Free and Open Source Software - Articles - Zimbio

It's the business model hombre...

Wed, 24 Jul 2008 13:00:05 GMT

posted by rporras

You don't have to look too hard to see examples of businesses that have been impacted as a result of a change in the business model that they served. One example that is still clear in my mind is the music industry. There are many empty record store buildings as a result of how the internet has shifted the business model of distribution, sharing and mindset. The music industry shift continues to this day, but some artists have gotten in front of the change rather than try to resist. What is the one thing that drives most change? I'll give you a hint. It is the most powerful army in the world. As I learned in business school, military war is plain awful, economic battle is simply brutal. The perfect storm is when you have a declining economy and a changing business model that implies commodity. Looking back at change it is easy to understand what happened to the slide rule, floppy disk drives, cathode ray tubes, drive-ins, the home delivery milkman and the home delivery iceman.

There was a lot of discussion about the Amazon S3 outage last Friday. Some folks were quick to jump on the cloud computing is dead wagon. Their probable cause was left to this new storage/compute paradigm is crazy, see what will happen if you buy into this new IT economy. Storage has to be expensive. Come on, it's the only thing expensive left... man. Of course only start ups and daring enterprises would use such a service. Well I disagree. Having been personally involved in outages with previous companies and relying on 27 years of industry experience, it is true that major outages also occur with proprietary server/storage solutions of yesterday. In fact some pretty severe outages and no vendor is excluded. Cloud computing is not going to go away. It is only going to get stronger. Economics will drive it. New services economically attractive to businesses, individuals, students, etc. will continue to grow it.

As my Dad use to say: "Lead, don't follow."

MySQL vs Postgres, Again - Is Postgres Better?

Sat, 20 Jul 2008 22:55:00 GMT

posted by LewisC

I was browsing the web on this lazy Sunday afternoon and ran across a good article on the Rarest Words blog. The author was trying to get Django installed and running with Postgres. From the author's own admissions, he is not a Postgres fanatic.

Well, this and last year I hear everywhere that PostgreSQL is the way to go and that usage of mySQL in 2008 makes people puke… But without any real arguments (besides "Postgres is the way to go").

After some not so compatible errors with these not so compatible databases, the author did get it working and ran some benchmarks. Postgres did not turn out faster than MySQL. If you ask anyone in the Postgres community which database is faster, they will say Postgres. Ask anyone in the MySQL community and there's no telling what answer you'll get. ;-)

I have now worked with quite a few different databases. Over the last decade most of my time has been spent with Oracle but I have also spent some time with MySQL and Postgres. So, I have to tell you, Oracle is faster. ;-) Just kidding.

What I have found is that any claim that one database is the best database is just kind of silly. Every database has a different feature set, a different set of strengths and a different set of weaknesses. Comparisons are good so that people know where a database is best used but it's pointless for claims of "winners and losers".

It's sort of like benchmarks. If you benchmark two databases, the loser fan base will always claim that you didn't tune correctly. Or the benchmark was invalid. Or the wrong engine was used. Or whatever. They may be true but even so, with all things being equal, that does not invalidate the benchmark. Under those conditions, one or the other is faster. Is that significant? Probably not.

So, which is better for Django? I haven't a clue. I don't know much about Django. I'd say the best database is the one you are most comfortable using and have the most experience with.

When switching from one database to another, I think most people have pretty much the same experience as the blog author had. It can be really painful at first. I like it. Not the pain so much but digging in to it. I like understanding the differences between one database and another. But then, I'm sort of weird that way. ;-)

For business reasons, if a database is working fine for your needs, don't switch. Most people don't need the absolute performance that a $250/hour brain surgeon DBA might be able to give you. And if you do, you're probably already running Oracle. ;-)

LewisC

Technorati : compare, database, django, mysql, oracle, postgres

PHP/MySQL Tutorial

Tue, 23 Jul 2008 15:25:01 GMT

posted by prolearn

Open source has brought a lot more than Linux to the computing world. It has also given us PHP and MySQL. According to Graeme, PHP and MySQL are the world’s best combination for creating data-driven sites. In the first installment of this three-lesson tutorial, our Kiwi guide covers everything you need to know to begin developing database hubs. He gives instructions for installation on both Unix and Windows, and then goes on to show some simple scripts that will insert information into a database and display that data on a Web page.
(more…)

PHP/MySQL Tutorial

Tue, 23 Jul 2008 14:25:25 GMT

posted by prolearn

System Mechanic 8 Professional

Mon, 15 Jul 2008 15:28:00 GMT

posted by ejajpasha786

System Mechanic 8 Professional
Make your old PC run like new. Keep your new PC running fast and problem-free. System and registry clutter will degrade your computer's performance, leading to crashes, longer boot times, and system errors. System Mechanic combines over 40 powerful PC tuneup tools to clean hard drive clutter, repair your registry, defragment drives and memory, manage programs, boost your Internet connection, and remove spyware.
19.7 MB Rapidshare
Download From Rapidshare

Password:www.egydown.com

****