Once. They changed the name once. It was MySQL for 14 years, now it's been MariaDB for 4 years. The name isn't changing. SkySQL is the name of the company, not the product.
Netflix is willing to spend $100 million on 26 episodes of things like House of Cards, an average of about $3.85 million each. It's not inconceivable that they might be willing to spend $1 million an episode on Futurama.
Unfortunately, the Kindle DX was discontinued. While I generally dislike reading on tablets (I've got an iPad, but I'd pick the Kindle for eBooks any day), they would do much better for PDFs. They can do colour, they're much higher res, and they're available in a 10" size that is at least not THAT much smaller than a sheet of letter/A4.
Looking at PDF-like documents on the iPad is definitely a much better experience than doing the same on a notebook, though.
The jpeg one was adjusted in lightroom to make it look more like real life. I adjusted the white balance (the camera's auto white balance picked a rather blueish hue), bumped the exposure up a bit (was a tad underexposed, still is, but good enough), disabled the chroma noise removal (not enough noise in the shot to justify it), and enabled lens profile correction for the camera (remove the remaining fisheye). The RAW is included for comparison. If memory serves, this one was taken with the paperwhite on full brightness.
- Zoomed out (to view the whole page) it's readable, but the text is tiny. The math formulas on page 202, the exponents are unreadable. - The PDF mode has a contrast setting that the text mode (books) doesn't, increasing the contrast a bit does help with the readability of the small print. - If you zoom in (pinch to zoom), it goes in a big chunk, so you can't zoom in just to remove the margin. - When zoomed in, scrolling is surprisingly smooth considering that it's e-ink. Maybe 4-5 FPS? - There seems to be a margin of whitespace around the PDF (even when zoomed in, you can see where the text cuts off), which is annoying considering the PDF itself has a whitespace margin. This reduces the readability. If I had to suggest a feature, I would add an option to disable the built-in margin, and to automatically trim the PDF's native margin. This would increase the text size and readability. - In landscape mode, the text is more than big enough such that everything is sharp and readable, but then you can only see part of the page. - In a pinch, it's usable, (the regular sized text is tiny but perfectly readable) but I wouldn't recommend this thing as a primary PDF-reading platform. Higher resolution might help, but the text is just too tiny when you take an 8.5x11 page and shrink it down to the pocketbook-sized screen. (it's 6" diagonal versus a sheet of paper which is 13.9" diagonal) - Combine higher res with automatic margin trim and a device this size could be pretty usable, but you could only do one of those on the current device (via software update).
Gotta be honest, I bought this thing to read books, so that's the only use case that it has to meet to make me happy, and it does that extremely well. Very sharp text, the frontlight seems magical, and having a whole library in my pocket is awesome. But if you stray from books, the experience will be sub-optimal.
Do you have any particular pages you'd like me to take a photo of? I tried snapping a few with my iPhone, but my hands were shaking too much, so I need to break out the real camera and tripod.
I haven't tried PDFs, but I've viewed other images... It does look better, but the screens are small, and even being able to scroll with the touchscreen the scrolling is slow. It's not a fantastic experience
It's still an eInk Pearl display, though. The different resolution displays all use the same eInk screen, but they put a different resolution of magnetic grid behind it.
Having compared macro shots of my Kindle 3 and Kindle Paperwhite, I wonder if they're not getting near the limit of how much detail the Pearl display can resolve anyhow, regardless of the resolution of the magnetic grid behind it. On the Kindle 3, the pixels were very noticeably square, but by the time they hit the paperwhite they were a lot less distinct. As in, the eInk capsules are only so small, so you don't necessarily get improvements as you keep shrinking. They'd need to make the capsules smaller for that.
I could be wrong, though, the Paperwhite might not be close to the limit, but take a look at the macro shots I made:
The first shot is grainier because the camera ISO was much higher. The wavyness of the second shot is not photo processing, it looks like that in real life when magnified. The font size was set to the same on both Kindles.
I've got two Kindles, the first is the Kindle Keyboard (AKA Kindle 3), and the second is the Paperwhite.
I do miss the buttons a bit. If I had it my way, I'd have the paperwhite with both a touchscreen and page turn buttons. The touchscreen is enormously better for doing pretty much anything else on the thing, be it buying a book, selecting a book, changing an option, chapter selection, etc. But the physical page turn buttons were better.
That said, it's not that bad, and accidental page turns haven't really been a problem.
My parents have a Kobo Touch (produced somewhere between the Kindle 3 and Kindle Touch). Wasn't a fan, didn't like the interface. Kindle's interface has a bunch of issues, but the Kobo interface (at the time) just confused me.
Considering that Kobo has very close to a majority marketshare in Canada (46% a year and a half ago, about double Amazon's), it doesn't seem surprising to me that they might be #2 globally. In the US, I would guess Nook would be second, but they don't sell it outside the US or UK, so it has a small marketshare globally.
Shawinigan is in the service area of Bell Canada, who are deploying fiber to the home (in general, not necessarily currently in Shawinigan) at a pretty decent pace, although their speeds top out at 175 Mbps symetrical for several times more than Google charges.
I can't speak for Brazil or the US, but here in Quebec, a lot of the prices for staple items are regulated, although normally the government only sets a minimum price rather than a maximum.
Microsoft is going to need to do a bit more than what can be accomplished by bundling Start8 with Windows (it supports both boot-to-desktop and a perfectly simulated start menu). To be sure, if Windows 8.1 was nothing more than the functionality of Win8 and Start8 combined, they'd be better off, but that's not quite all there is to it.
In systems on such a scale, you don't replace failed drives, you design the system to tolerate a bunch of failures per system and then when a given system drops below a certain threshold where it's not being all that useful anymore, you pull the whole box. In this case, you could probably get away with a bunch of guys on segways or something, and make it a day trip.
I agree with your point about how silly it is to throw around that number, but your storage density figures are a tad off... BackBlaze is hitting a density in real-world use of 180TB per 4U server, which in a 42U rack gives you 1800TB per rack with some room for switches. 5 zettabytes would therefore only require roughly 2,982,617 server cabinets. It's still ridiculously implausible, but ever so slightly less so;)
Continuing my tradition of using Hydro-Québec's installed capacity as a unit of measurement, this "environmental problem" is only consuming 0.0011 Hydro-Québecs.
Samsung has 36% marketshare, roughly the same as Toshiba. They're not the only fish in the pond, and with Apple sitting on something like $140 billion to throw around, they're not going to be hurting for NAND.
Toshiba, with more than a third of the global NAND market, has a market cap of $23 billion... Apple's cash hoard is six or seven times that size...
Not everything is available for paid streaming, particularly in Canada, where we often have much less content available than in the US. Streaming is nice, and I do take advantage of stuff like Netflix a lot, but there's a fair bit of difference between a 40 megabit video on a bluray disc and a 7 megabit stream. Even paid downloads are often not as high bitrate.
Some stuff simply isn't available yet. I'm buying the Star Trek: TNG blurays as they come out, and while they will probably appear on Netflix or iTunes or some such thing eventually, eventually isn't now, and even when they do they will probably not be of the same quality.
I do get a lot of video content online (more than I'd care to admit from HDBits), and it's one of the reasons why I've got a decently fast pipe (50/10 VDSL2), but I still do like buying the higher quality optical discs for the important stuff, or stuff you just can't get online. That's less of a problem in the US, but Canada is always going to be behind in terms of availability.
So that I can watch bluray movies on my PC, and so that I can burn movies to watch on other things. That's about it, I have no use for the thing apart from movie-related things. It'd be pretty hard to burn the AVCHD of Harmy's Despecialized Edition without an optical drive of some kind;)
SFF is where it's at these days. When you can put the fastest CPU and GPU available in a computer the size of a shoebox with an optical drive and two hard disks (plus an mSATA SSD), few people need anything bigger.
Me, I didn't quite go that overboard. I grabbed a Shuttle XPC, stuck an i7-3770k in it with a 16GB of RAM, a GTX670, two Intel 330 SSDs and a bluray burner. It's about one eighth the size of the desktop it replaced, and yet it's dramatically faster.
And this is an underpowered rig compared to the crazy stuff some people do. My point is, you don't have to compromise to get a small desktop with a lot of power. The bigger issue to portability is the monitor, really.
OK, the company from TFS is the maker of The Hurt Locker. Their name, Voltage Pictures, is right in the summary, hence why Slashdot's "related articles" mentions their Hurtlocker lawsuits.
Slashdot Mirror
Once. They changed the name once. It was MySQL for 14 years, now it's been MariaDB for 4 years. The name isn't changing. SkySQL is the name of the company, not the product.
I believe BitZtream was referring to MariaDB, not Postgres. MariaDB is a pretty seamless upgrade from MySQL, since it's a fork.
Some of the most memorable parts of Futurama were the musical numbers, particularly in the Christmas episodes...
Netflix is willing to spend $100 million on 26 episodes of things like House of Cards, an average of about $3.85 million each. It's not inconceivable that they might be willing to spend $1 million an episode on Futurama.
Unfortunately, the Kindle DX was discontinued. While I generally dislike reading on tablets (I've got an iPad, but I'd pick the Kindle for eBooks any day), they would do much better for PDFs. They can do colour, they're much higher res, and they're available in a 10" size that is at least not THAT much smaller than a sheet of letter/A4.
Looking at PDF-like documents on the iPad is definitely a much better experience than doing the same on a notebook, though.
Here's the photo:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48490966/IMG_5277.jpg
And here's the RAW of it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48490966/IMG_5277.CR2
The jpeg one was adjusted in lightroom to make it look more like real life. I adjusted the white balance (the camera's auto white balance picked a rather blueish hue), bumped the exposure up a bit (was a tad underexposed, still is, but good enough), disabled the chroma noise removal (not enough noise in the shot to justify it), and enabled lens profile correction for the camera (remove the remaining fisheye). The RAW is included for comparison. If memory serves, this one was taken with the paperwhite on full brightness.
Point form with random thoughts:
- Zoomed out (to view the whole page) it's readable, but the text is tiny. The math formulas on page 202, the exponents are unreadable.
- The PDF mode has a contrast setting that the text mode (books) doesn't, increasing the contrast a bit does help with the readability of the small print.
- If you zoom in (pinch to zoom), it goes in a big chunk, so you can't zoom in just to remove the margin.
- When zoomed in, scrolling is surprisingly smooth considering that it's e-ink. Maybe 4-5 FPS?
- There seems to be a margin of whitespace around the PDF (even when zoomed in, you can see where the text cuts off), which is annoying considering the PDF itself has a whitespace margin. This reduces the readability. If I had to suggest a feature, I would add an option to disable the built-in margin, and to automatically trim the PDF's native margin. This would increase the text size and readability.
- In landscape mode, the text is more than big enough such that everything is sharp and readable, but then you can only see part of the page.
- In a pinch, it's usable, (the regular sized text is tiny but perfectly readable) but I wouldn't recommend this thing as a primary PDF-reading platform. Higher resolution might help, but the text is just too tiny when you take an 8.5x11 page and shrink it down to the pocketbook-sized screen. (it's 6" diagonal versus a sheet of paper which is 13.9" diagonal)
- Combine higher res with automatic margin trim and a device this size could be pretty usable, but you could only do one of those on the current device (via software update).
Gotta be honest, I bought this thing to read books, so that's the only use case that it has to meet to make me happy, and it does that extremely well. Very sharp text, the frontlight seems magical, and having a whole library in my pocket is awesome. But if you stray from books, the experience will be sub-optimal.
Do you have any particular pages you'd like me to take a photo of? I tried snapping a few with my iPhone, but my hands were shaking too much, so I need to break out the real camera and tripod.
I haven't tried PDFs, but I've viewed other images... It does look better, but the screens are small, and even being able to scroll with the touchscreen the scrolling is slow. It's not a fantastic experience
Nook still isn't, but the Kindle is sold by Amazon.ca directly now.
When I bought my Kindle Keyboard, it was shipped from Amazon US, but the Paperwhite was a domestic shipment.
Nook wasn't even sold outside the US until a few months ago, and even then they only expanded to the UK. So of course Nook would be way behind.
It's still an eInk Pearl display, though. The different resolution displays all use the same eInk screen, but they put a different resolution of magnetic grid behind it.
Having compared macro shots of my Kindle 3 and Kindle Paperwhite, I wonder if they're not getting near the limit of how much detail the Pearl display can resolve anyhow, regardless of the resolution of the magnetic grid behind it. On the Kindle 3, the pixels were very noticeably square, but by the time they hit the paperwhite they were a lot less distinct. As in, the eInk capsules are only so small, so you don't necessarily get improvements as you keep shrinking. They'd need to make the capsules smaller for that.
I could be wrong, though, the Paperwhite might not be close to the limit, but take a look at the macro shots I made:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27956537-
The first shot is grainier because the camera ISO was much higher. The wavyness of the second shot is not photo processing, it looks like that in real life when magnified. The font size was set to the same on both Kindles.
I've got two Kindles, the first is the Kindle Keyboard (AKA Kindle 3), and the second is the Paperwhite.
I do miss the buttons a bit. If I had it my way, I'd have the paperwhite with both a touchscreen and page turn buttons. The touchscreen is enormously better for doing pretty much anything else on the thing, be it buying a book, selecting a book, changing an option, chapter selection, etc. But the physical page turn buttons were better.
That said, it's not that bad, and accidental page turns haven't really been a problem.
My parents have a Kobo Touch (produced somewhere between the Kindle 3 and Kindle Touch). Wasn't a fan, didn't like the interface. Kindle's interface has a bunch of issues, but the Kobo interface (at the time) just confused me.
Considering that Kobo has very close to a majority marketshare in Canada (46% a year and a half ago, about double Amazon's), it doesn't seem surprising to me that they might be #2 globally. In the US, I would guess Nook would be second, but they don't sell it outside the US or UK, so it has a small marketshare globally.
They have unlimited for $10/mth extra, although I'm not sure if they're still allowing people to sign up for it.
Shawinigan is in the service area of Bell Canada, who are deploying fiber to the home (in general, not necessarily currently in Shawinigan) at a pretty decent pace, although their speeds top out at 175 Mbps symetrical for several times more than Google charges.
I can't speak for Brazil or the US, but here in Quebec, a lot of the prices for staple items are regulated, although normally the government only sets a minimum price rather than a maximum.
Microsoft is going to need to do a bit more than what can be accomplished by bundling Start8 with Windows (it supports both boot-to-desktop and a perfectly simulated start menu). To be sure, if Windows 8.1 was nothing more than the functionality of Win8 and Start8 combined, they'd be better off, but that's not quite all there is to it.
In systems on such a scale, you don't replace failed drives, you design the system to tolerate a bunch of failures per system and then when a given system drops below a certain threshold where it's not being all that useful anymore, you pull the whole box. In this case, you could probably get away with a bunch of guys on segways or something, and make it a day trip.
I agree with your point about how silly it is to throw around that number, but your storage density figures are a tad off... BackBlaze is hitting a density in real-world use of 180TB per 4U server, which in a 42U rack gives you 1800TB per rack with some room for switches. 5 zettabytes would therefore only require roughly 2,982,617 server cabinets. It's still ridiculously implausible, but ever so slightly less so ;)
Continuing my tradition of using Hydro-Québec's installed capacity as a unit of measurement, this "environmental problem" is only consuming 0.0011 Hydro-Québecs.
Samsung has 36% marketshare, roughly the same as Toshiba. They're not the only fish in the pond, and with Apple sitting on something like $140 billion to throw around, they're not going to be hurting for NAND.
Toshiba, with more than a third of the global NAND market, has a market cap of $23 billion... Apple's cash hoard is six or seven times that size...
Not everything is available for paid streaming, particularly in Canada, where we often have much less content available than in the US. Streaming is nice, and I do take advantage of stuff like Netflix a lot, but there's a fair bit of difference between a 40 megabit video on a bluray disc and a 7 megabit stream. Even paid downloads are often not as high bitrate.
Some stuff simply isn't available yet. I'm buying the Star Trek: TNG blurays as they come out, and while they will probably appear on Netflix or iTunes or some such thing eventually, eventually isn't now, and even when they do they will probably not be of the same quality.
I do get a lot of video content online (more than I'd care to admit from HDBits), and it's one of the reasons why I've got a decently fast pipe (50/10 VDSL2), but I still do like buying the higher quality optical discs for the important stuff, or stuff you just can't get online. That's less of a problem in the US, but Canada is always going to be behind in terms of availability.
So that I can watch bluray movies on my PC, and so that I can burn movies to watch on other things. That's about it, I have no use for the thing apart from movie-related things. It'd be pretty hard to burn the AVCHD of Harmy's Despecialized Edition without an optical drive of some kind ;)
SFF is where it's at these days. When you can put the fastest CPU and GPU available in a computer the size of a shoebox with an optical drive and two hard disks (plus an mSATA SSD), few people need anything bigger.
Me, I didn't quite go that overboard. I grabbed a Shuttle XPC, stuck an i7-3770k in it with a 16GB of RAM, a GTX670, two Intel 330 SSDs and a bluray burner. It's about one eighth the size of the desktop it replaced, and yet it's dramatically faster.
And this is an underpowered rig compared to the crazy stuff some people do. My point is, you don't have to compromise to get a small desktop with a lot of power. The bigger issue to portability is the monitor, really.
OK, the company from TFS is the maker of The Hurt Locker. Their name, Voltage Pictures, is right in the summary, hence why Slashdot's "related articles" mentions their Hurtlocker lawsuits.