Excellent. That's, in fact, our use case. We have a very specialized application where every client is also server (multi-master). We even wrote our own database replication software, which is better than Intersystems' (the "shadow replication" Caché is able to do does not allow multi-master replication).
They should move to IntersystemsCaché. SQL, objects, XML and even MUMPS. It will make equally happy SQL and NoSQL fans. And it's damn fast. Much leaner than Oracle, DB2 or Informix, too. Excellent support. Extremely good. Not cheap, thought.
Same for Spain: you can request a pre-filled tax sheet in the mail (or e-mail), it's called a "tax return draft". The Spanish IRS (AEAT) will fill it with everything it knows for sure (mortgage, union, married status, etc) automatically. You can then just confirm that draft (i. e. accept whatever it says), or modify it.
There is a sleight of hand, though: in case the information in the draft is not correct, you MUST fix it or you will be fined. That's the reason why most people complain about their draft being always in favor of the Estate: given that a lot of people don't bother checking if the draft is accurate (and if it is not and the AEAT notices, you will face a fine), the AEAT does not add some deduction unless they are 99.99% sure you qualify for it.
Unfortunately for IT, it usually comes down to "How much revenue did you generate?" and "Oh, you're a cost center. Let's see if out sourcing is cheaper." As one boss of mine put it, once our IT department brings in 30 mill a year in revenue they can have a say in how we conduct business.
Once your IT department starts working sub-par, no department will bring 30 million a year in revenue. No department will bring a penny in, actually.
If you outsource your IT, you are as bad as your competitor. Actually, the shop you outsourced your IT to may very well also manage your competitors' IT departments. Companies need to realize an IT department is not a cost center but an investment, and a good IT department is a competitive advantage.
This is what Richard Dale (the main author of SMOKE and the Ruby and C# bindings for Qt and KDE, and C, Objective C and Java bindings in the past, to) said about PySide:
Currently the total size of the PySide libs for all the Qt modueles is 30 Mb. For just QtCore and QtGui they are 22.5 Mb. These are really high figures, and about twice the size of the existing PyQt libs. They are five or six (!) times larger than the Smoke libraries, which weigh in at just over 5 Mb for all the Qt modules. The Smoke libraries can be used by Ruby, C#, Perl, Common Lisp and PHP, not just a single language too. The large size is caused by the heavy use of C++ templates in Boost::Python.
Qt alone has about 500 classes, whereas the current KDE bindings like Python and Ruby wrap over 1500 classes, which would give a combined shared library size of 90 Mb or so assuming the same size per class as Qt. So as PySide stands, I would personally consider that these figures are just too high.
There is a hack in the generate code of doing '#define protected public', to allow protected methods to be called. This certainly won't work on Windows. Fixing it properly will require extra code to be generated to subclass each class with protected methods, and add a public method that calls a corresponding method in the class to be wrapped. This will add some extra code obviously.
It looks like PySide are huge (3x the size of PyQt and 6x the size of SMOKE-generated bindings!) and there is very little improvement they can do if they keep on using Boost::Python to generate PySide.
Given that PyQt costs only £350 (roughly 400 EUR) with full support and is much lighter and mature, I can't see why I would use PySide (unless Nokia gives me full, free, support with my commercial C++ license, of course, which I think they won't be doing because they required you to buy a 1000 EUR separate license for Qt Jambi -the Java bindings- )
The N810 is a 16-bit color device and Flash video is already slow there. Now try to play 24 bit video on such an underpowered device. The N810 is perfect for many things but "portable video player" is not one of them.
If you like C++ and the Qt API and you want to develop for the web (true web 2.0 AJAX apps), you should try Wt.
Wt clones the Qt API but using Boost instead of Qt. You can compile your web application to a FastCGI module (which you can deploy with Apache, lighttpd, IIS, etc) or to an executable which includes an embedded HTTP(S) web server.
I'm not saying my current setup (DL320s, SA P400, RAID-6, Linux, ext3) can outperform, or even be on-par, with the RAID-less storage appliances Sun introduced. I'm saying a setup with DL180/DL185, Solaris and ZFS can.
ext3 in RAID-6, BTW. But with the configuration I posted in the first post of this thread, you can build a very cheap SAN/NAS. It does work. You can get support from Sun for the software (Sun sells Solaris support contracts) and HP for the hardware. Obviously, you won't have the nice GUI, but it's TEN times cheaper per TB.
I'm using ext3, of course. ZFS on FUSE is nowhere near production quality. The original idea was to use Zumastor but it is not production-ready, either.
HP ProLiant DL180 + 1TB disks + Zumastor
on
What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Cheap and dead good setup: ProLiant DL180 + 1TB disks w/ compatible trays + Linux + Zumastor
The HP ProLiant DL180 server is a 2U rack server with 12 SATA 3.5 slots starting at US $1299. You may also use the older DL320s but its processor is less powerful, it only admits 8GB RAM and the machine is more expensive.
Buy the server, then buy 12 empty trays at US $25. I've always bought them at SCSITray (you are looking for part number 373211-001
Now, but 2x80GB SATA disks for system in RAID-1 and 10x1TB SATA disks for data in RAID-5 (if you want RAID-6, you need a P400 controller with BBWC or a P800 controller with BBWC, the P600 won't work with > 2TB volumes).
For the software part, install Linux and Zumastor, which provides ZFS-like features on top of any Linux filesystem (I'm using it on top of ext3, some people prefer XFS). In case you want to have several replicated fileservers, Zumastor does replication automagically for you.
I used to use Rails until I discovered Wt: C++, Qt-like API, you develop webapps with widgets (as if they were a desktop application, no more "templates" or "pages") and you don't need to write a single line of HTML, CSS or Javascript. You can deploy it as a FastCGI module for Apache, Lighttp, etc, or as a standalone application with its own webserver. It supports very heavy loads, more than Rails or Django will ever be able to deal with. And you can link to a myriad of existing C and C++ libraries.
Do you want to authenticate your users using Active Directory? Use Samba and link to libwinbind if on Unix, or link to the Windows API if on Windows (yes, it's cross-platform!). No more worries about language bindings.
If I were to develop a web-based desktop application, I'd use a web framework which allows me to develop a webapp just like it was a desktop app. The only such framework I know is Wt ( http://www.webtoolkit.eu/ ): C++, Qt-like API. I gave up on Rails after discovering it.
"The OpenDocument Foundation", in spite of its name, is nothing. They are not the "official" foundation backing ODF. They are just two guys, with a good name and without a garage, which used to develop a OOXML ODF converter. Read this for more information: Cracks in the Foundation.
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Excellent. That's, in fact, our use case. We have a very specialized application where every client is also server (multi-master). We even wrote our own database replication software, which is better than Intersystems' (the "shadow replication" Caché is able to do does not allow multi-master replication).
They should move to Intersystems Caché. SQL, objects, XML and even MUMPS. It will make equally happy SQL and NoSQL fans. And it's damn fast. Much leaner than Oracle, DB2 or Informix, too. Excellent support. Extremely good. Not cheap, thought.
Same for Spain: you can request a pre-filled tax sheet in the mail (or e-mail), it's called a "tax return draft". The Spanish IRS (AEAT) will fill it with everything it knows for sure (mortgage, union, married status, etc) automatically. You can then just confirm that draft (i. e. accept whatever it says), or modify it. There is a sleight of hand, though: in case the information in the draft is not correct, you MUST fix it or you will be fined. That's the reason why most people complain about their draft being always in favor of the Estate: given that a lot of people don't bother checking if the draft is accurate (and if it is not and the AEAT notices, you will face a fine), the AEAT does not add some deduction unless they are 99.99% sure you qualify for it.
Unfortunately for IT, it usually comes down to "How much revenue did you generate?" and "Oh, you're a cost center. Let's see if out sourcing is cheaper." As one boss of mine put it, once our IT department brings in 30 mill a year in revenue they can have a say in how we conduct business.
Once your IT department starts working sub-par, no department will bring 30 million a year in revenue. No department will bring a penny in, actually.
If you outsource your IT, you are as bad as your competitor. Actually, the shop you outsourced your IT to may very well also manage your competitors' IT departments. Companies need to realize an IT department is not a cost center but an investment, and a good IT department is a competitive advantage.
"Buying Riverbank" means buying its assets and hiring Phil. It's a 1-man operation. If Phil likes his independence, Nokia has nothing to do.
This is what Richard Dale (the main author of SMOKE and the Ruby and C# bindings for Qt and KDE, and C, Objective C and Java bindings in the past, to) said about PySide:
Currently the total size of the PySide libs for all the Qt modueles is 30 Mb. For just QtCore and QtGui they are 22.5 Mb. These are really high figures, and about twice the size of the existing PyQt libs. They are five or six (!) times larger than the Smoke libraries, which weigh in at just over 5 Mb for all the Qt modules. The Smoke libraries can be used by Ruby, C#, Perl, Common Lisp and PHP, not just a single language too. The large size is caused by the heavy use of C++ templates in Boost::Python.
Qt alone has about 500 classes, whereas the current KDE bindings like Python and Ruby wrap over 1500 classes, which would give a combined shared library size of 90 Mb or so assuming the same size per class as Qt. So as PySide stands, I would personally consider that these figures are just too high.
There is a hack in the generate code of doing '#define protected public', to allow protected methods to be called. This certainly won't work on Windows. Fixing it properly will require extra code to be generated to subclass each class with protected methods, and add a public method that calls a corresponding method in the class to be wrapped. This will add some extra code obviously.
It looks like PySide are huge (3x the size of PyQt and 6x the size of SMOKE-generated bindings!) and there is very little improvement they can do if they keep on using Boost::Python to generate PySide.
Given that PyQt costs only £350 (roughly 400 EUR) with full support and is much lighter and mature, I can't see why I would use PySide (unless Nokia gives me full, free, support with my commercial C++ license, of course, which I think they won't be doing because they required you to buy a 1000 EUR separate license for Qt Jambi -the Java bindings- )
The N810 is a 16-bit color device and Flash video is already slow there. Now try to play 24 bit video on such an underpowered device. The N810 is perfect for many things but "portable video player" is not one of them.
Support for debugging with VC++ debugger is already in git master branch.
If you like C++ and the Qt API and you want to develop for the web (true web 2.0 AJAX apps), you should try Wt.
Wt clones the Qt API but using Boost instead of Qt. You can compile your web application to a FastCGI module (which you can deploy with Apache, lighttpd, IIS, etc) or to an executable which includes an embedded HTTP(S) web server.
Oh, and there are Ruby bindings, too (code)
Oh, and best of all: you can link to any C and C++ library (including Qt). No more messing with Ruby/Python/PHP/whatever bindings!
+1 eDirectory (which pre-dates Active Directory, BTW) is very good and cheap. Used in combination with ZenWorks, it's a joy to work with.
Probably 75% of the cost of the installation is due to the panels being installed on top of a museum, which would require special care.
They do ship a BBU for the P400. Part number is 383280-B21
I'm not saying my current setup (DL320s, SA P400, RAID-6, Linux, ext3) can outperform, or even be on-par, with the RAID-less storage appliances Sun introduced. I'm saying a setup with DL180/DL185, Solaris and ZFS can.
ext3 in RAID-6, BTW. But with the configuration I posted in the first post of this thread, you can build a very cheap SAN/NAS. It does work. You can get support from Sun for the software (Sun sells Solaris support contracts) and HP for the hardware. Obviously, you won't have the nice GUI, but it's TEN times cheaper per TB.
I'm using ext3, of course. ZFS on FUSE is nowhere near production quality. The original idea was to use Zumastor but it is not production-ready, either.
I've done with the DL320s, P400 and Linux, as Solaris did not work on the DL320s at the moment. It does certainly work.
Four easy steps to dead-cheap SAN/NAS storage:
You are wrong. KDE 4.0 was not released for Windows. The WinKDE installer installs binaries compiled from trunk (the soon-to-be KDE 4.1)
Check http://windows.kde.org/ and use the WinKDE installer to install it: http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/installer/kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe Amarok is available on Windows, too. I think it's not included in the installer yet but you can certainly donwnload it from http://winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/releases/unstable/latest/ and extract the ZIP files yourself. This is what it looks like: http://www.elpauer.org/?p=259
Cheap and dead good setup: ProLiant DL180 + 1TB disks w/ compatible trays + Linux + Zumastor
The HP ProLiant DL180 server is a 2U rack server with 12 SATA 3.5 slots starting at US $1299. You may also use the older DL320s but its processor is less powerful, it only admits 8GB RAM and the machine is more expensive.
Buy the server, then buy 12 empty trays at US $25. I've always bought them at SCSITray (you are looking for part number 373211-001
Now, but 2x80GB SATA disks for system in RAID-1 and 10x1TB SATA disks for data in RAID-5 (if you want RAID-6, you need a P400 controller with BBWC or a P800 controller with BBWC, the P600 won't work with > 2TB volumes).
For the software part, install Linux and Zumastor, which provides ZFS-like features on top of any Linux filesystem (I'm using it on top of ext3, some people prefer XFS). In case you want to have several replicated fileservers, Zumastor does replication automagically for you.
I used to use Rails until I discovered Wt: C++, Qt-like API, you develop webapps with widgets (as if they were a desktop application, no more "templates" or "pages") and you don't need to write a single line of HTML, CSS or Javascript. You can deploy it as a FastCGI module for Apache, Lighttp, etc, or as a standalone application with its own webserver. It supports very heavy loads, more than Rails or Django will ever be able to deal with. And you can link to a myriad of existing C and C++ libraries.
Do you want to authenticate your users using Active Directory? Use Samba and link to libwinbind if on Unix, or link to the Windows API if on Windows (yes, it's cross-platform!). No more worries about language bindings.
You are wrong. Google data centers fulfill the EU Safe Harbor Directive, as stated in the Safe Harbor homepage at the US Department of Commerce Export site. It's perfectly safe for EU companies to have their data stored in Google's servers.
If I were to develop a web-based desktop application, I'd use a web framework which allows me to develop a webapp just like it was a desktop app. The only such framework I know is Wt ( http://www.webtoolkit.eu/ ): C++, Qt-like API. I gave up on Rails after discovering it.
"The OpenDocument Foundation", in spite of its name, is nothing. They are not the "official" foundation backing ODF. They are just two guys, with a good name and without a garage, which used to develop a OOXML ODF converter. Read this for more information: Cracks in the Foundation.
Gtk for the debugger GUI!? No wonder this version took them so long!