Unbelievable but true: I ran WinME on my home machine for quite some time with little ill effects. Apart from some hardware incompatibilities I've read about, what was _so_ bad about it?
Anyone stupid enough to read this article and decide avoid the Internet because it is a hive of scum & villany is just one less stupid person on the net in the first place. So much the better.
Obviously quite a few, because I know several Blackberry owners and clearly unlimited data is just not a priority for any people outside of 24/7 tech support...
Surfing from my Nokia 3G phone using it as a modem gets me about 512kbps which is reasonable - about 64KB/s which means most web pages render in less than 10 secs...
Outside of 3G coverage it's painful though. In any case, on a Blackberry you can already install GMail, Opera Mini & you have corp email... not bad.
The rest of the functionality (sync, charging, etc) seems way more interesting. Most hotels & cafes offer free or inexpensive Wifi anyway if you need your fix.
Most corporate comms policies I have seen where Blackberries are given strictly forbid the use of work mobile phones as modems for their laptops, because data charges are so high.
One of the reasons RIM carved such a niche in corporate phones/PDAs is the "eat as much as you want" (more or less) email access; surfing the net via GSM/TDMA/3G/UMTS is not part of the deal, and billed by your provider as data by the Kb or minute.
Good point, I think that boomers (and niche sites that sell for pennies / give stuff away) are the long tail, and that is absent from classic retailers - even Amazon.
There is a good point about how Amazon do have a lot of stuff that just doesn't sell at all though. People still flock to what is popular, basically.
I'm not sure. I think that what it is saying is that, rather than being able to sell low volumes of stuff that you couldn't sell before, in fact you can't. You'll actually just sell a bit more of the stuff you sold very low volumes (or you didn't stock) before, but there's no magic new stuff that sells at low volume on the net.
Dominating a market (like the low to mid range) means you'll catch the occasional upgrade to "enterprise". But you are indeed right. That wasn't the point I was making so much as the mindshare they have means that, relative to the argument in the article, forks don't really make a difference in the overall scheme of things.
PostgreSQL's site certainly seems to have stronger arguments on competing in the "enterprise" space (read stuff that isn't particularly web based IMHO) from a functionality / stability POV. But there is no denying that some very large, scalable sites like Google, Flickr et al have been known to use MySQL on a fairly serious enterprise level, so it really depends what your requirements are... dynamic websites don't need the same DB approach as back office systems for serious accounting / transactional recording.
Much of the article & threads here seem to be supposition, and niche arguments. MySQL has the mindshare because, back when RedHat was all the rage on production servers, MySQL + Apache was just an RPM away, and LAMP started to really kick in (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). PHP has big mindshare too, and the MySQL functions *are* the DB functions for a lot of coders out there.
So even if you fork, add third party patches, or whatever... the fact is that the basic MySQL dominates the low to mid range server DB market in Open Source, and that's that. Of course there are better alternatives available, but hiring staff that know those alternatives isn't as easy.
So I reckon Sun won't be affected too much, their product does what most people need already. Those who need something else can pay Oracle, MS or work with PostgreSQL, which kinda got to the party late. Yes, it is more powerful. But it's LAMP and not LAPP, and the tutorials for PHP/MySQL outnumber PHP/Postgres by a large factor.
I think GANDI have a good model. Their ethic is that they pretty much sell at cost. The service is great. I am just a customer, I'm not affiliated to them in any way.
Network Solutions have a long history of slightly bizarre business practices. Just because they're more expensive, the ultimate product (an entry in a DB that points to your DNS servers) is ridiculously cheap when you have big volume and decent automation. MarkMonitor add value by protecting you, maybe they're good. NetSol add marketing glitz value, but nothing good IMHO.
According the the "what's changed" page relative to the third edition, the update was sometime last year. This is hardly news, other than the poster having newly discovered it.
I don't like the style of the site and the way the site is written, which isn't a great advert for downloading. But just maybe the level of information is good, and it could be edited by someone who is less obsessed with Star Wars and more obsessed with the English language.
Interesting theory, and makes sense since MPlayer will be configured to use the best available screen access library, whether that be direct framebuffer, or various other possibilities (I am not an expert).
Using the standalone flash player in Windows, or even a plugin for a viewer like IrfanView, works better than the flash plugin in a browser and I can think of several reasons because for the plugin:
- Rest of the screen handled by browser rendering, which is unlikely to use anything close to framebuffer / direct hardware access and very likely to use standard API calls to the window manager - Requirement to have interactivity - clickable links, rollover actions, etc - May require transparency with content underneath visible, so can't be done using an overlay - Code covers vector graphics, etc which can be overlayed on video content too
So voilà, it's not just about the plugin being "bad", but that it has way less chance of using the most efficient video delivery method. MPlayer is just pulling out the FLV content, which is not the same as the SWF container + buffering code + FLV content sitting in a page which it may need to interact with and cover other issues.
However most modern companies in modern industries (like tech) don't believe in assistants any more, when they are a key resource to take away scheduling etc. from people who can use their time more productively (writing code, testing a site, whatever).
Just because the computer can do email, scheduling, and you can use IM and phone... some people aren't good at that and waste way too much time when they could just say to their assistant "I need this tomorrow, let xxx know about that meeting next week and schedule it, and I need to be in Houston a week tomorrow" and it'll happen.
In my company, there are 150 employees and 0 assistants. And people bitch most about execs not turning up to meetings on time and forgetting stuff, even though they have blackberries and outlook and mobile phones and laptops.
or with better def & resolution but still MPEG4 => 2500MB / 16 hrs = 156.25MB / hr = 0.044MB / s = 0.347 mbit/s = 355.55 kbit/s sustained [reasonably attainable on most broadband]
As long as seeders have decent _upload_ bandwidth, it's a piece of cake. I've seen Ubuntu CD come down on my connection via torrents at sustained 200KB/s ~= 0.2MB/s ~= 1.6mbit/s... almost there
I used Postfix for a long time. I'm no longer an MTA admin, but looking at QMail install procedure & Postfix procedure, I decided that Postfix was the way to go. It probably still is.
One other thing was that DJB's quirks (even if he may be right about a lot of the things he believes in) mean you have to adopt his style of doing things to get things to work. It's the same with djbdns.
The paper is still a worthwhile read though, if you're a serious software engineer you should, like him, be looking back over your last 10 years and asking yourself if you're better today, and whether you were right to adopt certain approaches.
I don't understand it either. But just ask my wife, she hates my ex(s). She'd like to be able to erase them from old photos still hanging around here & there.
In the control booth where you're already more or less soundproofed from the artists, it's still nice to have no loud machines, because you have monitor speakers in there too, and it might help in having a better environment for optimal level setting & pre-eq / noise cancellation.
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Unbelievable but true: I ran WinME on my home machine for quite some time with little ill effects. Apart from some hardware incompatibilities I've read about, what was _so_ bad about it?
Anyone stupid enough to read this article and decide avoid the Internet because it is a hive of scum & villany is just one less stupid person on the net in the first place. So much the better.
Old Skool GSM is 9.6kbps, aligned with the fax standard. Anything above that is something else (maybe UTMS?)
Obviously quite a few, because I know several Blackberry owners and clearly unlimited data is just not a priority for any people outside of 24/7 tech support...
Surfing from my Nokia 3G phone using it as a modem gets me about 512kbps which is reasonable - about 64KB/s which means most web pages render in less than 10 secs...
Outside of 3G coverage it's painful though. In any case, on a Blackberry you can already install GMail, Opera Mini & you have corp email... not bad.
The rest of the functionality (sync, charging, etc) seems way more interesting. Most hotels & cafes offer free or inexpensive Wifi anyway if you need your fix.
Most corporate comms policies I have seen where Blackberries are given strictly forbid the use of work mobile phones as modems for their laptops, because data charges are so high.
One of the reasons RIM carved such a niche in corporate phones/PDAs is the "eat as much as you want" (more or less) email access; surfing the net via GSM/TDMA/3G/UMTS is not part of the deal, and billed by your provider as data by the Kb or minute.
Good point, I think that boomers (and niche sites that sell for pennies / give stuff away) are the long tail, and that is absent from classic retailers - even Amazon.
There is a good point about how Amazon do have a lot of stuff that just doesn't sell at all though. People still flock to what is popular, basically.
I'm not sure. I think that what it is saying is that, rather than being able to sell low volumes of stuff that you couldn't sell before, in fact you can't. You'll actually just sell a bit more of the stuff you sold very low volumes (or you didn't stock) before, but there's no magic new stuff that sells at low volume on the net.
Dominating a market (like the low to mid range) means you'll catch the occasional upgrade to "enterprise". But you are indeed right. That wasn't the point I was making so much as the mindshare they have means that, relative to the argument in the article, forks don't really make a difference in the overall scheme of things.
PostgreSQL's site certainly seems to have stronger arguments on competing in the "enterprise" space (read stuff that isn't particularly web based IMHO) from a functionality / stability POV. But there is no denying that some very large, scalable sites like Google, Flickr et al have been known to use MySQL on a fairly serious enterprise level, so it really depends what your requirements are... dynamic websites don't need the same DB approach as back office systems for serious accounting / transactional recording.
Much of the article & threads here seem to be supposition, and niche arguments. MySQL has the mindshare because, back when RedHat was all the rage on production servers, MySQL + Apache was just an RPM away, and LAMP started to really kick in (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP). PHP has big mindshare too, and the MySQL functions *are* the DB functions for a lot of coders out there.
So even if you fork, add third party patches, or whatever... the fact is that the basic MySQL dominates the low to mid range server DB market in Open Source, and that's that. Of course there are better alternatives available, but hiring staff that know those alternatives isn't as easy.
So I reckon Sun won't be affected too much, their product does what most people need already. Those who need something else can pay Oracle, MS or work with PostgreSQL, which kinda got to the party late. Yes, it is more powerful. But it's LAMP and not LAPP, and the tutorials for PHP/MySQL outnumber PHP/Postgres by a large factor.
I think GANDI have a good model. Their ethic is that they pretty much sell at cost. The service is great. I am just a customer, I'm not affiliated to them in any way.
Network Solutions have a long history of slightly bizarre business practices. Just because they're more expensive, the ultimate product (an entry in a DB that points to your DNS servers) is ridiculously cheap when you have big volume and decent automation. MarkMonitor add value by protecting you, maybe they're good. NetSol add marketing glitz value, but nothing good IMHO.
You're absolutely right, I should have used what. That was a typo / reordering error.
Personally I'd say "think of which might have happend if Linus had waited..." - because it's a hypothetical situation.
I don't think you can use the double "would have" in the "American" example; but I'm a native British English speaker and may be wrong.
Gmail Mobile is great, but I was thinking more in terms of using a terminal / laptop in a hotel / webcafé rather than a mobile phone.
It costs a small fortune roaming on GPRS or other mobile packet data services. Webcafés are a better bet if you have serious email to write (away for a week in a foreign country for example).
Email (text only) is way more efficient in a cli with mutt or pine
But if you get attachments or images or need colour highlighting, then sure, use webmail.
Over the crappiest 14.4K modem connection mutt over SSH with compression is fast. Now try Gmail on that kind of a connection.
According the the "what's changed" page relative to the third edition, the update was sometime last year. This is hardly news, other than the poster having newly discovered it.
I don't like the style of the site and the way the site is written, which isn't a great advert for downloading. But just maybe the level of information is good, and it could be edited by someone who is less obsessed with Star Wars and more obsessed with the English language.
Come on, at least the blurb says so... that's progress. Nobody RTFA anyway.
So... this is more like a simple "what is the worst tech job" you ever had dressed up as an article.
That job is so easy to automate. Even with dialout, upload, check script, etc. Man, what a bomb.
Interesting theory, and makes sense since MPlayer will be configured to use the best available screen access library, whether that be direct framebuffer, or various other possibilities (I am not an expert).
Using the standalone flash player in Windows, or even a plugin for a viewer like IrfanView, works better than the flash plugin in a browser and I can think of several reasons because for the plugin:
- Rest of the screen handled by browser rendering, which is unlikely to use anything close to framebuffer / direct hardware access and very likely to use standard API calls to the window manager
- Requirement to have interactivity - clickable links, rollover actions, etc
- May require transparency with content underneath visible, so can't be done using an overlay
- Code covers vector graphics, etc which can be overlayed on video content too
So voilà, it's not just about the plugin being "bad", but that it has way less chance of using the most efficient video delivery method. MPlayer is just pulling out the FLV content, which is not the same as the SWF container + buffering code + FLV content sitting in a page which it may need to interact with and cover other issues.
Hear hear!
However most modern companies in modern industries (like tech) don't believe in assistants any more, when they are a key resource to take away scheduling etc. from people who can use their time more productively (writing code, testing a site, whatever).
Just because the computer can do email, scheduling, and you can use IM and phone... some people aren't good at that and waste way too much time when they could just say to their assistant "I need this tomorrow, let xxx know about that meeting next week and schedule it, and I need to be in Houston a week tomorrow" and it'll happen.
In my company, there are 150 employees and 0 assistants. And people bitch most about execs not turning up to meetings on time and forgetting stuff, even though they have blackberries and outlook and mobile phones and laptops.
I think most people don't even require HD - a decent XviD DVD rip (or HD rip fairly highly compressed)
=> 700MB / 16 hrs = 43.75MB / hr = 0.012MB / s = 0.097 mbit/s = 99.55 kbit/s sustained [easily attainable on crappiest broadband]
or with better def & resolution but still MPEG4
=> 2500MB / 16 hrs = 156.25MB / hr = 0.044MB / s = 0.347 mbit/s = 355.55 kbit/s sustained [reasonably attainable on most broadband]
As long as seeders have decent _upload_ bandwidth, it's a piece of cake. I've seen Ubuntu CD come down on my connection via torrents at sustained 200KB/s ~= 0.2MB/s ~= 1.6mbit/s... almost there
I used Postfix for a long time. I'm no longer an MTA admin, but looking at QMail install procedure & Postfix procedure, I decided that Postfix was the way to go. It probably still is.
One other thing was that DJB's quirks (even if he may be right about a lot of the things he believes in) mean you have to adopt his style of doing things to get things to work. It's the same with djbdns.
The paper is still a worthwhile read though, if you're a serious software engineer you should, like him, be looking back over your last 10 years and asking yourself if you're better today, and whether you were right to adopt certain approaches.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/8/29/69
Someone pointed out the problem and a patch is likely on its way.
I don't understand it either. But just ask my wife, she hates my ex(s). She'd like to be able to erase them from old photos still hanging around here & there.
In the control booth where you're already more or less soundproofed from the artists, it's still nice to have no loud machines, because you have monitor speakers in there too, and it might help in having a better environment for optimal level setting & pre-eq / noise cancellation.