Posts by Bas Scheffers

Just like in the Chocolate Factory

Sounds a bit like the Willy Wonkas' App Engine while it is in Beta... But at least they give you clear limits.

Needs to be fixed urgently

This needs to be fixed urgently so that the 0.01% of users who actually closely look at a link in an email before clicking on it are no longer at risk!

El Reg readers see a URL and can instantly identify all the parts and see something is not right. To Average Joe it looks about as complex as an equation Stephen Hawking might come up with and doesn't even being to try and read it.

You could create an email that looks like it comes from paypal with a link to clickheretoloseallyourmoney.com and the masses would still click it.

Could have been media streamer

This could have been the (near) perfect video streamer to hook up to your telly. DVI and S/PDIF are there, but wanting to save an extra $10, they put in a crappy GMA 950 instead of an Nvidia or ATI chipset capable of decoding h.264 and outputting 1080p.

Instead they put in a chipset that does only 1600x1200 and is unable to offload MPEG decoding from the CPU.

Nuts.

167 downloads per visitor!

So 30m unique visitors generating 5bn downloads? Uhm, that's just about 167 downloads per unique visitor.

Yeah, right. The average mininova visitor downloads 167 torrents.

Someone must be doing some creative accounting here. 167 *hits* (i.e.: all pages, css files, images, etc.) maybe, but certainly not 167 torrents downloaded.

Halting it would be irresponsible

I agree with AC, there are multiple checks; even off-line readers still sync at the end of the day and if you used a fraudulent card: smile, you are on CCTV!

They should continue as-is for now, going back to the drawing board would cost way more than they could ever hope to lose in fares through fraud. But get rid of the single use system and simply give proper cards you can load up with money again and again and ask for a deposit for these more expensive cards. Then over time upgrade all to the newer (and secure) Mifare DESFire card or the as-yet unreleased Mifare plus. (cheaper than the DESFire and unlikely to be hacked any time soon)

Tux, because an open system would have showed its insecurity a long time ago and have been fixed.

Not without hosting

How's that supposed to work, I would use a BigTable database from somewhere across the globe? That'll give great performance! Just like SimpleDB is only interesting for those hosting on EC2, any Google offering will require the same: some Google servers to host your application on.

I assume Google realises this too and will release the chicken before the egg.

Competition

One of the problems of course, is competition. If BEA and IBM (and Glassfish and JBoss and ...) were supposed to be 100% compatible, there would be nothing to distinguish them, apart maybe from ease of use, performance and price.

Obviously, different vendors are going to put in value-added non-standard features and if you use them, your application won't run in another container without modification.

Unfortunately, many of those value-added features made J2EE 1.4 bearable and you could not live without them. The Java EE 5 spec is much better, so I hope that from now on this will be a lesser problem and programming to the lowest common denominator actually makes you end up with a decent, run anywhere, application.

@Andrew

Andrew, that would have been +1 insightful if MySQL was actually faster or easier to install and use.

And that's not me making that up, that is visible from published SPEC results. (http://www.spec.org/jAppServer2004/results/)

I happen to regularly meet the Sun guy that does all this testing (http://blogs.sun.com/tomdaly/) and know for a fact he doesn't have a bias. He actively works as coder on both, to try and make them go faster, regularly submitting patches.

Speed wise there isn't that much between them, though Postgres still has a massive edge on 4 cores or more, MySQL can't take advantage of those.

Also, on Linux it is the same, but the Windows installer for Postgres is actually better than MySQL's. (which might be taste)

The only thing MySQL has going for it is the enormous amount of books written and the ubiquity it seems to have because of LAMP. Which is strange because with the dual license MySQL isn't exactly free. (as in speech) Plus there are lots of options you have to pay for, like a thousand Euros for online backups in InnoDB!

So no, Postgres won't eat too much into MySQL's market share soon, but that has nothing to do with speed, technical ability or ease of use.

Not that simple

In the wonderful world of HDBluDVRayD nothing is black and white.

All these announcements about allegiances are really only for the US market. Most studios have different distributors in different countries/regions and they may have another allegiance. It is not uncommon for a title that is exclusively Blu-Ray in the US to be available only on HDDVD in Europe.

And they wonder why consumers are confused about the formats...