There are different databases for different tasks. Teradata produces a damn good database, but it's primarily for data wearhousing and BI tasks. That being said, they now have a version that will run up to 1TB (I believe it's 1TB) available Free. Just like IBM has their DB2 Express-C edition for free as well. Both have suited our tasks for development work just fine.
However, PostgreSQL 9 is supposed to have native replication/clustering/Hot Standby. Which would address my concerns with using the database in mission critical databases that aren't dealing with large datasets.
I thought that about motherboards too until I had a couple times that I traced the root of problems to be a particular revision of a particular motherboard where the northbridge chip set (or southbridge, I can't remember which), played hell with sound card or something. I don't remember the specifics, but only that I had two games that just would not work. Everything else worked fine and it would play on my other system (not well because it was older). I went on an array of forums and saw everyone else with this particular motherboard revision had the same exact problem. It took a firmware patch from the vender's website buried 5 layers deep to fix it.
Since then, I've never discounted that motherboards can play a role in performance.
If you get to the size of Walmart doing anything, you have access to the capital to get a system from IBM or Oracle for OLTP and Teradata for data wearhousing.
I don't have mod points, but I've found the same thing. It's the perfect development database if you think that your program is ever going to need to support Enterprise class stuff. On the small scale, I've found that it's fast enough. Is MySQL faster? Yes, but where I've tested it's not been enough to really matter compared to the other advantages of PostgreSQL. Primarily that it's ACID compliant. What we've found is that it works well until you start getting into databases that are GB in size. But then you can easily port the datatables to DB2 or Oracle and go. Especially if you designed the rest of the software to do this from the get go.
In production, we moved all but one of our databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL. We were having problems with Innodb corrupted once every couple months. When it was announced that Oracle was bidding on Sun, we ported over to PostgreSQL, spent a couple weeks rewriting code, and we've not touched the Postgres database since. It's not corrupted and not even hiccuped once since we deployed. We run regular vacuuming and maintenance and that's it. It's been humming for well over a year and now is getting 400x's the use than we ever had with MySQL.
The only thing that PostgreSQL was lacking has been HA support. There are number of 3rd party tools that run well, PGCluster, Slony, GridSQL, but this looks like PostgreSQL is going to support native replication, clustering, and HA with hot-standby...
...prefer game consoles. For starters, you're dealing with a uniform hardware platform. The core specs and capabilities don't change too often, only about once every 5 years or so. So if you are developing for the Xbox360, you only have to get it to work on one 360 and it should work on all. On a PC, you're encountering a vast array of hardware configurations. X CPU with Y Motherboard using Z GPU. So while you can optimize for a number of these, you can't do it for all and that leads to a certain percentage of your customer base complaining.
That and pirating console games is a bit tougher for the average consumer. Usually requires a hardware mod chip and most people don't feel they have the technical skill to install one. On the PC, piracy is pretty much fire up bittorrent, go to the piratebay, and download.
For now. And that will only last until the founders leave or step back in the oversight and are replaced by Standford MBA's. Then it will become about the bottom line. Look at what happened to Motorola when the family was forced out about a decade or more ago...
It's anyone shipping an encoder/decoder, not content in H.264. If you use iMovie, Apple's already paid for the H.264 encoder in Quicktime. If you shot the video with a camera that has an H.264 encoder chip, you're covered when that chip manufacture paid the license to produce H.264 on a chip.
The only case where this becomes a problem is if you are using a program like ffmpeg which has not paid for a license and then wish to ship out content in H.264. Same if you are using ffmpeg on the backend of a server to convert video for streaming without paying for a license. For the vast majority of users not on Linux, this is not going to be a problem. Any tool they are likely to be using will be using a H.264 licensed encoder/decoder.
It's more like FireFox risks becoming the IE6 of internet video. H.264 is supported by IE, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. My guess is that fair number of non-/. FF users are going to go to Chrome rather than IE.
This is what so many have failed to see: for Theora to gain any traction it has to be BETTER than H.264. Right now it's not. H.264 is technically superior and the licensing terms aren't outrageous. It's been a couple years, but the cap was about $3M per year. The mozilla foundation had revenues last year of $70M. I'm not sure where they spend all their money, but this may be case where they're going to put up or shut up.
People only care that their browser if free (in as beer) and works with all the popular sites. The moment that FireFox no longer works for Youtube, the average users will rapidly replace it with Chrome.
I would tend to agree. A lot also depends on what you are programming. If you are programming scientific, economic analysis, or financial calculations that have to deal with very accurate floats, then you're going to need a good background in math. However, if you're like me, and programing mainly business apps that have to be accurate to a couple decimal places, then you need the logic side of the house, but business math skills. Honestly, I've not used Calculus in the 10 years since I've had the class. However I use the stuff I learned in various statistics classes and finance at least a few times a week. Just the other day I had to fix a rounding problem in a point of sale app. And in that case it's not only a logic problem, but you have to know the law(s) and take regulations into account. So you had to add the ability to always round up, always round down, or round half-even (bankers rounding). Legal regulations had more impact on the solution than the actual technical problem itself as some jurisdictions have different rules of how businesses have to round for VAT or sales tax collection. Also there are different rules for interest collection on in house credit, layaway, etc..
Granted, we're a smaller company, but we've taken the opposite approach. In the office, you either have a Mac Mini or an iMac. But when people are hired, we pay them a $3,500 signing bonus with the expectation that it is to buy a new laptop of their choice. Overwhelmingly they buy MacBook Pro's and add XP or Windows 7 with VMware/Parallels and we add $45 to the first paycheck of the month to cover data plans and "business" minutes/texts on their cell phones.
We find that they usually take much better care of the laptops when it's "their" laptop and it beats having to carry two cell phones.
However, Trademark is far different than insanity that is patents and copyright at the moment. Trademarks are unique logo marks and trade names and you HAVE to defend them else they are null and void. It is supposed to protect your brand identity. Imagine if a company puts out a similar product with using your logo/mark or similar name however their product is crap and starts to ruin your brand name. This is what Trademark is suppose to protect and it works pretty well. i know that we have trademark agreements with several of their logos. They are basic rules, like we cannot use their logo to show endorsement, and they can't be larger than our company's logo and product name. But we are free to put "Premiere Partner with XYZ, Gold Partner with ABC," etc. We also have a couple trademarks that we use in particular builds of our open source software. Anyone is free to compile the code, but they can't use our trademarked images. We don't distribute those images in the source. Only the binaries we compile and support all have our logo on the splash screen so that our clients know it's our build and therefore covered under our support agreements. Likewise, we can't use the company's name or logo which we forked the product from to promote or declare our own.
I also agree with this ruling. It shouldn't be Google's responsibility. However if another company is using your trademark in their advertising with out consent or in a way that infringes on our brand, sue the advertiser.
Unless your an enterprise sized company who needs support contracts for no other reason than it gives legal someone to sue if things go badly...
We have GPLv3'd products. Sure anyone can download them and install and compile. We have a public SVN and Git repos. However, there is no documentation or support without a service contract. Why? Those cost us a lot of time and money to produce and do right. The other part of the deal is that those who buy support agreements also get a warranty and priority bug fixes.
This is why the day the deal was announced we started migrating everything we could to PostgreSQL and FreeBSD (ZFS & DTrace Support). I had decent respect for Sun and have had some damn good products and service over the past 15 years or so. Oracle is a company that I absolutely had dealing with as a vender. We *have* to support Oracle because that is what some of our clients deploy on. Doesn't mean we have to like it. Honestly, for what we do, we've only had one client that had a HA requirement and they were already running Oracle. For all our other clients PostgreSQL has been able to handle everything we can throw at it and with the new cluster/replication/HA hot standby support in PostgreSQL 9, it looks like it will fill in those gaps that we currently use DB2 or Oracle for.
We used to run this way. Most of the programmers would come in about 11AM, work until 4 or 5 at the office. Usually if we needed to have a meeting or they needed something from one of the other people, it worked out well to have everyone in the same place. Then they'd go home and usually work again from 10PM - 2AM or so from home. Sometimes they'd come back to the office (all had 24 hours access cards). We were able to run like this for about the first year to 18 months until the product started shipping. And the bulk of our clients were small retail outlets that started about 8AM local time and ended about 5PM local time. Typically, we'd field more tech support calls right at 8AM than any other time of the day. So we had to be there because often times it really was a show stopping problem for the client.
We tried setting up an office system that would forward calls to cell phones, but half the time he employees wouldn't pick up. Either the phone was off, in another room, battery dead, or they simply slept through it. In the end we had to make sure at least two people were scheduled at 8AM whether they liked it or now.
I used to say the same thing. I was doing programing work. Who cared if I went to bed at 3AM and didn't wake up until 10AM? So long as the work got done, right?
Then the product launched and our customers very much keep an 8AM - 5PM schedule. And if they had a problem at 8AM and couldn't reach anyone for support, they're pissed. In the early days of the company, I was programmer guy/systems guy/tech support guy. I had to learn to adapt rather quick and just know to be up and alert by 8AM even if that meant going to bed before midnight.
The thing is very few people actually buy the OS updates. Anyone who has been around Apple knows they have a pretty regular update schedule. Most people get the new OS's when they get new hardware.
Since I've been buying macs in 2002 -
2002 - iBook, came with 10.1, got 10.2 free since it was purchased x days before OS 10.2 was released. Got OS 10.3 free from apple when the laptop went in for warranty repairs and they offered an upgraded superdrive free, but it required OS 10.3....which they put on for free. 2005 - Bought a 12.1" Powerbook to replace the iBook and it came with OSX 10.4. 2008 - Bought a MacBook with OS 10.5 installed. 2009 - Bought OS 10.6 upgrade for $30.
So in almost 8 years of buying macs, I've paid for OS upgrades exactly once, and that cost me $30.
My last PC had XP. When I replaced the motherboard after the one inside went bad the copy of Windows I had would no longer validate. MS wanted me to buy another XP license because the one that I had "Was no longer valid since they consider a new motherboard to be a new computer. That will be $279 for a retail copy XP Pro please". That was circa 2004.
Firefox has suffered the problem of forgetting what their original goal was: create a lightweight and fast browser to replace Mozilla. Now Firefox is as feature laden and bloated with feature creep as Mozilla once was. Now Chrome and Opera are delivering that niche of a fast lightweight browser.
Exactly, it should be the LOCAL governments that do this. If the local city/county wanted to pass a bond or even a sales tax increase to pay for it, I would vote for it. Especially since it's a lot easier to vote that lot out of office if they don't deliver than it is the people inside the Beltway.
How long though until some major pension fund or investment house files a lawsuit citing that by pulling out of the largest potential market in the 21st century is a fiduciary breach of responsibility to make money for the shareholder?
On 5 February 2007, Apple Inc. and Apple Corps announced a settlement of their trademark dispute under which Apple Inc. will own all of the trademarks related to "Apple" and will license certain of those trademarks back to Apple Corps for their continued use. The settlement ends the ongoing trademark lawsuit between the companies, with each party bearing its own legal costs, and Apple Inc. will continue using its name and logos on iTunes. The settlement includes terms that are confidential, although newspaper accounts at the time stated that Apple Computer was buying out Apple Corps' trademark rights for a total of $500 million U.S..
When you're dealing with TB/PB range, you call Teradata. At last check they handle 4 of the 5 largest databases in the world, including eBay/Paypal's 13PB's monster and Walmart.
If you're dead set on it, first place to visit after you land and go through customers is the Vodophone and T-Mobile store at the airport or at the main train station. I've used Vodophone for years when traveling in Germany. But I'm not sure what their data charges are as I've only gotten prepaid phones.
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There are different databases for different tasks. Teradata produces a damn good database, but it's primarily for data wearhousing and BI tasks. That being said, they now have a version that will run up to 1TB (I believe it's 1TB) available Free. Just like IBM has their DB2 Express-C edition for free as well. Both have suited our tasks for development work just fine.
However, PostgreSQL 9 is supposed to have native replication/clustering/Hot Standby. Which would address my concerns with using the database in mission critical databases that aren't dealing with large datasets.
I thought that about motherboards too until I had a couple times that I traced the root of problems to be a particular revision of a particular motherboard where the northbridge chip set (or southbridge, I can't remember which), played hell with sound card or something. I don't remember the specifics, but only that I had two games that just would not work. Everything else worked fine and it would play on my other system (not well because it was older). I went on an array of forums and saw everyone else with this particular motherboard revision had the same exact problem. It took a firmware patch from the vender's website buried 5 layers deep to fix it.
Since then, I've never discounted that motherboards can play a role in performance.
If you get to the size of Walmart doing anything, you have access to the capital to get a system from IBM or Oracle for OLTP and Teradata for data wearhousing.
I don't have mod points, but I've found the same thing. It's the perfect development database if you think that your program is ever going to need to support Enterprise class stuff. On the small scale, I've found that it's fast enough. Is MySQL faster? Yes, but where I've tested it's not been enough to really matter compared to the other advantages of PostgreSQL. Primarily that it's ACID compliant. What we've found is that it works well until you start getting into databases that are GB in size. But then you can easily port the datatables to DB2 or Oracle and go. Especially if you designed the rest of the software to do this from the get go.
In production, we moved all but one of our databases from MySQL to PostgreSQL. We were having problems with Innodb corrupted once every couple months. When it was announced that Oracle was bidding on Sun, we ported over to PostgreSQL, spent a couple weeks rewriting code, and we've not touched the Postgres database since. It's not corrupted and not even hiccuped once since we deployed. We run regular vacuuming and maintenance and that's it. It's been humming for well over a year and now is getting 400x's the use than we ever had with MySQL.
The only thing that PostgreSQL was lacking has been HA support. There are number of 3rd party tools that run well, PGCluster, Slony, GridSQL, but this looks like PostgreSQL is going to support native replication, clustering, and HA with hot-standby...
...prefer game consoles. For starters, you're dealing with a uniform hardware platform. The core specs and capabilities don't change too often, only about once every 5 years or so. So if you are developing for the Xbox360, you only have to get it to work on one 360 and it should work on all. On a PC, you're encountering a vast array of hardware configurations. X CPU with Y Motherboard using Z GPU. So while you can optimize for a number of these, you can't do it for all and that leads to a certain percentage of your customer base complaining.
That and pirating console games is a bit tougher for the average consumer. Usually requires a hardware mod chip and most people don't feel they have the technical skill to install one. On the PC, piracy is pretty much fire up bittorrent, go to the piratebay, and download.
For now. And that will only last until the founders leave or step back in the oversight and are replaced by Standford MBA's. Then it will become about the bottom line. Look at what happened to Motorola when the family was forced out about a decade or more ago...
It's anyone shipping an encoder/decoder, not content in H.264. If you use iMovie, Apple's already paid for the H.264 encoder in Quicktime. If you shot the video with a camera that has an H.264 encoder chip, you're covered when that chip manufacture paid the license to produce H.264 on a chip.
The only case where this becomes a problem is if you are using a program like ffmpeg which has not paid for a license and then wish to ship out content in H.264. Same if you are using ffmpeg on the backend of a server to convert video for streaming without paying for a license. For the vast majority of users not on Linux, this is not going to be a problem. Any tool they are likely to be using will be using a H.264 licensed encoder/decoder.
It's more like FireFox risks becoming the IE6 of internet video. H.264 is supported by IE, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. My guess is that fair number of non-/. FF users are going to go to Chrome rather than IE.
This is what so many have failed to see: for Theora to gain any traction it has to be BETTER than H.264. Right now it's not. H.264 is technically superior and the licensing terms aren't outrageous. It's been a couple years, but the cap was about $3M per year. The mozilla foundation had revenues last year of $70M. I'm not sure where they spend all their money, but this may be case where they're going to put up or shut up.
People only care that their browser if free (in as beer) and works with all the popular sites. The moment that FireFox no longer works for Youtube, the average users will rapidly replace it with Chrome.
I would tend to agree. A lot also depends on what you are programming. If you are programming scientific, economic analysis, or financial calculations that have to deal with very accurate floats, then you're going to need a good background in math. However, if you're like me, and programing mainly business apps that have to be accurate to a couple decimal places, then you need the logic side of the house, but business math skills. Honestly, I've not used Calculus in the 10 years since I've had the class. However I use the stuff I learned in various statistics classes and finance at least a few times a week. Just the other day I had to fix a rounding problem in a point of sale app. And in that case it's not only a logic problem, but you have to know the law(s) and take regulations into account. So you had to add the ability to always round up, always round down, or round half-even (bankers rounding). Legal regulations had more impact on the solution than the actual technical problem itself as some jurisdictions have different rules of how businesses have to round for VAT or sales tax collection. Also there are different rules for interest collection on in house credit, layaway, etc..
Granted, we're a smaller company, but we've taken the opposite approach. In the office, you either have a Mac Mini or an iMac. But when people are hired, we pay them a $3,500 signing bonus with the expectation that it is to buy a new laptop of their choice. Overwhelmingly they buy MacBook Pro's and add XP or Windows 7 with VMware/Parallels and we add $45 to the first paycheck of the month to cover data plans and "business" minutes/texts on their cell phones.
We find that they usually take much better care of the laptops when it's "their" laptop and it beats having to carry two cell phones.
However, Trademark is far different than insanity that is patents and copyright at the moment. Trademarks are unique logo marks and trade names and you HAVE to defend them else they are null and void. It is supposed to protect your brand identity. Imagine if a company puts out a similar product with using your logo/mark or similar name however their product is crap and starts to ruin your brand name. This is what Trademark is suppose to protect and it works pretty well. i know that we have trademark agreements with several of their logos. They are basic rules, like we cannot use their logo to show endorsement, and they can't be larger than our company's logo and product name. But we are free to put "Premiere Partner with XYZ, Gold Partner with ABC," etc. We also have a couple trademarks that we use in particular builds of our open source software. Anyone is free to compile the code, but they can't use our trademarked images. We don't distribute those images in the source. Only the binaries we compile and support all have our logo on the splash screen so that our clients know it's our build and therefore covered under our support agreements. Likewise, we can't use the company's name or logo which we forked the product from to promote or declare our own.
I also agree with this ruling. It shouldn't be Google's responsibility. However if another company is using your trademark in their advertising with out consent or in a way that infringes on our brand, sue the advertiser.
Unless your an enterprise sized company who needs support contracts for no other reason than it gives legal someone to sue if things go badly...
We have GPLv3'd products. Sure anyone can download them and install and compile. We have a public SVN and Git repos. However, there is no documentation or support without a service contract. Why? Those cost us a lot of time and money to produce and do right. The other part of the deal is that those who buy support agreements also get a warranty and priority bug fixes.
This is why the day the deal was announced we started migrating everything we could to PostgreSQL and FreeBSD (ZFS & DTrace Support). I had decent respect for Sun and have had some damn good products and service over the past 15 years or so. Oracle is a company that I absolutely had dealing with as a vender. We *have* to support Oracle because that is what some of our clients deploy on. Doesn't mean we have to like it. Honestly, for what we do, we've only had one client that had a HA requirement and they were already running Oracle. For all our other clients PostgreSQL has been able to handle everything we can throw at it and with the new cluster/replication/HA hot standby support in PostgreSQL 9, it looks like it will fill in those gaps that we currently use DB2 or Oracle for.
We used to run this way. Most of the programmers would come in about 11AM, work until 4 or 5 at the office. Usually if we needed to have a meeting or they needed something from one of the other people, it worked out well to have everyone in the same place. Then they'd go home and usually work again from 10PM - 2AM or so from home. Sometimes they'd come back to the office (all had 24 hours access cards). We were able to run like this for about the first year to 18 months until the product started shipping. And the bulk of our clients were small retail outlets that started about 8AM local time and ended about 5PM local time. Typically, we'd field more tech support calls right at 8AM than any other time of the day. So we had to be there because often times it really was a show stopping problem for the client.
We tried setting up an office system that would forward calls to cell phones, but half the time he employees wouldn't pick up. Either the phone was off, in another room, battery dead, or they simply slept through it. In the end we had to make sure at least two people were scheduled at 8AM whether they liked it or now.
I used to say the same thing. I was doing programing work. Who cared if I went to bed at 3AM and didn't wake up until 10AM? So long as the work got done, right?
Then the product launched and our customers very much keep an 8AM - 5PM schedule. And if they had a problem at 8AM and couldn't reach anyone for support, they're pissed. In the early days of the company, I was programmer guy/systems guy/tech support guy. I had to learn to adapt rather quick and just know to be up and alert by 8AM even if that meant going to bed before midnight.
...and it's still open source. Last time I checked, it's design was by invite only.
Western Europe also hasn't had to pay to defend itself for the last 60 years either. We pretty much subsidized their defense.
The thing is very few people actually buy the OS updates. Anyone who has been around Apple knows they have a pretty regular update schedule. Most people get the new OS's when they get new hardware.
Since I've been buying macs in 2002 -
2002 - iBook, came with 10.1, got 10.2 free since it was purchased x days before OS 10.2 was released. Got OS 10.3 free from apple when the laptop went in for warranty repairs and they offered an upgraded superdrive free, but it required OS 10.3....which they put on for free.
2005 - Bought a 12.1" Powerbook to replace the iBook and it came with OSX 10.4.
2008 - Bought a MacBook with OS 10.5 installed.
2009 - Bought OS 10.6 upgrade for $30.
So in almost 8 years of buying macs, I've paid for OS upgrades exactly once, and that cost me $30.
My last PC had XP. When I replaced the motherboard after the one inside went bad the copy of Windows I had would no longer validate. MS wanted me to buy another XP license because the one that I had "Was no longer valid since they consider a new motherboard to be a new computer. That will be $279 for a retail copy XP Pro please". That was circa 2004.
Firefox has suffered the problem of forgetting what their original goal was: create a lightweight and fast browser to replace Mozilla. Now Firefox is as feature laden and bloated with feature creep as Mozilla once was. Now Chrome and Opera are delivering that niche of a fast lightweight browser.
Exactly, it should be the LOCAL governments that do this. If the local city/county wanted to pass a bond or even a sales tax increase to pay for it, I would vote for it. Especially since it's a lot easier to vote that lot out of office if they don't deliver than it is the people inside the Beltway.
How long though until some major pension fund or investment house files a lawsuit citing that by pulling out of the largest potential market in the 21st century is a fiduciary breach of responsibility to make money for the shareholder?
from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Corps_v_Apple_Computer
On 5 February 2007, Apple Inc. and Apple Corps announced a settlement of their trademark dispute under which Apple Inc. will own all of the trademarks related to "Apple" and will license certain of those trademarks back to Apple Corps for their continued use. The settlement ends the ongoing trademark lawsuit between the companies, with each party bearing its own legal costs, and Apple Inc. will continue using its name and logos on iTunes. The settlement includes terms that are confidential, although newspaper accounts at the time stated that Apple Computer was buying out Apple Corps' trademark rights for a total of $500 million U.S..
When you're dealing with TB/PB range, you call Teradata. At last check they handle 4 of the 5 largest databases in the world, including eBay/Paypal's 13PB's monster and Walmart.
If you're dead set on it, first place to visit after you land and go through customers is the Vodophone and T-Mobile store at the airport or at the main train station. I've used Vodophone for years when traveling in Germany. But I'm not sure what their data charges are as I've only gotten prepaid phones.