That's nothing, these are just the reasons quoted in the writeup. The actual statistics from the article add up to 141.18%. I can understand being 2% off maybe, due to rounding, but I can't see any reason for a rounding error of 41.18%.
And what's worse, our broadband in Canada isn't even that impressive compared to other countries. While I pay $50CDN/mo for unmetered 3/0.75 DSL with 8 static IPs and reverse-DNS control, a friend in Sweden has 100/100 through her condo, and 24/1 DSL. She doesn't even pay extra for 24 megabit, they just upgraded her one day for the same price (one of those 'Dear customer,....' kind of e-mails).
Meanwhile, I still hear about customers in the US that pay $40USD/mo for 512k down. Sory, but it's just plain sad.
This is one of the main reasons I stopped playing WoW. I'm a very solitary player, and while I don't mind joining up with two or three people for company, having to schedule end-game content just seems impractical to me. I want to see a massive sprawling, complex dungeon designed for three people, with traps and puzzles and such meant for three people to solve.
Make it challenging, make it complex, make it interesting, but don't make it all colossally huge. I started playing WoW because it was 'the MMORPG for the rest of us', for the people who don't have eight hours a day to devote to dungeons and instances and plotting. I would like to see more 'lone wolf' content for people who can't join a guild and/or commit to certain times to be online and play.
If you're Steve Jobs, you have to be thinking "OK, if I own 5% of Disney, what will that get me?"
Actually, with Disney's market cap at about $49bn, I guess he'd own more like 15% of disney (or at least, 15% of the outstanding common shares). Not that that would tip the scales entirely, but it would put him in a pretty significant position to effect inertia on the company.
Re:10 Years Overdue
on
What is Perl 6?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
His post makes reference to how Perl 5 was released in 1994, and people were expecting Perl 6 to obsolete everything 'overnight'. 'Perl 5 is great, welcome to 1994, but Perl 6 is going to be out soon, and in order to stay up to date in this fast-paced world of technology, you'll need to learn Perl 6 before you're done learning Perl 5' sort of thing.
The 10 years the OP is referring to is the 10 (now 11, nearing 12) years since the release of Perl 5, without any major updates to the language (other than a sane versioning scheme).
A decently packaged dual-processor laptop for Windows XP for $2000 doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.
As much as I hate to counter my Apple-centric views in a public forum, I'm obliged to point out that the Dell Store Canada (NOT the US store) is selling the Inspiron 9400 - a laptop with the same price as the Macbook, but with a (marginally) better configuration.
Anyone know why the Dell Store US seems to not be aware of this laptop? I would think they'd want to push this pretty hard with all the fanfare around Apple's new system, but as far as I've seen, no one's mentioned this yet.
It's practicality. They want their content easily accessible to the masses, so they need to use a format that's going to be supported by most people already. Hence, Windows Media. *everyone* has WMP, so it's the obvious solution. Forcing people to download something to listen to your content is impractical, and reduces the number of people watching your media.
Now, however, Quicktime is getting a lot more popular. Everyone with iTunes has Quicktime, and every Mac user as well. It's not popular enough that it's practical to use, but it's getting there.
As to why they don't use open standards? Because there's no simple way to stream XviD/Ogg streams to the masses. Forcing people to download a CODEC isn't any more practical than forcing them to download another player, and I haven't seen any drop-in solutions for streaming either of those formats or any other.
Personally, I wish people would start streaming H.264, and then everyone wins (not to mention it's great compression and great quality).
1) "But you can turn it off!" - And here I thought it was about default settings and opt-in. Didn't we (users) already fight these battles with Windows Media Player and Real?
Yes, that's right, because Apple's hidden this 'feature' somewhere where the average user won't find it. There is a hidden option to turn it off, but what user is honestly going to stumble across that, even when they're looking for it?
Let's be realistic. It's pretty much impossible to notice this 'mini-store', especially on a resolution like mine, and everyone *I* know reacted the same as I did when I saw it - 'how do I turn it off?' For people with actual disposable income, this might actually be a great bonus.
I think that most people will tend to turn this off pretty fast, as it's not exactly subtle, and it takes up a significant amount of real estate. Anyone who doesn't explicitly want this is going to turn it off pretty fast. Compare this to RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, that have a small checkbox on an innocuous preferences page, which is the only way anyone would ever know (other than reading overblown sensationalism on Slashdot).
The ergonomically designed iTunes interface hides nothing from the user and shows any and all pertinent information at the briefest glance.
Truer than you know - the 'malware' is actually iTunes suggesting similar music when you click on a track, which displays in the Ministore pane. If you turn off the Mini-store, then no data is sent. Hence, your statement is correct. It *isn't* hiding it from the user, and it *does* show pertinent information. Neat huh?
They have been focusing on platforms for a while now. Take a look at their Centrino and as an example.
Centrino certification means that you have specific chipsets, processors, and wireless controllers - meaning that you know it's going to freaking work. Compare this with e.g. Dell's offerings, which need special drivers that you can only get from Dell, meaning that if you have (for example) an Inspiron 5150 and you don't have the system's driver CD, then you have to download the drivers from the Dell site, burn them on CD, and load them on your Inspiron that way. It will also hopefully avoid (rather unusual) hardware/software interoperation problems.
Another example: my Inspiron 5150 couldn't connect to a friend's wireless network if I was letting Windows manage my wireless networking, but it worked fine if I let Broadcom's utility manage it - a strange problem that took me a while to figure out. After I got home though, I found that I couldn't connect to my own network if Broadcom's utility was in charge, but rather I had to let Windows be in charge. A month or so later, I reformatted for whatever reason, and afterwards, I could only connect to my home network with Broadcom's utility, and my friend's only if Windows was managing. Idiotic problems like this are one of the issues Centrino is meant to avoid.
Secondly is their ViiV platform. Any 'ViiV' system will be dual-core, have gigabit ethernet, and have a remote control and wireless networking. They will also have Intel's new technology that lets a system power on/off in seconds (after an initial boot), probably like hibernate mode on Windows systems.
Intel wants to get away from being a chip manufacturer, because if they're just making chips, it's easy to switch from Intel to AMD to VIA and back. With Intel making entire platforms, then it's not so easy - if people start shopping for 'Centrino' laptops (which is what Intel is hoping for), then they won't be buying AMD laptops, whereas if people buy 'Windows' laptops, they could well end up with a Via C3 system, which doesn't help Intel at all.
I went to Toronto (actually Yorkdale) for a conference this past September, and I arrived in town at my hotel room at about 11 PM on a Tuesday. Bored stiff since no one else I knew was in town yet, I went across the street to get a latte at the Yorkdale shopping centre, in which, to my great joy, I discovered an Apple store.
As I said, it was before noon on a Tuesday, and the mall was dead. I probably saw less than a hundred customers wandering around the mall, and for the size of the place, that's not much... except for the Apple store. The Apple store alone probably had about fifty people in it, which was above the comfortable maximum for that size of store. It was the single busiest place in the mall as far as I could tell, and that was impressive.
So yes, Apple stores really *are* that busy, and if you've seen lineups at Christmas in any other stores (e.g. Electronics Boutique), then you'll understand how bad it can really be.
That sounds almost as cool as the cellular Interac terminals that TD Canada Trust has had for years. Now pizza deliveries show up at your door, swipe your bank card, you put in your PIN, and it authorises over the cellular network. Within a few seconds you have your receipt and your pizza, and no need for cash. Talk about handy.
Funny, I use Thunderbird, Mail.app, and Horde as well, and I don't have that worry either. How? Simple, I just use IMAP. Now I can access my e-mail from anywhere, AND I get a nice interface for when I have one of my own computers around. Imagine that!
Marge: "You speak English!" Kang: "Actually, I'm speaking Rigelian, but by an amazing coincidence, the two languages are exactly the same."
Re:Advances/Alternative to the server
on
PHP 5.1.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
In fact, there was a rumor that Zend bought and killed http://sourceforge.net/projects/turck-mmcache/, the best accelerator out there because it competed with their commercial product.
What happened was that Zend hired the author of turck-mmcache because they wanted his expertise on THEIR project. I don't think that's entirely unfair. The reason that Turck is pretty much dead at this point is that no one else understands 1) The Zend engine internals, and 2) The author's code nearly as well as the author did.
1. Yes, 802.11 breaks the frequency into 12 channels, and the router is set to a channel when configured. 2. Clients are presented a list - in OS X, I get a drop-down from the Airport menu; in Windows XP, you can 'Show available wireless networks' from the taskbar icon. 3. Theoretically, 12 routers can operate in the same location at the same time, but realistically, you tend to get interference from routers in neighbouring channels. Thus the optimal situation would be 'every odd' or 'every even' (e.g. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11), though it's entirely possible to have 'waste' (e.g. 1, 4, 7, 10) so less networks are available.
We have had a wireless network in our office for the last few months, and it's been working great, but last week when I went into the conference room, my signal completely disappeared. Come to find out that everyone and their dog is setting up wireless access points, and no one cares what channel they're on, so if I'm not in the same room as mine, I get nothing. Had to change the channel six times before I got one that worked well. Sigh. Maybe it's time to go to 802.11a after all.
WMV is not (currently) subject to any content royalties as long as you're using a licensed encoder and player. And it comes pre-installed with Media Player 9 or later, and is available for earlier players in a simple codec pack.
And cannot be played on Linux without using the Windows.dll files, and cannot be played on OS X unless you use Windows Media Player for Mac, which is the single worst media playing application I've ever used on any platform.
Please, please don't use WMV, or you'll be locked in. I would rather pay for MPEG4 than use WMV for free.
OS X uses BSD under a microkernel I think but my experience is that it is slow and the tests I've seen have shown that Linux performs a lot better on it than OS X (no idea if that was due to microkernel use).
The OS X kernel is a different situation. Darwin is a mixture of microkernel and monolithic, as is (for example) Linux. In Linux, a lot of things (like device configuration, etc.) get done in userspace by daemons using a kernel interface, which means the kernel need only contain the code necessary to initialize the device. Darwin's kernel (xnu), however, is a more complex design in terms of overall design (though the internals may be less complex - I'm not a kernel developer), and is derived from Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5.0.
Mach provides xnu with kernel threads, message-passing (for IPC), memory management (including protected memory and VM), kernel debugging, realtimeness, and console I/O. It also enables the use of the Mach-O binary format, which allows one binary to contain code for multiple architectures (e.g. x86 and PPC). In fact, when I installed OpenDarwin quite a while ago, all the binaries that came with it were dual-architecture-enabled, meaning I could mount the same drive on PPC or x86 and execute them (which is kind of neat).
The BSD kernel provides (obviously) the BSD layer, as well as POSIX, the process model, security policies, UIDs, networking, VFS (with filesystem-independant journalling), permissions, SysV IPC, the crypto framework, and some primitives.
On top of all that is IOKit, the driver framework. It uses a subset of C++, and the OO design allows faster development with less code, and easier debugging as well. It is multi-threaded, SMP-safe, and allows for hot-plugging and dynamic configuration, and most interestingly of all, some drivers can be written to run in userspace, providing stability in the case of a crash.
Now, as to your comment about performance, it is possible you are referring to the tests done using MySQL a while back, which shows MySQL performance as being (as I recall) abysmal compared to Linux on the same hardware. The problem with that test is that MySQL uses functions that tell the kernel to flush writes to disk. These functions are supposed to block so that the program can't continue until the writes are done and the data is stored on the platter. On OS X, this is exactly what happens, and every time MySQL requests data be flushed, the thread doing the flushing has to wait until the data is on the platter (or at the very least, in the drive's write cache). On Linux, this function returns instantly, as Linux (apparently) assumes that hard drives and power supplies are infallible, and obviously if you're that concerned about your data, get a UPS.
It should be noted that MySQL, in the online manual, strongly recommend turning that feature off for production systems, forcing Linux to block until the write is completed, and lowering performance. I would be interested to see a benchmark comparing the two with this configuration.
This discrepancy in the way Linux handles flush requests vs. the way OS X handles them gives a noticable drop in performance in a standard MySQL situation. I am told that the version that ships with OS X Server 10.4 is modified so as to increase performance while keeping reliability. Unfortunately, I cannot confirm this at this point.
Actually, if you read the cheque that PA is donating, it is a cheque from 'Penny Arcade, Inc.', the Seattle-based business that runs Penny Arcade and related goodness. It's hard to make money doing things like this if you don't have a corporate shell under which to work.
What amazes me is that they had $10,000 lying around that they could donate. Pretty amazing, I had no idea they were doing that well for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
That's nothing, these are just the reasons quoted in the writeup. The actual statistics from the article add up to 141.18%. I can understand being 2% off maybe, due to rounding, but I can't see any reason for a rounding error of 41.18%.
And what's worse, our broadband in Canada isn't even that impressive compared to other countries. While I pay $50CDN/mo for unmetered 3/0.75 DSL with 8 static IPs and reverse-DNS control, a friend in Sweden has 100/100 through her condo, and 24/1 DSL. She doesn't even pay extra for 24 megabit, they just upgraded her one day for the same price (one of those 'Dear customer, ....' kind of e-mails).
Meanwhile, I still hear about customers in the US that pay $40USD/mo for 512k down. Sory, but it's just plain sad.
MacOS uses the Xnu kernel, which is a different thing from the Mach kernel AND the FreeBSD kernel - it's an amalgam of the two. More info at Wikipedia
I'm looking forward to instancing King Soloman's Mines; That dude's got some phat lewtz. Gotta remember to bring my rifle though!
This is one of the main reasons I stopped playing WoW. I'm a very solitary player, and while I don't mind joining up with two or three people for company, having to schedule end-game content just seems impractical to me. I want to see a massive sprawling, complex dungeon designed for three people, with traps and puzzles and such meant for three people to solve.
Make it challenging, make it complex, make it interesting, but don't make it all colossally huge. I started playing WoW because it was 'the MMORPG for the rest of us', for the people who don't have eight hours a day to devote to dungeons and instances and plotting. I would like to see more 'lone wolf' content for people who can't join a guild and/or commit to certain times to be online and play.
Maybe that's just me though.
Not to nitpick, but the current season is actually Season Nine, though Season Ten has been signed on for 20 episodes.
If you're Steve Jobs, you have to be thinking "OK, if I own 5% of Disney, what will that get me?"
Actually, with Disney's market cap at about $49bn, I guess he'd own more like 15% of disney (or at least, 15% of the outstanding common shares). Not that that would tip the scales entirely, but it would put him in a pretty significant position to effect inertia on the company.
His post makes reference to how Perl 5 was released in 1994, and people were expecting Perl 6 to obsolete everything 'overnight'. 'Perl 5 is great, welcome to 1994, but Perl 6 is going to be out soon, and in order to stay up to date in this fast-paced world of technology, you'll need to learn Perl 6 before you're done learning Perl 5' sort of thing.
The 10 years the OP is referring to is the 10 (now 11, nearing 12) years since the release of Perl 5, without any major updates to the language (other than a sane versioning scheme).
A decently packaged dual-processor laptop for Windows XP for $2000 doesn't sound like a bad deal to me.
As much as I hate to counter my Apple-centric views in a public forum, I'm obliged to point out that the Dell Store Canada (NOT the US store) is selling the Inspiron 9400 - a laptop with the same price as the Macbook, but with a (marginally) better configuration.
Anyone know why the Dell Store US seems to not be aware of this laptop? I would think they'd want to push this pretty hard with all the fanfare around Apple's new system, but as far as I've seen, no one's mentioned this yet.
It's practicality. They want their content easily accessible to the masses, so they need to use a format that's going to be supported by most people already. Hence, Windows Media. *everyone* has WMP, so it's the obvious solution. Forcing people to download something to listen to your content is impractical, and reduces the number of people watching your media.
Now, however, Quicktime is getting a lot more popular. Everyone with iTunes has Quicktime, and every Mac user as well. It's not popular enough that it's practical to use, but it's getting there.
As to why they don't use open standards? Because there's no simple way to stream XviD/Ogg streams to the masses. Forcing people to download a CODEC isn't any more practical than forcing them to download another player, and I haven't seen any drop-in solutions for streaming either of those formats or any other.
Personally, I wish people would start streaming H.264, and then everyone wins (not to mention it's great compression and great quality).
1) "But you can turn it off!" - And here I thought it was about default settings and opt-in. Didn't we (users) already fight these battles with Windows Media Player and Real?
Yes, that's right, because Apple's hidden this 'feature' somewhere where the average user won't find it. There is a hidden option to turn it off, but what user is honestly going to stumble across that, even when they're looking for it?
Let's be realistic. It's pretty much impossible to notice this 'mini-store', especially on a resolution like mine, and everyone *I* know reacted the same as I did when I saw it - 'how do I turn it off?' For people with actual disposable income, this might actually be a great bonus.
I think that most people will tend to turn this off pretty fast, as it's not exactly subtle, and it takes up a significant amount of real estate. Anyone who doesn't explicitly want this is going to turn it off pretty fast. Compare this to RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, that have a small checkbox on an innocuous preferences page, which is the only way anyone would ever know (other than reading overblown sensationalism on Slashdot).
Can we be realistic, just for once? Please?
The ergonomically designed iTunes interface hides nothing from the user and shows any and all pertinent information at the briefest glance.
Truer than you know - the 'malware' is actually iTunes suggesting similar music when you click on a track, which displays in the Ministore pane. If you turn off the Mini-store, then no data is sent. Hence, your statement is correct. It *isn't* hiding it from the user, and it *does* show pertinent information. Neat huh?
They have been focusing on platforms for a while now. Take a look at their Centrino and as an example.
Centrino certification means that you have specific chipsets, processors, and wireless controllers - meaning that you know it's going to freaking work. Compare this with e.g. Dell's offerings, which need special drivers that you can only get from Dell, meaning that if you have (for example) an Inspiron 5150 and you don't have the system's driver CD, then you have to download the drivers from the Dell site, burn them on CD, and load them on your Inspiron that way. It will also hopefully avoid (rather unusual) hardware/software interoperation problems.
Another example: my Inspiron 5150 couldn't connect to a friend's wireless network if I was letting Windows manage my wireless networking, but it worked fine if I let Broadcom's utility manage it - a strange problem that took me a while to figure out. After I got home though, I found that I couldn't connect to my own network if Broadcom's utility was in charge, but rather I had to let Windows be in charge. A month or so later, I reformatted for whatever reason, and afterwards, I could only connect to my home network with Broadcom's utility, and my friend's only if Windows was managing. Idiotic problems like this are one of the issues Centrino is meant to avoid.
Secondly is their ViiV platform. Any 'ViiV' system will be dual-core, have gigabit ethernet, and have a remote control and wireless networking. They will also have Intel's new technology that lets a system power on/off in seconds (after an initial boot), probably like hibernate mode on Windows systems.
Intel wants to get away from being a chip manufacturer, because if they're just making chips, it's easy to switch from Intel to AMD to VIA and back. With Intel making entire platforms, then it's not so easy - if people start shopping for 'Centrino' laptops (which is what Intel is hoping for), then they won't be buying AMD laptops, whereas if people buy 'Windows' laptops, they could well end up with a Via C3 system, which doesn't help Intel at all.
I went to Toronto (actually Yorkdale) for a conference this past September, and I arrived in town at my hotel room at about 11 PM on a Tuesday. Bored stiff since no one else I knew was in town yet, I went across the street to get a latte at the Yorkdale shopping centre, in which, to my great joy, I discovered an Apple store.
As I said, it was before noon on a Tuesday, and the mall was dead. I probably saw less than a hundred customers wandering around the mall, and for the size of the place, that's not much... except for the Apple store. The Apple store alone probably had about fifty people in it, which was above the comfortable maximum for that size of store. It was the single busiest place in the mall as far as I could tell, and that was impressive.
So yes, Apple stores really *are* that busy, and if you've seen lineups at Christmas in any other stores (e.g. Electronics Boutique), then you'll understand how bad it can really be.
That sounds almost as cool as the cellular Interac terminals that TD Canada Trust has had for years. Now pizza deliveries show up at your door, swipe your bank card, you put in your PIN, and it authorises over the cellular network. Within a few seconds you have your receipt and your pizza, and no need for cash. Talk about handy.
Funny, I use Thunderbird, Mail.app, and Horde as well, and I don't have that worry either. How? Simple, I just use IMAP. Now I can access my e-mail from anywhere, AND I get a nice interface for when I have one of my own computers around. Imagine that!
It works in Safari though....
Marge: "You speak English!"
Kang: "Actually, I'm speaking Rigelian, but by an amazing coincidence, the two languages are exactly the same."
In fact, there was a rumor that Zend bought and killed http://sourceforge.net/projects/turck-mmcache/, the best accelerator out there because it competed with their commercial product.
What happened was that Zend hired the author of turck-mmcache because they wanted his expertise on THEIR project. I don't think that's entirely unfair. The reason that Turck is pretty much dead at this point is that no one else understands 1) The Zend engine internals, and 2) The author's code nearly as well as the author did.
Here's Penny Arcade's take on the issue.
That link will probably only work until Friday. I would have linked to the permanant link, but that, of course, does not work (at least, not yet).
1. Yes, 802.11 breaks the frequency into 12 channels, and the router is set to a channel when configured.
2. Clients are presented a list - in OS X, I get a drop-down from the Airport menu; in Windows XP, you can 'Show available wireless networks' from the taskbar icon.
3. Theoretically, 12 routers can operate in the same location at the same time, but realistically, you tend to get interference from routers in neighbouring channels. Thus the optimal situation would be 'every odd' or 'every even' (e.g. 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11), though it's entirely possible to have 'waste' (e.g. 1, 4, 7, 10) so less networks are available.
We have had a wireless network in our office for the last few months, and it's been working great, but last week when I went into the conference room, my signal completely disappeared. Come to find out that everyone and their dog is setting up wireless access points, and no one cares what channel they're on, so if I'm not in the same room as mine, I get nothing. Had to change the channel six times before I got one that worked well. Sigh. Maybe it's time to go to 802.11a after all.
WMV is not (currently) subject to any content royalties as long as you're using a licensed encoder and player. And it comes pre-installed with Media Player 9 or later, and is available for earlier players in a simple codec pack.
.dll files, and cannot be played on OS X unless you use Windows Media Player for Mac, which is the single worst media playing application I've ever used on any platform.
And cannot be played on Linux without using the Windows
Please, please don't use WMV, or you'll be locked in. I would rather pay for MPEG4 than use WMV for free.
Shouldn't that be 'underlords'?
OS X uses BSD under a microkernel I think but my experience is that it is slow and the tests I've seen have shown that Linux performs a lot better on it than OS X (no idea if that was due to microkernel use).
The OS X kernel is a different situation. Darwin is a mixture of microkernel and monolithic, as is (for example) Linux. In Linux, a lot of things (like device configuration, etc.) get done in userspace by daemons using a kernel interface, which means the kernel need only contain the code necessary to initialize the device. Darwin's kernel (xnu), however, is a more complex design in terms of overall design (though the internals may be less complex - I'm not a kernel developer), and is derived from Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5.0.
Mach provides xnu with kernel threads, message-passing (for IPC), memory management (including protected memory and VM), kernel debugging, realtimeness, and console I/O. It also enables the use of the Mach-O binary format, which allows one binary to contain code for multiple architectures (e.g. x86 and PPC). In fact, when I installed OpenDarwin quite a while ago, all the binaries that came with it were dual-architecture-enabled, meaning I could mount the same drive on PPC or x86 and execute them (which is kind of neat).
The BSD kernel provides (obviously) the BSD layer, as well as POSIX, the process model, security policies, UIDs, networking, VFS (with filesystem-independant journalling), permissions, SysV IPC, the crypto framework, and some primitives.
On top of all that is IOKit, the driver framework. It uses a subset of C++, and the OO design allows faster development with less code, and easier debugging as well. It is multi-threaded, SMP-safe, and allows for hot-plugging and dynamic configuration, and most interestingly of all, some drivers can be written to run in userspace, providing stability in the case of a crash.
Now, as to your comment about performance, it is possible you are referring to the tests done using MySQL a while back, which shows MySQL performance as being (as I recall) abysmal compared to Linux on the same hardware. The problem with that test is that MySQL uses functions that tell the kernel to flush writes to disk. These functions are supposed to block so that the program can't continue until the writes are done and the data is stored on the platter. On OS X, this is exactly what happens, and every time MySQL requests data be flushed, the thread doing the flushing has to wait until the data is on the platter (or at the very least, in the drive's write cache). On Linux, this function returns instantly, as Linux (apparently) assumes that hard drives and power supplies are infallible, and obviously if you're that concerned about your data, get a UPS.
It should be noted that MySQL, in the online manual, strongly recommend turning that feature off for production systems, forcing Linux to block until the write is completed, and lowering performance. I would be interested to see a benchmark comparing the two with this configuration.
This discrepancy in the way Linux handles flush requests vs. the way OS X handles them gives a noticable drop in performance in a standard MySQL situation. I am told that the version that ships with OS X Server 10.4 is modified so as to increase performance while keeping reliability. Unfortunately, I cannot confirm this at this point.
Actually, if you read the cheque that PA is donating, it is a cheque from 'Penny Arcade, Inc.', the Seattle-based business that runs Penny Arcade and related goodness. It's hard to make money doing things like this if you don't have a corporate shell under which to work.
What amazes me is that they had $10,000 lying around that they could donate. Pretty amazing, I had no idea they were doing that well for themselves.