That bill includes telephone, internet, and TV feeds. In much of the US DSL is down to $14.95, and high speed cable or FIOS is running about $50 for a 15 mb/sec feed in some areas. My cable service just announced a 30 mbit/sec premium service, and has hinted at 50 mbit/sec.
That is totally unacceptable performance from a mission critical database.
And here is the description of how MySQL is used at Travelocity:
For the shopping portion everything is done on a Linux farm (45 HP rx5670 4x1.5GHz 32 GB RAM). Pricing/booking is handled by a farm of HP NonStop servers, 17 nodes with 6 processors in each. Master database (not MySQL) is kept on NonStop and replicated to the Linux farms via GoldenGate Extractor/Replicator. The GoldenGate extractor replicates anywhere from 10 to 60 GB of data a day, typically gets data to all machines within 3-6 seconds. InnoDB is used, database on Linux are currently ~60GB in size.
In other words, MySQL serves as a cache of a non-MySQL database. Sorry, but it sure seems to me that MySQL is NOT the mission critical database in use here. THe data the resides in MySQL is rebuilt on a very frequent basis from a master copy.
Google probably considers AdWords to be mission-critical, since it is their revenue source.
Right, and Iam sure they are not happy over the early decisions that were made in the implementation of this project. Here are some of the comments in the article describing this:
We finally decided to go with a commercial database (I won't say which one) over the objections of a number of engineers, including myself. To ease the transition it was decided to convert AdWords over to the new system first, and to do the main ads system later. It was a project on a par with the internationalzation effort in terms of the tedious work required to comb over nearly all of the AdWords code and change all of the database queries. (Databases are supposed to all be compatible with one another, but in reality they pretty much aren't.)
In other words the MySQL application code that runs this thing is a giant stinking pile of doggy do. MySQL is well known for not supporting standard SQL, so if you use it and decide later you want an alternative your are well and truly screwed. Nor is this code abstracted out to a database access layer using technology like Hibernate where all you need is to redefine the data source. No wonder this guy is no longer a Google employee.
Now later in the article the author goes on to state that the alternative system actually was able to achive good performance. Now all of this was 4 years ago - Google has grown immensely now, is a publically traded company etc., and we do NOT know what they are using today, only what this blogger 'heard through the grapevine'. Google is very close-mouthed about what their internal technology implementations are, but one thing I'd bet is that as a publically traded company subject to Sarbanes Oxley, shareholder lawsuits, etc. they are NOT running jury rigged home brew transaction code to manage financial flows that are rapdily approaching a billion dollars a MONTH!!! It is absolutely farcical to believe this is what Google is doing. Criminy the executives at Google would be subject to jail time if this blew up.
Yeah, and if you read the article the author also states that they really didn't feel they needed tranactions, and later implemented a transaction manager themselves (I am sure THAT is really robust LOL). To me this sort of story utterly destroys any credibility. These guys are rank amatuers with no trace of a clue abut what they are doing.
Trying to port a ridiculous application like this to 'real' database (I'm assuming Oracle) is going to be painful at the best - MySQL is not standards compliant in any way, it doesn't have a real data dictionary (ever try to figure out how to query for FKEY constraints in MySQL? Serious pain there).
Not to mention that Yonah is a 65 nanonmeter part and doesn't offer 64 bit extensions. If you are looking at a laptop in the 2006 timeframe I'd strongly consider waiting for either the 2nd gen 65 nm Intel part (I forget the core name) or the 65 nm Turion dual core due later in 2006. Both will be seriously better than Yonah.
If you would take the time as an American to read the Declaration of Independence you would find that the colonists did not revolt over taxation, but rather a lack of self-determination, the one example being taxation without representation.
Now that we have this self-determination we are getting the government we deserve through apathy. Until things get bad enough where we have our cushy suburban lives disrupted by some sort of systemic collapse you can expect more of the same.
53 keys is too way many to interest me in relearning to type. If I was going to relearn typing I'd want a big gain from it - the only way I see that happening is with an 8 key cording keyboard.
Usually the thing that kills you is the database. Make sure you have a well desgined schema, every bit of RAM that you can cram on the db server machine, a scsi RAID array configured as 1+0, a fast multiport ethernet card connected directly to the web host and make damn sure you have a well impelemented connection pool used properly by your application.
Also make sure the server code is well designed, i.e. no select * stuff, just get what you actually need.
I think it is important to ask questions about the position, i.e. why is the position available (i.e. find out if previous incumbent went postal or got fired for banging secretary in stairwell etc.) as well as general questions about how success will be measured.
It now seems that Congress was advised that these investigations were going on before the press picked up on it. If so both the legislature and executive have let us down.
but you ALSO have to look at how effective they are at allowing big corporations to squash the little guy flat.
Not valid. Large corporations do NOT need patent laws to squash the little guy. All they have to do is copy the invention and let their market power win the day for them.
Without patent laws the little guy would NEVER, EVER win. While it is hard for the little guy to win now, he does have a chance. Without patent laws he would have ZERO chance.
Look at Microsoft - they have tried a number of times to just coopt inventions from other small companies - and when they do it they pretty much drive the small company out immediately. When this happens the only recourse (and sometimes it really works) is for the small company to sue.
This theory that patents only help large corporations is bullshit. Large corps can take care of themselves using other methods. The patent system in fact makes it possible for small inventors and research companies exist and be part of the mix.
As far as I can tell the incident under question was interception of international communications. The real puzzlement in this case is why the NSA didn't just go to the FISA court which routinely issues authorization for these sorts of intercepts. It is pretty unlikely that there would have been any issues with getting the authorization.
It seems to me to be more of a political foot-shot than anything.
Exactly, this story completely undermines the entire argument that the patent system somehow benefits small inventors--it doesn't.
I call bullshit.
Sure, the patent system does not protect every small inventor - however there are many cases of small inventors and companies benefitting from patent law against large companies. If there was no patent law how many of these stories would there be? Nada zip zero NONE.
Thus patents DO protect small inventors albeit imperfectly.
Unfortunately it is impossible to tell what makes this a novel idea without things like patent numbers and a more detailed look that the history of the portable casstte player. Making comments like 'why isn't this obvious' without actually doing the work to see what the deficiencies of the state of the art in the late '70s were is not being fair to the inventor.
I'll say it again: Ideas are almost entirely worthless.
Seriously. It's the implementation that counts. This is the problem most people have with the patent system, without even realizing that that's what their problem with it is.
If you would actually learn a bit about patent law you would find that Patents cover implementations, not ideas.
The problem with all systems like what China has is that distortions of the free market system due to excessive buraucracies always lead to a collapse of the monetary system. There are signs of this in China already with huge amounts of dead loans. IMHO there will be a huge banking collapse in the next 10-20 years leading to a big change in the government.
It is only a matter of time and how hard it will hit the rest of the world economies.
When it is over China will finally be a free nation.
The problem is that India and China have the numbers. Once these places are tapped out because of increasing internal demand the cost advantages are going to dry up and then we will *really* hear the whining from business who don't want to pay a real salary to their technical professionals.
It may, or may not have worked before, but reverse enginerieng has come a long way.
Companies have a lot of alternatives, including contract law to prevent reverse engineering. Be very careful when advocating elimination of patents - doing so will introduce a host of evils that are far worse.
These patent procedures are really impossible to understand.
THere are a lot of things in this world that are not easy to understand. quantum electrodynamics, reinnman geometry, organic chemistry, tort law, female psychology. Just because you haven't mastered an understanding of something doesn't mean it should be discarded or it isn't very useful.
Items that are revolutionary can be protected, temporarily, by hiding the process.
It is amazing how bad an understanding of history people have. What you are describing is the practice of trade secrets as existed prior to the invention of the concept of the patent. We have been there and done that. It doesn't work.
Use competitiveness instead of force to earn your future.
Your model would completely eliminate any economic progress. Large companies would be free to copy an idea, use it in their products and use their market position to crush any new ideas. I cannot imagine a more disasterous idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow Internet is expensive down south.
Wow you didn't read the article.
That bill includes telephone, internet, and TV feeds. In much of the US DSL is down to $14.95, and high speed cable or FIOS is running about $50 for a 15 mb/sec feed in some areas. My cable service just announced a 30 mbit/sec premium service, and has hinted at 50 mbit/sec.
That corrupted 5 of the database servers.
That is totally unacceptable performance from a mission critical database.
And here is the description of how MySQL is used at Travelocity:
For the shopping portion everything is done on a Linux farm (45 HP rx5670 4x1.5GHz 32 GB RAM). Pricing/booking is handled by a farm of HP NonStop servers, 17 nodes with 6 processors in each. Master database (not MySQL) is kept on NonStop and replicated to the Linux farms via GoldenGate Extractor/Replicator. The GoldenGate extractor replicates anywhere from 10 to 60 GB of data a day, typically gets data to all machines within 3-6 seconds. InnoDB is used, database on Linux are currently ~60GB in size.
In other words, MySQL serves as a cache of a non-MySQL database. Sorry, but it sure seems to me that MySQL is NOT the mission critical database in use here. THe data the resides in MySQL is rebuilt on a very frequent basis from a master copy.
Google probably considers AdWords to be mission-critical, since it is their revenue source.
Right, and Iam sure they are not happy over the early decisions that were made in the implementation of this project. Here are some of the comments in the article describing this:
We finally decided to go with a commercial database (I won't say which one) over the objections of a number of engineers, including myself. To ease the transition it was decided to convert AdWords over to the new system first, and to do the main ads system later. It was a project on a par with the internationalzation effort in terms of the tedious work required to comb over nearly all of the AdWords code and change all of the database queries. (Databases are supposed to all be compatible with one another, but in reality they pretty much aren't.)
In other words the MySQL application code that runs this thing is a giant stinking pile of doggy do. MySQL is well known for not supporting standard SQL, so if you use it and decide later you want an alternative your are well and truly screwed. Nor is this code abstracted out to a database access layer using technology like Hibernate where all you need is to redefine the data source. No wonder this guy is no longer a Google employee.
Now later in the article the author goes on to state that the alternative system actually was able to achive good performance. Now all of this was 4 years ago - Google has grown immensely now, is a publically traded company etc., and we do NOT know what they are using today, only what this blogger 'heard through the grapevine'. Google is very close-mouthed about what their internal technology implementations are, but one thing I'd bet is that as a publically traded company subject to Sarbanes Oxley, shareholder lawsuits, etc. they are NOT running jury rigged home brew transaction code to manage financial flows that are rapdily approaching a billion dollars a MONTH!!! It is absolutely farcical to believe this is what Google is doing. Criminy the executives at Google would be subject to jail time if this blew up.
Didn't Wikipedia crash this year due to MySQL data corruption?
The fact is that in almost any company you will find people using MySQL here and there as a file manager. But for mission critical stuff? Nope.
Yeah, and if you read the article the author also states that they really didn't feel they needed tranactions, and later implemented a transaction manager themselves (I am sure THAT is really robust LOL). To me this sort of story utterly destroys any credibility. These guys are rank amatuers with no trace of a clue abut what they are doing.
Trying to port a ridiculous application like this to 'real' database (I'm assuming Oracle) is going to be painful at the best - MySQL is not standards compliant in any way, it doesn't have a real data dictionary (ever try to figure out how to query for FKEY constraints in MySQL? Serious pain there).
Not to mention that Yonah is a 65 nanonmeter part and doesn't offer 64 bit extensions. If you are looking at a laptop in the 2006 timeframe I'd strongly consider waiting for either the 2nd gen 65 nm Intel part (I forget the core name) or the 65 nm Turion dual core due later in 2006. Both will be seriously better than Yonah.
If you would take the time as an American to read the Declaration of Independence you would find that the colonists did not revolt over taxation, but rather a lack of self-determination, the one example being taxation without representation.
Now that we have this self-determination we are getting the government we deserve through apathy. Until things get bad enough where we have our cushy suburban lives disrupted by some sort of systemic collapse you can expect more of the same.
53 keys is too way many to interest me in relearning to type. If I was going to relearn typing I'd want a big gain from it - the only way I see that happening is with an 8 key cording keyboard.
The problem is you need the sales reciept, a rebate form and Maxtor UPC code for every drive they ever sold to get this rebate.
Usually the thing that kills you is the database. Make sure you have a well desgined schema, every bit of RAM that you can cram on the db server machine, a scsi RAID array configured as 1+0, a fast multiport ethernet card connected directly to the web host and make damn sure you have a well impelemented connection pool used properly by your application.
Also make sure the server code is well designed, i.e. no select * stuff, just get what you actually need.
Better High-Res images find a sign attached which reads "Up Yours Earthlings".
I think it is important to ask questions about the position, i.e. why is the position available (i.e. find out if previous incumbent went postal or got fired for banging secretary in stairwell etc.) as well as general questions about how success will be measured.
It now seems that Congress was advised that these investigations were going on before the press picked up on it. If so both the legislature and executive have let us down.
but you ALSO have to look at how effective they are at allowing big corporations to squash the little guy flat.
Not valid. Large corporations do NOT need patent laws to squash the little guy. All they have to do is copy the invention and let their market power win the day for them.
Without patent laws the little guy would NEVER, EVER win. While it is hard for the little guy to win now, he does have a chance. Without patent laws he would have ZERO chance.
Look at Microsoft - they have tried a number of times to just coopt inventions from other small companies - and when they do it they pretty much drive the small company out immediately. When this happens the only recourse (and sometimes it really works) is for the small company to sue.
This theory that patents only help large corporations is bullshit. Large corps can take care of themselves using other methods. The patent system in fact makes it possible for small inventors and research companies exist and be part of the mix.
As far as I can tell the incident under question was interception of international communications. The real puzzlement in this case is why the NSA didn't just go to the FISA court which routinely issues authorization for these sorts of intercepts. It is pretty unlikely that there would have been any issues with getting the authorization.
It seems to me to be more of a political foot-shot than anything.
Exactly, this story completely undermines the entire argument that the patent system somehow benefits small inventors--it doesn't.
I call bullshit.
Sure, the patent system does not protect every small inventor - however there are many cases of small inventors and companies benefitting from patent law against large companies. If there was no patent law how many of these stories would there be? Nada zip zero NONE.
Thus patents DO protect small inventors albeit imperfectly.
So why is this not an obvious invention?
Unfortunately it is impossible to tell what makes this a novel idea without things like patent numbers and a more detailed look that the history of the portable casstte player. Making comments like 'why isn't this obvious' without actually doing the work to see what the deficiencies of the state of the art in the late '70s were is not being fair to the inventor.
I'll say it again: Ideas are almost entirely worthless.
Seriously. It's the implementation that counts. This is the problem most people have with the patent system, without even realizing that that's what their problem with it is.
If you would actually learn a bit about patent law you would find that Patents cover implementations, not ideas.
So you would like the Army to decide who they invaded and who they didn't invade?
The problem with all systems like what China has is that distortions of the free market system due to excessive buraucracies always lead to a collapse of the monetary system. There are signs of this in China already with huge amounts of dead loans. IMHO there will be a huge banking collapse in the next 10-20 years leading to a big change in the government.
It is only a matter of time and how hard it will hit the rest of the world economies.
When it is over China will finally be a free nation.
The problem is that India and China have the numbers. Once these places are tapped out because of increasing internal demand the cost advantages are going to dry up and then we will *really* hear the whining from business who don't want to pay a real salary to their technical professionals.
Big world war?
More likely less wage disparity between countries.
It may, or may not have worked before, but reverse enginerieng has come a long way.
Companies have a lot of alternatives, including contract law to prevent reverse engineering. Be very careful when advocating elimination of patents - doing so will introduce a host of evils that are far worse.
We've been there and done that. It wasn't pretty.
No where in the world do people give up their own constitutionally protected rights faster on the slightest scare than in the USA.
That's a ridiculous ssertion, not backed up by the fact that most democarcies have been eroding civil liberties like crazy recently. For example:
http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/1-84-174183-3
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/Inde
http://www.quaker.org/qcea/aroundeurope/2003/255.
http://uninews.unimelb.edu.au/articleid_2938.html
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:l-h-3gElzYcJ
http://www.forumsec.org.fj/news/2004/July/July_08
http://www.statewatch.org/news/2003/apr/18funrigh
Millions of new products come out annually without patents.
Millions of trivial products. Important products are almost always protected by patents.
Patents don't make people innovate, they prevent innovation and enhancement.
No, they reward innovation and enhancement. And they make it worthwhile for companies to fund the research needed to develop those inventions.
Look at what happened just this week with the Lipitor patents and Pfizer, and the impact that ruling had on the entire pharamcuetical industry.
These patent procedures are really impossible to understand.
THere are a lot of things in this world that are not easy to understand. quantum electrodynamics, reinnman geometry, organic chemistry, tort law, female psychology. Just because you haven't mastered an understanding of something doesn't mean it should be discarded or it isn't very useful.
Items that are revolutionary can be protected, temporarily, by hiding the process.
It is amazing how bad an understanding of history people have. What you are describing is the practice of trade secrets as existed prior to the invention of the concept of the patent. We have been there and done that. It doesn't work.
Use competitiveness instead of force to earn your future.
Your model would completely eliminate any economic progress. Large companies would be free to copy an idea, use it in their products and use their market position to crush any new ideas. I cannot imagine a more disasterous idea.