What makes my computer "My" computer is not the processor, RAM, DVD/RW drive, or the network adapter. If my Broadcom NIC was replaced with an Intel NIC, it would still be "my" computer.
What makes my computer "my" computer is the/home partition. There are all my settings, my KDE preferences, my bookmarks, my Email, my shell history, my KDE background photo of my kids, and my ~/bin directory with all my shell-script wizardry.
It's my personal data ON the computer that makes it uniquely mine, and this particular set of data has been mine continuously since about 1999 or so, despite me having some half dozen computers since then. They are all "mine" when I used them because they all had this dataset on them.
When I last switched from my Centrino 1.6 laptop to my new Intel Core2 Duo, I brought over that.../home directory, and did an OS upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 6. Despite having all new hardware and a new operating system, it was immediately recognizable as "my" computer because of all this pre-existing data.
So, if you had all your stuff sitting on a flash drive, that you could plug into anywhere you go, then any computer instantly becomes "your" computer.
It's not a literal statement of "Oh geez! Computer on a stick!" but more of an interpretive statement, "Your computer on a stick".
Don't look at this as a tech weenie - look at this as a more average Joe.
Losers: whoever thinks it makes a difference what user you run "configure" as without realizing that running "make install" as anybody other than root is pretty pointless.
1) How do you know a GUI application from a non-GUI one? What about programs that are run locally, but viewed remotely, and vice versa? What constitutes a "GUI" application?
2) But you are allocating different types of "memory"! See Leaky Abstractions for more information on this. Your "everything is memory" model sounds nice, but lacks a few key components.... When I fclose() a file, I have a STRONG assurance that the file has been saved and wouldn't go away if the power failed. That's not the case in your "everything is memory" model...
3) You are either talking about a security nightmare or pixie dust. How does computer B know that it's OK to run code from computer A? See other comments on #4
4) Capability security requires somebody to set up all those !#@!@# permissions. POSIX, by contrast, is very simple and requires little effort to maintain. Is POSIX ideal in all situations? No. But it's adequate in most circumstances without a lot of effort, and it's usually better to have a "just barely suits" possibility with a decent default than a perfect possibility with a lousy default. Perhaps that explains why your touted EROS operating system died on the vine?
Actually, the correct labels are "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion", imo. "Life" and "Choice" are of course much broader values than that which they fight over.
I think you are right about "pro-life" being "anti-abortion".
I'm not "Pro-Abortion". I think it's perfectly OK for people to carry their pregnancies to term. However, I think that if a mother has decided that she's just not ready to have a baby, and is willing to KILL the baby inside her, she's probably right. I trust her judgement. Every woman I know who's had an abortion really was not ready to care for a baby.
Abortion is a form of humane, mercy killing. We do it with dogs (and people!) all the time - when somebody/something is suffering needlessly and irrevocably, we "put 'em down".
Rather than see the child suffer for life being raised in a broken home with a mother that would rather the child was never born, with the abuse, insecurity, criminal career, and so on, allowing an abortion to happen stops all this pain from happening.
And I believe that prospective parents should have a choice in the matter. Thus, I am "pro choice".
"Pro-Abortion" implies that I want YOU to have an abortion. That it not the case. I just don't want to take that choice away from you.
I reiterate that you are not alone in your frustration. You didn't fail to adopt Linux, Linux didn't fail to meet your needs, it was the entire community and their business practices that failed you.
What is failing is the idea that it's either a "success" or a "failure". It's not good or bad, it just is.
I happen to be CTO of a million-dollar-a-year hosting business, using Linux as my platform. It's very efficient, it's rock-solid, it's 24x7x365, and it has caused me no significant pain in 7 years. We have redundancy, offsite backups, failover, and we have great performance response times. We use an embarrassingly small amount of hardware to satisfy very high-demand, database-driven applications.
Those are very, very, very good numbers.
When I hear "enterprise grade", here's what it means to me: It had better work reliably. It had better not give me trouble. It had better not require babysitting, frequent reboots, or any particular kludges or hacks to stay running.
I don't expect Linux to be "compatible" with closed products that make no claim of compatability. That's like expecting a teen marriage to work out. Good luck!
But, what it does claim to do, it had better do well.
Is our business based on Linux? Yes.
But do most of our computers run Linux? About 1/3. Sales, finance, etc. is all Windows. Tech is all Linux, but only represents the servers (just a few, midrange systems, see above) and a few workstations.
Ah, but you're forgetting Borland Sidekick and other TSR utilities that allowed copy/paste across DOS applications.
Shudder. Yes, it was there. When it didn't crash your main application. Ever try running any graphics-capable software and then turn on Sidekick? If you were lucky, pressing both shifts at the same time would restore order. All too often, you had to restart.
No, Sidekick is not something I'd consider part of a WORKING application...
And yes, it was a kludge because cross-app copy/paste wasn't a native feature of DOS although the TSR capability was. This is very similiar to the kludge of doing web apps in a browser since many non-native features are worked-around by using javascript.
Kludge? I agree. But javascript isn't some memory-resident hack, it's a program language that allows for lots of very neat, nifty things.
Copy/Paste between applications worked in Windows. Nobody in their right mind used Windows 3.x with the 640 mentioned by the parent poster - typical was 2 MB or more.
Thus, I infer the use of MS-DOS 5.0 or 6.0. And good luck, copy/paste.
My first PC wished it had the power of the 8086 microprocessor, with 16 Kb of RAM. I learned on MS-DOS 3.2, and I remember when the MS-DOS sub-directory (DOS 2.x) was a big deal. And I have a fully working, complete copy of MS Windows 1.0 on 5.25" 360k floppies. (Yes, the ORIGINAL release, not the 1.0A)
Come back when the bad memory you speak of has relapsed.
If you're tossing Wankr 2.1 [parm.net] together in your bedroom then MySQL free, pgsql, or even sqlite is more than enough to meet your needs. If you run a large business that relies on MySQL to actually make some $$, then purchasing support is a rational choice. Especially since TCO is still about an order of magnitude less than competition.
I make money with my PostgreSQL database. My small-but-growing business will pass the $1,000,000 gross income mark this year, with over 30% profit margins. My issue here is that PostgreSQL has "just worked" with zero significant support issues in almost 7 years.
24 x 7 x 365.
Over 70 school districts use our product, and while there are the inevitable wrinkles, uptime is *never* a problem, and never has a single support thread been tracked back to a fault in the database.
So, no. That's not an issue. At least, as far as I can determine.
My experience with "paid support" is that people who are essentially hired monkeys and who do not understand what they're talking about do google searches for you while you wait. If that fails, they talk to their managers who then do more google searches.
Typically, it's 4 or 5 days before you get ahold of somebody who does anything but google searches, and he/she then needs to spend a few hours determining that there is a real issue to be addressed. And when that happens, they'll implement one of the solutions found in a google search first.
But a support e-mail list usually has meaningful answers within a few hours if your question is reasonably well written, and doesn't cost jack.
Don't you feel the burning irony of posting this on Slashdot, one of the more prominent MySQL users?
Not at all. You *can* build great things with marginal technologies. It's just harder to do so.
Slashdot doesn't face a number of problems that MySQL would fail them on. Slashdot has a rather simple database schema - complex queries and joins are few to none. They don't rely on 100% ACID compliance. They don't use the database to help enforce data integrity.
So MySQL is sufficient for their needs.
But PostgreSQL matches in *all* these areas, and still manages to offer solid performance on complex queries/joins. It offers robust and mature ACID compliance. It offers excellent integrity constraints for your data.
It's not whether or not you can get something to work with MySQL - just like you can build a house with a dollar-store hammer. But why use the dollar-store hammer if both it and the $20 hammer are available to you for free?
Furthermore, the license behind PostgreSQL is MORE FREE than the one behind MySQL. You can build a commercial, shipping product with PostgreSQL and not be beholden to per-sale fees, as you'd see with MySQL.
So, again I ask.... Why would anybody use something with all the warts of MySQL?
Seriously, dude. There is so much valuable information available for FREE - it might be a good idea to look up some of it before commenting.
when man plays with mother nature, we almost inevitably come out on the losing end.
Yeah. Sorta like playing with mother nature has screwed us over by providing massive increases in the amount of usable food. Like playing with mother nature has doubled our average life expectancy in just 100 years. Just like playing with mother nature has increased the per-capita wealth of even the poor by over 200% in just 30 years.
drain the swamps in new orleans, then lose 60% of the land's ability to absorb water.
But what about all the houses on that land? What, they don't count? Sure, they come at a cost. But they came. And those that live there have a better quality of life than before.
introduce pest-killing amphibians to the everglades, then they procreate without preditors and wipe out existing species.
(Ahem) It's called "evolution". Survival of the fittest. It's been happening for billions of years. Or do you happen to have a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex? See, your mammalian ancestors out-competed the mighty dinosaurs.
Sorry about the native yellow-bellied sap-frog. (or whatever) But species invade new areas, naturally, all the time.
water the deserts of nevada to make lush golf courses, then people in colorado go thirsty and firemen can't put out historically large forest fires covering hundreds of thousands of acres.
I remember reading about some newcomers to North California's central valley in the late 1800's. They described late summer nights as the "glowing of the devil" because of all the forest fires in the surrounding foothills. They were common, back then. Today, we fight those fires, and have massive bomber planes drop fire-retardant to stop the fires. By stopping the fires, trees are saved that would otherwise burn. They are logged, at a handsome profit to both the lumber companies and the local jurisdictions.
But try explaining that whole exchange to an environmentalist.
Are there environmental problems?
YES! But there were environmental problems long before we humans got involved.
PS: Properly formed sentences start with an upper case. It involves the shift key on either side of your keyboard. Try it: lower case UPPER CASE lower case UPPER CASE. It's easy!
1) They managed to acquire 10,000 customers? Who are these customers, and why would they pay MySQL for a product that's not only free, but has better competitors available for free?
2) 10,000 customers, with 10 MILLION installs? So the odds are 1 in 1,000 that a user of your product would actually pay you anything? Those are TERRIBLE numbers....
Ahgh. Conflict. Partly because I just don't like MySQL - I'm a Postgres user and shrug my shoulders as to why anybody would use something with all the warts of MySQL...
Everything done to make dynamic web applications is a clumsy, tacked-on workaround to get around the built-in, inherent static document metaphor in all HTML browsers. Take the back button. It FUNDAMENTALLY....// Lots more ranting//
So what? *ALL* technology evolves this way. Baby steps, incrementally improving on previous technologies. Why do we use 60-cycle A/C? Because Nikolai Tesla wanted to power the entire earth with radio power, and the resonating frequency of the Earth is 60 Hz. Is 60 Hz the optimum for power transmission over long distances? Nope.
But that's what was there before, and the step of changing that would be excessively expensive - so that step never gets taken.
Rant rant rant... CONGRATULATIONS! It took over a decade of "technology progress", a browser that eats up to 30 megabytes and a more than a gigahertz of CPU cycles to simulate badly what a desktop app on a 386SX with 640K of RAM could do in the 1980's. And it still doesn't work right because all the leftover cruft from the discarded metaphor you subverted.
Except that it isn't. Your 386sx DOS application works on one computer. It requires software to be installed. It doesn't work concurrently with other applications. If you forget your disks, you can't use your Mother's computer in a pinch over the holidays while you are visiting your folks. The software includes you and only you, it has no access to other information. You can't get current stock quotes. It has an inconsistent user interface. You can't copy/paste information from other running apps. You have to worry about backups, viruses, computer crashes. Your DOS application is not PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, BEOS, AND PalmOS compatible. How much longer should I go on?
Seems that you're forgetting an awful lot of the benefits that the "new model" as it's evolved has given you. Sorry that your development tools cause you so much frustration just to get a dynamically generated application out. Consider using a language designed for web development - I recommend PHP.
I personally LOVE web-based development. Combined with database transactions, sessions, HTML templates, etc. I get a rich, simple, RAPID development environment that's let me write truly large applications in record time, coordinating the efforts of hundreds of people in realtime, with an incredibly small initial investment. Because I know the program runs and then dies, I don't have to worry about memory deallocation, garbage cleaning, etc.
Debugging is a snap, because I can write a page script to rollback the transaction, so I can just hit reload over and over until I work out all the kinks. And then update the script to commit the transaction and move on to the next stage of application development. So much better than client-side development, where you have to close the app, recompile, and re-run before you can even try again!
Compatibility problems are really minor when compared to client-side development - yes there are browser issues, but I can test in IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox and call it a day. (I develop for FF first, then test in IE, THANK YOU IES4LINUX!) When I need to ensure a consistent document, outputting in PDF has worked very well with almost no complaints or support calls.
Again, if browser-based development is so incredibly painful for you, I suggest improving your development tools. Web-based development is a breeze!
Then you get users onto it and now you only have X-1.5 years of support. On Fedora, this means practically no time is left.
What kind of dope uses Fedora on a production server?
Use CentOS - I'm running CentOS 4, and anticipate not having to do *ANYTHING* to my production systems except use them, keep them turned on, and keep them updated (which is about 5 min/week) until 2010 or so.
TLDs exist out of nothing more than a technical convenience. There is no usability value to a TLD.
If I say "IBM", do you have any question about what company I'm talking about? Funny how that worked without saying "IBM.com" or "IBM.company" or whatever. IBM is sufficient.
TLDs will proliferate because there is economic incentive for those who sell TLDs. And each time a new TLD comes out, the relative value of TLDs in general will drop until they lose relevance altogether. And it WILL go this way, because A) there's money in starting a TLD, and B) once started, a TLD will basically never be retracted. Thus, it's a one-way street.
Who wants to register mystupidcompany.com,.net,.org,.biz,.me,.you,.xxx,.whatever,.the,.fsck, and.else? Thus, the proliferation of TLDs causes a drop in the relative worth of each tld. In the meantime, a tremendous cost will be borne by businesses trying to enforce their trademarks in accordance with laws not intended to deal with the realities of the Internet as it exists today.
The answer is simple - Build a TLD of ".". Collapse all other domains into this super-root, while allowing ANY arbitrary phrases to the left of the dot. EG: it's perfectly ok to register "because.i.want.to." as a domain name, even though no TLD of ".to" might exist today. Domain slashdot.org becomes slashdot.org. and there can be a "slashdot.somerandomname.", but it has no more value than any other "root" domain, and slashdot would be reached by its new root domain, "slashdot." And from there, standard trademark law can govern, as it does today.
Years ago, I chose Gandi.net for my name services. A tad more expensive, but based in France, where very strong intellectual property laws exist that protect a domain holder.
I'm a software developer, and we present our products at a number of tradeshows. One of our products is server-based, and at the time, Internet connections were spotty at best, so I set up a duplicate of the server on a laptop. Combined with a pocket-wifi spot, it acted as a hotspot, with all routing tables mapping to self.
In short, it was its own entire Internet, with a single IP address. DNS was configured so that * mapped to that one IP address. The name of the hotspot was our company. So if you connected to this "hot spot", you got our website (hosted locally) no matter what address you went to.
We had problems at these conferences, with other vendors accusing us of hacking their websites, or hijacking the Internet! Some of the situations were simply comical!
Anyway, it's not hard to do, if you're familiar with Linux services. It took me a few hours to set it all up and test it.
Apple just upgrades and inmproves their OS at a much faster rate, not a hard thing to do when you dont support legacy hardware going back a decade, nor work with a huge range of gear by people who are like the one night wonders of the IT world.
I have a decade-old iMac (ruby) that runs the very latest version of Macintosh OSX. (10.4) What's that you say? Apple doesn't support legacy hardware?
Well, try getting Vista to run on a Pentium 2 with 128 MB of RAM on a 10 GB HDD, which is what was state of the art when the Apple iMac came out.
No, I didn't think so. Come back when you have some clue what you're talking about.
Sounds great, except that both neighbors are plugged into the same grid. Run the wires == no movement. Nothing happens. Nada. You need to have a difference in electrical potential. Sounds great, but it just wouldn't work...
I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out. Yeah, it has some limitations, such as: a single-speaker AM radio, no air conditioning, cruise control, electric windows, it requires fuel additives to not die on unleaded gas, and it's hard to find parts for. Oh, and it's a death trap in an accident.
And despite all that, it's still mighty cool. I honk when I see somebody driving one.
Can you imagine what a dorkass you'd look like if you stuck your head out the window and screamed: "Dude, die already! The Studebaker's time has come and gone already!".
Oh, wait. Nevermind. You're posting O/S elitism on Slashdot. My guess is that you probably already know all about what a dorkass you look like. Never mind.//Scuze me...
For some time a few years ago, spammers used to IGNORE the primary MX and send to secondary MXs preferentially.
Since in our case, the 2ndary MX was a dumb sendmail relay only without knowledge of the user DB, it shot the traffic load out thru the roof with bounces to junk spam that, because they couldn't be rejected during the actual delivery attempt, hammered our backup relay.
If you want reliable source material look elsewhere, if you want an exorbitant quantity of information, Wikipedia has that. It's the quick and dirty resource for people who might just need to know a few things about a subject without having to fact check and such. That's what it should be treated as. The fact that non-experts are allowed to edit entries is what made it grow to be the resource it is today.
Maybe we should be calling it the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"????
Wow, a cluestick is finaly showing up. The reports of only 22 purchased tracks per iPod sold is showing that consumers are voting down DRM with their pocketbooks in a big way. Wow, we finaly got enough votes in to be noticed.
Songs from ITMS are just 128 Kbps. That's poor enough quality that I seriously hesitate to buy. For my $1.00, I should be able to get it in any bitrate I desire. I consider tossing mp3 files at anything less than 192, and prefer 320.
I mean, I spent about $1,000 on a decent sound system, why would I do that just to listen to sound quality matched by a $50 ghetto blaster?
Early signs of this beyond the obvious google applications that require web access, are aggressive attempts by Microsoft to "activate" everything online. You are going to increasingly need network connections to run standard applications.
I don't like that myself, since it hurts reliability and autonomy in computing.
If all else is equal, a centralized approach is less reliable than a distributed approach.
But seldom is all else equal.
A distributed approach to software and information systems often has catastrophic failure as part of the mix. A well-designed central approach, with built-in redundancy and a qualified backup scheme can usually outperform the poorly administered "edge" systems run by end users.
And, in this space, the economies of scale rapidly factor in, making a better experience cheaper, as well. Sorry you don't trust the hosting providers, but it isn't always that way...
Slashdot Mirror
Computers on a stick?
/home partition. There are all my settings, my KDE preferences, my bookmarks, my Email, my shell history, my KDE background photo of my kids, and my ~/bin directory with all my shell-script wizardry.
.../home directory, and did an OS upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 6. Despite having all new hardware and a new operating system, it was immediately recognizable as "my" computer because of all this pre-existing data.
In what way?
Depends on how they do it.
What makes my computer "My" computer is not the processor, RAM, DVD/RW drive, or the network adapter. If my Broadcom NIC was replaced with an Intel NIC, it would still be "my" computer.
What makes my computer "my" computer is the
It's my personal data ON the computer that makes it uniquely mine, and this particular set of data has been mine continuously since about 1999 or so, despite me having some half dozen computers since then. They are all "mine" when I used them because they all had this dataset on them.
When I last switched from my Centrino 1.6 laptop to my new Intel Core2 Duo, I brought over that
So, if you had all your stuff sitting on a flash drive, that you could plug into anywhere you go, then any computer instantly becomes "your" computer.
It's not a literal statement of "Oh geez! Computer on a stick!" but more of an interpretive statement, "Your computer on a stick".
Don't look at this as a tech weenie - look at this as a more average Joe.
Losers: whoever runs "configure" as root.
Losers: whoever thinks it makes a difference what user you run "configure" as without realizing that running "make install" as anybody other than root is pretty pointless.
Addressing your points:
1) How do you know a GUI application from a non-GUI one? What about programs that are run locally, but viewed remotely, and vice versa? What constitutes a "GUI" application?
2) But you are allocating different types of "memory"! See Leaky Abstractions for more information on this. Your "everything is memory" model sounds nice, but lacks a few key components.... When I fclose() a file, I have a STRONG assurance that the file has been saved and wouldn't go away if the power failed. That's not the case in your "everything is memory" model...
3) You are either talking about a security nightmare or pixie dust. How does computer B know that it's OK to run code from computer A? See other comments on #4
4) Capability security requires somebody to set up all those !#@!@# permissions. POSIX, by contrast, is very simple and requires little effort to maintain. Is POSIX ideal in all situations? No. But it's adequate in most circumstances without a lot of effort, and it's usually better to have a "just barely suits" possibility with a decent default than a perfect possibility with a lousy default. Perhaps that explains why your touted EROS operating system died on the vine?
Actually, the correct labels are "pro-abortion" and "anti-abortion", imo. "Life" and "Choice" are of course much broader values than that which they fight over.
I think you are right about "pro-life" being "anti-abortion".
I'm not "Pro-Abortion". I think it's perfectly OK for people to carry their pregnancies to term. However, I think that if a mother has decided that she's just not ready to have a baby, and is willing to KILL the baby inside her, she's probably right. I trust her judgement. Every woman I know who's had an abortion really was not ready to care for a baby.
Abortion is a form of humane, mercy killing. We do it with dogs (and people!) all the time - when somebody/something is suffering needlessly and irrevocably, we "put 'em down".
Rather than see the child suffer for life being raised in a broken home with a mother that would rather the child was never born, with the abuse, insecurity, criminal career, and so on, allowing an abortion to happen stops all this pain from happening.
And I believe that prospective parents should have a choice in the matter. Thus, I am "pro choice".
"Pro-Abortion" implies that I want YOU to have an abortion. That it not the case. I just don't want to take that choice away from you.
I reiterate that you are not alone in your frustration. You didn't fail to adopt Linux, Linux didn't fail to meet your needs, it was the entire community and their business practices that failed you.
What is failing is the idea that it's either a "success" or a "failure". It's not good or bad, it just is.
I happen to be CTO of a million-dollar-a-year hosting business, using Linux as my platform. It's very efficient, it's rock-solid, it's 24x7x365, and it has caused me no significant pain in 7 years. We have redundancy, offsite backups, failover, and we have great performance response times. We use an embarrassingly small amount of hardware to satisfy very high-demand, database-driven applications.
Those are very, very, very good numbers.
When I hear "enterprise grade", here's what it means to me: It had better work reliably. It had better not give me trouble. It had better not require babysitting, frequent reboots, or any particular kludges or hacks to stay running.
I don't expect Linux to be "compatible" with closed products that make no claim of compatability. That's like expecting a teen marriage to work out. Good luck!
But, what it does claim to do, it had better do well.
Is our business based on Linux? Yes.
But do most of our computers run Linux? About 1/3. Sales, finance, etc. is all Windows. Tech is all Linux, but only represents the servers (just a few, midrange systems, see above) and a few workstations.
Use the best tool for the job!
Ah, but you're forgetting Borland Sidekick and other TSR utilities that allowed copy/paste across DOS applications.
Shudder. Yes, it was there. When it didn't crash your main application. Ever try running any graphics-capable software and then turn on Sidekick? If you were lucky, pressing both shifts at the same time would restore order. All too often, you had to restart.
No, Sidekick is not something I'd consider part of a WORKING application...
And yes, it was a kludge because cross-app copy/paste wasn't a native feature of DOS although the TSR capability was. This is very similiar to the kludge of doing web apps in a browser since many non-native features are worked-around by using javascript.
Kludge? I agree. But javascript isn't some memory-resident hack, it's a program language that allows for lots of very neat, nifty things.
Marten,
I'm probably not your demographic target market. Anyhow, technological inertia makes any switch at this point a non-starter.
However, I will say that based on my various comments herein, you've done a good job providing support for your clientelle.
I wish you the best of luck.
Copy/Paste between applications worked in Windows. Nobody in their right mind used Windows 3.x with the 640 mentioned by the parent poster - typical was 2 MB or more.
Thus, I infer the use of MS-DOS 5.0 or 6.0. And good luck, copy/paste.
My first PC wished it had the power of the 8086 microprocessor, with 16 Kb of RAM. I learned on MS-DOS 3.2, and I remember when the MS-DOS sub-directory (DOS 2.x) was a big deal. And I have a fully working, complete copy of MS Windows 1.0 on 5.25" 360k floppies. (Yes, the ORIGINAL release, not the 1.0A)
Come back when the bad memory you speak of has relapsed.
If you're tossing Wankr 2.1 [parm.net] together in your bedroom then MySQL free, pgsql, or even sqlite is more than enough to meet your needs. If you run a large business that relies on MySQL to actually make some $$, then purchasing support is a rational choice. Especially since TCO is still about an order of magnitude less than competition.
I make money with my PostgreSQL database. My small-but-growing business will pass the $1,000,000 gross income mark this year, with over 30% profit margins. My issue here is that PostgreSQL has "just worked" with zero significant support issues in almost 7 years.
24 x 7 x 365.
Over 70 school districts use our product, and while there are the inevitable wrinkles, uptime is *never* a problem, and never has a single support thread been tracked back to a fault in the database.
So, no. That's not an issue. At least, as far as I can determine.
My experience with "paid support" is that people who are essentially hired monkeys and who do not understand what they're talking about do google searches for you while you wait. If that fails, they talk to their managers who then do more google searches.
Typically, it's 4 or 5 days before you get ahold of somebody who does anything but google searches, and he/she then needs to spend a few hours determining that there is a real issue to be addressed. And when that happens, they'll implement one of the solutions found in a google search first.
But a support e-mail list usually has meaningful answers within a few hours if your question is reasonably well written, and doesn't cost jack.
Which do YOU prefer?
Don't you feel the burning irony of posting this on Slashdot, one of the more prominent MySQL users?
Not at all. You *can* build great things with marginal technologies. It's just harder to do so.
Slashdot doesn't face a number of problems that MySQL would fail them on. Slashdot has a rather simple database schema - complex queries and joins are few to none. They don't rely on 100% ACID compliance. They don't use the database to help enforce data integrity.
So MySQL is sufficient for their needs.
But PostgreSQL matches in *all* these areas, and still manages to offer solid performance on complex queries/joins. It offers robust and mature ACID compliance. It offers excellent integrity constraints for your data.
It's not whether or not you can get something to work with MySQL - just like you can build a house with a dollar-store hammer. But why use the dollar-store hammer if both it and the $20 hammer are available to you for free?
Furthermore, the license behind PostgreSQL is MORE FREE than the one behind MySQL. You can build a commercial, shipping product with PostgreSQL and not be beholden to per-sale fees, as you'd see with MySQL.
So, again I ask.... Why would anybody use something with all the warts of MySQL?
I guess I just can't help but reply to a highly-rated but retarded comment.
water will be replenished into the air from the oceans. how do we know this? how was this proven?
It's called Evaporation. In the United States, this concept is usually taught in 4th grade.
if the water content of oceans diminishes, the salt content increases proportionately.
70% of the Earth's surface is covered with water. Just 3% of the world's water is fresh, including all lakes, rivers, glaciers, snowpacks, etc. Thus, it's pretty unlikely that the water we're talking about will make
more than squat diddly bit of difference.
that would threaten to bring dramatic change to the fragile balance of the environment for marine life.
But not like the snapper you had for dinner last night, or the tuna sandwich you had for lunch? What about the ice-cream you ate? What happened to the turds when you flushed your toilet? Or what about the runoff from the farms that grew the food you ate, even if not seafood?
Seriously, dude. There is so much valuable information available for FREE - it might be a good idea to look up some of it before commenting.
when man plays with mother nature, we almost inevitably come out on the losing end.
Yeah. Sorta like playing with mother nature has screwed us over by providing massive increases in the amount of usable food. Like playing with mother nature has doubled our average life expectancy in just 100 years. Just like playing with mother nature has increased the per-capita wealth of even the poor by over 200% in just 30 years.
drain the swamps in new orleans, then lose 60% of the land's ability to absorb water.
But what about all the houses on that land? What, they don't count? Sure, they come at a cost. But they came. And those that live there have a better quality of life than before.
introduce pest-killing amphibians to the everglades, then they procreate without preditors and wipe out existing species.
(Ahem) It's called "evolution". Survival of the fittest. It's been happening for billions of years. Or do you happen to have a pet Tyrannosaurus Rex? See, your mammalian ancestors out-competed the mighty dinosaurs.
Sorry about the native yellow-bellied sap-frog. (or whatever) But species invade new areas, naturally, all the time.
water the deserts of nevada to make lush golf courses, then people in colorado go thirsty and firemen can't put out historically large forest fires covering hundreds of thousands of acres.
I remember reading about some newcomers to North California's central valley in the late 1800's. They described late summer nights as the "glowing of the devil" because of all the forest fires in the surrounding foothills. They were common, back then. Today, we fight those fires, and have massive bomber planes drop fire-retardant to stop the fires. By stopping the fires, trees are saved that would otherwise burn. They are logged, at a handsome profit to both the lumber companies and the local jurisdictions.
But try explaining that whole exchange to an environmentalist.
Are there environmental problems?
YES! But there were environmental problems long before we humans got involved.
PS: Properly formed sentences start with an upper case. It involves the shift key on either side of your keyboard. Try it: lower case UPPER CASE lower case UPPER CASE. It's easy!
I'm not sure how to take this.
1) They managed to acquire 10,000 customers? Who are these customers, and why would they pay MySQL for a product that's not only free, but has better competitors available for free?
2) 10,000 customers, with 10 MILLION installs? So the odds are 1 in 1,000 that a user of your product would actually pay you anything? Those are TERRIBLE numbers....
Ahgh. Conflict. Partly because I just don't like MySQL - I'm a Postgres user and shrug my shoulders as to why anybody would use something with all the warts of MySQL...
Everything done to make dynamic web applications is a clumsy, tacked-on workaround to get around the built-in, inherent static document metaphor in all HTML browsers. Take the back button. It FUNDAMENTALLY.... // Lots more ranting //
So what? *ALL* technology evolves this way. Baby steps, incrementally improving on previous technologies. Why do we use 60-cycle A/C? Because Nikolai Tesla wanted to power the entire earth with radio power, and the resonating frequency of the Earth is 60 Hz. Is 60 Hz the optimum for power transmission over long distances? Nope.
But that's what was there before, and the step of changing that would be excessively expensive - so that step never gets taken.
Rant rant rant... CONGRATULATIONS! It took over a decade of "technology progress", a browser that eats up to 30 megabytes and a more than a gigahertz of CPU cycles to simulate badly what a desktop app on a 386SX with 640K of RAM could do in the 1980's. And it still doesn't work right because all the leftover cruft from the discarded metaphor you subverted.
Except that it isn't. Your 386sx DOS application works on one computer. It requires software to be installed. It doesn't work concurrently with other applications. If you forget your disks, you can't use your Mother's computer in a pinch over the holidays while you are visiting your folks. The software includes you and only you, it has no access to other information. You can't get current stock quotes. It has an inconsistent user interface. You can't copy/paste information from other running apps. You have to worry about backups, viruses, computer crashes. Your DOS application is not PC, Mac, Linux, Unix, BEOS, AND PalmOS compatible. How much longer should I go on?
Seems that you're forgetting an awful lot of the benefits that the "new model" as it's evolved has given you. Sorry that your development tools cause you so much frustration just to get a dynamically generated application out. Consider using a language designed for web development - I recommend PHP.
I personally LOVE web-based development. Combined with database transactions, sessions, HTML templates, etc. I get a rich, simple, RAPID development environment that's let me write truly large applications in record time, coordinating the efforts of hundreds of people in realtime, with an incredibly small initial investment. Because I know the program runs and then dies, I don't have to worry about memory deallocation, garbage cleaning, etc.
Debugging is a snap, because I can write a page script to rollback the transaction, so I can just hit reload over and over until I work out all the kinks. And then update the script to commit the transaction and move on to the next stage of application development. So much better than client-side development, where you have to close the app, recompile, and re-run before you can even try again!
Compatibility problems are really minor when compared to client-side development - yes there are browser issues, but I can test in IE 6, IE 7, and Firefox and call it a day. (I develop for FF first, then test in IE, THANK YOU IES4LINUX!) When I need to ensure a consistent document, outputting in PDF has worked very well with almost no complaints or support calls.
Again, if browser-based development is so incredibly painful for you, I suggest improving your development tools. Web-based development is a breeze!
MySQL is great if you want a lightweight, fast database that doesn't need to be terribly robust.
That isn't quite right. Let me fix that for you...
MySQL is great if you want a lightweight, fast database with lousy data integrity that doesn't need to be terribly robust.
There. Much, much better.
Then you get users onto it and now you only have X-1.5 years of support. On Fedora, this means practically no time is left.
What kind of dope uses Fedora on a production server?
Use CentOS - I'm running CentOS 4, and anticipate not having to do *ANYTHING* to my production systems except use them, keep them turned on, and keep them updated (which is about 5 min/week) until 2010 or so.
TLDs exist out of nothing more than a technical convenience. There is no usability value to a TLD.
.net, .org, .biz, .me, .you, .xxx, .whatever, .the, .fsck, and .else? Thus, the proliferation of TLDs causes a drop in the relative worth of each tld. In the meantime, a tremendous cost will be borne by businesses trying to enforce their trademarks in accordance with laws not intended to deal with the realities of the Internet as it exists today.
If I say "IBM", do you have any question about what company I'm talking about? Funny how that worked without saying "IBM.com" or "IBM.company" or whatever. IBM is sufficient.
TLDs will proliferate because there is economic incentive for those who sell TLDs. And each time a new TLD comes out, the relative value of TLDs in general will drop until they lose relevance altogether. And it WILL go this way, because A) there's money in starting a TLD, and B) once started, a TLD will basically never be retracted. Thus, it's a one-way street.
Who wants to register mystupidcompany.com,
The answer is simple - Build a TLD of ".". Collapse all other domains into this super-root, while allowing ANY arbitrary phrases to the left of the dot. EG: it's perfectly ok to register "because.i.want.to." as a domain name, even though no TLD of ".to" might exist today. Domain slashdot.org becomes slashdot.org. and there can be a "slashdot.somerandomname.", but it has no more value than any other "root" domain, and slashdot would be reached by its new root domain, "slashdot." And from there, standard trademark law can govern, as it does today.
Years ago, I chose Gandi.net for my name services. A tad more expensive, but based in France, where very strong intellectual property laws exist that protect a domain holder.
That's funny. But I have something even funnier.
I'm a software developer, and we present our products at a number of tradeshows. One of our products is server-based, and at the time, Internet connections were spotty at best, so I set up a duplicate of the server on a laptop. Combined with a pocket-wifi spot, it acted as a hotspot, with all routing tables mapping to self.
In short, it was its own entire Internet, with a single IP address. DNS was configured so that * mapped to that one IP address. The name of the hotspot was our company. So if you connected to this "hot spot", you got our website (hosted locally) no matter what address you went to.
We had problems at these conferences, with other vendors accusing us of hacking their websites, or hijacking the Internet! Some of the situations were simply comical!
Anyway, it's not hard to do, if you're familiar with Linux services. It took me a few hours to set it all up and test it.
Apple just upgrades and inmproves their OS at a much faster rate, not a hard thing to do when you dont support legacy hardware going back a decade, nor work with a huge range of gear by people who are like the one night wonders of the IT world.
I have a decade-old iMac (ruby) that runs the very latest version of Macintosh OSX. (10.4) What's that you say? Apple doesn't support legacy hardware?
Well, try getting Vista to run on a Pentium 2 with 128 MB of RAM on a 10 GB HDD, which is what was state of the art when the Apple iMac came out.
No, I didn't think so. Come back when you have some clue what you're talking about.
Sounds great, except that both neighbors are plugged into the same grid. Run the wires == no movement. Nothing happens. Nada. You need to have a difference in electrical potential. Sounds great, but it just wouldn't work...
die already. the amiga's time has come and gone.
//Scuze me...
What is your problem?
I don't get all upset when somebody drives by in a 1950's Studebaker all tricked out. Yeah, it has some limitations, such as: a single-speaker AM radio, no air conditioning, cruise control, electric windows, it requires fuel additives to not die on unleaded gas, and it's hard to find parts for. Oh, and it's a death trap in an accident.
And despite all that, it's still mighty cool. I honk when I see somebody driving one.
Can you imagine what a dorkass you'd look like if you stuck your head out the window and screamed: "Dude, die already! The Studebaker's time has come and gone already!".
Oh, wait. Nevermind. You're posting O/S elitism on Slashdot. My guess is that you probably already know all about what a dorkass you look like. Never mind.
For some time a few years ago, spammers used to IGNORE the primary MX and send to secondary MXs preferentially.
Since in our case, the 2ndary MX was a dumb sendmail relay only without knowledge of the user DB, it shot the traffic load out thru the roof with bounces to junk spam that, because they couldn't be rejected during the actual delivery attempt, hammered our backup relay.
This is just a dumb idea.
If you want reliable source material look elsewhere, if you want an exorbitant quantity of information, Wikipedia has that. It's the quick and dirty resource for people who might just need to know a few things about a subject without having to fact check and such. That's what it should be treated as. The fact that non-experts are allowed to edit entries is what made it grow to be the resource it is today.
Maybe we should be calling it the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"????
Wow, a cluestick is finaly showing up. The reports of only 22 purchased tracks per iPod sold is showing that consumers are voting down DRM with their pocketbooks in a big way. Wow, we finaly got enough votes in to be noticed.
Songs from ITMS are just 128 Kbps. That's poor enough quality that I seriously hesitate to buy. For my $1.00, I should be able to get it in any bitrate I desire. I consider tossing mp3 files at anything less than 192, and prefer 320.
I mean, I spent about $1,000 on a decent sound system, why would I do that just to listen to sound quality matched by a $50 ghetto blaster?
Early signs of this beyond the obvious google applications that require web access, are aggressive attempts by Microsoft to "activate" everything online. You are going to increasingly need network connections to run standard applications.
I don't like that myself, since it hurts reliability and autonomy in computing.
If all else is equal, a centralized approach is less reliable than a distributed approach.
But seldom is all else equal.
A distributed approach to software and information systems often has catastrophic failure as part of the mix. A well-designed central approach, with built-in redundancy and a qualified backup scheme can usually outperform the poorly administered "edge" systems run by end users.
And, in this space, the economies of scale rapidly factor in, making a better experience cheaper, as well. Sorry you don't trust the hosting providers, but it isn't always that way...