Well since you asked for it and it was a nice comment, here are some more bits (but regrettably no full review).
1. Comparison of storage engine features (e.g. myISAM, InnoDB, BDB and Heap) including lock granularity, file split-up, referential integrity, caching, compression, etc.
2. RAID MyIsam Table for overcoming OS file size limitations.
3. Benchmarking strategies including how to write custom benchmarks useful to you.
4. Indexing structures: B-tree, vs. hash vs. the geographic R-tree indexes. Of course info on the MyISAM only Full-text indexes and its limitations (e.g. no stemming). Talks about how indexes are selected for use and how statistics comes into play for how they are selected and what you have to watch out for. Also how to reword queries to take advantage of indexes that might not otherwise be used.
5. Some great stuff like how the Query Cache works. For example, it only looks at the first characters first. So if you have lots of whitespace before your "SELECT", it won't use the query cache. Good stuff to know.
6. How to use hinting for indexes.
7. How to buy hardware. CPU, memory, RAID, etc.... Ah crud. I have to go but there is actually more. Anyways, worth picking up.
Actually, lack of live backups was one of my biggest fears with using MySQL as well and the book actually does address this.
The caveat: You need to set up replication. This is a good idea anyways for a high performance system in case the master crashes and you need another system available quickly.
It works like this:
1. Set up replication. 2. Do a locked table backup on the slave.
The nice things are the details like how the new version of MySQL uses two threads on the slave. One to copy the transactions to the local drive and the other to apply the transactions. Because of this, your local transaction log is up to date even if the transactions haven't been applied which subsequently means you don't have missing transactions if there is a crash on the master during the backup.
This is seriously a good book. Okay, you might want to use PostgreSQL for its feature set but if you are doing write few read mostly with the web as the application, this book seriously gives you the confidence to use MySQL. Up until I read this book, I didn't know enough about MySQL performance implications to trust it for scalability. Now I know what I need to do to get it.
The answer is yes it does show you how to setup massive high transaction systems.
Up until I picked up this book, I was not comfortable with using MySQL for the extremely high performance apps I have to write. Yes, they are web-based (meaning they fit into the MySQL appropriateness factor) but things like backups and scalability really scared me off of it.
This book talks about indexes but doesn't focus on them as the magic bullet. Rather it is very specific with lots of need to know items of importance.
Some things that it covers are:
1. How to setup replication with different architectures including master/slave, master/slave/slave (another level), replication rings, dual master replication with slaves and more.
2. RAID (software vs. hardware), RAID types, IDE vs. SCSI. I know. I'm sure you've thought of these things already but most people will find something new here because there is a lot on it. It is quite dense.
3. Selection of an OS. Seriously. It actually compares threading models on OSes compared to performance with MySQL. This is great stuff.
4. Selection of a filesystem on an OS. Yes, nitty gritty. Includes talk about journaling vs non-journaling benefits and warnings.
5. Load balancing mySQL. How to do this through a load balancer. Why and how it's different than load balancing web servers.
6. How to backup live using replication.
7. I love this: Detailed information on how the replication system actually works. I love understanding the inner workings because then I know how/why things went wrong.
8. The benefits of myISAM/InnoDB table types including how they store/retrieve data, the features available, etc.
I've been optimizing databases for web use for some time and this isn't a book you should be tired of because it claims "high performance." Okay, maybe I'm a geek, but this book kept me up at night figuring out how I should be architecting a system.
I use language zealotry as a clue-factor. Anybody who says "A" is better than "B" with strong conviction and no caveats, tells me how much they know about programming.
Great developers know two rules that keep them happy:
1. Choose the best tool for the job
2. Given that, know that the best tool is not always the best choice (e.g. everybody in your company knows Java but you want to write in PHP)
And I suppose even before all of this is, learn at least a few languages. It will give you the clue factor that each language does indeed have its strengths and its weaknesses.
For those who don't want to RTFA, here are some highlights from Linus:
Now, many of the volunteers end up getting paid, and maybe they can't be called "volunteers" any more if somebody ends up being silly enough to pay them for something they'd have done for free anyway.
In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny. When you play with it, mommy isn't going to tell you what you can and can not do, and not going to take your toy away from you when she thinks you are done. You're an adult, and you can make your own choices. That is when you get engaged.
I don't think the lawsuits have necessarily made a huge direct difference, but I do think that it has made a lot more people realize that maybe Microsoft wasn't the "American Dream" after all, but just another greedy company that might be better off with some competition.
Q. How can Linux avoid the security problems that have affected Windows?
A. Better design and actually caring about them. Having the guts to really fixing fundamental design mistakes, rather than trying to work around them.
I don't think I've ever replied to my own post before but I had to do a case in point with just the last episode I saw:
1. They were trying to prove that frozen chickens and thawed chickens cause the same amount of damage when fired through the front glass of a high speed train. To do this, they built a compressed air canon and fired frozen and thawed chickens through the glass of an airplane cockpit window, blocks of something (foam?) and sheets of glass. The conclusion was that frozen chickens actually did have more penetrating power.
3. (One of the funniest), they were trying to prove that you can't die from pissing on the tracks of an electric powered train. Or re-proving it. They get responses back that you could by peeing on an electric fence. Their conclusion was that you could get a mild shock from peeing at extremely close range on an electric fence. And by the way, they actually set up a fence and the guy actually peed on it. Funny stuff, all while exploring Science in the process.
3. That cell phones cannot cause explosions at gas stations. They did this by filling up a contained block with gas fumes and had the phone ring in the container and in a deseperate attempt even shorted out the battery multiple times. No explosion by the way. Of course, to prove that the container would actually explode, they blew it up anyways.
Lower power is only part of the point. With twice as many drives, you have twice the I/Os in less space. Anybody seriously considering performance knows that I/Os are the holy grail of RAID performance, not capacity.
Ironically, by making this information secret, telcos need to worry less about the reliability of their networks since their reliability will be difficult to assess by the buying public. This exerts less pressure on the telcos for improving the reliability of their systems.
As usual, government intervention will bring about the opposite of what they intend to do. Prescious few things are more efficient than the free market.
Remember that it wasn't that long ago that government supported the idea that a Monopoly in the telco industry kept prices down. Anybody remember exhoribitant long distance prices in the era of the government mandated telco monopoly?
If the government wants to improve redundancy, they should seek to make this information more public and more easily accessible and I guarantee you that buyers will exert the necessary pressures to keep the telcos running.
As many have mentioned, the idea behind patents is to encourage innovation. So for example, if inventor A decides to create a specific implementation of an idea, then all the effort to create that implementation does not go to waste.
One thing that I never see pointed out as a key difference between software patents and traditional real-world patents is the time it takes to make an implementation.
For example, in the past, it could have taken years and thousands to millions of dollars of development and testing to create a patentable idea. Because of this, you need a way to protect that hard work and investment or, yes, nobody would spend the time to invent things because they could get stolen by big companies (patents were originally designed to protect small inventors ironically). The problem with software patents is that it hardly takes any R&D whatsoever to create most of the patentable ideas. All it takes is an idea, something that patents were originally designed NOT to protect. They were designed to protect the implementation of an idea.
All the BS patents seem to fall into the space of no R&D for implementation, especially the "business processes" patents like 1-click. It's like "Oh, I have an idea," let's patent it. The patent office is making the erroneous assumption that not being able to patent an idea as soon as you thought of it would somehow have discourage you thinking of the idea. If software patents are allowed at all, they need to be tempered by the amount of research it requires to go from idea to implementation.
You should NOT be able to patent a "Hey, I just thought of something idea" that takes 10 minutes to implement. Practically all web-based patents fall into this category. I think there is still room for patents on ideas that take a lot of R&D work, investment and time.
Remember, your right to total privacy ends the moment you step into your car.
At least (for the time being) you can still walk around with relative anonymity. Though I wonder how long until face recognition tied to cameras becomes a closer reality.
327 comments after having just been posted says that SlashDot readers ARE interested in this.
The only other story with so many comments is "Your Rights Online: Missed Opportunities in U.S. v. Microsoft" with 342 comments but this was posted 7 hours earlier.
I don't come here to read politics either and I realize that comments alone do not necessarily denote interest, but you can't deny that Politics, for better or for worse, interests a lot of SlashDot readers. As a technical crowd, as close as I can tell, the stats bare this out.
CSSZenGarden is great and I use it as a source of inspiration; however, it does NOT allow you to create a template that can be re-used.
In most of the designs, custom images were made to replace the header text to get a nice look. It is a good trick, don't get me wrong, but this doesn't allow you to create a site with different content using the same template. You will have to generate new header images for every page you make.
This might have been true in the past, but a lot of cars have made it very close to their prototypes recently. Try:
Dodge Viper
Nissan 350Z
Mazda RX-8
Chrysler Crossfire
PT Cruiser
Furthermore, there are good reasons why cars are not exactly like their prototypes. Usually, it has to do with cost and/or practicality though we are seeing things like larger wheels on production cars finally (especially from Nissan).
Re:Where is American Society going
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 0
At the top end you have the rich and super-rich, with limited call on their wealth in terms of taxes.
Comments like this piss me off. Even with identical tax rates, a person who makes 100x as much as you pay 100x as many taxes. That means they pay your taxes and the taxes for 99 people just like you.
But not only that, rich people get taxed at a higher *rate* as well which means they usually pay more than 100x as many taxes as you do.
But most wealthy people recognize that paying a higher rate is part of the price you pay for the opportunities that a society based on capitalism offers and most don't complain because of the opportunities it has offered them. But what they have a right to be teed off at is people who complain that rich people are somehow slackers in what they give back to society.
Hello. Rich people give the MOST to society (economically anyways) per capita. We want more rich people, not less and suggesting they have a "limited call on their wealth" is not just uninformative and uninsightful, it is downright insulting.
Doesn't anybody else think that ever since Google announced a few new services that SlashDot is suddenly carrying stories that suggest that Google is evil?
Frankly, in this case it is quite clearly the Chinese government that is responsible for this. If Google doesn't comply, their service will be blocked from China such as they have done in ths past. If by "playing into the hands of the Chinese Government" you mean that they follow the rules of that country (just like they do in the U.S.), then I suppose they are. But by that argument, Google is clearly playing into the hands of the U.S. Government too.
Granted that technology will likely be evolutionary now, there are still some great things that have just come out or are coming soon. Furthermore, we have never had higher performing cars of better quality in any time in our history.
Some of these new things aren't perfected or aren't cheap yet but these things are on my radar:
1. Active suspension: This will allow us to overcome the tradeoff between comfortable riding and great performance. And remember, a hard ride might be "sporty" but if your car is bouncing off the road, you are losing traction. I don't think active suspension is perfect and it certainly isn't affordable to the masses but I expect interesting advancements in the near future.
2. Continuously Variable Transmission: Yes, I know it's been around for a while but until recently, this hasn't been seen in consumer cars. Frankly, I've always thought this was a great idea. You not only get better efficiency, you get better performance as well. Very cool indeed.
3. F1 Style Tranmissions: For those who love shifting gears (myself included here), the F1 tranmission gives you sharp crisp shifts (like manual tranmissions), no torque loss and shifts faster than can be done manually.
Another great incremental feature that is creeping its way into sports cars is the F1 style paddle shift transmission.
I know you don't believe me (it's not really ncessary to appreciate this post though), but I have this in my Ferrari 360 Modena and at first, this technology appeared to suck and didn't work well (too much clutch slipping, jerky starts, etc.). Then they upgraded the computer to a newer version and it works a lot better. Similar technology can now be found in more consumer friendly cars.
An important note: This is NOT an automatic transmission with a manual gear selector (which you'll still find in even a Porsche). An F1 transmission has a clutch, like a regular stick shift, but it is computer controlled. This means a few things:
A. You don't get the rubber banding of automatics because of the torque converter that makes most automatics lack the sharp "in control" feeling of sticks.
B. You don't get the torque loss from a torque converter.
C. You get faster shifts than a stick.
D. For sport driving, you don't have to take one hand off the wheel.
That said, there are still a few trade-offs.
a. You don't get to double-clutch because you don't control the amount your clutch is pushed in.
b. You can't push the clutch in when you get wheelspin to bring the tire rotation to neutral (i.e. same speed as the road)
Also, specifically in the 360, you HAVE to have the brake pushed in to engage 1st gear from neutral, the computer automatically puts you into neutral after a minute or so of being stopped (which really sucks if the light just turned green and your computer goes into neutral right before you need to go) and reverse takes a long time to engage because you have to hold the reverse lever in place for a few seconds. Not to mention that the reverse lever is so small and everyone routinely laughs at the cute "shift lever" you've got that is actually the "reverse" lever.
There is a link to a funny comic where they take Han Solo to court over the shooting of Greedo and its revisioning history. Very well done and funny. Check it out.
Don't forget that there are also wandering gate issues with projecting film. That is, the film is never projecting exactly on the same spot on the screen and therefore you get image jitter which blurs the image.
So, even though an individual frame may have quality greater than High Definition, the fact that watching a well projected High Definition image is *rock solid* means that film isn't necessarily better than a well projected High Definition signal.
The point is, using a program without paying for it (piracy) is not your decision to make, regardless of whether it ultimately ends up benefiting the company. Regardless, you did something wrong.
If the company wants to give an extended trial to get it into the market, the company has a right to decide to do that, not the consumer. Actually, dreaded Microsoft, for example, has a 120-day trial of SQL Server. Other vendors might wish to try a similar concept but, again, that's the company's decision. Actually, this seems like a good idea for expensive software that takes time to learn.
Ironically, in the 30-day, 60-day and one year money back guarantees, the one year guarantee is the one that gets the LEAST returns. Perhaps a similar concept applies to software but with longer trial lengths instead.
It's probably too late to be modded up but doesn't this remind everybody of another company that claimed a similar thing? I almost thought it was the same company.
Transmeta used to claim how they were building a chip that could emulate any other chip using what amounted to software. Ultimately, Transmeta is as we know it: Not a high performance chip company but rather fills in the low power consumption niche.
I remember all the hoo-ha about how if they can get x86 to run at competitive speeds how native code on the Transmeta chips should blow everyone away.
At the time, the claims were just as dubious as this and, ultimately, Transmeta never did become the "as fast as x86" people; however, they do provide a valuable product to companies that want low power consumption in their chips.
This may be what Transitive becomes. A useful company, filling a useful niche, but not equivalent to their original outlandish claims.
Slashdot Mirror
Well since you asked for it and it was a nice comment, here are some more bits (but regrettably no full review).
... Ah crud. I have to go but there is actually more. Anyways, worth picking up.
1. Comparison of storage engine features (e.g. myISAM, InnoDB, BDB and Heap) including lock granularity, file split-up, referential integrity, caching, compression, etc.
2. RAID MyIsam Table for overcoming OS file size limitations.
3. Benchmarking strategies including how to write custom benchmarks useful to you.
4. Indexing structures: B-tree, vs. hash vs. the geographic R-tree indexes. Of course info on the MyISAM only Full-text indexes and its limitations (e.g. no stemming). Talks about how indexes are selected for use and how statistics comes into play for how they are selected and what you have to watch out for. Also how to reword queries to take advantage of indexes that might not otherwise be used.
5. Some great stuff like how the Query Cache works. For example, it only looks at the first characters first. So if you have lots of whitespace before your "SELECT", it won't use the query cache. Good stuff to know.
6. How to use hinting for indexes.
7. How to buy hardware. CPU, memory, RAID, etc.
Actually, lack of live backups was one of my biggest fears with using MySQL as well and the book actually does address this.
The caveat: You need to set up replication. This is a good idea anyways for a high performance system in case the master crashes and you need another system available quickly.
It works like this:
1. Set up replication.
2. Do a locked table backup on the slave.
The nice things are the details like how the new version of MySQL uses two threads on the slave. One to copy the transactions to the local drive and the other to apply the transactions. Because of this, your local transaction log is up to date even if the transactions haven't been applied which subsequently means you don't have missing transactions if there is a crash on the master during the backup.
This is seriously a good book. Okay, you might want to use PostgreSQL for its feature set but if you are doing write few read mostly with the web as the application, this book seriously gives you the confidence to use MySQL. Up until I read this book, I didn't know enough about MySQL performance implications to trust it for scalability. Now I know what I need to do to get it.
The answer is yes it does show you how to setup massive high transaction systems.
Up until I picked up this book, I was not comfortable with using MySQL for the extremely high performance apps I have to write. Yes, they are web-based (meaning they fit into the MySQL appropriateness factor) but things like backups and scalability really scared me off of it.
This book talks about indexes but doesn't focus on them as the magic bullet. Rather it is very specific with lots of need to know items of importance.
Some things that it covers are:
1. How to setup replication with different architectures including master/slave, master/slave/slave (another level), replication rings, dual master replication with slaves and more.
2. RAID (software vs. hardware), RAID types, IDE vs. SCSI. I know. I'm sure you've thought of these things already but most people will find something new here because there is a lot on it. It is quite dense.
3. Selection of an OS. Seriously. It actually compares threading models on OSes compared to performance with MySQL. This is great stuff.
4. Selection of a filesystem on an OS. Yes, nitty gritty. Includes talk about journaling vs non-journaling benefits and warnings.
5. Load balancing mySQL. How to do this through a load balancer. Why and how it's different than load balancing web servers.
6. How to backup live using replication.
7. I love this: Detailed information on how the replication system actually works. I love understanding the inner workings because then I know how/why things went wrong.
8. The benefits of myISAM/InnoDB table types including how they store/retrieve data, the features available, etc.
I've been optimizing databases for web use for some time and this isn't a book you should be tired of because it claims "high performance." Okay, maybe I'm a geek, but this book kept me up at night figuring out how I should be architecting a system.
I use language zealotry as a clue-factor. Anybody who says "A" is better than "B" with strong conviction and no caveats, tells me how much they know about programming.
Great developers know two rules that keep them happy:
1. Choose the best tool for the job
2. Given that, know that the best tool is not always the best choice (e.g. everybody in your company knows Java but you want to write in PHP)
And I suppose even before all of this is, learn at least a few languages. It will give you the clue factor that each language does indeed have its strengths and its weaknesses.
A. Better design and actually caring about them. Having the guts to really fixing fundamental design mistakes, rather than trying to work around them.
I don't think I've ever replied to my own post before but I had to do a case in point with just the last episode I saw:
1. They were trying to prove that frozen chickens and thawed chickens cause the same amount of damage when fired through the front glass of a high speed train. To do this, they built a compressed air canon and fired frozen and thawed chickens through the glass of an airplane cockpit window, blocks of something (foam?) and sheets of glass. The conclusion was that frozen chickens actually did have more penetrating power.
3. (One of the funniest), they were trying to prove that you can't die from pissing on the tracks of an electric powered train. Or re-proving it. They get responses back that you could by peeing on an electric fence. Their conclusion was that you could get a mild shock from peeing at extremely close range on an electric fence. And by the way, they actually set up a fence and the guy actually peed on it. Funny stuff, all while exploring Science in the process.
3. That cell phones cannot cause explosions at gas stations. They did this by filling up a contained block with gas fumes and had the phone ring in the container and in a deseperate attempt even shorted out the battery multiple times. No explosion by the way. Of course, to prove that the container would actually explode, they blew it up anyways.
Can Sciend and fun be put together? The answer in Two Words:
Myth Busters
Lower power is only part of the point. With twice as many drives, you have twice the I/Os in less space. Anybody seriously considering performance knows that I/Os are the holy grail of RAID performance, not capacity.
Ironically, by making this information secret, telcos need to worry less about the reliability of their networks since their reliability will be difficult to assess by the buying public. This exerts less pressure on the telcos for improving the reliability of their systems.
As usual, government intervention will bring about the opposite of what they intend to do. Prescious few things are more efficient than the free market.
Remember that it wasn't that long ago that government supported the idea that a Monopoly in the telco industry kept prices down. Anybody remember exhoribitant long distance prices in the era of the government mandated telco monopoly?
If the government wants to improve redundancy, they should seek to make this information more public and more easily accessible and I guarantee you that buyers will exert the necessary pressures to keep the telcos running.
As many have mentioned, the idea behind patents is to encourage innovation. So for example, if inventor A decides to create a specific implementation of an idea, then all the effort to create that implementation does not go to waste.
One thing that I never see pointed out as a key difference between software patents and traditional real-world patents is the time it takes to make an implementation.
For example, in the past, it could have taken years and thousands to millions of dollars of development and testing to create a patentable idea. Because of this, you need a way to protect that hard work and investment or, yes, nobody would spend the time to invent things because they could get stolen by big companies (patents were originally designed to protect small inventors ironically). The problem with software patents is that it hardly takes any R&D whatsoever to create most of the patentable ideas. All it takes is an idea, something that patents were originally designed NOT to protect. They were designed to protect the implementation of an idea.
All the BS patents seem to fall into the space of no R&D for implementation, especially the "business processes" patents like 1-click. It's like "Oh, I have an idea," let's patent it. The patent office is making the erroneous assumption that not being able to patent an idea as soon as you thought of it would somehow have discourage you thinking of the idea. If software patents are allowed at all, they need to be tempered by the amount of research it requires to go from idea to implementation.
You should NOT be able to patent a "Hey, I just thought of something idea" that takes 10 minutes to implement. Practically all web-based patents fall into this category. I think there is still room for patents on ideas that take a lot of R&D work, investment and time.
If you're gonna make fun of his speaking rhythm, do it right.
;)
I... cannot... wait... to see... this... new show.
He doesn't break at every single word. It's more like 1 syllable, 2 syllable, 1 syllable, 2 syllable...
Technically you probably meant to say:
Remember, your right to total privacy ends the moment you step into your car.
At least (for the time being) you can still walk around with relative anonymity. Though I wonder how long until face recognition tied to cameras becomes a closer reality.
327 comments after having just been posted says that SlashDot readers ARE interested in this.
The only other story with so many comments is "Your Rights Online: Missed Opportunities in U.S. v. Microsoft" with 342 comments but this was posted 7 hours earlier.
I don't come here to read politics either and I realize that comments alone do not necessarily denote interest, but you can't deny that Politics, for better or for worse, interests a lot of SlashDot readers. As a technical crowd, as close as I can tell, the stats bare this out.
CSSZenGarden is great and I use it as a source of inspiration; however, it does NOT allow you to create a template that can be re-used.
In most of the designs, custom images were made to replace the header text to get a nice look. It is a good trick, don't get me wrong, but this doesn't allow you to create a site with different content using the same template. You will have to generate new header images for every page you make.
Is this related to the ominous statement in their FAQ:
Question 7: What does the name "Mono" mean?
Mono is the word for 'monkey' in Spanish. We like monkeys.
Furthermore, there are good reasons why cars are not exactly like their prototypes. Usually, it has to do with cost and/or practicality though we are seeing things like larger wheels on production cars finally (especially from Nissan).
Comments like this piss me off. Even with identical tax rates, a person who makes 100x as much as you pay 100x as many taxes. That means they pay your taxes and the taxes for 99 people just like you.
But not only that, rich people get taxed at a higher *rate* as well which means they usually pay more than 100x as many taxes as you do.
But most wealthy people recognize that paying a higher rate is part of the price you pay for the opportunities that a society based on capitalism offers and most don't complain because of the opportunities it has offered them. But what they have a right to be teed off at is people who complain that rich people are somehow slackers in what they give back to society.
Hello. Rich people give the MOST to society (economically anyways) per capita. We want more rich people, not less and suggesting they have a "limited call on their wealth" is not just uninformative and uninsightful, it is downright insulting.
Doesn't anybody else think that ever since Google announced a few new services that SlashDot is suddenly carrying stories that suggest that Google is evil?
Frankly, in this case it is quite clearly the Chinese government that is responsible for this. If Google doesn't comply, their service will be blocked from China such as they have done in ths past. If by "playing into the hands of the Chinese Government" you mean that they follow the rules of that country (just like they do in the U.S.), then I suppose they are. But by that argument, Google is clearly playing into the hands of the U.S. Government too.
Granted that technology will likely be evolutionary now, there are still some great things that have just come out or are coming soon. Furthermore, we have never had higher performing cars of better quality in any time in our history.
Some of these new things aren't perfected or aren't cheap yet but these things are on my radar:
1. Active suspension: This will allow us to overcome the tradeoff between comfortable riding and great performance. And remember, a hard ride might be "sporty" but if your car is bouncing off the road, you are losing traction. I don't think active suspension is perfect and it certainly isn't affordable to the masses but I expect interesting advancements in the near future.
2. Continuously Variable Transmission: Yes, I know it's been around for a while but until recently, this hasn't been seen in consumer cars. Frankly, I've always thought this was a great idea. You not only get better efficiency, you get better performance as well. Very cool indeed.
3. F1 Style Tranmissions: For those who love shifting gears (myself included here), the F1 tranmission gives you sharp crisp shifts (like manual tranmissions), no torque loss and shifts faster than can be done manually.
Another great incremental feature that is creeping its way into sports cars is the F1 style paddle shift transmission.
I know you don't believe me (it's not really ncessary to appreciate this post though), but I have this in my Ferrari 360 Modena and at first, this technology appeared to suck and didn't work well (too much clutch slipping, jerky starts, etc.). Then they upgraded the computer to a newer version and it works a lot better. Similar technology can now be found in more consumer friendly cars.
An important note: This is NOT an automatic transmission with a manual gear selector (which you'll still find in even a Porsche). An F1 transmission has a clutch, like a regular stick shift, but it is computer controlled. This means a few things:
A. You don't get the rubber banding of automatics because of the torque converter that makes most automatics lack the sharp "in control" feeling of sticks.
B. You don't get the torque loss from a torque converter.
C. You get faster shifts than a stick.
D. For sport driving, you don't have to take one hand off the wheel.
That said, there are still a few trade-offs.
a. You don't get to double-clutch because you don't control the amount your clutch is pushed in.
b. You can't push the clutch in when you get wheelspin to bring the tire rotation to neutral (i.e. same speed as the road)
Also, specifically in the 360, you HAVE to have the brake pushed in to engage 1st gear from neutral, the computer automatically puts you into neutral after a minute or so of being stopped (which really sucks if the light just turned green and your computer goes into neutral right before you need to go) and reverse takes a long time to engage because you have to hold the reverse lever in place for a few seconds. Not to mention that the reverse lever is so small and everyone routinely laughs at the cute "shift lever" you've got that is actually the "reverse" lever.
There is a link to a funny comic where they take Han Solo to court over the shooting of Greedo and its revisioning history. Very well done and funny. Check it out.
Han Solo in Court Comic
Don't forget that there are also wandering gate issues with projecting film. That is, the film is never projecting exactly on the same spot on the screen and therefore you get image jitter which blurs the image.
So, even though an individual frame may have quality greater than High Definition, the fact that watching a well projected High Definition image is *rock solid* means that film isn't necessarily better than a well projected High Definition signal.
Holy crap. A 20 foot screen for 1300? Sign me up. The 17 foot screen with a complete G5 sounds likewise as awesome.
Symbol alert. Inches is made with the "Double Quotes" symbols.
The point is, using a program without paying for it (piracy) is not your decision to make, regardless of whether it ultimately ends up benefiting the company. Regardless, you did something wrong.
If the company wants to give an extended trial to get it into the market, the company has a right to decide to do that, not the consumer. Actually, dreaded Microsoft, for example, has a 120-day trial of SQL Server. Other vendors might wish to try a similar concept but, again, that's the company's decision. Actually, this seems like a good idea for expensive software that takes time to learn.
Ironically, in the 30-day, 60-day and one year money back guarantees, the one year guarantee is the one that gets the LEAST returns. Perhaps a similar concept applies to software but with longer trial lengths instead.
It's probably too late to be modded up but doesn't this remind everybody of another company that claimed a similar thing? I almost thought it was the same company.
Transmeta used to claim how they were building a chip that could emulate any other chip using what amounted to software. Ultimately, Transmeta is as we know it: Not a high performance chip company but rather fills in the low power consumption niche.
I remember all the hoo-ha about how if they can get x86 to run at competitive speeds how native code on the Transmeta chips should blow everyone away.
At the time, the claims were just as dubious as this and, ultimately, Transmeta never did become the "as fast as x86" people; however, they do provide a valuable product to companies that want low power consumption in their chips.
This may be what Transitive becomes. A useful company, filling a useful niche, but not equivalent to their original outlandish claims.