn't the issue that data integrity is. Workflow automation, Contact Management, large-ish databases, often with 50 or more tables, often dynamically allocated.
Thus performance isn't the issue - features, stability, ACID compliance, etc. is.
ACID compliance, features that compare very nicely against MS-SQL/Oracle, foreign keys, triggers, transactions, embedded function definitions, the whole shebang.
About the only thing that it lacks (for free) is decent clustering/replication capability - and you can buy that fairly easily in the form of patches.
I've been using it for years, and it's a joy to work with!
Slashdot Mirror
If it didn't, people wouldn't do it.
I know somebody who runs a fax list. He's very religeous about getting you off his lists right away if you want off, but he's more liberal than I would prefer about what constitutes "opt in"...
It works.
He's getting business - lots of it. In his own words, he's "on a roll". It's cheaper and more effective to send junk faxes than to post legitimate ads in the trade magazines!
He's not selling penis pills or anything like that - just an independent broker promoting his services, which services he otherwise competently provides.
He'll continue this until the money runs out, like anybody else in his position.
Yeah.
Just don't eat the 3-headed fish.
Phatbot is insanely well-written. A while ago I read a web page about what Phatbot can do:
Well written != capable. It's perfectly possible that this is just a bunch of exploits strung together, but that doesn't necessarily make it cohesive or "well written"..
My $0.02 - well written or not, it's a nasty bugger.
-Ben
This has to be the most controversial post I've ever left on slashdot.
/. who would rather live boring lives bereft of real meaning, moderated by the likes of a TV or an MP3 player?
I mean, a post that complains about people not living a "real" life, getting modded to a range between +4 and -1 in a 24 hour period.
Wow.
You'd think that "living a real life", you know, with real people, real acomplishments and all, would be a desirable thing. But, instead, my post in favor of such is now moderated "0 Flamebait".
I guess there are lots of people on
Certainly seems to be the majority since my karma gives +2 to posts.
thanks. It's fixed now - but the product in quesiton was not Contact Manager, but Report Writer, hosted on the same server.
Wow. All or nothin', eh?
Really. Given the choice between 90% of users being able to use the net, or 100% of users being unable to use the net, which do you choose?
It's perfectly reasonable to block certain types of packets during times of need. Is it desirable? No - but it's also not desirable to have worms, viruses, trojans, and other malware in the first place.
Get over it. Idealism on the 'net ended when it became a commercial entity. Now pragmatism is the rule of order.
If your ISP blocks ICMP during a ping storm (as the grandparent examples) in order to preserve some semblance of service, and you are offended by that, get another ISP.
And while you are getting over it, get real, too. Freenet is cool, but it's not going to save mankind, and not everybody in favor of pragmatic use of private resources is a fan of the Record Industry Association.
Just thinking out loud here... A Slashdot Channel would actually be pretty informative, covering lots of different aspects. Maybe even have guest Slashdoters invited to cover stories not covered already on the front page.
If you want to have this idea stepped on; if you want to ask yourself "WTF was I THINKING!?!?!"; if your desire for self respect has just vanished...
Go and listen to the last episode of geeks in space.
They'll be able to render new skin on Ron Jeremy rather than having to shave his shoulders and back every couple of days?
There's something just plain wrong with knowing the names of various porn stars, and then throwing them out as if you "should know". Rather than knowing the finer details of Ron Jeremy's shoulders, you should know the finer details of your partner's shoulders!
Wrong. Just plain wrong.
Wrong in the same way as the fact that the "Lifestyle" section in USA Today is mostly about what's on TV.
Is your lifestyle dictated by the TV? If you unplug the TV for a week do you get antsy, not knowing what to do?
Most people here listen to music, how many have struggled, worked, and practiced a song enough that they've experienced the exhileration of performing in a band or choir and feeling the music flow through? The euphoric high of that?
Instead, we bootleg mp3s, and call it "music appreciation".
Wrong. Just plain wrong.
(sigh) - goes back to work updating shell scripts on servers while listening to (legal) MP3s....
Any tendency to optimize prematurely ought to be avoided, at least until after v1.0 ships.
Assuming there is a second version, which there may not be because potential customers found that the performance of v1.0 sucked.
I wrote an application not too long ago. Being that PHP is my language of choice, and being that PHP-GTK was available, I wrote it in that language.
The software manages paperwork for schools. There are about 1,000 courses in files in the program. The user selects courses, gives assignments to students, grades the results, and prints it off.
I initially paid no attention to performance - and performance sucked. It would tie down a P4-2000 badly in places.
So, I spent a week or two optimizing performance. I discovered a few things about what really slowed down the computer, and built indexes in memory rather than reading from disk anytime you "want to know".
Bottom line is that it's a terrible performer for performance. Just pitiful. It's also completely irrelevant since the average user has about 800 Mhz system, on which it performs just fast enough to never appear slow.
And, in a few years, it'll be "lean and mean" compared to whatever else is out there.
Oh, and version 1 (called 4.0 for largely historical reasons - it's a rewrite of an earlier, fundamentally broken codebase) has been quite successful, and I'm in the middle of pounding out version 2 as quick as I can.
Successful Cosmonaut: Hi, I successfully piloted to outer space and back. I'm here for my 10 million.
X Prize Review Board Member: Uhh...sorry, you have to be in good health.
Cosmonaut: What? I'm in perfect health. The mission went off without a hitch.
Board Member: No, you definitely look a little peaked. And let me feel your forehead...Ah, yes, you're burning up.
Cosmonaut: No, I'm fine, I've never felt better.
Board Member: You're at death's door. No prize for you.
I thought of this. Couldn't help it. (ducks, prepares for loss of karma)
I'm not talking about interoperability - I'm talking about simple operability.
In *theory*, packet size is determined at the protocol layer - the application layer should be unaware of what's happening at the protocol layer.
Yet, by being able to apply this at either layer could potentially break things.
For example, let's say that the optimum packet size is 410, but at the application layer it's determined to be 390.
RTFA - You'll find that the tolerance to get these kinds of gains is very slight.
Couldn't this easily break things?
My call is to say it should be done at the protocol layer, and forget the upper layers.
Thank you! You've just made my friggin point...
there's no excuse to make an mp3 player that only supports USB 1.1.
At least they are being honest. I mean, they could have called it "USB 2.0 High Speed"!
It is really cool that this can be done at the application layer, because it will allow applications to be developed to take advantage of it with out even changing the drivers for your wi-fi card.
But, what happens when product X that you totally depend on applies this at the application layer, and then product Y, which your business is "betting the farm" on, requires that it be applied at the protocol layer?
Does implementing it twice at different places in the software heap cause problems?
An example of this at work could be tunneling IP over IP. It all works fine, as long as there is *no* packet loss. As soon as a packet is lost at the protocol layer (not the virtualized protocol layer) you end up with a cascading set of timeouts that cause total failure. See Why TCP Over TCP Is A Bad Idea.
So, sounds good. Obviously, nobody's going to complain about 2x the performance. But, can this technology actually withstand the real world?
It works!
/etc/yum.conf with the offshore repositories that have decsslib. CHECK
Really, though. For my needs, it's AWESOME. I use Fedora C1.
X works out of the gate, as expected. CHECK
Sound works with the base install, as expected. CHECK
Network card works immediately, as expected, at 1 Gb. (w00t!) CHECK
CD-Burner works immediately, as expected. CHECK
DVD works simply by updating
ACPI power management and CPU throttling (with cpudyn) works easily. (had to google to find that I had to put "acpi=force" on the linux line in grub.conf) CHECK
USB stuff works as expected in the base install. I've hot swapped my mouse and a digital camera - both work instantly and easily. CHECK
What's left?
1) The modem is a funky broadcom chipset that's not supported by linmodem or pctel drivers. I have an old 33.6 3com pcmcia modem card that works fine. =/
2) Wireless with the Intel 2200 BG chipset is spotty, if at all. (so far, unable to confirm operation using ndiswrapper) =/
3) I haven't yet gotten it to see my Verizon Cell phone as a modem to use it for anytime/anywhere/slow service in those rare cases it's needed. For now I'll boot into WinXP when this is needed. =/
Given the problem - that of allowing me to retain the functional capacity of my 2 Ghz Athlon Desktop system in a laptop, it's a resounding success, allowing me to retain my productivity just about anywhere.
Would I *LIKE* wireless? Would I *LIKE* modem w/o card? Sure I would - and I'm still not convinced that wireless won't work.
But the primary issue for me is productivity - not necessarily having every last bell and whistle.
Oh, and I did use 9 of the 60 GB of disk space to keep the copy of XP Home running in those rare cases that I really do need it. (Hello wireless)
As the standard K-12 school system has deteriorated into a simmering bath of babysitters, many parents have taken notice.
I can't speak for other locations, but in California, the home-school and charter-school movement has been mushrooming.
Go to a local karate studio or gymnastics stadium, and you find probably greater than 75% of everybody is involved in some form of alternative educational system.
Parents really do want the best for their children, and a surprising number have decided that the standard school system is just no longer good enough.
In California, there's a very powerful teacher's union which largely has a deadlock on what's done in public schools. This has crushed California's once dominant educational system into something despised by intelligent adults.
And the jail break is on, in full force. I see it every day - my company now works with dozens of charter and alternative education schools to facilitate 100% funding of these alternative programs.
It's exciting, exhilerating, and loads of fun - and every night I sleep with the peaceful satisfaction of knowing that thousands of children across my state have an improved education due, in some small part, to my efforts for the day.
I am terrified of the implications of the declining scientific and educational standards amongst my people, and I'm doing what I can to help.
By supporting organizations such as Julian Charter School, HSC, and of course, my own company, CharterWorks, I'm doing my part to help.
Anybody can post on slashdot, but some people are doing something about it. Are you?
How well does apt-get for RPM compare with apt-get for Debian?
Are they really comparable?
As a user of yum on FC1, I'd really like to know. Why did I choose yum? Mainly because somebody I know used it and liked it, so I tried it, and liked it so much I set up my own yum repository mirror.
Does using apt-get really offer any benefit over yum? Doesn't apt-get simply mine the same RPM repositories surveyed when doing updates with yum?
Any intelligent response would be highly appreciated.
But, I've been playing around with yum on Fedora Core 1 - and it's damned impressive.
I can point to any number of yum repositories that contain packages for my particular system. As updates come out to these packages, I can have them all updated and applied with simplyIt's damned impressive to consider that binary packages from several (I've had up to 8) sources work together so simply and so easily.
With excellent security, too - all these packages are signed by the appropriate certificate authority, and it's a simple 2-step process to get and install a certificate for a particular yum repository.
WOW!
I was impressed with the Red Hat Network - this blows that away because it's open to the public. (up2date may have been, as well - I never bothered to find out and nobody ever mentioned it to me)
Privacy concerns? Not really. Paedophile concerns? Yes.
It's posts like this that will probably bring to life a new abbreviation:
RTFP: Read The F---ing Post
I mean, sheesh. I can understand not RTFA but not even reading the text in front of you?
Perhaps, when you post, there should be a "I'm feeling lucky" option where your post is inserted randomly into any article that's currently on the home page?
Those "good old days" were the days when your parents worked their asses off to provide stuff for you to use.
Patent disputes have been going on as long as there have been patents - Hollywood was founded in California because IP law wasn't strictly enforced in California, (like it was in New York) and so the MPAA could get around patents on the film camera.
However, in Florida, each and every vote was worth a LOT!!! Only a few votes either way in this state could swing the election! Maybe the next time, it will be YOUR state which is close, and YOUR vote will be worth it's weight in gold (I know, paper does not weigh much, it is a metaphor!)
And you say this... as though it were good. Why should a Floridan's vote count any more than somebodyy from Utah?
In Utah, (a VERY conservative state) there is basically no point to having 25% of the population voting their liberal viewpoint, because the Electoral College system means that only one victor will count.
Since you *know* that you are in the minority, why bother?
This polarizes politics and exacerbates voter apathy.
But, what if your vote could be counted to offset another's vote, anywhere?
This levels the playing field to an extent against the dominant party in one's state. This would *hopefully* serve to decrease voter apathy, and would work as a force against the two-party system that has a stranglehold on the dynamics of US Politics.
The electoral college was devised as a way to offset the inherent inability to quickly and accurately vote across the entire US. It's time has come, and it needs to "go away".
Bill,
I'd really like to get your feedback on XUL. Any chance I could arrange for a conversation w/you?
-Ben
Postgre might be Free, but converting an existing project that's already designed for MySQL to any other database engine has its costs.
I've found that it's relatively easy to port MySQL stuff to Postgres. Going the other way is frequently very painful.
Postgres is generally a feature superset of MySQL, so can thus handle most things that MySQL handles with minimal hassle.
Wouldn't that only limit performance on a Windows system, which relies so heavily on threads due to the incredibly inefficient forking process?
Since I use Linux servers, this shouldn't be much of an issue.
Also, I tend to focus on providing services where performance isn't the issue that data integrity is. Workflow automation, Contact Management, large-ish databases, often with 50 or more tables, often dynamically allocated.
Thus performance isn't the issue - features, stability, ACID compliance, etc. is.
I mean really, how many people out there can truely justify the cost of a full featured, robust database like MS-Sql? 10%? 5%?
How about 100%!?!? Ever hear of PostgreSQL?
ACID compliance, features that compare very nicely against MS-SQL/Oracle, foreign keys, triggers, transactions, embedded function definitions, the whole shebang.
About the only thing that it lacks (for free) is decent clustering/replication capability - and you can buy that fairly easily in the form of patches.
I've been using it for years, and it's a joy to work with!