IMO Microsoft made computing cheap (as in $) well before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye.
An IBM PC-compatible running MS-DOS was just about the most expensive home computer you could own in the 1980s (apart from the Macintosh).
The Commodore 64 and Amiga, the Apple 8-bit line, the Atari 8-bits and ST, the Tandy Color Computer... all of these were insanely cheap at a time when a 286 system would cost you $2000 or more.
With an open source project, you can pay one developer to work on just your stuff, have him start work immediately, and without layers of overhead adding onto the price.
"Hey, this is Joe 'Leet at Rent-An-OSS-Freelancer Incorporated... got your feature request proposal... to implement what you're asking for, I'm going to have to familiarize myself with 3,000,000 lines of code, acquire expert-level knowledge of digital signal processing, and then actually write and integrate the code that does what you want. My estimate is that this will cost you $225,000 and take 18 months to finish. Let me know when you'd like to stop by and sign the work order... 'kay, later."
Most likely, your bank is running its mortgage application on a seven year old database.
Yes, but that database system is a relatively bulletproof monster with a 25-year pedigree.
And while the production systems may be running a 7-year-old version right now, you can be sure they have a test machine with a 1-year-old version of the same DBMS on it, getting it certified so that when the old version is end-of-lifed they will be able to migrate seamlessly.
The thing I would really like to see is a way to in a fool proof way, move databases from MySQL to Postgres and have all of our PHP scripts (not custom, some commercial, some custom, and none with time for us to go and find every little change required) just work.
You will only be able to make a foolproof migration if the commercial PHP/SQL scripts weren't written by fools in the first place.
If they use the PEAR libraries (which SHOULD be the built-in default methods for DB interfacing in PHP, but the MySQL libs have history and inertia on their side), switching platforms should be as easy as replacing the DB connect string.
If they use the builtin MySQL-specific functions, but all the SQL code is standard, it'll take some search-and-replacing, but it's not TOO much work to migrate.
If they use nonstandard SQL extensions, there's not much you can do but refactor everything by hand.
There should be a software mechanism that automatically identifies dependencies and resolves them.
I still don't understand what you're trying to suggest.
Say Application X writes to Tables A, B, and C. Application Y writes to Tables A and D. Under what circumstances would App X need to know that data in Table A had been put there by App Y, or vice versa? How do existing database systems fall short of satisfying such a need? Keep in mind that table- and row-level locking, access control rules by account or schema, and NOTIFY-type triggers already exist in most modern SQL systems.
Modifications made to a complex system can have unforeseen consequences if programmers are not aware of the dependencies.
While true in a general sense, I'm not sure the correct solution to the problem is to add ADDITIONAL complexity the the system.
For the record, all my liberal friends tell me constantly that Fox News is oh-so-biased and CNN is oh-so-great, without EVER citing a single example for either case.
Here's an example: FoxNews posted an editorial about Microsoft products, written by a Microsoft advocate and employee. They did not disclose the author's conflict of interest.
CNN, in comparison, did NOT post the FUDitorial. This doesn't make them flawless, but in this case they're at least better than Fox.
This guy reminds me of the scene in Mallrats where they're trying to have an intellectual discussion about superman's baby. He's over thinking and over analyzing something that really just isn't that deep.
It must have been a challenging task to find the one scene in any of Kevin Smith's movies where that happens.
Do you have any evidence that snail mail is more effective at influencing governmental stance than email is? Perhaps a link to an on-the-record statement from a congressional staffer you could provide us?
Paper letters take more effort to write, yes, but they also take more effort to handle at the congressional office. I'd like to think that my representatives in the federal government and their staffs have better things to do than slice envelopes open all day. And that's why I write e-mail. And I know they pay attention to it because I get response messages, even from Old Man Lautenberg's office.
People criticise fine art and serious musicians for being elitist, but television and the recording industry show what happens when you have a non-elitist entertainment industry. Specifically, you get crap. Lots of it.
Don't tell me that you think 80% of "fine art" and "serious music" isn't CRAP, also.
And despite your opinion that the television industry is spewing out nothing but crap, I somehow manage to keep my DVR's somewhat large hard drive full of interesting programming from week to week.
Consumers value convenience over pristine fidelity. And it's far more convenient for consumers to continue buying the same DVD format they have been for the past five years than it is to junk all their equipment and re-buy their entire video library in some new format.
Do you suppose there's a www.crossingguard.org where people post complaints like "Goddamn ignorant little kids, not being able to cross the road on their own"?
The difference is, there's no reason that a schoolchild should be expected to perform a simple task without having a grownup there to hold his or her hand constantly.
Whereas an executive who's apparently competent enough to pull in a six-figure salary...
I don't think it's that they're more important, but rather that a vendor serving the governmental market doesn't have to play by exactly the same rules as a vendor serving the private market.
In some models of intellectual property, private companies are not allowed to deny the government use of protected IP, if doing so would benefit the company to the detriment of the gov't -- and when the gov't is harmed, so are all the companies in the country.
Imagine if a private inventor had developed and patented the M-16 rifle. Would it be right if the military had to pay this guy billions of dollars in license fees just to arm our soldiers? Would it be in the country's best interests?
But if they don't want SQL, then why are they using an SQL RDBMS in the first place?
How many non-SQL RDBMS's do you know of? How many of them compare to MySQL in terms of enterprise-readiness, much less Oracle or Sybase?
SQL is the lingua franca of relational database management. Any advantage in performance you might get from being able to bypass SQL's lexical parsing and query the data model directly is eclipsed by the lack of support, scalability, portability, and developer knowledge that come with a non-SQL database.
Whereas this is true, it's also true that using "?" parameters for any user-entered values can solve the SQL injection problem just as well.
Yeah basically.
When it comes down to it, somewhere along the line your application needs to understand what are valid parameters to a database call and what are not. There's nothing about DBMS-layer stored procedures that is intrinsically better at this than business-layer code, especially if you use a mature DB abstraction package.
The benefit of stored procedures in reducing useless traffic between the database and the business layer is harder to deny. Sometimes, especially in transactional operations, you can't write a single SQL query complex enough to provide just the data you need.
I have to agree with parent; it's way too soon in the cycle to be introducing a new media format to the market.
If people cared that much about fidelity that they were willing to upgrade to every new technology that came along, laserdisc would have superceded videotape about 20 years ago.
Heck, we've had audiophile DAT, SACD and DVD-Audio formats for years now, and most people still buy their music on 25-year-old CD media. And next up to rule the market: MP3 and its compressed audio cousins--a net DECREASE in audio fidelity.
Blue-Ray and/or HD-DVD may find adoption as high-density media for data applications, but I think for consumer A/V products plain old DVD-Video is going to stay on top for another 5-10 years.
I find myself supporting Microsoft's stance on letting customers stream their DVDs to other devices in the house.
That's not really their stance, though. The real stance is "consumers should be allowed to stream content to whatever device they like -- as long as that device is a licensed Microsoft Media Center Extender[TM]."
If MS were devoted to unfettered content sharing, XP Media Center Edition would save its TV recordings as raw MPEG-2 files, rather than wrapping them in their.ms-dvr DRM container. My portable media player doesn't support.ms-dvr, so I'm pretty much fucked, aren't I?
"Supermasterpiece.com" is a humor site. Therefore, it should be assumed that the alleged Satchmo recording of a Britney Spears song falls into the realm of parody, not that of genuine historical artifact.
"Informative" moderation is incorrect and will be meta-modded as such.
Running the same basic query against our main table took PostGres over 2 minutes.
Jesus! I've been working with PG for five years and I've never been able to conceive of a query that took two minutes to run. I have to wonder: 1. just how 'basic' is this query of yours? 2. how many rows in your table? 3. what level is your database design normalized to? (what is a 'main table' anyway?) 4. do you have appropriate indexes, etc. to optimize common queries?
But that's why you need to install it and perform some benchmarking. Do not rely on others, including me, to tell you which is better.
Oh, absolutely. Benchmarking yields very few universal truths.
That's not accurate either. I could be a Windows user without a portable music player at all, and still install the iTunes software and buy from the iTunes Music Store.
I have to wonder, is Apple to blame for all the misunderstanding about compatibilities between iPods, other MP3 devices, iTunes, other music library programs, iTunes Music Store, and other digital music sources? They want people to think of iPod+iTunes+iTMS as an inseperable package, but that implies less choice than users actually have...
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And yes, I know he isn't the same as the keyboard guy.
True, but his "New World" Symphony IS pretty kickin'.
IMO Microsoft made computing cheap (as in $) well before Linux was a twinkle in Linus' eye.
An IBM PC-compatible running MS-DOS was just about the most expensive home computer you could own in the 1980s (apart from the Macintosh).
The Commodore 64 and Amiga, the Apple 8-bit line, the Atari 8-bits and ST, the Tandy Color Computer... all of these were insanely cheap at a time when a 286 system would cost you $2000 or more.
"It looks a bit spaghetti [but] we can cast it in any shape."
They would just need to swap out the die on their Play-Doh Fun Factory.
With an open source project, you can pay one developer to work on just your stuff, have him start work immediately, and without layers of overhead adding onto the price.
"Hey, this is Joe 'Leet at Rent-An-OSS-Freelancer Incorporated... got your feature request proposal... to implement what you're asking for, I'm going to have to familiarize myself with 3,000,000 lines of code, acquire expert-level knowledge of digital signal processing, and then actually write and integrate the code that does what you want. My estimate is that this will cost you $225,000 and take 18 months to finish. Let me know when you'd like to stop by and sign the work order... 'kay, later."
Most likely, your bank is running its mortgage application on a seven year old database.
Yes, but that database system is a relatively bulletproof monster with a 25-year pedigree.
And while the production systems may be running a 7-year-old version right now, you can be sure they have a test machine with a 1-year-old version of the same DBMS on it, getting it certified so that when the old version is end-of-lifed they will be able to migrate seamlessly.
The thing I would really like to see is a way to in a fool proof way, move databases from MySQL to Postgres and have all of our PHP scripts (not custom, some commercial, some custom, and none with time for us to go and find every little change required) just work.
You will only be able to make a foolproof migration if the commercial PHP/SQL scripts weren't written by fools in the first place.
If they use the PEAR libraries (which SHOULD be the built-in default methods for DB interfacing in PHP, but the MySQL libs have history and inertia on their side), switching platforms should be as easy as replacing the DB connect string.
If they use the builtin MySQL-specific functions, but all the SQL code is standard, it'll take some search-and-replacing, but it's not TOO much work to migrate.
If they use nonstandard SQL extensions, there's not much you can do but refactor everything by hand.
There should be a software mechanism that automatically identifies dependencies and resolves them.
I still don't understand what you're trying to suggest.
Say Application X writes to Tables A, B, and C. Application Y writes to Tables A and D. Under what circumstances would App X need to know that data in Table A had been put there by App Y, or vice versa? How do existing database systems fall short of satisfying such a need? Keep in mind that table- and row-level locking, access control rules by account or schema, and NOTIFY-type triggers already exist in most modern SQL systems.
Modifications made to a complex system can have unforeseen consequences if programmers are not aware of the dependencies.
While true in a general sense, I'm not sure the correct solution to the problem is to add ADDITIONAL complexity the the system.
For the record, all my liberal friends tell me constantly that Fox News is oh-so-biased and CNN is oh-so-great, without EVER citing a single example for either case.
Here's an example: FoxNews posted an editorial about Microsoft products, written by a Microsoft advocate and employee. They did not disclose the author's conflict of interest.
CNN, in comparison, did NOT post the FUDitorial. This doesn't make them flawless, but in this case they're at least better than Fox.
This guy reminds me of the scene in Mallrats where they're trying to have an intellectual discussion about superman's baby. He's over thinking and over analyzing something that really just isn't that deep.
It must have been a challenging task to find the one scene in any of Kevin Smith's movies where that happens.
The only software that wikipedia attributes to Gates personally was the Altair BASIC interpreter, and even that was co-authored with Paul Allen.
So, where are your "indications" ?
Hey, don't forget about DONKEY.BAS!
" has the potential to become the world's most powerful, easiest-to-use and simply the world's best graphics program"
So does MS Paint, but I fully expect that potential to go unrealized.
E-mail WON'T CUT IT.
Do you have any evidence that snail mail is more effective at influencing governmental stance than email is? Perhaps a link to an on-the-record statement from a congressional staffer you could provide us?
Paper letters take more effort to write, yes, but they also take more effort to handle at the congressional office. I'd like to think that my representatives in the federal government and their staffs have better things to do than slice envelopes open all day. And that's why I write e-mail. And I know they pay attention to it because I get response messages, even from Old Man Lautenberg's office.
People criticise fine art and serious musicians for being elitist, but television and the recording industry show what happens when you have a non-elitist entertainment industry. Specifically, you get crap. Lots of it.
Don't tell me that you think 80% of "fine art" and "serious music" isn't CRAP, also.
And despite your opinion that the television industry is spewing out nothing but crap, I somehow manage to keep my DVR's somewhat large hard drive full of interesting programming from week to week.
MP3 works just fine
That's my point.
Consumers value convenience over pristine fidelity. And it's far more convenient for consumers to continue buying the same DVD format they have been for the past five years than it is to junk all their equipment and re-buy their entire video library in some new format.
Do you suppose there's a www.crossingguard.org where people post complaints like "Goddamn ignorant little kids, not being able to cross the road on their own"?
The difference is, there's no reason that a schoolchild should be expected to perform a simple task without having a grownup there to hold his or her hand constantly.
Whereas an executive who's apparently competent enough to pull in a six-figure salary...
Why are gov't employees more important?
I don't think it's that they're more important, but rather that a vendor serving the governmental market doesn't have to play by exactly the same rules as a vendor serving the private market.
In some models of intellectual property, private companies are not allowed to deny the government use of protected IP, if doing so would benefit the company to the detriment of the gov't -- and when the gov't is harmed, so are all the companies in the country.
Imagine if a private inventor had developed and patented the M-16 rifle. Would it be right if the military had to pay this guy billions of dollars in license fees just to arm our soldiers? Would it be in the country's best interests?
But if they don't want SQL, then why are they using an SQL RDBMS in the first place?
How many non-SQL RDBMS's do you know of? How many of them compare to MySQL in terms of enterprise-readiness, much less Oracle or Sybase?
SQL is the lingua franca of relational database management. Any advantage in performance you might get from being able to bypass SQL's lexical parsing and query the data model directly is eclipsed by the lack of support, scalability, portability, and developer knowledge that come with a non-SQL database.
Whereas this is true, it's also true that using "?" parameters for any user-entered values can solve the SQL injection problem just as well.
Yeah basically.
When it comes down to it, somewhere along the line your application needs to understand what are valid parameters to a database call and what are not. There's nothing about DBMS-layer stored procedures that is intrinsically better at this than business-layer code, especially if you use a mature DB abstraction package.
The benefit of stored procedures in reducing useless traffic between the database and the business layer is harder to deny. Sometimes, especially in transactional operations, you can't write a single SQL query complex enough to provide just the data you need.
I have to agree with parent; it's way too soon in the cycle to be introducing a new media format to the market.
If people cared that much about fidelity that they were willing to upgrade to every new technology that came along, laserdisc would have superceded videotape about 20 years ago.
Heck, we've had audiophile DAT, SACD and DVD-Audio formats for years now, and most people still buy their music on 25-year-old CD media. And next up to rule the market: MP3 and its compressed audio cousins--a net DECREASE in audio fidelity.
Blue-Ray and/or HD-DVD may find adoption as high-density media for data applications, but I think for consumer A/V products plain old DVD-Video is going to stay on top for another 5-10 years.
I find myself supporting Microsoft's stance on letting customers stream their DVDs to other devices in the house.
.ms-dvr DRM container. My portable media player doesn't support .ms-dvr, so I'm pretty much fucked, aren't I?
That's not really their stance, though. The real stance is "consumers should be allowed to stream content to whatever device they like -- as long as that device is a licensed Microsoft Media Center Extender[TM]."
If MS were devoted to unfettered content sharing, XP Media Center Edition would save its TV recordings as raw MPEG-2 files, rather than wrapping them in their
Dear moderators:
"Supermasterpiece.com" is a humor site. Therefore, it should be assumed that the alleged Satchmo recording of a Britney Spears song falls into the realm of parody, not that of genuine historical artifact.
"Informative" moderation is incorrect and will be meta-modded as such.
"Listen, are you gonna have those TPM reports for us this afternoon?"
9 times out of 10, Notepad.exe will run on Wine
That's almost as good as the success rate running it on native Windows!
(no, don't mod me up, this is CLEAR instance of karma-whoring via MS-bashing. don't.)
Running the same basic query against our main table took PostGres over 2 minutes.
Jesus! I've been working with PG for five years and I've never been able to conceive of a query that took two minutes to run. I have to wonder:
1. just how 'basic' is this query of yours?
2. how many rows in your table?
3. what level is your database design normalized to? (what is a 'main table' anyway?)
4. do you have appropriate indexes, etc. to optimize common queries?
But that's why you need to install it and perform some benchmarking. Do not rely on others, including me, to tell you which is better.
Oh, absolutely. Benchmarking yields very few universal truths.
That's not accurate either. I could be a Windows user without a portable music player at all, and still install the iTunes software and buy from the iTunes Music Store.
I have to wonder, is Apple to blame for all the misunderstanding about compatibilities between iPods, other MP3 devices, iTunes, other music library programs, iTunes Music Store, and other digital music sources? They want people to think of iPod+iTunes+iTMS as an inseperable package, but that implies less choice than users actually have...