I paid $199 for my DSL Modem. It's been made clear, time and again, that it's my modem. The warantee on it has expired, and when I had a problem with it, it was up to me to replace it. (though the replacement didn't solve the problem, it turned out to be a scratchy line)
So, not that I would do it, but what would be illegal about modifying my own hardware, or the software on it?
-Ben
PS: I have SBC DSL, fixed IP. It's been great! 384/128 promised, 1500/350 delivered. Hardly any downtime as long as I avoid their DNS and EMail servers. (I host my own on this line and have never had any complaints) 2+ years and still happy!
Look, these "major projects" are getting hammered by clueless dolts who haven't done any research, where a "bug" is something like "The script stops working when I call a function I never defined".
They get jaded. And why not? They are HUMAN.
A while ago, I hit a nasty (for me) bug in PHP 4.x. Basically, if you tried to include a file that wasn't there, the script would halt with an error.
And being that include() is a function, I felt that it should behave like any other, and return a failure code and continue, leaving it up to you to trap the error.
For me this was important, but I had to rally for a while with the developers, and get past the RTFM stuff, and argue my case before they accepted my logic and made the fix.
But they do care! Just understand their situation, and work from there.
It is generally a good idea to know what you are talking about before talking about it.
1. Lack of seperation between content and logic. Embedded logic code inside presentation can lead to a bewildering jungle of death for anyone who tries to maintain the code. Also, repeated logic must be maintained across all pages, instead of changing it in one place. (this goes for all ASP, PHP, perl type scripts)
There are a number of template solutions that you can use to avoid this problem. I work almost exclusively with PHPLIB's template class.
2. Performance problems with interpreted languages
Strictly speaking, PHP is not interpreted. PHP files are compiled before being run, and are cached for a while. This gives you a combination of great performance, much like a compiled language, with the write & immediate play of an interpreted language.
3. Can't take advantage of OO goodness. php is a flat procedural-like language, you can't do the robust object modeling, or any of the other spiffy OO things you can do with c++, java, (maybe.net) etc.
Did you pay attention to my answer to point #1 above? That bit about a class? Yeah, a class. PHP supports OO, in a clear, intuitive manner. Oh, and '.net' isn't a language.
4. HTML lock in. Your code will forever live in HTML, if you want a different display format (unlikely) you're stuck. ie. what if you want to have a propriatary client instead of html on your plam, you have to rewrite all the logic.
Only with very poor planning. You do plan your development before you start, right? There are plenty of template solutions you can choose. You can intersperse HTML for that quick 20 minute hack, use template objects for large projects that must scale.
5. Fancy features availible in Java (maybe.net) first. Oracle Objects, native DB connectors, will probably be written for Java before anyone tries to implement them (if ever) in PHP. You might not need these features of a small site, so its not that big of a deal.
As Yoda once said: "Hard to see the future is." - so I can't comment. But, did you know:
PHP is not web-only. I do large amounts of system administration and database manipulation in PHP. Its string handling abilities are concise, consistent, and powerful.
PHP is the most frequently installed Apache module. (As of a few months back, I couldn't locate current statistics)
PHP has bindings for GTK. That's right. You can write GUI applications using PHP if you like.
Using the Zend Optimizer, you can compile PHP scripts to binary code that can be distributed without revealing your sources.
A full featured Webserver has been written in PHP. Yes, the webserver itself. Features include HTTP/1.1, CGI support, name-based virtual hosts, server side includes, authentication, gzip content encoding support, Apache combined format and MySQL logging. Look out, Apache!
Not that I'm a fanatic, or anything... but PHP is a powerful, fast, flexible language that's easy to learn, and easy to read.
I can read somebody else's code almost immediately, unlike Perl or to a lesser extent, c, and the built-in functions for string handling allow me to get insane amounts of work done in a staggeringly short development cycle.
Writ of Mandate. aka Writ of Mandamus A court order to a government agency, including another court, to follow the law by correcting its prior actions or ceasing illegal acts.
Somehow, there's this perception that if a business migrates from Unix to Linux, that it's not a victory, that it might as well not be reported.
But, keep in mind, that very many of these Unix to Linux conversions may well have been, 5-7 years ago, Unix to NT conversions. Maybe more than half.
What's happened in the past few years is that Linux has all but halted NT/2000/XP's growth in the server space. And, being a *nix advocate, I think that's good news.
SPAM is a symptom of the "frictionless society" that BillG paid a ghost writer to write about in his landmark work (2nd revision) "The Road Ahead". (1st revision didn't mention the Internet)
So... Introduce friction into email. A "default deny, whitelist accept" would work nicely. This is being done by IM programs such as ICQ, Ymessenger and AIM, and many people use these as much as email to stay in touch!
There's a project called ASK (Active Spam Killer) that does this, as well. Basically, if somebody sends you an email, they get a bounce back requiring them to reply.
Spammers won't reply, friends will. Once friend has replied, all further email from him/her gets through unhindered.
It works perfect - 100% no spam, and no "false positives". But sometimes people don't understand that they just need to press "reply" and "send".
Laws won't fix spammers. Poorly applied bandaids like MAPS or RBL or SPEWS or whatever are very innefective, and do just as much to frustrate a valid provider as block SPAM to any noticable degree.
To fix email, you have to fix the POP/SMTP protocol itself to include authentication!
You know what though? That can't be true forever. I do feel that Linux can overtake Windows. The first step is to get millions of people running the OS. That's slowly but surely starting to happen.
It's starting to happen. Just tonight, I was exchanging a faulty printer at the local Walmart. The gal behind the counter said that there'd been alot of printers coming back. I asked her why, and she said something like "They didn't have a Linux, or something like that".
She had no idea what they were talking about, so I explained it to her a bit - that Linux is sort of like another "Windows", like Mac, only it works on normal PCs. She nodded blankly, pushed the barcode gun, and handed me my receipt.
Maybe you don't remember the days when Apple "had the desktop" and PCs were "Hard to use" and "good for business and serious number crunching".
Maybe you don't see the parallels here, but I sure do. Linux is "hard to use" but "good for business and serious number crunching".
As I see it, Linux won't go bankrupt, won't just "go away" and gets better and better every year. Word of mouth is increasing, and people will make "free" work for them, eventually.
I've been using ~assman's chroot for some time. In fact, it works with SSH and various other programs because of feedback I did with the project owner.
Yeah, chroot is not absolute. Neither is anything else. But, it's a great way to make sure that your clients don't see anything they aren't supposed to.
Combine chroot with SSH-only connections, and you have a real step in the area of security and/or privacy.
Again, read the subject, SECURITY IS NOT ABSOLUTE! But any step you make to prevent unwanted activity is a step in the right direction. Enough thwarting of "bad" behavior means the black hat will quit or look elsewhere, and that means you've won.
Security is not about absolutes; it's about risk management. Only idiots think that something is "secure" or it's "not". Chroot is a valid tool in the direction of more secure.
Patents are supposed to be for IMPLEMENTATIONS of things. Never were they intended for "ideas" or "business methods".
If you didn't have one you could hold in your hand, you couldn't (originally) get a patent.
Then they applied patents to business methods, and then software. (which at it's heart, is a number)
So now, you can patent a number, and not let anybody else print that number.
I know the hard work decent software takes, I'm an independent software developer myself. But to patent an idea (which is about the most you could claim software to be) is against the original concept of a patent.
You want ideas? They're cheap!
Get a 12 pack, go to a family reunion, and ask everybody for their "best ideas". You'll get (under current law) at least 10 patents some thanksgiving for $8.99.
Now, here you might have something! You get the 3 guys (or whatever) to agree to register with the International Registry, and... voila!
Heck, they practically are a ship to begin with!
But this raises more questions... What if you have a permanently anchored "dock" at sea? Something that floats, with pools, solar water purifiers, etc, and market it as a "vacation resort"?
Make it big, and kinda sprawling, and make it float. What then? Cruise ships today routinely take passengers numbering thousands, already many more people than something like Sealand.
At what point can a manmade structure become a nation?
OK, FLAC is "lossless" but it doesn't compress all that well.
Start with a 50 MB WAV file. Compress with Flac, and you *might* get 60% cut out. I honestly don't see much advantage over gzip or zip! Why bother with a new format name? ("Oh, our FLAC is better than zip/gzip, because... eh... we have a different name! We offer 2.2% better compression ratios!")
So now you have a 20 MB file. Lesee, over a 28.8 modem connection, you have...
A royal nightmare.
Ogg, on the other hand, compresses comparably to MP3. Your 50 MB WAV file might compress down to 4 MB with reasonable audio quality.
I find it surprising that many here would consider it a loss if Microsoft were to cut a reduced price deal for Telstra.
Hey, the software was released to the public, to be used for whatever purpose benefited them. That's what the GPL is for.
And, using it as a leverage to negotiate better prices with M$ is as legitimate a use as any other I can think of!
Don't assume the narrow-minded view that Linux only "wins" when it's the only thing in use. Free software was provided for free with the assumption that it might do you some good, and that it's up to you to determine what good it'd be.
If this Aussie company uses the software to negotiate better terms with MS, more power to 'em!
Either way, Linux continues to grow and improve, and "Billie boy" continues to require changes of underwear.
For example, in my web-based work, I make extensive use of PHPlib templates. For complex pages, they degrade system performance to (sometimes) 1% of what you'd get with a static page.
Yes, that's bad. However, even with that, a cheap, 1 Ghz system can still saturate a T1 with nothing but these "expensive", complex pages!
Would I consider doing this if the processor was 133 Mhz Pentium?
Not a chance.
But, in this case, the money saved by reducing development time for these templates makes the extra $300 in "get a fast CPU" cost well worth it. Using templates saves that $300 time and time and time again!
Hmm... I think I'm going to disagree with you, here. Mozilla doesn't need centralized branding any more/less than Linux does.
Working on other people's computers, I find probably more than half of them have a version of IE "themed" to suit some ISP (such as AOL).
Oh, you didn't know you could do that? Well, you can, using IEAK, free download from Microsoft.
Microsoft won over Apple by allowing many vendors to provide its product to Apple's one. Mozilla (and all open source software) do the same thing to Microsoft, in software.
I find it endlessly funny that the very forces Microsoft used to win (support from multiple hardware vendors) are the very forces they now fear most. (OSS support from multiple software vendors)
Linux has tcpwrappers (ACLs) and inherent permissions at the file level. Linux also works smoothly with LDAP (using a PAM module) thus granting everything on your (short) list.
I was an "early adopter" of a Kodak DC-210 1-MPx digital camera. I've taken thousands of pictures with it - most archived on CD-R.
I love it!
Between my 5 children, running my own business, and home-schooling them, I just never got the time to run stupid errands like developing film.
My my DC-210, I just plug the Compact Flash card into my USB reader, save to the HDD, and every few months to CD-R.
Given that my 1.0 MPx camera blows up to about 6x8 before looking "grainy", I can't see the need for more than about 4 Mpx, but then again, "we don't need more than 640k!"...
With my DC-210, I get pictures I simply wouldn't have any other way... pictures I will cherish as an old fart.
BDB (Berkeley DataBase) is a simple, DBM-style database that only has key/value pairs. Notwithstanding this simplicity, a company (Sleepy Cat) has been making a profit with this product! It's used extensively by OpenLDAP, which is an "enterprise ready" application, capable of scaling to handle every single person or thing on the face of the earth today.
MySQL is not "under par" or "substandard", it is written to perform simple queries rapidly.
PostgreSQL is not "a toy", it's designed to be a feature-complete, modest SQL engine, with features over performance. (Though performance gains of recent have been quite staggering)
Oracle is the "nut buster" of a database. Based on code now some 20 years old, they've had the time (and the money) to make a truly upwardly scalable application. For those to whom the tens of thousands of dollars price is not a problem, Oracle is it.
For those who want high performance and database replication for simple databases for cheap, MySQL is it.
For those who need to build complex datastructures and access them on a budget, PostgreSQL is the one.
For those who want a very simple values-container, BDB is what you want.
The scale is not linear, with "bad" on one side, and "good" on the other.
I would not even consider BDB for most of my mid-tier web-based software. Nor would I consider Oracle. Postgres fits just about perfectly - I need transactions, and frequently have to perform nested outer joins and subselects in a single statement.
On the other hand, the LDAP-based network I manage runs just fine on BDB, and one of my recent projects (a large database of registration information) works best on MySQL.
Which is better - a sledgehammer or a screwdriver? They're both tools that get a job done. Don't call a screwdriver "deficient" because you wouldn't want to crush a brick wall, and don't call a sledgehammer a "Piece of Sh--" because you can't turn a screw with it!
You know, I just read an interesting article on bayesian filtering... which I find interesting, but I find no different than the statistical analysis that our elected govornment is using.
Why is it OK to use these techniques to get the spammers, but not the terrorists?
What I understand of what you said is almost exactly what I thought I was saying when I said what I said... Er... we agree, we just haven't agreed on that, yet!
What I mean by "services" you call "distinct systems". And yes, Kerberos is yet another existing, already proven method of doing this.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... This leads to an interesting idea...
I paid $199 for my DSL Modem. It's been made clear, time and again, that it's my modem. The warantee on it has expired, and when I had a problem with it, it was up to me to replace it. (though the replacement didn't solve the problem, it turned out to be a scratchy line)
So, not that I would do it, but what would be illegal about modifying my own hardware, or the software on it?
-Ben
PS: I have SBC DSL, fixed IP. It's been great! 384/128 promised, 1500/350 delivered. Hardly any downtime as long as I avoid their DNS and EMail servers. (I host my own on this line and have never had any complaints) 2+ years and still happy!
Look, these "major projects" are getting hammered by clueless dolts who haven't done any research, where a "bug" is something like "The script stops working when I call a function I never defined".
They get jaded. And why not? They are HUMAN.
A while ago, I hit a nasty (for me) bug in PHP 4.x. Basically, if you tried to include a file that wasn't there, the script would halt with an error.
And being that include() is a function, I felt that it should behave like any other, and return a failure code and continue, leaving it up to you to trap the error.
For me this was important, but I had to rally for a while with the developers, and get past the RTFM stuff, and argue my case before they accepted my logic and made the fix.
But they do care! Just understand their situation, and work from there.
-Ben
1. Lack of seperation between content and logic. Embedded logic code inside presentation can lead to a bewildering jungle of death for anyone who tries to maintain the code. Also, repeated logic must be maintained across all pages, instead of changing it in one place. (this goes for all ASP, PHP, perl type scripts)
There are a number of template solutions that you can use to avoid this problem. I work almost exclusively with PHPLIB's template class.
2. Performance problems with interpreted languages
Strictly speaking, PHP is not interpreted. PHP files are compiled before being run, and are cached for a while. This gives you a combination of great performance, much like a compiled language, with the write & immediate play of an interpreted language.
3. Can't take advantage of OO goodness. php is a flat procedural-like language, you can't do the robust object modeling, or any of the other spiffy OO things you can do with c++, java, (maybe
Did you pay attention to my answer to point #1 above? That bit about a class? Yeah, a class. PHP supports OO, in a clear, intuitive manner. Oh, and '.net' isn't a language.
4. HTML lock in. Your code will forever live in HTML, if you want a different display format (unlikely) you're stuck. ie. what if you want to have a propriatary client instead of html on your plam, you have to rewrite all the logic.
Only with very poor planning. You do plan your development before you start, right? There are plenty of template solutions you can choose. You can intersperse HTML for that quick 20 minute hack, use template objects for large projects that must scale.
5. Fancy features availible in Java (maybe
As Yoda once said: "Hard to see the future is." - so I can't comment. But, did you know:
Not that I'm a fanatic, or anything... but PHP is a powerful, fast, flexible language that's easy to learn, and easy to read.
I can read somebody else's code almost immediately, unlike Perl or to a lesser extent, c, and the built-in functions for string handling allow me to get insane amounts of work done in a staggeringly short development cycle.
Only people who don't know bitch about PHP.
slashdot is a funny beast, people jeer the monopolies and people still jeer at a small upstart trying to take on the big boys.
/. people were not consumed by Borg, nor did we join a hive-mind collective.
You idiot. Slashdot is not a "beast", it's a group of frequently immature people who jeer at just about everything, most especially Microsoft.
In case you handn't noticed, we
Thus, some of us jeer at monopolies, and others jeer at upstarts trying to take on the big boys.
So, me says you need to be jeered at, for attempting to jeer at slashdot as the single, unified entity it most definitely is not.
HA HA!
I forget the technical legal term
Writ of Mandate. aka Writ of Mandamus A court order to a government agency, including another court, to follow the law by correcting its prior actions or ceasing illegal acts.
(BTW, IANAL, but more details can be found here in a legal dictionary)
Somehow, there's this perception that if a business migrates from Unix to Linux, that it's not a victory, that it might as well not be reported.
But, keep in mind, that very many of these Unix to Linux conversions may well have been, 5-7 years ago, Unix to NT conversions. Maybe more than half.
What's happened in the past few years is that Linux has all but halted NT/2000/XP's growth in the server space. And, being a *nix advocate, I think that's good news.
Remember when awesome games could fit on a handful of floppies?
Pull out those floppies, and load the game. You'll see why 4x the RAM isn't so unreasonable! The "old favorites" by today's standards suck.
ls is 45k!
/bin/ls
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 45948 Aug 9 2001
SPAM is a symptom of the "frictionless society" that BillG paid a ghost writer to write about in his landmark work (2nd revision) "The Road Ahead". (1st revision didn't mention the Internet)
So... Introduce friction into email. A "default deny, whitelist accept" would work nicely. This is being done by IM programs such as ICQ, Ymessenger and AIM, and many people use these as much as email to stay in touch!
There's a project called ASK (Active Spam Killer) that does this, as well. Basically, if somebody sends you an email, they get a bounce back requiring them to reply.
Spammers won't reply, friends will. Once friend has replied, all further email from him/her gets through unhindered.
It works perfect - 100% no spam, and no "false positives". But sometimes people don't understand that they just need to press "reply" and "send".
Laws won't fix spammers. Poorly applied bandaids like MAPS or RBL or SPEWS or whatever are very innefective, and do just as much to frustrate a valid provider as block SPAM to any noticable degree.
To fix email, you have to fix the POP/SMTP protocol itself to include authentication!
You know what though? That can't be true forever. I do feel that Linux can overtake Windows. The first step is to get millions of people running the OS. That's slowly but surely starting to happen.
It's starting to happen. Just tonight, I was exchanging a faulty printer at the local Walmart. The gal behind the counter said that there'd been alot of printers coming back. I asked her why, and she said something like "They didn't have a Linux, or something like that".
She had no idea what they were talking about, so I explained it to her a bit - that Linux is sort of like another "Windows", like Mac, only it works on normal PCs. She nodded blankly, pushed the barcode gun, and handed me my receipt.
Maybe you don't remember the days when Apple "had the desktop" and PCs were "Hard to use" and "good for business and serious number crunching".
Maybe you don't see the parallels here, but I sure do. Linux is "hard to use" but "good for business and serious number crunching".
As I see it, Linux won't go bankrupt, won't just "go away" and gets better and better every year. Word of mouth is increasing, and people will make "free" work for them, eventually.
I've been using ~assman's chroot for some time. In fact, it works with SSH and various other programs because of feedback I did with the project owner.
Yeah, chroot is not absolute. Neither is anything else. But, it's a great way to make sure that your clients don't see anything they aren't supposed to.
Combine chroot with SSH-only connections, and you have a real step in the area of security and/or privacy.
Again, read the subject, SECURITY IS NOT ABSOLUTE! But any step you make to prevent unwanted activity is a step in the right direction. Enough thwarting of "bad" behavior means the black hat will quit or look elsewhere, and that means you've won.
Security is not about absolutes; it's about risk management. Only idiots think that something is "secure" or it's "not". Chroot is a valid tool in the direction of more secure.
.. is like an unbreakable rope. It doesn't exist.
Get used to it. (MS is hopefully now learning something most of us learned long ago...)
Patents are supposed to be for IMPLEMENTATIONS of things. Never were they intended for "ideas" or "business methods".
If you didn't have one you could hold in your hand, you couldn't (originally) get a patent.
Then they applied patents to business methods, and then software. (which at it's heart, is a number)
So now, you can patent a number, and not let anybody else print that number.
I know the hard work decent software takes, I'm an independent software developer myself. But to patent an idea (which is about the most you could claim software to be) is against the original concept of a patent.
You want ideas? They're cheap!
Get a 12 pack, go to a family reunion, and ask everybody for their "best ideas". You'll get (under current law) at least 10 patents some thanksgiving for $8.99.
Crazy. Simply crazy.
Does anybody remember a /. article a while back link to this story about how carbon nanotubes cannot handle bursts of common, ordinary light?
Yes, that's right! A standard camera flash will cause carbon nanotubes to explode!
Check out the link, there's a neat video showing this effect at work.
I can just see it now, on the front page of the newspaper... Tourist arrested for carrying terrorist device and it's just a FLASH CAMERA!
Yeah, I'm excited that the technology to do this is just now barely within our reach - but it'll be a while before it's squarely in our grasp.
Why not a real Country?
... voila!
Say, perhaps, the "Country" of Sealand?
Now, here you might have something! You get the 3 guys (or whatever) to agree to register with the International Registry, and
Heck, they practically are a ship to begin with!
But this raises more questions... What if you have a permanently anchored "dock" at sea? Something that floats, with pools, solar water purifiers, etc, and market it as a "vacation resort"?
Make it big, and kinda sprawling, and make it float. What then? Cruise ships today routinely take passengers numbering thousands, already many more people than something like Sealand.
At what point can a manmade structure become a nation?
OK, FLAC is "lossless" but it doesn't compress all that well.
Start with a 50 MB WAV file. Compress with Flac, and you *might* get 60% cut out. I honestly don't see much advantage over gzip or zip! Why bother with a new format name? ("Oh, our FLAC is better than zip/gzip, because... eh... we have a different name! We offer 2.2% better compression ratios!")
So now you have a 20 MB file. Lesee, over a 28.8 modem connection, you have...
A royal nightmare.
Ogg, on the other hand, compresses comparably to MP3. Your 50 MB WAV file might compress down to 4 MB with reasonable audio quality.
Lesee, over a 28.8 modem connection, you have...
Something reasonable.
I find it surprising that many here would consider it a loss if Microsoft were to cut a reduced price deal for Telstra.
Hey, the software was released to the public, to be used for whatever purpose benefited them. That's what the GPL is for.
And, using it as a leverage to negotiate better prices with M$ is as legitimate a use as any other I can think of!
Don't assume the narrow-minded view that Linux only "wins" when it's the only thing in use. Free software was provided for free with the assumption that it might do you some good, and that it's up to you to determine what good it'd be.
If this Aussie company uses the software to negotiate better terms with MS, more power to 'em!
Either way, Linux continues to grow and improve, and "Billie boy" continues to require changes of underwear.
-Ben
Absolutely.
For example, in my web-based work, I make extensive use of PHPlib templates. For complex pages, they degrade system performance to (sometimes) 1% of what you'd get with a static page.
Yes, that's bad. However, even with that, a cheap, 1 Ghz system can still saturate a T1 with nothing but these "expensive", complex pages!
Would I consider doing this if the processor was 133 Mhz Pentium?
Not a chance.
But, in this case, the money saved by reducing development time for these templates makes the extra $300 in "get a fast CPU" cost well worth it. Using templates saves that $300 time and time and time again!
So, most definitely!
There is!
1) (Debian) apt-get
2) (RedHat) up2date
3) (Gentoo) emerge
Other distros usually have something similar...
Hmm... I think I'm going to disagree with you, here. Mozilla doesn't need centralized branding any more/less than Linux does.
Working on other people's computers, I find probably more than half of them have a version of IE "themed" to suit some ISP (such as AOL).
Oh, you didn't know you could do that? Well, you can, using IEAK, free download from Microsoft.
Microsoft won over Apple by allowing many vendors to provide its product to Apple's one. Mozilla (and all open source software) do the same thing to Microsoft, in software.
I find it endlessly funny that the very forces Microsoft used to win (support from multiple hardware vendors) are the very forces they now fear most. (OSS support from multiple software vendors)
Linux has tcpwrappers (ACLs) and inherent permissions at the file level. Linux also works smoothly with LDAP (using a PAM module) thus granting everything on your (short) list.
If you don't know it, don't say it!
I was an "early adopter" of a Kodak DC-210 1-MPx digital camera. I've taken thousands of pictures with it - most archived on CD-R.
I love it!
Between my 5 children, running my own business, and home-schooling them, I just never got the time to run stupid errands like developing film.
My my DC-210, I just plug the Compact Flash card into my USB reader, save to the HDD, and every few months to CD-R.
Given that my 1.0 MPx camera blows up to about 6x8 before looking "grainy", I can't see the need for more than about 4 Mpx, but then again, "we don't need more than 640k!"...
With my DC-210, I get pictures I simply wouldn't have any other way... pictures I will cherish as an old fart.
Anyway, I recommend one. Highly.
Fact is, BDB!=MySQL!=PostgreSQL!=DB2!=Oracle
BDB (Berkeley DataBase) is a simple, DBM-style database that only has key/value pairs. Notwithstanding this simplicity, a company (Sleepy Cat) has been making a profit with this product! It's used extensively by OpenLDAP, which is an "enterprise ready" application, capable of scaling to handle every single person or thing on the face of the earth today.
MySQL is not "under par" or "substandard", it is written to perform simple queries rapidly.
PostgreSQL is not "a toy", it's designed to be a feature-complete, modest SQL engine, with features over performance. (Though performance gains of recent have been quite staggering)
Oracle is the "nut buster" of a database. Based on code now some 20 years old, they've had the time (and the money) to make a truly upwardly scalable application. For those to whom the tens of thousands of dollars price is not a problem, Oracle is it.
For those who want high performance and database replication for simple databases for cheap, MySQL is it.
For those who need to build complex datastructures and access them on a budget, PostgreSQL is the one.
For those who want a very simple values-container, BDB is what you want.
The scale is not linear, with "bad" on one side, and "good" on the other.
I would not even consider BDB for most of my mid-tier web-based software. Nor would I consider Oracle. Postgres fits just about perfectly - I need transactions, and frequently have to perform nested outer joins and subselects in a single statement.
On the other hand, the LDAP-based network I manage runs just fine on BDB, and one of my recent projects (a large database of registration information) works best on MySQL.
Which is better - a sledgehammer or a screwdriver? They're both tools that get a job done. Don't call a screwdriver "deficient" because you wouldn't want to crush a brick wall, and don't call a sledgehammer a "Piece of Sh--" because you can't turn a screw with it!
You know, I just read an interesting article on bayesian filtering... which I find interesting, but I find no different than the statistical analysis that our elected govornment is using.
Why is it OK to use these techniques to get the spammers, but not the terrorists?
Could somebody explain this one to me?
Isn't that what I said?
What I understand of what you said is almost exactly what I thought I was saying when I said what I said... Er... we agree, we just haven't agreed on that, yet!
What I mean by "services" you call "distinct systems". And yes, Kerberos is yet another existing, already proven method of doing this.
So, anybody want to re-invent the wheel today?