It can run a root shell, but the manufacturer and carrier, together, can't add items to the interface? What, is the firmware burned into ROM or something? Obviously I'm missing something here, since I thought Maemo was quite customizable.
I think that what was meant was that Nokia will not supply exclusive (locked) versions to carriers with exclusive features (and maybe some features locked out) for carriers. The carrier is of course free to make it's own modifications to UI if it wants but that's not the whole picture of exclusivity. As important for the carrier as having an "exclusive" product is the financing of the handsets. It is typically a complex deal about when and according to what numbers the handsets are paid to manufacturer and of course the carrier tries to pull most out of the deal.
The worst part is that this doesn't even "close the analog hole" in any way. Sure, it stops one portion of it - recording/viewing media through component cable - but that's putting a band-aid on a chest wound. The real analog hole is the fact that, in the end, the screen is being displayed visually - it's just photons. We happen to have a method of captuing photons spread across a period of time, the video camera. Sure, it'll look crappy at first, but people will get better at normalizing the colours or finding different capture methods, and, as has been seen before, users will adapt to the worse quality format because it's the one that's not fleecing them.
The next step will be of course to criminalize video cameras that don't have a special "copyright-detection chip" which blacks out (and replaces it with a FBI WARNING!) any video/audio material that has a special watermark in it detected during recording (and all new material which is playable only playable through digital approved equipment must include this watermark). Photons can include quite much information and when you are in control of the information and in control of the lawmakers / enforcement about what can be done with that information...every "content producers" wet dream.
And yes I'm putting that in quotes because I understand that not every content producer wants their earnings to be secured by police state and banning technology, but it sure seems to be the dream of the big lobby organizations.
Unless you actually are one of the Murdochs, I pretty much guarantee that if the BBC ever had to fight for paying customers, youÂd end up almost apoplectic with rage at the sheer dross these independent broadcasters of yours would be producing. "Biased" you aint seen nothing yet.
Yes - just look at Russia. Although there the media, government and big corporations are sometimes the same thing. And even if the official government is shrinken to bare minium there will be another entity to fill the void, usually armed with tv and radio stations (again, look at Russia, Italy is much less worse but the Berlusconi empire is still quite scary). Public broadcasting can be bad and can be abused, but done right and with enough freedom from government control and some competition it has been show to be quite good.
I disagree. For two reasons. Firstly, the BBC has political bias. I've gone on about that at length, won't mention it again.
Secondly, the quality of BBC programmes isn't all that great. There are some gems out there, but a lot of it is just mindless mainstream dross of the sort that could quite easily be produced by any of the commercial channels. It's as if they've given up on trying to be cultured, and have just decided to compete for viewers instead. I find myself watching a lot of TV imported from the US these days - no BBC influence there - so I just don't think the licence fee is worth it.
This seems to be a common gripe in countries with strong public television. I happen to live in Finland and we have the same kind of system and the complaints are the same. Depending on which party is in the majority the public broadcasting company is accused to favor it and the mandatory tv license is often called unconstitutional, unfair, and whatnot on discussion forums. And the funny part is - our broadcasting company buys several BBC and HBO shows and there are both people who claim that the quality is not good enough and people who say that those expensive programs belong to pay-tv channels.
And we have had the same despute here in Finland too - a few months ago the heads of the commercial tv/radio companies filed a complainment against the public broadcast company because it provides it's news on public billboards and loudly voiced an outcry that their business is hurting. And there have been also mumbling about how a publicly funded organization should not have a good web service with news and archives of it's programs.
For me this is just hilarious - channels with no ability to produce original tv programs (let alone domestic tv shows) and fill themselfs with crap and occasional news broadcast (competition in news is good, Finnish tv suffered from "one source syndrome" 30 years ago but then again - the whole society was bend over tovard the soviet union). I can't - even for money buy ad-free quality news, drama and documentary. I am more than happy to pay for my programs but I want them ad-free and produced with professionalism, not the crap Animal Planet and Discovery gives me (1/5 of the time is ads even on pay-tv, only a few quality shows).
Actually it's not free, it's "Free". That might seem a small distinction, but the minute you want to license your own code that talks to MySQL commerically it will bite you in the ass in a rather unpleasant way (as in, call your Oracle sales-rep).
The minute you want to sell closed-source derivate of MySQL it will bite you, just like Linux will. Commercial open source projects have no problems, and while MySQL sales rep will tell you otherwise legally redistributing your closed source program (with MySQL) which talks to unmodified MySQL via TCP or UNIX socket is quite safe. If you don't distribute MySQL at all you are perfectly safe. It's not exactly rocket science to provide instructions how to add the JDBC driver to the application server or install the needed DBI package.
But yes, PostgreSQL is "more free" in the sense that it is not GPL, and for some people it is important.
With most of the exanmples mentioned, a small number of DB errors (lost records, index errors, sychronzation errors) are accepttable. For applications like youtube, slashdot, etc. it really doesn't matter if records are lost. I'd be more interested in hearing about major financial or business systems that run on MySql. MySQL is a nice database--good for hobby projects--even big ones--but nor really the choice for heavy lifting DBs. Most of those examples started with MySQL because they needed free more than reliable.
Actually I know several systems in the telecom, traffic and accounting industry where MySQL is used heavily and successfully. All these require outside oversight and reproductability of data (accounting, test result archiving, billing data). This is just a bullshit claim that MySQL is somehow "a hobby project database". I've seen a multi-hundred thousand dollar Oracle and MSSQL based systems have database errors, I have seen completely hosed PostgreSQL databases, I have repaired countless crashed MySQL indexes. There are means to counter these and if you just believe that your database magically works without logging, without redundancy and other things these "financial systems" need you are just waiting a disaster.
Right tool for the job and right precautions for disasters is invaluable skill to have, and no computer system I have worked with so far hasn't been failsafe without redundance and alternative ways of detecting what happened (outside the DB).
MySQL is actually exremely easy to repair with basic skills (MyISAM) and quite transaction-reliable (InnoDB), from these you have to choose which one to use. I'm sure PostgreSQL is also very good, but my personal experience has proven that it is not immortal either. And I don't expect my database ever to be, there must be a recovery plan for situtations like database corruption, error in program logic etc. when the integrity of data really matters. It's not just "but MySQL allows me to enter 2009-02-31 as a date" - in the real world this is not really very big concern (and for the record, you can now disable that behaviour).
Big iron boxes have big iron price tags, and you can almost always hack together something cheaper. The question is how much more reliable, easy to configure, and easy to upgrade is the big iron? In most organizations, buying equipment is cheaper in the long run then buying experience and maintenance for a home grown solution.
Yes, but big iron boxes are just boxes. They might have special hardware optimized to do what they do, but it just might also be cheaper to DIY. Case in point - EMC Celerra: It is basicly a Redhat with custom management software (with nice but quite expensive hardware). Doing the same thing homegrown (iSCSI + NAS-gui) can be cheaper and you can even have more features. You can buy a support contract and you have a clear upgrade path, and there are propably contractors willing to work for you even if you can't hire a full time admin. But as with SAN/NAS boxes SSL accelerators are not excatly very complicated - a sysadmin with few years experience can get a grip of a homegrown solution within days (without manufacturers expensive training courses).
The first thing I do when I get a new phone is turn off roaming. I've never seen one that didn't allow that. If I have an emergency, I can always turn it on. But in the normal case, I'd rather stick to my plan's fees.
At least in GSM networks if you have a serious emergency you can call the official emergency number (112/911) with roaming turned off, and even without a SIM card.
For example I have a Nokia phone and Nokia mostly uses their own proprietary power connector. While I have charging cables for my phone with a USB connector on the "wall" end the device end is a proprietary Nokia connector. There is no technological reason I can divine for that choice - it is simply a lock in scheme. Plus if I want to sync my phone's data, Nokia has a *different* cable for that - again for no technological reason whatsoever. I also have to carry a special cable for my iPod for no good reason.
Yes - both cases - Nokia (the old "Pop Port") and Apple are partly a Not Invented Here -thing and a lockin-scheme.
Fortunately Nokia seems to be improving - my new N85 has only USB connector which acts both as a power and sync port, no pop port or the old power connector.
This is also a bad thing because here in Finland Nokia has about 80% market share which means that if I go to visit someone it is virtually guaranteed that "Nokia power" is available if needed and I don't have to carry anything. Also when charging from computer the current is limited to 500mA, the power brick that came with the phone supplies 1600mA (it says so on the type label, I haven't actually measured) so charging with it is significantly faster than from computer.
It is also annoying that we have a Mini-B (my GPS navigator uses this and came with a car adapter) and Micro-USB (Nokia has this, can't use the same car adapter...).
But there is a fundamental difference. Someone *else* is providing the server and everything else that goes with it to provide the end-user experience. This is different from having a right to know/modify something that runs on your computer. It is true that SaaS has changed software distribution models and AGPL has a place in this landscape.
And in this case it is ironic that the company provides the server software under AGPL, thus making it impossible for anyone to make site-specific changes or their own extensions for their customers without publishing changes, but their Outlook-plugin is closed source restricted with 3 user limit...
being very, very careful to strip out your config files so that you're not uploading your database passwords or merchant account numbers.
Being a devils advocate here - what is a "config file"? If everything in a software package is released under AGPL would it not be the users right to receive the AGPL-licensed config file as well with modifications? What if the config file is in some programming language? Does it contain some SQL specific to your site? Is that a change you must redistribute to every user?
AGPL can be a very nasty trap. Read it carefully and understand it before deploying software licensed under it - either in a home/hobby or corporate environvement. It's "clean, pure and good-smelling" purpose is to provide an incentive for ASPs to release their changes to say - for a webmail or mobile sync software, it's true nature is a way for makers of those software to sell their closed source variants with a license to permit making site-specific changes without distribution while still being "open source".
Not that there is nothing wrong with that, and it happens with traditional GPL as well, but I think vendors should be more straightforward with the real reasons of going AGPL.
Not to mention that Top Gear looks absolutely stunning in HD - check the Polar Special, it is definitive HD demo material.
But the grandparent has a point. Digital terrestial TV is kind-of half baked in most European countries because they went with DVB-T (MPEG 2). (As did my country, Finland). That means that without new boxes the terrestial customers are left with SD until the next "big change". And since the as in the UK and in Finland there are similiar terrestial networks the national TV companies (BBC in the UK, YLE here) are not that interested in producing HD content for cable customers. YLE did the Beijing Games in HD as a test for a small ammount of terrestial customers living withing coverage of one broadcast tower, though.
I'm not an advocate of delaying transition to digital TV, but in countries where there is a strong public tv company (like in UK and in Finland) it might have been better to wait for DVB-T2 and MPEG4 and transition to HD at the same time. Here in Finland YLE promises HD content maybe in 2016, until that it is cable and satellite and no public tv in HD I fear...
And to those who think public TV is crap and I should go for commercial cable / sat receiving anyway: What we have from YLE here is quite good actually - quality news and documentry (of course to be applied with the normal critical thinking and not believing the only source) and for an example recently they bought the rights for all the HBO shows and BBC material is also quite common. HD would be very, very nice, thankyou...
You can. The problem is that if you want to make money, selling iPhone apps is the way to go, not selling Symbian Apps.
Not exactly whole truth. While Apple has made a very nice entry into consumer space with their app store, there are still enormous ammounts of Symbian software developed in-house or sold as part of an bigger enterprise-deal.
Making Super Monkey Ball and making a deal with your customer where CRM software has your customer data synched in real time with our ERP app and cell phone is not exactly the same deal...
I agree with you 100%. What VMware needs to do is to get their licensing act together. There are "nice" startup bundles with VirtualCenter and limited number of managed ESX hosts (Foundation, Standard) with manageable price (for a SMB). But if you want to add that 4th ESX host to the setup, prepare to be royally screwed. You need all kinds of upgrade packages and believe me, they are not cheap, my advice is that go for the enterprise even if you don't need the features, it's much easier that way. It is expensive, but at least you know up front what your costs are - our resellers have trouble themselves figuring out how we can upgrade without paying everything else again (of couse we can just keep on buing the bundles but wasn't central management the idea...).
ESXi is free right now and it works for very well for isolated hosts which need no management (a small to medium team managing a few isolated servers on one machine).
I don't know if my experience is because of my country or what, but as of now for us the pricing and upgrade paths are very confusing. But please, please get your licensing straight and simple, not a mess someone without expensive training can't figure out.
As for the product - I am very pleased. Combined with a nicely supported SAN the thing runs like a dream (with it's glitches and issues on upgrades etc.) but virtual machine migration and daily management tasks are childs play - something which was a constant headache when we were on Xen. (Though we did not try any commercial management tools, there can be good alternatives there I'm not familiar with.)
If a guest really is so important that you can't have maintenance windows for it, then you need to cluster it to provide availability. All the VMotion in the world won't save you from a host failure, after all. Or operator error.
vmotion exactly saves you from host failure - if you have enough spare resources available in your cluster. Also live migration isn't exactly instant but it is "nearly instant enough" for many cases, and definitely better than manual alternatives. If you need truly disaster-proof setup which must preserve network connections and have absolutely no effect on ongoing service if any device dies you are looking at much more expensive setup than "basic" vmotion. But for us that require that in case of hardware failure guest moves to working hadware in matter of (tens) seconds and doesn't cause outages if resources (network, cpu, ram) are available vmotion can actually be quite cheap and simple compared to building a cluster setup.
Operator errir is a different thing of course - and there lies the power of application clustering.
Thank God we had a contingency plan for switching VM providers for a DR exercise a year ago and here we go.
May I ask what you migrated to? Disk storage is nearly always "vm-agnostic" but how did you migrate your vmware guest images to another platform and what would that be? If you mean that you had alternative guest VMs ready and the data was just in NFS / iSCSI mounts then I undestand, but that means building the base systems twice, and double maintenance to keep them in sync.
I'm not justifying this for vmware - they screwed it bad this time, and I got bitten by this as well (luckily only one development host was upgraded to 3.5u2, our production was still at earlier 3.5 which did not suffer from this).
Yes, the data sheet clearly states GPS and A-GPS (GPS assisted with tower data to get initial fix).
Calling cell tower approximation (what Google Maps uses on phones with no real GPS) any kind of "GPS" would clearly be false advertising and just calling for trouble.
This is not Nokias first GPS model either, they routinely seem to put GPS on their new models. What really interests me how good is it. If initial fix takes minutes it is basically useless for quick "was the address I'm going to on this block or the next one"-type of usage. N95 (at least the early firmwares, I'm not sure if the newer ones have A-GPS) was terrible in this respect and keeping the GPS always on was not an option either because of the increased battery drain.
It might help ensure that future potential partners (after the abusee leaves) would know what they were getting into. Yes, it might - I'll admit that. But there are some serious potential problems:
- "Slippery slope". First sex offenders, now domestic violence - what's next? - Abuses of the registry. Before it was "just" sex offenders who were sometime victims of the mob justice, now you can add nutcases who feel that beating up a "wife-beater" is a heroic action to the list. - This "solution" has a potential to create a two-class society - those who are found in some public, searchable crime registry and those who are not. This creates enormous barriers to those who genuinely want (and can) feel remorse and never do their crime again - they might be practically isolated from many things (getting an apartment, getting a date, etc.) for life. Once hitting your partner during a nasty argument (no injuries), getting a fine and maybe a relatively short jail sentence - AND getting potentially for-life stamp on your forehead. One miss and you are out.
Maybe tougher sentences to repeated offenders. Maybe even a web searchable list of repeated offenders (I would not support that and I think in my country that would never be implemented because of the problems but I could understand existance of such a "service".) And the most important part: Teach in schools (and homes, but especially in schools because some children sadly live in abusive families) that violence is not ok, and you should immediately bail out even if the violent person is someone close to you. And take care of your friends. In todays society we are often told to "mind our own business" and even saying something about someones relationship or behaviour is seen as an invasion to privacy and rude behaviour. It is not.
I believe you meant to say, there's never an excuse to beat up on anyone.
Yep, just today when driving to work I heard a brief news on radio about a recent study made in Finland (link in Finnish).
Briefly: -- A two-part study was made in 2006 among 17-20 year old men serving their military service in Finland - a total over 2000 young men who had been in a relationship participated. Of those, nearly 17% said that they have been hit by their partner at least once. Critics of the study have commented that the definitions of "relationship" and "hitting" were not clear enough and that the number is therefore too high. --
Violence in a relationship is NOT just a problem with men hitting woman, and I have seen opinion pieces in newspapers where those men who uphold the principle that they should "never hit a woman" are quite upset and shaken when their wife/girlfriend hits them (repeatedly) and only thing they feel they can do is try to protect themselves (and maybe their kids) from blows.
It is said that women who end up in abusive relationship tend to stick in that relationship despite of the violence (and there are many speculative reasons why) - and while this is propably true, so can be the opposite. It is really hard for a "man of principle who would never beat up a woman" to admit to himself, his friends and ultimately to the police that he is a target of violence from woman, and can't really do anything about it.
As there are (stereotypical) males who drink too much on a friday night and then hit their wife/girlfriend when they nag about drinking / don't want to have sex etc. there are women who can be loving wives and mothers, but when rage takes them on they can throw a frying pan at you (happened to a friend, multiple times...).
But exposing these types to the whole Internet to see forever (Internet remembers, the sentence is for life) is not right and won't solve the problem.
I am waiting for my mini laser powered home cinema projector that I can get for £100 (or $200 if you like), never have to change a £300 bulb on a £300 projector, never have a loud whirry fan and huge amounts of excess heat, generates a good HD image with a respectable amount of lumens and can be tastefully hidden in a wall of books with a drop down projector screen on the over side of the room.
This might interest you, then. Good HD image? Where? That product promises a loysy resolution with no mention on lumens. They even talk about "business and personal" projector, not movies. That one is only good for youtube. Grandparent is right - heat, unreliable lamps (some manufacturers don't even tell you an estimate on lamp life anymore because your lamp can last anywhere between 500 and 8000 hours depending on make, model, environment, luck, phase of the moon etc.) and fans are a plague on current projectors. And yes, I now that some manufacturers / resellers offer lamp warranties that are not completely ridiculously short. Still, the next generation is still years away and I would not hold my breath waiting for a decent movie projector based on this technology anytime soon.
Meanwhile I enjoy my HD LCD projector, and I will never go back to watching any screen smaller than 80":)
Some are doing that and there are sites devoted to stories of scamming the scammers. The problem is volume - in Nigeria (this info comes from documentary - I don't remember if it was on Discovery or the National Geographic channel) this is a "real" job for many. Although technically illegal and Nigerian and foreign officials are fighting the crime they literally have to follow phone lines to find them. These are enterprises with people hired (and payed) as call-center workers with benefits and all that like a real job. And there are buttloads of these companies. When you face a professinally run company with full-time employees who are doing the answering job you would need enormous ammounts of "normal" people who had to spend their time scamming the scammers. Best practice is to educate people about dangers of these scams, but as like with other "make money fast" -schemes greed sometimes makes even bright people do stupid things.
If you got Unix shell access what's wrong with dig soa yourdomain.com? No need to use whois, and the only one who knows you did the query is the TLD operator, and if they (for.com Verisign) are corrupt and sell this data you are screwed.
Could you back that up? There are horror stories for every registrar, but GoDaddy is in my opinion one of the best of the cheap ones. Their customer support actually works (I have always got a response to email within 2 hours - Network Solutions has 12-24 hour answer time at best and they cost 5x as much as GoDaddy, not to mention their refusal policy to transfer domains to other registrars without phonecalls (I'm not living in the USA so the phonecalls to them are expensive international ones) just because they think transfer is "suspicious").
Also - GoDaddy has a quite nice spam policy - which other cheap registrars often don't have and they actually do not care much because being too strict about spam would not give them income.
joker.com would be nice because their web interface is clean and they don't try to sell you a kitchen sink with your domain, but their spam policy has at least in the past been non-existant.
And here in Finland Apple can't sell the phone with contract because it isn't 3G - the only phone that are allowed to be locked and sold with contract are the 3G ones. Of course they can pick an exclusive reseller but they can't lock the phone.
And my thoughts about the iPhone (used one for about on hour so pick these with grain of salt):
- Browser is great. The best there is (zooming, scrolling, etc.) but my Nokia E65 comes close (there is a miniature screen featuring the full page, just scrolling is not so great wit the 4-way pad).
- Typing sucks. Getting to right contact in phonebook is slower than with dedicated keyboard.
- I wonder if I can even answerd a call with gloves on (here gloves are required for 6 months or so).
- Missing 3G. This of course increases battery life but having 3G would make the great browser more usefull. Now it is just a great browser on a 14.4k modem.
And btw. I'm not a big fan of Nokia either (because of Symbian - it is a pain in the ass to develop for and the current implementations are full of menus and the UI is confusing). But I hope that my choise (the small E65 and Nokia N810 when it ships) will fulfill all my navigation, communication and media needs.
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It can run a root shell, but the manufacturer and carrier, together, can't add items to the interface? What, is the firmware burned into ROM or something? Obviously I'm missing something here, since I thought Maemo was quite customizable.
I think that what was meant was that Nokia will not supply exclusive (locked) versions to carriers with exclusive features (and maybe some features locked out) for carriers. The carrier is of course free to make it's own modifications to UI if it wants but that's not the whole picture of exclusivity. As important for the carrier as having an "exclusive" product is the financing of the handsets. It is typically a complex deal about when and according to what numbers the handsets are paid to manufacturer and of course the carrier tries to pull most out of the deal.
The worst part is that this doesn't even "close the analog hole" in any way. Sure, it stops one portion of it - recording/viewing media through component cable - but that's putting a band-aid on a chest wound. The real analog hole is the fact that, in the end, the screen is being displayed visually - it's just photons. We happen to have a method of captuing photons spread across a period of time, the video camera. Sure, it'll look crappy at first, but people will get better at normalizing the colours or finding different capture methods, and, as has been seen before, users will adapt to the worse quality format because it's the one that's not fleecing them.
The next step will be of course to criminalize video cameras that don't have a special "copyright-detection chip" which blacks out (and replaces it with a FBI WARNING!) any video/audio material that has a special watermark in it detected during recording (and all new material which is playable only playable through digital approved equipment must include this watermark). Photons can include quite much information and when you are in control of the information and in control of the lawmakers / enforcement about what can be done with that information...every "content producers" wet dream.
And yes I'm putting that in quotes because I understand that not every content producer wants their earnings to be secured by police state and banning technology, but it sure seems to be the dream of the big lobby organizations.
Unless you actually are one of the Murdochs, I pretty much guarantee that if the BBC ever had to fight for paying customers, youÂd end up almost apoplectic with rage at the sheer dross these independent broadcasters of yours would be producing. "Biased" you aint seen nothing yet.
Yes - just look at Russia. Although there the media, government and big corporations are sometimes the same thing. And even if the official government is shrinken to bare minium there will be another entity to fill the void, usually armed with tv and radio stations (again, look at Russia, Italy is much less worse but the Berlusconi empire is still quite scary). Public broadcasting can be bad and can be abused, but done right and with enough freedom from government control and some competition it has been show to be quite good.
I disagree. For two reasons. Firstly, the BBC has political bias. I've gone on about that at length, won't mention it again.
Secondly, the quality of BBC programmes isn't all that great. There are some gems out there, but a lot of it is just mindless mainstream dross of the sort that could quite easily be produced by any of the commercial channels. It's as if they've given up on trying to be cultured, and have just decided to compete for viewers instead. I find myself watching a lot of TV imported from the US these days - no BBC influence there - so I just don't think the licence fee is worth it.
This seems to be a common gripe in countries with strong public television. I happen to live in Finland and we have the same kind of system and the complaints are the same. Depending on which party is in the majority the public broadcasting company is accused to favor it and the mandatory tv license is often called unconstitutional, unfair, and whatnot on discussion forums. And the funny part is - our broadcasting company buys several BBC and HBO shows and there are both people who claim that the quality is not good enough and people who say that those expensive programs belong to pay-tv channels.
And we have had the same despute here in Finland too - a few months ago the heads of the commercial tv/radio companies filed a complainment against the public broadcast company because it provides it's news on public billboards and loudly voiced an outcry that their business is hurting. And there have been also mumbling about how a publicly funded organization should not have a good web service with news and archives of it's programs.
For me this is just hilarious - channels with no ability to produce original tv programs (let alone domestic tv shows) and fill themselfs with crap and occasional news broadcast (competition in news is good, Finnish tv suffered from "one source syndrome" 30 years ago but then again - the whole society was bend over tovard the soviet union). I can't - even for money buy ad-free quality news, drama and documentary. I am more than happy to pay for my programs but I want them ad-free and produced with professionalism, not the crap Animal Planet and Discovery gives me (1/5 of the time is ads even on pay-tv, only a few quality shows).
the entire iTunes store for example is now completely DRM free, and all the market leaders right now are so DRM free.
The videos and games on iTunes store are now drm-free? Wow, I have completely missed this...
> MySQL is free and fairly reliable
Actually it's not free, it's "Free". That might seem a small distinction, but the minute you want to license your own code that talks to MySQL commerically it will bite you in the ass in a rather unpleasant way (as in, call your Oracle sales-rep).
The minute you want to sell closed-source derivate of MySQL it will bite you, just like Linux will. Commercial open source projects have no problems, and while MySQL sales rep will tell you otherwise legally redistributing your closed source program (with MySQL) which talks to unmodified MySQL via TCP or UNIX socket is quite safe. If you don't distribute MySQL at all you are perfectly safe. It's not exactly rocket science to provide instructions how to add the JDBC driver to the application server or install the needed DBI package.
But yes, PostgreSQL is "more free" in the sense that it is not GPL, and for some people it is important.
With most of the exanmples mentioned, a small number of DB errors (lost records, index errors, sychronzation errors) are accepttable. For applications like youtube, slashdot, etc. it really doesn't matter if records are lost. I'd be more interested in hearing about major financial or business systems that run on MySql. MySQL is a nice database--good for hobby projects--even big ones--but nor really the choice for heavy lifting DBs. Most of those examples started with MySQL because they needed free more than reliable.
Actually I know several systems in the telecom, traffic and accounting industry where MySQL is used heavily and successfully. All these require outside oversight and reproductability of data (accounting, test result archiving, billing data). This is just a bullshit claim that MySQL is somehow "a hobby project database". I've seen a multi-hundred thousand dollar Oracle and MSSQL based systems have database errors, I have seen completely hosed PostgreSQL databases, I have repaired countless crashed MySQL indexes. There are means to counter these and if you just believe that your database magically works without logging, without redundancy and other things these "financial systems" need you are just waiting a disaster.
Right tool for the job and right precautions for disasters is invaluable skill to have, and no computer system I have worked with so far hasn't been failsafe without redundance and alternative ways of detecting what happened (outside the DB).
MySQL is actually exremely easy to repair with basic skills (MyISAM) and quite transaction-reliable (InnoDB), from these you have to choose which one to use. I'm sure PostgreSQL is also very good, but my personal experience has proven that it is not immortal either. And I don't expect my database ever to be, there must be a recovery plan for situtations like database corruption, error in program logic etc. when the integrity of data really matters. It's not just "but MySQL allows me to enter 2009-02-31 as a date" - in the real world this is not really very big concern (and for the record, you can now disable that behaviour).
Big iron boxes have big iron price tags, and you can almost always hack together something cheaper. The question is how much more reliable, easy to configure, and easy to upgrade is the big iron? In most organizations, buying equipment is cheaper in the long run then buying experience and maintenance for a home grown solution.
Yes, but big iron boxes are just boxes. They might have special hardware optimized to do what they do, but it just might also be cheaper to DIY. Case in point - EMC Celerra: It is basicly a Redhat with custom management software (with nice but quite expensive hardware). Doing the same thing homegrown (iSCSI + NAS-gui) can be cheaper and you can even have more features. You can buy a support contract and you have a clear upgrade path, and there are propably contractors willing to work for you even if you can't hire a full time admin. But as with SAN/NAS boxes SSL accelerators are not excatly very complicated - a sysadmin with few years experience can get a grip of a homegrown solution within days (without manufacturers expensive training courses).
The first thing I do when I get a new phone is turn off roaming. I've never seen one that didn't allow that. If I have an emergency, I can always turn it on. But in the normal case, I'd rather stick to my plan's fees.
At least in GSM networks if you have a serious emergency you can call the official emergency number (112/911) with roaming turned off, and even without a SIM card.
For example I have a Nokia phone and Nokia mostly uses their own proprietary power connector. While I have charging cables for my phone with a USB connector on the "wall" end the device end is a proprietary Nokia connector. There is no technological reason I can divine for that choice - it is simply a lock in scheme. Plus if I want to sync my phone's data, Nokia has a *different* cable for that - again for no technological reason whatsoever. I also have to carry a special cable for my iPod for no good reason.
Yes - both cases - Nokia (the old "Pop Port") and Apple are partly a Not Invented Here -thing and a lockin-scheme.
Fortunately Nokia seems to be improving - my new N85 has only USB connector which acts both as a power and sync port, no pop port or the old power connector.
This is also a bad thing because here in Finland Nokia has about 80% market share which means that if I go to visit someone it is virtually guaranteed that "Nokia power" is available if needed and I don't have to carry anything. Also when charging from computer the current is limited to 500mA, the power brick that came with the phone supplies 1600mA (it says so on the type label, I haven't actually measured) so charging with it is significantly faster than from computer.
It is also annoying that we have a Mini-B (my GPS navigator uses this and came with a car adapter) and Micro-USB (Nokia has this, can't use the same car adapter...).
But there is a fundamental difference. Someone *else* is providing the server and everything else that goes with it to provide the end-user experience. This is different from having a right to know/modify something that runs on your computer. It is true that SaaS has changed software distribution models and AGPL has a place in this landscape.
And in this case it is ironic that the company provides the server software under AGPL, thus making it impossible for anyone to make site-specific changes or their own extensions for their customers without publishing changes, but their Outlook-plugin is closed source restricted with 3 user limit...
being very, very careful to strip out your config files so that you're not uploading your database passwords or merchant account numbers.
Being a devils advocate here - what is a "config file"? If everything in a software package is released under AGPL would it not be the users right to receive the AGPL-licensed config file as well with modifications? What if the config file is in some programming language? Does it contain some SQL specific to your site? Is that a change you must redistribute to every user?
AGPL can be a very nasty trap. Read it carefully and understand it before deploying software licensed under it - either in a home/hobby or corporate environvement. It's "clean, pure and good-smelling" purpose is to provide an incentive for ASPs to release their changes to say - for a webmail or mobile sync software, it's true nature is a way for makers of those software to sell their closed source variants with a license to permit making site-specific changes without distribution while still being "open source".
Not that there is nothing wrong with that, and it happens with traditional GPL as well, but I think vendors should be more straightforward with the real reasons of going AGPL.
Not to mention that Top Gear looks absolutely stunning in HD - check the Polar Special, it is definitive HD demo material.
But the grandparent has a point. Digital terrestial TV is kind-of half baked in most European countries because they went with DVB-T (MPEG 2). (As did my country, Finland). That means that without new boxes the terrestial customers are left with SD until the next "big change". And since the as in the UK and in Finland there are similiar terrestial networks the national TV companies (BBC in the UK, YLE here) are not that interested in producing HD content for cable customers. YLE did the Beijing Games in HD as a test for a small ammount of terrestial customers living withing coverage of one broadcast tower, though.
I'm not an advocate of delaying transition to digital TV, but in countries where there is a strong public tv company (like in UK and in Finland) it might have been better to wait for DVB-T2 and MPEG4 and transition to HD at the same time. Here in Finland YLE promises HD content maybe in 2016, until that it is cable and satellite and no public tv in HD I fear...
And to those who think public TV is crap and I should go for commercial cable / sat receiving anyway: What we have from YLE here is quite good actually - quality news and documentry (of course to be applied with the normal critical thinking and not believing the only source) and for an example recently they bought the rights for all the HBO shows and BBC material is also quite common. HD would be very, very nice, thankyou...
You can. The problem is that if you want to make money, selling iPhone apps is the way to go, not selling Symbian Apps.
Not exactly whole truth. While Apple has made a very nice entry into consumer space with their app store, there are still enormous ammounts of Symbian software developed in-house or sold as part of an bigger enterprise-deal.
Making Super Monkey Ball and making a deal with your customer where CRM software has your customer data synched in real time with our ERP app and cell phone is not exactly the same deal...
I agree with you 100%. What VMware needs to do is to get their licensing act together. There are "nice" startup bundles with VirtualCenter and limited number of managed ESX hosts (Foundation, Standard) with manageable price (for a SMB). But if you want to add that 4th ESX host to the setup, prepare to be royally screwed. You need all kinds of upgrade packages and believe me, they are not cheap, my advice is that go for the enterprise even if you don't need the features, it's much easier that way. It is expensive, but at least you know up front what your costs are - our resellers have trouble themselves figuring out how we can upgrade without paying everything else again (of couse we can just keep on buing the bundles but wasn't central management the idea...).
ESXi is free right now and it works for very well for isolated hosts which need no management (a small to medium team managing a few isolated servers on one machine).
I don't know if my experience is because of my country or what, but as of now for us the pricing and upgrade paths are very confusing. But please, please get your licensing straight and simple, not a mess someone without expensive training can't figure out.
As for the product - I am very pleased. Combined with a nicely supported SAN the thing runs like a dream (with it's glitches and issues on upgrades etc.) but virtual machine migration and daily management tasks are childs play - something which was a constant headache when we were on Xen. (Though we did not try any commercial management tools, there can be good alternatives there I'm not familiar with.)
If a guest really is so important that you can't have maintenance windows for it, then you need to cluster it to provide availability. All the VMotion in the world won't save you from a host failure, after all. Or operator error.
vmotion exactly saves you from host failure - if you have enough spare resources available in your cluster. Also live migration isn't exactly instant but it is "nearly instant enough" for many cases, and definitely better than manual alternatives. If you need truly disaster-proof setup which must preserve network connections and have absolutely no effect on ongoing service if any device dies you are looking at much more expensive setup than "basic" vmotion. But for us that require that in case of hardware failure guest moves to working hadware in matter of (tens) seconds and doesn't cause outages if resources (network, cpu, ram) are available vmotion can actually be quite cheap and simple compared to building a cluster setup.
Operator errir is a different thing of course - and there lies the power of application clustering.
Thank God we had a contingency plan for switching VM providers for a DR exercise a year ago and here we go.
May I ask what you migrated to? Disk storage is nearly always "vm-agnostic" but how did you migrate your vmware guest images to another platform and what would that be? If you mean that you had alternative guest VMs ready and the data was just in NFS / iSCSI mounts then I undestand, but that means building the base systems twice, and double maintenance to keep them in sync.
I'm not justifying this for vmware - they screwed it bad this time, and I got bitten by this as well (luckily only one development host was upgraded to 3.5u2, our production was still at earlier 3.5 which did not suffer from this).
Yes, the data sheet clearly states GPS and A-GPS (GPS assisted with tower data to get initial fix).
Calling cell tower approximation (what Google Maps uses on phones with no real GPS) any kind of "GPS" would clearly be false advertising and just calling for trouble.
This is not Nokias first GPS model either, they routinely seem to put GPS on their new models. What really interests me how good is it. If initial fix takes minutes it is basically useless for quick "was the address I'm going to on this block or the next one"-type of usage. N95 (at least the early firmwares, I'm not sure if the newer ones have A-GPS) was terrible in this respect and keeping the GPS always on was not an option either because of the increased battery drain.
- "Slippery slope". First sex offenders, now domestic violence - what's next?
- Abuses of the registry. Before it was "just" sex offenders who were sometime victims of the mob justice, now you can add nutcases who feel that beating up a "wife-beater" is a heroic action to the list.
- This "solution" has a potential to create a two-class society - those who are found in some public, searchable crime registry and those who are not. This creates enormous barriers to those who genuinely want (and can) feel remorse and never do their crime again - they might be practically isolated from many things (getting an apartment, getting a date, etc.) for life. Once hitting your partner during a nasty argument (no injuries), getting a fine and maybe a relatively short jail sentence - AND getting potentially for-life stamp on your forehead. One miss and you are out.
Maybe tougher sentences to repeated offenders. Maybe even a web searchable list of repeated offenders (I would not support that and I think in my country that would never be implemented because of the problems but I could understand existance of such a "service".) And the most important part: Teach in schools (and homes, but especially in schools because some children sadly live in abusive families) that violence is not ok, and you should immediately bail out even if the violent person is someone close to you. And take care of your friends. In todays society we are often told to "mind our own business" and even saying something about someones relationship or behaviour is seen as an invasion to privacy and rude behaviour. It is not.
I believe you meant to say, there's never an excuse to beat up on anyone.
Yep, just today when driving to work I heard a brief news on radio about a recent study made in Finland (link in Finnish).Briefly:
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A two-part study was made in 2006 among 17-20 year old men serving their military service in Finland - a total over 2000 young men who had been in a relationship participated. Of those, nearly 17% said that they have been hit by their partner at least once. Critics of the study have commented that the definitions of "relationship" and "hitting" were not clear enough and that the number is therefore too high.
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Violence in a relationship is NOT just a problem with men hitting woman, and I have seen opinion pieces in newspapers where those men who uphold the principle that they should "never hit a woman" are quite upset and shaken when their wife/girlfriend hits them (repeatedly) and only thing they feel they can do is try to protect themselves (and maybe their kids) from blows.
It is said that women who end up in abusive relationship tend to stick in that relationship despite of the violence (and there are many speculative reasons why) - and while this is propably true, so can be the opposite. It is really hard for a "man of principle who would never beat up a woman" to admit to himself, his friends and ultimately to the police that he is a target of violence from woman, and can't really do anything about it.
As there are (stereotypical) males who drink too much on a friday night and then hit their wife/girlfriend when they nag about drinking / don't want to have sex etc. there are women who can be loving wives and mothers, but when rage takes them on they can throw a frying pan at you (happened to a friend, multiple times...).
But exposing these types to the whole Internet to see forever (Internet remembers, the sentence is for life) is not right and won't solve the problem.
This might interest you, then. Good HD image? Where? That product promises a loysy resolution with no mention on lumens. They even talk about "business and personal" projector, not movies. That one is only good for youtube. Grandparent is right - heat, unreliable lamps (some manufacturers don't even tell you an estimate on lamp life anymore because your lamp can last anywhere between 500 and 8000 hours depending on make, model, environment, luck, phase of the moon etc.) and fans are a plague on current projectors. And yes, I now that some manufacturers / resellers offer lamp warranties that are not completely ridiculously short. Still, the next generation is still years away and I would not hold my breath waiting for a decent movie projector based on this technology anytime soon.
Meanwhile I enjoy my HD LCD projector, and I will never go back to watching any screen smaller than 80"
Some are doing that and there are sites devoted to stories of scamming the scammers. The problem is volume - in Nigeria (this info comes from documentary - I don't remember if it was on Discovery or the National Geographic channel) this is a "real" job for many. Although technically illegal and Nigerian and foreign officials are fighting the crime they literally have to follow phone lines to find them. These are enterprises with people hired (and payed) as call-center workers with benefits and all that like a real job. And there are buttloads of these companies. When you face a professinally run company with full-time employees who are doing the answering job you would need enormous ammounts of "normal" people who had to spend their time scamming the scammers. Best practice is to educate people about dangers of these scams, but as like with other "make money fast" -schemes greed sometimes makes even bright people do stupid things.
-k
If you got Unix shell access what's wrong with dig soa yourdomain.com? No need to use whois, and the only one who knows you did the query is the TLD operator, and if they (for .com Verisign) are corrupt and sell this data you are screwed.
Could you back that up? There are horror stories for every registrar, but GoDaddy is in my opinion one of the best of the cheap ones. Their customer support actually works (I have always got a response to email within 2 hours - Network Solutions has 12-24 hour answer time at best and they cost 5x as much as GoDaddy, not to mention their refusal policy to transfer domains to other registrars without phonecalls (I'm not living in the USA so the phonecalls to them are expensive international ones) just because they think transfer is "suspicious").
Also - GoDaddy has a quite nice spam policy - which other cheap registrars often don't have and they actually do not care much because being too strict about spam would not give them income.
joker.com would be nice because their web interface is clean and they don't try to sell you a kitchen sink with your domain, but their spam policy has at least in the past been non-existant.
And here in Finland Apple can't sell the phone with contract because it isn't 3G - the only phone that are allowed to be locked and sold with contract are the 3G ones. Of course they can pick an exclusive reseller but they can't lock the phone.
And my thoughts about the iPhone (used one for about on hour so pick these with grain of salt):
- Browser is great. The best there is (zooming, scrolling, etc.) but my Nokia E65 comes close (there is a miniature screen featuring the full page, just scrolling is not so great wit the 4-way pad).
- Typing sucks. Getting to right contact in phonebook is slower than with dedicated keyboard.
- I wonder if I can even answerd a call with gloves on (here gloves are required for 6 months or so).
- Missing 3G. This of course increases battery life but having 3G would make the great browser more usefull. Now it is just a great browser on a 14.4k modem.
And btw. I'm not a big fan of Nokia either (because of Symbian - it is a pain in the ass to develop for and the current implementations are full of menus and the UI is confusing). But I hope that my choise (the small E65 and Nokia N810 when it ships) will fulfill all my navigation, communication and media needs.