Last time I looked, Oracle XE was free (as in beer).
Now there are plenty of limitations (one CPU only, max of 2 or 4Gb of data) but still sufficient for the type of solutions mySQL has traditionally been used for (and if you get to 2Gb of data you can probably afford standard edition). Plus you can always have multiple instances providing different services. However, if your architecture just requires an RDBMS I would go with something that is just that, rather than a heavy platform solution.
IMO - Oracle XE is actually targeting SQL Server's free edition, not mySQL. I've seen Oracle present on the issue and they don't think they would win any mySQL customers over, as mySQL users have already rejected a free proprietary database. SQL Server, on the other hand, is worrying them. What they said was along the lines of : Someone starts developing an application on SQL Server's free edition - it grows and then they need SQL Server enterprise edition. That's a lost sale for Oracle. But it's also how many apps grow, rather than people starting out with an enterprise app / database requirement.
I would have mentioned the same (most of the major UK supermarkets do delivery) but the US is a very different market, as brought home to me by someone telling me how their nearest Walmart / major town was . . . 50 miles away. What makes the model work so well in the UK is that most of the population live close to an urban centre.
Amazon also love the UK for that - apparently we're one of their best markets because most things get delivered next day.
Thanks very much. Hopefully someone will mod your post informative.
Now I know it's actually a case of people not bothering, rather than it being technically difficult. Or to be closer to my original point - it's the philosophical rather than technical differences that make cross-platform GUI hard.
Re:What makes you think Java won't rule the client
on
The End of Native Code?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm not sure that we've moved that much. I think Gosling and the other originators of Java are still pushing in the wrong direction with GUI; see his remarks on Eclipse / SWT.
It is not a Java problem per se, but goes right back to the issue of creating cross-platform client apps in the first place. Many of us like to think of the OS as something that provides services - disk access, windowing, etc - that look like they can easily be abstracted - and they can. However, as well as being OS, Windows, OS X, KDE and GNOME are platforms - a set of programming APIs and a philosophy.
Rather than transcending these differences, Swing is yet another variation. Potentially you could make a Swing app that did look and behave identical to a Windows app - but it would feel plain wrong on OS X. The reverse is equally true (well, just about - I don't think you can use the top-of-screen menu bar in Swing apps).
I think SWT may be the better approach - it's not write-once run-anywhere, but you are reducing the amount you need to port. And as said above, you need to consider the philosophical differences between platform HCI anyway.
Ironically one of the few really successful Java GUI apps I know is a data visualisation tool - it mostly consists of OpenGL calls so it's a bit of a misnomer to say it's Java, but it's back to the point that it's the APIs that count. OpenGL is a nice x-platform API.
Perhaps I am a socialist, but I think the thing that is missing here is organised resistance - i.e. increasing the cost to business of getting rid of their employees. The fact that employees have become so scared of resistance to the forces of capital ('it'll look bad on your CV') allows them to act as they please. People would rather mouth off on Slashdot than actually engage in actions (strikes, consumer boycotts, etc) that have some meaningful effect on the bottom line - the only one that does, of course, count.
At the very least, an organised walkout would deprive the owners of the capital in the place you work of a few thousand dollars per worker. A temporary but satisfying blip. In a dog eat dog free market we should remember that occasionally it is worth landing a punch back, rather that forever acting in the interests of business and believing the bullshit rhetoric that what is good for business and good for consumers is also good for us (we are mostly workers as well as consumers).
I thought optimism as a philosophy went out with Voltaire's Candide.
Nah, he means 'as in people with talent for anything other than publicly mouthing off'. If his finger was on the pulse he'd realise there has always been free content - the problem has been distribution. As distribution has got easier, the focus of the industry has been on increasing the cost of publicity. (How ugly was your typical musician on the radio).
I think this is a big factor in the trend towards cheaper / low power PCs. In terms of power/cost you're probably better off paying $500 every 18 months than $1000 every 36 months.
Although we should be glad some people are driving the market along.
I'm not even convinced that it was deliberate policy on the part of MS, so much as natural selection favouring the type of business consumers prefer.
Look at cars, clothes, and food - the dominant market goes to 'inferior' products. People generally prefer to buy cheap and dispose, that make an investment. 'New Improved' has been an advertising staple since the 50s.
I guess from another point of view it's a risk reduction strategy - invest less and you have less to lose. It's why my company buys Dell's. They may be less reliable but like so many electrical goods it's getting to the point where it just cheaper to replace kit than make any effort to repair it (I don't personally agree but I can understand the point).
>At one point, the Michael Ignatieff campaign's Quebec youth director, Marc-André Gendron, was suspected He's got to be a hacker with a name like Marc-André.
On the other hand, they may end up like my firm - paying contract rates to hire back the staff it made redundant after things picked up.
You could see that as a win-win situation for the redundant staff, or at least revenge.
Although at least the staff knew about this before it appeared in Slashdot (I had a CV from a really interesting Sun employee who had just taken voluntary redundancy, and thought 'I didn't know they were making cuts'). It's hardly an unexpected turn of events.
I was trying to draw a line between licences that ensure personal freedom against those that allow commercial freedom - the former strikes me as more important if useless to most - the second is probably more useful.
It's so not new, it was the inspiration for the WWW (the first browser being a browser / editor, and the idea being somewhere to dump all that miscellaneous info about CERN that would also - unlike historical documentation - be easy to keep up do date).
I'd be intrigued as to what definition of open-source Negroponte is working to - i.e. is he saying GPL only?
We know he has rejected free-beer closed source software (i.e. OS X), but it's a bit misleading to describe Sun's licence as 'closed-source'. It's not a binary blob (like many video drivers). You're free to study it, and you're free to implement your own; you could build a computer on a new kind of CPU and OS and compile up a version of the JVM without having to ask Sun's permission. To me that ticks most of the really important - personal freedom - parts of an open source licence.
What's limited is the ability of 'the community' to contribute, and more importantly, I suspect, to Red Hat, commercial freedom to modify and redistribute. In that respect, the GPL is actually similarly restrictive, just in a different way.
In several of his books Michael Moorcock points out that in WW2, the British authorities had planned for civil breakdown. The population of London completely surprised them by, like New Yorkers, rising to the challenge, rather than going to pieces.
Perhaps that's the difference - once the worst has happened, you are no longer trying to maintain security.
Yup. I guess the point is 'don't misapply advise across domains'.
The most annoying recent occurrence I've seen was in Ken Pugh's 'Prefactoring' which again repeated it as a general principle - i.e. at the design level. I think perhaps the best way to explain it to modern OO developers is 'don't optimise the inside of your classes - always optimise the structure of your classes'. (And always think that any external resource takes 30 seconds to access).
We've heard it many times, but I do sometimes wonder what the consequences of Knuth's piece of advise are.
While it stops developers tweaking every possible piece of code to be an unreadable high-performance mess, I've also seen it used as an excuse to 'not think about performance now' at design time. Even when you are showing them evidence that they are repeating a known performance problem - and some performance problems require major restructuring - i.e. the stuff you can't fix by tuning the code inside a class, but because some dimwit designer is working at such an abstract level, they can't see that calling a web-service located in China, once per object, for thousands of objects, was NEVER going to work.
'Premature optimisation' is a usefully vague phrase - you can only know it was premature with hindsight. Rant over.
(But yes, it's nice that Apple improve performance with each release, although with Tiger it looks like that has been at the cost of needing more memory).
There used to be great course/exam run in UK schools called 'Use of English' - unfortunately I think the last year it ran was 1988.
The focus of the course was very much on journalism and editing, rather than creative or essay writing. It largely entailed taking extracts and either summarising them to 200 words, or padding them. These were great skills to develop - being able to edit someone else's work gives perspective on your own writing.
The only thing I question is the constant pressure on software developers to improve various unrelated skills. No company would hire someone on a software engineer's salary to write documentation, yet many spend man-years of developer time in doing so.
If their revision crashes a machine with, say, their network card installed, then of course they will care. If their revision to the kernel causes a problem for other network cards - they have less motivation. It won't crash machines with their card in.
One of the specific issues Andrew Morton raised is vendors not even maintaining backward compatibility for their own hardware, but only presumably only testing against their current range.
(I don't blame developers - they're going to be under the usual pressure to do their work in half the time needed).
The myth that they are 'design' machines really needs to die. Maybe back in the late 80s, when the only WYSIWYG DTP software available was on the Mac, but the Adobe, Macromedia and Quark software used by most 'design' types has long been designed / developed in a cross-platform way. By numbers, there is more design software on the PC.
I don't really think there is a lot that makes the Mac an inherently better platform for 'design' - or rather, I don't think there is anything that makes the Mac a better platform for design that doesn't ALSO apply to other fields.
As for software support in general - as a software developer who uses both PCs and Macs, I've not found myself stuck for anything. I use different programs on both machines, but you can achieve the same functionality on both platforms. Sometimes I find myself cursing not having Expose, Xylescope, native PDF support or the Omni apps on the PC. Sometimes, as with Oracle XE, the problem is in the other direction.
If you're not a troll, I'd suggest developing a bit of curiosity towards the systems you use, and a bit of flexibility with your tools - it could pay dividends for your career.
It's worth reading the article - as he points out many Linux contributors are not volunteers, but paid by vendors, which I guess makes the management chain very complex. The vendors don't care about breaking things so long as it works on their hardware (In fact, hassling vendors to give support to their Linux developers sounds like a full time job in itself).
If driver vendors really are the problem, maybe it's time to crack open the microkernel / monolithic kernel debate again . . . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel
Slashdot Mirror
Last time I looked, Oracle XE was free (as in beer).
Now there are plenty of limitations (one CPU only, max of 2 or 4Gb of data) but still sufficient for the type of solutions mySQL has traditionally been used for (and if you get to 2Gb of data you can probably afford standard edition). Plus you can always have multiple instances providing different services. However, if your architecture just requires an RDBMS I would go with something that is just that, rather than a heavy platform solution.
IMO - Oracle XE is actually targeting SQL Server's free edition, not mySQL. I've seen Oracle present on the issue and they don't think they would win any mySQL customers over, as mySQL users have already rejected a free proprietary database. SQL Server, on the other hand, is worrying them. What they said was along the lines of : Someone starts developing an application on SQL Server's free edition - it grows and then they need SQL Server enterprise edition. That's a lost sale for Oracle. But it's also how many apps grow, rather than people starting out with an enterprise app / database requirement.
I would have mentioned the same (most of the major UK supermarkets do delivery) but the US is a very different market, as brought home to me by someone telling me how their nearest Walmart / major town was . . . 50 miles away. What makes the model work so well in the UK is that most of the population live close to an urban centre.
Amazon also love the UK for that - apparently we're one of their best markets because most things get delivered next day.
Thanks very much. Hopefully someone will mod your post informative.
Now I know it's actually a case of people not bothering, rather than it being technically difficult.
Or to be closer to my original point - it's the philosophical rather than technical differences that make cross-platform GUI hard.
I'm not sure that we've moved that much. I think Gosling and the other originators of Java are still pushing in the wrong direction with GUI; see his remarks on Eclipse / SWT.
It is not a Java problem per se, but goes right back to the issue of creating cross-platform client apps in the first place. Many of us like to think of the OS as something that provides services - disk access, windowing, etc - that look like they can easily be abstracted - and they can. However, as well as being OS, Windows, OS X, KDE and GNOME are platforms - a set of programming APIs and a philosophy.
Rather than transcending these differences, Swing is yet another variation. Potentially you could make a Swing app that did look and behave identical to a Windows app - but it would feel plain wrong on OS X. The reverse is equally true (well, just about - I don't think you can use the top-of-screen menu bar in Swing apps).
I think SWT may be the better approach - it's not write-once run-anywhere, but you are reducing the amount you need to port. And as said above, you need to consider the philosophical differences between platform HCI anyway.
Ironically one of the few really successful Java GUI apps I know is a data visualisation tool - it mostly consists of OpenGL calls so it's a bit of a misnomer to say it's Java, but it's back to the point that it's the APIs that count. OpenGL is a nice x-platform API.
Perhaps I am a socialist, but I think the thing that is missing here is organised resistance - i.e. increasing the cost to business of getting rid of their employees. The fact that employees have become so scared of resistance to the forces of capital ('it'll look bad on your CV') allows them to act as they please. People would rather mouth off on Slashdot than actually engage in actions (strikes, consumer boycotts, etc) that have some meaningful effect on the bottom line - the only one that does, of course, count.
At the very least, an organised walkout would deprive the owners of the capital in the place you work of a few thousand dollars per worker. A temporary but satisfying blip. In a dog eat dog free market we should remember that occasionally it is worth landing a punch back, rather that forever acting in the interests of business and believing the bullshit rhetoric that what is good for business and good for consumers is also good for us (we are mostly workers as well as consumers).
I thought optimism as a philosophy went out with Voltaire's Candide.
Nah, he means 'as in people with talent for anything other than publicly mouthing off'. If his finger was on the pulse he'd realise there has always been free content - the problem has been distribution. As distribution has got easier, the focus of the industry has been on increasing the cost of publicity. (How ugly was your typical musician on the radio).
I think this is a big factor in the trend towards cheaper / low power PCs. In terms of power/cost you're probably better off paying $500 every 18 months than $1000 every 36 months. Although we should be glad some people are driving the market along.
I'm not even convinced that it was deliberate policy on the part of MS, so much as natural selection favouring the type of business consumers prefer.
Look at cars, clothes, and food - the dominant market goes to 'inferior' products. People generally prefer to buy cheap and dispose, that make an investment. 'New Improved' has been an advertising staple since the 50s.
I guess from another point of view it's a risk reduction strategy - invest less and you have less to lose. It's why my company buys Dell's. They may be less reliable but like so many electrical goods it's getting to the point where it just cheaper to replace kit than make any effort to repair it (I don't personally agree but I can understand the point).
It's Clippy's big Auntie.
>At one point, the Michael Ignatieff campaign's Quebec youth director, Marc-André Gendron, was suspected
He's got to be a hacker with a name like Marc-André.
I will be more impressed when the headline is 'SanDisk to pay open-source developers to port Rockbox to it's players'.
On the other hand, they may end up like my firm - paying contract rates to hire back the staff it made redundant after things picked up.
You could see that as a win-win situation for the redundant staff, or at least revenge.
Although at least the staff knew about this before it appeared in Slashdot (I had a CV from a really interesting Sun employee who had just taken voluntary redundancy, and thought 'I didn't know they were making cuts'). It's hardly an unexpected turn of events.
Intel hasn't (to my knowledge) killed anyone protesting against it, in full view of the world's cameras, just because it can.
Agreed.
I was trying to draw a line between licences that ensure personal freedom against those that allow commercial freedom - the former strikes me as more important if useless to most - the second is probably more useful.
It's so not new, it was the inspiration for the WWW (the first browser being a browser / editor, and the idea being somewhere to dump all that miscellaneous info about CERN that would also - unlike historical documentation - be easy to keep up do date).
I'd be intrigued as to what definition of open-source Negroponte is working to - i.e. is he saying GPL only?
We know he has rejected free-beer closed source software (i.e. OS X), but it's a bit misleading to describe Sun's licence as 'closed-source'. It's not a binary blob (like many video drivers). You're free to study it, and you're free to implement your own; you could build a computer on a new kind of CPU and OS and compile up a version of the JVM without having to ask Sun's permission. To me that ticks most of the really important - personal freedom - parts of an open source licence.
What's limited is the ability of 'the community' to contribute, and more importantly, I suspect, to Red Hat, commercial freedom to modify and redistribute.
In that respect, the GPL is actually similarly restrictive, just in a different way.
Strictly speaking, KHTML rather than Konqueror. All other WebKit based browsers like Shiira also benefit from the same codebase.
(Does that mean the Nokia mobile browser passes?)
In several of his books Michael Moorcock points out that in WW2, the British authorities had planned for civil breakdown. The population of London completely surprised them by, like New Yorkers, rising to the challenge, rather than going to pieces.
Perhaps that's the difference - once the worst has happened, you are no longer trying to maintain security.
Yup. I guess the point is 'don't misapply advise across domains'.
The most annoying recent occurrence I've seen was in Ken Pugh's 'Prefactoring' which again repeated it as a general principle - i.e. at the design level.
I think perhaps the best way to explain it to modern OO developers is 'don't optimise the inside of your classes - always optimise the structure of your classes'. (And always think that any external resource takes 30 seconds to access).
We've heard it many times, but I do sometimes wonder what the consequences of Knuth's piece of advise are.
While it stops developers tweaking every possible piece of code to be an unreadable high-performance mess, I've also seen it used as an excuse to 'not think about performance now' at design time. Even when you are showing them evidence that they are repeating a known performance problem - and some performance problems require major restructuring - i.e. the stuff you can't fix by tuning the code inside a class, but because some dimwit designer is working at such an abstract level, they can't see that calling a web-service located in China, once per object, for thousands of objects, was NEVER going to work.
'Premature optimisation' is a usefully vague phrase - you can only know it was premature with hindsight. Rant over.
(But yes, it's nice that Apple improve performance with each release, although with Tiger it looks like that has been at the cost of needing more memory).
The tendency with OS X has been the other way.
As they have a strictly controlled hardware platform it is less risky than on systems that have to maintain a wider hardware base.
There used to be great course/exam run in UK schools called 'Use of English' - unfortunately I think the last year it ran was 1988.
The focus of the course was very much on journalism and editing, rather than creative or essay writing. It largely entailed taking extracts and either summarising them to 200 words, or padding them. These were great skills to develop - being able to edit someone else's work gives perspective on your own writing.
The only thing I question is the constant pressure on software developers to improve various unrelated skills. No company would hire someone on a software engineer's salary to write documentation, yet many spend man-years of developer time in doing so.
To clarify :
If their revision crashes a machine with, say, their network card installed, then of course they will care.
If their revision to the kernel causes a problem for other network cards - they have less motivation. It won't crash machines with their card in.
One of the specific issues Andrew Morton raised is vendors not even maintaining backward compatibility for their own hardware, but only presumably only testing against their current range.
(I don't blame developers - they're going to be under the usual pressure to do their work in half the time needed).
The myth that they are 'design' machines really needs to die. Maybe back in the late 80s, when the only WYSIWYG DTP software available was on the Mac, but the Adobe, Macromedia and Quark software used by most 'design' types has long been designed / developed in a cross-platform way. By numbers, there is more design software on the PC.
I don't really think there is a lot that makes the Mac an inherently better platform for 'design' - or rather, I don't think there is anything that makes the Mac a better platform for design that doesn't ALSO apply to other fields.
As for software support in general - as a software developer who uses both PCs and Macs, I've not found myself stuck for anything. I use different programs on both machines, but you can achieve the same functionality on both platforms. Sometimes I find myself cursing not having Expose, Xylescope, native PDF support or the Omni apps on the PC. Sometimes, as with Oracle XE, the problem is in the other direction.
If you're not a troll, I'd suggest developing a bit of curiosity towards the systems you use, and a bit of flexibility with your tools - it could pay dividends for your career.
It's worth reading the article - as he points out many Linux contributors are not volunteers, but paid by vendors, which I guess makes the management chain very complex. The vendors don't care about breaking things so long as it works on their hardware (In fact, hassling vendors to give support to their Linux developers sounds like a full time job in itself).
If driver vendors really are the problem, maybe it's time to crack open the microkernel / monolithic kernel debate again . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel