Not necessarily the same use however. Canadian doctrine tells you that you can engage the enemy effectively at 400 meters with the C7 (M16 variant) with section strength. You can't do that with an AK-47.
In Vietnam sure this was not an advantage, but imagine those few times when your section can mow down oncoming enemy from a comfortable distance. Because what you have is essentially a precision rifle with the ability to fire in repetition.
There are other advantages to the M16, the ammunition is far lighter. That means you can carry a lot more of it, the more you have, the longer you can typically last in a conflict. Assuming you have a cleaning kit with you to prevent jams.
That's rather tall for a woman, even in this day and age I know a lot of women that are shorter. Back then, even the men were on average shorter, being average height balooned in the last hundred years or so.
So this man's assumption on her height is rather flawed by lack of historical reference.
Been using an Aircard for a while now
on
3G Notebook In Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have been using a Sierra Wireless Aircard for a while though Telus Mobility (Canadian) and its been working out pretty well for me. The card itself is completely free if you sign up for a three year contract and if you choose the appropriate data rate montly fees are pretty reasonable.
Speed in major cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary make use of their 1X EDO protocol which is about the speed of a slow ADSL connection. In order places you get simple 1X with vaying speeds but I can average 13Kbs in transfer rates for large files.
The problem with these things however is the cost of the connection itself. I've been moving from place to place for a while now so getting an Cable/DSL connection for a month or two at a time is just not worth it.
However with Telus, most of their plans charge by the meg and that does not take very long to break if your using even just straight IMAP mail. So your generally stuck with their 'unlimited' service which is about 100$ a month (50$/month for the first three months).
For me its worth it, even though Halifax is still on plain 1X. But its certainly not for everyone!
When a building is zoned there can't be any unwanted radiation of signals from the building. So cell phones are most certainly not an option in those buildings.
However some buildings have additional features, basically large rooms sound proofed, completly independant of the main structure with no water pipes, windows, sealed doors and no data capable connections other then fibre going in. Its impressive to see, specially the larger versions which essentially look like a large office without a washroom because water pipes can carry sound for some distance.
If its anything like the ones they were trying to sell here. You'd have your average thumb drive of small sizes to hardened portable hard drives which can carry well over 20Gb of space. In either case these had built in finger print scanner.
I had the opportunity to visit a Canadian Government IT tradeshow given in Ottawa. One of the firms marketing their devices specialized in USB/Portal drives which had finger print scanners built-in. According to the salesman these things were selling like hotcakes, especially in the US military.
As mentioned before, they tend to be used for things like sneaker nets, where bandwidth requirements of the data inside (G2/Int) would simply bog down the communications network. This is especially critical your using VHF/HF radios to pass on your voice/data communications.
They are also used to carry around orders as a lot of briefing rooms now have projectors and computers even in the field. Simply put, the same uses you and I have for such devices the military will find useful as well.
That being said, the norm for such devices with any critical information is to have them stored in appropriate storage containers based on classification. For example, a CONFIDENTIAL document needs only to be stored steel container with a specific vault, while a COSMIC TOP SECRET document would need a vault. Interestingly enough the classicisation remains on such devices even after the file has been removed.
I've been working on a role-play/chat site since 1999 and in time it has grown to pick up a lot of features. These days in addition to the role-play component, there are built-in forums, a collaborative gallery component for text and image works and I am currently working on a social aspect based loosely on PlentyOfFish. While it does not have webmail, it does support an Internal Mail system and private messaging when within rooms.
The code has always been released under the GPL, listed under Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Though I normally never get too much interest in the matter, must be the Perl and PostgreSQL combo!
You can run it concurrently only if your Vacuum buffer has not overflowed and thus require to do a more detailed run (FULL) in order to clean up the mess. Such a vacuum WILL lock your tables exclusively and can cause an awful mess if there is a lot of concurrent activity going on.
PostgreSQL is not necessarily the easiest beast in the world to get going. A few years back, I converted a chat/gallery portal system Ethereal Realms (http://www.erealms.org/ from MySQL to PostgreSQL, since at the time it was felt that features like proper referential integrity and stored procedures would really pay off.
The code was shortened considerably, was more stable overall and the OpenBSD port compiles properly without threading issues. However, despite all of those advantages and the database server being on a bigger server with more memory performance suffered considerably.
Want a good starting place in settings? The default documentation does little if anything to really help you on the matter, its like trying to learn the English language solely through the use of a dictionary.
There are tutorials available, some out of date and while Usenets can certainly help, you'll get wildly varying answers because some of the configuration options are more black magic then science. Rather makes it hard to get started when you don't know exactly where to start or how increasing a value will really affect performance as a whole. You are expected to load test the database before implementation which is not always possible for small hobby sites, and it can test patience.
With MySQL you had a few configuration files designed for use in various environments and it would show you how certain settings had changed. This is not the case with PostgreSQL in fact 32 connections is the default which is painfully inadequate for most peoples needs when dealing with a site. I'd personally love to see an application that detected your memory and other settings and came out with sane settings, at least with such an option you'd have a place to start.
Queries were slow, but then that was supposed to be MySQL's strength. Solution? Run explain/analyze on everything and tweak the hell out of every single query being generated. If you don't necessarily understand how the query is analyzed and run by PostgreSQL then there must be something wrong with you!
Vacuum? That concept alone can throw people in for a loop, especially when designing a system which is meant to be run by people with no technical experience. So you have to code in a serious amount of intelligence into the application or rely on Auto-Vacuum (not available at the time) which can slow performance down even more.
Because of vacuum, I had to design a process for the site to lock out all users. This had never been required under MySQL and took a while for the users to get used to. In certain cases, if the lock-out failed, the vacuum would cause permanent locks in tables which would quickly pile up scripts on the webserver side leading to extreme high loads or just crashing the machine.
PostgreSQL has a LOT of features and a lot to offer in general. However, there is a major learning curve required to get it going right. I've had other sites implement the code and whenever they hit the version which required PostgreSQL most gave up on the idea of migrating or complained endlessly on how things seemed sluggish. That is NOT a major selling point when trying to get the unwashed masses to adopt your product.
deviantART is a site that allows people to post their 'art' to the site. Its not necessarily down, however the site tends to get unresponsive, images appear and dissapear and the service continues to grow. Its not about service, quality and speed its about being in with the 'it' crowd.
A coworker recently quoted an article where someone had five iPods of various generations. All of them had broken and had been replaced, again obviously for this man it was not about quality but about having the rep of holding the newest nanon in his hands to show the coworkers.
People like to feel like they belong, these places allow them to congregate into flocks of sheep. Nothing new really and its going to take a LOT of puishment before they move off to any other alternative out there!
Could this be a certain amount of social conditioning on the matter. I had heard stories on how North-American children will form into lines naturally because they learned to do so in school, while some countries on the African continent, this is a rare occurrence. In many ways following direction is doing what is expected from a child when given direction from an adult?
I've seen fairly irrelevant procedures in many tasks that exist for safety reasons. Weapons handling in the military is certainly an example of this and when it comes to such matters its not simple imitation. These involve a LOT of practice to get it just right and even then you have to keep it up to really maintain efficient drill on a weapon.
These tasks were simpler by far, however many would accept that the person showing the step is doing so for a reason. Trust is probably something that affects how we learn as well?
That was explained recently. The Vulcan High Command had taken control and enforced an interpretation of Surak's (sp) teachings that were different. They found the original words, a T'Pow (sp) from the TOS Amok Time was one of the insurgents.
Essentially a shift in power, explained by some Romulan re-unification...
I switched a an open-source project from MySQL to PostgreSQL a year or so back. The application of proper transactions, referential integrity, views and stored procedures really cleaned up the code.
However, PostgreSQL is not necessarily the easiest DBMS to get used to. For one, some platforms such as *BSD will require a recompile of the kernel to support a bit more then 32 concurrent connections. While well documented if you know what your looking for, this can prove to difficult to implement if for example your on a shared hosting system.
Documentation can be cryptic, tending to be more like a reference manual then an actual manual to teach you how something works. When it comes to optimizing the database itself this becomes painfully obvious as certain switches and options in the postgresql.conf file do little more then offer a one line description with no real clue on how a change will affect it.
In MySQL for example there are sample configation files which show a 'typical' configuration for small, mid-sized and dedicated setups. I have yet to see something similiar and such discussions on the newsgroups have generally shot it down because of the exotic configurations out there.
Vacuuming is one of those things that can really confuse people. While in MySQL deleting and altering rows has no real lasting effect for the user, this is not the case with Postgres. When a row is deleted, the information remains, but is unlinked, making the system run less IO but forcing you to juggle vacuuming, re-indexing and server operations.
You could make use of the auto-vacuum daemon available. I found however, that performance suffered greatly when it was being used on my live system.
More often then not, documentation will speak of load testing and tweaking the server at different values to see how it works. This is sound advice if you have the hardware and time necessary to get things going properly.
On light loads, Postgres can be great, but once you start pounding at it it will slow down unless you know what your doing. The learning curve is far greater then MySQL, the documentation could stand to be more descriptive to end-users/non-Oracle DBA's and the tools available for Windows less advanced but the feature set will make it worth while if you can devote some time for trail and error.
iTunes Music Store perhaps it, but since it supports MP3 and WMA it should support most of the PC alternatives out there. If anything it opens up more avenues, unless your already tied into iTunes.
A year ago, I converted an open source project I write in my spare time from MySQL to PostgreSQL. The primary driving factor in the conversion was to make use of the more robust features of PostgreSQL in order to maintain data integrity.
This involved of course the creation of a schema that made use of referential integrity and stored procedures for certain key operations that would enforce data integrity that the code required but fell outside of relational databases proper.
As I was completing the source code conversion I noticed that a lot of the data checks that had to be done under MySQL 3.x disappeared as PostgreSQL enforced it for me.
The creation of users, and other entities became much simpler as did their removal. Cleaning up the code and making it easier for me to make modifications to the scripts, without having to second guess another script having adverse effects.
The scripts themselves still handle logic, albeit at a higher level. The process of using stored procedures to handle data integrity and enforcing certain rules simply allowed me to concentrate on the bigger picture when dealing with scripts.
Of course, the trade off was in speed. MySQL to this day, still seemed to be capable of handling more loads since the site is dominant on SELECT statements. However that is more of an issue between PostgreSQL and MySQL proper.
I was actually introduced to a fairly useful use of that key recently. When booting up a dual-processor Opteron machine I could not see if any errors were being generated.
When booting up pressing Pause/Break will pause the screen and give you time to read what is taking place. At least it worked on that board, but judging from support it's not an isolated feature.
I would think that running web servers running Round-Robin DNS or similar would be an issue. With a DBMS in the background you can have multiple web servers serving the same user as he or she goes from one server to the other.
With everything in memory, the user gets bumped onto another server due to a quick hiccup, browser cash or getting a different server when querying the address and finds all of their information is gone. As in on another system where it is useless to the user.
One of the advantages of putting everything into a database, is being able to use the same information on different systems, such as a web server farm. This allows you to add new machines into the server farm, keep things redundant and increasing speed.
Two:
One also needs to consider the penalties of existing systems. Using mod_perl, your processes can reach easily 10 megabytes per process, but now everything is put into RAM itself?
With that in mind, with 1 gigabyte of RAM and using mod_perl, you can expect anything from 50 to 200 concurrent connections. Would hate to imagine it if you have every object in memory as well how much those numbers could drop.
It takes in oxygen according to their sales presentation and spits out water vapor. How would this be good for a server farm or even the domestic home?
I can see the fact it leeches oxygen as a potential problem in itself when people will invariably use it with the doors and windows closed. Given a long enough storm could this eventually pose a problem? It could very well explain why the domestic version is not yet available.
As for the vapor, I would not want to see the server room becoming a sauna. Elevations in humidity would tend to worry me, even if it is only a little bit, as server rooms of large companies tend to tightly regulate temperature and other such conditions.
I got the released CD through the mail a few days ago. Could be because I live near where the main distributor is based.
This allowed me to spend the weekend upgrading the servers over to 3.1. The process was painless, the pre-compiled packages from ports allowed me to speed a few things up and within seconds I had everything patched against the errata and ready to go.
I would like to point out that this is the first release where ports.tar.gz works without a problem. Normally I am forced to download ports or even src.tar.gz because they refuse to be decompressed.
However, I am not looking forward my 2.9 firewall to 3.1. Since OpenBSD 3.x releases no longer support IPF, I need to have the new FP ruleset in place before I do anything serious on that machine.
It's probably a matter of perception for me. I played a lot of Red Alert and while there was land and air it was still primarily a grand assault war.
If you played Total Annihilation on resource starved maps you would generally see more tactics. Some people used walls to halt the advance of tank rushes and since tanks left debris that would prevent passing further they could form very cheap and powerful tools against attackers.
Total Annihilation had tons of units for both sides, be it land sea or air and even more unique units such as amphibious tanks which could be a strategic gem if well played. And of course you can build on water and land as well which added a touch that the made the battles more interesting on multi terrained maps.
That and I could play the game at 1024x768 and not have any problems (on PII class systems). Kingdoms was much the same, but the sides were very different from one another which only added to the game.It's probably a matter of perception for me. I played a lot of Red Alert and while there was land and air it was still primarily a grand assault war.
If you played Total Annihilation on resource starved maps you would generally see more tactics. Some people used walls to halt the advance of tank rushes and since tanks left debris that would prevent passing further they could form very cheap and powerful tools against attackers.
Total Annihilation had tons of units for both sides, be it land sea or air and even more unique units such as amphibious tanks which could be a strategic gem if well played. And of course you can build on water and land as well which added a touch that the made the battles more interesting on multi terrained maps.
That and I could play the game at 1024x768 and not have any problems (on PII class systems). Kingdoms was much the same, but the sides were very different from one another which only added to the game.
Of course the game was a tank rushing nightmare if you played on metal maps. And those generally allowed for nuke fests as well.
Total Annihilation and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms which followed before seem to be ahead of their time (Total Annihilation came a year before Starcraft) considering that they used 3D units that behaved differently based on terrain, planes that actually seemed to bank to the side in order to turn et cetera.
The artificial intelligence was fairly advanced for it's time and units could be automatically ordered to perform certain tasks such as patrol using predefined way points or guard areas (even before they were produced by giving these orders to the manufacturing facilities).
The game allows for more units (or seems to) then Warcraft III, had a higher resolution and is the first game I know of that allowed for Air, Sea and Land battled at the same time. It seems a shame that it took so long for Warfact III to be released only to seem slightly more advanced then something that was released seemingly ages ago.
I have a Yamaha HSS-1 and it uses Dolby Digital 5.1. The problem with it, is that it allows for two analog connections, be it front and rear.
When one tries to make it use the center channel one can't because of the fact that the digital signal from the Audigy is not Dolby Digital. It simply treats it as stero and kicks in prologic.
Since the Audigy is not sending all channels to the amplifier, it only does stereo on whatever the audigy sends it decreasing sound quality that much more. On the fly Dolby Digital encoding allows you to hook up to stereo systems and they would understand that it's getting all of the channels from the Audigy and not assume stero.
Can't forget CADVision in Calgary, with their 8000K ADSL connections. Requires an additional line (covered in the price) as it's dedicated, but with 7000K Downstream and 1000K upstream you can't really complain.
Now if only getting the line through Telus was not so tedious. Took them two months to get the ADSL setup for me, two months for telus, less then a day for CADVision to have me routed and hand me my 8 IP subnet.
IPSec is one of the more interesting technologies out there at the moment. Essentially, it has the advantages of being implemented into multiple diffrent server platforms and client workstations.
For example OpenBSD supports it's natively and Linux can be made to support it with the FreeS/WAN projects kernel patches which allow you the IPSec functionality.
Unforuntately, the problems lie with IPSec compatible clients for the Win32 platform:
Essentially, if you company uses Win9X and NT then you have no problems. The Link will show you a bunch of clients that will actually work under OpenBSD's implementation of IPSec. Some of which are actually quite good.
On the other hand Windows 2000 is VERY unsupported. In fact it is very hard to find a Windows 2000 implementation (other then the poor implementation in Windows 2000 itself). Quite a few promise an implementation in a few months, some even a few weeks, but that does little if you need it done now.
If you need to get VPN clients for Windows 2000. I have found two that support it, but have yet to be able to test it's implementation ability with OpenBSD (the companies current Firewall/NAT platform). The two I have found are listed below:
Ashley-Laurent's VPCom Client. They also sell server software which may be of use (as you can open up one port to that box to gain IPSec functionality). The clients are a bit pricy (US 89.00$) in my opinion and I found the configuration to be somewhat convoluted. You can find their page
here.
While I have not tried this one yet, it looks very nice, at least on the sales side. They offer a hardware server as well as software clients and the licensing is a bit lower in price (US 49.00$). They too have had a Windows 2000 clients for a few months now, and seem to be keeping tabs on technology. You can look at their products
here.
Note: You can get a trial server and client if you are a company for about a month.
.
Now if anyone else knows of Windows 2000 compatible clients that work with IPSec then I would be very interested in knowing about them
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily the same use however. Canadian doctrine tells you that you can engage the enemy effectively at 400 meters with the C7 (M16 variant) with section strength. You can't do that with an AK-47.
In Vietnam sure this was not an advantage, but imagine those few times when your section can mow down oncoming enemy from a comfortable distance. Because what you have is essentially a precision rifle with the ability to fire in repetition.
There are other advantages to the M16, the ammunition is far lighter. That means you can carry a lot more of it, the more you have, the longer you can typically last in a conflict. Assuming you have a cleaning kit with you to prevent jams.
That's rather tall for a woman, even in this day and age I know a lot of women that are shorter. Back then, even the men were on average shorter, being average height balooned in the last hundred years or so.
So this man's assumption on her height is rather flawed by lack of historical reference.
I have been using a Sierra Wireless Aircard for a while though Telus Mobility (Canadian) and its been working out pretty well for me. The card itself is completely free if you sign up for a three year contract and if you choose the appropriate data rate montly fees are pretty reasonable.
Speed in major cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Edmonton and Calgary make use of their 1X EDO protocol which is about the speed of a slow ADSL connection. In order places you get simple 1X with vaying speeds but I can average 13Kbs in transfer rates for large files.
The problem with these things however is the cost of the connection itself. I've been moving from place to place for a while now so getting an Cable/DSL connection for a month or two at a time is just not worth it.
However with Telus, most of their plans charge by the meg and that does not take very long to break if your using even just straight IMAP mail. So your generally stuck with their 'unlimited' service which is about 100$ a month (50$/month for the first three months).
For me its worth it, even though Halifax is still on plain 1X. But its certainly not for everyone!
When a building is zoned there can't be any unwanted radiation of signals from the building. So cell phones are most certainly not an option in those buildings.
However some buildings have additional features, basically large rooms sound proofed, completly independant of the main structure with no water pipes, windows, sealed doors and no data capable connections other then fibre going in. Its impressive to see, specially the larger versions which essentially look like a large office without a washroom because water pipes can carry sound for some distance.
If its anything like the ones they were trying to sell here. You'd have your average thumb drive of small sizes to hardened portable hard drives which can carry well over 20Gb of space. In either case these had built in finger print scanner.
I had the opportunity to visit a Canadian Government IT tradeshow given in Ottawa. One of the firms marketing their devices specialized in USB/Portal drives which had finger print scanners built-in. According to the salesman these things were selling like hotcakes, especially in the US military.
As mentioned before, they tend to be used for things like sneaker nets, where bandwidth requirements of the data inside (G2/Int) would simply bog down the communications network. This is especially critical your using VHF/HF radios to pass on your voice/data communications.
They are also used to carry around orders as a lot of briefing rooms now have projectors and computers even in the field. Simply put, the same uses you and I have for such devices the military will find useful as well.
That being said, the norm for such devices with any critical information is to have them stored in appropriate storage containers based on classification. For example, a CONFIDENTIAL document needs only to be stored steel container with a specific vault, while a COSMIC TOP SECRET document would need a vault. Interestingly enough the classicisation remains on such devices even after the file has been removed.
I've been working on a role-play/chat site since 1999 and in time it has grown to pick up a lot of features. These days in addition to the role-play component, there are built-in forums, a collaborative gallery component for text and image works and I am currently working on a social aspect based loosely on PlentyOfFish. While it does not have webmail, it does support an Internal Mail system and private messaging when within rooms.
The code has always been released under the GPL, listed under Sourceforge and Freshmeat. Though I normally never get too much interest in the matter, must be the Perl and PostgreSQL combo!
You can run it concurrently only if your Vacuum buffer has not overflowed and thus require to do a more detailed run (FULL) in order to clean up the mess. Such a vacuum WILL lock your tables exclusively and can cause an awful mess if there is a lot of concurrent activity going on.
PostgreSQL is not necessarily the easiest beast in the world to get going. A few years back, I converted a chat/gallery portal system Ethereal Realms (http://www.erealms.org/ from MySQL to PostgreSQL, since at the time it was felt that features like proper referential integrity and stored procedures would really pay off.
The code was shortened considerably, was more stable overall and the OpenBSD port compiles properly without threading issues. However, despite all of those advantages and the database server being on a bigger server with more memory performance suffered considerably.
Want a good starting place in settings? The default documentation does little if anything to really help you on the matter, its like trying to learn the English language solely through the use of a dictionary.
There are tutorials available, some out of date and while Usenets can certainly help, you'll get wildly varying answers because some of the configuration options are more black magic then science. Rather makes it hard to get started when you don't know exactly where to start or how increasing a value will really affect performance as a whole. You are expected to load test the database before implementation which is not always possible for small hobby sites, and it can test patience.
With MySQL you had a few configuration files designed for use in various environments and it would show you how certain settings had changed. This is not the case with PostgreSQL in fact 32 connections is the default which is painfully inadequate for most peoples needs when dealing with a site. I'd personally love to see an application that detected your memory and other settings and came out with sane settings, at least with such an option you'd have a place to start.
Queries were slow, but then that was supposed to be MySQL's strength. Solution? Run explain/analyze on everything and tweak the hell out of every single query being generated. If you don't necessarily understand how the query is analyzed and run by PostgreSQL then there must be something wrong with you!
Vacuum? That concept alone can throw people in for a loop, especially when designing a system which is meant to be run by people with no technical experience. So you have to code in a serious amount of intelligence into the application or rely on Auto-Vacuum (not available at the time) which can slow performance down even more.
Because of vacuum, I had to design a process for the site to lock out all users. This had never been required under MySQL and took a while for the users to get used to. In certain cases, if the lock-out failed, the vacuum would cause permanent locks in tables which would quickly pile up scripts on the webserver side leading to extreme high loads or just crashing the machine.
PostgreSQL has a LOT of features and a lot to offer in general. However, there is a major learning curve required to get it going right. I've had other sites implement the code and whenever they hit the version which required PostgreSQL most gave up on the idea of migrating or complained endlessly on how things seemed sluggish. That is NOT a major selling point when trying to get the unwashed masses to adopt your product.
A lot of small companies, organizations and people in general could do miracles in Access if they would quit treating MS Excel as one...
deviantART is a site that allows people to post their 'art' to the site. Its not necessarily down, however the site tends to get unresponsive, images appear and dissapear and the service continues to grow. Its not about service, quality and speed its about being in with the 'it' crowd.
A coworker recently quoted an article where someone had five iPods of various generations. All of them had broken and had been replaced, again obviously for this man it was not about quality but about having the rep of holding the newest nanon in his hands to show the coworkers.
People like to feel like they belong, these places allow them to congregate into flocks of sheep. Nothing new really and its going to take a LOT of puishment before they move off to any other alternative out there!
Could this be a certain amount of social conditioning on the matter. I had heard stories on how North-American children will form into lines naturally because they learned to do so in school, while some countries on the African continent, this is a rare occurrence. In many ways following direction is doing what is expected from a child when given direction from an adult?
I've seen fairly irrelevant procedures in many tasks that exist for safety reasons. Weapons handling in the military is certainly an example of this and when it comes to such matters its not simple imitation. These involve a LOT of practice to get it just right and even then you have to keep it up to really maintain efficient drill on a weapon.
These tasks were simpler by far, however many would accept that the person showing the step is doing so for a reason. Trust is probably something that affects how we learn as well?
That was explained recently. The Vulcan High Command had taken control and enforced an interpretation of Surak's (sp) teachings that were different. They found the original words, a T'Pow (sp) from the TOS Amok Time was one of the insurgents.
Essentially a shift in power, explained by some Romulan re-unification...
I switched a an open-source project from MySQL to PostgreSQL a year or so back. The application of proper transactions, referential integrity, views and stored procedures really cleaned up the code.
However, PostgreSQL is not necessarily the easiest DBMS to get used to. For one, some platforms such as *BSD will require a recompile of the kernel to support a bit more then 32 concurrent connections. While well documented if you know what your looking for, this can prove to difficult to implement if for example your on a shared hosting system.
Documentation can be cryptic, tending to be more like a reference manual then an actual manual to teach you how something works. When it comes to optimizing the database itself this becomes painfully obvious as certain switches and options in the postgresql.conf file do little more then offer a one line description with no real clue on how a change will affect it.
In MySQL for example there are sample configation files which show a 'typical' configuration for small, mid-sized and dedicated setups. I have yet to see something similiar and such discussions on the newsgroups have generally shot it down because of the exotic configurations out there.
Vacuuming is one of those things that can really confuse people. While in MySQL deleting and altering rows has no real lasting effect for the user, this is not the case with Postgres. When a row is deleted, the information remains, but is unlinked, making the system run less IO but forcing you to juggle vacuuming, re-indexing and server operations.
You could make use of the auto-vacuum daemon available. I found however, that performance suffered greatly when it was being used on my live system.
More often then not, documentation will speak of load testing and tweaking the server at different values to see how it works. This is sound advice if you have the hardware and time necessary to get things going properly.
On light loads, Postgres can be great, but once you start pounding at it it will slow down unless you know what your doing. The learning curve is far greater then MySQL, the documentation could stand to be more descriptive to end-users/non-Oracle DBA's and the tools available for Windows less advanced but the feature set will make it worth while if you can devote some time for trail and error.
iTunes Music Store perhaps it, but since it supports MP3 and WMA it should support most of the PC alternatives out there. If anything it opens up more avenues, unless your already tied into iTunes.
A year ago, I converted an open source project I write in my spare time from MySQL to PostgreSQL. The primary driving factor in the conversion was to make use of the more robust features of PostgreSQL in order to maintain data integrity.
This involved of course the creation of a schema that made use of referential integrity and stored procedures for certain key operations that would enforce data integrity that the code required but fell outside of relational databases proper.
As I was completing the source code conversion I noticed that a lot of the data checks that had to be done under MySQL 3.x disappeared as PostgreSQL enforced it for me.
The creation of users, and other entities became much simpler as did their removal. Cleaning up the code and making it easier for me to make modifications to the scripts, without having to second guess another script having adverse effects.
The scripts themselves still handle logic, albeit at a higher level. The process of using stored procedures to handle data integrity and enforcing certain rules simply allowed me to concentrate on the bigger picture when dealing with scripts.
Of course, the trade off was in speed. MySQL to this day, still seemed to be capable of handling more loads since the site is dominant on SELECT statements. However that is more of an issue between PostgreSQL and MySQL proper.
I was actually introduced to a fairly useful use of that key recently. When booting up a dual-processor Opteron machine I could not see if any errors were being generated.
When booting up pressing Pause/Break will pause the screen and give you time to read what is taking place. At least it worked on that board, but judging from support it's not an isolated feature.
One:
I would think that running web servers running Round-Robin DNS or similar would be an issue. With a DBMS in the background you can have multiple web servers serving the same user as he or she goes from one server to the other.
With everything in memory, the user gets bumped onto another server due to a quick hiccup, browser cash or getting a different server when querying the address and finds all of their information is gone. As in on another system where it is useless to the user.
One of the advantages of putting everything into a database, is being able to use the same information on different systems, such as a web server farm. This allows you to add new machines into the server farm, keep things redundant and increasing speed.
Two:
One also needs to consider the penalties of existing systems. Using mod_perl, your processes can reach easily 10 megabytes per process, but now everything is put into RAM itself?
With that in mind, with 1 gigabyte of RAM and using mod_perl, you can expect anything from 50 to 200 concurrent connections. Would hate to imagine it if you have every object in memory as well how much those numbers could drop.
It takes in oxygen according to their sales presentation and spits out water vapor. How would this be good for a server farm or even the domestic home?
I can see the fact it leeches oxygen as a potential problem in itself when people will invariably use it with the doors and windows closed. Given a long enough storm could this eventually pose a problem? It could very well explain why the domestic version is not yet available.
As for the vapor, I would not want to see the server room becoming a sauna. Elevations in humidity would tend to worry me, even if it is only a little bit, as server rooms of large companies tend to tightly regulate temperature and other such conditions.
I got the released CD through the mail a few days ago. Could be because I live near where the main distributor is based.
This allowed me to spend the weekend upgrading the servers over to 3.1. The process was painless, the pre-compiled packages from ports allowed me to speed a few things up and within seconds I had everything patched against the errata and ready to go.
I would like to point out that this is the first release where ports.tar.gz works without a problem. Normally I am forced to download ports or even src.tar.gz because they refuse to be decompressed.
However, I am not looking forward my 2.9 firewall to 3.1. Since OpenBSD 3.x releases no longer support IPF, I need to have the new FP ruleset in place before I do anything serious on that machine.
It's probably a matter of perception for me. I played a lot of Red Alert and while there was land and air it was still primarily a grand assault war.
If you played Total Annihilation on resource starved maps you would generally see more tactics. Some people used walls to halt the advance of tank rushes and since tanks left debris that would prevent passing further they could form very cheap and powerful tools against attackers.
Total Annihilation had tons of units for both sides, be it land sea or air and even more unique units such as amphibious tanks which could be a strategic gem if well played. And of course you can build on water and land as well which added a touch that the made the battles more interesting on multi terrained maps.
That and I could play the game at 1024x768 and not have any problems (on PII class systems). Kingdoms was much the same, but the sides were very different from one another which only added to the game.It's probably a matter of perception for me. I played a lot of Red Alert and while there was land and air it was still primarily a grand assault war.
If you played Total Annihilation on resource starved maps you would generally see more tactics. Some people used walls to halt the advance of tank rushes and since tanks left debris that would prevent passing further they could form very cheap and powerful tools against attackers.
Total Annihilation had tons of units for both sides, be it land sea or air and even more unique units such as amphibious tanks which could be a strategic gem if well played. And of course you can build on water and land as well which added a touch that the made the battles more interesting on multi terrained maps.
That and I could play the game at 1024x768 and not have any problems (on PII class systems). Kingdoms was much the same, but the sides were very different from one another which only added to the game.
Of course the game was a tank rushing nightmare if you played on metal maps. And those generally allowed for nuke fests as well.
Total Annihilation and Total Annihilation: Kingdoms which followed before seem to be ahead of their time (Total Annihilation came a year before Starcraft) considering that they used 3D units that behaved differently based on terrain, planes that actually seemed to bank to the side in order to turn et cetera.
The artificial intelligence was fairly advanced for it's time and units could be automatically ordered to perform certain tasks such as patrol using predefined way points or guard areas (even before they were produced by giving these orders to the manufacturing facilities).
The game allows for more units (or seems to) then Warcraft III, had a higher resolution and is the first game I know of that allowed for Air, Sea and Land battled at the same time. It seems a shame that it took so long for Warfact III to be released only to seem slightly more advanced then something that was released seemingly ages ago.
I have a Yamaha HSS-1 and it uses Dolby Digital 5.1. The problem with it, is that it allows for two analog connections, be it front and rear.
When one tries to make it use the center channel one can't because of the fact that the digital signal from the Audigy is not Dolby Digital. It simply treats it as stero and kicks in prologic.
Since the Audigy is not sending all channels to the amplifier, it only does stereo on whatever the audigy sends it decreasing sound quality that much more. On the fly Dolby Digital encoding allows you to hook up to stereo systems and they would understand that it's getting all of the channels from the Audigy and not assume stero.
Can't forget CADVision in Calgary, with their 8000K ADSL connections. Requires an additional line (covered in the price) as it's dedicated, but with 7000K Downstream and 1000K upstream you can't really complain.
Now if only getting the line through Telus was not so tedious. Took them two months to get the ADSL setup for me, two months for telus, less then a day for CADVision to have me routed and hand me my 8 IP subnet.
IPSec is one of the more interesting technologies out there at the moment. Essentially, it has the advantages of being implemented into multiple diffrent server platforms and client workstations.
For example OpenBSD supports it's natively and Linux can be made to support it with the FreeS/WAN projects kernel patches which allow you the IPSec functionality.
Unforuntately, the problems lie with IPSec compatible clients for the Win32 platform:
Essentially, if you company uses Win9X and NT then you have no problems. The Link will show you a bunch of clients that will actually work under OpenBSD's implementation of IPSec. Some of which are actually quite good.
On the other hand Windows 2000 is VERY unsupported. In fact it is very hard to find a Windows 2000 implementation (other then the poor implementation in Windows 2000 itself). Quite a few promise an implementation in a few months, some even a few weeks, but that does little if you need it done now.
If you need to get VPN clients for Windows 2000. I have found two that support it, but have yet to be able to test it's implementation ability with OpenBSD (the companies current Firewall/NAT platform). The two I have found are listed below:
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Now if anyone else knows of Windows 2000 compatible clients that work with IPSec then I would be very interested in knowing about them