In my tests PostgreSQL is consistently faster than MySQL and scales much better for multiple CPUs (which matters a lot!!!). Also see this indipendant article: http://tweakers.net/reviews/646/10 - you will notice that not only PostgreSQL is faster than MySQL to begin with, but it gets even faster with HypterThreading and so on.
In my professional opinion there are absolutely no reasons to ever choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. The latter is completely free (as opposed to dual licensed), much more powerful, more standard compliant, faster, and better documented.
I wonder whether there are plans for launching a new, more powerful, more sophisticated aircraft with the same purpose. After 30 years of progress we should be able to do much better, shouldn't we ? (To be honest I suspect that modern technology is less reliable than 30 years ago - the complexity is killer - but still we have to try)
Couldn't there be a very low power engine of some kind, just enough to provide a minimal thrust for, lets say, a decade. You don't need a lot of thrust in vacuum. Even small but constant acceleration should be sufficient to eventually achieve very high speed and perhaps even outrun the older spacecraft.
Same here, brother. We always used to play DOOM co-op. It is so much fun to plan ahead, coordinate how to attack the monsters, to help each other when somebody has low health, etc. Playing death-match always seemed very mechanical to me and got boring fast - after a couple of hours are levels looked the same to me and I barely noticed them anywaw since I am constantly running and shooting.
The answer to your question is simple: It is technically impossible without fundamentally changing all PC hardware.
Some driver bugs can be averted by moving drivers into user mode - this is especially true for drivers that do not talk to hardware directly, but these are not interested cases. Drivers which do not talk to hardware (e.g. drivers for USB devices) should not be in the kernel in the first place, so it is just a case of bad design.
The interesting and important drivers are ones that do talk to hardware. Unfortunately they are the ones that cannot be made completely safe. A driver can program its DMA controller to overwrite the entire system RAM, or it can set the device up to lock the bus. There are ways to avoid these problems (with significant increase in cost and complexity), but not in PC hardware - it is simply not worth it. Would you rather have a PC which hangs up once every week, or one that costs ten times more ? If you answered the latter, then you don't need a PC!
The subject of microkernels has been discussed to death. I think that everybody agrees that microkernels are slower, so it becomes a question of economics again: People would you rather have a PC which crashes once every week that one which is twice slower.
Lastly, I am going to say that in my opinion microkernels increase complexity disproportionately, and complexity leads to bugs, so they are not a scalable solution. Of course this point is debatable.
Are you implying that MS written drivers are perfect ?:-) I am pretty sure the system will not distinguish by who wrote the driver - that would be just silly. MS drivers typically have better quality because it is much easier to write a robust driver when you have access to the OS source (see Linux:-), but that doesn't mean they are flawless.
The question of abuse is a very interesting one. I can't imagine how they can solve it reliably, since obviously it is unsolvable: hypothetically I could submit crash reports from my Linux machine.
It also seems to me that regardless of the infrastructure, consumer Internet connections are not treated with the same importance as phones, yet. So the provider will not jump through hoops to avoid a service interruption. Unless it is their own VOIP service:-) Any idea how reliable Comcast's digital phone is ? I used it only briefly a couple of years ago, but had to give up because the quality was terrible (I have no idea why, I suspect it was a local problem in the building).
All high-speed Internet providers that I have ever had (Comcast, Yahoo/SBC/AT&T) suffer outages periodically - say, about once every two months for several hours on the average, and this is only the outages that I know about, since I don't use my home computer all the time. Happens at work too - at one time our business DSL was out for two days (thank you "new" AT&T). The electrical power has also been out several times. At the same time I don't remember a single problem with my land line. Note that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so this is a relatively high-tech place.
You end up depending on both consumer-grade Internet service and electrical power, neither of which is completely reliable. Which is probably OK, esp if you have your cell phone, so I am not advocating against Vonage.
However it strikes me that people generally do not realize that the Internet connection (as the Internet itself) is not completely reliable. At a trade show a sales person was trying to convince of the benefits of their credit card authorization software, which resides on their own server and is accessible as a web service. The idea is that the consumer pays for a service (e.g. in a hair salon) in advance and then gets to use it for a period of time. Not bad stuff, actually, but that is beside the point. When I told her that I am worried about reliability in case the internet connection is down and the customer will not be able to be authorized for the service they already paid for, she looked at me silly and said: "Ihe Interned connection down ? Does that ever happen?" Duh! It happens!
If this has already been discussed, sorry. I am all pro-net-neutrality and so on, but aren't the telcos fighting for being able to charge by type of service and not to be able to charge by provider ?
It makes a certain amount of sense that streaming video or VOIP should be billed differenty from other traffic, simply because they do have different requirements - both bandwith and esp. latency. Then all businesses who want to provide streaming video will be paying the same higher prices, which isn't inherently anti-competitive.
Now, before flaming begins, I am not saying it is a good thing; I am simply looking for some clarification.
Oh, great. So if I happen to use SSH or a VPN to talk to my office network, or secure POP3, I get downgraded. I don't want to get around my ISP's restrictions - I just want to have my data secure. This is complete bull - I don't mean your post, but the consequences if you are right.
It should be much simpler than that. If I am paying for a 1.5Mb/s, I should receive 1.5Mb/s, regardless of what protocols I use, encrypted or not. Latency is a little tricker, but in the end there's a limit to latency for a packet if you have to stay within X Mb/s. Saying that I have X Mb/s but only if I use them for unecrypted browsing and uncencrypted e-mail is just absurd.
On the other hand, my opinion (and the opinion of all other Slashdot) statistically gets trumpled by the number of AOL subscribers, so it won't matter in the end. The economic argument is perhaps that if I want to use encryption, then I am using the Internet for "business" needs (which is somewhat true), so I should pay the higher price. However where will that end ? How can you truly distinguish business from home use ? How about porn use ?
I hate living in the 21st century. We had to much more fun with the 2400bps modems and BBS-es.
You should be more crafeul with posts like that! You made me spill hot coffee on my lap (ouch) from laughter, so now you have a lawsuit coming up. We'll see who the loser is !!!!
While I agree completely, my thoughts were somewhere along the lines of: It is ridiculous to complain when things gets stolen and you must buy them again. Yes, things get stolen, even phones - that is life, alas. Here is an example: how would you react if I said:
"My BMW 765 was stolen:-( After a day of waiting I had to go to the dealership and spend over $100,000 on a new one!"
But the bigger point is, why the f*ck is this a story and why are we discussing it ?
I find it amusing that she absolutely had to a buy a new sidekick within 24 hours. Can't live without it. No doubt that is good for the economy.
Anyway, how is stealing a sidekick different from stealing anything else and why does it deserve a story ? The phones of several of my friends have been stolen of the years. I had my car CD player stolen a couple of years ago, but you don't see me bitching about it on Slashdot (oops, now you do).
On Windows it is impossible to delete or replace a file which is in use (e.g. a shared library). The same applies for directories. Thus for any meaningful upgrade you need to restart the applications and often the OS _before_ you can do anything with their files. There are complicated mechanisms for keeping track of files that need to be deleted/replaced after a reboot. It appears that recently they have added yet another even more complicated feature to avoid reboots: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895276,00.as p
Such complicated techniques for a basic thing like an upgrade make me very nervous. What happens if something goes wrong with the extensive bookkeeping in the middle of the upgrade ?
I am not sure what you mean by "flaws". You confirmed almost everything I said - it is impossible to play a single-player offline game without an Internet connection. Valve is not hiding that, so of course it is printed on the box. Their point is : if you don't like it, don't buy the game. Most people don't care that and buy it. Most people are slowly giving up their freedoms without even realizing it. If all games adopted this model, it really is a very small leap to starting to charge by play time. All software businesses would prefer to sell a service instead of a product, if they could.
Game companies don't care about what is "fair" and they especially don't care about what will happen when they go out of business. Do you seriously think that if Valve went out of business they would altruistically pay for developping and releasing a patch to disable Steam ?? You must be kidding.
Anyway, I don't hate Valve and I don't hate Steam. They are not "evil". However what they are doing is wrong and I wish more people would see that so that there would be market pressure against it.
I don't hate Steam either. In itself it probably isn't a bad technology and it does make certain things convenient. I don't hate Windows Update either for the same reasons - it is an useful tool. The things that I am opposed to are:
- It _requires_ an Internet connection. Even if you buy the CD, you need Internet connection to "unlock" it (or something like that). You need Internet to reinstall it too. If Valve goes out of business or decides to stop supporting it, you can't play your game. In the first day of the release many people couldn't play the CD they purchased because Valve's servers were overloaded. That is simply unacceptable. (Incidentally the same reasoning applies to Windows activation, but at least MSFT provide a way to activate by phone)
- An Internet connection is needed even for single-player offline mode! I have read many complaints from people who selected "offline mode" but after a couple of weeks the game refuses to start. Perhaps this was a bug and it is fixed now - I don't know.
- I have also seen many complaints from people who had their accounts deactivated by Valve. Perhaps they were "hackers" and deserved it from Valve's point of view, but I don't care about that - if I have paid for a game, I would like to be able to play it wherever and whenever I want, not when Valve decides to grant me this privilege.
Understand that I don't have first-hand experience with HL2, because I refuse to buy it on moral grounds, so perhaps my facts may not be 100$ accurate. However I was really looking forward to playing HL2, so when it came out I spend some time reading Valve's forums - I think it gave me a good idea of the situation.
But again, unless I am badly mistaken this only applies to the US! I guarantee that the rest of the world will absolutely not shut off their analog TV broadcasts in 2009.
Unless you are being ironic, you are deluded if you think that American Football is more popular than soccer. Well, obviously it is in the US, but soccer is immensely more popular in the rest of the world and the US is still only at about 300 million people.
So you are allowed to use quotes on one or the other depending on where you are posting from:-)
I hope you are wrong. Nothing personal:-) So far my cable company has been providing me with analog content (I had "digital cable" a couple of years ago but the quality was amazingly bad - terrible colors, MPEG artifacts all over the place, changing channels was annoyingly slow) and if they stopped in 2009 I hope there might be another cable provider that would fill that gap. I suspect that there are many people that would rather change their cable company than buy new TV sets.
I very much doubt that HD will take over the world by 2009. Especially outside of the US where people don't upgrade their home equipment so often. Even in the US the thousands of illegal workers and low income people probably don't really care about HD:-) Yes, they do exist although they probbaly don't post on Slashdot .
About movies: what I suspect will happen is that by 2009 HD players with _analog_ output will be reasonably cheap, so people, including me, will eventually start upgrading. The trick is to be able to upgrade naturally as part of purchasing new stuff whenever that happens - like it happened with color TV - people bought color TV sets but B&W ones continued to work (and still do to this day, if I am not mistaken).
Seconded. Several years ago the company I worked for bought purchased a Sony VAIO laptop with Windows XP Professional. It was expensive. It looked good. It came formatted as FAT32 and separated into several partitions. Absurd, but true. Additionally, there wasn't an OS CD to reinstall the OS - only a "backup" CD which restored the HDD to its FAT32 state. Customer service was completely unresponsive. What utter crap !! We had to purchase a regular Windows XP Professional license, so we might as well have bought the laptop with XP Home Edition (or even with Windows 98 if was available).
The whole experience turned me away from Sony for computing products. (Although I highly suspect that Dell would have been worse:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I solve all compatibility problems by using Flash version 9!
In my tests PostgreSQL is consistently faster than MySQL and scales much better for multiple CPUs (which matters a lot!!!). Also see this indipendant article: http://tweakers.net/reviews/646/10 - you will notice that not only PostgreSQL is faster than MySQL to begin with, but it gets even faster with HypterThreading and so on.
In my professional opinion there are absolutely no reasons to ever choose MySQL over PostgreSQL. The latter is completely free (as opposed to dual licensed), much more powerful, more standard compliant, faster, and better documented.
I wonder whether there are plans for launching a new, more powerful, more sophisticated aircraft with the same purpose. After 30 years of progress we should be able to do much better, shouldn't we ? (To be honest I suspect that modern technology is less reliable than 30 years ago - the complexity is killer - but still we have to try)
Couldn't there be a very low power engine of some kind, just enough to provide a minimal thrust for, lets say, a decade. You don't need a lot of thrust in vacuum. Even small but constant acceleration should be sufficient to eventually achieve very high speed and perhaps even outrun the older spacecraft.
Same here, brother. We always used to play DOOM co-op. It is so much fun to plan ahead, coordinate how to attack the monsters, to help each other when somebody has low health, etc. Playing death-match always seemed very mechanical to me and got boring fast - after a couple of hours are levels looked the same to me and I barely noticed them anywaw since I am constantly running and shooting.
Ahem. Movies are not filmed using TV cameras. Film already has resolution greater than HD.
The answer to your question is simple: It is technically impossible without fundamentally changing all PC hardware.
Some driver bugs can be averted by moving drivers into user mode - this is especially true for drivers that do not talk to hardware directly, but these are not interested cases. Drivers which do not talk to hardware (e.g. drivers for USB devices) should not be in the kernel in the first place, so it is just a case of bad design.
The interesting and important drivers are ones that do talk to hardware. Unfortunately they are the ones that cannot be made completely safe. A driver can program its DMA controller to overwrite the entire system RAM, or it can set the device up to lock the bus. There are ways to avoid these problems (with significant increase in cost and complexity), but not in PC hardware - it is simply not worth it. Would you rather have a PC which hangs up once every week, or one that costs ten times more ? If you answered the latter, then you don't need a PC!
The subject of microkernels has been discussed to death. I think that everybody agrees that microkernels are slower, so it becomes a question of economics again: People would you rather have a PC which crashes once every week that one which is twice slower.
Lastly, I am going to say that in my opinion microkernels increase complexity disproportionately, and complexity leads to bugs, so they are not a scalable solution. Of course this point is debatable.
Are you implying that MS written drivers are perfect ? :-) I am pretty sure the system will not distinguish by who wrote the driver - that would be just silly. MS drivers typically have better quality because it is much easier to write a robust driver when you have access to the OS source (see Linux :-), but that doesn't mean they are flawless.
The question of abuse is a very interesting one. I can't imagine how they can solve it reliably, since obviously it is unsolvable: hypothetically I could submit crash reports from my Linux machine.
Oh, I see he wrote the Windows Vista kernel. No ? MS Office ? Again no ? C#? No, no and no ??? WTF did he code then ?
Oh, I see he was a an MS evangelist and he wrote blogs! Impressive.
Good point, thanks.
:-) Any idea how reliable Comcast's digital phone is ? I used it only briefly a couple of years ago, but had to give up because the quality was terrible (I have no idea why, I suspect it was a local problem in the building).
It also seems to me that regardless of the infrastructure, consumer Internet connections are not treated with the same importance as phones, yet. So the provider will not jump through hoops to avoid a service interruption. Unless it is their own VOIP service
All high-speed Internet providers that I have ever had (Comcast, Yahoo/SBC/AT&T) suffer outages periodically - say, about once every two months for several hours on the average, and this is only the outages that I know about, since I don't use my home computer all the time. Happens at work too - at one time our business DSL was out for two days (thank you "new" AT&T). The electrical power has also been out several times. At the same time I don't remember a single problem with my land line. Note that I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, so this is a relatively high-tech place.
You end up depending on both consumer-grade Internet service and electrical power, neither of which is completely reliable. Which is probably OK, esp if you have your cell phone, so I am not advocating against Vonage.
However it strikes me that people generally do not realize that the Internet connection (as the Internet itself) is not completely reliable. At a trade show a sales person was trying to convince of the benefits of their credit card authorization software, which resides on their own server and is accessible as a web service. The idea is that the consumer pays for a service (e.g. in a hair salon) in advance and then gets to use it for a period of time. Not bad stuff, actually, but that is beside the point. When I told her that I am worried about reliability in case the internet connection is down and the customer will not be able to be authorized for the service they already paid for, she looked at me silly and said: "Ihe Interned connection down ? Does that ever happen?" Duh! It happens!
Precisely. Isn't that what they are proposing ?
If this has already been discussed, sorry. I am all pro-net-neutrality and so on, but aren't the telcos fighting for being able to charge by type of service and not to be able to charge by provider ?
It makes a certain amount of sense that streaming video or VOIP should be billed differenty from other traffic, simply because they do have different requirements - both bandwith and esp. latency. Then all businesses who want to provide streaming video will be paying the same higher prices, which isn't inherently anti-competitive.
Now, before flaming begins, I am not saying it is a good thing; I am simply looking for some clarification.
Oh, great. So if I happen to use SSH or a VPN to talk to my office network, or secure POP3, I get downgraded. I don't want to get around my ISP's restrictions - I just want to have my data secure. This is complete bull - I don't mean your post, but the consequences if you are right.
It should be much simpler than that. If I am paying for a 1.5Mb/s, I should receive 1.5Mb/s, regardless of what protocols I use, encrypted or not. Latency is a little tricker, but in the end there's a limit to latency for a packet if you have to stay within X Mb/s. Saying that I have X Mb/s but only if I use them for unecrypted browsing and uncencrypted e-mail is just absurd.
On the other hand, my opinion (and the opinion of all other Slashdot) statistically gets trumpled by the number of AOL subscribers, so it won't matter in the end. The economic argument is perhaps that if I want to use encryption, then I am using the Internet for "business" needs (which is somewhat true), so I should pay the higher price. However where will that end ? How can you truly distinguish business from home use ? How about porn use ?
I hate living in the 21st century. We had to much more fun with the 2400bps modems and BBS-es.
You should be more crafeul with posts like that! You made me spill hot coffee on my lap (ouch) from laughter, so now you have a lawsuit coming up. We'll see who the loser is !!!!
Oh, so Slashdot is America's dumbest criminals now ? :-)
While I agree completely, my thoughts were somewhere along the lines of:
:-( After a day of waiting I had to go to the dealership and spend over $100,000 on a new one!"
It is ridiculous to complain when things gets stolen and you must buy them again. Yes, things get stolen, even phones - that is life, alas. Here is an example: how would you react if I said:
"My BMW 765 was stolen
But the bigger point is, why the f*ck is this a story and why are we discussing it ?
You are right.
I find it amusing that she absolutely had to a buy a new sidekick within 24 hours. Can't live without it. No doubt that is good for the economy.
Anyway, how is stealing a sidekick different from stealing anything else and why does it deserve a story ? The phones of several of my friends have been stolen of the years. I had my car CD player stolen a couple of years ago, but you don't see me bitching about it on Slashdot (oops, now you do).
On Windows it is impossible to delete or replace a file which is in use (e.g. a shared library). The same applies for directories. Thus for any meaningful upgrade you need to restart the applications and often the OS _before_ you can do anything with their files. There are complicated mechanisms for keeping track of files that need to be deleted/replaced after a reboot. It appears that recently they have added yet another even more complicated feature to avoid reboots: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895276,00.as p
Such complicated techniques for a basic thing like an upgrade make me very nervous. What happens if something goes wrong with the extensive bookkeeping in the middle of the upgrade ?
I am not sure what you mean by "flaws". You confirmed almost everything I said - it is impossible to play a single-player offline game without an Internet connection. Valve is not hiding that, so of course it is printed on the box. Their point is : if you don't like it, don't buy the game. Most people don't care that and buy it. Most people are slowly giving up their freedoms without even realizing it. If all games adopted this model, it really is a very small leap to starting to charge by play time. All software businesses would prefer to sell a service instead of a product, if they could.
Game companies don't care about what is "fair" and they especially don't care about what will happen when they go out of business. Do you seriously think that if Valve went out of business they would altruistically pay for developping and releasing a patch to disable Steam ?? You must be kidding.
Anyway, I don't hate Valve and I don't hate Steam. They are not "evil". However what they are doing is wrong and I wish more people would see that so that there would be market pressure against it.
I don't hate Steam either. In itself it probably isn't a bad technology and it does make certain things convenient. I don't hate Windows Update either for the same reasons - it is an useful tool.
The things that I am opposed to are:
- It _requires_ an Internet connection. Even if you buy the CD, you need Internet connection to "unlock" it (or something like that). You need Internet to reinstall it too. If Valve goes out of business or decides to stop supporting it, you can't play your game. In the first day of the release many people couldn't play the CD they purchased because Valve's servers were overloaded. That is simply unacceptable.
(Incidentally the same reasoning applies to Windows activation, but at least MSFT provide a way to activate by phone)
- An Internet connection is needed even for single-player offline mode! I have read many complaints from people who selected "offline mode" but after a couple of weeks the game refuses to start. Perhaps this was a bug and it is fixed now - I don't know.
- I have also seen many complaints from people who had their accounts deactivated by Valve. Perhaps they were "hackers" and deserved it from Valve's point of view, but I don't care about that - if I have paid for a game, I would like to be able to play it wherever and whenever I want, not when Valve decides to grant me this privilege.
Understand that I don't have first-hand experience with HL2, because I refuse to buy it on moral grounds, so perhaps my facts may not be 100$ accurate. However I was really looking forward to playing HL2, so when it came out I spend some time reading Valve's forums - I think it gave me a good idea of the situation.
But again, unless I am badly mistaken this only applies to the US! I guarantee that the rest of the world will absolutely not shut off their analog TV broadcasts in 2009.
Unless you are being ironic, you are deluded if you think that American Football is more popular than soccer. Well, obviously it is in the US, but soccer is immensely more popular in the rest of the world and the US is still only at about 300 million people.
:-)
So you are allowed to use quotes on one or the other depending on where you are posting from
I hope you are wrong. Nothing personal :-) So far my cable company has been providing me with analog content (I had "digital cable" a couple of years ago but the quality was amazingly bad - terrible colors, MPEG artifacts all over the place, changing channels was annoyingly slow) and if they stopped in 2009 I hope there might be another cable provider that would fill that gap. I suspect that there are many people that would rather change their cable company than buy new TV sets.
:-) Yes, they do exist although they probbaly don't post on Slashdot .
I very much doubt that HD will take over the world by 2009. Especially outside of the US where people don't upgrade their home equipment so often. Even in the US the thousands of illegal workers and low income people probably don't really care about HD
About movies: what I suspect will happen is that by 2009 HD players with _analog_ output will be reasonably cheap, so people, including me, will eventually start upgrading. The trick is to be able to upgrade naturally as part of purchasing new stuff whenever that happens - like it happened with color TV - people bought color TV sets but B&W ones continued to work (and still do to this day, if I am not mistaken).
Seconded. Several years ago the company I worked for bought purchased a Sony VAIO laptop with Windows XP Professional. It was expensive. It looked good. It came formatted as FAT32 and separated into several partitions. Absurd, but true. Additionally, there wasn't an OS CD to reinstall the OS - only a "backup" CD which restored the HDD to its FAT32 state. Customer service was completely unresponsive. What utter crap !! We had to purchase a regular Windows XP Professional license, so we might as well have bought the laptop with XP Home Edition (or even with Windows 98 if was available).
:-)
The whole experience turned me away from Sony for computing products. (Although I highly suspect that Dell would have been worse