You're obviously using the wrong channels. I've never had any trouble obtaining Oracle licenses. The streamlined acquisition process goes like this:
1. Government agency your company works for pays $90 million for Oracle licenses 2. Larry Ellison gives your congressman a nice campaign contribution 3. Government agency happily hands over license certificates by the wheelbarrow load to show that they were needed in the first place
They're not aimed at the same markets. I haven't followed this too closely, but I assume the reason Oracle is interested in MySQL at all is that they're somewhat complimentary products. MySQL is great if you want a lightweight, fast database that doesn't need to be terribly robust.
I doubt MySQL is ever going to have the sort of PL/SQL support Oracle does, and you're not likely to see things like enterprise-class clustering, data partitioning, replication, and so forth. If you added all that to MySQL, it'd wind up just like Oracle - big, complex, and expensive. They occupy opposite ends of the spectrum.
And for what it's worth, I've got an Oracle database on a modest single-processor AMD server with a single hard drive handling about 20 inserts per second with R-tree spatial indexing and it keeps up just fine, with a bit of tuning. Given a real server with multiple drives I'd be able to optimize things much better, but it's just a testbed.
Comparing MySQL to Oracle is a little like comparing a high-performance motorcycle to an M1A2 tank. They'll both get you from point A to point B, but with different levels of cost and safety.
AND more quotas (including CPU time and memory) than you can shake a stick at. There's a lot I don't miss about VMS, but it certainly did some things right.
Anyone interested in this sort of thing should also check out sites like ARHAB and EOSS. High-altitude ballooning has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, especially among ham radio hobbyists. It's relatively easy to build a payload that can reach an altitude of over 20 miles. I finally built one myself and launched it last month - it reached an altitude of over 106,000 feet and took over a thousand pictures between takeoff and landing. I posted a writeup on my website.
Basic payloads like mine don't really contribute much scientific knowledge, but they're a lot of fun and it's a good way to get kids interested in science. It's the closest thing to launching a satellite you're likely to get on a shoestring budget. For the record, my launch probably cost around $400, and everything but the balloon ($65) and helium (about $40) was recovered in reusable condition. Though I'll probably shell out another $8 for a new payload housing - the last one hit a dry lake bed at around 20-30 mph when the 'chute got tangled.
Actually, I seem to remember that the original military use was an attempt to replace spider silk for crosshairs in weapon sights. Didn't work worth a damn for that (just stuck all the parts together), but it's found a lot of uses since then.
We must have had a better colonel than you. When we had an evacuation in the building (due to burning popcorn in the break room, oddly enough) the colonel was apparently the only one who remembered that the fire alarms didn't always work in the network control center, and made a sweep through to personally make sure we all got out. Didn't ban popcorn, either, though I'm sure he made sure whoever screwed up the machine was suitably embarrassed.
Worse than the popcorn fire was the metal and plastic mug left in the microwave NOT 10 MINUTES after we'd come back in from the previous evacuation. Fortunately they hadn't even gotten around to rearming the alarm system or we'd have all been back out in the parking lot! Once the smoke had cleared it was actually kind of interesting to look at... sort of Starbucks meets Salvador Dali.
I guess I may as well chime in here too. I only ever passed the 5 WPM test (when I was 10) and upgraded to extra after the 20 WPM code requirement was dropped. I'm happy to see it go entirely - it only serves as an artificial barrier to getting people into the hobby. It'd be nice if they augmented the tests with a little bit about digital modes and such, though. Modes like PSK31 can get through in situations where CW used to be your only option, but people need to understand a bit about how they work and how they can be used most effectively.
It's kind of like in the graphics world - everyone recognizes.jpg and.gif files, and they're easy to use, but there are many, many people that don't understand HOW they work, or why you don't want to save a line drawing in jpeg format, or when to keep something in TIFF. It's that sort of knowledge that separates communicators from appliance operators. I'd much rather see hams introduced to, say, Shannon's theorem than forced to learn CW, when 90% of them won't retain any proficiency over the long term.
Yeah, don't get me started on RoHS. I once went on a walk around the block with my kids and picked up 64 GRAMS of lead, in the form of discarded tire weights, from the gutter - where it would have eventually washed into a groundwater recharge basin. That's been going on for years, and yet people would rather fixate on eliminating milligrams of lead from electronic devices. Yeah, CRTs contribute a lot of lead to landfills, I'm sure. But cell phones and iPods? That has to be orders of magnitude less than other common sources. And it could be handled on the disposal side, rather than eliminating an entire element from the materials allowed to be used by manufacturers.
I went with a gold finish exactly because I wasn't comfortable using any other lead-free finish. That still doesn't solve the problem of having to use lead-free solder that requires higher temperatures and doesn't flow as readily. The industry will adapt and improve, but it'll take time, and until then it's the consumers that are hurt most.
Quality tends to be expensive - not only in materials, but also in increased design and testing costs. I can understand why in a hyper-competitive market like cell phones it'd be hard to justify the added costs.
Fortunately the field I'm in is a little less competitive. For my latest products, I opted for powder-coated steel enclosures when most are using plastic or sometimes aluminum. Yeah, it's more expensive, but you can drive over one (which has happened to previous models) without harming it. But aside from that, it makes a big impact when I'm showing them off at a convention. People smile when they pick one up - it doesn't feel cheap or flimsy, and it's immediately obvious that quality is a major concern with the product. Same goes for the internals, with gold-finished PCBs and higher quality parts than are strictly necessary. It all adds up to an extra few bucks for a $65 product - more than worth it from my perspective.
Besides, I can't afford to hire a tech support / rework staff - if it breaks, I'm the one who has to fix it. Now THAT is a real incentive for quality!
I'll be watching this to see how it turns out. I had the same idea about 7 or 8 years ago, and went as far as designing a prototype system and selecting scanning hardware, but I gave up when it came to the legal issues. It was looking like the ability to actually open and scan the mail would require some serious legal wrangling - as far as I can tell that's not covered by the normal commercial mail receiving agent stuff. And then the domain name I'd bought for it (back in the Network Solutions monopoly days) got snatched, and I just gave up.
...something called a "book," which is a story that is found printed on a bunch of pages glued together on one side to hold them together for easy carrying and reading.
I'm going to call shenanigans on this one. Putting glue on one side of each page seems like it'd make reading this "book" thing even more difficult. Or perhaps it's a low-tack adhesive, like you find on sticky notes? I suppose that could work. And it sounds just like something the "studios" would come up with. After all, you wouldn't want people selling a "book" after they were done reading it. And who's going to have the patience to stick all those pages back together?
I broke my arm playing supervised, school-sponsored dodgeball in the 7th grade. Just a simple accident - it happens. Hurt like a bitch, and I spent some time with my arm in a cast, but still preferable to not being able to play simple games.
Ironically, the best physical conditioning I ever got in school was from unsanctioned chicken fighting - and I never got so much as a scratch from that.
What, cover the roof in photovoltaics? Ok, that's 20 x 8 feet, for 160 square feet of area. That's somewhere around 15 kW of total solar energy. With 25% efficient panels, under 4 kW electricity. Probably not more than 1 kW average throughout the day - enough to run maybe one server.
Damn straight. Exceptions might be in order for things like smoke detectors with radioisotopes (they already take those back), but the only reason electronics are being singled out is that it's trendy right now to go after 'e-waste'. Probably because there's such a psychological impact in throwing away a now-worthless piece of high tech equipment that was state of the art a few years ago. People feel differently about throwing away computers and cell phones than they do about, say, car batteries. It's not how hazardous the materials are that gets people upset, it's the perceived value in the things being thrown away.
And people connect more with the waste they SEE - it's easy to ignore the waste generated in the manufacture of those devices, or in any of thousands of other products that people consume, because that waste is happening in some remote factory (or rather, in many places throughout the supply chain) and they never have to see it.
Then there's the impact on small businesses. Everyone hates the big corporations, but they're perfectly willing to pass all sorts of idiotic legistlation that ensures no company without a gigantic legal department can possibly survive.
Our first H-bomb ("Mike") was 82 tons and occupied its own building. When you're trying to prove the basic technology, miniaturization isn't a priority. That said, I don't know if North Korea's going to bother. As someone else pointed out, they have plenty of conventional weapons, and proving that they have nukes is probably worth more for the psychological impact.
Then the US needs to wake up and do something to level the playing field. China screws with their currency to keep good cheap, for one. I don't like the political situation there, but the US seems to be doing everything possible to drive manufacturing away. I can get cables made in China for $1.50 that (even after shipping and import duties) would cost me 3 or 4 times as much to have produced here. And that's assuming that I can even get a US manufacturer to talk to me, being a very small business. Less than half of the US manufacturers I contacted even bothered to return an email. Four out of five Chinese firms responded within 24 hours, and all were eager to meet my needs, even for relatively small orders. You can get that kind of response from US companies, but usually only the small ones - and it's usually not the small ones that can compete in these areas of manufacturing.
Ditto for my late mother-in-law. Suffered a serious back injury moving a patient in the hospital she worked in. Only in her case it led to a slow spiral into pain killer addiction and eventually death.
Not really new...
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I used to have 'D' cells that'd plug in to a wall outlet, too. Trouble is, a large portion of the volume is devoted to the connector and charging circuit. But if 50% capacity is enough, I suppose they'll work.
See also ARHAB for more on amateur radio high altitude ballooning. I have yet to put together a full payload myself, but I've provided electronics for quite a few of these.
They may get brighter after 30 seconds, but I've never noticed it
I've noticed it. Maybe I've just got cheap bulbs, but I noticed that the room just seemed dim for a bit. For a while I thought maybe it was just my imagination and that it seemed OK after a minute because my eyes adjusted, but I finally got out a light meter and verified that the reading roughly doubled in the first 60 seconds. It bugs me, but it's still better than wasting all that power.
I've replaced most of the bulbs in my house too, but what I don't see this article addressing is the total bulb lifecycle. These things have mercury in them, which will probably mean people screaming about disposal when they DO have to be replaced. Are there recycling programs in place? What's the environmental impact of making them in the first place, compared to incadescents?
I have to agree with this. I've worked as a contractor along side civil servants and uniformed military personnel. It's rare for the military folks to stick around more than two years in one place, and one job - in some posts, 9 months was about average. The civil service guys had typically been around for many years, and had a much greater sense of ownership of their systems and processes.
I worked on a system that was developed in-house by civil servants. It was an effective system because it was developed by the people who needed it, and it was relatively inexpensive. I worked on it as a contractor, but I was there long-term (most of a decade), and it was MY system - I was right down the hall from the guys using it, I spent enough time with them to know at least the basics of all of their jobs, and it was MY problem to make it all work. I had a vested interest in making sure it ran smoothly and required as little maintenance as possible. After all, less time fixing things means more time on Slashdot.
But along came a sweeping billion-dollar modernization project, and someone decided it was time to replace the system. That was around ten years ago. Tens of millions of dollars later, they still haven't matched the usability of the old system. But the contractors have no incentive to make it work. Once they hand it over, it's ANOTHER company's job to maintain it and fix it. There's way too much separation between the people doing the work, and the people using the end result.
I bought a RSV2 for my son. It has a bit of trouble walking around on carpet - especially if it needs to change directions - but it does ok. Every once in awhile, though, it'll decide my ugly green sofa is its bowling ball. It'll stand there grabbing the recliner handle and repeatedly try to lift the entire sofa. Thankfully it's not quite that strong.
Slashdot Mirror
You're obviously using the wrong channels. I've never had any trouble obtaining Oracle licenses. The streamlined acquisition process goes like this:
1. Government agency your company works for pays $90 million for Oracle licenses
2. Larry Ellison gives your congressman a nice campaign contribution
3. Government agency happily hands over license certificates by the wheelbarrow load to show that they were needed in the first place
Never once had to deal with a sales rep.
They're not aimed at the same markets. I haven't followed this too closely, but I assume the reason Oracle is interested in MySQL at all is that they're somewhat complimentary products. MySQL is great if you want a lightweight, fast database that doesn't need to be terribly robust.
I doubt MySQL is ever going to have the sort of PL/SQL support Oracle does, and you're not likely to see things like enterprise-class clustering, data partitioning, replication, and so forth. If you added all that to MySQL, it'd wind up just like Oracle - big, complex, and expensive. They occupy opposite ends of the spectrum.
And for what it's worth, I've got an Oracle database on a modest single-processor AMD server with a single hard drive handling about 20 inserts per second with R-tree spatial indexing and it keeps up just fine, with a bit of tuning. Given a real server with multiple drives I'd be able to optimize things much better, but it's just a testbed.
Comparing MySQL to Oracle is a little like comparing a high-performance motorcycle to an M1A2 tank. They'll both get you from point A to point B, but with different levels of cost and safety.
AND more quotas (including CPU time and memory) than you can shake a stick at. There's a lot I don't miss about VMS, but it certainly did some things right.
Anyone interested in this sort of thing should also check out sites like ARHAB and EOSS. High-altitude ballooning has gained a lot of popularity in recent years, especially among ham radio hobbyists. It's relatively easy to build a payload that can reach an altitude of over 20 miles. I finally built one myself and launched it last month - it reached an altitude of over 106,000 feet and took over a thousand pictures between takeoff and landing. I posted a writeup on my website.
Basic payloads like mine don't really contribute much scientific knowledge, but they're a lot of fun and it's a good way to get kids interested in science. It's the closest thing to launching a satellite you're likely to get on a shoestring budget. For the record, my launch probably cost around $400, and everything but the balloon ($65) and helium (about $40) was recovered in reusable condition. Though I'll probably shell out another $8 for a new payload housing - the last one hit a dry lake bed at around 20-30 mph when the 'chute got tangled.
Actually, I seem to remember that the original military use was an attempt to replace spider silk for crosshairs in weapon sights. Didn't work worth a damn for that (just stuck all the parts together), but it's found a lot of uses since then.
We must have had a better colonel than you. When we had an evacuation in the building (due to burning popcorn in the break room, oddly enough) the colonel was apparently the only one who remembered that the fire alarms didn't always work in the network control center, and made a sweep through to personally make sure we all got out. Didn't ban popcorn, either, though I'm sure he made sure whoever screwed up the machine was suitably embarrassed.
Worse than the popcorn fire was the metal and plastic mug left in the microwave NOT 10 MINUTES after we'd come back in from the previous evacuation. Fortunately they hadn't even gotten around to rearming the alarm system or we'd have all been back out in the parking lot! Once the smoke had cleared it was actually kind of interesting to look at... sort of Starbucks meets Salvador Dali.
I guess I may as well chime in here too. I only ever passed the 5 WPM test (when I was 10) and upgraded to extra after the 20 WPM code requirement was dropped. I'm happy to see it go entirely - it only serves as an artificial barrier to getting people into the hobby. It'd be nice if they augmented the tests with a little bit about digital modes and such, though. Modes like PSK31 can get through in situations where CW used to be your only option, but people need to understand a bit about how they work and how they can be used most effectively.
.jpg and .gif files, and they're easy to use, but there are many, many people that don't understand HOW they work, or why you don't want to save a line drawing in jpeg format, or when to keep something in TIFF. It's that sort of knowledge that separates communicators from appliance operators. I'd much rather see hams introduced to, say, Shannon's theorem than forced to learn CW, when 90% of them won't retain any proficiency over the long term.
It's kind of like in the graphics world - everyone recognizes
Your golf ball looks like a patch of sand dune at the bottom of a crater, sculpted by wind. See http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/gallery/press/oppor tunity/20040916a.html for something similar in Endurance Crater.
Yeah, don't get me started on RoHS. I once went on a walk around the block with my kids and picked up 64 GRAMS of lead, in the form of discarded tire weights, from the gutter - where it would have eventually washed into a groundwater recharge basin. That's been going on for years, and yet people would rather fixate on eliminating milligrams of lead from electronic devices. Yeah, CRTs contribute a lot of lead to landfills, I'm sure. But cell phones and iPods? That has to be orders of magnitude less than other common sources. And it could be handled on the disposal side, rather than eliminating an entire element from the materials allowed to be used by manufacturers.
I went with a gold finish exactly because I wasn't comfortable using any other lead-free finish. That still doesn't solve the problem of having to use lead-free solder that requires higher temperatures and doesn't flow as readily. The industry will adapt and improve, but it'll take time, and until then it's the consumers that are hurt most.
Quality tends to be expensive - not only in materials, but also in increased design and testing costs. I can understand why in a hyper-competitive market like cell phones it'd be hard to justify the added costs.
Fortunately the field I'm in is a little less competitive. For my latest products, I opted for powder-coated steel enclosures when most are using plastic or sometimes aluminum. Yeah, it's more expensive, but you can drive over one (which has happened to previous models) without harming it. But aside from that, it makes a big impact when I'm showing them off at a convention. People smile when they pick one up - it doesn't feel cheap or flimsy, and it's immediately obvious that quality is a major concern with the product. Same goes for the internals, with gold-finished PCBs and higher quality parts than are strictly necessary. It all adds up to an extra few bucks for a $65 product - more than worth it from my perspective.
Besides, I can't afford to hire a tech support / rework staff - if it breaks, I'm the one who has to fix it. Now THAT is a real incentive for quality!
I'll be watching this to see how it turns out. I had the same idea about 7 or 8 years ago, and went as far as designing a prototype system and selecting scanning hardware, but I gave up when it came to the legal issues. It was looking like the ability to actually open and scan the mail would require some serious legal wrangling - as far as I can tell that's not covered by the normal commercial mail receiving agent stuff. And then the domain name I'd bought for it (back in the Network Solutions monopoly days) got snatched, and I just gave up.
I'm going to call shenanigans on this one. Putting glue on one side of each page seems like it'd make reading this "book" thing even more difficult. Or perhaps it's a low-tack adhesive, like you find on sticky notes? I suppose that could work. And it sounds just like something the "studios" would come up with. After all, you wouldn't want people selling a "book" after they were done reading it. And who's going to have the patience to stick all those pages back together?
I broke my arm playing supervised, school-sponsored dodgeball in the 7th grade. Just a simple accident - it happens. Hurt like a bitch, and I spent some time with my arm in a cast, but still preferable to not being able to play simple games.
Ironically, the best physical conditioning I ever got in school was from unsanctioned chicken fighting - and I never got so much as a scratch from that.
What, cover the roof in photovoltaics? Ok, that's 20 x 8 feet, for 160 square feet of area. That's somewhere around 15 kW of total solar energy. With 25% efficient panels, under 4 kW electricity. Probably not more than 1 kW average throughout the day - enough to run maybe one server.
Damn straight. Exceptions might be in order for things like smoke detectors with radioisotopes (they already take those back), but the only reason electronics are being singled out is that it's trendy right now to go after 'e-waste'. Probably because there's such a psychological impact in throwing away a now-worthless piece of high tech equipment that was state of the art a few years ago. People feel differently about throwing away computers and cell phones than they do about, say, car batteries. It's not how hazardous the materials are that gets people upset, it's the perceived value in the things being thrown away.
And people connect more with the waste they SEE - it's easy to ignore the waste generated in the manufacture of those devices, or in any of thousands of other products that people consume, because that waste is happening in some remote factory (or rather, in many places throughout the supply chain) and they never have to see it.
Then there's the impact on small businesses. Everyone hates the big corporations, but they're perfectly willing to pass all sorts of idiotic legistlation that ensures no company without a gigantic legal department can possibly survive.
Our first H-bomb ("Mike") was 82 tons and occupied its own building. When you're trying to prove the basic technology, miniaturization isn't a priority. That said, I don't know if North Korea's going to bother. As someone else pointed out, they have plenty of conventional weapons, and proving that they have nukes is probably worth more for the psychological impact.
Then the US needs to wake up and do something to level the playing field. China screws with their currency to keep good cheap, for one. I don't like the political situation there, but the US seems to be doing everything possible to drive manufacturing away. I can get cables made in China for $1.50 that (even after shipping and import duties) would cost me 3 or 4 times as much to have produced here. And that's assuming that I can even get a US manufacturer to talk to me, being a very small business. Less than half of the US manufacturers I contacted even bothered to return an email. Four out of five Chinese firms responded within 24 hours, and all were eager to meet my needs, even for relatively small orders. You can get that kind of response from US companies, but usually only the small ones - and it's usually not the small ones that can compete in these areas of manufacturing.
Ditto for my late mother-in-law. Suffered a serious back injury moving a patient in the hospital she worked in. Only in her case it led to a slow spiral into pain killer addiction and eventually death.
I used to have 'D' cells that'd plug in to a wall outlet, too. Trouble is, a large portion of the volume is devoted to the connector and charging circuit. But if 50% capacity is enough, I suppose they'll work.
See also ARHAB for more on amateur radio high altitude ballooning. I have yet to put together a full payload myself, but I've provided electronics for quite a few of these.
Well, sure, but only with about 5 meters precision.
They may get brighter after 30 seconds, but I've never noticed it
I've noticed it. Maybe I've just got cheap bulbs, but I noticed that the room just seemed dim for a bit. For a while I thought maybe it was just my imagination and that it seemed OK after a minute because my eyes adjusted, but I finally got out a light meter and verified that the reading roughly doubled in the first 60 seconds. It bugs me, but it's still better than wasting all that power.
I've replaced most of the bulbs in my house too, but what I don't see this article addressing is the total bulb lifecycle. These things have mercury in them, which will probably mean people screaming about disposal when they DO have to be replaced. Are there recycling programs in place? What's the environmental impact of making them in the first place, compared to incadescents?
I have to agree with this. I've worked as a contractor along side civil servants and uniformed military personnel. It's rare for the military folks to stick around more than two years in one place, and one job - in some posts, 9 months was about average. The civil service guys had typically been around for many years, and had a much greater sense of ownership of their systems and processes.
I worked on a system that was developed in-house by civil servants. It was an effective system because it was developed by the people who needed it, and it was relatively inexpensive. I worked on it as a contractor, but I was there long-term (most of a decade), and it was MY system - I was right down the hall from the guys using it, I spent enough time with them to know at least the basics of all of their jobs, and it was MY problem to make it all work. I had a vested interest in making sure it ran smoothly and required as little maintenance as possible. After all, less time fixing things means more time on Slashdot.
But along came a sweeping billion-dollar modernization project, and someone decided it was time to replace the system. That was around ten years ago. Tens of millions of dollars later, they still haven't matched the usability of the old system. But the contractors have no incentive to make it work. Once they hand it over, it's ANOTHER company's job to maintain it and fix it. There's way too much separation between the people doing the work, and the people using the end result.
I bought a RSV2 for my son. It has a bit of trouble walking around on carpet - especially if it needs to change directions - but it does ok. Every once in awhile, though, it'll decide my ugly green sofa is its bowling ball. It'll stand there grabbing the recliner handle and repeatedly try to lift the entire sofa. Thankfully it's not quite that strong.