It's not just Isreal. They view our very culture as overbearing and anti-Muslim. And unless we want to roll back over 200 years of progress in women's and religious rights, we can't change that. sure we can. it's not our attitude towards women's rights that they consider anti-muslim. nor is it our religious freedom. overall muslims don't automatically dislike non-muslims any more than christians dislike non-christians. (*) their biggest issue with our culture is that it is overly materialistic, and not conducive to a healthy spiritual life (something many other religious groups have said as well)
However, giving in to the terrorists is not the answer. i never said that giving into the terrorists was the answer, nor do i believe that. but i do believe our blind support of everything isreal does in the region has earned us a lot of enemies. regardless of 'the ultimate palestinian objective'(**), isreal has done a lot of horrific things in their 'defense', and we have turned a blind eye or even congratulated them for their efforts time and time again. isreal wouldn't even be occupying much of palestine if we hadn't handed them one of the world's largest and best equipped military forces. sure, they needed it for self-defense, but they used it to practically triple the size of their country, over the protests of most of the world. i don't believe we need to give any concessions to terrorists, and i see no reason we shouldn't hunt them down. but i also think we can do a lot to change our foreign policy and stop acting like a beligerent schoolyard bully, and in the process greatly reduce the likelyhood that we will be the target of large well-orchestrated terrorist attacks.
george bush is probably the terrorists' greatest recruiting tool.(***) i've lost count of the number of times that i've seen prominent arab and non-arab world leaders say that his policies are largely to blame for anti-US sentiments in countries all around the world. and this is supposed to help us win the 'War on Terror'?
(*) I am not trying to prop up the Christian religion here. Obviously the Christian Church is no model of religious tolerance, especially historically, but most Christians today are capable interacting civilly with people of other beliefs (so long as those people don't do anything to demean their own beliefs) The same could be said of most Muslims. My point is that Americans are still not perfect when it comes to religious rights, and the Muslims are not so far behind us as a lot of people like to believe.
(**) While this may be true of many Palestineans, I suspect that there are still many others (most?) that would just as soon live in peace and only want Isreal to leave the land they illegaly invaded.
(***) Ironically Michael Moore is probably their second best....
I've read all of the specs for DVD-A and SACD, and I am aware of the differences between the two. The point is not that DVD-A is not better than CD, but that it's not better enough. Probably 90% of CD consumers don't care about the difference, or don't have/can't afford a setup that would allow them to distinguish the difference. You can by a diskman for under 30 bucks. you can buy a decent 3 speaker bookshelf stereo with CD player for about $50. How much for a quality surround sound amp, 6 speaker setup, and SACD/DVD-A player? Never mind the lack of availability of portable options such as car stereos and diskmans.
The vast majority of music purchasers will not upgrade to SACD/DVD-A any time soon, and so for the forseeable future, every new release will still be availabe on CD, while only releases that are expected to sell in high enough volume will be deemed worth the additional expense of selling on DVD-A/SACD. And this would be true regardless of whether there was concern over competing advanced formats.
I still believe that the DAT analogy was accurate, but maybe MiniDisk would have been more appropriate. DAT and MiniDisk were both designed to provide CD quality digital audio that addressed the two biggest initial shortcomings of CDs- skipping and lack of recordability. The point was neither one caught on because despite the fact that both offered benefits over the CD, the benefits were not seen by the market as being important enough to buy a new player and start collecting media in a new format.
And the same thing will happen with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. No movie distributer will want to lose the large base of installed DVD players, so every new movie that comes out will still be released as DVD, with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD being saved for the special editions with more features than will fit on a standard DVD (which most people never watch anyway.) And most people will keep buying the DVDs because they will cost less. DVD will be king for a long time to come, just because it was here first.
most US companies get 6 to 8 holidays (memorial and labor day, independence day, thanksgiving, chirstmas, new years. after that it depends where you work, usually some combination of the day after thanksgiving, the day before christmas, veterans day, presidents day, martin luther king jr, etc.) I've never worked at or heard of a company that had more than 8 holidays.
even if everyone in a US company were to take their vacation at the same time (something most US companies would never allow) most US workers only get 2-3 weeks of vacation a year. so all together, most US workers get less than a month total vacation, and 1/4 - 1/3 of that we have no choice when we use.
so there is a big difference between US and europeans, even if europeans don't actually schedule a month off in the middle of the year. the difference is that most europeans (at least the ones that i've spoken to) get much more vacation overall than their american counterparts, and the work culture there allows for most or all of a company to take vacation at the same time, something that as far as i am aware never happens here in the US, except for the 1-2 day holidays scattered around the year.
i don't think the lousy performance of DVD-A and SACD have anything to do with format competition. even if there were only one format it wouldn't be going anywhere. DVD-A/SACD is no different from DAT- a solution in search of a problem. from the consumer point of view, neither one offers any benefit over CD. of course the record industry want the consumer base to adopt an encrypted format to help curb "rampant piracy" but the consumer doesn't care. all they see is a higher priced disk offering special features of dubious value.
at any rate i doubt i'll buy either of these formats anytime soon. i'm actually just about to buy a new dvd player because my first generation sony is finally giving up the ghost. DVD will end up the same way MP3 did. higher quality formats than MP3 have been around for over 5 years, and it is only within the last year starting to lose ground, mainly due to the online music stores preferring DRM'able formats. if not for apple, mp3 would probably continue to be the dominant format for another 5 years.
too true. i had a nobel laureate as a teacher in my freshman physics course in college. brilliant man, and a great researcher, but i couldn't help being amused seeing him stumble over basic physics problems and getting stuck to the point that the class would have to point out what he was doing wrong.
Re:RTFM is the fix?
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In many European countries there is a month long period where everyone goes on vacation. As I understand it, pretty much the entire country except for basic service industries shuts down for a month. I don't understand the specifics, as I've never been to Europe during a vaction, but I did work on a project once with SwedenPost (the Swedish Post Office) that ended up being pushed back quite a bit because the original project schedule had us going into client QA right as the entire company took a month and a half off for vacation. And this was the Post Office!
So I doubt that the fact that all of the company's officials were on summer vaction at the same time reflects on their abilities to design complicated hardware. It's just business as usual over there.
And as the article points out, NASA probably could have gotten the specs if they had signed an NDA but they didn't believe they were necessary. Given that statement, it's quite possible that no one would have looked at the specs close enough to notice the problem, even if they had them.
It is Outhouse Springs, and if I remember correctly the tagline is something like "It's number 1, not number 2!"
I've seen billboards for it, but only along a small stretch of I94 in southern michigan. The fact that I only ever saw the billboards in that one area and have never actually seen it sold anywhere has led me to wonder whether the whole thing was just a joke.
Since I've never been to Russia, Finland or ex-eastern Europe (have the plates drifted that much- last i checked it was still eastern Europe) are you suggesting that the theives there are more or less technologically advanced than in the U.S?
For comparison, most apartments I've lived in or visited in chicago have no less then 3 locks on each door to the unit as well as a locked door to get into the building. some of them even had special keys to get into the building which could not be duplicated. replacing a lost key meant installing a new lock and reissuing keys to everyone in the building (needless to say, loosing your keys was an expensive thing to do if you lived there) To be honest though, I would say this says less about the sophistication of theives in Chicago, and more about the tendency of people in large cities (at least in the U.S.) to a) be very paranoid, and b) completely ignore anything bad going on around them that doesn't directly affect them.
My wife discovered while traveling in europe that crystal vases have a high enough lead content to block airport x-rays. The security people made her unpack her entire bag (large backpack that was carrying all of her clothes and souvenirs from a three week trip) so they could see what she was 'hiding' inside the vase.
I would guess that our behaviour in isreal and the other middle eastern countries over the last 20 years would have more to do with why we are targetted and hated throughout the world than anything realting to the cold war (unless maybe you're in china or korea).
Interesting thing I noticed during the presidential debates when it came to national security. Both candidates talked a lot about things that they would do to try and make Americans safer from terrorism, but neither ever addressed the simple fact that if everyone in the word didn't hate us so much, we wouldn't have as much of a problem. Given how much of the current hatred in the Middle East towards our country is a direct result of Bush's policies, I'd feel infinitely safer with Kerry as president than Bush. (Never mind that I believe the "War on Terror" is merely a Bush campaign play to distract most Americans from the real problems in our country. And it seems to be working...)
Not exactly a dupe, because it is referring to a different article, but this article is discussing the same project that was covered Wednesday in The War of the Virtual Worlds
if microsoft released a product like this we would be blaming them because it revealed the poor security of the underlying windows system- namely that by default any user can read any other users files. since google released this tool instead of microsoft, we are still blaming microsoft, because it has revealed the poor security of the underlying windows system.
we'd probably also complain that microsoft's indexing procedure was leaving junk files named ms.createdir or somesuch nonsense scattered all over our hard drive. which, btw, is one reason i hated using the search assistant in office, which would index the hard drive so that the windows 'find file' search would return results faster. in other words, basically everything the google desktop search does except without the nice user interface for the results, and without the ability to search for emails in outlook, which i consider to be a godsend.
i would say this is especially true in the case of console games. seriously, how many people have the necessary equipment and could figure out how to play a ps2 or xbox game they downloaded off the net? the dent this will make in sales will be completely unnoticeable for them, but they have just been given some of the best publicity they could have gotten for this game.
while i agree with you overall, i would hardly say that grand theft auto is targeted towards kids. in fact, i would say that the growing trend these days is to not target games towards kids, but towards young adults who have much more money to spend on new games and consoles. i would guess that the target market for gta, halo 2, and most other new xbox and ps2 games is around 18-26. only nintendo has continued to focus most of its efforts on the younger age group, and look where it's gotten them.
copying software is not theft, but it is copyright infringement and therefore illegal. you are free to believe that copying software it is not morally wrong, and you are free to believe that the law wrong. however, regardless of what you believe, it is still illegal, and unless the law is changed or repealed, you can get in significant trouble for it regardless of whether you believe it to be morally right or wrong.
I guess I can't speak for everyone else, but for my part, I wouldn't say that I hate it, just that I see very few uses where it is appropriate. In this particular case, it seems very appropriate- They need extremely high nearly read-only performance, and all of the data being stored in the system is coming from outside providers, so they are not losing mission critical data when it ineveitably takes a dump. It looks as though they are using it as a sort of data cache/aggregator rather than as a store of business-critical data. The first is something MySQL excels at, the second is not.
MySQL does have it's uses. I worked for a now defunct internet advertising company while i was in college. They used MySQL extensively in the ad serving process- they would create a queue of ads for a given visitor to a site, and store the queue and the history of ads served to that visitor in MySQL. They also used it to do various queries for targetting purposes, such as geographic targetting. Oracle was used to keep track of all of the important data (numbers of impressions, click-thrus, etc.- the stuff that made them money) but it was nowhere near fast enough to do all of the work that MySQL did. So there were a couple of dedicated Oracle database that did all of the tracking and logging, while each pool of webservers had it's own MySQL database to do targetting and such. If a MySQL database got corrupted (it happened pretty frequently- there were at least 40 MySQL databases) we just truncated the user queues and histories and copied a backup of the tables used for targetting and they were up and running again. the worst that happened was that somebody who had been served an ad by that server might see the same ad again before the other ads it was supposed to serve. They were using this setup to serve over 6 billion banners a month when doubleclick bought them out.
I can't say whether this is still true now, but at that time ('99 or so) for doing simple queries MySQL was so far beyond anything else out there in terms of speed that it wasn't even funny. Of course you took a big hit in data integrity to get that speed, but in some cases it's worth it if that's what you really need. Of course, most people who use MySQL don't really have that need, bt that's not to say it doesn't have its uses.
I know MySQL has improved dramatically since the last time I used it (early 2001), both in speed and features. However, I don't believe I will ever use it again, not because I don't like the features or the database, but because I no longer trust the developers to know what they are doing. I have read too many announcements on their website, and too many mailing list discussions that indicate that they don't really understand the theory behind what they are trying to write, why people ask for certain features, and what those features really mean.
I'm not database nazi- over the last year or so i have used pgSQL, MS SQL Server, and Oracle for various projects and reasons. All of them are solid applications and I feel that I can trust them to do what they are supposed to do. (say what you will about Microsoft, SQL Server is a pretty solid product. Besides, they didn't write it, they lifted it from Sybase)
I continue to follow MySQL's progress from time to time, and maybe in time I will use it again, but it willtake a long time for the MySQL developers to prve to me why I should trust them with my data.
i've known too many people that have purchased or assembled their own pvr device who suddenly find they now have to spend every free moment watching all of the shows their magic box recorded for them while they were working or sleeping or doing some other thing that forced them away from the tv for a few minutes. if you're not one of them good for you.
As the other respondent pointed out, i probably should have attributed the quote to jack valenti, the head of the MPAA. it was from an article by Joel Stein in Entertainment Weekly a while back.
Actual article: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary/ 0,6115,442 431_7||400257|0_0_,00.html (you can't read the whole thing unless you are a subscriber.)
Quote in context: When I asked Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti whether the director of the highest-grossing movie of all time [James Cameron, who was also in the PSA discussed in the article] was the ideal spokesperson against petty theft, he tap-danced. "I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs," said Valenti of the PSA, "the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that," he said, vastly overestimating the U.S. poverty level and what I get paid for this column. I vowed right then not only to pirate a movie but also to find a way to use the Internet to steal directly from Jack Valenti's home.
don't forget about the working stiffs, the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that.
while this may seem impressive to you, the rest of us are busy with our lives, working, enjoying the outdoors, or socializing with other members of the species (possibly even of the opposite sex).
wait, this is slashdot- you're probably the majority. i guess i'll just shut up now and go ride my bike.
However, I looked at the source of what is returned and this is not done using client-side script or an ActiveX object, so I'm not sure how they pull this off. This sort of scares me. For instance, the path to one of my files is seen coming from the their server.
although i haven't researched this very carefully yet, my guess would be that the google desktop application uses some invisible hooks to set itself as a proxy for http://*.google.com, and splices any of it's search results into the page that it gets back. at least that's how i would do it if i were writing such an application. sort of like a junkbuster, except its adding stuff to the results instead of filtering it out.
While I was impressed by the lockdown of interface to the local machine, this is easily compromised. In an hour or two I created a VBScript class that could host on the user's machine and use local HTTP to access this data.
i wouldn't say this is an issue for google to fix. if somebody else can get sufficient access to your machine to install and run a proxy daemon with your user permissions, you're pretty much fscked anyway, google desktop search or not.
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It's not just Isreal. They view our very culture as overbearing and anti-Muslim. And unless we want to roll back over 200 years of progress in women's and religious rights, we can't change that.
sure we can. it's not our attitude towards women's rights that they consider anti-muslim. nor is it our religious freedom. overall muslims don't automatically dislike non-muslims any more than christians dislike non-christians. (*) their biggest issue with our culture is that it is overly materialistic, and not conducive to a healthy spiritual life (something many other religious groups have said as well)
However, giving in to the terrorists is not the answer.
i never said that giving into the terrorists was the answer, nor do i believe that. but i do believe our blind support of everything isreal does in the region has earned us a lot of enemies. regardless of 'the ultimate palestinian objective'(**), isreal has done a lot of horrific things in their 'defense', and we have turned a blind eye or even congratulated them for their efforts time and time again. isreal wouldn't even be occupying much of palestine if we hadn't handed them one of the world's largest and best equipped military forces. sure, they needed it for self-defense, but they used it to practically triple the size of their country, over the protests of most of the world. i don't believe we need to give any concessions to terrorists, and i see no reason we shouldn't hunt them down. but i also think we can do a lot to change our foreign policy and stop acting like a beligerent schoolyard bully, and in the process greatly reduce the likelyhood that we will be the target of large well-orchestrated terrorist attacks.
george bush is probably the terrorists' greatest recruiting tool.(***) i've lost count of the number of times that i've seen prominent arab and non-arab world leaders say that his policies are largely to blame for anti-US sentiments in countries all around the world. and this is supposed to help us win the 'War on Terror'?
(*) I am not trying to prop up the Christian religion here. Obviously the Christian Church is no model of religious tolerance, especially historically, but most Christians today are capable interacting civilly with people of other beliefs (so long as those people don't do anything to demean their own beliefs) The same could be said of most Muslims. My point is that Americans are still not perfect when it comes to religious rights, and the Muslims are not so far behind us as a lot of people like to believe.
(**) While this may be true of many Palestineans, I suspect that there are still many others (most?) that would just as soon live in peace and only want Isreal to leave the land they illegaly invaded.
(***) Ironically Michael Moore is probably their second best....
I've read all of the specs for DVD-A and SACD, and I am aware of the differences between the two. The point is not that DVD-A is not better than CD, but that it's not better enough. Probably 90% of CD consumers don't care about the difference, or don't have/can't afford a setup that would allow them to distinguish the difference. You can by a diskman for under 30 bucks. you can buy a decent 3 speaker bookshelf stereo with CD player for about $50. How much for a quality surround sound amp, 6 speaker setup, and SACD/DVD-A player? Never mind the lack of availability of portable options such as car stereos and diskmans.
The vast majority of music purchasers will not upgrade to SACD/DVD-A any time soon, and so for the forseeable future, every new release will still be availabe on CD, while only releases that are expected to sell in high enough volume will be deemed worth the additional expense of selling on DVD-A/SACD. And this would be true regardless of whether there was concern over competing advanced formats.
I still believe that the DAT analogy was accurate, but maybe MiniDisk would have been more appropriate. DAT and MiniDisk were both designed to provide CD quality digital audio that addressed the two biggest initial shortcomings of CDs- skipping and lack of recordability. The point was neither one caught on because despite the fact that both offered benefits over the CD, the benefits were not seen by the market as being important enough to buy a new player and start collecting media in a new format.
And the same thing will happen with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD. No movie distributer will want to lose the large base of installed DVD players, so every new movie that comes out will still be released as DVD, with Blu-Ray/HD-DVD being saved for the special editions with more features than will fit on a standard DVD (which most people never watch anyway.) And most people will keep buying the DVDs because they will cost less. DVD will be king for a long time to come, just because it was here first.
most US companies get 6 to 8 holidays (memorial and labor day, independence day, thanksgiving, chirstmas, new years. after that it depends where you work, usually some combination of the day after thanksgiving, the day before christmas, veterans day, presidents day, martin luther king jr, etc.) I've never worked at or heard of a company that had more than 8 holidays.
even if everyone in a US company were to take their vacation at the same time (something most US companies would never allow) most US workers only get 2-3 weeks of vacation a year. so all together, most US workers get less than a month total vacation, and 1/4 - 1/3 of that we have no choice when we use.
so there is a big difference between US and europeans, even if europeans don't actually schedule a month off in the middle of the year. the difference is that most europeans (at least the ones that i've spoken to) get much more vacation overall than their american counterparts, and the work culture there allows for most or all of a company to take vacation at the same time, something that as far as i am aware never happens here in the US, except for the 1-2 day holidays scattered around the year.
i don't think the lousy performance of DVD-A and SACD have anything to do with format competition. even if there were only one format it wouldn't be going anywhere. DVD-A/SACD is no different from DAT- a solution in search of a problem. from the consumer point of view, neither one offers any benefit over CD. of course the record industry want the consumer base to adopt an encrypted format to help curb "rampant piracy" but the consumer doesn't care. all they see is a higher priced disk offering special features of dubious value.
at any rate i doubt i'll buy either of these formats anytime soon. i'm actually just about to buy a new dvd player because my first generation sony is finally giving up the ghost. DVD will end up the same way MP3 did. higher quality formats than MP3 have been around for over 5 years, and it is only within the last year starting to lose ground, mainly due to the online music stores preferring DRM'able formats. if not for apple, mp3 would probably continue to be the dominant format for another 5 years.
too true. i had a nobel laureate as a teacher in my freshman physics course in college. brilliant man, and a great researcher, but i couldn't help being amused seeing him stumble over basic physics problems and getting stuck to the point that the class would have to point out what he was doing wrong.
In many European countries there is a month long period where everyone goes on vacation. As I understand it, pretty much the entire country except for basic service industries shuts down for a month. I don't understand the specifics, as I've never been to Europe during a vaction, but I did work on a project once with SwedenPost (the Swedish Post Office) that ended up being pushed back quite a bit because the original project schedule had us going into client QA right as the entire company took a month and a half off for vacation. And this was the Post Office!
So I doubt that the fact that all of the company's officials were on summer vaction at the same time reflects on their abilities to design complicated hardware. It's just business as usual over there.
And as the article points out, NASA probably could have gotten the specs if they had signed an NDA but they didn't believe they were necessary. Given that statement, it's quite possible that no one would have looked at the specs close enough to notice the problem, even if they had them.
It is Outhouse Springs, and if I remember correctly the tagline is something like "It's number 1, not number 2!"
I've seen billboards for it, but only along a small stretch of I94 in southern michigan. The fact that I only ever saw the billboards in that one area and have never actually seen it sold anywhere has led me to wonder whether the whole thing was just a joke.
Since I've never been to Russia, Finland or ex-eastern Europe (have the plates drifted that much- last i checked it was still eastern Europe) are you suggesting that the theives there are more or less technologically advanced than in the U.S?
For comparison, most apartments I've lived in or visited in chicago have no less then 3 locks on each door to the unit as well as a locked door to get into the building. some of them even had special keys to get into the building which could not be duplicated. replacing a lost key meant installing a new lock and reissuing keys to everyone in the building (needless to say, loosing your keys was an expensive thing to do if you lived there) To be honest though, I would say this says less about the sophistication of theives in Chicago, and more about the tendency of people in large cities (at least in the U.S.) to a) be very paranoid, and b) completely ignore anything bad going on around them that doesn't directly affect them.
My wife discovered while traveling in europe that crystal vases have a high enough lead content to block airport x-rays. The security people made her unpack her entire bag (large backpack that was carrying all of her clothes and souvenirs from a three week trip) so they could see what she was 'hiding' inside the vase.
I would guess that our behaviour in isreal and the other middle eastern countries over the last 20 years would have more to do with why we are targetted and hated throughout the world than anything realting to the cold war (unless maybe you're in china or korea).
Interesting thing I noticed during the presidential debates when it came to national security. Both candidates talked a lot about things that they would do to try and make Americans safer from terrorism, but neither ever addressed the simple fact that if everyone in the word didn't hate us so much, we wouldn't have as much of a problem. Given how much of the current hatred in the Middle East towards our country is a direct result of Bush's policies, I'd feel infinitely safer with Kerry as president than Bush. (Never mind that I believe the "War on Terror" is merely a Bush campaign play to distract most Americans from the real problems in our country. And it seems to be working...)
Not exactly a dupe, because it is referring to a different article, but this article is discussing the same project that was covered Wednesday in The War of the Virtual Worlds
if microsoft released a product like this we would be blaming them because it revealed the poor security of the underlying windows system- namely that by default any user can read any other users files. since google released this tool instead of microsoft, we are still blaming microsoft, because it has revealed the poor security of the underlying windows system.
we'd probably also complain that microsoft's indexing procedure was leaving junk files named ms.createdir or somesuch nonsense scattered all over our hard drive. which, btw, is one reason i hated using the search assistant in office, which would index the hard drive so that the windows 'find file' search would return results faster. in other words, basically everything the google desktop search does except without the nice user interface for the results, and without the ability to search for emails in outlook, which i consider to be a godsend.
i would say this is especially true in the case of console games. seriously, how many people have the necessary equipment and could figure out how to play a ps2 or xbox game they downloaded off the net? the dent this will make in sales will be completely unnoticeable for them, but they have just been given some of the best publicity they could have gotten for this game.
while i agree with you overall, i would hardly say that grand theft auto is targeted towards kids. in fact, i would say that the growing trend these days is to not target games towards kids, but towards young adults who have much more money to spend on new games and consoles. i would guess that the target market for gta, halo 2, and most other new xbox and ps2 games is around 18-26. only nintendo has continued to focus most of its efforts on the younger age group, and look where it's gotten them.
copying software is not theft, but it is copyright infringement and therefore illegal. you are free to believe that copying software it is not morally wrong, and you are free to believe that the law wrong. however, regardless of what you believe, it is still illegal, and unless the law is changed or repealed, you can get in significant trouble for it regardless of whether you believe it to be morally right or wrong.
I guess I can't speak for everyone else, but for my part, I wouldn't say that I hate it, just that I see very few uses where it is appropriate. In this particular case, it seems very appropriate- They need extremely high nearly read-only performance, and all of the data being stored in the system is coming from outside providers, so they are not losing mission critical data when it ineveitably takes a dump. It looks as though they are using it as a sort of data cache/aggregator rather than as a store of business-critical data. The first is something MySQL excels at, the second is not.
MySQL does have it's uses. I worked for a now defunct internet advertising company while i was in college. They used MySQL extensively in the ad serving process- they would create a queue of ads for a given visitor to a site, and store the queue and the history of ads served to that visitor in MySQL. They also used it to do various queries for targetting purposes, such as geographic targetting. Oracle was used to keep track of all of the important data (numbers of impressions, click-thrus, etc.- the stuff that made them money) but it was nowhere near fast enough to do all of the work that MySQL did. So there were a couple of dedicated Oracle database that did all of the tracking and logging, while each pool of webservers had it's own MySQL database to do targetting and such. If a MySQL database got corrupted (it happened pretty frequently- there were at least 40 MySQL databases) we just truncated the user queues and histories and copied a backup of the tables used for targetting and they were up and running again. the worst that happened was that somebody who had been served an ad by that server might see the same ad again before the other ads it was supposed to serve. They were using this setup to serve over 6 billion banners a month when doubleclick bought them out.
I can't say whether this is still true now, but at that time ('99 or so) for doing simple queries MySQL was so far beyond anything else out there in terms of speed that it wasn't even funny. Of course you took a big hit in data integrity to get that speed, but in some cases it's worth it if that's what you really need. Of course, most people who use MySQL don't really have that need, bt that's not to say it doesn't have its uses.
I know MySQL has improved dramatically since the last time I used it (early 2001), both in speed and features. However, I don't believe I will ever use it again, not because I don't like the features or the database, but because I no longer trust the developers to know what they are doing. I have read too many announcements on their website, and too many mailing list discussions that indicate that they don't really understand the theory behind what they are trying to write, why people ask for certain features, and what those features really mean.
I'm not database nazi- over the last year or so i have used pgSQL, MS SQL Server, and Oracle for various projects and reasons. All of them are solid applications and I feel that I can trust them to do what they are supposed to do. (say what you will about Microsoft, SQL Server is a pretty solid product. Besides, they didn't write it, they lifted it from Sybase)
I continue to follow MySQL's progress from time to time, and maybe in time I will use it again, but it willtake a long time for the MySQL developers to prve to me why I should trust them with my data.
i think they make up for it with the overpriced coffee. it's like crossing starbucks with the local library.
alright i'm over myself now.
i've known too many people that have purchased or assembled their own pvr device who suddenly find they now have to spend every free moment watching all of the shows their magic box recorded for them while they were working or sleeping or doing some other thing that forced them away from the tv for a few minutes. if you're not one of them good for you.
As the other respondent pointed out, i probably should have attributed the quote to jack valenti, the head of the MPAA. it was from an article by Joel Stein in Entertainment Weekly a while back.
/ 0,6115,442 431_7||400257|0_0_,00.html
Actual article:
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/commentary
(you can't read the whole thing unless you are a subscriber.)
Quote in context:
When I asked Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti whether the director of the highest-grossing movie of all time [James Cameron, who was also in the PSA discussed in the article] was the ideal spokesperson against petty theft, he tap-danced. "I found the most convincing part to be the working stiffs," said Valenti of the PSA, "the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that," he said, vastly overestimating the U.S. poverty level and what I get paid for this column. I vowed right then not only to pirate a movie but also to find a way to use the Internet to steal directly from Jack Valenti's home.
now watch as all the browsers implement this, and millions of geeks around the world scream because they can no longer read slashdot.
don't forget about the working stiffs, the guys who have a modest home and kids who go to public schools. They make $75,000 to $100,000 a year. That's not much to live on. I don't have to tell you that.
while this may seem impressive to you, the rest of us are busy with our lives, working, enjoying the outdoors, or socializing with other members of the species (possibly even of the opposite sex).
wait, this is slashdot- you're probably the majority. i guess i'll just shut up now and go ride my bike.
However, I looked at the source of what is returned and this is not done using client-side script or an ActiveX object, so I'm not sure how they pull this off. This sort of scares me. For instance, the path to one of my files is seen coming from the their server.
although i haven't researched this very carefully yet, my guess would be that the google desktop application uses some invisible hooks to set itself as a proxy for http://*.google.com, and splices any of it's search results into the page that it gets back. at least that's how i would do it if i were writing such an application. sort of like a junkbuster, except its adding stuff to the results instead of filtering it out.
While I was impressed by the lockdown of interface to the local machine, this is easily compromised. In an hour or two I created a VBScript class that could host on the user's machine and use local HTTP to access this data.
i wouldn't say this is an issue for google to fix. if somebody else can get sufficient access to your machine to install and run a proxy daemon with your user permissions, you're pretty much fscked anyway, google desktop search or not.