I dunno. This "database" thing you speak out sounds dangerous and untrustworthy. Maybe FB could give an option to store in a database or with these gnomes you are talking about?
Contrary to the naysayers here, I think Bethesda has done a great job with DLC. Shivering Isles is bigger than most full $50 games (I am at 120 hours and counting), well worth the price to add more depth even to a ludicrously huge game like Oblivion (over 480 hours for me).
Likewise, when you consider other games Fallout 3 was a bargain when you consider cost, entertainment value, and time. Even more so compared to other mainstream forms of entertainment. If they'd release any of the Fallout3 DLC for the PS3 I'd buy some in a heartbeat, fully expecting them to be worthwhile as well.
Full Text Search does not belong in a relational database engine. None of them do it well compared to dedicated FTSE like Sphinx Search or Lucene, not Postgres, not MyISAM FULLTEXT, and not Mssql.
Thus only consider InnoDB for MySQL data storage, it supports transactions, FK support, and safe crash recovery.
What you responded to was an out of context quote, which by omission seemed to combine two sentences. In context my words might be less valium-inducing to you. """ Obviously 5.1 is not a perfect release. Quality is critically important to a database and I hope MySQL/Sun takes note of Montyâ(TM)s concerns, especially about core developers working on fun new projects like Drizzle and leaving relatively inexperienced developers fixing bugs in their core business product.
However in my opinion MySQL 5.1 a very good release, long ready for general production usage. Definitely test it before you use it, like you should also test new kernels, Apache versions, distribution releases, etc. But do not alow this sensationalist blog post to overshadow what should be considered a solid engineering accomplishment by the MySQL team. """
"How about the "bad connection" issue where the database server due to no reason obvious to the developer will count to ten and then just refuse new connections? How about when MySQL trips over itself and locks it's own tempfile? How about the admin gui that pretends to let you change parameters but really doesn't?"
I've developed, debugged, administered, and administered MySQL databases for nearly a decade now, and I have never seen any of those issues you complain about.
"How about MySQLs abmyssal speed once it has to deal with larger tables?"
The InnoDB storage engine uses clustered indexes and is actually pretty good with large tables. Combine that with the partitioned table support in MySQL 5.1 and large tables are quite manageable. I have one OLTP application with well over 300M rows, and the server runs fine even though it is on commodity hardware.
"but there is no use in pretending like there aren't any problems..."
Indeed, but they weren't what you mentioned here. I am looking for better CPU utilization on multicore systems, semi-synchronous replication, parallelized replication, better foreign key performance, and better join algorithms. Many of these features are planned of course but I want them now.
OK can someone pleas hire these guys to work on handwriting recognition software? If they can ready these bizarrely twisted captchas why can't Palm read my name?
- Disk based clustering: I assume this means I can dynamically expand the size of my database by adding more disks. Is this correct? Does PostgreSQL also support this (my project where this would be handy currently uses pgsql)? Disk based clustering only applies to people using the MySQL NDB Cluster product, which is quite different from the traditional MySQL product. So for the vast majority of MySQL users who use MyISAM or InnoDB tables, this doesn't really affect them at all.
- Partitioning: I can think of several things this could mean.. Splitting data among several tables at some logical dividing point. Or, limiting the size of tables so they can't overrun the complete storage space. What does this mean in MySQL 5.1 terms? This means splitting an existing table along logical dividing points, but still acting as a single table. Let's say you partition it by date, well then you would insert/select/update like normal -- but a query or update that looks at the date would only have to look at a smaller partition of the table to know what row needs to be updated.
With NDB Cluster 5.1, all of the indexed columns are still in memory, so the performance impact is minimal for the types of queries and DML that NDB is good for. At least, in my testing it has been.
For things NDB cluster is really bad at, like querying against non-indexed tables... even the memory based NDB is terrible compared with the innodb/myisam. So you wouldn't be doing that anyway, but the indexed columns would be relatively unaffected by the change.
Do some research before you talk about things you dont understand. For starters, Google uses MySQL for their ads, not searches. Searches are done via Bigtable, which is actuall pretty cool. However I find it extremely unlikely that Google would trust their ad system to something they felt was "loosey-goosey".
Regardless there are plenty of large scale institutions which use MySQL cluster for financial and other critical applications. MySQL Cluster is extremely robust, and thanks to rolling upgrades and built in redundancy it is a very safe and reliable system.
You guys are close, but here's the cigar: allow *only* walking robots into the competition. This would solve many of the problems that plague the last version of battlebots: * walking implies falling, which would allow for variations on KO rules * walking reduces the impression that these are just gussied up RC cars * maybe it's just me, but robots lumbering around a course just seems more... interesting.
If the project had offered these laptops for sale to the general public from day 1, they would have sold quite a few (look at how the EEE did at twice the price). This would have helped get towards the production economies of scale they wanted and they'd be able to sell these things to their target market.
"If nobody buys these, I seriously doubt they'll keep them around. And if Dell drops them due to lack of demand (in real life, not on the Internet), Linux will end up farther from getting on the average person's desktop than before."
Your implicit assumption is that they are doing this to try to make money selling products to Ubuntu Linux users. This is likely very far from the truth -- Dell is doing this as a PR stunt to combat their public image as being lame and crappy. It's raised their profile with techno-savvy users who may have previously written them off -- but more than anything it has people discussing Dell in a positive way. It's been a while since I can remember that happening...
The new Wii controller isn't necessarily going to work with "traditional" games like Unreal. Red Steel for example was completely crap... even if you factor out the bad graphics and horrible voice acting, the gameplay itself was pretty lame *because of the controller*. For me at least, the Wiimote is going to supplant, not replace, the existing types of games out there. When GTA4 comes out I'll grab a PS3 or 360, but when friends come to visit I'll throw WarioWare up on the Wii for everyone to laugh until it hurts.
"These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation."
Of course it's anticompetitive, that's how Microsoft works. They have proven it time and time again and every time they have the opportunity they act anticompetitively.
For another prominent example, take the browser. From a competitive market, having people working hard to produce a quality browser for you means reduced production costs -- it's totally awesome, which is probably why Apple went with a KHTML based solution for their OS. So why on Earth would Microsoft not take the gift that Mozilla gave them and build IE7 around that? Instead of accepting that free work, Microsoft instead builds a proprietary solution that is just incompatible enough that gives them an anticompetitive edge. Once again their actions only makes sense from the perspective of someone who wants to avoid the lower margins of a truly competitive market.
And of course, world governments are too gutless, corrupt, or ignorant to do anything about it.
Supply vs. demand. Demand is increasing, and by the terms of "peak oil" regarding supply we have reached a plateau of oil production or the production is dropping. The math is simple, if "peak oil" was the case that means it would make sense if you could to buy future oil because as demand outstrips supply the price will increase.
Except that you *can* buy future oil, or more specifically oil futures. In fact there is an entire market for this, the prices for oil delivered in the future is available right here. It plainly shows that the people whose job it is to analyze and bet on the direction of oil prices do not see the dramatic imbalance of demand vs. supply which peak oil theory predicts.
Lots of comments here have focused on the bias of the people involved in this study. Well, the market is not biased -- if people thought that the price of oil is going to go way up in the next 10 years you can literally go out and buy some. Except they don't, they write books with half-baked statistics and scare people half to death talking about some fantasy "peak oil" scenario that is unlikely.
Keep your heads on, people. Having enough oil production does not mean that we are okay, it means that we are able to cook our planet death with readily available cheap carbon. If we don't accept that thinking we are going to run out soon, we continue down the path instead of addressing the very real problem of global climate change.
FireFox is a brand, Mozilla is right that if they don't ship what they have designated it's not "FireFox" anymore -- even if the two largely share the same codebase. But if Debian calls it "Web Browser, based on FireFox (TM)" with a generic logo it should make everyone happy.
(a) Identifies the package by function for users (b) Does not suggest that it _is_ Firefox and respects the integrity of the trademark (c) Users can figure out both that it's like firefox, but not exactly. (d) Fits with how Debian policy and advocates wants its own trademark used (want to be recognized but not misappropriated).
I never saw the old series but fell in love with the first new one last year. This will betray my ignorance at the time of the show's history but I was totally shocked that they replaced Eccleston. I tried to Tennant a chance, I really did. I watched all of the episodes of the most recent series and was completely unimpressed, by the season finale I felt that the quality of the show has degraded to a point where I'm just not interested in watching any more of it. Eccleston brought a certain joy and optimism the role, I think what I really liked was not the show itself but instead the tone character that he played.
"Bad link? Or did someone antecipate the/. effect and preemptively removed the page?"
It's not a bad link, the top item on their "most read" articles is the same as the link from slashdot with the title "Nintendo gets Wii ready for holidays". It was probably written in advance of the media embargo deadline and posted too early for whatever reason, then had to be pulled.
Anything that could be salvaged by another project would not be a waste, granted, but there is a heck of a lot that is just plain duplication. Testing/Bugs/QA, distro-specific documentation, packaging -- those things are largely wasted if the poster was correct that Mandrake is a dead end it really would be a waste of effort.
I was recently in the same position. They aren't looking for a great credit rating, just to make sure you don't have a bad one. Not having a rating at all and having a good reason is as good as having a decent credit rating -- that is to say you are no additional risk. So don't sweat it.
They went to all this work doing a sophisticated study, only to make a glaringly false assumption that shows up throughout the entire paper.
Guess what? What people generally refer to as "Linux" is not free cost to an organization! Yes, the kernel does not cost you anything to download and sometimes you can even get an entire distribution without cost -- but this is but a fraction of the TCO because it doesn't include support or staffing. In fact, in some cases such as with Red Hat, the software itself is even priced above that of Windows, no?
The idea of Linux as a collection of nerds hacking away in their mothers basments is so passe, it's ridiculous now to base a large body of work on that premise. The Linux kernel and the softwares that run on top of it are mainly constructed by people working for large corporations who mutually benefit from their GPL-enforced co-operation.
The question of whether Linux can unseat Microsoft's dominance given their massive degree of monopoly power over the market is still unanswered, it's just incredibly sad to see how much effort these fine folks have put in a completely uninteresting tangent of that question.
That's a logically incoherent answer. If you're caught robbing a store, saying "but I just stole the candy bars, jimbo stole the safe" -- yeah well you still stole the frigging candy bars now didn't you?
Just because the USA spends a lot on military doesn't mean that the unrelated expenditure of the ISS isn't excessive compared to any other uses of the money. What you are REALLY saying is just that from your political perspective, those military expenditures are ones you don't respect and would prefer to see them cut first. That's a red herring from the issue of how much is the correct amount of money to spend on orbiting space station research.
If you cut the spending on the ISS, the gov't could spend that very significant amount money in any number of places or simply return it to the citizens via debt repayments or even tax cuts. Not _just_ the agencies you love to hate. If those agencies are overfunded their budgets ought to be cut, but again this has nothing to do with the funding of the ISS -- once those would be cut the question of how much to fund the ISS still remains.
Fact is, I agree with your implied position that the amount of money the US spends on defense is truly insane, while the amount of money to support the ISS is justified. But the argument you used to support that is total bull.
Slashdot Mirror
I dunno. This "database" thing you speak out sounds dangerous and untrustworthy. Maybe FB could give an option to store in a database or with these gnomes you are talking about?
Contrary to the naysayers here, I think Bethesda has done a great job with DLC. Shivering Isles is bigger than most full $50 games (I am at 120 hours and counting), well worth the price to add more depth even to a ludicrously huge game like Oblivion (over 480 hours for me).
Likewise, when you consider other games Fallout 3 was a bargain when you consider cost, entertainment value, and time. Even more so compared to other mainstream forms of entertainment. If they'd release any of the Fallout3 DLC for the PS3 I'd buy some in a heartbeat, fully expecting them to be worthwhile as well.
Full Text Search does not belong in a relational database engine. None of them do it well compared to dedicated FTSE like Sphinx Search or Lucene, not Postgres, not MyISAM FULLTEXT, and not Mssql.
Thus only consider InnoDB for MySQL data storage, it supports transactions, FK support, and safe crash recovery.
What you responded to was an out of context quote, which by omission seemed to combine two sentences. In context my words might be less valium-inducing to you.
"""
Obviously 5.1 is not a perfect release. Quality is critically important to a database and I hope MySQL/Sun takes note of Montyâ(TM)s concerns, especially about core developers working on fun new projects like Drizzle and leaving relatively inexperienced developers fixing bugs in their core business product.
However in my opinion MySQL 5.1 a very good release, long ready for general production usage. Definitely test it before you use it, like you should also test new kernels, Apache versions, distribution releases, etc. But do not alow this sensationalist blog post to overshadow what should be considered a solid engineering accomplishment by the MySQL team.
"""
"How about the "bad connection" issue where the database server due to no reason obvious to the developer will count to ten and then just refuse new connections? How about when MySQL trips over itself and locks it's own tempfile? How about the admin gui that pretends to let you change parameters but really doesn't?"
I've developed, debugged, administered, and administered MySQL databases for nearly a decade now, and I have never seen any of those issues you complain about.
"How about MySQLs abmyssal speed once it has to deal with larger tables?"
The InnoDB storage engine uses clustered indexes and is actually pretty good with large tables. Combine that with the partitioned table support in MySQL 5.1 and large tables are quite manageable. I have one OLTP application with well over 300M rows, and the server runs fine even though it is on commodity hardware.
"but there is no use in pretending like there aren't any problems ..."
Indeed, but they weren't what you mentioned here. I am looking for better CPU utilization on multicore systems, semi-synchronous replication, parallelized replication, better foreign key performance, and better join algorithms. Many of these features are planned of course but I want them now.
OK can someone pleas hire these guys to work on handwriting recognition software? If they can ready these bizarrely twisted captchas why can't Palm read my name?
With NDB Cluster 5.1, all of the indexed columns are still in memory, so the performance impact is minimal for the types of queries and DML that NDB is good for. At least, in my testing it has been.
For things NDB cluster is really bad at, like querying against non-indexed tables... even the memory based NDB is terrible compared with the innodb/myisam. So you wouldn't be doing that anyway, but the indexed columns would be relatively unaffected by the change.
Do some research before you talk about things you dont understand. For starters, Google uses MySQL for their ads, not searches. Searches are done via Bigtable, which is actuall pretty cool. However I find it extremely unlikely that Google would trust their ad system to something they felt was "loosey-goosey".
Regardless there are plenty of large scale institutions which use MySQL cluster for financial and other critical applications. MySQL Cluster is extremely robust, and thanks to rolling upgrades and built in redundancy it is a very safe and reliable system.
You guys are close, but here's the cigar: allow *only* walking robots into the competition. This would solve many of the problems that plague the last version of battlebots:
* walking implies falling, which would allow for variations on KO rules
* walking reduces the impression that these are just gussied up RC cars
* maybe it's just me, but robots lumbering around a course just seems more... interesting.
If the project had offered these laptops for sale to the general public from day 1, they would have sold quite a few (look at how the EEE did at twice the price). This would have helped get towards the production economies of scale they wanted and they'd be able to sell these things to their target market.
Now I think it's too little, too late.
"There nothing inherently illegal about Automatix: it just allows you to break the DMCA."
Incorrect. Distributing w32codecs and other proprietary software without permission violates traditional copyright law, not just DMCA provisions.
"If nobody buys these, I seriously doubt they'll keep them around. And if Dell drops them due to lack of demand (in real life, not on the Internet), Linux will end up farther from getting on the average person's desktop than before."
Your implicit assumption is that they are doing this to try to make money selling products to Ubuntu Linux users. This is likely very far from the truth -- Dell is doing this as a PR stunt to combat their public image as being lame and crappy. It's raised their profile with techno-savvy users who may have previously written them off -- but more than anything it has people discussing Dell in a positive way. It's been a while since I can remember that happening...
The new Wii controller isn't necessarily going to work with "traditional" games like Unreal. Red Steel for example was completely crap... even if you factor out the bad graphics and horrible voice acting, the gameplay itself was pretty lame *because of the controller*. For me at least, the Wiimote is going to supplant, not replace, the existing types of games out there. When GTA4 comes out I'll grab a PS3 or 360, but when friends come to visit I'll throw WarioWare up on the Wii for everyone to laugh until it hurts.
"These actions only make sense from an anticompetitive standpoint. There's no other logical explanation."
Of course it's anticompetitive, that's how Microsoft works. They have proven it time and time again and every time they have the opportunity they act anticompetitively.
For another prominent example, take the browser. From a competitive market, having people working hard to produce a quality browser for you means reduced production costs -- it's totally awesome, which is probably why Apple went with a KHTML based solution for their OS. So why on Earth would Microsoft not take the gift that Mozilla gave them and build IE7 around that? Instead of accepting that free work, Microsoft instead builds a proprietary solution that is just incompatible enough that gives them an anticompetitive edge. Once again their actions only makes sense from the perspective of someone who wants to avoid the lower margins of a truly competitive market.
And of course, world governments are too gutless, corrupt, or ignorant to do anything about it.
Supply vs. demand. Demand is increasing, and by the terms of "peak oil" regarding supply we have reached a plateau of oil production or the production is dropping. The math is simple, if "peak oil" was the case that means it would make sense if you could to buy future oil because as demand outstrips supply the price will increase.
Except that you *can* buy future oil, or more specifically oil futures. In fact there is an entire market for this, the prices for oil delivered in the future is available right here. It plainly shows that the people whose job it is to analyze and bet on the direction of oil prices do not see the dramatic imbalance of demand vs. supply which peak oil theory predicts.
Lots of comments here have focused on the bias of the people involved in this study. Well, the market is not biased -- if people thought that the price of oil is going to go way up in the next 10 years you can literally go out and buy some. Except they don't, they write books with half-baked statistics and scare people half to death talking about some fantasy "peak oil" scenario that is unlikely.
Keep your heads on, people. Having enough oil production does not mean that we are okay, it means that we are able to cook our planet death with readily available cheap carbon. If we don't accept that thinking we are going to run out soon, we continue down the path instead of addressing the very real problem of global climate change.
"which are intended to be available to the members of the public"
So, not your docs which are intended to be available to you and who you choose to share it with.
FireFox is a brand, Mozilla is right that if they don't ship what they have designated it's not "FireFox" anymore -- even if the two largely share the same codebase. But if Debian calls it "Web Browser, based on FireFox (TM)" with a generic logo it should make everyone happy.
(a) Identifies the package by function for users
(b) Does not suggest that it _is_ Firefox and respects the integrity of the trademark
(c) Users can figure out both that it's like firefox, but not exactly.
(d) Fits with how Debian policy and advocates wants its own trademark used (want to be recognized but not misappropriated).
I never saw the old series but fell in love with the first new one last year. This will betray my ignorance at the time of the show's history but I was totally shocked that they replaced Eccleston. I tried to Tennant a chance, I really did. I watched all of the episodes of the most recent series and was completely unimpressed, by the season finale I felt that the quality of the show has degraded to a point where I'm just not interested in watching any more of it. Eccleston brought a certain joy and optimism the role, I think what I really liked was not the show itself but instead the tone character that he played.
"Bad link? Or did someone antecipate the /. effect and preemptively removed the page?"
It's not a bad link, the top item on their "most read" articles is the same as the link from slashdot with the title "Nintendo gets Wii ready for holidays". It was probably written in advance of the media embargo deadline and posted too early for whatever reason, then had to be pulled.
Anything that could be salvaged by another project would not be a waste, granted, but there is a heck of a lot that is just plain duplication. Testing/Bugs/QA, distro-specific documentation, packaging -- those things are largely wasted if the poster was correct that Mandrake is a dead end it really would be a waste of effort.
I was recently in the same position. They aren't looking for a great credit rating, just to make sure you don't have a bad one. Not having a rating at all and having a good reason is as good as having a decent credit rating -- that is to say you are no additional risk. So don't sweat it.
They went to all this work doing a sophisticated study, only to make a glaringly false assumption that shows up throughout the entire paper.
Guess what? What people generally refer to as "Linux" is not free cost to an organization! Yes, the kernel does not cost you anything to download and sometimes you can even get an entire distribution without cost -- but this is but a fraction of the TCO because it doesn't include support or staffing. In fact, in some cases such as with Red Hat, the software itself is even priced above that of Windows, no?
The idea of Linux as a collection of nerds hacking away in their mothers basments is so passe, it's ridiculous now to base a large body of work on that premise. The Linux kernel and the softwares that run on top of it are mainly constructed by people working for large corporations who mutually benefit from their GPL-enforced co-operation.
The question of whether Linux can unseat Microsoft's dominance given their massive degree of monopoly power over the market is still unanswered, it's just incredibly sad to see how much effort these fine folks have put in a completely uninteresting tangent of that question.
It seems that one of us doesn't understand what "first mover" means.
That's a logically incoherent answer. If you're caught robbing a store, saying "but I just stole the candy bars, jimbo stole the safe" -- yeah well you still stole the frigging candy bars now didn't you?
Just because the USA spends a lot on military doesn't mean that the unrelated expenditure of the ISS isn't excessive compared to any other uses of the money. What you are REALLY saying is just that from your political perspective, those military expenditures are ones you don't respect and would prefer to see them cut first. That's a red herring from the issue of how much is the correct amount of money to spend on orbiting space station research.
If you cut the spending on the ISS, the gov't could spend that very significant amount money in any number of places or simply return it to the citizens via debt repayments or even tax cuts. Not _just_ the agencies you love to hate. If those agencies are overfunded their budgets ought to be cut, but again this has nothing to do with the funding of the ISS -- once those would be cut the question of how much to fund the ISS still remains.
Fact is, I agree with your implied position that the amount of money the US spends on defense is truly insane, while the amount of money to support the ISS is justified. But the argument you used to support that is total bull.