There's a big diference between reporting news about others (where you're allowed to be inaccurate or opinionated) and reporting about yourself, which you'd better be able to get the right numbers since you have access to the right numbers.
Of course, Google can just shut up and not disclose any non-money stats, but there'd be a big problem with not qualifying their stats when they know they're being downgraded.
I'm surprised they're not able to raise their prices to become profitable. I mean, where else is there to turn for something as strong as Akamai for a bursting-load application?
Google would only have to report that information to its shareholders who could sit on it if they wanted to... however, if any shareholder wants to sell, then anybody they talk to about selling the shares would have to get the "true" info too.
Since there's no NDA at all possible, the secrecy would likely crumble very quickly if the shares are all but very thinly traded.
Wow, those are strong words. Real hard news here. News for Trolls maybe.
You didn't hear? Slashdot's fallen on some hard times, and the marketing consultants decided they needed to liven the traffic stats up a bit with a new slogan:
Slashdot. News for trolls. Stuff that doesn't matter.
To be fair, there are important differences between Google and Akamai, differences that assure that Google won't be breaking into Akamai's business anytime soon, nor Akamai moving into Google's. Both companies have developed infrastructure for running massively parallel systems, but the applications that they are running on top of those systems are different. Google's primary application is a search engine. Akamai, by contrast, has developed a system for delivering Web pages, streaming media, and a variety of other standard Internet protocols.
Two businesses in completely different lines of work don't usually make good merger partners. They're neither competitors nor in a supplier/customer relationship.
To put it mildly... merging the Google network into the Akamai network would likely be a nightmare. They're doing two completely different things. There's just no sense trying to mix them. So, there's not much of a reason for Google to either hire or aquire Akamai. They're devising GMail for their own resources, I doubt that'd be an application that could instantly port over to Akamai.
They might make sense to be commonly owned, but there's certainly no way that common owner would want to mix the two networks.
Worldcom's major problem was that they couldn't keep their numbers straight about anything, and had a bad habit of lying to make them bigger. Google's habit is to lie to make the numbers smaller, to the point that they don't even check when compared to each other...
That's fine for Google's PR people to do today, but it'll never fly at a public company. And, the SEC's definition of "public company" doesn't quite require there to be an IPO, just simply having enough assets split among enough shareholders is enough to require all the same reporting standards that a company that has an exchange-traded stock has to live with.
So, this is one part of Google's culture that may be about to burst. You can't lie to your potential investors, and when you're a big enough company every member the entire public is considered a potential investor. These understatements are just plain going to have to start getting identified as such with cussioning words like "more than" or "over" coming before them in order to remain legal.
Therefore, better comparisons to align themselves would have been BMP for 2d images and WAV for audio... both of which are elementry enough to avoid patent scares which mostly center over compression routines.
Not only did they pick two lossy formats to use as examples, both MP3 and JPEG are patent-encumbered formats. (The validity of the Forgent patent on a piece of JPEG is a bit of a still-contested issue... but I'll leave that to others to discuss.) If you want to write a program using either of those formats, you're going to have to pay the toll.
Let's hope U3D is able to stay clear of such entanglements. Having a patent involved in a file format makes it questionable if FOSS can legally use the format.
An web e-mail service is not a very useful file sharing platform. Just like any time somebody posts a New York Times username/password on Slashdot, not soon after somebody logs onto said account and resets the password an e-mail address which steals the account and changes the locks on it.
GMail's definitely expected to be much more than the storage alone, but also the way they'll be able to sort and search e-mail as threads of information.
They're out to raise the bar for the existing free mail providers, because it seems like everything from radio stations to comic books have their own free e-mail service these days...
This definitely seems like an attempt to steal Google's thunder, but you have to ask if an Israel-local portal company really has the global reach that Google has to be able to offer high-performance ad-supported e-mail to everybody.
I'm not quite sure that they're going to have enough non-local ads in order to serve the world in the way that Google now seems pretty confident in its global geotargeting systems.
It should be noted that if you're an overtime-exempt non-hourly employee, a whole new rulebook comes into play.
They can't make you punch a timeclock... nor can they deduct pay for being late or leaving early. Just like working extra time can't earn you extra money for the week, they can't deduct money if you work less than fourty hours. When it comes down to it, about the only retribution they have if they don't think you're working enough is to let you go.
I usually make a policy of demanding offsets for any time that I'm schedule to do something outside of business hours within the same week so that if anybody asks while I'm not there, there's a recent project that can be pointed at.
If a project just can't survive without me showing up seven consecutive days... then this is an ill-designed project to begin with. Most states have a "day of rest" law that prevents employers from scheduling any seven days in a row for the same employee anyway...
Reminds me of the rumored Microsoft tactic of hiring two people for one job, with the knowledge that one of them would be fired at the end of the first year. The result is that the two would end up working many hours of unpaid overtime that management doesn't even have to ask for in order to get ahead of their rival.
I'm not quite sure that's the kind of environment where I'd want to struggle to keep the job...
The key thing is that you at least feel that your're getting a fair shake on the deal... no more accounting for OT in exchange for more money than you feel you would have gotten if the meter was running.
2am pages are acceptable if they're rare and they're about real issues. It's when there starts being too many of them that things get messy.
Views represent first class relational objects that can be used in yet other relational expressions (just like physical tables can be used), like joins, etc. A view itself may represent a join of a data table with a security table (for example), and maybe used instead of a physical table.
Which is basically executing the SELECT represented by the view, and storing it in a temp table so that another query can use it.
If specified correctly a view can be updatable. Which really is the same as executing the select for that one specific value so that it can be translated to the appropriate group of records in the other table.
Those are logical equals at the SQL level... of course, the higher-end database engines are more optimized for those situations, but most MySQL users rarely need that complicated of joins...
But AirPhones can take incoming calls... you could set your cell phone voice mail to give out the 1-800 number they need to call, your flight number, and your seat number before getting on the plane.
For caller ID purposes your company could allow you to call the office number, and then use the PBX to dial out so you originate from the office's Caller ID values. Yeah, that's an extra toll hop... but it's nothing compared to the price you're paying to use the AirPhone. Or just tell whomever you're calling to expect a call from an AirPhone.
They might as well just leave a voice mail on your cell phone that you can answer as you walk off the plane and into the airport... it's not like there's much you can do from the sky anyway.
Things got interesting when I loaded all 2 million rows of data (one per file) into the poor POS Access DB. It took over 8 hours (I left it running and went home; it was still running when I got back. Lo and behold, it accepted every row. Trouble started when I discovered that trying to save a query or report would send the machine into la-la land.
Whatever you were running on... it wasn't enough of a computer. I've never seen Access truely hang. I've given it requests that take it near-forever to get done, but it gets there in time.
Your biggest problem was most likely that your table size got so huge that you maxed-out your system's RAM and were resorting to virtual memory for nearly every move you made. That'll cause things to slow down in a hurry. However, that's no excuse to "dump" the DB. You imported once and you did it perfectly... keep that data at all costs.
What you should have done was to make a copy of the big table's structure, and then copied over enough records to make a suitable test subset, one that exposes any sort of special cases you're expecting. Run your report against the subset when you're testing, and then just switch over the table name from the subset table to the real table when it comes time to run the real report. Why are you bothering to make Access produce 500+ pages all the time when you just need to see your changes laid out once?
At worst, you could have just saved out the populated tables as a flat-file so that you could have reimported those instead of having to run you takes-a-day import routine...
Re:Views? Subqueries? Easy to move databases?
on
Why MySQL Grew So Fast
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
If you want "views"... you want recent PhpMyAdmins which let you "bookmark" a SELECT query so you can run it again sometime. That's really all a view is.
MySQL is nothing more than a database engine. You need some other application to provide a UI if you want to see what's going on visually, otherwise you're just interfacing with command line...
And this is exactly why, time and time again, people point MySQL users to PostgreSQL. It's for all the reasons you can use MySQL and look up to Oracle, yet, it's free and fast.
Most us MySQL users have a lot of things we have to get done first before we have need for any of those advanced features from any database. A database conversion project just isn't something we have time for...
Come to think about it, isn't that the reason why Slashdot's still on perl rather than PHP? PHP wasn't quite yet mature at the time Slashdot started... and even today there's just not that much of an advantage to justify recoding major parts of this site. The inertia of staying with the tool you selected the first time is pretty strong.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a big diference between reporting news about others (where you're allowed to be inaccurate or opinionated) and reporting about yourself, which you'd better be able to get the right numbers since you have access to the right numbers.
Of course, Google can just shut up and not disclose any non-money stats, but there'd be a big problem with not qualifying their stats when they know they're being downgraded.
I'm surprised they're not able to raise their prices to become profitable. I mean, where else is there to turn for something as strong as Akamai for a bursting-load application?
Google would only have to report that information to its shareholders who could sit on it if they wanted to... however, if any shareholder wants to sell, then anybody they talk to about selling the shares would have to get the "true" info too.
Since there's no NDA at all possible, the secrecy would likely crumble very quickly if the shares are all but very thinly traded.
Wow, those are strong words. Real hard news here. News for Trolls maybe.
You didn't hear? Slashdot's fallen on some hard times, and the marketing consultants decided they needed to liven the traffic stats up a bit with a new slogan:
Slashdot. News for trolls. Stuff that doesn't matter.
Incredibly, I've actually got an image that I use on my site that is smaller as a .bmp than as a .png, .gif, or .jpeg. There's a brainteaser for ya...
To be fair, there are important differences between Google and Akamai, differences that assure that Google won't be breaking into Akamai's business anytime soon, nor Akamai moving into Google's. Both companies have developed infrastructure for running massively parallel systems, but the applications that they are running on top of those systems are different. Google's primary application is a search engine. Akamai, by contrast, has developed a system for delivering Web pages, streaming media, and a variety of other standard Internet protocols.
Two businesses in completely different lines of work don't usually make good merger partners. They're neither competitors nor in a supplier/customer relationship.
To put it mildly... merging the Google network into the Akamai network would likely be a nightmare. They're doing two completely different things. There's just no sense trying to mix them. So, there's not much of a reason for Google to either hire or aquire Akamai. They're devising GMail for their own resources, I doubt that'd be an application that could instantly port over to Akamai.
They might make sense to be commonly owned, but there's certainly no way that common owner would want to mix the two networks.
Worldcom's major problem was that they couldn't keep their numbers straight about anything, and had a bad habit of lying to make them bigger. Google's habit is to lie to make the numbers smaller, to the point that they don't even check when compared to each other...
That's fine for Google's PR people to do today, but it'll never fly at a public company. And, the SEC's definition of "public company" doesn't quite require there to be an IPO, just simply having enough assets split among enough shareholders is enough to require all the same reporting standards that a company that has an exchange-traded stock has to live with.
So, this is one part of Google's culture that may be about to burst. You can't lie to your potential investors, and when you're a big enough company every member the entire public is considered a potential investor. These understatements are just plain going to have to start getting identified as such with cussioning words like "more than" or "over" coming before them in order to remain legal.
Maybe so, but at least they have a patent number, which is further along than anything SCO's been able to come up with.
Therefore, better comparisons to align themselves would have been BMP for 2d images and WAV for audio... both of which are elementry enough to avoid patent scares which mostly center over compression routines.
Would one really notice slight noise in the coordinates of points of a mesh or in texel color values?
Uhm... yes... it'd create a jittery effect that could make a mess of things when it comes times to convert the rendered output to an MPEG.
Not only did they pick two lossy formats to use as examples, both MP3 and JPEG are patent-encumbered formats. (The validity of the Forgent patent on a piece of JPEG is a bit of a still-contested issue... but I'll leave that to others to discuss.) If you want to write a program using either of those formats, you're going to have to pay the toll.
Let's hope U3D is able to stay clear of such entanglements. Having a patent involved in a file format makes it questionable if FOSS can legally use the format.
The Walla! portal seems to be in hebrew. One of 5000 other languages I don't know...
Yet that doesn't stand in the way when they try to write an English-language press release...
Seems like stock pumping an nothing more... move along...
An web e-mail service is not a very useful file sharing platform. Just like any time somebody posts a New York Times username/password on Slashdot, not soon after somebody logs onto said account and resets the password an e-mail address which steals the account and changes the locks on it.
GMail's definitely expected to be much more than the storage alone, but also the way they'll be able to sort and search e-mail as threads of information.
They're out to raise the bar for the existing free mail providers, because it seems like everything from radio stations to comic books have their own free e-mail service these days...
This definitely seems like an attempt to steal Google's thunder, but you have to ask if an Israel-local portal company really has the global reach that Google has to be able to offer high-performance ad-supported e-mail to everybody.
I'm not quite sure that they're going to have enough non-local ads in order to serve the world in the way that Google now seems pretty confident in its global geotargeting systems.
It should be noted that if you're an overtime-exempt non-hourly employee, a whole new rulebook comes into play.
They can't make you punch a timeclock... nor can they deduct pay for being late or leaving early. Just like working extra time can't earn you extra money for the week, they can't deduct money if you work less than fourty hours. When it comes down to it, about the only retribution they have if they don't think you're working enough is to let you go.
I usually make a policy of demanding offsets for any time that I'm schedule to do something outside of business hours within the same week so that if anybody asks while I'm not there, there's a recent project that can be pointed at.
If a project just can't survive without me showing up seven consecutive days... then this is an ill-designed project to begin with. Most states have a "day of rest" law that prevents employers from scheduling any seven days in a row for the same employee anyway...
Reminds me of the rumored Microsoft tactic of hiring two people for one job, with the knowledge that one of them would be fired at the end of the first year. The result is that the two would end up working many hours of unpaid overtime that management doesn't even have to ask for in order to get ahead of their rival.
I'm not quite sure that's the kind of environment where I'd want to struggle to keep the job...
The key thing is that you at least feel that your're getting a fair shake on the deal... no more accounting for OT in exchange for more money than you feel you would have gotten if the meter was running.
2am pages are acceptable if they're rare and they're about real issues. It's when there starts being too many of them that things get messy.
It should be noted that the blue collar workers like pulmbers and carpenters also have unions...
Not that a union is the perfect solution for all labor issues, but it does put up some resistance to one-sided policies.
Views represent first class relational objects that can be used in yet other relational expressions (just like physical tables can be used), like joins, etc. A view itself may represent a join of a data table with a security table (for example), and maybe used instead of a physical table.
Which is basically executing the SELECT represented by the view, and storing it in a temp table so that another query can use it.
If specified correctly a view can be updatable.
Which really is the same as executing the select for that one specific value so that it can be translated to the appropriate group of records in the other table.
Those are logical equals at the SQL level... of course, the higher-end database engines are more optimized for those situations, but most MySQL users rarely need that complicated of joins...
Well, yeah...
But AirPhones can take incoming calls... you could set your cell phone voice mail to give out the 1-800 number they need to call, your flight number, and your seat number before getting on the plane.
For caller ID purposes your company could allow you to call the office number, and then use the PBX to dial out so you originate from the office's Caller ID values. Yeah, that's an extra toll hop... but it's nothing compared to the price you're paying to use the AirPhone. Or just tell whomever you're calling to expect a call from an AirPhone.
They might as well just leave a voice mail on your cell phone that you can answer as you walk off the plane and into the airport... it's not like there's much you can do from the sky anyway.
Things got interesting when I loaded all 2 million rows of data (one per file) into the poor POS Access DB. It took over 8 hours (I left it running and went home; it was still running when I got back. Lo and behold, it accepted every row. Trouble started when I discovered that trying to save a query or report would send the machine into la-la land.
Whatever you were running on... it wasn't enough of a computer. I've never seen Access truely hang. I've given it requests that take it near-forever to get done, but it gets there in time.
Your biggest problem was most likely that your table size got so huge that you maxed-out your system's RAM and were resorting to virtual memory for nearly every move you made. That'll cause things to slow down in a hurry. However, that's no excuse to "dump" the DB. You imported once and you did it perfectly... keep that data at all costs.
What you should have done was to make a copy of the big table's structure, and then copied over enough records to make a suitable test subset, one that exposes any sort of special cases you're expecting. Run your report against the subset when you're testing, and then just switch over the table name from the subset table to the real table when it comes time to run the real report. Why are you bothering to make Access produce 500+ pages all the time when you just need to see your changes laid out once?
At worst, you could have just saved out the populated tables as a flat-file so that you could have reimported those instead of having to run you takes-a-day import routine...
If you want "views"... you want recent PhpMyAdmins which let you "bookmark" a SELECT query so you can run it again sometime. That's really all a view is.
MySQL is nothing more than a database engine. You need some other application to provide a UI if you want to see what's going on visually, otherwise you're just interfacing with command line...
Postgre might be Free, but converting an existing project that's already designed for MySQL to any other database engine has its costs.
And this is exactly why, time and time again, people point MySQL users to PostgreSQL. It's for all the reasons you can use MySQL and look up to Oracle, yet, it's free and fast.
Most us MySQL users have a lot of things we have to get done first before we have need for any of those advanced features from any database. A database conversion project just isn't something we have time for...
Come to think about it, isn't that the reason why Slashdot's still on perl rather than PHP? PHP wasn't quite yet mature at the time Slashdot started... and even today there's just not that much of an advantage to justify recoding major parts of this site. The inertia of staying with the tool you selected the first time is pretty strong.