No, but Oracle taking over MySQL and the community already showing signs of forking in 4 different directions might be a reason to seriously look at PostgreSQL.
I hear people say how we should spend more on social services and cut the military and NASA without really knowing any of the numbers. They see 15B for Nasa and think that 15B is a really big number, yet has percentage of overall spending or even vs entitlement spending, it's a drop in the bucket. Hell, unless I read the numbers wrong (I've not had my morning coffee yet) the New York Health care system got almost as much money as NASA's entire budget.
Last time I checked, which was a year or two ago, entitlement spending is roughly half the US budget and twice what we spend on the military.
It's not the big e-tailers like Amazon that's the problem, it's the smaller mom and pop shops is who this will kill. Likely there will be 3rd party billing services that will do the work for Mom & Pop for a fee, but the internet is a race to the lowest common denominator. 3% can mean the difference between staying in business and closing up shop.
And it may not only be the people inside Iran. I'm not sure what Iran's capabilities are for external intelligence operations, but I wouldn't be surprised if we don't hear about a few of these people outside Iran that were leading the charge to set up proxies have unfortunate accidents.
We put solar up on our office roof last year. Met about 70% of our energy needs, but the main reason we did it was the fact we had enough cash in the bank to cover it and the choices were spent it or watch 40% goto uncle sam in the form of corporate income tax. None of the owners wanted to take anymore home due to then having to pay more in personal income tax.
We looked at the various options and putting up solar panels made sense since it freed up enough cash flow to hire an extra jr. developer. That paid huge dividends this year as we were able to move 2 projects/products to market faster.
All worked out well until we had a freak storm with 100MPH straight line winds that tore the panels off the roof a month ago and the insurance check isn't quite enough to cover replacing all the panels.
when I was working as an IT consultant for videographers they were asking about the coming HD video format (back in 2002/2003) and I kept telling them not to worry about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD because by the time one format wins, digital content distribution would kill them both by 2010. It looks like my prediction back then was about right. In 2005 I bought a Mac-Mini and hooked up to my 32" HDTV's DVI port and have used it as my DVD player and play TV shows i've downloaded from iTunes.
Last fall I cancelled my cable and started downing the half dozen shows I watch from iTunes. I thought their SD versions were acceptable, but their new HD versions look great.
Is it 1080P? No, but my TV's only 720 anyway. But it is good enough for me. And I bought all my TV shows for what 2 months of cable was costing me.
Generally you have to pay a deposit. I went through this when I got my iPhone. I have one credit card and two debit cards. My car was paid in cash, and I rent an apartment. It took forever to get approval from AT&T while at the Apple store. I think the only reason I did was the fact my Credit Card has way to high of credit limit. Anyway, I checked my credit a couple months later, and it seemed low. When I asked around, people told me it was low because "I didn't have enough credit". It was a bit of a WTF moment because I wasn't going out and getting in debt over my head and generally paid cash for most things. This year I checked my credit score and it was up almost 90 points from last year. Apparently, due to the economy, the powers that be decided to redo how they calculate that magic number and suddenly my score was 780.
It was a 120GB HDD or 8GB SSD for the same price. We chose the HDD's and it took about a whole 2 seconds to come to that decision. SSD's might be all the rage in the geeky circles, but 120GB vs. 8GB. The extra performance was not worth it to us over the extra storage.
One of the major problems over is that fact that we're not all GSM on this side of the pond, and therefore are not all that open simply because the radio chips are different. AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM. Verizon, Alltel, and US Cellular are all CDMA (iirc), and Sprint had PCS and Nextel had something else before they merged. So it's not like I can take an unlocked GSM phone and switch to Verizon.
Now my understanding that 4G will all pretty much be the same technology. But we don't even have 3G here yet and doubt well see 4G here until late in the next decade.
I have to do a lot of on site consulting where I need to be able to dial into a server to adjust something on that end. Especially if the customer lacks wifi on site. And often times these are small businesses where someone else set up the wireless password and they have no idea what it is. In a pinch, I can use my iPhone, but we had to get an Air Card for the office because sometimes it took a laptop to make it work well.
If I can tether with iPhone 3.0, even at a monthly premium, I'd do it and ditch the air card. It's $70 a month for 5GB of data transfer. And I already pay for my iPhone's data plan.
My ex-fiancee was a wedding planner. Typically those that make wedding cakes have to plan things out months in advance. Even if you cancel a couple weeks in advance, they are unlikely to fill that slot on the roster on short notice and incur an opportunity loss. If the wedding gets cancelled a few days before, well, the cake is usually already made. Or there is always the problem of not getting paid after the event because the bride/groom racked up a bigger bill than they really could afford.
That's why deposits are required and often times the full bill due days/weeks ahead of time. They've been burned enough times.
I wouldn't mind paying a national sales tax or VAT tax on everything I buy. The caveat is that the income tax goes away. Taxing consumption seems fair to me.
Hell, if the local community wanted to put in fiber and then lease the lines out to whatever ISP I want, I would gladly pay an internet tax or sales tax on that at the local level.
I can build this box, and have the future of media and news, but I'm breaking federal laws to have it work. Greeedy asshats want to keep their old business models so they fight the windows of change. My newspaper, last news broadcast, TV, music should all be 100% on demand on my TV. I'd even GLADLY pay for it. But I cant. The "free stuff" is either locked to being viewed on a PC, or so low resolution that it's not worth watching.
I've been watching my TV shows on a 32" LCD TV for about 3 years now powered by a Mac Mini hooked into the TV's DVI port. Quality of the SD programming was acceptable. The new HD versions look great. Even better than some of the expanded basic channels I had. I'm sure if I had an Apple TV it may even look better via HDMI, but the current quality is more than acceptable to me.
About a year ago I knew I'd be spending 15 hours days at work on a project pretty much 6 days a week. I was spending about $150 a month on Phone/Internet/TV from the cable company and I only really watched about 6 TV programs. All 6 were available on iTunes. So I canceled the bundle and my TV shows have cost me about $300 in the past year.
Company I worked for many moons ago had an IRIX application they ported to linux. Those were back in the days of Dependancy hell, libraries inconsistent across distros, so we settled on supporting Redhat 4 (might have been 5, i can't remember). Linux accounted for less than 5% of sales and something like 20% of support requests. Mostly it was people trying the trial version and the linux people emailing us with questions like, "What won't this run on my custom compiled slackware kernel with XYZ and..." Then we'd flamed when we answered we only supported the default install of Red Hat X. Now I do believe it also ran on SuSE without issues.
It was nightmare.
When OS X 10.1 was released, we ported to MacOSX and dropped linux support.
Honestly, it was that experience that drove me to BSD on the server side and OSX on the desktop more than anything else.
We avoid anything that has less than 24 months of wide deployment unless there is some absolute pressing need to move to an unstable/untested product.
We have test and development systems where we run latest and greatest, but generally they are used in sync with the existing system. We don't switch over until we're damn sure there aren't any unforeseen consequences. That typically means 12 months without any major hiccups and 3 months without minor ones.
Read a little history. They tried this in the 1990's. It nearly killed Apple. They won't do it again.
I use mac because OSX provided me with a Unix based desktop that worked on a laptop and had commercial application support including MS Office and Adobe products. I used to play with Linux, but never got my sound card, printer, and a host of other hardware to work back in the day. Especially if you wanted to run Linux on a laptop. If the Mac saves me 1 day of hassle of having to reinstall other OS's offered on other laptops, not hunt down and compile drivers, etc. then I've recovered any premium I paid.
Now there are ways of being smart about it. I bought the last generation of 12.1" Powerbook in 2005. I paid about USD 2500 for the machine, but I still have it and it still works and I still use it every day. But it came time where I needed an Intel mac. Bought a second generation white MacBook for $550 a couple weeks ago.
A good friend of mine was finally diagnosed as having Asperger, at least officially. Nice guy, fun to be around, but completely and utterly lacking in the ability to read body language. Now he got lucky in so far as he inherited enough from his grand father, and overseen by good trustees, that he can afford to live a comfortable middle class life without a real career. He did finish a bachelors and 2 masters degrees in writing and advertising, but trying to find and hold a job with a company in that field has been impossible for him. But he's tried the business world, teaching, and a number of other things only to have failed repeatedly or been exploited.
Which is a real shame, because he's great at things like copywriting. (Ad copy, not the IP stuff). Now the other problem is coming from a rural wealthy southern family where he was treated as the black sheep to be kept sorta locked up in attic because he was "special". I'm almost sure that his own family is where his self-esteem problems come from.
He's ended up going back and learning to bake, which is something else he's good at, with the goal to open his own bakery.
I spent about 5 years at video production shop that included 3D animation. They went from a few very powerful DEC ALPHA and SGI workstations to deploying a render farm on generic x86 and linux. Yes, the DEC ALPHA boxes kicked the living crap out of the x86 boxes one on one, but at $60k+ a pop, the DEC boxes were expensive. It could take 14 hours to render on the ALPHAs vs. say 20 hours on an x86 box. But for $60k you could be rendering 10 different frames on x86.. In 3D CGI rendering, you're better off to more physical CPU's producing X number of CPU cycles. Because you're always going to have down time due to hardware problems. You have 1 of 10 boxes go down, you're still running at 90%. If you have 1 of 1 go down and you're at 0%
Now there does come a point where overhead costs start to factor in, such as building space, electricity, cooling, etc.. But we were able to make more deadlines with more x86 boxes rather than a few uber powerful boxes.
I have a small cluster of 10 Mac Mini's I've picked up over the years off Ebay for cheap to play with Xgrid. I still do some Lightwave work on the side and fun. I could see where these would be perfect for a CGI hobbyist looking to render a little faster.
That's why I've kept my 12.1" Powerbook, but it's EOL. Fan bearings are rumbling, audio jack doesn't work unless you get the connection just right, same with the powercord, and the backlight is extremely dim, and I'm starting to see enough Intel only stuff. Although once they went back to a dedicated video card in the new MacBook Aluminum, I've been tempted to get one this fall when 10.6 is released.
I've found that anything less than 12" is hard to use if you're coding. Especially these 9/10" widescreens that are on the acer aspire ones and other netbooks. Fortunately I'm not doing as much coding and more management and meetings. I suspect, though, that I'm still going to need a full laptop. Hell, I didn't like the air (I mean why pay $500 more for a machine with no optical drive and no ability to replace batteries. I used to travel with 3 laptop batteries).
If they release a 10" tablet or iPod Touch - Mega Screen Edition, I'll consider it. I set up a new production server the other day from my iPhone while on a friend's boat thanks to SSH, VNC, and Safari Mobile. It was less than ideal for the task but worked...plus the fact I was on a boat made up for the inconvenience.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but Oracle taking over MySQL and the community already showing signs of forking in 4 different directions might be a reason to seriously look at PostgreSQL.
...a netbook with Verizon vCast OS.
I hear people say how we should spend more on social services and cut the military and NASA without really knowing any of the numbers. They see 15B for Nasa and think that 15B is a really big number, yet has percentage of overall spending or even vs entitlement spending, it's a drop in the bucket. Hell, unless I read the numbers wrong (I've not had my morning coffee yet) the New York Health care system got almost as much money as NASA's entire budget.
Last time I checked, which was a year or two ago, entitlement spending is roughly half the US budget and twice what we spend on the military.
It's not the big e-tailers like Amazon that's the problem, it's the smaller mom and pop shops is who this will kill. Likely there will be 3rd party billing services that will do the work for Mom & Pop for a fee, but the internet is a race to the lowest common denominator. 3% can mean the difference between staying in business and closing up shop.
And it may not only be the people inside Iran. I'm not sure what Iran's capabilities are for external intelligence operations, but I wouldn't be surprised if we don't hear about a few of these people outside Iran that were leading the charge to set up proxies have unfortunate accidents.
GCHQ is basically the UK NSA. So it looks like the cousins plans are pretty much the same as ours.
We put solar up on our office roof last year. Met about 70% of our energy needs, but the main reason we did it was the fact we had enough cash in the bank to cover it and the choices were spent it or watch 40% goto uncle sam in the form of corporate income tax. None of the owners wanted to take anymore home due to then having to pay more in personal income tax.
We looked at the various options and putting up solar panels made sense since it freed up enough cash flow to hire an extra jr. developer. That paid huge dividends this year as we were able to move 2 projects/products to market faster.
All worked out well until we had a freak storm with 100MPH straight line winds that tore the panels off the roof a month ago and the insurance check isn't quite enough to cover replacing all the panels.
when I was working as an IT consultant for videographers they were asking about the coming HD video format (back in 2002/2003) and I kept telling them not to worry about Blu-Ray or HD-DVD because by the time one format wins, digital content distribution would kill them both by 2010. It looks like my prediction back then was about right. In 2005 I bought a Mac-Mini and hooked up to my 32" HDTV's DVI port and have used it as my DVD player and play TV shows i've downloaded from iTunes.
Last fall I cancelled my cable and started downing the half dozen shows I watch from iTunes. I thought their SD versions were acceptable, but their new HD versions look great.
Is it 1080P? No, but my TV's only 720 anyway. But it is good enough for me. And I bought all my TV shows for what 2 months of cable was costing me.
Generally you have to pay a deposit. I went through this when I got my iPhone. I have one credit card and two debit cards. My car was paid in cash, and I rent an apartment. It took forever to get approval from AT&T while at the Apple store. I think the only reason I did was the fact my Credit Card has way to high of credit limit. Anyway, I checked my credit a couple months later, and it seemed low. When I asked around, people told me it was low because "I didn't have enough credit". It was a bit of a WTF moment because I wasn't going out and getting in debt over my head and generally paid cash for most things. This year I checked my credit score and it was up almost 90 points from last year. Apparently, due to the economy, the powers that be decided to redo how they calculate that magic number and suddenly my score was 780.
It was a 120GB HDD or 8GB SSD for the same price. We chose the HDD's and it took about a whole 2 seconds to come to that decision. SSD's might be all the rage in the geeky circles, but 120GB vs. 8GB. The extra performance was not worth it to us over the extra storage.
One of the major problems over is that fact that we're not all GSM on this side of the pond, and therefore are not all that open simply because the radio chips are different. AT&T and T-Mobile are GSM. Verizon, Alltel, and US Cellular are all CDMA (iirc), and Sprint had PCS and Nextel had something else before they merged. So it's not like I can take an unlocked GSM phone and switch to Verizon.
Now my understanding that 4G will all pretty much be the same technology. But we don't even have 3G here yet and doubt well see 4G here until late in the next decade.
I have to do a lot of on site consulting where I need to be able to dial into a server to adjust something on that end. Especially if the customer lacks wifi on site. And often times these are small businesses where someone else set up the wireless password and they have no idea what it is. In a pinch, I can use my iPhone, but we had to get an Air Card for the office because sometimes it took a laptop to make it work well.
If I can tether with iPhone 3.0, even at a monthly premium, I'd do it and ditch the air card. It's $70 a month for 5GB of data transfer. And I already pay for my iPhone's data plan.
My ex-fiancee was a wedding planner. Typically those that make wedding cakes have to plan things out months in advance. Even if you cancel a couple weeks in advance, they are unlikely to fill that slot on the roster on short notice and incur an opportunity loss. If the wedding gets cancelled a few days before, well, the cake is usually already made. Or there is always the problem of not getting paid after the event because the bride/groom racked up a bigger bill than they really could afford.
That's why deposits are required and often times the full bill due days/weeks ahead of time. They've been burned enough times.
Sounds more like the last generation G5 iMac.
...rebroadcasting the BBC & CNN over the Iranian jamming? If not, they should be.
I wouldn't mind paying a national sales tax or VAT tax on everything I buy. The caveat is that the income tax goes away. Taxing consumption seems fair to me.
Hell, if the local community wanted to put in fiber and then lease the lines out to whatever ISP I want, I would gladly pay an internet tax or sales tax on that at the local level.
I can build this box, and have the future of media and news, but I'm breaking federal laws to have it work. Greeedy asshats want to keep their old business models so they fight the windows of change. My newspaper, last news broadcast, TV, music should all be 100% on demand on my TV. I'd even GLADLY pay for it. But I cant. The "free stuff" is either locked to being viewed on a PC, or so low resolution that it's not worth watching.
I've been watching my TV shows on a 32" LCD TV for about 3 years now powered by a Mac Mini hooked into the TV's DVI port. Quality of the SD programming was acceptable. The new HD versions look great. Even better than some of the expanded basic channels I had. I'm sure if I had an Apple TV it may even look better via HDMI, but the current quality is more than acceptable to me.
About a year ago I knew I'd be spending 15 hours days at work on a project pretty much 6 days a week. I was spending about $150 a month on Phone/Internet/TV from the cable company and I only really watched about 6 TV programs. All 6 were available on iTunes. So I canceled the bundle and my TV shows have cost me about $300 in the past year.
Company I worked for many moons ago had an IRIX application they ported to linux. Those were back in the days of Dependancy hell, libraries inconsistent across distros, so we settled on supporting Redhat 4 (might have been 5, i can't remember). Linux accounted for less than 5% of sales and something like 20% of support requests. Mostly it was people trying the trial version and the linux people emailing us with questions like, "What won't this run on my custom compiled slackware kernel with XYZ and..." Then we'd flamed when we answered we only supported the default install of Red Hat X. Now I do believe it also ran on SuSE without issues.
It was nightmare.
When OS X 10.1 was released, we ported to MacOSX and dropped linux support.
Honestly, it was that experience that drove me to BSD on the server side and OSX on the desktop more than anything else.
We avoid anything that has less than 24 months of wide deployment unless there is some absolute pressing need to move to an unstable/untested product.
We have test and development systems where we run latest and greatest, but generally they are used in sync with the existing system. We don't switch over until we're damn sure there aren't any unforeseen consequences. That typically means 12 months without any major hiccups and 3 months without minor ones.
Read a little history. They tried this in the 1990's. It nearly killed Apple. They won't do it again.
I use mac because OSX provided me with a Unix based desktop that worked on a laptop and had commercial application support including MS Office and Adobe products. I used to play with Linux, but never got my sound card, printer, and a host of other hardware to work back in the day. Especially if you wanted to run Linux on a laptop. If the Mac saves me 1 day of hassle of having to reinstall other OS's offered on other laptops, not hunt down and compile drivers, etc. then I've recovered any premium I paid.
Now there are ways of being smart about it. I bought the last generation of 12.1" Powerbook in 2005. I paid about USD 2500 for the machine, but I still have it and it still works and I still use it every day. But it came time where I needed an Intel mac. Bought a second generation white MacBook for $550 a couple weeks ago.
A good friend of mine was finally diagnosed as having Asperger, at least officially. Nice guy, fun to be around, but completely and utterly lacking in the ability to read body language. Now he got lucky in so far as he inherited enough from his grand father, and overseen by good trustees, that he can afford to live a comfortable middle class life without a real career. He did finish a bachelors and 2 masters degrees in writing and advertising, but trying to find and hold a job with a company in that field has been impossible for him. But he's tried the business world, teaching, and a number of other things only to have failed repeatedly or been exploited.
Which is a real shame, because he's great at things like copywriting. (Ad copy, not the IP stuff). Now the other problem is coming from a rural wealthy southern family where he was treated as the black sheep to be kept sorta locked up in attic because he was "special". I'm almost sure that his own family is where his self-esteem problems come from.
He's ended up going back and learning to bake, which is something else he's good at, with the goal to open his own bakery.
However, the people over 50 generally vote.
We apologise again for the fault with the judges. Those
responsible for sacking the judges who have just been sacked
have been sacked.
I spent about 5 years at video production shop that included 3D animation. They went from a few very powerful DEC ALPHA and SGI workstations to deploying a render farm on generic x86 and linux. Yes, the DEC ALPHA boxes kicked the living crap out of the x86 boxes one on one, but at $60k+ a pop, the DEC boxes were expensive. It could take 14 hours to render on the ALPHAs vs. say 20 hours on an x86 box. But for $60k you could be rendering 10 different frames on x86.. In 3D CGI rendering, you're better off to more physical CPU's producing X number of CPU cycles. Because you're always going to have down time due to hardware problems. You have 1 of 10 boxes go down, you're still running at 90%. If you have 1 of 1 go down and you're at 0%
Now there does come a point where overhead costs start to factor in, such as building space, electricity, cooling, etc.. But we were able to make more deadlines with more x86 boxes rather than a few uber powerful boxes.
I have a small cluster of 10 Mac Mini's I've picked up over the years off Ebay for cheap to play with Xgrid. I still do some Lightwave work on the side and fun. I could see where these would be perfect for a CGI hobbyist looking to render a little faster.
That's why I've kept my 12.1" Powerbook, but it's EOL. Fan bearings are rumbling, audio jack doesn't work unless you get the connection just right, same with the powercord, and the backlight is extremely dim, and I'm starting to see enough Intel only stuff. Although once they went back to a dedicated video card in the new MacBook Aluminum, I've been tempted to get one this fall when 10.6 is released.
I've found that anything less than 12" is hard to use if you're coding. Especially these 9/10" widescreens that are on the acer aspire ones and other netbooks. Fortunately I'm not doing as much coding and more management and meetings. I suspect, though, that I'm still going to need a full laptop. Hell, I didn't like the air (I mean why pay $500 more for a machine with no optical drive and no ability to replace batteries. I used to travel with 3 laptop batteries).
If they release a 10" tablet or iPod Touch - Mega Screen Edition, I'll consider it. I set up a new production server the other day from my iPhone while on a friend's boat thanks to SSH, VNC, and Safari Mobile. It was less than ideal for the task but worked...plus the fact I was on a boat made up for the inconvenience.