The way you're working with Subversion right now, each developer checks out a copy where they are making private temporary modifications in order to improve the code, only to check the result in when it's done. You have no ability to see, backup, or manage those private checkouts, even though there may be substantial work going into them each day. You should consider that a large problem with using Subversion. If you're lucky, developers make branches and commit to that regularly so there's less chance of losing that work, but since branches are so painful in svn that's probably not happening for anything but major projects.
With a DVCS, you can have each developer publish their private version of the code and see what they're doing at any time. When they have a good changeset ready, they integrate that back into the master repository--updating your central spot you worry about backing up, same as you always have. But in addition to that, you have visibility into work in progress that the Subversion model only provides if people go out of their way to enable it.
OK, so XP or Vista and that card works for you. Great. But things aren't even completely rosy here in Microsoft land: a quick read suggests many people have issues with this card even in Windows. These people were doing plenty of, as you say, chicken killing by moonlight.
Another search finds a report that the card does work with the latest Ubuntu release, so you might have better luck if you tried again now.
Considering how many people I know who have become so frustrated with their PC experience in Windows (mainly viruses and spyware) that they threw out the whole computer and bought a Mac, I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest to someone that they might need to buy a new known Linux compatible video card to make things work.
You seem to have missed that in the last few years, there's damn few PC games being made. There's still a few big selling standout titles--"World of Warcraft" and "The Sims" come to mind--but the game industry is getting to the point where they don't care about PC gaming. Don't have to care about piracy on a typical console. According to Is PC gaming dying? Or thriving?, there won't even be a PC release of the next Civilization title. That's how much even die-hard PC gaming companies have given up on the PC as a platform.
Some quick research suggests wire hangers are 12 gauge and made out of solid steel; what the audio cable industry would call "solid core". Monster is a bit evasive about what's in their Monster Ultra Series THX 1000 speaker cables, saying only "4 large gauge copper conductors"; based on other Monster cable products I'd expect they're 12 or 14 gauge stranded wire.
I do a fair amount of single-blind speaker cable tests myself, certainly more than this one anecdotal experiment. Differences here are subtle but I've done way too many comparisons with consistent results to think they don't exist. The best results in any listening comparison are always when comparing with music the listener is intimately familiar with, so their test starts out badly in that regard. Generally I prefer the sound of fat solid wire to anything else. People like stranded wire because it's easy to work with, but it doesn't sound as good as a solid wire of the same gauge. Accordingly, I'm unsurprised that they found the solid steel coat hanger wire to be similar to the Monster cable.
The thing most people miss about that article is that there were two listeners who were cable of hearing the difference between the Monster product and the Belden cable they started with, suggesting there is an audible difference to cables--just not a major difference between the Monster and the hanger. I suspect that further, better tests would show a ranking like this:
I've had audiophile speaker cables here up to the $1000 price range (but not the expensive Monsters, their stuff is awful per dollar). Nowadays I'm usually happy with some hand twisted pair designs I wired up with 12AWG solid copper purchased from Home Depot. It's certainly superior to the 14AWG stranded cables I made out of an extension cord also purchased there. The extension cord "design" does sound better than most cheap speaker cables, including the budget Monster line; it is good quality copper and almost thick enough.
The subject of this article, EnterpriseDB, is trying to target this market with GridSQL. As it's new in it's current form, impossible to say how reliable systems built with it will be quite yet. Those looking for reasons behind the IBM investment might consider whether GridSQL might one day talk to DB2 databases as well.
The closest fully open-source PostgreSQL solution to your requirements that's been around a bit is pgpool-II. It think it's still too immature to be considered five-nines quality though, and there are some restrictions you have to observe. A PostgreSQL replication solution that is very robust and proven is slony but it's not a load-balancing solution in the way I suspect you want.
There's also the Greenplum Database, which isn't free or open-source but is rooted in PostgreSQL technology.
Good enterprise-grade clustering with load-balancing is still on the PostgreSQL work in progress list rather than being here right now. I expect the core infrastructure piece needed to really make it work well (support for read-only warm-standby slaves) will make it into PostgreSQL 8.4 and be released around a year from now. I started a comparison page of the replication solutions currently available that's on the PostgreSQL wiki now that is trying to track progress in this area. Much like core PostgreSQL support for enabling replication, it still needs some work .
Tech support shouldn't be expected to know information about how to serve legal documents to the company; you should have contacted their main corporate offices instead. Not that this would have helped you much, as you'll first need to unravel just who you're going to sue here first. There's a good outline at http://www.secinfo.com/dut49.33Q9.d.htm showing the possibilities. You probably want to serve Seagate Technology LLC or Seagate US LLC rather than the Cayman Islands parent corporation. As far as I can tell the US LLC is located at the 920 Disc Drive address.
For once that's on topic. I stated to rant like everybody else on how this was skewed by not taking into account the market share of Apache vs. IIS, but that's not the real story here.
Take a look at the "Webserver defaced" table. It's badly formatted in a couple of respects. Here's a copy of the interesting data with defacement numbers sorted by server platform:
nginx doesn't run on Windows; I'd expect most sites deploying it would be on Linux or BSD. Rapidsite runs on a customized Apache, and again while I haven't found a definitive statement here I'd expect virtual hosting using Apache is going to be Linux or BSD as well. I'd welcome corrections here if I'm wrong about that.
Combine this with the Netcraft data and the initial conclusion I would reach is that Linux+Apache is still the most secure platform. The only reason the Linux numbers are so inflated is that they include some really crappy web servers with significant vulnerabilities running something other than stock Apache.
I wish I had the raw data so I could ask some more interesting questions, like how things change you take the stupid user/admin data out. I don't care that it's possible to setup a platform up wrong and get simple vulnerabilities, I only care about how vulnerable a good installation is.
Court TV used to run this series called The Takedown. Every week they tried to do some casino scam using a team of experts, often at the behest of the hotel's internal security. The way everything was staged was kind of fake in spots, but an interesting look regardless at the mechanics of actually trying to cheat at a casino. Fun show, don't know where it's still running but you might be able to find it somewhere (*cough* torrent *cough*).
I personally don't play games of chance for money, just Texas Hold'Em where people with poor math skills are a steady income source.
If sysbench has some performance problem running PostgreSQL, and the tests I've done never gave me any confidence in it there, those issues could end up bottlenecking the benchmark results. Now: what if that's the case, but that bottleneck is less of a problem with FreeBSD than Linux? All you've proven is that FreeBSD is faster at running sysbench, not PostgreSQL.
Unless you're using a good benchmark for the database you're testing, you can't draw any strong conclusion about how that database performs, and I feel it's suspicious even for comparing the OS as a result. Maybe it's good data, maybe it's not, but you can't really know. Even the PostgreSQL bundled pgbench has limitations you must be aware of in order to get good results from it.
Oh, and if you could tell me where that deadlock patch is, that would be great; I'd like to dig into this issue some more. If all the patch does is detect deadlocks that's not really the right resolution though. There shouldn't be any deadlocks if the transactions are correct, the PostgreSQL MVCC keeps that from happening. I've taken the same queries sysbench chokes on and fed them into pgbench, wrapped properly in begin/commit blocks, and there's no trace of a deadlock then.
While I'm glad for FreeBSD they're showing good numbers again, their testing of PostgreSQL in this study is rather odd. The results are using the read-only tests from sysbench. You can see from its sourceforge page that sysbench is a MySQL benchmarking tool that has some rudimentary PostgreSQL support bolted on top. That particular code is so bad that the last time I checked, turning on the write OLTP tests deadlocked the PostgreSQL server, as it wasn't putting statements into transactions correctly (which of course the ancient MySQL versions this code targeted doesn't care about). As the sysbench tool hasn't been actively maintained in ages I doubt that has improved.
The claimed "15% faster than linux" is pretty clear in the MySQL tests; the PostgreSQL ones have a weird dip in them but are in general much closer. I'd be comfortable if the result of this study was "FreeBSD 7 has been optimized to be 15% faster running MySQL than Linux", because that matches what they did (note the specific libpthread patch for example). But the fact that they used such an awful PostgreSQL benchmarking methodology leaves me hesitant to draw a broader conclusion than that based on their tests.
IBM could have bought them out at a couple of points cheap--when they started this lawsuit they weren't trading for that much more than they are now. They didn't because it's more important to make an example of these idiots, and therefore to the larger group of potential future intellectual property trolls, as to what happens when you mess with companies because you think using Linux makes them vulnerable. No one should even consider spending a penny to buy them out, they need to die the hard way to make that lesson stick.
Also, it's quite possible Novell will own them anyway before this has finished playing out, because of the $37M SCO owes them. This shell game with loans won't necessarily change that. While they're posturing hard now, I have my doubts as to whether these "angels" will really cough up all that money when the courts force the company to do that.
So they want to allow teachers to ignore standards and provide their own unique implementation of the curriculum that's incompatible with the rest of the thinking world. Who is sponsoring this bill, Microsoft?
Another thing that bugs me about this is there's no notion of how much on-line activity is involved.
As an example, one of the reasons I have a Bank of America account is that you can do just about anything from their web site. I routinely move money around between accounts, pay bills, all sorts of stuff. Now, probably because of this, as well as their wide customer base, I regularly see phishing attacks aimed at BoA, with plenty of them e-mailed to me over the years. I've seen some pretty sophisticated replicas of their site aimed just at getting people to think they're at the real deal so they put their passwords in. The fact that many of their customers get scammed by such things is no surprise to me. Is that the bank's fault?
Chase and Citibank have pretty good on-line features as well so I'd expect them to be near the top as they are. What really bothers me about this study is how miserably the phone carriers did; it's not like they're doing anything as sophisticated as the banks are.
What he said. I've also seen my IPSEC VPN connections get trashed. As for other encryption not helping, when I start an scp session uploading a file to my office I get 190KB/s. After a minute or two that rate is down to 40-45KB/s, and the entire network is punished. Other people here using the Internet can tell when I'm uploading something because the entire Internet connection is flogged to a crawl the same way we are when there's a torrent active.
Yeah, and back in those days the ads were for products to add inches to your chest and arms; certainly a different target from today's spam.
Those old-time bodybuilding courses are both funny and surprisingly informative at times. You can see the "Moulding a mighty " booklets they're selling on the last page of this reprint at Sandow Plus.
Releasing internal code as open-source has many costs associated with it, from software packaging issues to legal ones. Unless it's clearly a case where that code has some value to a larger community, paying those "free the code" costs may have no payback for the company. It's completely reasonable to say that the default position is "do nothing", which also costs nothing, and only consider the costs of releasing as open-source when there's a demonstrated need or desire to use the code outside of the company.
To think of it another way: if you were IBM, would you rather spend a hypothetical $1M cleaning up crufty old code and having your lawyers review it so you can release it, or spend the same amount of resources improving/extended existing open-source projects? Choosing to ignore your old code just because you're friendly to the open source community isn't necessarily hypocrisy, sometimes it's the only rational business decision.
Slashdot Mirror
The way you're working with Subversion right now, each developer checks out a copy where they are making private temporary modifications in order to improve the code, only to check the result in when it's done. You have no ability to see, backup, or manage those private checkouts, even though there may be substantial work going into them each day. You should consider that a large problem with using Subversion. If you're lucky, developers make branches and commit to that regularly so there's less chance of losing that work, but since branches are so painful in svn that's probably not happening for anything but major projects.
With a DVCS, you can have each developer publish their private version of the code and see what they're doing at any time. When they have a good changeset ready, they integrate that back into the master repository--updating your central spot you worry about backing up, same as you always have. But in addition to that, you have visibility into work in progress that the Subversion model only provides if people go out of their way to enable it.
Didn't have to; they know something about opening windows and doors, and how to move quietly to creep across creaky wooden floors.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/
OK, so XP or Vista and that card works for you. Great. But things aren't even completely rosy here in Microsoft land: a quick read suggests
many
people
have
issues
with this card even in Windows. These people were doing plenty of, as you say, chicken killing by moonlight.
Another search finds a report that the card does work with the latest Ubuntu release, so you might have better luck if you tried again now.
Considering how many people I know who have become so frustrated with their PC experience in Windows (mainly viruses and spyware) that they threw out the whole computer and bought a Mac, I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest to someone that they might need to buy a new known Linux compatible video card to make things work.
You seem to have missed that in the last few years, there's damn few PC games being made. There's still a few big selling standout titles--"World of Warcraft" and "The Sims" come to mind--but the game industry is getting to the point where they don't care about PC gaming. Don't have to care about piracy on a typical console. According to Is PC gaming dying? Or thriving?, there won't even be a PC release of the next Civilization title. That's how much even die-hard PC gaming companies have given up on the PC as a platform.
Not having enough cat pictures certainly is a real problem with KittenAuth. If only someone were to create a site people uploaded an seemingly infinite number of cat pictures to everyday.
Some quick research suggests wire hangers are 12 gauge and made out of solid steel; what the audio cable industry would call "solid core". Monster is a bit evasive about what's in their Monster Ultra Series THX 1000 speaker cables, saying only "4 large gauge copper conductors"; based on other Monster cable products I'd expect they're 12 or 14 gauge stranded wire.
I do a fair amount of single-blind speaker cable tests myself, certainly more than this one anecdotal experiment. Differences here are subtle but I've done way too many comparisons with consistent results to think they don't exist. The best results in any listening comparison are always when comparing with music the listener is intimately familiar with, so their test starts out badly in that regard. Generally I prefer the sound of fat solid wire to anything else. People like stranded wire because it's easy to work with, but it doesn't sound as good as a solid wire of the same gauge. Accordingly, I'm unsurprised that they found the solid steel coat hanger wire to be similar to the Monster cable.
The thing most people miss about that article is that there were two listeners who were cable of hearing the difference between the Monster product and the Belden cable they started with, suggesting there is an audible difference to cables--just not a major difference between the Monster and the hanger. I suspect that further, better tests would show a ranking like this:
Belden 14AWG Stranded Copper < Monster 1000 ~= 12AWG Solid Steel < 12AWG Solid Copper
I've had audiophile speaker cables here up to the $1000 price range (but not the expensive Monsters, their stuff is awful per dollar). Nowadays I'm usually happy with some hand twisted pair designs I wired up with 12AWG solid copper purchased from Home Depot. It's certainly superior to the 14AWG stranded cables I made out of an extension cord also purchased there. The extension cord "design" does sound better than most cheap speaker cables, including the budget Monster line; it is good quality copper and almost thick enough.
Why PostgreSQL Instead of MySQL: Comparing Reliability and Speed in 2007
I'll have a 2008 update out soon now that PostgreSQL 8.3 has been released.
The subject of this article, EnterpriseDB, is trying to target this market with GridSQL. As it's new in it's current form, impossible to say how reliable systems built with it will be quite yet. Those looking for reasons behind the IBM investment might consider whether GridSQL might one day talk to DB2 databases as well.
The closest fully open-source PostgreSQL solution to your requirements that's been around a bit is pgpool-II. It think it's still too immature to be considered five-nines quality though, and there are some restrictions you have to observe. A PostgreSQL replication solution that is very robust and proven is slony but it's not a load-balancing solution in the way I suspect you want.
There's also the Greenplum Database, which isn't free or open-source but is rooted in PostgreSQL technology.
Good enterprise-grade clustering with load-balancing is still on the PostgreSQL work in progress list rather than being here right now. I expect the core infrastructure piece needed to really make it work well (support for read-only warm-standby slaves) will make it into PostgreSQL 8.4 and be released around a year from now. I started a comparison page of the replication solutions currently available that's on the PostgreSQL wiki now that is trying to track progress in this area. Much like core PostgreSQL support for enabling replication, it still needs some work .
A nice bonus to this solution is that you'll be able to overclock your processor higher.
Tech support shouldn't be expected to know information about how to serve legal documents to the company; you should have contacted their main corporate offices instead. Not that this would have helped you much, as you'll first need to unravel just who you're going to sue here first. There's a good outline at http://www.secinfo.com/dut49.33Q9.d.htm showing the possibilities. You probably want to serve Seagate Technology LLC or Seagate US LLC rather than the Cayman Islands parent corporation. As far as I can tell the US LLC is located at the 920 Disc Drive address.
For once that's on topic. I stated to rant like everybody else on how this was skewed by not taking into account the market share of Apache vs. IIS, but that's not the real story here.
Take a look at the "Webserver defaced" table. It's badly formatted in a couple of respects. Here's a copy of the interesting data with defacement numbers sorted by server platform:
nginx 729
IIS (total) 447
Apache 319
Rapidsite 244
SonataServer 178
nginx doesn't run on Windows; I'd expect most sites deploying it would be on Linux or BSD. Rapidsite runs on a customized Apache, and again while I haven't found a definitive statement here I'd expect virtual hosting using Apache is going to be Linux or BSD as well. I'd welcome corrections here if I'm wrong about that.
Combine this with the Netcraft data and the initial conclusion I would reach is that Linux+Apache is still the most secure platform. The only reason the Linux numbers are so inflated is that they include some really crappy web servers with significant vulnerabilities running something other than stock Apache.
I wish I had the raw data so I could ask some more interesting questions, like how things change you take the stupid user/admin data out. I don't care that it's possible to setup a platform up wrong and get simple vulnerabilities, I only care about how vulnerable a good installation is.
All Apple has to do here is look at every decision they made when designing the Newton, then not do that.
Court TV used to run this series called The Takedown. Every week they tried to do some casino scam using a team of experts, often at the behest of the hotel's internal security. The way everything was staged was kind of fake in spots, but an interesting look regardless at the mechanics of actually trying to cheat at a casino. Fun show, don't know where it's still running but you might be able to find it somewhere (*cough* torrent *cough*).
I personally don't play games of chance for money, just Texas Hold'Em where people with poor math skills are a steady income source.
FRAILS? That sounds about right.
If sysbench has some performance problem running PostgreSQL, and the tests I've done never gave me any confidence in it there, those issues could end up bottlenecking the benchmark results. Now: what if that's the case, but that bottleneck is less of a problem with FreeBSD than Linux? All you've proven is that FreeBSD is faster at running sysbench, not PostgreSQL.
Unless you're using a good benchmark for the database you're testing, you can't draw any strong conclusion about how that database performs, and I feel it's suspicious even for comparing the OS as a result. Maybe it's good data, maybe it's not, but you can't really know. Even the PostgreSQL bundled pgbench has limitations you must be aware of in order to get good results from it.
Oh, and if you could tell me where that deadlock patch is, that would be great; I'd like to dig into this issue some more. If all the patch does is detect deadlocks that's not really the right resolution though. There shouldn't be any deadlocks if the transactions are correct, the PostgreSQL MVCC keeps that from happening. I've taken the same queries sysbench chokes on and fed them into pgbench, wrapped properly in begin/commit blocks, and there's no trace of a deadlock then.
While I'm glad for FreeBSD they're showing good numbers again, their testing of PostgreSQL in this study is rather odd. The results are using the read-only tests from sysbench. You can see from its sourceforge page that sysbench is a MySQL benchmarking tool that has some rudimentary PostgreSQL support bolted on top. That particular code is so bad that the last time I checked, turning on the write OLTP tests deadlocked the PostgreSQL server, as it wasn't putting statements into transactions correctly (which of course the ancient MySQL versions this code targeted doesn't care about). As the sysbench tool hasn't been actively maintained in ages I doubt that has improved.
The claimed "15% faster than linux" is pretty clear in the MySQL tests; the PostgreSQL ones have a weird dip in them but are in general much closer. I'd be comfortable if the result of this study was "FreeBSD 7 has been optimized to be 15% faster running MySQL than Linux", because that matches what they did (note the specific libpthread patch for example). But the fact that they used such an awful PostgreSQL benchmarking methodology leaves me hesitant to draw a broader conclusion than that based on their tests.
IBM could have bought them out at a couple of points cheap--when they started this lawsuit they weren't trading for that much more than they are now. They didn't because it's more important to make an example of these idiots, and therefore to the larger group of potential future intellectual property trolls, as to what happens when you mess with companies because you think using Linux makes them vulnerable. No one should even consider spending a penny to buy them out, they need to die the hard way to make that lesson stick.
Also, it's quite possible Novell will own them anyway before this has finished playing out, because of the $37M SCO owes them. This shell game with loans won't necessarily change that. While they're posturing hard now, I have my doubts as to whether these "angels" will really cough up all that money when the courts force the company to do that.
The logistics problem with that is lawyers can't survive exposure to the holy water either.
So they want to allow teachers to ignore standards and provide their own unique implementation of the curriculum that's incompatible with the rest of the thinking world. Who is sponsoring this bill, Microsoft?
Another thing that bugs me about this is there's no notion of how much on-line activity is involved.
As an example, one of the reasons I have a Bank of America account is that you can do just about anything from their web site. I routinely move money around between accounts, pay bills, all sorts of stuff. Now, probably because of this, as well as their wide customer base, I regularly see phishing attacks aimed at BoA, with plenty of them e-mailed to me over the years. I've seen some pretty sophisticated replicas of their site aimed just at getting people to think they're at the real deal so they put their passwords in. The fact that many of their customers get scammed by such things is no surprise to me. Is that the bank's fault?
Chase and Citibank have pretty good on-line features as well so I'd expect them to be near the top as they are. What really bothers me about this study is how miserably the phone carriers did; it's not like they're doing anything as sophisticated as the banks are.
What he said. I've also seen my IPSEC VPN connections get trashed. As for other encryption not helping, when I start an scp session uploading a file to my office I get 190KB/s. After a minute or two that rate is down to 40-45KB/s, and the entire network is punished. Other people here using the Internet can tell when I'm uploading something because the entire Internet connection is flogged to a crawl the same way we are when there's a torrent active.
Yeah, and back in those days the ads were for products to add inches to your chest and arms; certainly a different target from today's spam.
Those old-time bodybuilding courses are both funny and surprisingly informative at times. You can see the "Moulding a mighty " booklets they're selling on the last page of this reprint at Sandow Plus.
I don't know how you can suggest Walker is close to the slashdot ideal considering the man actually works on his diet.
Releasing internal code as open-source has many costs associated with it, from software packaging issues to legal ones. Unless it's clearly a case where that code has some value to a larger community, paying those "free the code" costs may have no payback for the company. It's completely reasonable to say that the default position is "do nothing", which also costs nothing, and only consider the costs of releasing as open-source when there's a demonstrated need or desire to use the code outside of the company.
To think of it another way: if you were IBM, would you rather spend a hypothetical $1M cleaning up crufty old code and having your lawyers review it so you can release it, or spend the same amount of resources improving/extended existing open-source projects? Choosing to ignore your old code just because you're friendly to the open source community isn't necessarily hypocrisy, sometimes it's the only rational business decision.