I have some server apps still on python2.4, and some on python 2.7. They're completely unrelated apps.
On fBSD, just create two jails, and set up the two environments how you like, update them independently.
On Linux (are vservers at the convenience and security level of jails?) goodluck installing a myriad of python2.4 and python2.7 packages, hope the "system python" points to the right one, make you sure everywhere replace "python" with "python2.X" in your apps; or set up virtualenvs or such, which make updating more cumbersome since you now need to track these manually.
That's just a small example, you'd have jails for your database, mailserver, etc, you'd have them on ZFS partitions, and they are completely independent from your main system (i.e. when you update from 8.1 and 8.2 the jails might not work until you update them, but your base is extremely lean and does not carry any of the baggage of the jails, so some python2.4 dependency is not going to break one of your python scripts or whatever. Also, your ports are up to date (see Debian).
A lot of people would argue.Net is a much better development environment than Qt. I can't understand why someone would willingly use C++ to develop user applications ( not systems dev ) in 2011. Even Android promotes Java for this.
Good for you, but I am one of those people who prefer the power of C++, and more importantly to target other platforms than Windows. Besides, with Qt, C++ isn't any harder than Java (which sucks in its verbosity, I can't stand it, see how that works with opinions?). Android is by the way fully embracing native development now, as it improves performance, reduces reliance on the controversial Java code and Oracle threats, and allows much quicker porting of existing applications (exactly the same thing that's going to hamper WP7's C#)
Microsoft brings, XBox, office productivity, Bing and many other very large franchises.
Bing ?????? Who cares? Xbox ? Don't give a crap wrt my phone. Office productivity, MS already have this on Symbian
I have no doubt MS can and will produce a very smooth and nice experience, but as with Google it will lock in tightly to their own OS, their own services, etc. I highly doubt a WP phone will export itself as a generic mass storage device like Symbian can, for example, instead needing drivers which are of course only available for Windows, and probably only Windows 7 onwards at that. Email will favour Outlook/Exchange, just like Android favours gmail. IE9 will have its own quirks and deviations from the standard. What Nokia used to have was independent support of those, though none of it stellar
.
And of course this article is about Qt on Android, which is Nokia's strategy and investments now paying off in providing an upgrade path from Symbian - except to Android instead of their own next gen OS!
IMHO more people prefer Qt and targetting several platforms, than using MS only tools and targetting only WP. Nokia is shooting itself in the foot by not supporting Qt on WP, which is a purely political BS decision.
As I understand it, Symbian is just the legacy system that Nokia uses on "feature phones" until MeeGo matures.
Where would you get that idea? Even +3 informative?
Symbian is not going anywhere. Feature phones run S40. MeeGo is high-end and beautiful and wonderful, but it will not run on the same class of hardware. The large part of Nokia's market is still going to be Symbian.
However, you shouldn't confuse Symbian with its S60 UI. Now it goes back in-house where they can start to kick around the needed changes to make it a proper Qt platform without the bureaucracy of a committee.
Nokia's smartphone platform is Qt, and you won't care if it runs Symbian underneath or MeeGo
I agree with all your comments about Symbian development.
"I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again"
Well, it's really good, on the newer devices (N8 and onwards, post S60). Here they have the potential to minimize the role of Avkon and have a Qt UI pushing the pixels. The SDK is pretty painless, and development moves fast (you can follow it through gitorious).
I am not sure how things are going to be for S60, I am pretty confident the Qt SDK will isolate you from Symbian for normal application developments, but I'm not confident about the performance, let alone the pitiful C: drive space needed just for the libs.
But about your point, a Linux kernel would not be as efficient on eg the N8 as Symbian. It's the legacy UI stuff that is holding it back. If executed well, developers could care less what contortions the core OS is performing as long as they can pass in a QString. The build system is supposedly also improved, but the Qt SDK does a good job hiding its warts from you anyway. I quite like Qt Creator.
Eh yeah, a non-proprietary charging method, using a cheap and widely available cable, connecting to a port that pretty much every smartphone is going to have anyway if they want USB connectivity. You can now buy a 5 car cigarette lighter micro usb chargers, instead of a specific LG/SE/Nokia/Samsung/Apple one, how is that hurting you??
Like you said, they can keep the old charging port as well, and that's exactly what Nokia has done with its latest phones. Again, what is bad about that? Would they have skipped the USB port otherwise?
"CockMonster says it is unlikely Nokia is capable of backporting Meego to N8: I read of people speculating the machine just isn't powerful enough, but haven't come across details on why the hardware isn't capable of doing it. If it is a hard task that Nokia doesn't want to be bothered with, they need to streamline their future offerings and use standard architectures (as was suggested in another post) to get both OSs working."
It doesn't really matter whether the N8 could/will/won't run Meego; Nokia's smartphone platform is Qt, most users only see the pixels, not the type of kernel running underneath, and both Symbian and Meego will have Qt pixels. The N8 is ample hardware to run Symbian with a Qt UI very smoothly as indicated by insider testing comments.
"""Uhm, better hardware?.. Beyond that, devices are more than just their spec sheet, it's the whole user experience and ecosystem."""
Contradiction much?
"""the 12 Megapixel camera, which is pointless because the lens on cel phone cameras suck. All that 12 megapixel camera's doing is just providing the same grainy photographs but using more space. When you publish these images to the web, it gets downsampled anyway."""
Resolution? N8 is 210ppi, nothing wrong with that. And certainly never was an issue for iphone fans until the iphone 4 (up until then they had 163ppi).
"""You think it's a good idea for a phone to be always connected to some server to be told how hot or cold it is outside? You don't see how this could say, impact the battery?"""
Widgets know when the screen is on, when the network is up, and which screen you are looking it. They do not update otherwise. Oh, and you can see if you missed a call without having to unlock your phone. Battery life is very good on the N8, even when using widgets: http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/09/23/nokia-n8-live-photography-live-qa-join-in-now/ as told by an iphone 4 user.
Now obviously you're just a troll, but I hope some might find these links useful.
Time will tell how things turn out. I've used S^3 and like it a lot. But that's of course just my personal opinion.
Thank you for your answers, and good luck with your apps (no snark)
(just out of curiousity, what is the market share ratio of symbian:android in the markets where your app sells/applies, compared to the 1:30 sales ratio? For example I'd expect a NYC subway app to sell much more on Android given the much larger market share in the US)
"""And just to clarify: I still like Symbian - I don't like what NOKIA and Sony-Ericsson have made from it. And speaking of it: I don't like the Android phones Sony-Ericsson came up with either. I have a Nexus-One these days."""
Which? S60? UIQ? Or S^3?
But I am not sure what your point is. You're a disgruntled former fanboy? So are you trying to convince people to stay away from this competition? Just acting out some anger? Dismiss the N8 out of hand? Microsoft is responsible for Windows ME, does that mean Windows 7 doesn't get a chance? Do you tell people to not use that?
It's great that your apps are doing well. How does it hurt you if Nokia actually does manage to sell 50M S^3 devices in the next 1-2 years, which can all run your app, and are available in nearly 200 countries via operator billing / CC. Over here, Google doesn't even offer paid apps in its marketplace.
So you're not interested in trying out for the prize money. You probably make so much money already writing for iOS/Android, right. We get it. So why are you wasting your time here? Are you so worried that perhaps they might be onto something? Or do you troll sony-ericsson threads as well?
No, it's no longer that laggy and annoying S60, with single/double tap confusion etc. That is kind of the point of this competition.
S^3 is a fully GPU accelerated UI, it's quite good, and very promising considering it's still only PR1.0. Try one out when you get a chance, you'd be surprised. You may prefer grid-of-icons, which btw you can replicate by using shortcut widgets, but it stomps all over say the N97/5800. And yet, those sold really well (iOS is definitely smoother, though much less capable, but Android has nothing on S^3, my opinion of course, based on actually *using both*). Nokia will sell the 50M S^3 devices they forecasted.
The US basically does not have SIM-only contracts. To sell phones you need to do so through an operator. Operators insist of things like disabling frequencies of competing carriers, disabling tethering, installing crapware ("Verizon navigator" anyone), etc. Nokia always stayed away from this, and this has been fine as the US market has always been a bit backwards anyway. However, it has become a whole different market in the last few years, and worth getting into, as shown by this AT&T deal. We'll have to see what kind of device(s) with what kind of features come out. Incidentally, doesn't the iPhone exclusivity run out H1 2011 ?
"""The problem is that they are coming very late to the "applications game", and they are trying to fit those applications on legacy devices with vastly differing capabilities from one another. The reason Apple has been so successful here is that all of its devices have similar capabilities and screen resolution, so there is a common baseline for all of the applications to assume, and so from that you get applications capable of using the device capabilities better, rather than scaling back and having the "minimum" UI."""
That is exactly right.
It took forever, but by now it seems they have finally realized this, and all S^3 devices use the same resolution and base software, same CPU and, very capable (similar to iphone 4), GPU. Instead of updating firmware for dozens of S60 phones with FP3/5 etc, S^3 is basically a single platform. What runs smoothly on the N8 will run exactly the same on the C6-01. (There are of course hardware differences, camera, hdmi, etc, and E7 gets some business perks, vpn support, etc). Any current apps being made using Qt are immediately S^4 and Meego proof. The weakest component is currently the browser, but there is a Qt version in development and unofficial comments say it's excellent. (why wouldn't it, same webkit as chrome/safari)
S^3's nHD resolution is the result of maintaining backward compatibility with S^1. The E7 having nHD (4" screen) is again because of compatibility. And to be honest, the screens look awesome. (normal people hardly know what resolution even means).
Incidentally, the retina display also only exists because of backward compatibility, i.e. being able to scale up apps exactly twice in both width and height. The ppi is actually ridiculous, and had there been a way to get a lower-but-still-high-res amoled Steve would have been proclaiming the beautiful blacks and popping colours and iphone fans would be preaching about that instead of resolution.
For S^4 and Meego the resolution will most likely go up, but hopefully the UI's will be fully scalable (with Qt they should be) and there will not be too many variants, i.e. similar to how the S^3 portfolio works.
Your point is a very good one, and I believe they do get it by now.
Come on, slashdot used to be smarter than this. Last year iOS was going to be biggest, this year Android is going to be biggest, etc. See also: http://xkcd.com/605/
It has lost market share, but gained users (market has grown). This is without Nokia releasing any proper high end phones during that time. And who cares whether S-E/Samsung uses Symbian, their share was non-existent to begin with.
The 4 announced S^3 devices, and the unnannounced AT&T phone, will sell, and they will sell a lot. Did you have a chance to play with them? I mean for yourself, in your hand. It's easy to make a phone look bad on video. This is a nice review where the reviewer, an iphone4 owner, does not feel insecure about that and thus does not feel the need to go out of his way to bash it just because it is Nokia/not an iPhone: http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/09/23/nokia-n8-live-photography-live-qa-join-in-now/
Like he said.. "This is not your daddy's Nokia".
See also: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.xhtml Does that look like it's going anywhere? And this is based on S60, which I hate myself. S^3 is worlds above that. Imagine what it is going to do with that, and with Qt, WRT, flash, and java apps, and a nice SDK.
iOS share will stabilize in its niche, Android will battle with WP7 (and people stop saying Windows Mobile, it's not the same thing all), Symbian will increase. Android is not going to take over the world, sorry. If HTC/Samsung for even one second think WP7 will bring them more, (and in terms of maintenance it is a lot easier for them, look at phones still being on Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, etc) they'll drop Android like a hot potato. No, Android also will not die, but it's not going to be the king either.
Oh you're such a dick. Do you work for engadget? With your skills of linking to a source and misquoting it completely, you should.
Quote: "51 Category Winner Prizes - Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a First Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $150,000 USD / $156,229 CAD. Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a Second Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $50,000 USD / $52,076 CAD. Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a Third Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $25,000 USD / $26,028 CAD. Total value of Category Winner prizes $3,825,000 USD / $3,983,661 CAD."
The 100k (times two) comes ON TOP of the 150k.
But of course when you're not busy being a dick on the internet, you're netting 250k per app writing iOS/Android apps, right, so this is hardly worth your time.
You also get more flexibility; want to replicate your "current" tables but keep your "history" tables only on the master? Want to chain slaves to slaves instead of all slaves to one master? Want a special search database (you can have transactions and fulltext search at the same time) that only contains the ts_vector (fulltext search index) tables? Slony lets you do all of those.
And you consider failing to give a syntax error on one unsupported REFERENCES syntax a serious enough problem to use a different database? You're really reaching for these.
To give you a fair response, even though you post anonymously, no it's not a good enough reason to use a different database. You can remember to use the "working" syntax. It was a response to a question of why strict mode + innodb still does not solve all the famous "gotchas". A better reason to use a different database, would be to use one with transactional DDL, where altering a table (add an index? drop one?) does not rewrite the entire table on disk with a full table lock. I've mentioned this earlier, so you're probably just trolling.
These are really lame complaints. You're upset that InnoDB gives you options for tuning the balance of risk vs. performance? You might better ask why Postgres can't offer some ability to improve speed for applications that can tolerate losing 1 second of data if there's a hard system crash.
It does, asynchronous commit. Except without corrupting your database if it does happen to crash in between.
And you consider failing to give a syntax error on one unsupported REFERENCES syntax a serious enough problem to use a different database? You're really reaching for these.
If it is not going to enforce the constraint, then it shouldn't pretend to and surprise me later. It's not the only issue, but it's a typical one.
This is new to me. I've used foreign keys and seen it complain when the constraints aren't met. I know this happens in MyISAM though (because there are no foreign keys). I'd like to see an example of where InnoDB doesn't respect the constraints
You can just check the manual, or the bugreports
mysql> create table a ( aval integer not null ) type=innodb; Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.08 sec)
mysql> insert into b values (10); Query OK, 1 row affected (0.05 sec)
mysql> select * from a; Empty set (0.00 sec)
mysql> select * from b; +------+ | aval | +------+ | 10 | +------+ 1 row in set (0.00 sec)
InnoDB defaults to off too. If you're going to enable InnoDB because you're looking for an ACID RDBMS, then you should also configure your database server to properly utilize InnoDB.
This is valid, however who actually knows to do that?
Google is using it to power their adwords. How is that not "their business"? besides that, there are plenty of companies out there that run their "business" on mysql. you know it, i know it, every postgres, oracle, mssql dba knows it. here's some more info...
Ok, it is their business, but it is still a memory only non transactional clustered datastore with an SQL frontend. If you're (general you) going to point out examples of why to choose MySQL, point out those cases where it is actually used in the way you want to use your database. Yes, it's plenty good for plenty of companies, but we're talking about an RDBMS in that traditional old fashioned financial reliability sense.
2. "Pgpool". If I have to lock out all clients just to add a node to the cluster, then it is not a high-availability solution.
As opposed to a database where modifying a table (add/remove an index, column) results in the entire table being rewritten on disk under a full table lock ? And you actually argue that database for high availability ?
As opposed to: The cluster can not be expanded dynamically, and has to be restarted to introduce new nodes. This limits availability in a dynamic setting. (source). Or directly from the horse's mouth: Adding and dropping of data nodes. Online adding or dropping of data nodes is not currently possible. In such cases, the entire cluster must be restarted. ?
When I write NOT NULL in a column, it doesn't necessarily mean I want to enforce that I MUST supply a value during any INSERT (and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc). Therefore I always supply a DEFAULT value, that the DB can safely insert in that column, IF I haven't specified anything different during the INSERT.
THis also means that I also do not need to code checks everywhere I will subsequently USE that column's data to see if it is still NULL, or if there is something in it. I am guaranteed that even if I haven't explicitly set anything, the column will have taken the default value instead, and CANNOT contain any NULLs.
Certainly. My point is just that this should be the behaviour only when you explicitly define what the default value should be. The database should not make up some default for me. There IS a big difference between '' and NULL, since '' == '' and 0 == 0, but NULL != NULL (actually the result is NULL), which has security implications when you're joining to permissions tables. NULL is a really valuable concept. Phrased differently: if you feel the need for default values or you are not willing to provide a proper value passing all constraints, you probably should not be using NOT NULL but allow NULL and make THAT be your "default", since NULL != NULL and when you don't have a proper value yet, it probably also isn't equal to some other value which you also don't know yet.
In the real world however, people tend to look at columns in a database in the same way as they see a variable in a program. Depending on the language, a declared but undefined variable can be "NULL", or "undefined", or more commonly, defaults to what is considered an "empty" or default value suitable for that column. i.e. strings take on the value "", integers take the value 0, etc etc.
Are 2 strings which are NULL equal? strcmp( some_string, NULL )? Also in C there is a difference between NULL and ''. Again, I would argue to use NULL for when you don't know, rather than some default, again _because_ NULL != NULL
Sorry if I missed something critical, but it seems like you are trying to put all the load onto the programmer just so you can have a "cleaner" table definition ? Seems a bit counter-productive to me. Especially when you read that table definition, which says somethig like "nulls are not allowed, and the default value is null" ???
nulls are not allowed, and the default is null. This is clear, it means it must have some valid entry. I can have a UNIQUE constraint on a colum which allows NULLs, but not on one where the default is '' or such (well I can, but the default can only be used once). I argue against abusing "default values" when it should just be NULL, and against MySQL not honoring that constraint (except in strict mode but than only if it is one row, otherwise it goes ahead and inserts default values into a NOT NULL columns anway?? arghh)
Short version: use NULL when you don't know, not some default value. If I know a person does not have a middle name, then the middle name is ''. This is not the same as saying I don't know his middle name, nor do 2 people of whom I don't know their middle names have the same middle name. I am not saying this is intuitive, but I like my data enough to care.
So you want the column to be NOT NULL, and yet you can't be bothered to tell the db your desired default value for that column. What EXACTLY do you expect the database to do ?
What kind of weird argument is that? Yes I want the column to be not NULL, but why on earth would you just assume that therefore there must be some default value that's acceptable? What if it's also a unique column?
when you say "NOT NULL" as such, PostgreSQL makes it "NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL" which means that yes, it's going to not allow you to INSERT anything that is NULL and you MUST specify some valid value. That certainly does not imply that a sane default exists, and IF it did, I would have just specified it myself in the first place.
Now a "proper" db might just moan at table creation time that you're trying to do something silly, whereas MySQL assumes you are silly and inserts it's own suggested default.
There is nothing silly about having a NOT NULL column with no default (i.e. default is NULL so not allowed). It is a FEATURE of the database to stop me when I have some bug in my code trying to insert a NULL there, just like it is to stop me from inserting a duplicate value, or violate any other constraint I have set.
Inserting its own suggested default is completely braindead, when I say NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL I want the database to enforce that, and to force me to provide proper data. Period. Putting 0 or '' or 0000-00-00 there is retarded, and it's a complete MySQL-ism.
i asked you a valid question, how does innodb not maintain referential integrity? you bring up myisam. i didn't mention myisam. i know myisam isn't ACID. i asked you how innodb isn't. and as for error reporting, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/error-handling.html. so again, how does innodb not take referential integrity and error reporting seriously?
Well, how about completely ignoring the "REFERENCES othertable(othercolumn)" syntax for foreign key constraints without as much as a warning in even the strictest mode, leaving you without referential integrity without any way of knowing?
Or from the manual: "By default, the binary log is not synchronized to disk at each write. So if the operating system or machine (not only the MySQL server) crashes there is a chance that the last statements of the binary log are lost. To prevent this, you can make the binary log be synchronized to disk after every Nth binary log write, with the sync_binlog global variable (1 being the safest value, but also the slowest)."
So InnoDB still defaults to non-ACID behaviour, but it doesn't stop there yet:
More from the manual: Even with [sync_binlog] set to 1, there is still the chance of an inconsistency between the tables content and the binary log content in case of crash. [...] This problem can be solved with the --innodb-safe-binlog option (available starting from MySQL 4.1.3), which adds consistency between the content of InnoDB tables and the binary log. For this option to really bring safety to you, the MySQL server should also be configured to synchronize to disk, at every transaction, the binary log (sync_binlog=1) and (which is true by default) the InnoDB logs.
Another option if you want ACID. Oh wait, there's a 3rd, since binlog defaults to off so you need to enable that too. Three options have to be changed from their defaults to get durability after each and every single commit (when we're talking databases, that's kind of what I expect. If you don't, that's fine, but we're not talking about the same thing then)
, are you referring to companies like google, yahoo, or alcatel-lucent? need i really go on?
Stick to apples-apples comparisons. None of those companies are using MySQL as a relational database (say, doing their accounting in it or trusting their business on it), sure Google uses it as a memory-only non-transactional clustered datastore with an SQL query interface, after having put in a lot of patches to make that work, but so what? Yes, use it for that, sure use MyISAM for your blog, but when we're talking about a proper relational database where "commit" means the data is stored, where a foreign key means a foreign key and where you would run your core business on it then stick to those cases where it's actually used as such. A better example for that is Skype, which runs its entire operations from buddylists to billing on Postgresql.
Slashdot Mirror
What happened /., you used to be cool.
FUD much? No more stories about inaccurate (technical) reporting anymore from you then, pot kettle and all that.
One example:
I have some server apps still on python2.4, and some on python 2.7. They're completely unrelated apps.
On fBSD, just create two jails, and set up the two environments how you like, update them independently.
On Linux (are vservers at the convenience and security level of jails?) goodluck installing a myriad of python2.4 and python2.7 packages, hope the "system python" points to the right one, make you sure everywhere replace "python" with "python2.X" in your apps; or set up virtualenvs or such, which make updating more cumbersome since you now need to track these manually.
That's just a small example, you'd have jails for your database, mailserver, etc, you'd have them on ZFS partitions, and they are completely independent from your main system (i.e. when you update from 8.1 and 8.2 the jails might not work until you update them, but your base is extremely lean and does not carry any of the baggage of the jails, so some python2.4 dependency is not going to break one of your python scripts or whatever. Also, your ports are up to date (see Debian).
Note that this is not really actually "money".
It's things like Microsoft licenses (valued at outrageous prices), mentioning Nokia in ads (valued at outrageous prices), etc.
It's a bit like me giving you a self-drawn picture of a donkey, that I value at $1M, versus giving you an actual suitcase with $1M.
Good for you, but I am one of those people who prefer the power of C++, and more importantly to target other platforms than Windows. Besides, with Qt, C++ isn't any harder than Java (which sucks in its verbosity, I can't stand it, see how that works with opinions?). Android is by the way fully embracing native development now, as it improves performance, reduces reliance on the controversial Java code and Oracle threats, and allows much quicker porting of existing applications (exactly the same thing that's going to hamper WP7's C#)
Microsoft brings, XBox, office productivity, Bing and many other very large franchises.
Bing ?????? Who cares? Xbox ? Don't give a crap wrt my phone. Office productivity, MS already have this on Symbian
I have no doubt MS can and will produce a very smooth and nice experience, but as with Google it will lock in tightly to their own OS, their own services, etc. I highly doubt a WP phone will export itself as a generic mass storage device like Symbian can, for example, instead needing drivers which are of course only available for Windows, and probably only Windows 7 onwards at that. Email will favour Outlook/Exchange, just like Android favours gmail. IE9 will have its own quirks and deviations from the standard. What Nokia used to have was independent support of those, though none of it stellar
.
And of course this article is about Qt on Android, which is Nokia's strategy and investments now paying off in providing an upgrade path from Symbian - except to Android instead of their own next gen OS!
IMHO more people prefer Qt and targetting several platforms, than using MS only tools and targetting only WP. Nokia is shooting itself in the foot by not supporting Qt on WP, which is a purely political BS decision.
Where would you get that idea? Even +3 informative?
Symbian is not going anywhere. Feature phones run S40. MeeGo is high-end and beautiful and wonderful, but it will not run on the same class of hardware. The large part of Nokia's market is still going to be Symbian.
However, you shouldn't confuse Symbian with its S60 UI. Now it goes back in-house where they can start to kick around the needed changes to make it a proper Qt platform without the bureaucracy of a committee.
Nokia's smartphone platform is Qt, and you won't care if it runs Symbian underneath or MeeGo
I agree with all your comments about Symbian development.
"I'll admit that I've never had any contact with this, because our product is really aimed at Series 60, and it is faintly possible that if they do a good enough job they might make Symbian usable again"
Well, it's really good, on the newer devices (N8 and onwards, post S60). Here they have the potential to minimize the role of Avkon and have a Qt UI pushing the pixels. The SDK is pretty painless, and development moves fast (you can follow it through gitorious).
I am not sure how things are going to be for S60, I am pretty confident the Qt SDK will isolate you from Symbian for normal application developments, but I'm not confident about the performance, let alone the pitiful C: drive space needed just for the libs.
But about your point, a Linux kernel would not be as efficient on eg the N8 as Symbian. It's the legacy UI stuff that is holding it back. If executed well, developers could care less what contortions the core OS is performing as long as they can pass in a QString. The build system is supposedly also improved, but the Qt SDK does a good job hiding its warts from you anyway. I quite like Qt Creator.
Eh yeah, a non-proprietary charging method, using a cheap and widely available cable, connecting to a port that pretty much every smartphone is going to have anyway if they want USB connectivity. You can now buy a 5 car cigarette lighter micro usb chargers, instead of a specific LG/SE/Nokia/Samsung/Apple one, how is that hurting you??
Like you said, they can keep the old charging port as well, and that's exactly what Nokia has done with its latest phones. Again, what is bad about that? Would they have skipped the USB port otherwise?
"CockMonster says it is unlikely Nokia is capable of backporting Meego to N8: I read of people speculating the machine just isn't powerful enough, but haven't come across details on why the hardware isn't capable of doing it. If it is a hard task that Nokia doesn't want to be bothered with, they need to streamline their future offerings and use standard architectures (as was suggested in another post) to get both OSs working."
It doesn't really matter whether the N8 could/will/won't run Meego; Nokia's smartphone platform is Qt, most users only see the pixels, not the type of kernel running underneath, and both Symbian and Meego will have Qt pixels. The N8 is ample hardware to run Symbian with a Qt UI very smoothly as indicated by insider testing comments.
"""Uhm, better hardware? .. Beyond that, devices are more than just their spec sheet, it's the whole user experience and ecosystem."""
Contradiction much?
"""the 12 Megapixel camera, which is pointless because the lens on cel phone cameras suck. All that 12 megapixel camera's doing is just providing the same grainy photographs but using more space. When you publish these images to the web, it gets downsampled anyway."""
Yeah about that lens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtIFBMbiaPo&feature=player_embedded
Yeah about that camera: http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/07/08/nokia-n8-camera-2260-days-in-the-making-part-12/ and http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/07/09/nokia-n8-camera-2260-days-in-the-making-part-22/
HDR? that you've never mentioned until Apple added it recently? http://conversations.nokia.com/2010/07/27/nokia-n900-fcam-hdr-and-low-light-examples/ (that's before the iphone added it, and will come to N8). Other nice things in the N8 (and its S^3 siblings) are automatic panorama: http://dailymobile.se/2010/09/21/nokia-n8-panorama-photo/
Resolution? N8 is 210ppi, nothing wrong with that. And certainly never was an issue for iphone fans until the iphone 4 (up until then they had 163ppi).
"""You think it's a good idea for a phone to be always connected to some server to be told how hot or cold it is outside? You don't see how this could say, impact the battery?"""
Widgets know when the screen is on, when the network is up, and which screen you are looking it. They do not update otherwise. Oh, and you can see if you missed a call without having to unlock your phone. Battery life is very good on the N8, even when using widgets: http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/09/23/nokia-n8-live-photography-live-qa-join-in-now/ as told by an iphone 4 user.
Now obviously you're just a troll, but I hope some might find these links useful.
Time will tell how things turn out. I've used S^3 and like it a lot. But that's of course just my personal opinion.
Thank you for your answers, and good luck with your apps (no snark)
(just out of curiousity, what is the market share ratio of symbian:android in the markets where your app sells/applies, compared to the 1:30 sales ratio? For example I'd expect a NYC subway app to sell much more on Android given the much larger market share in the US)
"""And just to clarify: I still like Symbian - I don't like what NOKIA and Sony-Ericsson have made from it. And speaking of it: I don't like the Android phones Sony-Ericsson came up with either. I have a Nexus-One these days."""
Which? S60? UIQ? Or S^3?
But I am not sure what your point is. You're a disgruntled former fanboy? So are you trying to convince people to stay away from this competition? Just acting out some anger? Dismiss the N8 out of hand? Microsoft is responsible for Windows ME, does that mean Windows 7 doesn't get a chance? Do you tell people to not use that?
It's great that your apps are doing well. How does it hurt you if Nokia actually does manage to sell 50M S^3 devices in the next 1-2 years, which can all run your app, and are available in nearly 200 countries via operator billing / CC. Over here, Google doesn't even offer paid apps in its marketplace.
So you're not interested in trying out for the prize money. You probably make so much money already writing for iOS/Android, right. We get it. So why are you wasting your time here? Are you so worried that perhaps they might be onto something? Or do you troll sony-ericsson threads as well?
"2) GUI: S60 Android Quartz"
No, it's no longer that laggy and annoying S60, with single/double tap confusion etc. That is kind of the point of this competition.
S^3 is a fully GPU accelerated UI, it's quite good, and very promising considering it's still only PR1.0. Try one out when you get a chance, you'd be surprised. You may prefer grid-of-icons, which btw you can replicate by using shortcut widgets, but it stomps all over say the N97/5800. And yet, those sold really well (iOS is definitely smoother, though much less capable, but Android has nothing on S^3, my opinion of course, based on actually *using both*). Nokia will sell the 50M S^3 devices they forecasted.
The US basically does not have SIM-only contracts. To sell phones you need to do so through an operator. Operators insist of things like disabling frequencies of competing carriers, disabling tethering, installing crapware ("Verizon navigator" anyone), etc. Nokia always stayed away from this, and this has been fine as the US market has always been a bit backwards anyway. However, it has become a whole different market in the last few years, and worth getting into, as shown by this AT&T deal. We'll have to see what kind of device(s) with what kind of features come out. Incidentally, doesn't the iPhone exclusivity run out H1 2011 ?
"""The problem is that they are coming very late to the "applications game", and they are trying to fit those applications on legacy devices with vastly differing capabilities from one another. The reason Apple has been so successful here is that all of its devices have similar capabilities and screen resolution, so there is a common baseline for all of the applications to assume, and so from that you get applications capable of using the device capabilities better, rather than scaling back and having the "minimum" UI."""
That is exactly right.
It took forever, but by now it seems they have finally realized this, and all S^3 devices use the same resolution and base software, same CPU and, very capable (similar to iphone 4), GPU. Instead of updating firmware for dozens of S60 phones with FP3/5 etc, S^3 is basically a single platform. What runs smoothly on the N8 will run exactly the same on the C6-01. (There are of course hardware differences, camera, hdmi, etc, and E7 gets some business perks, vpn support, etc). Any current apps being made using Qt are immediately S^4 and Meego proof. The weakest component is currently the browser, but there is a Qt version in development and unofficial comments say it's excellent. (why wouldn't it, same webkit as chrome/safari)
S^3's nHD resolution is the result of maintaining backward compatibility with S^1. The E7 having nHD (4" screen) is again because of compatibility. And to be honest, the screens look awesome. (normal people hardly know what resolution even means).
Incidentally, the retina display also only exists because of backward compatibility, i.e. being able to scale up apps exactly twice in both width and height. The ppi is actually ridiculous, and had there been a way to get a lower-but-still-high-res amoled Steve would have been proclaiming the beautiful blacks and popping colours and iphone fans would be preaching about that instead of resolution.
For S^4 and Meego the resolution will most likely go up, but hopefully the UI's will be fully scalable (with Qt they should be) and there will not be too many variants, i.e. similar to how the S^3 portfolio works.
Your point is a very good one, and I believe they do get it by now.
Come on, slashdot used to be smarter than this. Last year iOS was going to be biggest, this year Android is going to be biggest, etc. See also: http://xkcd.com/605/
It has lost market share, but gained users (market has grown). This is without Nokia releasing any proper high end phones during that time. And who cares whether S-E/Samsung uses Symbian, their share was non-existent to begin with.
The 4 announced S^3 devices, and the unnannounced AT&T phone, will sell, and they will sell a lot. Did you have a chance to play with them? I mean for yourself, in your hand. It's easy to make a phone look bad on video. This is a nice review where the reviewer, an iphone4 owner, does not feel insecure about that and thus does not feel the need to go out of his way to bash it just because it is Nokia/not an iPhone: http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2010/09/23/nokia-n8-live-photography-live-qa-join-in-now/
Like he said.. "This is not your daddy's Nokia".
See also: http://www.forum.nokia.com/Distribute/Ovi_Store_statistics.xhtml
Does that look like it's going anywhere? And this is based on S60, which I hate myself. S^3 is worlds above that. Imagine what it is going to do with that, and with Qt, WRT, flash, and java apps, and a nice SDK.
iOS share will stabilize in its niche, Android will battle with WP7 (and people stop saying Windows Mobile, it's not the same thing all), Symbian will increase. Android is not going to take over the world, sorry. If HTC/Samsung for even one second think WP7 will bring them more, (and in terms of maintenance it is a lot easier for them, look at phones still being on Android 1.5, 1.6, 2.1, etc) they'll drop Android like a hot potato. No, Android also will not die, but it's not going to be the king either.
Oh you're such a dick. Do you work for engadget? With your skills of linking to a source and misquoting it completely, you should.
Quote: "51 Category Winner Prizes - Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a First Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $150,000 USD / $156,229 CAD. Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a Second Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $50,000 USD / $52,076 CAD. Each of the verified Eligible Entrants that published one of the seventeen (17) Apps selected as a Third Prize Category Winner will receive a check for $25,000 USD / $26,028 CAD. Total value of Category Winner prizes $3,825,000 USD / $3,983,661 CAD."
The 100k (times two) comes ON TOP of the 150k.
But of course when you're not busy being a dick on the internet, you're netting 250k per app writing iOS/Android apps, right, so this is hardly worth your time.
Slony-I is asynchronous. Read postgres' excellent documentation for some other possibilities.
You also get more flexibility; want to replicate your "current" tables but keep your "history" tables only on the master? Want to chain slaves to slaves instead of all slaves to one master? Want a special search database (you can have transactions and fulltext search at the same time) that only contains the ts_vector (fulltext search index) tables? Slony lets you do all of those.
And you consider failing to give a syntax error on one unsupported REFERENCES syntax a serious enough problem to use a different database? You're really reaching for these.
To give you a fair response, even though you post anonymously, no it's not a good enough reason to use a different database. You can remember to use the "working" syntax. It was a response to a question of why strict mode + innodb still does not solve all the famous "gotchas". A better reason to use a different database, would be to use one with transactional DDL, where altering a table (add an index? drop one?) does not rewrite the entire table on disk with a full table lock. I've mentioned this earlier, so you're probably just trolling.
These are really lame complaints. You're upset that InnoDB gives you options for tuning the balance of risk vs. performance? You might better ask why Postgres can't offer some ability to improve speed for applications that can tolerate losing 1 second of data if there's a hard system crash.
It does, asynchronous commit. Except without corrupting your database if it does happen to crash in between.
And you consider failing to give a syntax error on one unsupported REFERENCES syntax a serious enough problem to use a different database? You're really reaching for these.
If it is not going to enforce the constraint, then it shouldn't pretend to and surprise me later. It's not the only issue, but it's a typical one.
You can just check the manual, or the bugreports
InnoDB defaults to off too. If you're going to enable InnoDB because you're looking for an ACID RDBMS, then you should also configure your database server to properly utilize InnoDB.
This is valid, however who actually knows to do that?
Google is using it to power their adwords. How is that not "their business"? besides that, there are plenty of companies out there that run their "business" on mysql. you know it, i know it, every postgres, oracle, mssql dba knows it. here's some more info...
Ok, it is their business, but it is still a memory only non transactional clustered datastore with an SQL frontend. If you're (general you) going to point out examples of why to choose MySQL, point out those cases where it is actually used in the way you want to use your database. Yes, it's plenty good for plenty of companies, but we're talking about an RDBMS in that traditional old fashioned financial reliability sense.
2. "Pgpool". If I have to lock out all clients just to add a node to the cluster, then it is not a high-availability solution.
As opposed to a database where modifying a table (add/remove an index, column) results in the entire table being rewritten on disk under a full table lock ? And you actually argue that database for high availability ?
As opposed to: The cluster can not be expanded dynamically, and has to be restarted to introduce new nodes. This limits availability in a dynamic setting. (source). Or directly from the horse's mouth: Adding and dropping of data nodes. Online adding or dropping of data nodes is not currently possible. In such cases, the entire cluster must be restarted. ?
I'm not sure we actually disagree
When I write NOT NULL in a column, it doesn't necessarily mean I want to enforce that I MUST supply a value during any INSERT (and indeed then have to check that my INSERT actually worked and check for possible returned errors, coding exceptions etc). Therefore I always supply a DEFAULT value, that the DB can safely insert in that column, IF I haven't specified anything different during the INSERT. THis also means that I also do not need to code checks everywhere I will subsequently USE that column's data to see if it is still NULL, or if there is something in it. I am guaranteed that even if I haven't explicitly set anything, the column will have taken the default value instead, and CANNOT contain any NULLs.
Certainly. My point is just that this should be the behaviour only when you explicitly define what the default value should be. The database should not make up some default for me. There IS a big difference between '' and NULL, since '' == '' and 0 == 0, but NULL != NULL (actually the result is NULL), which has security implications when you're joining to permissions tables. NULL is a really valuable concept. Phrased differently: if you feel the need for default values or you are not willing to provide a proper value passing all constraints, you probably should not be using NOT NULL but allow NULL and make THAT be your "default", since NULL != NULL and when you don't have a proper value yet, it probably also isn't equal to some other value which you also don't know yet.
In the real world however, people tend to look at columns in a database in the same way as they see a variable in a program. Depending on the language, a declared but undefined variable can be "NULL", or "undefined", or more commonly, defaults to what is considered an "empty" or default value suitable for that column. i.e. strings take on the value "", integers take the value 0, etc etc.
Are 2 strings which are NULL equal? strcmp( some_string, NULL )? Also in C there is a difference between NULL and ''. Again, I would argue to use NULL for when you don't know, rather than some default, again _because_ NULL != NULL
Sorry if I missed something critical, but it seems like you are trying to put all the load onto the programmer just so you can have a "cleaner" table definition ? Seems a bit counter-productive to me. Especially when you read that table definition, which says somethig like "nulls are not allowed, and the default value is null" ???
nulls are not allowed, and the default is null. This is clear, it means it must have some valid entry. I can have a UNIQUE constraint on a colum which allows NULLs, but not on one where the default is '' or such (well I can, but the default can only be used once). I argue against abusing "default values" when it should just be NULL, and against MySQL not honoring that constraint (except in strict mode but than only if it is one row, otherwise it goes ahead and inserts default values into a NOT NULL columns anway?? arghh)
Short version: use NULL when you don't know, not some default value. If I know a person does not have a middle name, then the middle name is ''. This is not the same as saying I don't know his middle name, nor do 2 people of whom I don't know their middle names have the same middle name. I am not saying this is intuitive, but I like my data enough to care.
So you want the column to be NOT NULL, and yet you can't be bothered to tell the db your desired default value for that column. What EXACTLY do you expect the database to do ?
What kind of weird argument is that? Yes I want the column to be not NULL, but why on earth would you just assume that therefore there must be some default value that's acceptable? What if it's also a unique column?
when you say "NOT NULL" as such, PostgreSQL makes it "NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL" which means that yes, it's going to not allow you to INSERT anything that is NULL and you MUST specify some valid value. That certainly does not imply that a sane default exists, and IF it did, I would have just specified it myself in the first place.
Now a "proper" db might just moan at table creation time that you're trying to do something silly, whereas MySQL assumes you are silly and inserts it's own suggested default.
There is nothing silly about having a NOT NULL column with no default (i.e. default is NULL so not allowed). It is a FEATURE of the database to stop me when I have some bug in my code trying to insert a NULL there, just like it is to stop me from inserting a duplicate value, or violate any other constraint I have set.
Inserting its own suggested default is completely braindead, when I say NOT NULL DEFAULT NULL I want the database to enforce that, and to force me to provide proper data. Period. Putting 0 or '' or 0000-00-00 there is retarded, and it's a complete MySQL-ism.
i asked you a valid question, how does innodb not maintain referential integrity? you bring up myisam. i didn't mention myisam. i know myisam isn't ACID. i asked you how innodb isn't. and as for error reporting, http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/error-handling.html. so again, how does innodb not take referential integrity and error reporting seriously?
Well, how about completely ignoring the "REFERENCES othertable(othercolumn)" syntax for foreign key constraints without as much as a warning in even the strictest mode, leaving you without referential integrity without any way of knowing?
Or from the manual: "By default, the binary log is not synchronized to disk at each write. So if the operating system or machine (not only the MySQL server) crashes there is a chance that the last statements of the binary log are lost. To prevent this, you can make the binary log be synchronized to disk after every Nth binary log write, with the sync_binlog global variable (1 being the safest value, but also the slowest)."
So InnoDB still defaults to non-ACID behaviour, but it doesn't stop there yet:
More from the manual: Even with [sync_binlog] set to 1, there is still the chance of an inconsistency between the tables content and the binary log content in case of crash. [...] This problem can be solved with the --innodb-safe-binlog option (available starting from MySQL 4.1.3), which adds consistency between the content of InnoDB tables and the binary log. For this option to really bring safety to you, the MySQL server should also be configured to synchronize to disk, at every transaction, the binary log (sync_binlog=1) and (which is true by default) the InnoDB logs.
Another option if you want ACID. Oh wait, there's a 3rd, since binlog defaults to off so you need to enable that too. Three options have to be changed from their defaults to get durability after each and every single commit (when we're talking databases, that's kind of what I expect. If you don't, that's fine, but we're not talking about the same thing then)
, are you referring to companies like google, yahoo, or alcatel-lucent? need i really go on?
Stick to apples-apples comparisons. None of those companies are using MySQL as a relational database (say, doing their accounting in it or trusting their business on it), sure Google uses it as a memory-only non-transactional clustered datastore with an SQL query interface, after having put in a lot of patches to make that work, but so what? Yes, use it for that, sure use MyISAM for your blog, but when we're talking about a proper relational database where "commit" means the data is stored, where a foreign key means a foreign key and where you would run your core business on it then stick to those cases where it's actually used as such. A better example for that is Skype, which runs its entire operations from buddylists to billing on Postgresql.