It may be an oxymoron in the RDBMS world. In the distributed world, it's par for the course - in fact, it has its own letter in CAP.

They're also still missing 99% of the subquery optimizations they had in the 6.0 Alpha codebase and 99% of the other improvements. When they went sun they started worrying too much about BC and improvements slowed down substantially. In my opinion, if you want less buggy software on a faster release model, you need to not give priority to BC. But then you lose the support contracts, which is all sun cares about.

Unless it's some extreme niche where the shaved cycles really pay off over some time, it seems like a gigantic waste of time for 5%-15% here and there. When you use precompiled, you're already looking at diminishing returns WRT compiling performance, but when you're spending your time compiling everything for that extra 3%, it seems pretty ridiculous. A fraction of that time could be spent flipping burgers to get enough dough to secure yourself a nice SSD which would make totally irrelevant any 1%-5% boosts. In fact, you might even get to finish up on the computer earlier, and go have some beers with your newfound supply of money and time.

I saw you try to sneak that one in there. Haha, nice try!

They don't support DVDs, but you can do hard drives (USB2/eSATA).

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

(Originally replied to wrong poster, now modified to prevent "This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original... ")
It's extremely unfair to link to the print version of that article. Anand put an immense amount of time into that (and everything before it!) and scarred quite a few bridges to bring it to light for his readers - there are very, very few reviewers out there that would do that for their readerbase. The least you could do is offer him and his site _some_ respect.

Whoops! Sorry, wrong post!

It's extremely unfair to link to the print version of that article. Anand put an immense amount of time into that (and everything before it!) and scarred quite a few bridges to bring it to light for his readers - there are very, very few reviewers out there that would do that for their readerbase. The least you could do is offer him and his site _some_ respect.

If you delete a partition or even a file, why the *hell* are you expecting it to be reversible? That's "delete" we're talking about here, not "hold my hand recycle bin". Delete. If you don't know in you're soul what you're doing, then why are you even in a partition editor?

I can see how you would draw that conclusion alone on just the numbers, but I think you failed to take into account that hard drives are selling at much faster rates than they did during the times of HDDs, and those rates are accelerating. Since volume is ramping up considerably, manf have insane incentives to increase there economies of scales at commenserate rates, thus lowering the costs.

If you don't believe it, use your same reasoning for SIMMs vs. DIMMs. Then try it against DIMMs vs. DDR1, then DDR2. I picked up two 2GB SODIMM DDR2 modules yesterday for $20/piece.

Heh, yeah, I guess I forgot about that. It's such a habit now to hit Escape immediately when I see the username and password box that I don't even think about it any more. That right there makes it one of the most inconvenient sites I have to visit. At least they do just about everything else right.

I've been using Linux on the desktop since '01, and I can for certain that around 2004 or was when I could visit random sites and have them work without any issues. There are two that I know of that "require" a browser/OS combo, but they let you carry on any way - at your own risk. Of course, they work fine. One is HR Block when filing taxes, the other is CitiCard's virtual/temporary CC# generator webapp.

Nintendo and Sony are based in Japan. No USA == no regulations/pressure to follow GAAP.

Found On Reservation Dump

You're implying that the amount of users a social networking site should have is somehow linear to how many database servers it needs. I have news for you - it doesn't. You also don't mention the roles for the servers, nor the hits per interval, nor even a feature comparison (some may have much harder hitting queries) - and finally, you're outright neglecting to mention hardware. MYB might have 17 quad core, 16x320GB 15k rpm drives compared to facebook's whitebox google model. Your entire post is useless without apples to apples comparisons.