Unfortunately, I cannot because MySQL AB was not a publicly traded company.
But I was an employee of MySQL... although I cannot give specific details, you can be pretty certain that Sun Microsystems wasn't going to put down $1bn in cash for a company which was burning through it's VC funding.
If MySQL AB wasn't acquired by Sun, there was enough cash in the bank that they would definitely still be here today... and next year too, even if they had zero revenue.
The British Government, or at least, branches of it, used to be very open source friendly. Developing software and publishing it with a very permissive license attached to the source code.
Alas, since the Blair Regime started, that all seemed to come to an end... and the British people had to learn to put up with huge IT spending to private firms, usually affiliated with Fujitsu or Microsoft... and those public IT projects would famously fall flat on their faces and be quietly shelved.
Just look at the recent hiccups with the UK Biometrics scheme... 'nuff said.
This is something I wondered at the time. Sun paid a lot of money (~$1B) for a free database, even after they'd been bundling Postgres on Solaris 10 (you now get both Postgres & MySQL on the latest release of Solaris 10, FWIW).
Having chatted to some people at work, the concensus seems to be that it was primarily to piss off Oracle; "look, we can do databases too, we don't need you". So, Oracle have gotten into bed with HP & linux, just to spite Sun after having largely given Sun "favoured OS" status for a number of years.
All seems to be one big corporate soap opera/bitchfest...
Sun didn't pay $1bn for just some free software. If that was all they wanted, they could have simply downloaded it for free.
Sun purchased the MySQL (r) registered trademark and full rights to the source (including the ability to relicense as desired).
Don't forget, also the couple hundred staff who they don't need to pay any headhunters to find.
And, of course, the most important asset they purchased was "goodwill"... Which is hard to build but quite invaluable.
I have to admit that I am glad to see him leave Sun. I am developing an Open Source POS system and originally I was using MySQL as the database. I sent an email to MySQL about distribution questions and was then contacted by different sales people trying to talk me out of Open Sourcing my project. "Do you really want you competitors to have your POS code"... "How are you going make money off of Open Source". I felt bullied.
Understand that MySQL is only GPL (Free) if everything touching it is also GPL (or internal use only). If we distribute it with MySQL and make it commercial, we need to pay yearly for MySQL ($$$). That is understood when dealing with GPL software. Just don't try and talk me out of GPL'ing my code to line your pockets. Business models like this hurt the Open Source community and don't promote Open Source software!
You should be chatting to the MySQL developers and the community... A lot of them are quite passionate about open source.
Most inquiries tend to go direct to the sales staff who (understandably) are tying to maximize the revenue. Remember that MySQL AB was a profitable company, despite having to pay the salary of >150 full time developers.
Why should he need a loan? He got 1 billion from selling his last company. He can use some of that as venture capital for his new project
I think that about 80% of the $1bn stock purchase by Sun went to the Venture Capital companies. The remaining $200m was divided between the employees who held stock options and other private investors.
Years ago, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain at the time, had some law passed which banned television and radio from broadcasting terrorists, including Sinn Fein, the political branch of the IRA terrorists.
The end result was perhaps more damaging to the Government's position - They started by doing 'reenactments' and later when they discovered that the ban only really covered the spoken word, they simply dubbed over by a newscaster.
Why was it detrimental for the Government? Quite simple really. Some Sinn Fein representatives, such as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, initially had such thick accents that most British people probably wouldn't have understood them anyways. By forcing the media to dub over the audio with a clearly spoken newscasters voice, it allowed the people to understand what they were talking about.
Joking aside, perhaps more relevant: Many high profile court cases have been 'reenacted' by the media for television in Britain, mostly because video, photo and audio recording equipment were not allowed... so court transcripts were used, along with either artists sketches of the courtroom scene or even a few actors in a mock courtroom, to reenact events in court to make it accessible to the layman in the comfort of his own home.
Funnily enough, I did not factor in any "expected bonus" when deciding to work for Google: They just seemed like great fun people to work with. Given that my previous employer was acquired by another company, I had to choose to take a leap of faith or stay with the current ship.
Given a choice between being rich and miserable or poor and happy, I'd personally take poor and happy.
Right now, I'm happy to have a job where I work with great people. And I still occasionally keep in touch with some of the great people I knew from my previous job.
Personally, I am very happy to receive the dev G1 phone... It wasn't something I would have purchased for myself (tough economic times ahead yadda yadda yadda) nor was it something that I would have asked anyone else to get for me. It gives me the opportunity to play with it and maybe develop a few stupid little applications, just for fun: It will be a much appreciated toy for Christmas.
Will it replace my old phone? Don't know yet. It is a lot bulkier than my Samsung Trace. For now, I'm giving it a test-drive.
In any case, this is the most valuable Christmas bonus that I have received in recent years - so I kinda feel that anyone complaining about it are kinda being ungrateful. I am used to getting perhaps a company-branded backpack, shot glass, towel or USB pen drive as a Christmas bonus from my previous employer so this phone gift is positively extravagant by comparison. Even considering that I occasionally worked long hours and was key in developing a few features which formed the foundation of my then-CEO's promise, I appreciated the small token gifts and I still enjoy using them today.
I never expected, nor did I ever receive, a large bonus from my previous employer. I never expected any bonus from Google this year, especially considering the current economy.
You're probably not going to like this answer but....
The data is not in an optimal form for MySQL. Consider storing the IP address as a BINARY CHAR field, and not as a number. Order the bytes so that it is in big-endian byte order. Now MySQL can use it's indexes.
The problem is that MySQL treats index keys as a binary string so if you are using a function to join two tables, MySQL does things the hard way.
Windows NT 3.51 would not even install unless you had 12Mb of RAM. I have no idea where you got your 8MB figure from.
OS/2 1.x was a beast but there again much of the work was done by Microsoft. The IBM versions consistently had lower system requirements and a easier to navigate UI. OS/2 2.0 could run in 4Mb of RAM (which was already a lot by 1992 standards) but ideally needed at least 6Mb. OS/2 3.0 actually had lower memory requirements than the previous version - so for almost all users who upgraded from 2.x to 3.0, experienced a very noticeable performance improvement while running on the same hardware.
I was a student at Reading University a little over 10 years ago and it seems that not much has changed.
We had Prof Warwick, whose main duties were to perform interviews for the press, write some books (March of the Machines), be the Cyb department figurehead, do a few lectures on AI and basically drum up as much money as possible.
He is a nice guy though.
Then there is the rest of the department who are supposed to do the heavy lifting... Among us, the students there, we kind of assumed that Dr Richard Mitchell was the "real" head of the department and then there was also Dr Bishop who basically set the coursework plan, who we decided was the #2 in charge.
Amazing how time flies.... I still remember the smell of stale and moldy coffee in staff office corridor: I wonder if they have cleaned that out yet?
They should be teaching those doctors Prolog etc so that they could write Expert systems which could adequately outperform the kind of doctor which would otherwise be moulded by premed students who couldn't do organic chemistry.
I personally believe that a good foundation is necessary irrespective of what programme the student is looking at.
Is it too much to ask for a car mechanic who at least has the basics of mechanical engineering? Or an electrician with the basics of electronics? Or even a computer programmer with the basics of discrete mathematics?
A:... now you should simplify the expression in that "if" statement with De Morgan's... B: Duh what?
Personally, I have no problem with people seeing where I am in public. Seriously, there is nothing I do in public which is really that interesting. Perhaps the most useful thing to me is that I wouldn't have to purchase a GPS device because they know where I am already.
However, in private.... well, that should stay private and they better have a court order as required by law.
Why bother with a complicated cover for your license plate?
Just take the license plates off the vehicle and put it on your front dashboard, perhaps with a map partially obscuring it because "thats where the map landed when you threw it out of the way".
For extra credit, have your windshield be dusty/dirty to make the OCR job just that little bit harder. Perhaps have the wipers in the way a bit too.
AFAIK, this has been in partial operation on select roads and motorways (such as the M4 and the London congestion zone) for years already. The only "news" for the UK is that they are enabling it nationwide.
The hydrogen fuel generator for the Honda Insight will makes the hydrogen gas from your natural gas fuel supply. Waste heat from the process is used to make hot water for your home.
So the Honda Insight is basically powered from Natural Gas and consumed in a 2 stage process - the at-home fuel generator and then the in-vehicle fuel cell.
There is another option which has about the same environmental impact, which is just to use the natural gas in an internal combustion engine. No exotic ceramics required for the fuel cells, no exotic metal alloys for the batteries. And its technology which is available today - the Honda Civic GX is a compressed natural gas only powered vehicle and the EPA has declared it as the worlds cleanest, most environmentally friendly, internal combustion engine for sale anywhere in the world.
OS/2 had a way to implement such a scheme without having to resort to using multiple processes. You could allocate a large chunk of uncommitted memory with DosAllocMem.... Then you can use DosSubAllocMem/DosSubFreeMem to alloc and free smaller chunks from the larger block. When you want to blow the entire block away, call DosFreeMem and it all immediately goes back to the OS.
Painless.
It seems that people are attempting to reinvent alternate solutions to problems which have already been solved nearly 20 years ago.
IIRC, The University of Belgrade did plenty of research into bipedal prosthetics and in the late 1930s even demonstrated such a prosthetic mechanical device being used by an amputee. Alas, WWII came along and kinda messed up the scene for science for a bit. I came across some papers/photos while I was doing research into bipedal robotics more than 10 years ago.
So... it would appear that it has taken 60 years to redo the work... okay, so it is perhaps a little more practical and portable but this is in no way completely original work.
The USA needs something like the Data Protection Act which the UK has... It gives individuals rights to access and correct data held about them and it mandates that organizations must take adequate steps to protect and secure the data. Failure to do so is a criminal offense.
IANAL... If any of Best Western's compromised data details reservations at any of Best Western's hotels in the United Kingdom, they may have opened themselves up for prosecution under this law. All organizations and businesses in the UK which may store details on more than around 500 individuals must register and adhere to the DPA. I am sure that Best Western has had more than 500 customers in their UK operations!
If anyone remembers those old original Pentiums, their 16-bit processing sucked - so much that a similarly clocked 486 could outperform them. I guess that it would be reasonably trivial for Intel to slice off the 16bit microcode on this old chip to make a 'pure' 32-bit only processor. I am sure that they will be using the designs with a working FPU... but for many visual operations, occasional maths errors would largely go unnoticed. Remember when some graphics chip vendors were cheating on benchmarks by reducing the quality... and how long it took for people to notice?
Although, if I had Intel's resources and was designing a 32-core cpu, I would probably choose the core from the latter 486 chips... I don't think a graphics pipeline processor would benefit much from the Pentium's dual instruction pipelines and I doubt that it would be worth the silicon realestate. The 486 has all the same important instructions useful for multi-core work - the CMPXCHG instruction debuted on the 486.
I noticed when I scrolled down to the bottom of the "e-wikipedia"'s clone of the About page, there was some junk words at the bottom which were not on the original.
The site is probably just a reverse proxy with a few filters to insert ads, maybe embed malicious content, insert some junk text, white on white, and the site owners probably hope that when people are looking for info using a search engine, that they will mistake the site for the real Wikipedia.
1. Create a Fake-e-pedia site 2. ???? 3. Profit!!!
A policy of no child left behind leaves every child behind.
When you have a large class and the intent to ensure that there is a minimum understanding between all the students, equally, you end up with a situation where teachers have to teach at the lowest common denominator. The end result is that all the high-achievers and all the mediocre students are all being dragged down to the performance levels of the meat-heads of the year.
The solution is obvious - the classes need to be split so that each peer group can have sufficient advancement so that every individual in their class feels challenged by the work. If it means that the kids at the lowest group could barely multiply by 10 without the aid of a calculator, so be it. It is important that every student feels stretched: Including the high-achievers.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, I cannot because MySQL AB was not a publicly traded company.
But I was an employee of MySQL ... although I cannot give specific details, you can be pretty certain that Sun Microsystems wasn't going to put down $1bn in cash for a company which was burning through it's VC funding.
If MySQL AB wasn't acquired by Sun, there was enough cash in the bank that they would definitely still be here today... and next year too, even if they had zero revenue.
The British Government, or at least, branches of it, used to be very open source friendly. Developing software and publishing it with a very permissive license attached to the source code.
Alas, since the Blair Regime started, that all seemed to come to an end... and the British people had to learn to put up with huge IT spending to private firms, usually affiliated with Fujitsu or Microsoft ... and those public IT projects would famously fall flat on their faces and be quietly shelved.
Just look at the recent hiccups with the UK Biometrics scheme... 'nuff said.
Sun didn't pay $1bn for just some free software. If that was all they wanted, they could have simply downloaded it for free.
Sun purchased the MySQL (r) registered trademark and full rights to the source (including the ability to relicense as desired).
Don't forget, also the couple hundred staff who they don't need to pay any headhunters to find.
And, of course, the most important asset they purchased was "goodwill"... Which is hard to build but quite invaluable.
You should be chatting to the MySQL developers and the community... A lot of them are quite passionate about open source.
Most inquiries tend to go direct to the sales staff who (understandably) are tying to maximize the revenue. Remember that MySQL AB was a profitable company, despite having to pay the salary of >150 full time developers.
I think that about 80% of the $1bn stock purchase by Sun went to the Venture Capital companies.
The remaining $200m was divided between the employees who held stock options and other private investors.
I must admit that it sometimes annoys my wife when I ask for a "Double-A Cell" for a clock but at the store, I would ask, do we need "batteries".
The enlightenment is simple... "Behold, one 'AA' Cell" .... then grab a handful and say "Behold, a battery of 'AA' Cells"
It is usually at that point when she whacks me over the head with whatever she has immediately hand for being pompous.
I believe that has been done in the past...
Years ago, Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of Great Britain at the time, had some law passed which banned television and radio from broadcasting terrorists, including Sinn Fein, the political branch of the IRA terrorists.
The end result was perhaps more damaging to the Government's position - They started by doing 'reenactments' and later when they discovered that the ban only really covered the spoken word, they simply dubbed over by a newscaster.
Why was it detrimental for the Government? Quite simple really. Some Sinn Fein representatives, such as Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, initially had such thick accents that most British people probably wouldn't have understood them anyways. By forcing the media to dub over the audio with a clearly spoken newscasters voice, it allowed the people to understand what they were talking about.
Joking aside, perhaps more relevant: Many high profile court cases have been 'reenacted' by the media for television in Britain, mostly because video, photo and audio recording equipment were not allowed ... so court transcripts were used, along with either artists sketches of the courtroom scene or even a few actors in a mock courtroom, to reenact events in court to make it accessible to the layman in the comfort of his own home.
Hey, you can always give the unwanted phone to a fellow Googler...
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these... Oops, that /. meme probably died years ago.
Seriously, if your dev G1 needs a new home, feel free to pass it along. I'm not going to complain if a 2nd one appeared on my desk.
Funnily enough, I did not factor in any "expected bonus" when deciding to work for Google: They just seemed like great fun people to work with. Given that my previous employer was acquired by another company, I had to choose to take a leap of faith or stay with the current ship.
Given a choice between being rich and miserable or poor and happy, I'd personally take poor and happy.
Right now, I'm happy to have a job where I work with great people. And I still occasionally keep in touch with some of the great people I knew from my previous job.
Personally, I am very happy to receive the dev G1 phone... It wasn't something I would have purchased for myself (tough economic times ahead yadda yadda yadda) nor was it something that I would have asked anyone else to get for me. It gives me the opportunity to play with it and maybe develop a few stupid little applications, just for fun: It will be a much appreciated toy for Christmas.
Will it replace my old phone? Don't know yet. It is a lot bulkier than my Samsung Trace. For now, I'm giving it a test-drive.
In any case, this is the most valuable Christmas bonus that I have received in recent years - so I kinda feel that anyone complaining about it are kinda being ungrateful. I am used to getting perhaps a company-branded backpack, shot glass, towel or USB pen drive as a Christmas bonus from my previous employer so this phone gift is positively extravagant by comparison. Even considering that I occasionally worked long hours and was key in developing a few features which formed the foundation of my then-CEO's promise, I appreciated the small token gifts and I still enjoy using them today.
I never expected, nor did I ever receive, a large bonus from my previous employer.
I never expected any bonus from Google this year, especially considering the current economy.
Just my 2c opinion..
You're probably not going to like this answer but....
The data is not in an optimal form for MySQL. Consider storing the IP address as a BINARY CHAR field, and not as a number. Order the bytes so that it is in big-endian byte order. Now MySQL can use it's indexes.
The problem is that MySQL treats index keys as a binary string so if you are using a function to join two tables, MySQL does things the hard way.
Windows NT 3.51 would not even install unless you had 12Mb of RAM. I have no idea where you got your 8MB figure from.
OS/2 1.x was a beast but there again much of the work was done by Microsoft. The IBM versions consistently had lower system requirements and a easier to navigate UI. OS/2 2.0 could run in 4Mb of RAM (which was already a lot by 1992 standards) but ideally needed at least 6Mb. OS/2 3.0 actually had lower memory requirements than the previous version - so for almost all users who upgraded from 2.x to 3.0, experienced a very noticeable performance improvement while running on the same hardware.
I was a student at Reading University a little over 10 years ago and it seems that not much has changed.
We had Prof Warwick, whose main duties were to perform interviews for the press, write some books (March of the Machines), be the Cyb department figurehead, do a few lectures on AI and basically drum up as much money as possible.
He is a nice guy though.
Then there is the rest of the department who are supposed to do the heavy lifting... Among us, the students there, we kind of assumed that Dr Richard Mitchell was the "real" head of the department and then there was also Dr Bishop who basically set the coursework plan, who we decided was the #2 in charge.
Amazing how time flies.... I still remember the smell of stale and moldy coffee in staff office corridor: I wonder if they have cleaned that out yet?
Meh...
They should be teaching those doctors Prolog etc so that they could write Expert systems which could adequately outperform the kind of doctor which would otherwise be moulded by premed students who couldn't do organic chemistry.
I personally believe that a good foundation is necessary irrespective of what programme the student is looking at.
Is it too much to ask for a car mechanic who at least has the basics of mechanical engineering?
Or an electrician with the basics of electronics?
Or even a computer programmer with the basics of discrete mathematics?
A: ... now you should simplify the expression in that "if" statement with De Morgan's...
B: Duh what?
*sighs*
Personally, I have no problem with people seeing where I am in public. Seriously, there is nothing I do in public which is really that interesting. Perhaps the most useful thing to me is that I wouldn't have to purchase a GPS device because they know where I am already.
However, in private.... well, that should stay private and they better have a court order as required by law.
Why bother with a complicated cover for your license plate?
Just take the license plates off the vehicle and put it on your front dashboard, perhaps with a map partially obscuring it because "thats where the map landed when you threw it out of the way".
For extra credit, have your windshield be dusty/dirty to make the OCR job just that little bit harder. Perhaps have the wipers in the way a bit too.
AFAIK, this has been in partial operation on select roads and motorways (such as the M4 and the London congestion zone) for years already. The only "news" for the UK is that they are enabling it nationwide.
The hydrogen fuel generator for the Honda Insight will makes the hydrogen gas from your natural gas fuel supply. Waste heat from the process is used to make hot water for your home.
So the Honda Insight is basically powered from Natural Gas and consumed in a 2 stage process - the at-home fuel generator and then the in-vehicle fuel cell.
There is another option which has about the same environmental impact, which is just to use the natural gas in an internal combustion engine. No exotic ceramics required for the fuel cells, no exotic metal alloys for the batteries. And its technology which is available today - the Honda Civic GX is a compressed natural gas only powered vehicle and the EPA has declared it as the worlds cleanest, most environmentally friendly, internal combustion engine for sale anywhere in the world.
OS/2 had a way to implement such a scheme without having to resort to using multiple processes.
You could allocate a large chunk of uncommitted memory with DosAllocMem.... Then you can use DosSubAllocMem/DosSubFreeMem to alloc and free smaller chunks from the larger block. When you want to blow the entire block away, call DosFreeMem and it all immediately goes back to the OS.
Painless.
It seems that people are attempting to reinvent alternate solutions to problems which have already been solved nearly 20 years ago.
Ahh.... Nostalgia...
IIRC, The University of Belgrade did plenty of research into bipedal prosthetics and in the late 1930s even demonstrated such a prosthetic mechanical device being used by an amputee. Alas, WWII came along and kinda messed up the scene for science for a bit. I came across some papers/photos while I was doing research into bipedal robotics more than 10 years ago.
So... it would appear that it has taken 60 years to redo the work... okay, so it is perhaps a little more practical and portable but this is in no way completely original work.
The USA needs something like the Data Protection Act which the UK has... It gives individuals rights to access and correct data held about them and it mandates that organizations must take adequate steps to protect and secure the data. Failure to do so is a criminal offense.
IANAL... If any of Best Western's compromised data details reservations at any of Best Western's hotels in the United Kingdom, they may have opened themselves up for prosecution under this law. All organizations and businesses in the UK which may store details on more than around 500 individuals must register and adhere to the DPA. I am sure that Best Western has had more than 500 customers in their UK operations!
If anyone remembers those old original Pentiums, their 16-bit processing sucked - so much that a similarly clocked 486 could outperform them. I guess that it would be reasonably trivial for Intel to slice off the 16bit microcode on this old chip to make a 'pure' 32-bit only processor. I am sure that they will be using the designs with a working FPU... but for many visual operations, occasional maths errors would largely go unnoticed. Remember when some graphics chip vendors were cheating on benchmarks by reducing the quality ... and how long it took for people to notice?
Although, if I had Intel's resources and was designing a 32-core cpu, I would probably choose the core from the latter 486 chips... I don't think a graphics pipeline processor would benefit much from the Pentium's dual instruction pipelines and I doubt that it would be worth the silicon realestate. The 486 has all the same important instructions useful for multi-core work - the CMPXCHG instruction debuted on the 486.
I noticed when I scrolled down to the bottom of the "e-wikipedia"'s clone of the About page, there was some junk words at the bottom which were not on the original.
The site is probably just a reverse proxy with a few filters to insert ads, maybe embed malicious content, insert some junk text, white on white, and the site owners probably hope that when people are looking for info using a search engine, that they will mistake the site for the real Wikipedia.
1. Create a Fake-e-pedia site
2. ????
3. Profit!!!
I wonder what their #2 is...
Just my 2cents.
At a previous sysadmin job, I never snooped on colleagues.
However, as part of my duties, I was instructed to monitor some individuals and to scan for specific keywords in the logs.
I've said it often and loudly:
A policy of no child left behind leaves every child behind.
When you have a large class and the intent to ensure that there is a minimum understanding between all the students, equally, you end up with a situation where teachers have to teach at the lowest common denominator. The end result is that all the high-achievers and all the mediocre students are all being dragged down to the performance levels of the meat-heads of the year.
The solution is obvious - the classes need to be split so that each peer group can have sufficient advancement so that every individual in their class feels challenged by the work. If it means that the kids at the lowest group could barely multiply by 10 without the aid of a calculator, so be it. It is important that every student feels stretched: Including the high-achievers.