In the SPARC line, the CMT, CoolThreads, Niagara, whatever you want to call them servers have been growing.
When you start from zero it's easy to show some decent growth percentages;-). However, it's not anywhere near enough to justify the amount of investment needed in SPARC as a hardware platform.
Re:Sun's Declining Business == Trolling? Ha.
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 1
Quoting abyolutly nothing doesn't lead to much credibility either.
Hmmmmmm. It's just a pity you couldn't actually talk about what you've quoted and I was never aware that quoting figures trumps discussion.
And if you really really want to see Sun als a SPARC company only (which is way off the mark)...
The problem is that most of their revenue still comes from the incumbant SPARC installed base, but it's declining. They haven't figured out a way of making enough money off x86 yet where margins are even tighter and they might have even cooked their own goose by selling some of these machines cheaply to gain shipments. They're also late to the game with x86 because they desperately have not wanted to go anywhere near that platform for a long time because they knew what it meant. However, it was only merely delaying the inevitable. Oracle, being the rather ruthless business it is with costs, I just can't see trying to work that out.
i could stil point you to the demise of IBMs Power-based workstations.
IBM didn't care and it doesn't matter. They moved on and didn't rely on them whereas Sun and SGI were wedded to their particular platforms and bound to protect them.
All non-i86 CPU-architectures between 200 $ and 10K$ are essentially dead.
I can't disagree there, although I'd put the figure at a bit higher than 10K. That's why SPARC has been so badly affected. Sun sold a lot of SPARC systems, particularly in the dot com boom, where people then realised that they could get better performance on a cheaper platform by moving to x86. In academic circles I've seen many universities who were big Sun and SPARC users who have long since moved to x86 and Linux, especially where they use a lot of open source software that is readily available and working on the platform. OpenSolaris has a long road to travel there.
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
...but of course if you have a single huge query, it's going to run on a single execution thread, slowly.
You've described > 90% of the workload use cases that > 90% of organisations have and why businesses have been moving from SPARC to x86 for a vast number of jobs where they simply want to process single jobs faster, or increasingly large single jobs. As a result, you've also described why Niagara won't save SPARC.
The majority of Sun's $13billion in revenues comes from hardware.....The majority of their hardware comes from Sparc......Why would you buy a company for billions of dollars and ditch it's most popular product?
You've said it all yourself. Sun's SPARC sales have been declining for years, it's not growing revenue and hardware margins are miniscule. They're even more razor thin when it comes to x86, which is why Sun really didn't want to sell x86 machines at all. In the end though they've had no choice.
Sun's Declining Business == Trolling? Ha.
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 0, Troll
I find it very funny that certain people think it's trolling to point out the seriousness of Sun's predicament that has been brewing for the past ten years. The truth hurts some people quit a bit I suppose, and I've seen it a lot. I think when you reply to something like that then you need to ask yourself why Sun needed to get bought in the first place out if everything is as rosy as you paint it.
Don't give a flying fig about Suns servers?
People have been giving less of a damn about SPARC for years, especially when the performance is better on x86 and they have the open source 'Unix' in Linux on x86 that Sun refused to give anyone. You have to have been living under a rock not to have seen how much Sun's workstation business got eaten overnight and how many of their SPARC server sales have overlapped too much with the workloads that have long since been taken over by x86 and Linux systems.
Quoting IDC's figures doesn't lend you much credibility. They skew their view by ooking at the market based on revenue, and there is an awful lot more that IBM and even HP makes off the back of their server sales that doesn't show up there, hence the grandparent talking about additional software services. Additionally, the lion's share Sun's revenue is off the back of a declining, once lucrative SPARC market that they relied on and their x86 sales are nowhere near to recouping what they're losing in revenue and in maintaining SPARC, and to a slightly lesser extent Solaris. Indeed, Sun have been selling their x86 servers quite cheaply in order to keep people interested and the sales figures up.
Sun have a decent customer base that any company would be interested in acquiring, and why IBM was interested but wasn't willing to do just anything for. They have no power whatsoever to harm IBM though otherwise IBM would have kept at the deal. The end game is the same no matter how much wishful thinking, IDC stats and takeovers you throw at it and IBM knew the price for that.
Goodness me. What with GM trying to belatedly throw a billion dollars into an electric car that is years and billions behind what Toyota, Honda and others have been doing (petrol electric? Please........) and Ford trying to turn a car into some social network phenomenon the big US car companies must be getting desperate. Maybe if they'd started having these ideas and doing this research years (well, decades) ago then they might have had a chance, but they don't. They've relied on selling crap to their home market for too long.
Various figures in the US prison system just weren't interested, on the grounds that the prisoner wouldn't suffer enough. Despite the US constitutional prohibition on "cruel" punishment, it wasn't considered fair to the families of victims to end lives using this humane method.
That's why the death penalty is largely a failure as a deterrent in the US. There is too much emphasis on vengeance and not enough on getting rid of awful people who have no place in society and who no one should be paying for. We also shouldn't underestimate the harm this does to people who actually work in prisons and on death row.
The same old sad refrain, right to the last breath. I have had countless Sun consultants for the best part of ten years telling me that Linux is unstable versus the 'rock solid' Solaris and that no one could ever run anything serious on a x86 system versus SPARC. When I challenge them for specifics they clam up tightly as if saying it should somehow be enough or they retreat by pointing to some exceptionally vague Sun 'studies', again, as if pointing to them is somehow sufficient. Your comment is the same amongst thousands and it's not helping.
Alas, saying it doesn't make it true, and given Sun's current sad state it can't be all that important to people if it's actually true.
I do, and with applications like Amarok, it's crucial since I can't go about switching in and out of full screen applications to change a song etc.
Still sounds like an excuse.
There honestly isn't really any better KDE distros out there in my opinion.
You haven't looked far and it obviously can't be that good given what you've described. OpenSuse is a far better KDE distro and I'd suggest you try something that has a chance of working first before pinning various things as KDE bugs.
They're still extremely cagey about letting just any old riff-raff develop for their platforms, and still not realising at all that encouraging developers to write for their platforms in any way that they can is more than compensated for by people buying their products because of the applications available and the installed base it brings.
I compiled 4.2.1 on FreeBSD over last weekend and found an irritating delay to user input: mouse click anything and start finger tapping for 30 seconds waiting for something to happen. Seems all user input and system response suffers long delays.
I'm sorry, but neither I nor most other people running KDE 4.2 are seeing that and I don't see how anyone else can take responsibility for something you compiled yourself on a platform that, quite frankly, fewer people use and that you've chosen to configure yourself.
I can't. I set the global hot key in any kde3 application running in KDE4.x and the hot key doesn't work, preventing me from using the applications.
That sounds like an excuse not to use them rather than a reason why you 'can't'. Besides, I've used KDE 3 applications in KDE 4 and I don't see that at all.
Kubuntu actually, not KDE. Thus, not available on all distros.
Don't use Kubuntu then. It's hardly the KDE project's fault for that as you're trying to insinuate. Blame the Ubuntu edict on KDE 4, because they totally misunderstood what needed to be done, particularly where LTS was concerned - deliberately some would say.
Considering I'm using the latest Kubuntu version to get updated applications, I am unfortunately - what sucks is that KDE4 isn't finished yet and they're pushing it as a full desktop system.
Is anything ever finished? People set milestones for a software project and then make a release when those have been achieved. In the open source world that means that we try things out and if it doesn't do anything for us we stay where we are until it does do what we want. I think it's high time we moved past the bitching on 4.0 because things have been moving on regardless. 4.2 has become a great desktop just by itself and in the next couple of point releases the applications will have moved much further along with the platform to take advantage of what it can really do. Continuing to bitch about 4.0 is just going to look a bit sad and conspicuous.
I wish KDE would adopt at least some of Gnome's Human Interface Guidelines.
Unfortunately, the reason why Gnome came up with a HIG was because:
1. Gnome has no underlying arhcitecture that lays out a default 'Gnome' application. Menu spacings and various other things are done manually.
2. Gnome has some pretty severe issues laying out any kind of complex GUI, thus, they had to give a reason why - simplicity.
KDE is working on a HIG as it goes through the 4.x cycle, but it isn't based on those two reasons.
It'd help everyone if the Linux desktops came together in that respect, at least to ditch those silly Windows-centric "Cancel/Apply/OK" preference dialogues which don't offer any reason not to be done more simply.
They can't be done any more simply. Providing only instant apply is total brain damage and I simply don't see it as my problem to remember the way things were so I can revert to what I had. You know, that's kind of why people use a computer in the first place.
Yes. Gnome, XFCE, and OSX do it. You click an option, it takes effect. Don't like it? Just put it back. Optionally, the dialogue can have a revert or defaults button.
Instant apply is bullshit, and I've highlighted why it's bullshit. It is not my job to remember the way things were so I can do the job of a cancel button and resetting to defaults doesn't help. I want it back the way I had it before. You know, that's why I use computers, so I don't have to remember. I have no clue how anyone has been hypnotised into thinking that this is a usable situation.
This is no narcissism that the article is describing here, and I have no clue whatsoever how the author proposes that this should be 'solved'.
It's been a few years since I was fresh out of university, but I think it is healthy for a graduate to have expectations of being pushed. Pushed to learn new things, pushed to travel and use the skills that they have spent many years acquiring. The reality is rather more depressing and it's an organisation's loss. You get shoved on to a 'Graduate Scheme' where you end up doing lots of dreary tasks that should really be done by management, and all on a salary that looks OK to a new graduate but is slave labour in the grand scheme of things. There is nothing wrong with expecting to use the skills and knowledge you have spent time, effort and money acquiring. While learning is important an organisation has no right whatsoever to expect that it will get free skills because a new graduate should just be automatically eager to do so - but gets nothing in return. Organisations also stupidly perpetuate the myth by giving graduates much grander job titles as well. The rule that you are not owed anything in real life works both ways, and many organisations have become somewhat narcissistic themselves - they don't want to compete, they want a nice easy cash cow, they want to cut costs but keep revenue rising and they want their employees to act like they are doing them a favour and it's all just 'expected'. If you want to retain the best people and survive then do everything you can to do so. If you don't then go away and die, but don't whinge as if you're owed something.
Few companies get this though because it shows their current management and leadership up for what it is - inept and lacking in requisite knowledge. If you get graduates who are disatisfied at working in your company then the simplest explanation is usually the truth - you're a shit organisation to work for who is not getting enough out of their employees.
You'd probably be best off getting yourself a blog and writing fairly regular reviews of stuff you find good and stuff you find bad. When people do a search on something with Google they will almost inevitably end up finding your review. I just don't trust these review sites. I've seen a number of reviews that have been negative on many of them that have been removed and it kind of negates the point of writing a review in the first place.
Oh really? Can you please point out where it says that in the TOS?
It doesn't need to be. Microsoft have been actively developing DRM to get into bed with the content companies and they have made statements to the effect that if they don't then they won't be allowed to come and play in their paddling pool. Do you really think they're going to do unrestricted Microsoft Bitorrent(tm)?
It's just another in a long line of copy-cats that is burned into Microsoft's nature. If there is something successful out there then Microsoft makes its own version and uses Windows to have as many bites of the cherry as they like, as sure as eggs is eggs. It doesn't matter that MSN, Hailstorm, Passport or Windows Live or whatever they call it now has been thrown back in their faces more times than you can count. They'll keep going until they succeed or the cash cow monopolies of Windows and Office stop providing the cash to allow them to do it.
I'm always uncomfortable when a CEO goes on a crusade like this:
At the heart of this issue is that the CPU has run its course and the soul of the PC is shifting quickly to the GPU. This is clearly an attempt to stifle innovation to protect a decaying CPU business.
Errrrrr, I think you'll find it's the other way aroud mate. That is, afterall, why you're maing comments like this?
Virtualisation has been a bit of a curveball that Microsoft hasn't liked for some time. It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely. It also gives the potential to outflank Windows technology by bypassing it in the virtual machine itself and surrounding Windows with non-Windows systems. Additionally, ubiquitous, freely available virtualisation is going to end up ruling, and ultimately that means an open source host running something like KVM. I suppose Microsoft had to try and do something. They want to try and get into all of this somehow, and I suppose it does mean they sell more Windows licenses and Red Hat gets to run Windows certified on their platforms which should please some people.
It's a real kick in the teeth for Novell. This is a perfectly straightforward deal of certifying each other's systems on their virtual platforms that Novell couldn't get right. In practice, Microsoft is providing no help whatsoever to Novell in running Windows on their virtual platform (which I don't think Red Hat is expecting itself really) and they sold themselves down the river by agreeing to some elaborate coupon scheme that saw SLES servers totally surrounded by installations of Windows Server and AD domains. I don't think they even realised what they'd signed up to. At least Red Hat gets some marketable press out of this without conceding anything.
let me guess, you don't like mssql because it's microsoft? what a fucking sheep, mssql is a great database.
I always chuckle when I see this because it's the only tac left - claim that everybody hates Microsoft. SQL Server is about the only database that isn't cross-platform these days, and while it is quite powerful, that power comes at the expense of consuming a terrible amount of system resources when compared with a database system such as Postgres.
So you realize that the structure you are suggesting can be easily built in a traditional RDB, using a star-schema or cluster design right?
#
I think the point is that you have to put those things on top of a RDB and hammer it into shape. Yer it's doable, but the basic design just doesn't really reflect what needs to be done.
As a previous Slashdot article claimed, us technology people are not lawyers. What would we know about this stuff? Of course you can identify one person via one IP address in a one-to-one mapping. Everyone knows that. I got modded down for suggesting this kind of idiocy, because this is internet and networking 101. If you can't present the facts of what an IP address actually is then you have a real problem.
Child pornography is serious (OK, it's used as a politically correct example sometimes) and I'm not suggesting for a second people should get off on technicalities, but if courts are going to gather evidence and convict then they need to get some clue about the facts and understand what it is that they're talking about. Unless they do I can see massive claims for damages at some point in the future. This happens all over the world as well.
As for cross-platform, Moonlight 2.0 should be able to run SmoothHD just fine, and more importantly a whole lot of content published using that platform.
Cross-platform....... Using a blob of codecs that are almost certainly not going to be updated or even there in a few years' time.
I don't think you understand quite what cross-platform means.
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When you start from zero it's easy to show some decent growth percentages ;-). However, it's not anywhere near enough to justify the amount of investment needed in SPARC as a hardware platform.
Hmmmmmm. It's just a pity you couldn't actually talk about what you've quoted and I was never aware that quoting figures trumps discussion.
The problem is that most of their revenue still comes from the incumbant SPARC installed base, but it's declining. They haven't figured out a way of making enough money off x86 yet where margins are even tighter and they might have even cooked their own goose by selling some of these machines cheaply to gain shipments. They're also late to the game with x86 because they desperately have not wanted to go anywhere near that platform for a long time because they knew what it meant. However, it was only merely delaying the inevitable. Oracle, being the rather ruthless business it is with costs, I just can't see trying to work that out.
IBM didn't care and it doesn't matter. They moved on and didn't rely on them whereas Sun and SGI were wedded to their particular platforms and bound to protect them.
I can't disagree there, although I'd put the figure at a bit higher than 10K. That's why SPARC has been so badly affected. Sun sold a lot of SPARC systems, particularly in the dot com boom, where people then realised that they could get better performance on a cheaper platform by moving to x86. In academic circles I've seen many universities who were big Sun and SPARC users who have long since moved to x86 and Linux, especially where they use a lot of open source software that is readily available and working on the platform. OpenSolaris has a long road to travel there.
You've described > 90% of the workload use cases that > 90% of organisations have and why businesses have been moving from SPARC to x86 for a vast number of jobs where they simply want to process single jobs faster, or increasingly large single jobs. As a result, you've also described why Niagara won't save SPARC.
You've said it all yourself. Sun's SPARC sales have been declining for years, it's not growing revenue and hardware margins are miniscule. They're even more razor thin when it comes to x86, which is why Sun really didn't want to sell x86 machines at all. In the end though they've had no choice.
People have been giving less of a damn about SPARC for years, especially when the performance is better on x86 and they have the open source 'Unix' in Linux on x86 that Sun refused to give anyone. You have to have been living under a rock not to have seen how much Sun's workstation business got eaten overnight and how many of their SPARC server sales have overlapped too much with the workloads that have long since been taken over by x86 and Linux systems.
Quoting IDC's figures doesn't lend you much credibility. They skew their view by ooking at the market based on revenue, and there is an awful lot more that IBM and even HP makes off the back of their server sales that doesn't show up there, hence the grandparent talking about additional software services. Additionally, the lion's share Sun's revenue is off the back of a declining, once lucrative SPARC market that they relied on and their x86 sales are nowhere near to recouping what they're losing in revenue and in maintaining SPARC, and to a slightly lesser extent Solaris. Indeed, Sun have been selling their x86 servers quite cheaply in order to keep people interested and the sales figures up.
Sun have a decent customer base that any company would be interested in acquiring, and why IBM was interested but wasn't willing to do just anything for. They have no power whatsoever to harm IBM though otherwise IBM would have kept at the deal. The end game is the same no matter how much wishful thinking, IDC stats and takeovers you throw at it and IBM knew the price for that.
Goodness me. What with GM trying to belatedly throw a billion dollars into an electric car that is years and billions behind what Toyota, Honda and others have been doing (petrol electric? Please........) and Ford trying to turn a car into some social network phenomenon the big US car companies must be getting desperate. Maybe if they'd started having these ideas and doing this research years (well, decades) ago then they might have had a chance, but they don't. They've relied on selling crap to their home market for too long.
That's why the death penalty is largely a failure as a deterrent in the US. There is too much emphasis on vengeance and not enough on getting rid of awful people who have no place in society and who no one should be paying for. We also shouldn't underestimate the harm this does to people who actually work in prisons and on death row.
The same old sad refrain, right to the last breath. I have had countless Sun consultants for the best part of ten years telling me that Linux is unstable versus the 'rock solid' Solaris and that no one could ever run anything serious on a x86 system versus SPARC. When I challenge them for specifics they clam up tightly as if saying it should somehow be enough or they retreat by pointing to some exceptionally vague Sun 'studies', again, as if pointing to them is somehow sufficient. Your comment is the same amongst thousands and it's not helping.
Alas, saying it doesn't make it true, and given Sun's current sad state it can't be all that important to people if it's actually true.
Still sounds like an excuse.
You haven't looked far and it obviously can't be that good given what you've described. OpenSuse is a far better KDE distro and I'd suggest you try something that has a chance of working first before pinning various things as KDE bugs.
It wasn't an excuse. It's the way it is.
They're still extremely cagey about letting just any old riff-raff develop for their platforms, and still not realising at all that encouraging developers to write for their platforms in any way that they can is more than compensated for by people buying their products because of the applications available and the installed base it brings.
I'm sorry, but neither I nor most other people running KDE 4.2 are seeing that and I don't see how anyone else can take responsibility for something you compiled yourself on a platform that, quite frankly, fewer people use and that you've chosen to configure yourself.
That sounds like an excuse not to use them rather than a reason why you 'can't'. Besides, I've used KDE 3 applications in KDE 4 and I don't see that at all.
Don't use Kubuntu then. It's hardly the KDE project's fault for that as you're trying to insinuate. Blame the Ubuntu edict on KDE 4, because they totally misunderstood what needed to be done, particularly where LTS was concerned - deliberately some would say.
Is anything ever finished? People set milestones for a software project and then make a release when those have been achieved. In the open source world that means that we try things out and if it doesn't do anything for us we stay where we are until it does do what we want. I think it's high time we moved past the bitching on 4.0 because things have been moving on regardless. 4.2 has become a great desktop just by itself and in the next couple of point releases the applications will have moved much further along with the platform to take advantage of what it can really do. Continuing to bitch about 4.0 is just going to look a bit sad and conspicuous.
Unfortunately, the reason why Gnome came up with a HIG was because:
1. Gnome has no underlying arhcitecture that lays out a default 'Gnome' application. Menu spacings and various other things are done manually.
2. Gnome has some pretty severe issues laying out any kind of complex GUI, thus, they had to give a reason why - simplicity.
KDE is working on a HIG as it goes through the 4.x cycle, but it isn't based on those two reasons.
They can't be done any more simply. Providing only instant apply is total brain damage and I simply don't see it as my problem to remember the way things were so I can revert to what I had. You know, that's kind of why people use a computer in the first place.
Instant apply is bullshit, and I've highlighted why it's bullshit. It is not my job to remember the way things were so I can do the job of a cancel button and resetting to defaults doesn't help. I want it back the way I had it before. You know, that's why I use computers, so I don't have to remember. I have no clue how anyone has been hypnotised into thinking that this is a usable situation.
1. Red Hat are now employing too many lawyers and they need something to do.
2. Red Hat have started to become the target of a lot of patent trolls themselves and this is what the said lawyers recommend as a defense mechanism.
This is no narcissism that the article is describing here, and I have no clue whatsoever how the author proposes that this should be 'solved'.
It's been a few years since I was fresh out of university, but I think it is healthy for a graduate to have expectations of being pushed. Pushed to learn new things, pushed to travel and use the skills that they have spent many years acquiring. The reality is rather more depressing and it's an organisation's loss. You get shoved on to a 'Graduate Scheme' where you end up doing lots of dreary tasks that should really be done by management, and all on a salary that looks OK to a new graduate but is slave labour in the grand scheme of things. There is nothing wrong with expecting to use the skills and knowledge you have spent time, effort and money acquiring. While learning is important an organisation has no right whatsoever to expect that it will get free skills because a new graduate should just be automatically eager to do so - but gets nothing in return. Organisations also stupidly perpetuate the myth by giving graduates much grander job titles as well. The rule that you are not owed anything in real life works both ways, and many organisations have become somewhat narcissistic themselves - they don't want to compete, they want a nice easy cash cow, they want to cut costs but keep revenue rising and they want their employees to act like they are doing them a favour and it's all just 'expected'. If you want to retain the best people and survive then do everything you can to do so. If you don't then go away and die, but don't whinge as if you're owed something.
Few companies get this though because it shows their current management and leadership up for what it is - inept and lacking in requisite knowledge. If you get graduates who are disatisfied at working in your company then the simplest explanation is usually the truth - you're a shit organisation to work for who is not getting enough out of their employees.
You'd probably be best off getting yourself a blog and writing fairly regular reviews of stuff you find good and stuff you find bad. When people do a search on something with Google they will almost inevitably end up finding your review. I just don't trust these review sites. I've seen a number of reviews that have been negative on many of them that have been removed and it kind of negates the point of writing a review in the first place.
It doesn't need to be. Microsoft have been actively developing DRM to get into bed with the content companies and they have made statements to the effect that if they don't then they won't be allowed to come and play in their paddling pool. Do you really think they're going to do unrestricted Microsoft Bitorrent(tm)?
It's just another in a long line of copy-cats that is burned into Microsoft's nature. If there is something successful out there then Microsoft makes its own version and uses Windows to have as many bites of the cherry as they like, as sure as eggs is eggs. It doesn't matter that MSN, Hailstorm, Passport or Windows Live or whatever they call it now has been thrown back in their faces more times than you can count. They'll keep going until they succeed or the cash cow monopolies of Windows and Office stop providing the cash to allow them to do it.
Errrrrr, I think you'll find it's the other way aroud mate. That is, afterall, why you're maing comments like this?
Virtualisation has been a bit of a curveball that Microsoft hasn't liked for some time. It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely. It also gives the potential to outflank Windows technology by bypassing it in the virtual machine itself and surrounding Windows with non-Windows systems. Additionally, ubiquitous, freely available virtualisation is going to end up ruling, and ultimately that means an open source host running something like KVM. I suppose Microsoft had to try and do something. They want to try and get into all of this somehow, and I suppose it does mean they sell more Windows licenses and Red Hat gets to run Windows certified on their platforms which should please some people.
It's a real kick in the teeth for Novell. This is a perfectly straightforward deal of certifying each other's systems on their virtual platforms that Novell couldn't get right. In practice, Microsoft is providing no help whatsoever to Novell in running Windows on their virtual platform (which I don't think Red Hat is expecting itself really) and they sold themselves down the river by agreeing to some elaborate coupon scheme that saw SLES servers totally surrounded by installations of Windows Server and AD domains. I don't think they even realised what they'd signed up to. At least Red Hat gets some marketable press out of this without conceding anything.
I always chuckle when I see this because it's the only tac left - claim that everybody hates Microsoft. SQL Server is about the only database that isn't cross-platform these days, and while it is quite powerful, that power comes at the expense of consuming a terrible amount of system resources when compared with a database system such as Postgres.
# I think the point is that you have to put those things on top of a RDB and hammer it into shape. Yer it's doable, but the basic design just doesn't really reflect what needs to be done.
As a previous Slashdot article claimed, us technology people are not lawyers. What would we know about this stuff? Of course you can identify one person via one IP address in a one-to-one mapping. Everyone knows that. I got modded down for suggesting this kind of idiocy, because this is internet and networking 101. If you can't present the facts of what an IP address actually is then you have a real problem.
Child pornography is serious (OK, it's used as a politically correct example sometimes) and I'm not suggesting for a second people should get off on technicalities, but if courts are going to gather evidence and convict then they need to get some clue about the facts and understand what it is that they're talking about. Unless they do I can see massive claims for damages at some point in the future. This happens all over the world as well.
Cross-platform....... Using a blob of codecs that are almost certainly not going to be updated or even there in a few years' time.
I don't think you understand quite what cross-platform means.
Well, if it was good enough for Clint then it's good enough for the rest of us.