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  1. I Suppose..... on Microsoft Accommodating Eee With Lightweight XP · · Score: 2, Funny

    ...a Vista Lite is out of the question then?

  2. Re:It's nearly caught up to PostgreSQL. on MySQL 5.1 Improves Performance, Partitioning, Bug Fixes · · Score: 3, Informative

    When multimillion dollar installations fails and you are paying for the support + guarantee on uptime you got somewhere to send the bill if shit hits the fan.
    In reality, you have absolutely nowhere to hide and no one else to blame. The downtime still happened, you still have to deal with it and you're the one who picked IBM or whoever. The enterprise vendor doesn't give a fuck because you ponied up the money and you're locked in anyway. The fingers always point at you. Spending other peoples' money in large quantities to cover your ample ass isn't going to help.

    What will you do when your PG installation fail? Go on IRC and ask for help?
    This is another point that gets made by idiot analysts banging on their blogs. Noting the above, that it is always your fault and your responsibility no matter how much money you chuck at an enterprise vendor, you have to have experienced some of the 'enterprise' support from vendors as I have. The caveats on what they will and won't support a lot of the time are unbelievable. In a lot of cases, Google gives you a faster response and more of a hint at the problem - and I've experienced that from everything from databases to server hardware. By the time a consultant arrives, I know more about what's going on than he does.

    Also, I think you save a lot of time, money and stress by putting yourself into situations where dependency on emergency enterprise support is minimised. Just a small hint.
  3. Re:It's nearly caught up to PostgreSQL. on MySQL 5.1 Improves Performance, Partitioning, Bug Fixes · · Score: 1

    MySQL fails at some very critical points. As I said in previous post it fails to fire triggers on updates.
    If you have a lot of cascading triggers then I'd worry more about what you're doing than how your database handles them. Handling triggers responsibly is important, as you'll never figure out what the hell is happening twelve months from now. That's an application developer's problem, not a DBA's problem, and I wish DBA's would just stay the hell away. If it has to be done for maintenance reasons or something, fair enough, write a trigger or a stored procedure, but if not stay the fuck away please. MySQL doesn't have the best track record on them so don't use it if that bothers you. However, you'd be surprised how often people use triggers when they just shouldn't be. Stored procedures get similar mistreatment from ejit DBAs.

    PG however does not have any support for scaling
    Sorry, but I've seen people 'scale' Oracle not because they actually need it but because Oracle (and other enterprise DBs) is so bad at handling the system resources it consumes that you've got no other option but to get yourself a large cluster. It also tends to be what the Oracle consultants tell you to do. Failover is one thing, which Postgres has fairly decent options for these days, but scaling for the sake of it is quite another. I was surprised how well a Postgres set up scaled though.

    all of them lack the ability to take down primary or secondary server(s) in a running environment and put a new up without interruption in the data flow.
    Not really. There are ways and means around that problem if you have do have it though.

    That line alone tells me you got your head so far up your OSS arse you are seeing pink elephants.
    The only pink elephants I can see are those that Oracle consultants ride in on when they fly in to tell people what it is they should be doing, and scaring them into buying things to patch the deficiencies that Oracle deliberately builds in.

    IBM Denmark just went down this week for a whole day, pretty sure their big clients are a bit unimpressed in their failure to bring multimillion installations back online.
    More fool IBM. Doesn't inspire confidence in enterprise vendors, does it? There are ways and means of making sure that that situation never even occurs and where you don't plan how you're going to bring installations back online first and foremost, but how you keep the thing running indefinitely. That's the biggest failing of 'enterprise' DB consultant thinking. There's a constant attempt to scare people into thinking about this happening, or that happening, when prevention is what matters. Hopefully, open source databases will continue to scare them even more in the future.

    And when you promise clients 99.999% uptime you sure as hell need subsecond failover *hint you can't do that with anything that reads binary logs from primary* and zero loss of transactions.
    I've had Postgres databases over the past few years that have done that, and have provided uptime that is as close to 100% as you can get (albeit with some inexpensive add-on options at times) - network and operating system permitting. In fact, it's always been a network, OS or other outage that has been the cause of any downtime. These are in environments where people really would notice if the database went away for some reason, and very regular backups are kept which are necessary whatever failover options you have.

    My main point still stands. I just don't see the reason for the panic some people want to instil over this whole thing. Oracle, and other 'enterprise' DBs, are a waste of time, money, manpower, effort and resources for 99% of the majority.
  4. Re:It's nearly caught up to PostgreSQL. on MySQL 5.1 Improves Performance, Partitioning, Bug Fixes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Personally I wouldn't touch either PGSQL or MySQL in a mission critical environment, they are very nice toy databases
    I hear this refrain from every terrified analyst who ever wants to bring up the dreaded subject of open source databases, and I see no hard evidence for it. Sorry, but my bullshit detector goes into overdrive when I hear the phrase 'mission critical' and 'toy databases'. MySQL has its shortcomings, and has generally been the web database backend of choice (and it powers quite a few large 'mission critical' web sites), but Postgres really has been the open source database that has kicked on. Failover? Mirroring? Clustering? Yer, there are ways and means of doing that pretty well, and I have seen ample evidence that it can be trusted with lots of 'mission critical' tasks.

    I've managed to start using Postgres in an organisation that has traditionally been all Oracle. The main reasons are the huge cost involved of additional licensing for additional servers, the incredible amount of DBA assistance that all Oracle installations seem to need and which they don't have the resources to provide and Oracle's incredible ability to suck any system resources you have into a black hole on any system. When any 'mission critical' database has the memory footprint of either MySQL or Postgres, and when it can actually start up in time for the end of the next ice age, give me a call.

    but when shit hits the fan - and it WILL happen - you need a reliable system with instant failover, which neither database can provide.
    An awful lot of people have been waiting an awful long time for that shit to hit the fan - and in the meantime it has cost them an arm and a leg in not only licensing and support costs, but also in a needless waste of system and hardware resources.
  5. I'm Already Gone on MySQL 5.1 Improves Performance, Partitioning, Bug Fixes · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We've already started a migration from MySQL to Postgres, and we're not going back. Full Text Searching was one of the features, but Postgres all round just has a lot more to it. You can make the thing look like an Oracle database if necessary, there's auto vacuuming now, asynchronous commits and a ton of other performance improvements that don't skimp on features.

    I really can't see why anyone would choose MySQL now, apart from inertia and backwards compatibility.

  6. Re:You Got What You Deserved on Apple Error Leaves iPhone Developers In the Lurch · · Score: 1

    How does it feel to know you missed the point entirely and just ranted about basically unrelated and untrue items?
    Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. It's funny that a few rape victims, or kidnap victims, sometimes feel sympathy for the rapist or kidnapper, possibly because they have come to accept the situation they were in and be submissive. It's a similar situation here, as Apple fans try and paint over the whole thing. How does that feel? You see it, as a comment above pointed out, in all the ejits on the Apple forums saying "Oh damn, I should have read my EULA." Sad. Simply sad.

    If they're untrue you can give me some examples as to how accommodating Apple is for developers who write software for their platforms. Can't you? Oh, what's that? You can't? I fail to see how it's unrelated because this isn't helping developers supporting the iPhone, is it? You know, developers helping Apple sell more iPhones? Writing the above and modding it flamebait (I see the Apple sympathetic mods got in quick ;-)) isn't going to make it wrong sadly.

    When you develop for Apple platforms you end up getting fucked. Just face it.
  7. You Got What You Deserved on Apple Error Leaves iPhone Developers In the Lurch · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Apple doesn't do development, doesn't get development and doesn't support developers. There has been ample evidence for that for some time now, and yet, we still get some braindead twonks telling us we all should have read the EULA! Unbelievable. How much would it cost Apple to fix this for the people who are developing software so Apple can sell more iPhones? Errrrrr...............

  8. This Guy Doesn't Get Security on What Spooks Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Among the most frustrating findings for Arsenault: Just over half of all attacks originated from the .edu domain. "[That's] a fundamental problem," he said. "We've got to do a better job with the university systems to stop that."
    You can never run around trying to get people, and universities, to stop things that are basically open-ended. If those are the number of attacks you're experiencing then those are the number of attacks you're experiencing, regardless of where they originate from and why. The web is a free place, and it shows an exceptional naivety to think that can be stopped by pressuring universities.

    But Arsenault does sweat over whether there's really less exploitable code, or whether it's more a case of such code just being kept secret by nation states looking to wage cyberwar.
    Rrrrrrrrrright. So just like with Iraq's incredibly destructive weapons, if there isn't anything happening then it's because there is something even more devious and cunning going on?

    Mind you, I wouldn't have expected anything less from Microsoft's Chief Security Advisor.
  9. Re:The Real Motorola Split in the 90s on Will Motorola Rise From the Ashes? · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Fucking hell...........

  10. Management and Leadership on Will Motorola Rise From the Ashes? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's yet another classic case of a complete lack of management and leadership, way too much politics and a complete lack of understanding of what products they're selling and how they're produced. The products were actually there, and the people (one who sadly passed away), to achieve success were there, but it's been squandered. They're not the first, and they won't be the last. The management and executives at Motorola are, and were, incompetent losers, and that's the label they carry and the price that they pay for those golden parachutes.

    Desperate measures such as the breaking up of a business is always a big indication that no one has a clue what to do and that people who don't understand what the business does have taken over.

  11. Re:Doesn't Solve the Fundamentals on India Votes Against OOXML · · Score: 1

    There's already an OS like that. It's called GNU/Linux.
    Alas, that comment and those who modded you up shows how little you do know. Software development and installation are still massive problems, and it's unlikely that a lot of people will 'get it'.
  12. Re:Doesn't Solve the Fundamentals on India Votes Against OOXML · · Score: 1

    A viable alternative to Windows has to run popular Windows software.
    Not necessarily. While I believe Ubuntu and others are making a mistake by ignoring WINE, and I think it would be a boon for many to be able to import a COM DLL into a Linux desktop environment and create a native front-end (the scary thing is, WINE might actually do a better job than successive versions of Windows), what we're talking about here is a snowball effect. The people who can use it now can pick it up, you make sure everything you need to develop and deploy software written by both open source developers (imagine if the people who write open source software for Windows started writing for your platform?) so you get a gradual side-to-side movement where ISV and open source software and userbase moves forwards, back and forth. Userbase increases -> Software development increases -> Userbase increases -> software development increases............

    the most popular Windows software and can modify it to be incompatible with an alternative OS
    Not really. Joel Spolsky amongst others has pointed out that Microsoft have, in effect, lost control of their development APIs and despite a lot of painful effort WINE is getting to the point where it will have jumped on nearly all the mole hills in the field. Despite all Microsoft's best efforts, no one is going to re-write all their software for .Net, WPF and all that other stuff no one currently cares about because Microsoft has stopped caring about their existing customers and existing code. There is zero commercial benefit to re-writing in these APIs, you limit your userbase and the inertia will keep this in place for some years to come. It's like Microsoft's vain hope that everyone will start rewriting all the billions of web pages for Silverlight, because heaven knows, they've made IE a complete pain in the arse for web developers and the code they have now.

    The MSDN lunatics that have taken over Microsoft are certainly making things interesting, as it's a sharp departure from the Microsoft that used to go to extreme and ludicrous lengths to maintain backwards compatibility, and ensure that you could use existing code right in a new version (VB -> VB.Net).

    Which is why ODF scares the hell out of MS. ODF would make it much easier to develop an alternative to Office.
    ODF in itself doesn't do anything. It's the applications that matter to users, and they have to be there for ODF usage to increase. You're looking at this entirely the wrong way round, as many who are backing ODF by banging away on their blogs are.
  13. Doesn't Solve the Fundamentals on India Votes Against OOXML · · Score: 4, Insightful

    While I applaud the moves in recent times to give us standards within the field of office documents that we can all work with, it doesn't solve the fundamental problems. Chasing after Microsoft, trying to get ISO committees to reject OOXML and trying to get governments to mandate proper standards (a worthy goal, as IT has so very few) is, unfortunately, a saga destined to never end. The reason for this is that Microsoft has the dominant office suite in the world today held in place by the platform they control (Windows), they can mandate any formats they like and they can keep going back to the ISO to get a puppet standard through.

    If IBM and others are as serious as people like Rob Weir seem to be then I strongly suggest they stop being chicken shits after the way in which they capitulated OS/2 in the face of Windows, start funding a really viable alternative to Windows and start really getting just what is required. This would be a desktop operating system that would circumvent the OEM channels Microsoft controls by being given away freely so that everybody, including OEMs, can install it free of Microsoft's control, and it will be a desktop good enough in terms of developers' tools and installation so software can get to users. With enough effort then you'd definitely carve out a market large enough to make it viable, and you'd then have an office suite with enough of an installed base. Governments and other organisations would then pick it up as a result.

    Winging about OOXML isn't going to get anybody anywhere, sadly. It's only maintaining the status quo.

  14. Re:Close Stable Door After Horses Are Off and Away on Chicago Links School Cameras To Police · · Score: 1

    Ok, so you have confirmed that you are lying as opposed to being ignorant.
    If you have a response to the argument that guns are fundamentally different weapons compared to anything else in terms of the distance and ease with which fatal injuries can be made, I'm all ears. Anything else is just mental gymnastics and denial.

    It is clear that you don't know how guns actually work.
    It's self-evident you don't know what a gun's primary purpose is, which is a tad worrying.

    You then get condescending because everyone does not make the conclusions that guns must be evil due to your faultily logic.
    Since you can't explain what faulty logic I'm using here, saying it doesn't make it true, alas ;-).

    Finally, when called on your faulty logic, you go into denial mode, and try to claim that pointing out your faulty logic proves your point.
    I'm sorry to say that simply repeating, parrot fashion, what I've written in response to you doesn't discredit my initial point.

    More dishonesty. Try comparing them to cars and bottles of gasoline.
    Let's do that, shall we? Cars and bottles of gasoline can indeed be used to kill people, but so can a lot of things, and killing people is not their primary purpose. Petrol is used to power motors, and cars are used to get from A to B. Even knives have other primary purposes.

    Guns. Now what are they for? They have one purpose, and one purpose only. To kill people. They can be used to inflict fatal injuries on people, whilst keeping the killer at a safe and escapable distance, in a way that simply is not possible with cars, petrol bombs or knives.
  15. Re:Why switch? on Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers · · Score: 1

    There are no features in any Turing complete language which couldn't be added to any other.
    Sorry, but no. That's crap, and I'm afraid you probably know it. CLS .Net languages have the same language features, the same data types and the same object oriented features in order to keep them compatible. Ergo, they're all the same language, fundamentally. You can't just arbitrarily take language features and data types from one language and start using them in another.
  16. Re:Close Stable Door After Horses Are Off and Away on Chicago Links School Cameras To Police · · Score: 1

    Ahhh, hyperbole. You do know what a 'yard' is right? And what a hundred of them looks like? Let me put it in perspective for you. It's the length of a football field. When is the last time there was a mass shooting where a kid was shooting people from a hundred yards away? I'm guessing it was right after the mass stabbing. If you are lying, it isn't really logic now is it?
    You're waaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy off on a tangent because you don't have a clue how to answer the general argument. Arguing about what a yard is? I ask you, but there are some pretty high powered rifles that have been used in many shootings that could kill from those ranges, and sniper rifles have been used in the past. That's just peripheral to the main argument though. When people don't have a clue, they try to argue about specifics in order to try and divert attention from the main argument which is that using guns allows the killer to put real distance between him and victims and inflict fatal injuries that are just simply not possible with other weapons.

    The reason you have to keep repeating this piece of "logic" is that it is utter BS, so people dismiss you as not having valid input. If you want to try to rephrase your comment in a way that doesn't sound like you are either intentionally trying to deceive, or like you don't know what a yard is, I would be happy to respond.
    You won't respond. You could have just confirmed that you don't have a clue how to respond as to how, and why, guns are used in the way that they are and how comparing them to other weapons such as meat cleavers is just total crap.
  17. Re:Close Stable Door After Horses Are Off and Away on Chicago Links School Cameras To Police · · Score: 1

    Selling firearms across state lines without going through a Federally licensed dealer is also criminalized, so it's not the fault of adjoining states with less controls.
    It's trivially easy to do, and get away with. You can't prevent absolutely everything from crossing state lines unless you have stop and search checkpoints.

    If another young adult wanted to kill 5 people, he could just as easily bring in a kitchen cleaver or a few mason jars filled with gasoline; every teen has access to these, so there's something besides availability stopping the average teen from mass murder.
    Sorry, but I don't see many mass meat cleaverings and mass petrol bombings as the murder methods of choice. This is the classic logical fallacy defence that comes out whenever guns are mentioned. You can kill many, many people from extreme ranges that you simply can't with any other weapon, and it also allows you to make a get away. No one would consider committing such crimes with anything other than a gun.
  18. Re:Close Stable Door After Horses Are Off and Away on Chicago Links School Cameras To Police · · Score: 1

    ALL kids have access to weapons that allow them to kill people very easily. This is not only in the US, but in every country in the world. Don't fall for the "guns are evil" line. Don't underestimate the amount of damage that can be done with a glass jug of gasoline combined with a bicycle lock, or a car.
    Ahhhh, this is the classic delusion that comes out every time when the issue of guns is discussed. Which is easier? Shooting people from a hundred yards whilst being able to make a swift get away, or having to walk into a crowd of people with a knife and attempting to stab and kill everyone?

    It's amazing that this piece of logic has to be repeated every time. How many mass stabbings and mass petrol bomb killings have there been in the US versus mass shootings in schools? Why do you think that a gun, and quite powerful guns that kill over large distances, have been the weapons of choice for these people? Because it's far, far, far easier to give lots of people fatal injuries than any other weapon, and get away in the process.
  19. Re:FUD. Actually, it is the exact same thing... on Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers · · Score: 1
    I'm assuming you know what FUD really means?

    Just because C# and VB.net have been largely in line in terms of syntax in the past (and this is becoming less and less so over time, if the introduction of things like VB.net's new XML Literals is any indication)
    There are no features inherent to VB.Net or C# that actually make them unique and that you couldn't implement in the other - very trivially. There are no fundamental differences between them that you would find between languages such as Fortran, Ruby, Python or Perl that actually make them useful and different for different purposes. You could trivially add any support that C# has over VB.Net and vice versa. The differences are purely syntactic and completely artificial in many cases.

    VB.net, C#, IronPython, Boo, IronRuby, F#, Scala, and the list goes on. The are all implemented in the exact same way: by writing a compiler that targets IL.
    Not quite. Being a .Net language, and being able to write in any language, implies that you adhere to the CLS to keep things compatible. Languages like IronPython and IronRuby trade off their CLS compatibility by being complete implementations of Python and Ruby that run within the CLR. As such, you can't take something written with IronRuby and simply reuse it in IronPython, but in order to make the languages different and actually useful, that's a sacrifice that has to be made.
  20. Re:Why switch? on Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers · · Score: 1

    What do you call x86? Or a modern OS?
    A .Net language that compiles to the same IL has fairly strict rules as to what it needs to support to be a .Net language, and for a Boo, VB.Net or a Python .Net component to be reused in a C# using application. That's what we're talking about here. It compiles to the same compatible IL and bytecode.

    By that measure, C# is also "a language on top of .Net" -- the fact that IronPython isn't included in that ginormous download off Windows Update doesn't make it any less of a .Net language.
    No, you don't get this at all. A language that adheres to the CLS is completely different to an implementation of a language like IronPython running in a .Net environment. You can use some .Net features and parts of the framework, obviously, but in order to actually make it Python it has to trade off some .Net features and quirks in order for that to happen. That makes it a non-compatible .Net language that doesn't adhere to the CLS.
  21. Re:Why switch? on Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers · · Score: 1

    Try Boo or Scala. They don't work at all the way that C#/VB do.
    There are no features that Boo has that couldn't be trivially added to C#.
  22. Close Stable Door After Horses Are Off and Away on Chicago Links School Cameras To Police · · Score: 3, Insightful

    They're not tackling the root cause of why they're having to do this. The fact is that an awful lot of kids in school in the US can get very easy access to weapons that allow them to kill people very easily. As long as the US at large is OK with accepting that kind of risk, and public anxiety quickly dies down after every shooting, then trying to half-heartedly try and film everything that people do is quite simply pointless.

    It's also no deterrent at all. We've seen from the vast majority of shootings that those involved are quite willing to shoot first, and then shoot themselves so that there are no consequences. The notion that cameras are going to be a deterrent is well wide of the mark.

  23. Re:Why switch? on Little Demand Yet For Silverlight Developers · · Score: 1

    Well, if I'm reading right, Silverlight lets you program it in pretty much any .NET language.
    The notion of a common runtime that supports different languages is bogus. They are all .Net languages, and the main two are C# and VB.Net. Even VB.Net developers question why they use VB and why they don't just learn C#. Porting Perl, Python or any other language as a .Net language is pointless as they cease to have the differences that actually made them relevant. They are .Net languages that differ only via syntax. Another approach is to implement a language on top of .Net, like IronPython, but that's not the same thing.
  24. What's the Problem? on BBC iPlayer Bandwidth Explosion Bodes Ill For ISPs · · Score: 1

    The last I looked, most people in the UK have a bandwidth cap for each month. If people are merely using the bandwidth they are entitled to, and paying a premium if they go over the cap (or they get cut off), I'm wondering what the problem is here?

  25. Re:Isn't that theft? on iPhones Produced in China Smuggled Right Back in · · Score: 1

    The key to keeping IP "protected" in China is to partner with a strong Chinese manufacturer and give them financial incentives to police the market for you. It's what I do with my IP; I have two "blessed" factories in China authorized to build with it, and they get to maintain that "blessed" status...
    You've got no chance mate. Which do you think is most important to whom? Your need to get low costs and wages in China, or their desire to get their hands on your IP? Western companies like you queuing up to get low costs, low wages, no pensions, no health and safety etc. are two a penny to the Chinese. Uh, huh. The Chinese companies will also pass the parcel with you. If you move to a new factory and company it makes no difference. If they have an opportunity to make money on the side then they'll do so, and they will share information between themselves to do it. You're really no big loss.

    That's the price you pay for cutting your costs to the bone. If your IP really is important to you, make your products in a country that doesn't have that culture and those incentives. No? I thought not.