Umm, InnoDB is an engine for MySQL, they are still using MySQL. They just said they use the InnoDB engine exclusively rather than the other engines such as MyISAM. They probably never used MyISAM since it doesn't have foreign keys or transactions. No respected DBA would ever use MyISAM.
Where did I say InnoDB wasn't MySQL..? And no, they used MyISAM initially, you can check the comments after their original post.
In fact the irony in your post is big, as the original post addresses just people like you who are very quick to decide what a "respected DBA" would do, or not (versus reality).
I'll quote one of the Google devs answering questions about it:
Q: holy crap, you ran adwords on a transactionless database?
A: Yep.
Q: you have balls. and you're lucky as hell nothing (else) went wrong.
A: Nope. Luck had nothing to do with it. If you don't have transactions you just roll your own. It's actually not hard at all.
Bottom line is, you use transactions as it easier to retain data integrity and makes for simpler code. You don't use transactions to be "respected DBA". Whatever reasons they had to use MyISAM was probably sound, but after certain level of sophistication, they switched to InnoDB to make things easier to manage.
Apparently something has changed in Google's usage of MySQL. They have this to say for their patch:
"In a perfect world, each feature would be provided as a separate patch and all code would be as portable as MySQL. We are not there yet. These have been implemented and deployed on Linux. Also, some of these features only work with InnoDB, because we use InnoDB."
InnoDB is the slower, but safer/transaction-able way to use MySQL. In an earlier blog entry "let's get a real database", Google revealed they run AdWords/AdSense on MySQL, and they rolled up their own transactions as they went for speed with MySQL. Now we see they changed their mind.
So I suppose that goes to show, never mind how limited your application, you better stay away from MyISAM: it'll bite you sooner or later.
Slashdot users, I bow to you. It's hard to beat that much bias and ignorance as you've demonstrated in most of the posts over here. Which is why you'll never be convinced that Windows has benefits, and the world will keep using it.
Don't let this little disparity bother you, just put a spin on it and contribute 100% of it to evil MS schemes, which force you to use Windows, never mind the OSS options.
Would it not be a good idea to keep doing this to see if we can break Slashdot? How many levels deep can we go?
If the threading in Slashdot comments is implemented via MPTT (google it), then we may go on forever, and it'll run as usual (it won't break or slow down or anything at all).
"This shows that Intel is willing to take AMD seriously as a competitive threat, and is prepared to act upon it. In addition to this breaking one of the most sacred taboos at Intel, it also hints that engineering now has the upper hand over bureaucracy."
When they have to spell it out for you what their actions supposedly "hint" at, you know you're reading quite a silly PR spin on the matter.
People don't buy the faster, more efficient chips, but they buy the chips advertisement tells them to buy.
Your cynicism is out of place in this discussion.
This is not a coffee brand, this is a chip. People look at the price, at the benchmarks in the magazines, and consult knowledgeable friends.
The idea that you can make someone buy a poor chip with a neat advertisement was disproven when AMD started eating at Intel's marketshare during the P4 times. Intel never stopped their ads, but their chips simply were worse.
ATI makes chipsets for AMD systems outside of the GPU areas. They've had mobile chipsets for notebooks for a while, and you can get desktop motherboards with ATI chipsets.
AMD's purchase of ATI makes them more like Intel, because now they have CPUs, a decent array of motherboard chipsets, and GPUs all under one roof.
Let's just hope they can sort everything out internally and start putting some decent products out on shelves soon.
I never liked ATI's chipsets, what people (and I) know is NForce chipsets. The whole idea of AMD buying ATI is crazy in my opinion. IBM didn't buy AMD and AMD didn't buy IBM, yet they cooperate tightly on the technology behind both of their chip technologies.
The smart move in my opinion would be if nVidia and AMD partnered on the chipsets and graphics chips without necessarily merging and thus destabilizing further AMD's financial situation. Instead of working with the market leader as partners, AMD opted to buy ATI since although inferior, now it gets to own its own GPU company. Well looks pretty childish, looked childish back then, and now even more, looking from the perspective of their Q1 reports.
It wasn't a matter if it makes chipsets or not, but how viable are they. The only chipset I'd ever run an AMD today (if I had to) would be nForce, which is incidentally produced by ATI's rival.
YOU, yes you are whats wrong today. You and your attitude is what drives companies out of business, which FAR to many people have.
This is quite arrogant, given said companies operate with this guy's money (and other people like him). If he wouldn't initially fund the company, that company would end its life much sooner, wouldn't it.
You can't expect casual people to think 5-10 or 20 years in the future. That's also quite arrogant. If you want to make the rules, just keep your company privately owned.
If people go public, it's maybe since having those extra funds (even if volatile) is better than not having any additional funds at all. Think about that.
That's why I bought an AMD Turion X2 laptop recently, well knowing that I sacrificed both performance and battery life.
I'm glad you're the exception and not the rule, for if we had a free market when customers buy the worst chip in fear anything else would harm free market forces, those free market forces wouldn't work in the first place.
The reason Intel and AMD are fighting for faster, more efficient chips, is because people do buy the faster, more efficient chips. Doing otherwise sends AMD the wrong message.
Question: if you are an underdog in a hypercompetitive industry, when a little success comes your way and you are finally climbing out of debt, do you:
(a) Stop what you are doing and deeply indebt yourself in order to enter another cutthroat industry largely outside of your expertise? (b) Freaking invest in your core competencies while you have the chance?
You're right, when a little success came my way in the form of the payment from my last project, I should've concentrated on my core competence, but I instead went out and bought ATI X2900 for my PC. Since the ATI merger it's been downhill ever since: all night and day Doom3 and Half Life 2.
I'm not sure if I speak for anyone else, but the reason I stopped buying amd is because of the merger with ati.
You're not, because the majority of people don't obsess on "out of principle" stances (for good or bad).
AMD's problem however is technical, and not philosophical (no own chipsets, worse power efficiency, worse speed, worse yields, worse process, worse scaling).
Is that recently AMD's best chipsets for desktop systems have come from nVidia. AMD themselves seems to be unwilling or unable to make desktop chipsets, and thus relies on third parties.
In my eye this has always been the greatest problem of AMD. I've tried having AMD systems few times. The problem is the chipsets were all lemons, and caused BSODs on a bare Windows install or various other issues.
With more knowledge on the good vendors (nVidia being one, but NForce wasn't there at that time), it's a lot more hassle for me to play mix-and-match in the hope of creating a stable system, versus just going Intel chipset and Intel CPU and knowing I have a efficient, stable system.
Even in the time of Pentium 4, which is by far Intel's worst CPU, I preferred Intel because of their chipsets.
It's outrageous that when AMD started thinking of platforms, they started with buying ATI and thinking of GPU-s, versus taking care of their missing chipset problem. And now that Intel has the better CPU-s as well, tough times for AMD.
But any kernel mode drivers Toshiba shipped had to go through Microsoft's certification program, so the blame still ultimately falls there.
The responsibility to deliver stable software is with the software Maker. Microsoft's certification program ensures the code isn't blatantly unstable (such as found by some small asian manifacturers) or malicious. Testing kernel drivers isn't very trivial, you know.
And that BSOD isn't the worst thing in the world, it happens even with the best ones sometimes. Toshiba will just test, and issue a fix, it's apparently easy to reproduce, so good for them.
I get firefox crashing hard if I view any of the mac vs pc videos on their home page. It might be Jobs' way of showing me how crap life is on pcs.
I've used to experience quicktime crashes in Firefox as well, on certain QT versions (I think the latest is better).
I'm afraid the only thing Jobs is showing you, is his Windows team of programmers aren't quite good. If I didn't know better, it would make me think OSX and Macs are total crap, but in fact QuickTime on OSX is running just fine.
The fact that it crashed was probably Apple's "bad", but the fact that it resulted in a BSOD is obviously Vista.
Don't be so certain. Anyone in the kernel space can cause BSOD. Which means it may be any of the kernel mode drivers Toshiba loaded their tablet with.
The Windows version of Apple's software is quite poorly written, but I wouldn't blame it, unless they install kernel drivers (for virtual devices, and for iPod presumably). I doubt it's the case but you never know. User space software can NOT cause a BSOD, end of story.
The goal of a kernel mode driver is to have raw access to the hardware. As such, the OS can't limit the damage to a given process or ensure integrity after a critical situation. The BSOD is in fact happening to protect from any (or at least further) data corruption and loss. If Vista would be "nice" and just keep on running after a kernel mode driver screwed up badly, you may not be able to even boot next time.
Otherwise Google is a one trick pony which peculiarly spends most of its R&D budget outside of its core revenue market !
Wait a minute.. We're on to something. So Google has one single core business which makes it profits, and keeps spending R&D on other initiatives, and entering late in markets by buying other companies which are already there.
Where the heck is this familiar from.. Anyone help?
After enough number of iterations trying to optimize a software program to do everything very well compared to the base "naive" solution, you end up with an OS that does everything poorly.
It's counterintuitive, but we see it it every day around us.
Sadly goatse is part of the history of the internet.
You'll be surprised how many people, making millions on the Internet, have no clue what it is. The people familiar in details with all the shock sites are a certain subculture, and certainly doesn't make up the history of the Internet.
Am I the only one who finds this story, for lack of a better word, alarmist. I'm sure there is a better word, but I can't think of it at the moment. This article is all about AMD shipping a 3 GHZ chip. 3 GHZ chips are not exactly breaking news, and while it is a high for AMD, again, not news. Now were AMD to push the envelope farther than intel has previously gone, then I would find this story more insteresting, but the fact the AMD is only now shipping 3 GHZ processors I find quite ho-hum, and perhaps a desperate attempt to imnprove their financial situation, rather than any kind of real innovation.
Right.. right.. Or just they were doing business as usual and a bunch of guys freaked out for no good reason? Don't get caught in the loop.
future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.
This is misleading. No one gave up improving the performance of single-threaded apps.
All new chips are striving to improve the performance of each core by packing more executed commands per cpu cycle. This is achieved with better branch prediction, concurrent execution of commands that are in principle serial (this is possible as long as they don't depend on each other), and less execution "stages", i.e. more efficient architecture.
We'll see lots of speed improvements in each separate core, and we'll see it via smarter and smarter architecture that adapts to the code being executed.
The reason we've not seen this before, is because this is a very complex task, and upping the GHz seemed easier.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, InnoDB is an engine for MySQL, they are still using MySQL. They just said they use the InnoDB engine exclusively rather than the other engines such as MyISAM. They probably never used MyISAM since it doesn't have foreign keys or transactions. No respected DBA would ever use MyISAM.
..? And no, they used MyISAM initially, you can check the comments after their original post.
Where did I say InnoDB wasn't MySQL
In fact the irony in your post is big, as the original post addresses just people like you who are very quick to decide what a "respected DBA" would do, or not (versus reality).
I'll quote one of the Google devs answering questions about it:
Q: holy crap, you ran adwords on a transactionless database?
A: Yep.
Q: you have balls. and you're lucky as hell nothing (else) went wrong.
A: Nope. Luck had nothing to do with it. If you don't have transactions you just roll your own. It's actually not hard at all.
Bottom line is, you use transactions as it easier to retain data integrity and makes for simpler code. You don't use transactions to be "respected DBA". Whatever reasons they had to use MyISAM was probably sound, but after certain level of sophistication, they switched to InnoDB to make things easier to manage.
Apparently something has changed in Google's usage of MySQL. They have this to say for their patch:
"In a perfect world, each feature would be provided as a separate patch and all code would be as portable as MySQL. We are not there yet. These have been implemented and deployed on Linux. Also, some of these features only work with InnoDB, because we use InnoDB."
InnoDB is the slower, but safer/transaction-able way to use MySQL. In an earlier blog entry "let's get a real database", Google revealed they run AdWords/AdSense on MySQL, and they rolled up their own transactions as they went for speed with MySQL. Now we see they changed their mind.
So I suppose that goes to show, never mind how limited your application, you better stay away from MyISAM: it'll bite you sooner or later.
Slashdot users, I bow to you. It's hard to beat that much bias and ignorance as you've demonstrated in most of the posts over here. Which is why you'll never be convinced that Windows has benefits, and the world will keep using it.
Don't let this little disparity bother you, just put a spin on it and contribute 100% of it to evil MS schemes, which force you to use Windows, never mind the OSS options.
As in - Why not limit the number of websites? Too much choice!
Noone is limiting the number of OS, people just pick one OS most of the time. But congrats for your absurd pointless example, nonetheless.
Would it not be a good idea to keep doing this to see if we can break Slashdot? How many levels deep can we go?
If the threading in Slashdot comments is implemented via MPTT (google it), then we may go on forever, and it'll run as usual (it won't break or slow down or anything at all).
"This shows that Intel is willing to take AMD seriously as a competitive threat, and is prepared to act upon it. In addition to this breaking one of the most sacred taboos at Intel, it also hints that engineering now has the upper hand over bureaucracy."
When they have to spell it out for you what their actions supposedly "hint" at, you know you're reading quite a silly PR spin on the matter.
People don't buy the faster, more efficient chips, but they buy the chips advertisement tells them to buy.
Your cynicism is out of place in this discussion.
This is not a coffee brand, this is a chip. People look at the price, at the benchmarks in the magazines, and consult knowledgeable friends.
The idea that you can make someone buy a poor chip with a neat advertisement was disproven when AMD started eating at Intel's marketshare during the P4 times. Intel never stopped their ads, but their chips simply were worse.
ATI makes chipsets for AMD systems outside of the GPU areas. They've had mobile chipsets for notebooks for a while, and you can get desktop motherboards with ATI chipsets.
AMD's purchase of ATI makes them more like Intel, because now they have CPUs, a decent array of motherboard chipsets, and GPUs all under one roof.
Let's just hope they can sort everything out internally and start putting some decent products out on shelves soon.
I never liked ATI's chipsets, what people (and I) know is NForce chipsets. The whole idea of AMD buying ATI is crazy in my opinion. IBM didn't buy AMD and AMD didn't buy IBM, yet they cooperate tightly on the technology behind both of their chip technologies.
The smart move in my opinion would be if nVidia and AMD partnered on the chipsets and graphics chips without necessarily merging and thus destabilizing further AMD's financial situation. Instead of working with the market leader as partners, AMD opted to buy ATI since although inferior, now it gets to own its own GPU company. Well looks pretty childish, looked childish back then, and now even more, looking from the perspective of their Q1 reports.
Someone didn't even know ATI makes chipsets.
It wasn't a matter if it makes chipsets or not, but how viable are they. The only chipset I'd ever run an AMD today (if I had to) would be nForce, which is incidentally produced by ATI's rival.
YOU, yes you are whats wrong today. You and your attitude is what drives companies out of business, which FAR to many people have.
This is quite arrogant, given said companies operate with this guy's money (and other people like him). If he wouldn't initially fund the company, that company would end its life much sooner, wouldn't it.
You can't expect casual people to think 5-10 or 20 years in the future. That's also quite arrogant. If you want to make the rules, just keep your company privately owned.
If people go public, it's maybe since having those extra funds (even if volatile) is better than not having any additional funds at all. Think about that.
That's why I bought an AMD Turion X2 laptop recently, well knowing that I sacrificed both performance and battery life.
I'm glad you're the exception and not the rule, for if we had a free market when customers buy the worst chip in fear anything else would harm free market forces, those free market forces wouldn't work in the first place.
The reason Intel and AMD are fighting for faster, more efficient chips, is because people do buy the faster, more efficient chips. Doing otherwise sends AMD the wrong message.
You're right, when a little success came my way in the form of the payment from my last project, I should've concentrated on my core competence, but I instead went out and bought ATI X2900 for my PC. Since the ATI merger it's been downhill ever since: all night and day Doom3 and Half Life 2.
People, don't merge with ATI!
I'm not sure if I speak for anyone else, but the reason I stopped buying amd is because of the merger with ati.
You're not, because the majority of people don't obsess on "out of principle" stances (for good or bad).
AMD's problem however is technical, and not philosophical (no own chipsets, worse power efficiency, worse speed, worse yields, worse process, worse scaling).
1. Issue press release decrying DRM and refuse to support it at a hardware level.
2. Announce and develop proper linux support for the ATI range.
Yes, amazing strategy you got there.
Lack of support for Windows Vista and supporting the edge case of a user playing games on Linux.
You must be working in AMD already, seeing their Q1 results.
Is that recently AMD's best chipsets for desktop systems have come from nVidia. AMD themselves seems to be unwilling or unable to make desktop chipsets, and thus relies on third parties.
In my eye this has always been the greatest problem of AMD. I've tried having AMD systems few times. The problem is the chipsets were all lemons, and caused BSODs on a bare Windows install or various other issues.
With more knowledge on the good vendors (nVidia being one, but NForce wasn't there at that time), it's a lot more hassle for me to play mix-and-match in the hope of creating a stable system, versus just going Intel chipset and Intel CPU and knowing I have a efficient, stable system.
Even in the time of Pentium 4, which is by far Intel's worst CPU, I preferred Intel because of their chipsets.
It's outrageous that when AMD started thinking of platforms, they started with buying ATI and thinking of GPU-s, versus taking care of their missing chipset problem. And now that Intel has the better CPU-s as well, tough times for AMD.
But any kernel mode drivers Toshiba shipped had to go through Microsoft's certification program, so the blame still ultimately falls there.
The responsibility to deliver stable software is with the software Maker. Microsoft's certification program ensures the code isn't blatantly unstable (such as found by some small asian manifacturers) or malicious. Testing kernel drivers isn't very trivial, you know.
And that BSOD isn't the worst thing in the world, it happens even with the best ones sometimes. Toshiba will just test, and issue a fix, it's apparently easy to reproduce, so good for them.
Also, why is this Slashdot worthy?
Anything is.
What you are seeing lies at the bullseye of the primary reason why I don't intend to ever install Vista
Riight, riight.. You remind me of myself. A proud DOS user, I'd never install them newfangled Win 3.11 softwarez.
An year later, a proud Windows 3.11 users, I'd never install them newfangled Windows 95 softwarez.
I'm writing this from Windows XP btw. I'll never install them newfangled Vista softwarez.
I get firefox crashing hard if I view any of the mac vs pc videos on their home page. It might be Jobs' way of showing me how crap life is on pcs.
I've used to experience quicktime crashes in Firefox as well, on certain QT versions (I think the latest is better).
I'm afraid the only thing Jobs is showing you, is his Windows team of programmers aren't quite good. If I didn't know better, it would make me think OSX and Macs are total crap, but in fact QuickTime on OSX is running just fine.
The fact that it crashed was probably Apple's "bad", but the fact that it resulted in a BSOD is obviously Vista.
Don't be so certain. Anyone in the kernel space can cause BSOD. Which means it may be any of the kernel mode drivers Toshiba loaded their tablet with.
The Windows version of Apple's software is quite poorly written, but I wouldn't blame it, unless they install kernel drivers (for virtual devices, and for iPod presumably). I doubt it's the case but you never know. User space software can NOT cause a BSOD, end of story.
The goal of a kernel mode driver is to have raw access to the hardware. As such, the OS can't limit the damage to a given process or ensure integrity after a critical situation. The BSOD is in fact happening to protect from any (or at least further) data corruption and loss. If Vista would be "nice" and just keep on running after a kernel mode driver screwed up badly, you may not be able to even boot next time.
Otherwise Google is a one trick pony which peculiarly spends most of its R&D budget outside of its core revenue market !
Wait a minute.. We're on to something. So Google has one single core business which makes it profits, and keeps spending R&D on other initiatives, and entering late in markets by buying other companies which are already there.
Where the heck is this familiar from.. Anyone help?
It's a very interesting phenomenon.
After enough number of iterations trying to optimize a software program to do everything very well compared to the base "naive" solution, you end up with an OS that does everything poorly.
It's counterintuitive, but we see it it every day around us.
Sadly goatse is part of the history of the internet.
You'll be surprised how many people, making millions on the Internet, have no clue what it is. The people familiar in details with all the shock sites are a certain subculture, and certainly doesn't make up the history of the Internet.
Am I the only one who finds this story, for lack of a better word, alarmist. I'm sure there is a better word, but I can't think of it at the moment. This article is all about AMD shipping a 3 GHZ chip. 3 GHZ chips are not exactly breaking news, and while it is a high for AMD, again, not news. Now were AMD to push the envelope farther than intel has previously gone, then I would find this story more insteresting, but the fact the AMD is only now shipping 3 GHZ processors I find quite ho-hum, and perhaps a desperate attempt to imnprove their financial situation, rather than any kind of real innovation.
Right.. right.. Or just they were doing business as usual and a bunch of guys freaked out for no good reason? Don't get caught in the loop.
future products will run at slower clock speeds and gain performance through the use of multiple cores and other techniques that won't improve single-threaded application performance.
This is misleading. No one gave up improving the performance of single-threaded apps.
All new chips are striving to improve the performance of each core by packing more executed commands per cpu cycle. This is achieved with better branch prediction, concurrent execution of commands that are in principle serial (this is possible as long as they don't depend on each other), and less execution "stages", i.e. more efficient architecture.
We'll see lots of speed improvements in each separate core, and we'll see it via smarter and smarter architecture that adapts to the code being executed.
The reason we've not seen this before, is because this is a very complex task, and upping the GHz seemed easier.