Posts by Dawid Kuroczko5 posts • joined Monday 19th March 2007 07:03 GMT
Niagara may be a multithreaded wonder, but in applications where you need a solid single-thread performance its a no-go. Think databases (especially if they are per-core licensed). M series is a reasonable upgrade path for these.
I guess the real aim of Orange Poland is to create publicity -- good or bad, doesn't matter. Just that it stays within peoples' heads that Orange Poland is selling iPhones. So people will fail to remember that Era (competetive mobile operator) is selling them also.
I guess they had to admit they hired actors -- how would they explain there are no queues in front of Era? Perhaps they thought Era will hire actors too. ;)
And as for queues themselves, I guess Polish hearts are sterner. Hey. many a person still remember Soviet ehm... "friendship" times, whem shops were empty and queues were longish. It does not stirr any positive emotion.
I think it is a good idea to look back and see what patents actually were intended for.
When the patents weren't there, the inventor carefully guarded its knowledge and this knowledge was lost to the public. The patent was a method of encouraging the inventor to share the knowledge with community. "Describe us your invention, and for this we will grant you a few years of monopoly on it; after that the invention becomes public domain". This benefits both the inventor (who has monopoly then) and the community (who will eventually have details enabling to easily recreate the invention).
What is wrong is that in the US (and Japan) patent system changed into something completely different. Fortunately the rest of the world is mostly true to the original spirit of patents though.
Oh, and outside US patents must be non-obvious, patent must describe the invention in detail (so it can be recreated easily), and ideas, mathematical forumlas, algorithms and business models are of course not patentable.
To sum up: patent is for making sure that invention (something non-obvious, ingenious) will end up in the public domain (and not something to fight high unemployment of lawers and judges).
Well, EnterpriseDB is doing a good job here.
Oracle has a big advantage against MySQL -- they own the InnoDB and
BerkeleyDB. PostgreSQL is a much trickier opponent here. The code
is BSD licensed, so they cannot possibly "buy out" companies or even
programmers to stop the code from flowing. And secondly, PostgreSQL
has lesser media-traction. It is not as visible as MySQL, yet they are
doing very good job -- which means Oracle may be overlooking a really
hard opponent out there.
Personally I feel much better when a mission critical system is built around PostgreSQL database. I think PostgreSQL is already ready for Enterprise -- it has support available from companies like Fujitsu or Sun and also the EnterpriseDB which aims at Oracle compatibility.
As for MySQL... it has its drawbacks. You have to double check all the features work as expected (as you have learned using DB2 or Oracle), otherwise you may be seriousley bitten,
as many of its users have. And get ready for some hacking like reimplementing sequences yourself because AUTO_INCREMENT is not exactly the thing you need, learning to define FOREIGN KEY constraints the right way, so they are not considered just comments by the database or keeping in mind that by default comparisons are case insensitive (unless declared binary/case sensitive locale). These are the things which make some people claim MySQL not ACID compilant. If you intend to use MySQL where data is very valuable, make sure you hire people who really KNOW this specific engine.
Being bitten too many a time I have happily converted to PostgreSQL (together with Oracle).
