First, I actually don't know anything about OpenCCVS. I've played with CCVS a bit, and worked for a company that made a very similar product a while back.
The biggest obstacle to this would be certification of the product. A software credit-card processing product needs to be certified with each credit card "processor" (aka clearinghouse) for each type of transaction that will be processed - mail order, retail, hotel, restaurant, etc. This process entails product review and/or QA by the processing network to make sure the product basically works okay with their network.
Maintaining the certification relationship with all the processors was a HUGE deal where I used to work. It costs money and time, it requires lots of diplomacy, and if your product is "decertified" then merchants using your software will get a degraded "discount rate" when they process transactions, and they will become very unhappy. In other words, certification is life for this kind of product.
Most processors will require you to sign an NDA before you can get a copy of their specs. If you release code to your product you're probably violating the terms of your NDA. Unfortunately the more popular processors seem more likely to have strict NDA rules.
You don't really want to get involved in legal tangles with Visanet or somebody, since they really do have all the money in the world to pursue those who irritate them. This was all expected to change when the SET protocol became popular, but it never did.
I disagree. It is important to recognize that these books were a very personal and individual effort and that is what made them great. Unlike so many books in the technical market they don't follow some generic publisher guidelines or formulas. It would be hard for any author to live up to what Stevens delivered, and even a very good author would have to face some tough choices about how to "fit" in with the rest of the books.
If the publisher lets the books remain as they are, they will still stay in print a long time and remain important. Part of what made these books great is that they are not specific to one platform or vendor, but outline the technology itself.
Life will be very happy on FreeBSD when some of the Xfree 4.0 DRI drivers are complete. In the meantime:
A binary package of Utah-GLX for FreeBSD can be found here:
http://www.matroxusers.com/Driver/FreeBSD.html
A port also exists:
http://people.freebsd.org/~3d/distfiles/glx/linux/
Take a peek at Loki's newsgroups for some other useful information.
It's too bad they didn't benchmark exactly the same systems, with exactly the same RAID configuration. Dell's onboard hardware RAID has good Linux drivers on the PowerEdge 2400 and 2450, and this is a more reasonable system to be running a web server on anyhow - the 6450 is just overkill.
You can put together a pretty darn solid 2400 with Linux, dual power supplies, dual CPUs, and hardware RAID for something around $5000, which isn't bad. Seems like a good system for comparison, too.
The problem most likely is not the fact that it's ECC memory. The registering is more likely a problem. You probably want "unbuffered" SDRAM.
Basically, registering is a performance enhancement, ECC is a reliability feature. ECC is supported much more widely than resistering on motherboards targeted to home users.
Re:Is part of the problem lack of machines?
on
New Mega Alphas
·
· Score: 1
Actually, Compaq/Digital Tru-64 UNIX is not descended from Ultrix (a BSD derivitive). Sadly Ultrix has gone away - it was my first UNIX experience, and really very solid. Tru-64 UNIX is based on OSF-1, and is the only microkernel based UNIX on the market. It would be interesting to hear from some people who use it, and hear how it compares to other UNIXes and VMS?
This is a bit confusing...
on
Why Not MySQL?
·
· Score: 2
Let me get this straight. PostgreSQL has more features and has a more open/free license than MySQL (which isn't really FREE at all). The *only* advantage that MySQL has is a speed advantage, which can be mitigated by using faster hardware or doing better tuning. Right?
So WHY is MySQL getting so much support from the free software community? There is certainly a place for a free lightweight database product, but MySQL is NOT free. PostgreSQL is. This seems pretty significant.
Why does the so-called free software community have such a hard time picking a favorite here? I'm genuinely curious, but my stuff is running on Oracle, so I'm not exacly emotionally invested in either product.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I actually don't know anything about OpenCCVS. I've played with CCVS a bit, and worked for a company that made a very similar product a while back.
The biggest obstacle to this would be certification of the product. A software credit-card processing product needs to be certified with each credit card "processor" (aka clearinghouse) for each type of transaction that will be processed - mail order, retail, hotel, restaurant, etc. This process entails product review and/or QA by the processing network to make sure the product basically works okay with their network.
Maintaining the certification relationship with all the processors was a HUGE deal where I used to work. It costs money and time, it requires lots of diplomacy, and if your product is "decertified" then merchants using your software will get a degraded "discount rate" when they process transactions, and they will become very unhappy. In other words, certification is life for this kind of product.
Most processors will require you to sign an NDA before you can get a copy of their specs. If you release code to your product you're probably violating the terms of your NDA. Unfortunately the more popular processors seem more likely to have strict NDA rules.
You don't really want to get involved in legal tangles with Visanet or somebody, since they really do have all the money in the world to pursue those who irritate them. This was all expected to change when the SET protocol became popular, but it never did.
I disagree. It is important to recognize that these books were a very personal and individual effort and that is what made them great. Unlike so many books in the technical market they don't follow some generic publisher guidelines or formulas. It would be hard for any author to live up to what Stevens delivered, and even a very good author would have to face some tough choices about how to "fit" in with the rest of the books.
If the publisher lets the books remain as they are, they will still stay in print a long time and remain important. Part of what made these books great is that they are not specific to one platform or vendor, but outline the technology itself.
Life will be very happy on FreeBSD when some of the Xfree 4.0 DRI drivers are complete. In the meantime: A binary package of Utah-GLX for FreeBSD can be found here: http://www.matroxusers.com/Driver/FreeBSD.html A port also exists: http://people.freebsd.org/~3d/distfiles/glx/linux/
Take a peek at Loki's newsgroups for some other useful information.
It's too bad they didn't benchmark exactly the same systems, with exactly the same RAID configuration. Dell's onboard hardware RAID has good Linux drivers on the PowerEdge 2400 and 2450, and this is a more reasonable system to be running a web server on anyhow - the 6450 is just overkill.
You can put together a pretty darn solid 2400 with Linux, dual power supplies, dual CPUs, and hardware RAID for something around $5000, which isn't bad. Seems like a good system for comparison, too.
The problem most likely is not the fact that it's ECC memory. The registering is more likely a problem. You probably want "unbuffered" SDRAM.
Basically, registering is a performance enhancement, ECC is a reliability feature. ECC is supported much more widely than resistering on motherboards targeted to home users.
Actually, Compaq/Digital Tru-64 UNIX is not descended from Ultrix (a BSD derivitive). Sadly Ultrix has gone away - it was my first UNIX experience, and really very solid. Tru-64 UNIX is based on OSF-1, and is the only microkernel based UNIX on the market. It would be interesting to hear from some people who use it, and hear how it compares to other UNIXes and VMS?
Let me get this straight. PostgreSQL has more features and has a more open/free license than MySQL (which isn't really FREE at all). The *only* advantage that MySQL has is a speed advantage, which can be mitigated by using faster hardware or doing better tuning. Right?
So WHY is MySQL getting so much support from the free software community? There is certainly a place for a free lightweight database product, but MySQL is NOT free. PostgreSQL is. This seems pretty significant.
Why does the so-called free software community have such a hard time picking a favorite here? I'm genuinely curious, but my stuff is running on Oracle, so I'm not exacly emotionally invested in either product.