The reviewer starts his review by a derisive review of some of the history involved, and procedes with the same, tired, old attacks.
I'd be far more interested in a review of some quantative measures of quality. For example, in comparison to britannica, how many topics are there articles on ? What is the average length of an article ? Choosing a random sampling of articles, rate them for completeness, accuracy, and readability.
That sort of information is arguable, but just another presentation of 'it doesn't use our process, so it can't be good' is tiresome.
The thought that immediately sprung to my mind is if you have some satellite spewing a huge stream of charged particles, that's called an ion drive, a rather big one in our terms.
What keeps this base propulsion station from rocketing off into the nether parts of the solar system ?
The real problem isn't the kernels and the device support therein, rather, its the devices. Really, how many different ways do you need to send data to a printer, or a disk, or get images off a digital camera or webcam, or sound to and from a soundcard, or a 3d command pipeline to a vid card ? The plethora of different device interfaces for substantially identical devices is the real problem.
Instead, I think there should be a (small set of) _device_ standards.
That is, something like a architecture standard: a standard category of devices which the manufacturers will agree to provide standard interfaces for
Combine that with a standard, architecture independent way of allowing devices to carry their own drivers. Perhaps something like a fast Forth like bytecode interpreter.
Maybe not the best approach, but a lot better than what we have now.
We run Ingres on OpenVMS as the core behind one of our business critical systems. Also, I use postgres a lot for other, smaller, projects. Here's my partial list o' features:
Point in time database recovery
Tablespaces
Industrial grade, garunteed coherent backups
(note you can do something like this using LVM snaphots underneath postgres, but it's a hack)
Fantastic admin tools, so that I can easily, for instance, find a session holding a blocking lock or running a resource sucking query and kill it
Runs well on platforms unsupported by postgres, e.g. VMS
C2 auditing - trace everything, should you desire
very solid and mature replication and distributed database components
clustering (not sure if this componant is open sourced, though...)
insane amounts of scalability (dozens of CPUs... multi gigabytes of DBMS cache)
.....
In essence, you're asking what the difference is between, say, a great plains accounting and gnucash. Gnucash is great software, but great plains has that polish that only rare open source projects seem to reach. Ditto postgres and ingres
Hope this helps, -- Pat
Re:Sorta agree with both points of view
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
The thing I find annoying about Weber's work is the constant litany of 'Rah rah Kings are good, Rah rah heroic military, booo hiss all of you bad, evil, liberal government folks."
The guy has apparently never heard of a system of checks and balances.
The space opera battle scenes are fairly enjoyable, and I own most of the Honor Harrington series for them. Just ignore the technobabble.:-) (Excuse me - fission reactors require less fuel mass per watt than a mature fusion technology? Say what?)
Unfortunately, his last couple of books in the series have been 3/4 politics and very little space opera.
You mean like SSIC clusters ? It's a project to take Digital's cluster technology and port it to linux.
They've got the IBM version of the DLM, two cluster filesystems (CFS for locally attached storage, and GFS for cluster shared storage), transparent process migration AKA mosix, and lots lots more.
Both are good, high quality, commercial or formally commercial products released under an open source license. (interbase public license and GPL respectively)
Further, SAP-DB has excellent commerical support available from SAP, the company, at or better than the same level of responsiveness as, say, Oracle support.
Both are fantastic, enterprise level full ACID RDBMS's with all the great management features a heavy duty shop could want:
* online backups, * transaction logs, * restore to point in time * subselects, views, rules/triggers, procedures, etc. * great storage management
3) Are there redundant systems using different methods, or other forms of backup ?
(LORAN and GPS systems, skilled pilot knowledgable of local reefs)
Assign an arbitrary scale to each of these criteria, and use it to consistantly evaluate effected systems. Over time you'll build up a body of knowledge about effected systems.
Note that this will bias strongly toward older, proven systems rather than upgrade of the month type, which for critical software is exactly as it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Gosh, you mean in a markup language, say, like Tex/LaTex ?
Gee, it's a shame no-one ever came up with _that_ idea before.
Oh, but then, you'd actually have to learn something in order to produce documents.
It's just too damn bad that early word processer architects never grokked that easy to learn gui != broken file format.
-- Pat
The reviewer starts his review by a derisive review of some of the history involved, and procedes with the same, tired, old attacks.
I'd be far more interested in a review of some quantative measures of quality. For example, in comparison to britannica, how many topics are there articles on ? What is the average length of an article ? Choosing a random sampling of articles, rate them for completeness, accuracy, and readability.
That sort of information is arguable, but just another presentation of 'it doesn't use our process, so it can't be good' is tiresome.
-- Pat
The thought that immediately sprung to my mind is if you have some satellite spewing a huge stream of charged particles, that's called an ion drive, a rather big one in our terms.
What keeps this base propulsion station from rocketing off into the nether parts of the solar system ?
-- Pat
Any of the cards mentioned have support in the linux kernel ? Do they appear as a modem to the PC, or something totally non-standard ?
Thanks,
-- Pat
The real problem isn't the kernels and the device support therein, rather, its the devices. Really, how many different ways do you need to send data to a printer, or a disk, or get images off a digital camera or webcam, or sound to and from a soundcard, or a 3d command pipeline to a vid card ? The plethora of different device interfaces for substantially identical devices is the real problem.
Instead, I think there should be a (small set of) _device_ standards.
That is, something like a architecture standard: a standard category of devices which the manufacturers will agree to provide standard interfaces for
Combine that with a standard, architecture independent way of allowing devices to carry their own drivers. Perhaps something like a fast Forth like bytecode interpreter.
Maybe not the best approach, but a lot better than what we have now.
-- Pat
We run Ingres on OpenVMS as the core behind one of our business critical systems. Also, I use postgres a lot for other, smaller, projects. Here's my partial list o' features:
(note you can do something like this using LVM snaphots underneath postgres, but it's a hack)
In essence, you're asking what the difference is between, say, a great plains accounting and gnucash. Gnucash is great software, but great plains has that polish that only rare open source projects seem to reach. Ditto postgres and ingres
Hope this helps,
-- Pat
The thing I find annoying about Weber's work is the constant litany of 'Rah rah Kings are good, Rah rah heroic military, booo hiss all of you bad, evil, liberal government folks."
:-) (Excuse me - fission reactors require less fuel mass per watt than a mature fusion technology? Say what?)
The guy has apparently never heard of a system of checks and balances.
The space opera battle scenes are fairly enjoyable, and I own most of the Honor Harrington series for them. Just ignore the technobabble.
Unfortunately, his last couple of books in the series have been 3/4 politics and very little space opera.
-- Pat
You mean like SSIC clusters ? It's a project to take Digital's cluster technology and port it to linux.
They've got the IBM version of the DLM, two cluster filesystems (CFS for locally attached storage, and GFS for cluster shared storage), transparent process migration AKA mosix, and lots lots more.
Keen stuff, check it out.
that have received little comment so far:
* Firebird (ne: Borland Interbase)
* SAP-DB (ne: Adabas-D)
Both are good, high quality, commercial or formally commercial products released under an open source license. (interbase public license and GPL respectively)
Further, SAP-DB has excellent commerical support available from SAP, the company, at or better than the same level of responsiveness as, say, Oracle support.
Both are fantastic, enterprise level full ACID RDBMS's with all the great management features a heavy duty shop could want:
* online backups,
* transaction logs,
* restore to point in time
* subselects, views, rules/triggers, procedures, etc.
* great storage management
Check 'em out.
-- Pat
Ask three questions:
1) What are the consequences of failure:
(Nav system steers you into rocks == bad)
2) What's the risk of that failure mode happening
(GPS systems == highly reliable)
3) Are there redundant systems using different methods, or other forms of backup ?
(LORAN and GPS systems, skilled pilot knowledgable of local reefs)
Assign an arbitrary scale to each of these criteria, and use it to consistantly evaluate effected systems. Over time you'll build up a body of knowledge about effected systems.
Note that this will bias strongly toward older, proven systems rather than upgrade of the month type, which for critical software is exactly as it should be.
-- Pat
Don't loose hope, if XM and Sirius services fail, I can see someone pulling an Iridium manuver out of bankruptcy procedings.
(e.g. buying their satellites and frequencies at a vastly reduced cost, and offering a much much cheaper service)
-- Pat
Not necessarily - simply send data to a non-blocked port. E.g. an fbi webserver.