Being more of a Postgresql kind of guy, I really can't comment on the virtues of MySQL V4.
Having dealt with a lot of databases in a production environment here's my take:
You absolutely don't want to run any database which is designated "not stable" in a production environment.
Or put it another way: If I'm your boss I won't fire you for lacking features of the database. If we decided on this database engine we work around the shortcomings. But I'll have your ass sacked in no time if you install an unstable version of the product and corrupt the database in this process.
If that seems too harsh: You may explain to me the business reason and the risks associated and get it in writing that your management is aware of what's going on and knows of the risks.
Yep, and at 350 grams it's about 4 times as heavy as my Nokia 6510, which gives me roughly 5 days of standby.
Conclusion: if you're too damn stupid, or lazy to hook up your phone for a couple hours every four to five days, then you probably deserve the additional weight.
I would argue that it is essentially the same thing.
Not really; although the consequences might have been the same. Let's examine Yahoo's options:
Implement technical measures to make such content unavailable to French citizens, since it is illegal to hawk such wares in France. As you pointed out, this is probably close to impossible.
Comply (which they did as I recall)
Showing the middle finger to the judge accompagnied by a loud Fuckez vous, Monsieur
Option three would have been absolutely legit since no US court would shut down Yahoos US servers based on a French ruling.
But if Yahoo choses to ignore the verdict then they can't do any business in France. It's as simple as that.
Actually (assuming that you are US-American) the US is a lot worse in this respect, since they try to outlaw actions that doesn't even involve them directly. That is: threatening to seize assets of a foreign company in the US just because they do business with another sovereign foreign country.
I'm guessing you are referring to the Yahoo case here. I might misunderstand the issue - but the way I remember it, the French government wanted Nazi items removed from Yahoo's US sites.
This is not correct. The court ordered Yahoo not to make such content accessible to French citizens in France. Yahoo claimed that this is impossible.
"We do this, as the court insisted, while still respecting companies' valid speech interests pursuant to the First Amendment."
What the fsck selling my private data to some scum of the earth marketing firms has to do with free speech?
To extend that logic it is then OK to walk into MCIs head quarter and shit on their carpet in order to express my dissatisfaction with their customer service.
What about doing what Microplanet did with their Gravity news reader and making it freely available in binary format for all to use?
Because that reduces the credibility of the product to basically zero.
It doesn't matter if you understand the source, or are a crypto expert. If you can't analyze the source and compile it yourself, the product is essentially worthless from a crypto perspective.
Except when you're roaming of course. However, the convenience of leaving a plane in Barcelona, Copenhagen or London and being instantly reachable under my normal number offsets the slight cost (maybe 30-50 cents a minute).
This is what US carriers just don't get. Receiving a call in the US is ~ 1.50$ (for fairly meager GSM coverage). This leads me to not even consider to get a tri-band phone, since I rather get a prepaid card for outgoing calls and advise the carriers to fsck themselves very much for their rotten, overprized services.
Yeah, see the thing is, I don't want to be reached all the time. Right now, there is no reason any one would need to contact me urgently. Whatever it is, it can wait. If it's that much of an emergency that you have to get in touch with me, maybe you should call 911 first.
The big misconception is that cell phone owners are slaves that have to be reachable all the time.
Personally I should be able to be reached during office hours, since I'm an independent contractor. When you call my office the call is diverted to my cell phone and you won't even realize that your call gets diverted.
For all other times there's voice mail if I don't want to be reached.
Actually my main reason for having a cell phone is to have a 120gm heavy high tech phone booth at my disposal throughout Europe and most of the world and not that I can be reached at all times.
The most accurate watches don't come from time-giant Timex
Maybe they even manufacture the most accurate watches in the world (which isn't such a feat in the quartz watch age), but that's not the point at all.
If you buy a really, really expensive watch it's probably less accurate then your 40$ Swatch since it is hand crafted. It might have an automatic winding mechanism, but probably no battery. By definition it's less accurate then a quartz watch.
But, if you pay 5 figures for a watch you want something unique and rare and special and you probably are rich enough to not care if it's two minutes off in the first place.
I generally agree with your point, it's just not always so easy to tie the quality of a product with it's performance.
Microsoft won the browser war because IE4 beat the hell out of any other browser that was available at the time. In fact, IE4 beats the hell out of the latest Netscape 4.7x release on any platform.
Actually the main reason why Microsoft won the browser war was not the incredible kick-ass quality of IE4, but the fact that they could bundle it with every new computer sold.
In addition their secret, but aparantly very drastic OEM contracts prohibited vendors to ship a competing product, let alone display it prominently on the desktop.
Granted, that Netscape 4.7 is a bloated heap of crap, but that was not the main reason why Microsoft managed to cut off Netscapes air supply.
Microsoft is a company, which very rarely won on the merrits of their technology...
Yes, compared to an Oracle license 2'000$ are chickenshit.
For me as an independant contractor however it is most definitely not, especially, since I can get the product to play around (not for production use of course) virtually for free.
I can understand, why one would want to raise the bar for getting certified. The bar however should be within the exams and not via the price.
So if I want to get certified I am forced to sit for three days into a class, that likely bores the living shit out of me plus I can't bill any customers for this time.
Having actually teached system administration and performance & tuning classes for an enterprise database product (which was not Oracle though, but relational databases are conceptually rather comparable) it's a pretty safe bet, that this is a complete waste of time for my specific case.
But then I don't really care: Certification might look good on paper. I have never really had a need to prove my knowledge to a customer with a crappy piece of (overprized) paper.
Candidate B:) I am a Unix Admin. If you have Microsoft, you are criminally negligent morons. I refuse to touch IIS lest I be prosecutable as an accessory to stupidiy.
Granted, there might be some 1 4m 4 50 fucK1n6 c00L haX0r d00dZ frequenting/., but you might want to give the average reader a tad more credit.
I run a business, privately held and founded in '99. It's based on keeping my customers out of being dumped into the harbor with cement shoes when it comes to operating their databases. I conciously banked my business on Free Software because it provides the required environment to run 4 different industry strength databases on a simple box with limited resources. This in turn serves my customers very well. I can reproduce their real world problems with multimillion row tables in order to gather hard data in terms of clustered index usage for example. And all that on my modest 128MB 500Mhz clunker, which overall still serves me nicely.
Recently I got a cold call from a prospect, who was slightly fed up with Microsofts licensing games and was interested in the possibilities to switch the environment. According to your specification I should have tormented him with the unix-advocacy-everything-will-be-great-gospel. Well, I didn't quite do that. I instead recommended that he compiles a list of the must have- and the nice to have- applications they require and that such a list serves as the baseline to determine the feasibility and the cost. They didn't switch after all due to time constraints that would have not been realistic.
You you might see why I take a slight offense, when you charactarize me as a zealot with a bad shave and even worse communication skills.
If one is not the decision maker, and admins are often not the
decision makers for what software is used in a company, one can not
simply say they will not support a particular application, they need
to explain their concerns, and describe the risks to the decision
maker(s). Let the decision maker understand the risks and costs, once
that is done, the decision maker must deal with the consequences.
If I'd have moderating points the only reason why I wouldn't mod you up to +5 (insightfull) is that I started the whole ruckus and couldn't
I could never have put it more eloquent and concise.
Clients keep looking at us as if we're weird outter-space creatures everytime we mention unix-based hosting and programming.
When I was working as a consultant for a major database vendor I walked into customer sites, looked at the problems at hand and usually started to script in either perl or shell.
This provoked indescribable looks from (mostly) younger IT staff and questions around the line, of:
What the hell is this? What are you doing here? Why don't you use a GUI? This was often accompagnied with smirks and laughs.
Laughing was reduced to an absolute minimum after 2 hours of scripting (including testing) and 10 minutes running the script, instead of opening a window 3000 times in order to uncheck a checkbox.
It was ususally also the very GUI oriented shops that ran into wicked recoverability problems, since they implemented their databases with GUIs, modified their database structures with GUI's and the last time they re-generated scripts from the physical schema was in the summer of '98 or so.
If they would have used scripts to start with and would have treated those scripts like source code, they could have avoided weeks - if not month - of agony and pain. Not even to mention the costs.
The fact is Microsoft doesn't give a damn, because it doesn't need to give a damn anymore. Windows in its various forms continues to have outrageous security holes [...]
I think you're wrong here, since Microsoft was always very, very good at feeling out the vibes of their customer base. The current perception in the marketplace is, that Microsofts security is beyond rotten. Since even the Gartner Group got on the bandwaggon, Microsoft seems to be scared shitless about that public perception.
The problem is the same as the sorcerers apprentice, who just can't get rid of the monsters anymore.
For years and years Microsoft has (overladden-) their products with features and bloat. They missed the internet entirely and when they realised their mistake they rushed an inherently insecure internet platform into the market and during all this time they didn't give a flying f*ck about security.
I agree, that Microsoft is an extremely arrogant company, that regards their customer base as cows to be milked and taken for a ride in every way possible.
The problem is that perception is changing and so they are frantically trying to restore trust; they can't let such glitches happen by purpose.
I think it's too late though to call the monsters back in and even worse:
It is my true conviction that any IT responsible on any level using IIS on new projects is guilty of gross negligence and incredible incompetence.
I'm a little bit sick and tired about all those whiners complaining about biased reporting.
This is slashdot for crying out loud and neither the editors nor the contributers have any obligations whatsoever for objective reporting or commenting.
If you don't like it in here feel free to tune into ZDnet or read some unbiased reports by Microsoft sponsored "Think Tanks".
It's the word 'NIKE' and the tick logo that ALL the value resides in - because people associate THOSE with the Nike values.
You mean like having sneakers glued by 10 year old vietnamese girls under unbelievable conditions in a factory operated by an "indipendant contractor".
You're right of course, that the only value is in the Nike brand. Who in his right mind would pay 180$ for a pair of sneakers that cost a couple of bucks to manufacture at most.
Call me a ludite, but as an avid Palm user (Vx) this might well be a step backwards.
The thing I love most about the Palm and the PalmOs is that it works, that it's extremely simple and that it's extremely reliable.
I didn't like when they introduced colour and I care even less for all the fancy features promised with PalmOS 5.
Frankly, if the only direction is more colours, better resolution, more MP3, full feature video and other such assorted crap, then I guess it's time to ditch the Palm and go for a Symbian smart phone.
At least then, when the good old b&w simplicity of the V series is no more supported.
"The story was written by one of our freelance writers," an editor at the Evening News told Reuters on Friday. "His stuff has been pretty much reliable before."
I sure give those blokes a call for a consultation should I ever have to hire a reliable journalist.
From what I understand the authorization systems (specifically in the US) suck shit!
From a data processing pov it would be incredible hard to implement, specifically based on current systems.
True story: MCI was not able to authorize a 10$ purchase via the phone on my non-us credit card. They wanted a zip code. No zip-code no authorization. Now, if the cc authorization systems really rely on 5 digit zip codes in order to authorize a 10 dollar purchase it's beyond my comprehension just how much those systems must suck.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of the days, when sex was safe and diving was dangerous.
Having dealt with a lot of databases in a production environment here's my take:
You absolutely don't want to run any database which is designated "not stable" in a production environment.
Or put it another way: If I'm your boss I won't fire you for lacking features of the database. If we decided on this database engine we work around the shortcomings. But I'll have your ass sacked in no time if you install an unstable version of the product and corrupt the database in this process.
If that seems too harsh: You may explain to me the business reason and the risks associated and get it in writing that your management is aware of what's going on and knows of the risks.
Yep, and at 350 grams it's about 4 times as heavy as my Nokia 6510, which gives me roughly 5 days of standby.
Conclusion: if you're too damn stupid, or lazy to hook up your phone for a couple hours every four to five days, then you probably deserve the additional weight.
Not really; although the consequences might have been the same. Let's examine Yahoo's options:
Implement technical measures to make such content unavailable to French citizens, since it is illegal to hawk such wares in France. As you pointed out, this is probably close to impossible.
Comply (which they did as I recall)
Showing the middle finger to the judge accompagnied by a loud Fuckez vous, Monsieur
Option three would have been absolutely legit since no US court would shut down Yahoos US servers based on a French ruling.
But if Yahoo choses to ignore the verdict then they can't do any business in France. It's as simple as that.
Actually (assuming that you are US-American) the US is a lot worse in this respect, since they try to outlaw actions that doesn't even involve them directly. That is: threatening to seize assets of a foreign company in the US just because they do business with another sovereign foreign country.
Those that sit in glass houses...
This is not correct. The court ordered Yahoo not to make such content accessible to French citizens in France. Yahoo claimed that this is impossible.
There's quite a difference here in my book.
What the fsck selling my private data to some scum of the earth marketing firms has to do with free speech?
To extend that logic it is then OK to walk into MCIs head quarter and shit on their carpet in order to express my dissatisfaction with their customer service.
Because that reduces the credibility of the product to basically zero.
It doesn't matter if you understand the source, or are a crypto expert. If you can't analyze the source and compile it yourself, the product is essentially worthless from a crypto perspective.
has the government to do with extorcionist roaming charges set forth by those carriers?
Except when you're roaming of course. However, the convenience of leaving a plane in Barcelona, Copenhagen or London and being instantly reachable under my normal number offsets the slight cost (maybe 30-50 cents a minute).
This is what US carriers just don't get. Receiving a call in the US is ~ 1.50$ (for fairly meager GSM coverage). This leads me to not even consider to get a tri-band phone, since I rather get a prepaid card for outgoing calls and advise the carriers to fsck themselves very much for their rotten, overprized services.
The big misconception is that cell phone owners are slaves that have to be reachable all the time.
Personally I should be able to be reached during office hours, since I'm an independent contractor. When you call my office the call is diverted to my cell phone and you won't even realize that your call gets diverted.
For all other times there's voice mail if I don't want to be reached.
Actually my main reason for having a cell phone is to have a 120gm heavy high tech phone booth at my disposal throughout Europe and most of the world and not that I can be reached at all times.
Maybe they even manufacture the most accurate watches in the world (which isn't such a feat in the quartz watch age), but that's not the point at all.
If you buy a really, really expensive watch it's probably less accurate then your 40$ Swatch since it is hand crafted. It might have an automatic winding mechanism, but probably no battery. By definition it's less accurate then a quartz watch.
But, if you pay 5 figures for a watch you want something unique and rare and special and you probably are rich enough to not care if it's two minutes off in the first place.
I generally agree with your point, it's just not always so easy to tie the quality of a product with it's performance.
Actually the main reason why Microsoft won the browser war was not the incredible kick-ass quality of IE4, but the fact that they could bundle it with every new computer sold.
In addition their secret, but aparantly very drastic OEM contracts prohibited vendors to ship a competing product, let alone display it prominently on the desktop.
Granted, that Netscape 4.7 is a bloated heap of crap, but that was not the main reason why Microsoft managed to cut off Netscapes air supply.
Microsoft is a company, which very rarely won on the merrits of their technology...
#include "asbestos.h"
For me as an independant contractor however it is most definitely not, especially, since I can get the product to play around (not for production use of course) virtually for free.
I can understand, why one would want to raise the bar for getting certified. The bar however should be within the exams and not via the price.
So if I want to get certified I am forced to sit for three days into a class, that likely bores the living shit out of me plus I can't bill any customers for this time.
Having actually teached system administration and performance & tuning classes for an enterprise database product (which was not Oracle though, but relational databases are conceptually rather comparable) it's a pretty safe bet, that this is a complete waste of time for my specific case.
But then I don't really care: Certification might look good on paper. I have never really had a need to prove my knowledge to a customer with a crappy piece of (overprized) paper.
Granted, there might be some 1 4m 4 50 fucK1n6 c00L haX0r d00dZ frequenting /., but you might want to give the average reader a tad more credit.
I run a business, privately held and founded in '99. It's based on keeping my customers out of being dumped into the harbor with cement shoes when it comes to operating their databases. I conciously banked my business on Free Software because it provides the required environment to run 4 different industry strength databases on a simple box with limited resources. This in turn serves my customers very well. I can reproduce their real world problems with multimillion row tables in order to gather hard data in terms of clustered index usage for example. And all that on my modest 128MB 500Mhz clunker, which overall still serves me nicely.
Recently I got a cold call from a prospect, who was slightly fed up with Microsofts licensing games and was interested in the possibilities to switch the environment. According to your specification I should have tormented him with the unix-advocacy-everything-will-be-great-gospel. Well, I didn't quite do that. I instead recommended that he compiles a list of the must have- and the nice to have- applications they require and that such a list serves as the baseline to determine the feasibility and the cost. They didn't switch after all due to time constraints that would have not been realistic.
You you might see why I take a slight offense, when you charactarize me as a zealot with a bad shave and even worse communication skills.
If I'd have moderating points the only reason why I wouldn't mod you up to +5 (insightfull) is that I started the whole ruckus and couldn't
I could never have put it more eloquent and concise.
And I'm sure those ugly little buggers actually like to be licked
When I was working as a consultant for a major database vendor I walked into customer sites, looked at the problems at hand and usually started to script in either perl or shell.
This provoked indescribable looks from (mostly) younger IT staff and questions around the line, of:
What the hell is this? What are you doing here? Why don't you use a GUI? This was often accompagnied with smirks and laughs.
Laughing was reduced to an absolute minimum after 2 hours of scripting (including testing) and 10 minutes running the script, instead of opening a window 3000 times in order to uncheck a checkbox.
It was ususally also the very GUI oriented shops that ran into wicked recoverability problems, since they implemented their databases with GUIs, modified their database structures with GUI's and the last time they re-generated scripts from the physical schema was in the summer of '98 or so.
If they would have used scripts to start with and would have treated those scripts like source code, they could have avoided weeks - if not month - of agony and pain. Not even to mention the costs.
I think you're wrong here, since Microsoft was always very, very good at feeling out the vibes of their customer base. The current perception in the marketplace is, that Microsofts security is beyond rotten. Since even the Gartner Group got on the bandwaggon, Microsoft seems to be scared shitless about that public perception.
The problem is the same as the sorcerers apprentice, who just can't get rid of the monsters anymore.
For years and years Microsoft has (overladden-) their products with features and bloat. They missed the internet entirely and when they realised their mistake they rushed an inherently insecure internet platform into the market and during all this time they didn't give a flying f*ck about security.
I agree, that Microsoft is an extremely arrogant company, that regards their customer base as cows to be milked and taken for a ride in every way possible.
The problem is that perception is changing and so they are frantically trying to restore trust; they can't let such glitches happen by purpose.
I think it's too late though to call the monsters back in and even worse:
It is my true conviction that any IT responsible on any level using IIS on new projects is guilty of gross negligence and incredible incompetence.
This is slashdot for crying out loud and neither the editors nor the contributers have any obligations whatsoever for objective reporting or commenting.
If you don't like it in here feel free to tune into ZDnet or read some unbiased reports by Microsoft sponsored "Think Tanks".
There is no need to thank me.
You mean like having sneakers glued by 10 year old vietnamese girls under unbelievable conditions in a factory operated by an "indipendant contractor".
You're right of course, that the only value is in the Nike brand. Who in his right mind would pay 180$ for a pair of sneakers that cost a couple of bucks to manufacture at most.
You throw a valid gripe into the lions den and get umpteen good reasons why you're not right without getting chewed out, so to speak.
And everybody seems to appreciate and understand the validity and ascii centered concerns of your gripe in the process.
The thing I love most about the Palm and the PalmOs is that it works, that it's extremely simple and that it's extremely reliable.
I didn't like when they introduced colour and I care even less for all the fancy features promised with PalmOS 5.
Frankly, if the only direction is more colours, better resolution, more MP3, full feature video and other such assorted crap, then I guess it's time to ditch the Palm and go for a Symbian smart phone.
At least then, when the good old b&w simplicity of the V series is no more supported.
Not that they look very appealing, but apparently they are quite hallucinogenic...
I sure give those blokes a call for a consultation should I ever have to hire a reliable journalist.
From a data processing pov it would be incredible hard to implement, specifically based on current systems.
True story: MCI was not able to authorize a 10$ purchase via the phone on my non-us credit card. They wanted a zip code. No zip-code no authorization. Now, if the cc authorization systems really rely on 5 digit zip codes in order to authorize a 10 dollar purchase it's beyond my comprehension just how much those systems must suck.