You might want to take a look at PHPRunner from Xlinesoft. We've used it build web-based CRUD forms for our control panels in hours instead of weeks. There are some limitations, but it supports Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and ODBC. Version 5.2 now supports DB2 as well. There are some limitations that are annoying. You can't just get a "blank" page that is password protected, but you can write custom code in while maintaining the look and feel. But we've found ways around some of the limitations. In fact, I rebuilt the entire backend for one of our products in about 6 hours from a clean start a couple weeks ago. I know the software extremely well, so take someone that's never used it before and it will probably take 2 - 3 days the first time.
For the first year we were in business, the software allowed us to get stuff done easily and effectively without having to hire several coders to create our administrative backend.
Do you have a need for datacenters? We do and I frankly could care less if our datacenters are located in the US and Iceland is an attractive location for the reason mentioned in the article. Geothermal power is plentiful and the climate keeps the cooling costs down, but there are some other factors to consider. Bandwidth is one, another is how much extra does it cost to design a facility to be more resistant to earthquakes as the vulcanization that offers those benefits of abundant geothermal power also means there is seismic instability.
There are other factors as well. Iceland has a small population. Do they have the local expertise? If not, how hard is it to get residency permits for foreign workers. What are the other associated tax laws and other legal differences in the area. Do they have different data laws than here in the US? Do these costs off set the energy cost savings?
I've been to Iceland a couple times to visit friends and like it there. They are used to constructing buildings to withstand earthquakes and they have an educated work force and middle of the rung when it comes to tax and other expenses. Our only huge concern I know was looking at the size of the population and wondering how many people in the entire country are familiar with Teradata. If not, we'd need to relocate a couple people at least for 3 - 5 years.
But the cost of malpractice insurance has gone down? When I was living in Illinois, a lot of doctors were leaving the state, especially specialists because the state is particularly lawsuit friendly and the price of malpractice insurance was driving most to either work at hospitals or leave. Most doctors I know would love to see their malpractice insurance rates drop by 25%.
The US Government (i.e federal) didn't sanction the local cable monopoly, my local city hall gave Charter the cable monopoly and the state regulars the telephone company.
I used to get the local newspaper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch. But every year it got thinner and thinner to the point where all that was in the news paper were AP stories I had already read online for free. Especially when they cut the number of stocks/mutual funds listed. There is nothing there I can't get from local TV news. Instead of subscribe to the paper, I bought a subscription to The Economist and I pay for the Wall Street Journal online.
The Economist is the best publication for getting a quick overview of what is going on in the world. Typically I read the major points on Monday and then will read some of the smaller articles through out the week.
Last thing I want is to pay another "fee" that goes to my "local" paper to just keep it alive. If the Post Dispatch did any type of real investigative journalism, like the expose on the fire departments a few years ago, on a regular basis, then I might subscribe again. Helen Mirran made this point years ago in her book. The newspapers are loosing money so what do they do? Cut the news room and print more AP stories. Well without those local stories, more people stop subscribing, and they decide to cut the news room further. And then suddenly they realize one day that they don't have anything people want to buy.
I bought Apple $1,500 worth of shares at around $18 in 1999. I rode it up, watched it split once, and when the price hit $120 I dumped it. Figured I had made about 6x's my investment, I had held the stock for over 5 years at that point so lower capital gains, and so it was time to take some profits. That's how I made some money in Apple stock.
But what happens when you start using market places other than Google's for android phones. That's supposed to be an "advantage" of droid vs. iphone right?
Tragedy of the Commons comes to mind here. People around here like to bitch about Apple's policies with their app store, but I understood the reasoning behind it from the beginning. The average consumer doesn't know better. A cute app that is malicious can spread to millions of users before someone wises up. And it only takes one or two to make people fearful of the platform.
It will be fun to see if the carriers take advantage of this and try to get control over the handsets back in their court as opposed to that of Google. If it happens a couple more times, I can the Verizon App store popping up and a Verizon UI required on all android phones that only allow users to use their store. And I'm sure a lot of the apps will require extra "monthly" fees.
This happens enough, the carriers will quickly move to take back control of the handsets with their own "software" in the guise of consumer protection just like they have been. I can see a day where the, the new Verzion "SafeDroid" runs a firewall that blocks everything by default, for user safety of course. Oh, want to run turn by turn navigation, that will be $15 a month please. Want to unlock this app, $5 a month please.
It may be based on android, but I'll be the carriers will move to lock it down.
Mod parent up. He's hit it on the head when it comes to the history of PostgreSQL. What is missing is that fact that PostgreSQL had table/row locking and other ACID compliant features way before MySQL. And even with MySQL, they had to import the features using other DB engines such as Berkley or InnoDB. While native replication has been missing there are a number of 3rd party clustering tools that work extremely well. I've used pgpool, Slony, and GridSQL myself. So what if they are 3rd party tools? They are solid and I have a choice of tools to match the right one for the job instead of one-size-fits all.
Furthermore, PostgreSQL modelled itself around Oracle and DB2. If you developed something that worked well on PostgreSQL it was usually relatively painless to convert to DB2 or Oracle and the system would scream. But today, unless your dealing with databases in the Terabyte range, performance is good enough in PostgreSQL.
The early versions of our product ran on MySQL because that was what was available on the servers at the time and we were on a shoestring budget and had to use what was there. As our product grew, we encountered problems with data corruption on MySQL, found that MySQL's DBCLUSTER engine was horribly buggy, and started to look towards alternatives when I suggested PostgreSQL. When it was announced Sun would buy MySQL, we made the switch that day. Since we were using abstraction to begin with, it just took a couple days to port the tables and then import the data from MySQL and we were done. Our plan was to use PostgreSQL until we could afford DB2 or Teradata.
However, PostgreSQL has yet to crash or corrupt any data in 18 months. With GridSQL we have HA with shared nothing architechure and it seems to be able to handle hundreds to a couple thousand concurrent connections on $12k in hardware without a hiccup. In fact I have to remind our guys to do the routine maintence and preform checks otherwise we'd almost forget about it.
I spent a few years of the software vender blaming hardware vender A (server) who blamed hardware vender B (networking equipment) and it could take hours to get the right people on the phone with each other.
It's always fun when we have interns from the local university CS dept and the first time they run into a systems problem in the real world, i.e. a router not properly configured or a firewall problem, and they spend hours trying to figure out what is wrong with their code.
I come from the SA/SI world. The students always wonder why so much of our code is written in Perl as opposed to PHP, Python, Ruby, or whatever is the "cool" scripting language this year. And the reason is that a lot of it was stuff that I wrote 10 years ago. It worked then, especially log analysis stuff, and here it is 10 years later and guess what: it still works.
Software development is writing code. IT is going around to people who are never happy because something is broken. I did that as a field tech for 3 years and never once did I walk into a situation where the person was happy. Then it was the mystical game of figuring out if the problem was hardware, software, our stuff, another venders stuff, etc..
Phones are easy to loose or get nicked. One of the features enterprises like about the Blackbery is the ability to do a remote datawipe. On my iPhone I can set a password. If it's entered incorrectly 10 times, the device automatically wipes itself. I can also do a remote datawipe as well. I've tried googling about this feature on the N1 and so far have found nothing.
Ability to do a remote data wipe is key for the enterprise market.
Why would that spur Adobe to make a 64-bit version? As much as people hate it around here, it would take a 64-bit version of IE being the default to really spur them. I look at our website statistics and over 80% of our hits are from some type of MSIE. This causes much gnashing of teeth, but...
Funny, because where I live Verizon has the better network, but just about everyone feels the same way about dealing with Verizon as you talk about people hating AT&T.
I use them only because they have a mini-apple store in the one down where I live. It's the nearest place that handles any kind of Apple products, which is handy if I need a Mini-DVI to VGA adaptor to hook up to a project or a new powersupply for my MacBook Pro (I seem to break 1 a year. Doesn't seem to like the drop from my table onto a ceremic tile floor too much).
Is the 12.1" powerbook I have on my desk retroactively a netbook? Other than the fact it does have an optical drive? Now I see some "netbooks" with 11.6" screens and are only $50 less than the 15" "laptops" setting right next to them with a full sized keyboard, a better processor, and more RAM.
Apple bought Final Cut and later Shake creating a video production suite that beat the tar out of Premiere and After Effects. Especially in the Premiere 6 days.
That we will have to test against to make sure our apps work right. Android is starting to get as bad as WinMo. We ported our iPhone apps over to Android, but testing and QA is starting to rack up on the Android side of the house.
Love of hate Apple, their basic configuration is the same across the various iPhone/iPod Touch models. Make it work well on one, it works well on all 30M or so devices out there. Even Blackberry is basically 2 configs, classic and storm.
But Windows Mobile is a nightmare as just about every handset has a different UI and hardware spec. And Google seems to be heading down the same road.
Slashdot Mirror
You might want to take a look at PHPRunner from Xlinesoft. We've used it build web-based CRUD forms for our control panels in hours instead of weeks. There are some limitations, but it supports Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL and ODBC. Version 5.2 now supports DB2 as well. There are some limitations that are annoying. You can't just get a "blank" page that is password protected, but you can write custom code in while maintaining the look and feel. But we've found ways around some of the limitations. In fact, I rebuilt the entire backend for one of our products in about 6 hours from a clean start a couple weeks ago. I know the software extremely well, so take someone that's never used it before and it will probably take 2 - 3 days the first time.
For the first year we were in business, the software allowed us to get stuff done easily and effectively without having to hire several coders to create our administrative backend.
Do you have a need for datacenters? We do and I frankly could care less if our datacenters are located in the US and Iceland is an attractive location for the reason mentioned in the article. Geothermal power is plentiful and the climate keeps the cooling costs down, but there are some other factors to consider. Bandwidth is one, another is how much extra does it cost to design a facility to be more resistant to earthquakes as the vulcanization that offers those benefits of abundant geothermal power also means there is seismic instability.
There are other factors as well. Iceland has a small population. Do they have the local expertise? If not, how hard is it to get residency permits for foreign workers. What are the other associated tax laws and other legal differences in the area. Do they have different data laws than here in the US? Do these costs off set the energy cost savings?
I've been to Iceland a couple times to visit friends and like it there. They are used to constructing buildings to withstand earthquakes and they have an educated work force and middle of the rung when it comes to tax and other expenses. Our only huge concern I know was looking at the size of the population and wondering how many people in the entire country are familiar with Teradata. If not, we'd need to relocate a couple people at least for 3 - 5 years.
But the cost of malpractice insurance has gone down? When I was living in Illinois, a lot of doctors were leaving the state, especially specialists because the state is particularly lawsuit friendly and the price of malpractice insurance was driving most to either work at hospitals or leave. Most doctors I know would love to see their malpractice insurance rates drop by 25%.
The US Government (i.e federal) didn't sanction the local cable monopoly, my local city hall gave Charter the cable monopoly and the state regulars the telephone company.
I used to get the local newspaper, the St. Louis Post Dispatch. But every year it got thinner and thinner to the point where all that was in the news paper were AP stories I had already read online for free. Especially when they cut the number of stocks/mutual funds listed. There is nothing there I can't get from local TV news. Instead of subscribe to the paper, I bought a subscription to The Economist and I pay for the Wall Street Journal online.
The Economist is the best publication for getting a quick overview of what is going on in the world. Typically I read the major points on Monday and then will read some of the smaller articles through out the week.
Last thing I want is to pay another "fee" that goes to my "local" paper to just keep it alive. If the Post Dispatch did any type of real investigative journalism, like the expose on the fire departments a few years ago, on a regular basis, then I might subscribe again. Helen Mirran made this point years ago in her book. The newspapers are loosing money so what do they do? Cut the news room and print more AP stories. Well without those local stories, more people stop subscribing, and they decide to cut the news room further. And then suddenly they realize one day that they don't have anything people want to buy.
I bought Apple $1,500 worth of shares at around $18 in 1999. I rode it up, watched it split once, and when the price hit $120 I dumped it. Figured I had made about 6x's my investment, I had held the stock for over 5 years at that point so lower capital gains, and so it was time to take some profits. That's how I made some money in Apple stock.
Explain how the BSD license works in three sentences or less....I thought the BSD was three sentences.
Flash is the container. The Codec is H.264. .mov is the quicktime container. The Codec is often H.264. .mkv is a container, the Codec is often DivX.
Container formats != Codec.
But what happens when you start using market places other than Google's for android phones. That's supposed to be an "advantage" of droid vs. iphone right?
Tragedy of the Commons comes to mind here. People around here like to bitch about Apple's policies with their app store, but I understood the reasoning behind it from the beginning. The average consumer doesn't know better. A cute app that is malicious can spread to millions of users before someone wises up. And it only takes one or two to make people fearful of the platform.
It will be fun to see if the carriers take advantage of this and try to get control over the handsets back in their court as opposed to that of Google. If it happens a couple more times, I can the Verizon App store popping up and a Verizon UI required on all android phones that only allow users to use their store. And I'm sure a lot of the apps will require extra "monthly" fees.
This happens enough, the carriers will quickly move to take back control of the handsets with their own "software" in the guise of consumer protection just like they have been. I can see a day where the, the new Verzion "SafeDroid" runs a firewall that blocks everything by default, for user safety of course. Oh, want to run turn by turn navigation, that will be $15 a month please. Want to unlock this app, $5 a month please.
It may be based on android, but I'll be the carriers will move to lock it down.
Mod parent up. He's hit it on the head when it comes to the history of PostgreSQL. What is missing is that fact that PostgreSQL had table/row locking and other ACID compliant features way before MySQL. And even with MySQL, they had to import the features using other DB engines such as Berkley or InnoDB. While native replication has been missing there are a number of 3rd party clustering tools that work extremely well. I've used pgpool, Slony, and GridSQL myself. So what if they are 3rd party tools? They are solid and I have a choice of tools to match the right one for the job instead of one-size-fits all.
Furthermore, PostgreSQL modelled itself around Oracle and DB2. If you developed something that worked well on PostgreSQL it was usually relatively painless to convert to DB2 or Oracle and the system would scream. But today, unless your dealing with databases in the Terabyte range, performance is good enough in PostgreSQL.
The early versions of our product ran on MySQL because that was what was available on the servers at the time and we were on a shoestring budget and had to use what was there. As our product grew, we encountered problems with data corruption on MySQL, found that MySQL's DBCLUSTER engine was horribly buggy, and started to look towards alternatives when I suggested PostgreSQL. When it was announced Sun would buy MySQL, we made the switch that day. Since we were using abstraction to begin with, it just took a couple days to port the tables and then import the data from MySQL and we were done. Our plan was to use PostgreSQL until we could afford DB2 or Teradata.
However, PostgreSQL has yet to crash or corrupt any data in 18 months. With GridSQL we have HA with shared nothing architechure and it seems to be able to handle hundreds to a couple thousand concurrent connections on $12k in hardware without a hiccup. In fact I have to remind our guys to do the routine maintence and preform checks otherwise we'd almost forget about it.
You've never worked in field support have you?
I spent a few years of the software vender blaming hardware vender A (server) who blamed hardware vender B (networking equipment) and it could take hours to get the right people on the phone with each other.
It's always fun when we have interns from the local university CS dept and the first time they run into a systems problem in the real world, i.e. a router not properly configured or a firewall problem, and they spend hours trying to figure out what is wrong with their code.
I come from the SA/SI world. The students always wonder why so much of our code is written in Perl as opposed to PHP, Python, Ruby, or whatever is the "cool" scripting language this year. And the reason is that a lot of it was stuff that I wrote 10 years ago. It worked then, especially log analysis stuff, and here it is 10 years later and guess what: it still works.
Apparently, my 12.1" powerbook retroactively counts as a Netbook.....err, wait, no, sorry it has an optical drive.
pffft duh......
http://xkcd.com/224/
Software development is writing code. IT is going around to people who are never happy because something is broken. I did that as a field tech for 3 years and never once did I walk into a situation where the person was happy. Then it was the mystical game of figuring out if the problem was hardware, software, our stuff, another venders stuff, etc..
Linux is a kernel. Nothing more. An OS is the kernel + userland. In that respect, Android is indeed still in the infancy.
Phones are easy to loose or get nicked. One of the features enterprises like about the Blackbery is the ability to do a remote datawipe. On my iPhone I can set a password. If it's entered incorrectly 10 times, the device automatically wipes itself. I can also do a remote datawipe as well. I've tried googling about this feature on the N1 and so far have found nothing.
Ability to do a remote data wipe is key for the enterprise market.
Why would that spur Adobe to make a 64-bit version? As much as people hate it around here, it would take a 64-bit version of IE being the default to really spur them. I look at our website statistics and over 80% of our hits are from some type of MSIE. This causes much gnashing of teeth, but...
Funny, because where I live Verizon has the better network, but just about everyone feels the same way about dealing with Verizon as you talk about people hating AT&T.
I use them only because they have a mini-apple store in the one down where I live. It's the nearest place that handles any kind of Apple products, which is handy if I need a Mini-DVI to VGA adaptor to hook up to a project or a new powersupply for my MacBook Pro (I seem to break 1 a year. Doesn't seem to like the drop from my table onto a ceremic tile floor too much).
Linux is just a Kernel, not an OS. Android is an OS with a Linux kernel.
Is the 12.1" powerbook I have on my desk retroactively a netbook? Other than the fact it does have an optical drive? Now I see some "netbooks" with 11.6" screens and are only $50 less than the 15" "laptops" setting right next to them with a full sized keyboard, a better processor, and more RAM.
Apple bought Final Cut and later Shake creating a video production suite that beat the tar out of Premiere and After Effects. Especially in the Premiere 6 days.
That we will have to test against to make sure our apps work right. Android is starting to get as bad as WinMo. We ported our iPhone apps over to Android, but testing and QA is starting to rack up on the Android side of the house.
Love of hate Apple, their basic configuration is the same across the various iPhone/iPod Touch models. Make it work well on one, it works well on all 30M or so devices out there. Even Blackberry is basically 2 configs, classic and storm.
But Windows Mobile is a nightmare as just about every handset has a different UI and hardware spec. And Google seems to be heading down the same road.