There are some flaws with the math, but the comparison is fair. His point is that buying a hybrid to save money is like buying shoes on sale to "save" money. The most economical alternative is to simply keep driving your car. I hear countless people saying that they would never drive a car more than 5 years old because of the lack of a warantee. That's stupid. Old, well kept cars are always the most economical choice. The only people trying to convince you otherwise are selling cars.
The "apples-to-apples" here is the fact that they are both valid and complete solutions to a transportation problem. No one is twisting your arm to go out and buy a new car -- the fact that you aren't making payments any longer is a good thing, not a problem to be fixed.
Please tell me how to implement MD5 in T-SQL. How about writing to a file? Calling an XML Web Service? I'm sure all of these are possible in T-SQL, but they are simple 2 line jobs in C#.
C# and the.Net framework will be a wonderful addition to SPs, but not a replacement. I see.Net used mostly for Functions and simple one-row SPs. SQL will still be king for set operations.
I work with a piece of software that charges everywhere they can. First, you buy the software. Then you pay annual "maintenance". That does include upgrades, but it adds up to the original purchase price in five years, so it is essentially forced upgrades at full price. If you don't subscribe to maintenance, no fixes, no tech support, and no upgrades. If you have a lapse in maintenance, you have to pay back to the lapse point if you want to re-subscribe.
If you want to write a program that accesses the data through the objects they provide, that costs extra. They even claim ownership of the data in your database server (the DB server license is not included in the product cost) and want a license fee if you access that data directly.
For resellers and support professionals, you MUST be certified in order to install or configure the software. This is enforced through security hardware installed on servers and configuration workstations and with challenge numbers that make you call support in order to get the product to work. In order to be certified, not only do you need to pass a test, be you MUST attend their $2000 a week training (for two weeks). If you want support on custom programming, you MUST have attended their class or they won't even answer your question.
Any time anyone finds a workaround that provides alternative access to data without costing extra money (above the normal license fee, I'm not talking about getting anything for free), but is against the "spirit" of the license, the next version has some kind of feature to breaks that workaround. Yes, this company spends licensing money adding features that break customer extensions to the product, just so they can sell it back to them.
BTW, this software is not sold as "subscription based software", but with a traditional license. Gouging customers is not new, and is not limited to Microsoft.
This kind of model works because it lowers the initial cost of the software and makes it look good to decision-making committees. But, it's really bait-and-switch marketing.
Seriously. For nearly every case, if there are two available pieces of software (OSS or not), most people will choose the one that is more feature rich. Sure, those in a mission critical situation or the poor people that get to install and support the software long-term will demand quality and maintainability. But, those people are far outnumbered by the masses that use software casually.
So, given a limited set of resources, quality will always be just barely up to what people will tolerate. Yes, even in open source software. Example: Mozilla Thunderbird -- They have a feature schedule out right now. About half of the planned features are in the current build. Do you think they'll wait until the code is 99.99999% error free in all situations before comitting time to add features? They have no deadlines, no financial burdens, no one telling them to ship the software. Yet, they will ship it. If they don't, their user base will entirely desert them and switch to a horrible, buggy, alternative (probably Outlook Express). This is simply because people demand cool crap. That's why they buy half the crap they buy, that's why the US has a $250 billion trade deficit with China. We collectively love crap.
I've done a lot of performance testing and taking batch x by submitting it raw vs. putting it in a procedure have only very small differences in performance. The more processing is done, the smaller the difference. I've even seen cases where preparing and executing ad-hoc SQL is slightly faster than using an existing SP.
The only time SPs are significantly faster than ad-hoc SQL are when the two are different. Every database worth a crap today implements ad-hoc batch caching. That means that SQL blocks from applications execute exactly as if they were pre-compliled SPs.
As for sharing code, that causes as many problems as it fixes. When code is implemented as SPs and called from multiple apps, then a change to an SP can potentially have compatibility problems with any of the applications. Nothing is guaranteed to work. If the business code were in a seperate business layer, then maybe the change wouldn't be instantly effective in all applications, BUT, all application would be guaranteed not to break until you visit them. Test each app and patch. If you haven't figured out how to effectively deploy a middle-tier fix, that's your own fault.
I fight this battle every day at work. We implement WAY too much code in SPs. It takes far longer to build logic into an SP han to put in in compiled code in a good IDE. Almost every developer is mores likely to make an error in SQL than in a procedural language. Also, SQL debugging is never as easy as native debugging.
Architecturally, a good business layer built as Web Services is far superior to a business layer built as SPs. Better passing semantics, better language choices, more portability. If you don't like disconnected processing, pick your favorite three tier technology -- COM+,.Net Remoting, CORBA, J2EE, etc.
In 1996, SPs were invaluable. Today, they are a great tool, but not necessary for either good performance or good security.
Some of what you have said is true. For example, WiFi leeching will deprive your neighbor of available bandwidth and bypassing your electric meter will put more load on the power company's generator but give them no revenue. But the others are infractions other than stealing. The unemployment and insurance examples were fraud. With fraud you go to jail for lying, not for taking.
However, getting free cable and free music is another form of crime. It is copyright infringement. It is a system put in place to make sure that the business of creating non-physical property will continue to be a viable business. Laws are created with that in mind and only that. For example, if you rip the next Harry Potter book to PDF and sell it on the Internet, you are guilty of copyright infringement. However, if you rip The Great Gatsby and sell it on the Internet, you are not doing anything illegal. If it was cut and dried theft, why isn't the second illegal? If you want to get really weird, the US is working on agreements where a person can copy something in Germany that was produced in the UK, sell it to someone in China and be extradited to the US for a crime. It seems that shortly, you may have to follow the copyright laws of hundreds of nations simultaneously.
The way you seem to think this country works is that a bunch of smart guys make laws and we follow them. Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Our laws are made by a feedback system designed to make sure the people get what they want. Some people are artists, some are music execs, and some are neither. When the people think the laws are tipping too far in one direction, we have a few choices. One, we can vote. However, you only get to vote for four nationally influential positions (President, your two Senators and your Representative). Also, sometimes there is not a clear cut good choice or you win on some issues and not others. So, voting isn't a perfect system. If things get out of hand, we can lodge some type of protest. The only way to directly get a law changed is in court. So, you have to break a law that you believe is unfair and defend yourself until you're blue in the face. Really, that is our responsibility as citizens. However, don't do it on a whim or you'll end up in jail pretty quickly.
Those who are going to court against the RIAA are essentially soldiers in a campaign to put a little more sense in intellectual property law. They are brave souls risking very high stakes. Every time they lose, it's like taking a bullet for their cause. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of them. Those taking the settlements are draft-dodging to Canada. If I were sent a letter from the RIAA, I'd probably settle. But that's because I'm generally a play-it-safe kind of guy.
So please, get off your high horse and realize that these are real issues and that American law is always being adjusted. Also realize that CDs cost what they do because of a massive price-fixing system that is being protected with our own court system. With the Internet, the middle man really isn't that useful. Instead of making themselves useful in a new economy, the RIAA's members are trying to scare the new economy out of existence.
Think about this -- if there were a law on the books that 30% of the country regularly broke, would you think that the country was suddenly tranformed into lawlessness, or would you think that the law simply doesn't fit the way we live? If it doesn't fit the way we live, why is it our law?
...is that the article was posted yesterday. Is Computerworld really posting blatantly false information? I realize that it was in a blog, but that's no excuse for fear-mongering by a regular contributor (he's a featured blogger there and also contributes to the non-blog section of the site). Shouldn't any self-respecting editor consider firing a journlist who posts a false (at least nowadays) story without checking his sources.
I just ran HD Tach on my 7200rpm 60GB Hitachi 7K60 in my laptop and the Seagate at 5400rpm nearly matched it. I had the same 40MB/s max, 33MB/s average read speed and a slightly faster 14.6ms seek time. Most likely the Seagate can keep up because of the higher density. Even though it spins fewer times in a second, the heads still see the same amount of data.
So, this drive is actually impressive. I paid $200 for my 60GB, I'd consider another $50 for double the space at the same speed a very good deal.
Also, a few people were wondering what you'd do with 120GB of space other than rip DVDs. I need it for what I do with my laptop. I often find myself showing a customer a solution on my laptop and needing to run several virtual computers, a Linux mail server for my mail archiving product, two MS Exchanges server as sample senders and receivers (to show that the product will work with their mail system), and a Windows-based document management system that we've imported the archived mail to. That's 10 to 12GB of drive space just to do a demo.
I don't get it. I say that in THIS list, the money comes from hardware manufacturers and not database vendors and you ask me where the money comes from.
If HP could get a better ranking by switching to MySQL, they would in a heartbeat. No one would have to give them a dime. They'd even pay MySQL AB tens of thousands to set it up as best as possible.
BTW, MySQL is developed by an actual company with a sales force and a marketing team. They'll either give it to you under a GPL license or sell it to you under a far less restrictive license.
This isn't a scalability benchmark, it's price/performance. Some of the system on the list are pretty modest. One of the HP systems is only a $4,000 server with a small truckload of drives attached. If you aren't at least in that ballpark, you shouldn't be worried about which is best because any server you'd put together would perform just fine.
As for money, it was all HP and Dell's money that made up this list. Both of them would do whatever it takes to make a system that would outperform the other. MySQL and PostgreSQL wouldn't have to cough up a dime, they'd just have to be faster on the same hardware.
This is a price/performance benchmark. It is mostly supported by hardware manufacturers, so it's less likely to be influenced by Microsoft's or Oracle's bank accounts. Notice that in a price/performance benchmark, free DBMS don't even show up. The most obvious conclusion to be drawn is that free choices require more expensive hardware to get to the same performance level. I'm quite certain that if HP could leapfrog over Dell by using MySQL or PosgreSQL, they would. Also note that RedHat and SUSE made it on the list. They aren't anti-open source.
Several proposed DRM techniques use watermarking where the device will recognize the restrictions using data embedded into the actual sound. If they ever get this working well, it will eliminate the "analog hole".
Signitures are NOT protection of any kind. And the above issues don't make signitures any less relevant. So what if YOU don't have a proxy. The security professional investigating the virus/malware issue does. He will be able to get the signiture even if the virus wipes out the infected computer. That's more than we have today. Also, certificate systems have feature to fix 2 through 5 above. Al certificate have a URL in them to a Certificate Revocation List. If a certificate is found to have been issued in error, it can be revoked even if it is in the wild. If the Cerificate Authority (eg. Verisign) is compromised, a security patch can take it out of the root certificate list and all certs issued by it become invalid.
Certificates are a wonderful code source authentication system. They are not a code security system.
A good lock on a bad door won't keep burglers out..... does that mean good locks are worthless?
Well, C2 seems to want to tell you who they are. Either they are operating just barely within legal limits, aren't afraid of prosecution, or have obtained a bogus certificate.
If they are within legal limits, there's nothing we can do.
If they aren't afraid of prosecution, then if the software is deemed a security threat by Microsoft, they can simply revoke it with the next Windows security update.
If they have a bogus certificate, then the issuer will put it on their Certificate Revocation List and it will stop working. Interestingly, IE is the only browser I know of that checks the CRL for certiciates it uses.
Those are some of the points of accountability. Signitures don't fix any problems, but they let other fix them effectively. It's like logging onto a network. If you force everyone to log on, security problems don't magically go away. But if you let everyone use the system anonymously, security problems will never go away.
That's an implementation issue. Who says the firewall or proxy can't log code signitures?
Plus, malicious code that only infects select few systems and erases its tracks isn't the real problem in the wild right now. The worst malware is widespread and easy to find. If it were signed, you'd see the sig.
What code signing is for
on
Do You Code Sign?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As stated numerous times, code signing is not designed to let a user decide whether code is good or bad. But, for signed code, there is a way to track it back and make the author accountable. If all of today's viruses were signed, most of the authors would be caught. Even if they were signed in a fraudulent manner, there would be a thread to trace back. Enough threads and a good investigator will catch the bad guy.
So, code signing is a sign of software good-faith. Everyone should show that they are distributing software as something more than an Anonymous Coward. It always disappoints me that major hardware manufacturers won't even sign their device drives.
Sorry I led you a little astray..... I live 400 miles from New York City, near Buffalo, NY. For comparison, a Mechanical Engineer working for one of our local big automotive companies like Delphi Thermal Systems or GM Powertrain, with a four year degree and 10 years in would be lucky to crack $60K. Average Computer Professional salary - $41,000 a year (Source -- Buffalo News survey from last winter). You can buy a 1/3 acre with a 2600 sq. ft. house on it in a good school district for $150,000 (however, school taxes on the $150,000 house would be $3,000 a year!!!).
Also, just because our teachers make 80K, doesn't mean starting salaries are higher. It's part of the beaurocracy. If you were a new teacher in Western New York, the only jobs you'd find would be in the cities of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, or Lockport, or in a very rural community. Now matter how good you are, you won't get a big wealthy suburb. After you put some time in and kiss enough Teachers Union ass, then you can get into the suburbs. So, people don't make it to suburban schools until they've made it pretty far up the pay scale.
In a true capitalist world, the wealthy suburbs would get to pick the cream of the crop. But no one wants to upset the Teachers Union because then we'd need a bizillion babysitters to stay home with the kids when they went on strike. So the Union decides which teachers go where. And believe me, putting the best teachers in the best jobs is NOT a goal of the Teachers Union. Firing bad teachers and replacing them with people who actually care about the kids is also not a goal of the Teachers Union.
You don't get what you pay for. The biggest problem with teachers in suburban New York is the lack of correlation between pay and quality. I don't care what bus fuel costs. 80% of my school tax money goes to teacher salaries. The average teacher salary in my school district is over $80,000 a year. I would be fine with that if I was getting $80,000 people. But, some high-paid teachers are good, some are bad. Some of the best teachers are newer and far under the average.
Here is my favorite shcool system story...
This comes from an ex-teacher who quit over this very issue and came to work as a peer of mine where he could teach BS-free. His school district came up with a new program to add value to the school system and to bring new teachers up to the quality level of experienced teachers. On the surface, this "mentoring" program would allow the best and brightest to share their skills with the new people. Here's how it works... A seasoned teacher gets a $5,000 a year raise to compensate for mentoring a junior teacher. The seasoned teacher gives assignments to the junior teacher and reports back to the district on progress.
Reality..... A teacher with a lot of tenure and good political contacts gets a newbie to boss around. Old teacher gets a $5,000 PERMANENT RAISE. Old teacher gives homework to young teacher to grade. Young teacher does all the work. Old teacher coasts until retirement. If the old teacher gets tired of the young teacher bitching, he declares the young teacher "mentored" and gets a new lackey AND GETS ANOTHER $5,000 RAISE on top of the previous one.
I'm certain there are good teachers in New York. But I'm also certain that there are a lot of really bad ones making better money than 80% of the community. The only criteria to make a lot of money is to put up with the BS and kiss ass. Many good teachers run screaming from the system long before they make and real money.
That's what TurboCNC takes care of for me. It works through the parallel port so it can truely move two axes simultaneously. It cuts very nice circles and angles. No noticeable stepping on the edges. Since it's stepper based, there will always be a very tiny amount of roughness on angle cuts. But, a servo-based solution is out of my reach at the moment. I'm sure the above poster is working on high quality production stuff that is far better than what's in my basement. However, my stuff is good enough for any hobbyist.
It works more than well enough for me. I can hold better than 0.001 inch tolerance. BTW, I run it on a 200MHz Pentium. All the motor control stuff is home-made, based on L298 motor drivers.
The real trick is to do it from DOS. If you use windows then the timing has to be done in a real-time external box. DOS is already real-time.
It's no where near as exciting as it sounds. Right now I have a regular 3-axis mill with a rotary table as a fourth axis. The steppers draw up to 3A per coil, making 24A total. My fifth axis would be a second rotary table mounted 90 degrees on the first. It would make really nice chamfers without changing tools.
I use PC power supplies for other stuff because they are VERY cheap when compared to general purpose power supplies from electronics places. 66A at 12V will run a nice little 5-axis home built CNC mill. The "proper" power supply for something like this would be way out of my budget.
Notice that it is a 33.3333MHz crystal. This implies an accuracy of around 0.00005 MHz and is fairly typical of crystal oscillators. You can also buy a 33.3330MHz (not 33.333Mhz, but actually 33.3330MHz) one from DigiKey. Seriously, they sell them that close together.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to hang the power supply brick out the window in the winter to get more run time from a C64 about 20 years ago.
There are some flaws with the math, but the comparison is fair. His point is that buying a hybrid to save money is like buying shoes on sale to "save" money. The most economical alternative is to simply keep driving your car. I hear countless people saying that they would never drive a car more than 5 years old because of the lack of a warantee. That's stupid. Old, well kept cars are always the most economical choice. The only people trying to convince you otherwise are selling cars.
The "apples-to-apples" here is the fact that they are both valid and complete solutions to a transportation problem. No one is twisting your arm to go out and buy a new car -- the fact that you aren't making payments any longer is a good thing, not a problem to be fixed.
Please tell me how to implement MD5 in T-SQL. How about writing to a file? Calling an XML Web Service? I'm sure all of these are possible in T-SQL, but they are simple 2 line jobs in C#.
.Net framework will be a wonderful addition to SPs, but not a replacement. I see .Net used mostly for Functions and simple one-row SPs. SQL will still be king for set operations.
C# and the
I work with a piece of software that charges everywhere they can. First, you buy the software. Then you pay annual "maintenance". That does include upgrades, but it adds up to the original purchase price in five years, so it is essentially forced upgrades at full price. If you don't subscribe to maintenance, no fixes, no tech support, and no upgrades. If you have a lapse in maintenance, you have to pay back to the lapse point if you want to re-subscribe.
If you want to write a program that accesses the data through the objects they provide, that costs extra. They even claim ownership of the data in your database server (the DB server license is not included in the product cost) and want a license fee if you access that data directly.
For resellers and support professionals, you MUST be certified in order to install or configure the software. This is enforced through security hardware installed on servers and configuration workstations and with challenge numbers that make you call support in order to get the product to work. In order to be certified, not only do you need to pass a test, be you MUST attend their $2000 a week training (for two weeks). If you want support on custom programming, you MUST have attended their class or they won't even answer your question.
Any time anyone finds a workaround that provides alternative access to data without costing extra money (above the normal license fee, I'm not talking about getting anything for free), but is against the "spirit" of the license, the next version has some kind of feature to breaks that workaround. Yes, this company spends licensing money adding features that break customer extensions to the product, just so they can sell it back to them.
BTW, this software is not sold as "subscription based software", but with a traditional license. Gouging customers is not new, and is not limited to Microsoft.
This kind of model works because it lowers the initial cost of the software and makes it look good to decision-making committees. But, it's really bait-and-switch marketing.
It's asked nicely first. 20 seconds later, you get the "End Now" button in the dialog box. If you click it, the process address space is torn down.
people demand that it sucks.
Seriously. For nearly every case, if there are two available pieces of software (OSS or not), most people will choose the one that is more feature rich. Sure, those in a mission critical situation or the poor people that get to install and support the software long-term will demand quality and maintainability. But, those people are far outnumbered by the masses that use software casually.
So, given a limited set of resources, quality will always be just barely up to what people will tolerate. Yes, even in open source software. Example: Mozilla Thunderbird -- They have a feature schedule out right now. About half of the planned features are in the current build. Do you think they'll wait until the code is 99.99999% error free in all situations before comitting time to add features? They have no deadlines, no financial burdens, no one telling them to ship the software. Yet, they will ship it. If they don't, their user base will entirely desert them and switch to a horrible, buggy, alternative (probably Outlook Express). This is simply because people demand cool crap. That's why they buy half the crap they buy, that's why the US has a $250 billion trade deficit with China. We collectively love crap.
I've done a lot of performance testing and taking batch x by submitting it raw vs. putting it in a procedure have only very small differences in performance. The more processing is done, the smaller the difference. I've even seen cases where preparing and executing ad-hoc SQL is slightly faster than using an existing SP.
.Net Remoting, CORBA, J2EE, etc.
The only time SPs are significantly faster than ad-hoc SQL are when the two are different. Every database worth a crap today implements ad-hoc batch caching. That means that SQL blocks from applications execute exactly as if they were pre-compliled SPs.
As for sharing code, that causes as many problems as it fixes. When code is implemented as SPs and called from multiple apps, then a change to an SP can potentially have compatibility problems with any of the applications. Nothing is guaranteed to work. If the business code were in a seperate business layer, then maybe the change wouldn't be instantly effective in all applications, BUT, all application would be guaranteed not to break until you visit them. Test each app and patch. If you haven't figured out how to effectively deploy a middle-tier fix, that's your own fault.
I fight this battle every day at work. We implement WAY too much code in SPs. It takes far longer to build logic into an SP han to put in in compiled code in a good IDE. Almost every developer is mores likely to make an error in SQL than in a procedural language. Also, SQL debugging is never as easy as native debugging.
Architecturally, a good business layer built as Web Services is far superior to a business layer built as SPs. Better passing semantics, better language choices, more portability. If you don't like disconnected processing, pick your favorite three tier technology -- COM+,
In 1996, SPs were invaluable. Today, they are a great tool, but not necessary for either good performance or good security.
Some of what you have said is true. For example, WiFi leeching will deprive your neighbor of available bandwidth and bypassing your electric meter will put more load on the power company's generator but give them no revenue. But the others are infractions other than stealing. The unemployment and insurance examples were fraud. With fraud you go to jail for lying, not for taking.
However, getting free cable and free music is another form of crime. It is copyright infringement. It is a system put in place to make sure that the business of creating non-physical property will continue to be a viable business. Laws are created with that in mind and only that. For example, if you rip the next Harry Potter book to PDF and sell it on the Internet, you are guilty of copyright infringement. However, if you rip The Great Gatsby and sell it on the Internet, you are not doing anything illegal. If it was cut and dried theft, why isn't the second illegal? If you want to get really weird, the US is working on agreements where a person can copy something in Germany that was produced in the UK, sell it to someone in China and be extradited to the US for a crime. It seems that shortly, you may have to follow the copyright laws of hundreds of nations simultaneously.
The way you seem to think this country works is that a bunch of smart guys make laws and we follow them. Well, it's a little more complicated than that. Our laws are made by a feedback system designed to make sure the people get what they want. Some people are artists, some are music execs, and some are neither. When the people think the laws are tipping too far in one direction, we have a few choices. One, we can vote. However, you only get to vote for four nationally influential positions (President, your two Senators and your Representative). Also, sometimes there is not a clear cut good choice or you win on some issues and not others. So, voting isn't a perfect system. If things get out of hand, we can lodge some type of protest. The only way to directly get a law changed is in court. So, you have to break a law that you believe is unfair and defend yourself until you're blue in the face. Really, that is our responsibility as citizens. However, don't do it on a whim or you'll end up in jail pretty quickly.
Those who are going to court against the RIAA are essentially soldiers in a campaign to put a little more sense in intellectual property law. They are brave souls risking very high stakes. Every time they lose, it's like taking a bullet for their cause. Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson would be proud of them. Those taking the settlements are draft-dodging to Canada. If I were sent a letter from the RIAA, I'd probably settle. But that's because I'm generally a play-it-safe kind of guy.
So please, get off your high horse and realize that these are real issues and that American law is always being adjusted. Also realize that CDs cost what they do because of a massive price-fixing system that is being protected with our own court system. With the Internet, the middle man really isn't that useful. Instead of making themselves useful in a new economy, the RIAA's members are trying to scare the new economy out of existence.
Think about this -- if there were a law on the books that 30% of the country regularly broke, would you think that the country was suddenly tranformed into lawlessness, or would you think that the law simply doesn't fit the way we live? If it doesn't fit the way we live, why is it our law?
...is that the article was posted yesterday. Is Computerworld really posting blatantly false information? I realize that it was in a blog, but that's no excuse for fear-mongering by a regular contributor (he's a featured blogger there and also contributes to the non-blog section of the site). Shouldn't any self-respecting editor consider firing a journlist who posts a false (at least nowadays) story without checking his sources.
I just ran HD Tach on my 7200rpm 60GB Hitachi 7K60 in my laptop and the Seagate at 5400rpm nearly matched it. I had the same 40MB/s max, 33MB/s average read speed and a slightly faster 14.6ms seek time. Most likely the Seagate can keep up because of the higher density. Even though it spins fewer times in a second, the heads still see the same amount of data.
So, this drive is actually impressive. I paid $200 for my 60GB, I'd consider another $50 for double the space at the same speed a very good deal.
Also, a few people were wondering what you'd do with 120GB of space other than rip DVDs. I need it for what I do with my laptop. I often find myself showing a customer a solution on my laptop and needing to run several virtual computers, a Linux mail server for my mail archiving product, two MS Exchanges server as sample senders and receivers (to show that the product will work with their mail system), and a Windows-based document management system that we've imported the archived mail to. That's 10 to 12GB of drive space just to do a demo.
I don't get it. I say that in THIS list, the money comes from hardware manufacturers and not database vendors and you ask me where the money comes from.
If HP could get a better ranking by switching to MySQL, they would in a heartbeat. No one would have to give them a dime. They'd even pay MySQL AB tens of thousands to set it up as best as possible.
BTW, MySQL is developed by an actual company with a sales force and a marketing team. They'll either give it to you under a GPL license or sell it to you under a far less restrictive license.
This isn't a scalability benchmark, it's price/performance. Some of the system on the list are pretty modest. One of the HP systems is only a $4,000 server with a small truckload of drives attached. If you aren't at least in that ballpark, you shouldn't be worried about which is best because any server you'd put together would perform just fine.
As for money, it was all HP and Dell's money that made up this list. Both of them would do whatever it takes to make a system that would outperform the other. MySQL and PostgreSQL wouldn't have to cough up a dime, they'd just have to be faster on the same hardware.
Food for thought, but of course not an end to all discussion:e sults.asp
http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_price_perf_r
This is a price/performance benchmark. It is mostly supported by hardware manufacturers, so it's less likely to be influenced by Microsoft's or Oracle's bank accounts. Notice that in a price/performance benchmark, free DBMS don't even show up. The most obvious conclusion to be drawn is that free choices require more expensive hardware to get to the same performance level. I'm quite certain that if HP could leapfrog over Dell by using MySQL or PosgreSQL, they would. Also note that RedHat and SUSE made it on the list. They aren't anti-open source.
Several proposed DRM techniques use watermarking where the device will recognize the restrictions using data embedded into the actual sound. If they ever get this working well, it will eliminate the "analog hole".
Signitures are NOT protection of any kind. And the above issues don't make signitures any less relevant. So what if YOU don't have a proxy. The security professional investigating the virus/malware issue does. He will be able to get the signiture even if the virus wipes out the infected computer. That's more than we have today. Also, certificate systems have feature to fix 2 through 5 above. Al certificate have a URL in them to a Certificate Revocation List. If a certificate is found to have been issued in error, it can be revoked even if it is in the wild. If the Cerificate Authority (eg. Verisign) is compromised, a security patch can take it out of the root certificate list and all certs issued by it become invalid.
Certificates are a wonderful code source authentication system. They are not a code security system.
A good lock on a bad door won't keep burglers out..... does that mean good locks are worthless?
Well, C2 seems to want to tell you who they are. Either they are operating just barely within legal limits, aren't afraid of prosecution, or have obtained a bogus certificate.
If they are within legal limits, there's nothing we can do.
If they aren't afraid of prosecution, then if the software is deemed a security threat by Microsoft, they can simply revoke it with the next Windows security update.
If they have a bogus certificate, then the issuer will put it on their Certificate Revocation List and it will stop working. Interestingly, IE is the only browser I know of that checks the CRL for certiciates it uses.
Those are some of the points of accountability. Signitures don't fix any problems, but they let other fix them effectively. It's like logging onto a network. If you force everyone to log on, security problems don't magically go away. But if you let everyone use the system anonymously, security problems will never go away.
That's an implementation issue. Who says the firewall or proxy can't log code signitures?
Plus, malicious code that only infects select few systems and erases its tracks isn't the real problem in the wild right now. The worst malware is widespread and easy to find. If it were signed, you'd see the sig.
As stated numerous times, code signing is not designed to let a user decide whether code is good or bad. But, for signed code, there is a way to track it back and make the author accountable. If all of today's viruses were signed, most of the authors would be caught. Even if they were signed in a fraudulent manner, there would be a thread to trace back. Enough threads and a good investigator will catch the bad guy.
So, code signing is a sign of software good-faith. Everyone should show that they are distributing software as something more than an Anonymous Coward. It always disappoints me that major hardware manufacturers won't even sign their device drives.
Sorry I led you a little astray..... I live 400 miles from New York City, near Buffalo, NY. For comparison, a Mechanical Engineer working for one of our local big automotive companies like Delphi Thermal Systems or GM Powertrain, with a four year degree and 10 years in would be lucky to crack $60K. Average Computer Professional salary - $41,000 a year (Source -- Buffalo News survey from last winter). You can buy a 1/3 acre with a 2600 sq. ft. house on it in a good school district for $150,000 (however, school taxes on the $150,000 house would be $3,000 a year!!!).
Also, just because our teachers make 80K, doesn't mean starting salaries are higher. It's part of the beaurocracy. If you were a new teacher in Western New York, the only jobs you'd find would be in the cities of Buffalo, Niagara Falls, or Lockport, or in a very rural community. Now matter how good you are, you won't get a big wealthy suburb. After you put some time in and kiss enough Teachers Union ass, then you can get into the suburbs. So, people don't make it to suburban schools until they've made it pretty far up the pay scale.
In a true capitalist world, the wealthy suburbs would get to pick the cream of the crop. But no one wants to upset the Teachers Union because then we'd need a bizillion babysitters to stay home with the kids when they went on strike. So the Union decides which teachers go where. And believe me, putting the best teachers in the best jobs is NOT a goal of the Teachers Union. Firing bad teachers and replacing them with people who actually care about the kids is also not a goal of the Teachers Union.
You don't get what you pay for. The biggest problem with teachers in suburban New York is the lack of correlation between pay and quality. I don't care what bus fuel costs. 80% of my school tax money goes to teacher salaries. The average teacher salary in my school district is over $80,000 a year. I would be fine with that if I was getting $80,000 people. But, some high-paid teachers are good, some are bad. Some of the best teachers are newer and far under the average.
Here is my favorite shcool system story...
This comes from an ex-teacher who quit over this very issue and came to work as a peer of mine where he could teach BS-free. His school district came up with a new program to add value to the school system and to bring new teachers up to the quality level of experienced teachers. On the surface, this "mentoring" program would allow the best and brightest to share their skills with the new people. Here's how it works... A seasoned teacher gets a $5,000 a year raise to compensate for mentoring a junior teacher. The seasoned teacher gives assignments to the junior teacher and reports back to the district on progress.
Reality..... A teacher with a lot of tenure and good political contacts gets a newbie to boss around. Old teacher gets a $5,000 PERMANENT RAISE. Old teacher gives homework to young teacher to grade. Young teacher does all the work. Old teacher coasts until retirement. If the old teacher gets tired of the young teacher bitching, he declares the young teacher "mentored" and gets a new lackey AND GETS ANOTHER $5,000 RAISE on top of the previous one.
I'm certain there are good teachers in New York. But I'm also certain that there are a lot of really bad ones making better money than 80% of the community. The only criteria to make a lot of money is to put up with the BS and kiss ass. Many good teachers run screaming from the system long before they make and real money.
That's what TurboCNC takes care of for me. It works through the parallel port so it can truely move two axes simultaneously. It cuts very nice circles and angles. No noticeable stepping on the edges. Since it's stepper based, there will always be a very tiny amount of roughness on angle cuts. But, a servo-based solution is out of my reach at the moment. I'm sure the above poster is working on high quality production stuff that is far better than what's in my basement. However, my stuff is good enough for any hobbyist.
http://www.dakeng.com/turbocnc.html
It works more than well enough for me. I can hold better than 0.001 inch tolerance. BTW, I run it on a 200MHz Pentium. All the motor control stuff is home-made, based on L298 motor drivers.
The real trick is to do it from DOS. If you use windows then the timing has to be done in a real-time external box. DOS is already real-time.
It's no where near as exciting as it sounds. Right now I have a regular 3-axis mill with a rotary table as a fourth axis. The steppers draw up to 3A per coil, making 24A total. My fifth axis would be a second rotary table mounted 90 degrees on the first. It would make really nice chamfers without changing tools.
I use PC power supplies for other stuff because they are VERY cheap when compared to general purpose power supplies from electronics places. 66A at 12V will run a nice little 5-axis home built CNC mill. The "proper" power supply for something like this would be way out of my budget.
Have you ever bought an oscillator? Here is an example: http://www.digikey.com/scripts/DkSearch/dksus.dll? PName?Name=300-8079-1-ND&Site=US
Notice that it is a 33.3333MHz crystal. This implies an accuracy of around 0.00005 MHz and is fairly typical of crystal oscillators. You can also buy a 33.3330MHz (not 33.333Mhz, but actually 33.3330MHz) one from DigiKey. Seriously, they sell them that close together.