I know I'm coming in late in the thread, but Reply Systems keypads are where it's at.
The problem is that they only sell to dealers, and to be a dealer, it appears that you have to be able to sell software for them.
I wrote up a review of the major available software systems recently. We bought a 300 keypad system.
It would be great to see open source, cross-platform software to run these puppies.
Getting Fleetwood (Reply Systems' owner) to let people buy the hardware for use with open source software might be tricky though.
Re:Propriety formats are Apple's enemy. Or should
on
Sorenson Countersues Apple
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Of course you are being a troll here - QuickTime is the basis for MPEG4's file format.
The Sorenson codec is proprietary, as is the Cinepak codec, one of the suggested Quicktime codecs for use with Xanim.
Oddly enough, Apple's Quicktime 6, also supports some very fine standards, like the officially sanctioned MPEG4 codecs (not the bastardized pre-standards "MS-MPG4"), the MPEG 1 & 2 codecs, and MJPEG.
Open standards are obviously different than open source, but the net effect to interoperability is the same.
Plus, you can't take Steve to Denny's for cheese sticks - he's Vegan.
Roll-your-own digital editing stations have just started to become viable over the past five years or so. Prior to that, the only way to get a reliable digital editing system was to buy a proprietary solution.
Firewire (IEEE 1394) has been a huge boon to the DIY editing station market because of its low system requirements (3.5MB/s constant datarate) and the proliferation of cheap, good quality cameras with Firewire on board.
Some choices from (in no order):
Final Cut Pro EditDV Raptor Media100 Avid
Some are MacOS or Windows only and some are cross-platform.
I'd be wary of any packages that have been through less than three public revisions. Digital video is *not* trivial.
Speed isn't the only reason to want to let the RDBMS use raw partitions (which essentially means it is managing its own filesystem...)
Reliability in database consistency is crucial. Put a RDBMS on a cached filesystem and you are asking for trouble. When writing to a raw partition, a write is actually committed to disk. When writing to a cached partition that guarantee cannot be made. While there are some filesystems that support specific database engines (vxfs from Veritas comes to mind - it supports Oracle and Sybase), putting any RDBMS on any OS's native filesystem is a Bad Thing(TM).
There are so many RDBMSs out there that it is very difficult to make a good choice quickly.
Even if you limit your choices to one OS, you still have at least five or six great DB platforms.
The choices you've given are by no means the only ones you have, and the reasons you give for narrowing down your choice of engines seem to be pretty sparse.
For instance, Sybase ASE and ASA both support referential integrity constraints. ASE's are more limited than ASA's, but ASA has RI checks that are comparable to what I've seen of Oracle 8i.
All of Sybase's products have T-SQL, which are their programmatic extensions to SQL92. Sybase has a robust C API for writing server extensions.
Sybase ASE is fully capable of handling the data load you've specified. So is Oracle's enterprise-scale product. So are some of Informix's products.
Interesting tidbit about Postgres - parts of it found its way directly into a product called Illustra. Illustra was bought lock, stock and barrel by Informix. Informix has in one of their products the object-polymorphism you crave.
From the PostgreSQL Guide:
The authors of PostgreSQL 1.01 were Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen. Many others have contributed to the porting, testing, debugging and enhancement of the code. The original Postgres code, from which PostgreSQL is derived, was the effort of many graduate students, undergraduate students, and staff programmers working under the direction of Professor Michael Stonebraker at the University of California, Berkeley.
Michael Stonebraker spun Postgres into Illustra. For a while after the Informix buyout he was grafted into their executive management. I dunno if he's still there, since Informix doesn't seem to list that information on their site.
Informix still has grants at UCB as well as many, many other colleges. (source) Some of those grants sound interesting...
Now, I realize that the subject was "Linux Databases", but there are *solid* RDBMSs that run on the various BSD's and commercial *nix, too. I mention this because of the large scale data needs. I'm not sure that Linux running on any PC hardware is capable of supporting the amount of data you are looking at. (Notice I said PC hardware...)
Because of that, I'd suggest a commercial *nix, running on a server-class machine and an engine from one of the "big three" database vendors: Sybase, Oracle or Informix.
All of these vendors offer their enterprise-level engines at very reasonable prices, since you are buying at the per-seat level in most cases.
Of course, I'll likely get flamed to hell and back for the above statements because I'm suggesting commercial, non-GPL engines running on commercial, non-GPL OS's on top of hardware that wasn't built by stuffing armfuls of parts from Fry's into a whitebox ATX case.
If I were stuck cobbling things together because of budgetary constraints, I'd go with Linux running on a whitebox and use the free Sybase ASE installation that bundled with RedHat.
The MacOS has had multi-tasking since late System 6 (1991). The Mac uses cooperative multitasking. That means that the applications running determine how much of the machine's resources are utilized. A poorly written program won't give up control when it is supposed to. (Some apps {like servers} take advantage of this). Recently, Apple has threaded just about everything in the OS. This is a good thing.
Windows95 uses (sort of) pre-emptive mt. WinNT uses better pre-emptive mt. UN*X has really good mt. BeOS uses what they call "pervasive" mt, which just means that they have threaded the hell out of the OS. Pre-emptive mt means the OS does the scheduling.
Whether pre-emptive or cooperative mt is used, it is STILL multi-tasking. Whether one is better than the other wholly depends on what you plan on doing with the box.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I'm coming in late in the thread, but Reply Systems keypads are where it's at. The problem is that they only sell to dealers, and to be a dealer, it appears that you have to be able to sell software for them. I wrote up a review of the major available software systems recently. We bought a 300 keypad system. It would be great to see open source, cross-platform software to run these puppies. Getting Fleetwood (Reply Systems' owner) to let people buy the hardware for use with open source software might be tricky though.
Of course you are being a troll here - QuickTime is the basis for MPEG4's file format.
The Sorenson codec is proprietary, as is the Cinepak codec, one of the suggested Quicktime codecs for use with Xanim.
Oddly enough, Apple's Quicktime 6, also supports some very fine standards, like the officially sanctioned MPEG4 codecs (not the bastardized pre-standards "MS-MPG4"), the MPEG 1 & 2 codecs, and MJPEG.
Open standards are obviously different than open source, but the net effect to interoperability is the same.
Plus, you can't take Steve to Denny's for cheese sticks - he's Vegan.
6100's are still useful.
Mine serves as a fine MP3 player.
In my car.
Media100 bought Digital Origin, not Avid.
Roll-your-own digital editing stations have just started to become viable over the past five years or so. Prior to that, the only way to get a reliable digital editing system was to buy a proprietary solution.
Firewire (IEEE 1394) has been a huge boon to the DIY editing station market because of its low system requirements (3.5MB/s constant datarate) and the proliferation of cheap, good quality cameras with Firewire on board.
Some choices from (in no order):
Final Cut Pro
EditDV
Raptor
Media100
Avid
Some are MacOS or Windows only and some are cross-platform.
I'd be wary of any packages that have been through less than three public revisions. Digital video is *not* trivial.
What platform/filesystem are you using Oracle on?
Oracle does not recommend cooked file db's AFAIK, unless used in conjunction with Veritas vxfs.
Speed isn't the only reason to want to let the RDBMS use raw partitions (which essentially means it is managing its own filesystem...)
Reliability in database consistency is crucial. Put a RDBMS on a cached filesystem and you are asking for trouble. When writing to a raw partition, a write is actually committed to disk. When writing to a cached partition that guarantee cannot be made. While there are some filesystems that support specific database engines (vxfs from Veritas comes to mind - it supports Oracle and Sybase), putting any RDBMS on any OS's native filesystem is a Bad Thing(TM).
Even if you limit your choices to one OS, you still have at least five or six great DB platforms.
The choices you've given are by no means the only ones you have, and the reasons you give for narrowing down your choice of engines seem to be pretty sparse.
For instance, Sybase ASE and ASA both support referential integrity constraints. ASE's are more limited than ASA's, but ASA has RI checks that are comparable to what I've seen of Oracle 8i.
All of Sybase's products have T-SQL, which are their programmatic extensions to SQL92. Sybase has a robust C API for writing server extensions.
Sybase ASE is fully capable of handling the data load you've specified. So is Oracle's enterprise-scale product. So are some of Informix's products.
Interesting tidbit about Postgres - parts of it found its way directly into a product called Illustra. Illustra was bought lock, stock and barrel by Informix. Informix has in one of their products the object-polymorphism you crave.
From the PostgreSQL Guide:
Michael Stonebraker spun Postgres into Illustra. For a while after the Informix buyout he was grafted into their executive management. I dunno if he's still there, since Informix doesn't seem to list that information on their site.
Informix still has grants at UCB as well as many, many other colleges. (source) Some of those grants sound interesting...
Now, I realize that the subject was "Linux Databases", but there are *solid* RDBMSs that run on the various BSD's and commercial *nix, too. I mention this because of the large scale data needs. I'm not sure that Linux running on any PC hardware is capable of supporting the amount of data you are looking at. (Notice I said PC hardware...)
Because of that, I'd suggest a commercial *nix, running on a server-class machine and an engine from one of the "big three" database vendors: Sybase, Oracle or Informix.
All of these vendors offer their enterprise-level engines at very reasonable prices, since you are buying at the per-seat level in most cases.
Of course, I'll likely get flamed to hell and back for the above statements because I'm suggesting commercial, non-GPL engines running on commercial, non-GPL OS's on top of hardware that wasn't built by stuffing armfuls of parts from Fry's into a whitebox ATX case.
If I were stuck cobbling things together because of budgetary constraints, I'd go with Linux running on a whitebox and use the free Sybase ASE installation that bundled with RedHat.
...and kind of surprises me.
Does Bob actually think that Un*x and Linux have remained stagnant over the last 30 years?
I guess he just sees the huge momentum of MS as unstoppable.
Hopefully *that's* not the case!
You really are an idiot.
Multi-tasking comes in many flavors.
The MacOS has had multi-tasking since late System 6 (1991). The Mac uses cooperative multitasking. That means that the applications running determine how much of the machine's resources are utilized. A poorly written program won't give up control when it is supposed to. (Some apps {like servers} take advantage of this). Recently, Apple has threaded just about everything in the OS. This is a good thing.
Windows95 uses (sort of) pre-emptive mt. WinNT uses better pre-emptive mt. UN*X has really good mt. BeOS uses what they call "pervasive" mt, which just means that they have threaded the hell out of the OS. Pre-emptive mt means the OS does the scheduling.
Whether pre-emptive or cooperative mt is used, it is STILL multi-tasking. Whether one is better than the other wholly depends on what you plan on doing with the box.