I don't think this idea makes sense because I don't think Slashdot has ever had a single coherent voice (and it would be duller if it did).
It bothers me when the/. "community" is stereotyped as pro-Linux (I am, many are not), Anti-MS (I see plenty of Windows users here now), Libertarian (a lot of the libertarianism here, esp. wrt gun control, goes too far for my liking), anti-IP (there are plenty of dissenting voices on copyright)...
No, Slashdot hosts heterogenous set of views. If you want to support a particular political agenda, get with a more singleminded organisation, one per issue. The EFF might be a good start, as might the FSF. Or the NRA if you're that way inclined.
Other ways geeks might influence their national politics is through running services like Britain's faxyourmp.org.uk -- the site was prompted by opposition to the RIP bill (privacy stuff) but now it addresses parliament's accountability, and public political apathy by making it easy for a constituent to contact their MP even if they don't know what constituency they live in or who their MP is (as is worryingly common).
Yes, but since IBM and Compaq (and others) have to pay a license to m$ for every PC they sell, whether it has an m$ OS installed on it or not, you have paid for XP, even though you did not get the media or license.
AFAIK that is no longer the case. There was a big fuss about it a couple of years ago and I was under the impression the law had put a stop to it. If I'm wrong, I concede the point to you.
Hell, the challenge is to NOT buy it. If you want a brand name computer, you're going to pay for the XP OEM license whether you weant it or not. That's what it means to be a monopoly - they can pressure (coerce) manufacturers into putting Windows on EVERY box.
Pretty easy challenge: you can buy PCs with Linux preinstalled from both IBM and Compaq, among others. A couple of years ago that was not the case, and I can only assume that market forces drove these brand name computer manufacturers to provide Linux as an option. That's evidence of a free market economy working. If enough consumers started to demand it, I'm sure they'd start preinstalling a BSD, BeOS, etc. (not that I see that happening any time soon).
NB: I'm a raving lefty; it actually pains me to be echoing post-Thatcher "the market will make everything right" dogma. But in this case, I think it's correct.
I'm not a big MS fan, but frankly, they're operating in a free market, and it's their right to charge whatever they like. If you think it's too much, don't buy it.
To any business that's become reliant on MS technology, and thinks these price hikes might cost them dearly, I'd say this: This is what Richard Stallman warned you about 20 years ago. If you rely on proprietary software, belonging to a third party, you're putting yourself in a position where that third party has you by the nuts.
In future, leave yourself an escape route: at the very least make sure your business' IT is based on open protocols, and aim to use software which allows you to flit from support suppier to support supplier at will (at present OSS is the only kind of software I can think of which allows this).
VNC does have a few problems.. one of the most strange problem that can be fixed (not their fault) would be the lag created by your computer uploading pictures of its entire desktop when anything on it has changed... well, this COULD be fixed by just uploading the changed part of the desktop. RAdmin does this and gets better mouse movement/page display, but not when the entire page is changing... then it is uploading entire page and is just like VNC.
Check the options in your vncviewer -- unless you select "raw" as the preferred encoding, VNC will only transmit screen "tiles" which have changed.
Of course, as you say, if the entire screen changes, not much can be done.
unless there's scrolling, the monitor on that phone is poorly shaped, unless you're controlling a palm with VNC...
I don't think the idea is for the remote application to be a desktop. Yes, the VNC protocol can be used this way, and that's how the vast majority use it these days, but you could use it for *any* visual interface.
This thing would probably connect to a server which piped non-windowed applications at the same (low) pixel height and width of the screen.
It might be worth pointing out to the non-Americans reading just how freakily attached to the Stars and Stripes Americans are. (or maybe, worth pointing out to Americans how unusual their preoccupation with the flag is).
In the USA you can buy a national flag in every supermarket. I don't know where I'd go to buy a union jack flag (as opposed to a t-shirt, whatever) -- I'd probably have to find some sort of specialist ceremonial goods shop...
There was recently an interesting TV series called 'The Tourist Trap', wherein each episode a group of holidaymakers from a single country were exposed to a series of events designed to test their reactions. One morning, the holidaymakers awoke to find their national flag in ashen tatters, and their hotel deserted. The Brits reacted with nonplussed bemusement, a few giggles. The Japanese didn't really know what to think, teh Germans were stoic. The Americans threw an absolute fit; you'd have thought someone had killed their grannies...
I'm not criticising anyone, just pointing out some cultural differences...
Wasn't a law against flag burning the theme of the "Amendment to Be" song that replace Itchy and Scratchy in one episode of The Simpsons....?
Does this mean they can start allowing import games to be sold? I've bid on a number of Japanese import Dreamcast and Saturn games, where the auction has subsequently been pulled. Turns out that Sega demanded that eBay pull any such auctions, suggesting that they "promote piracy", although afaik there is no law prohibiting the resale of import games.
How much horsepower does each of those virtual servers get? It can't be that much. $500/server would be too much if it was only 100 MIPS.
That depends on the application. Lots of servers spend most of their time idle. If you expect to be doing CPU intensive work a lot of the time, then no, a VM on a partitioned server is not for you. If however you want cheap, reliable, high availability for the kind of applications that do not tax the CPU, this is ideal.
Not too far off in Europe
on
HDTV Over IP
·
· Score: 2
British Sky Broadcasting (Rupert Murdoch's European satellite broadcaster) recently bought the licence to broadcast digital TV over ADSL in the UK. The service will begin in the next couple of years.
Note that this is/not/ HDTV -- it's MPEG2 encoded PAL.
PubCam is a small Perl script which extracts any SirCam attachments, removes the virus, and produces an index.html listing the files, the sender, and the date header from the mail in question. This makes it very quick and easy to put up a web page of your SirCam spoils.
Beware, though, hosting services such as Tripod don't like it very much! --
He says HDTV is "like watching a DVD all the time", but unless I'm misinformed, DVDs contain an MPEG2 at normal PAL or NTSC resolution. Sure, it's less munged around than what you get off VHS or a UFH broadcast, but it's still 525-615ish lines. I was under the impression that HDTV was supposed to be a *much* higher resolution than this.
Frankly, however, standard TV resolution should be enough for anyone, as anyone with a DVD should know. It's a shame that Americans are being denied digital TV and widescreen, unless they buy into HD.
In Europe, by the way, digital TV is not a byword for HDTV as it is in the US. Companies are fairly successfully broadcasting digital TV at normal PAL resolution (often in widescreen mind you) over cable, satellite and terrestrial transmitters.
It's usually a better picture than analogue (apart from the occasional over-compressed MPEG stream), it's a far more efficient use of bandwidth (more channels - a treat for us Brits who are used to 4 terrestrial channels). I only with they'd bothered to embrace 5.1 digital audio while they were at it. --
Anyway, I'm not sure if you've ever used vi over a slow link, say 300 baud modem slow, but the unneeded screen redraws on pico tend to screw things up.
Fully agree. I only properly learned vi when the only way I could post to Usenet was by telnetting across the Atlantic, then back again. If you learn vi properly you can work ahead of it even when you have an 8 second lag.
Still, pico's not for people who want to do that sort of thing. It's not even for people who want to code all day. It's for people who want to knock off a 20 line email. Let'em. --
There is now a port of XFree86 to Cygwin. It's not all that mature... Xeyes doesn't work properly on my laptop...but if you need a Free X for Windows, use it, and I'm sure the team will be grateful for your bug reports.
We were taught procedural programming in Modula 2 -- because it enforces good practice.
We were taught functional programming in Miranda -- because Miranda doesn't let you sneak in procedural paradigms by the back door (although Miranda only really clicked for me after a Lisp course taught by a better lecturer -- Lisp *does* let you sneak in procedural tricks).
We were taught OO using Eiffel -- because Eiffel is a pure OO language that doesn't tempt you into non-OO constructs (as C++ might).
--
This was around 1995, when Java was quite new -- I recall our OO lecturer saying that maybe Java might soon become a suitable language for teaching OO but that it was too soon to tell. In my limited experience of Java, I suspect that it would make an excellent teaching language (I tried to persuade my IT-teaching girlfriend to use Java as her language for teaching programming -- school politics with regard to installing software on the system put paid to that idea).
At university there were no end of students whingeing at the lack of real-world stuff they were learning: one student memorably complained that the word "Novell" was never mentioned in a complete networks. Likewise, many wanted to learn real-world languages such as C (which we did, later). Those people were and are wrong. If you have a good grounding in the theory, adapting to the real world is easy. The reverse is not as easy. --
> > > My step-daughter is almost 11 and, though she's only with her mother and
> > > me every other weekend
> > By my standards this would qualify as a total wreck of a family, and
> > accessibility of the Internet would be the least problem for the daughter.
> > Then again, I am not American.
> What an interesting, ignorant thing to say, you Non-American, you.
I can only assume the guy with three ">"s didn't notice the "step-" in
"step-daughter". Divorce is pretty common in most western countries now.
What's more worrying is that the mother and stepfather don't seem to trust
the father (who I assume to be the guardian most of the time) to take charge
of supervising the child's internet usage.
"Woot! -- We can port Doom.... err instead of buy Doom;)"
Except there is no commercial port of DOOM available for Dreamcast. I have, however, seen a port of DoomCE running on Dreamcast; to my untrained eye it looked and sounded exactly like the PC original; I was most impressed.
MAME is what excites me most about this one though -- although the 9FPS reported by the Pac Man screenshot doesn't look to promising. --
Nobody seems to have noted (at least not in the modded-up posts) that this is largely a matter of the server checking browser strings.
Netscape 4.7 works on Mac and Windows, and since all versions of Netscape 4.7 on all platforms can do all the PKI/crypto stuff, there shouldn't be any technical reason why Netscape won't work under Linux/NetBSD/Solaris/AIX/whatever.
If I knew a URL beyond the browser-checking first page, I'd be surprised if I couldn't go on to use the site perfectly happily. It's a shame the authors of this site couldn't be a little more intelligent with their checking. --
Although my player is region-hacked, so it makes little difference to me, I have quite by chance accumulated quite a few region 0 DVDs.
The US Criterion Edition version of Brazil is region 0.
The Hong Kong version of Naked Killer (what a film!) is region 0 (and I believe a lot of Hong Kong Cat. 3 movies are released as R0 DVDs).
UK Playstation World Magazine has a monthly DVD video coverdisk, which is region 0.
Also, check the documentary shelf in your local DVD shop: most documentary DVDs seem to be R0, as are the DVDs they sell in tourist traps (for example the Grand Canyon DVDs -- it makes sense if you're selling to people from all over the world; you sometimes PAL VHS tapes in the gift shops of American tourist traps)
For comparison purposes, when was the last time any other console crashed at a show?
Shows are an opportunity to show off unfinished software. Frequent crashes are par for the course. I had a play with the demo Dreamcast version of Disney's Dinosaur at last year's ECTS -- it would freeze up frequenly, requiring a soft reset, and pressing obscure button combinations would cause diagnostic messages to appear on screen.
I wouldn't say this story is a big deal, any more than I would whinge if I downloaded an alpha version of a kernel driver, and my Linux box crashed. --
"At the risk of feeding the trolls, using a plural verb for a corporate entity (e.g. "Linuxworld have") is perfectly normal British/Australian English.
I fully agree. While it does not follow the classical rules of grammar, it has fallen into such common usage that it should now be considered correct. Strict grammar dictates that you should say "R.E.M. is appearing on stage"; but everyone but the worst kind of pedant says "R.E.M. are appearing on stage". --
The Dreamcast isn't locked to a single ISP in hardware -- it's just that in Europe Sega never gave you the software to change the dialup settings. You *can* change the settings, even on a Euro DC, using US or Jap browser disks, and those settings are kept in flash RAM, so that certain PAL games can use whatever ISP you like. Phantasy Star Online is one such game... --
"It is quite surprising to see the write time be so slow for linux, as quite frankly, FAT32 is so simple (no transaction) it *should* be only slightly slower than optimal in medium to large file size cases."
I would imagine that the reason FAT32 isn't highly optimised on Linux is that it's only there as a compatibility tool. Nobody running Linux would put data on a FAT32 partition when performance was an issue. Being able to get at the filesystem at all is enough. --
The same is partly true for commercial middleware. Working on RDBMS, I don't see that feature wall coming for many years yet - there are many requests made by customers for features and enough things we want to get done internally to last another quarter-century at least.
Read up on Disruptive Technologies http://www.zena.net/htdocs/FAQ/DisTech.shtml
Your high-end RDBMS product is exactly the kind of thing that's vulnerable to disruptive technologies, when for many "small-fry" potential customers, something like PostgreSQL or even MySQL is sufficient and far cheaper. --
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think this idea makes sense because I don't think Slashdot has ever had a single coherent voice (and it would be duller if it did).
/. "community" is stereotyped as pro-Linux (I am, many are not), Anti-MS (I see plenty of Windows users here now), Libertarian (a lot of the libertarianism here, esp. wrt gun control, goes too far for my liking), anti-IP (there are plenty of dissenting voices on copyright)...
It bothers me when the
No, Slashdot hosts heterogenous set of views. If you want to support a particular political agenda, get with a more singleminded organisation, one per issue. The EFF might be a good start, as might the FSF. Or the NRA if you're that way inclined.
Other ways geeks might influence their national politics is through running services like Britain's faxyourmp.org.uk -- the site was prompted by opposition to the RIP bill (privacy stuff) but now it addresses parliament's accountability, and public political apathy by making it easy for a constituent to contact their MP even if they don't know what constituency they live in or who their MP is (as is worryingly common).
Yes, but since IBM and Compaq (and others) have to pay a license to m$ for every PC they sell, whether it has an m$ OS installed on it or not, you have paid for XP, even though you did not get the media or license.
AFAIK that is no longer the case. There was a big fuss about it a couple of years ago and I was under the impression the law had put a stop to it. If I'm wrong, I concede the point to you.
Hell, the challenge is to NOT buy it. If you want a brand name computer, you're going to pay for the XP OEM license whether you weant it or not. That's what it means to be a monopoly - they can pressure (coerce) manufacturers into putting Windows on EVERY box.
Pretty easy challenge: you can buy PCs with Linux preinstalled from both IBM and Compaq, among others. A couple of years ago that was not the case, and I can only assume that market forces drove these brand name computer manufacturers to provide Linux as an option. That's evidence of a free market economy working. If enough consumers started to demand it, I'm sure they'd start preinstalling a BSD, BeOS, etc. (not that I see that happening any time soon).
NB: I'm a raving lefty; it actually pains me to be echoing post-Thatcher "the market will make everything right" dogma. But in this case, I think it's correct.
I'm not a big MS fan, but frankly, they're operating in a free market, and it's their right to charge whatever they like. If you think it's too much, don't buy it.
To any business that's become reliant on MS technology, and thinks these price hikes might cost them dearly, I'd say this: This is what Richard Stallman warned you about 20 years ago. If you rely on proprietary software, belonging to a third party, you're putting yourself in a position where that third party has you by the nuts.
In future, leave yourself an escape route: at the very least make sure your business' IT is based on open protocols, and aim to use software which allows you to flit from support suppier to support supplier at will (at present OSS is the only kind of software I can think of which allows this).
VNC does have a few problems.. one of the most strange problem that can be fixed (not their fault) would be the lag created by your computer uploading pictures of its entire desktop when anything on it has changed... well, this COULD be fixed by just uploading the changed part of the desktop. RAdmin does this and gets better mouse movement/page display, but not when the entire page is changing... then it is uploading entire page and is just like VNC.
Check the options in your vncviewer -- unless you select "raw" as the preferred encoding, VNC will only transmit screen "tiles" which have changed.
Of course, as you say, if the entire screen changes, not much can be done.
unless there's scrolling, the monitor on that phone is poorly shaped, unless you're controlling a palm with VNC...
I don't think the idea is for the remote application to be a desktop. Yes, the VNC protocol can be used this way, and that's how the vast majority use it these days, but you could use it for *any* visual interface.
This thing would probably connect to a server which piped non-windowed applications at the same (low) pixel height and width of the screen.
It might be worth pointing out to the non-Americans reading just how freakily attached to the Stars and Stripes Americans are. (or maybe, worth pointing out to Americans how unusual their preoccupation with the flag is).
In the USA you can buy a national flag in every supermarket. I don't know where I'd go to buy a union jack flag (as opposed to a t-shirt, whatever) -- I'd probably have to find some sort of specialist ceremonial goods shop...
There was recently an interesting TV series called 'The Tourist Trap', wherein each episode a group of holidaymakers from a single country were exposed to a series of events designed to test their reactions. One morning, the holidaymakers awoke to find their national flag in ashen tatters, and their hotel deserted. The Brits reacted with nonplussed bemusement, a few giggles. The Japanese didn't really know what to think, teh Germans were stoic. The Americans threw an absolute fit; you'd have thought someone had killed their grannies...
I'm not criticising anyone, just pointing out some cultural differences...
Wasn't a law against flag burning the theme of the "Amendment to Be" song that replace Itchy and Scratchy in one episode of The Simpsons....?
Does this mean they can start allowing import games to be sold? I've bid on a number of Japanese import Dreamcast and Saturn games, where the auction has subsequently been pulled. Turns out that Sega demanded that eBay pull any such auctions, suggesting that they "promote piracy", although afaik there is no law prohibiting the resale of import games.
How much horsepower does each of those virtual servers get? It can't be that much. $500/server would be too much if it was only 100 MIPS.
That depends on the application. Lots of servers spend most of their time idle. If you expect to be doing CPU intensive work a lot of the time, then no, a VM on a partitioned server is not for you. If however you want cheap, reliable, high availability for the kind of applications that do not tax the CPU, this is ideal.
British Sky Broadcasting (Rupert Murdoch's European satellite broadcaster) recently bought the licence to broadcast digital TV over ADSL in the UK. The service will begin in the next couple of years.
/not/ HDTV -- it's MPEG2 encoded PAL.
Note that this is
PubCam is a small Perl script which extracts any SirCam attachments, removes the virus, and produces an index.html listing the files, the sender, and the date header from the mail in question. This makes it very quick and easy to put up a web page of your SirCam spoils.
Beware, though, hosting services such as Tripod don't like it very much!
--
He says HDTV is "like watching a DVD all the time", but unless I'm misinformed, DVDs contain an MPEG2 at normal PAL or NTSC resolution. Sure, it's less munged around than what you get off VHS or a UFH broadcast, but it's still 525-615ish lines. I was under the impression that HDTV was supposed to be a *much* higher resolution than this.
Frankly, however, standard TV resolution should be enough for anyone, as anyone with a DVD should know. It's a shame that Americans are being denied digital TV and widescreen, unless they buy into HD.
In Europe, by the way, digital TV is not a byword for HDTV as it is in the US. Companies are fairly successfully broadcasting digital TV at normal PAL resolution (often in widescreen mind you) over cable, satellite and terrestrial transmitters.
It's usually a better picture than analogue (apart from the occasional over-compressed MPEG stream), it's a far more efficient use of bandwidth (more channels - a treat for us Brits who are used to 4 terrestrial channels). I only with they'd bothered to embrace 5.1 digital audio while they were at it.
--
It's because the Windows telnet claims to be a VT220, and it just ain't. "export TERM=vt100" before you start, and vi'll work just fine.
--
Anyway, I'm not sure if you've ever used vi over a slow link, say 300 baud modem slow, but the unneeded screen redraws on pico tend to screw things up.
Fully agree. I only properly learned vi when the only way I could post to Usenet was by telnetting across the Atlantic, then back again. If you learn vi properly you can work ahead of it even when you have an 8 second lag.
Still, pico's not for people who want to do that sort of thing. It's not even for people who want to code all day. It's for people who want to knock off a 20 line email. Let'em.
--
There is now a port of XFree86 to Cygwin. It's not all that mature... Xeyes doesn't work properly on my laptop...but if you need a Free X for Windows, use it, and I'm sure the team will be grateful for your bug reports.
http://www.cygwin.com/
--
Oh, how I agree. In my university:
We were taught procedural programming in Modula 2 -- because it enforces good practice.
We were taught functional programming in Miranda -- because Miranda doesn't let you sneak in procedural paradigms by the back door (although Miranda only really clicked for me after a Lisp course taught by a better lecturer -- Lisp *does* let you sneak in procedural tricks).
We were taught OO using Eiffel -- because Eiffel is a pure OO language that doesn't tempt you into non-OO constructs (as C++ might).
--
This was around 1995, when Java was quite new -- I recall our OO lecturer saying that maybe Java might soon become a suitable language for teaching OO but that it was too soon to tell. In my limited experience of Java, I suspect that it would make an excellent teaching language (I tried to persuade my IT-teaching girlfriend to use Java as her language for teaching programming -- school politics with regard to installing software on the system put paid to that idea).
At university there were no end of students whingeing at the lack of real-world stuff they were learning: one student memorably complained that the word "Novell" was never mentioned in a complete networks. Likewise, many wanted to learn real-world languages such as C (which we did, later). Those people were and are wrong. If you have a good grounding in the theory, adapting to the real world is easy. The reverse is not as easy.
--
> > > My step-daughter is almost 11 and, though she's only with her mother and
> > > me every other weekend
> > By my standards this would qualify as a total wreck of a family, and
> > accessibility of the Internet would be the least problem for the daughter.
> > Then again, I am not American.
> What an interesting, ignorant thing to say, you Non-American, you.
I can only assume the guy with three ">"s didn't notice the "step-" in
"step-daughter". Divorce is pretty common in most western countries now.
What's more worrying is that the mother and stepfather don't seem to trust
the father (who I assume to be the guardian most of the time) to take charge
of supervising the child's internet usage.
--
"Woot! -- We can port Doom.... err instead of buy Doom ;)"
Except there is no commercial port of DOOM available for Dreamcast. I have, however, seen a port of DoomCE running on Dreamcast; to my untrained eye it looked and sounded exactly like the PC original; I was most impressed.
MAME is what excites me most about this one though -- although the 9FPS reported by the Pac Man screenshot doesn't look to promising.
--
Nobody seems to have noted (at least not in the modded-up posts) that this is largely a matter of the server checking browser strings.
Netscape 4.7 works on Mac and Windows, and since all versions of Netscape 4.7 on all platforms can do all the PKI/crypto stuff, there shouldn't be any technical reason why Netscape won't work under Linux/NetBSD/Solaris/AIX/whatever.
If I knew a URL beyond the browser-checking first page, I'd be surprised if I couldn't go on to use the site perfectly happily. It's a shame the authors of this site couldn't be a little more intelligent with their checking.
--
Although my player is region-hacked, so it makes little difference to me, I have quite by chance accumulated quite a few region 0 DVDs.
The US Criterion Edition version of Brazil is region 0.
The Hong Kong version of Naked Killer (what a film!) is region 0 (and I believe a lot of Hong Kong Cat. 3 movies are released as R0 DVDs).
UK Playstation World Magazine has a monthly DVD video coverdisk, which is region 0.
Also, check the documentary shelf in your local DVD shop: most documentary DVDs seem to be R0, as are the DVDs they sell in tourist traps (for example the Grand Canyon DVDs -- it makes sense if you're selling to people from all over the world; you sometimes PAL VHS tapes in the gift shops of American tourist traps)
--
For comparison purposes, when was the last time any other console crashed at a show?
Shows are an opportunity to show off unfinished software. Frequent crashes are par for the course. I had a play with the demo Dreamcast version of Disney's Dinosaur at last year's ECTS -- it would freeze up frequenly, requiring a soft reset, and pressing obscure button combinations would cause diagnostic messages to appear on screen.
I wouldn't say this story is a big deal, any more than I would whinge if I downloaded an alpha version of a kernel driver, and my Linux box crashed.
--
"At the risk of feeding the trolls, using a plural verb for a corporate entity (e.g. "Linuxworld have") is perfectly normal British/Australian English.
I fully agree. While it does not follow the classical rules of grammar, it has fallen into such common usage that it should now be considered correct. Strict grammar dictates that you should say "R.E.M. is appearing on stage"; but everyone but the worst kind of pedant says "R.E.M. are appearing on stage".
--
The Dreamcast isn't locked to a single ISP in hardware -- it's just that in Europe Sega never gave you the software to change the dialup settings. You *can* change the settings, even on a Euro DC, using US or Jap browser disks, and those settings are kept in flash RAM, so that certain PAL games can use whatever ISP you like. Phantasy Star Online is one such game...
--
"It is quite surprising to see the write time be so slow for linux, as quite frankly, FAT32 is so simple (no transaction) it *should* be only slightly slower than optimal in medium to large file size cases."
I would imagine that the reason FAT32 isn't highly optimised on Linux is that it's only there as a compatibility tool. Nobody running Linux would put data on a FAT32 partition when performance was an issue. Being able to get at the filesystem at all is enough.
--
The same is partly true for commercial middleware. Working on RDBMS, I don't see that feature wall coming for many years yet - there are many requests made by customers for features and enough things we want to get done internally to last another quarter-century at least.
Read up on Disruptive Technologies http://www.zena.net/htdocs/FAQ/DisTech.shtml
Your high-end RDBMS product is exactly the kind of thing that's vulnerable to disruptive technologies, when for many "small-fry" potential customers, something like PostgreSQL or even MySQL is sufficient and far cheaper.
--