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Comment MySQL MXJ connector vanished from downloads (Score 1) 336

by brajesh (#41034295) Attached to: Is MySQL Slowly Turning Closed Source?
I've downloaded it as recently as 2 months back, and found it gone yesterday. The download page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/mxj/ is empty and mxj connector is no longer listed under connectors - http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/. SQLite aside, MXJ was the easiest way to embed a MySQL database in your (Java) package.
Apple

Submission + - Is iPhone the New Internet Explorer 6 (quirksmode.org)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "In a long blog post, Quirksmode blog argues that the iPhone is the Internet Explorer 6 once again. FTFA — "The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don't pay attention, we'll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we'll have the real mobile web that wasn't made by us and doesn't give a shit about web standards and best practices." and "We have come full-circle back to developing for only one browser. Worse, we are congratulating ourselves on that bit of cleverness. Christ, do we really have to go through the whole standards movement once again?""
Programming

Submission + - New Leader in Netflix Prize Race with 1 Day to Go (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Netfix Prize, an algorithm competition to improve The Netflix Cinematch recommendation system by more than 10% has a new leader — The Ensemble, just one day before the competition ends. The 30 day race to the end was kicked off after BellKor's Pragmatic Chaos submitted the first entry to break the 10% barrier with the results showing 10.08% improvement. The Ensemble, made up of three teams who chose to join forces: "Grand Prize Team", "Opera Solutions", and "Vandelay United", has managed to overtake BellKor with a score of 10.09% — an improvement of .01% over the former leaders. From the article on Techcrunch —

The competition will end tomorrow morning, so teams still have a little bit of time left to make their last-second submissions, but things are looking good for The Ensemble. This has to be absolutely brutal for team BellKor.

"
Music

Submission + - comScore: 38% Downloaders Paid for Radiohead Album (comscore.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "It was reported earlier that Radiohead may have made $6-$10 Million on Name-Your Cost Album "In Rainbows" with average price between $5 and $8. Now comScore has come out with some numbers. FTA — "During the first 29 days of October, 1.2 million people worldwide visited the "In Rainbows" site, with a significant percentage of visitors ultimately downloading the album. The study showed that 38 percent of global downloaders of the album willingly paid to do so, with the remaining 62 percent choosing to pay nothing. [...] Of those who were willing to pay, the largest percentage (17 percent) paid less than $4. However, a significant percentage (12 percent) were willing to pay between $8-$12, or approximately the cost to download a typical album via iTunes, and these consumers accounted for more than half (52 percent) of all sales in dollars.""
Software

Submission + - Skype blames Microsoft Patch Tuesday for Outage (skype.com)

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "Skype has blamed its outage over the last week on Microsoft's Patch Tuesday. FTA — "The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype's network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact." Previsously, it was speculated that Skype outage may have been caused by a Russian hack attempt. Further FTA- "The issue has now been identified explicitly within Skype. We can confirm categorically that no malicious activities were attributed or that our users' security was not, at any point, at risk." Butterfly effect?"
Java

Submission + - Java Urban performance legends

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Pop quiz: Which language boasts faster raw allocation performance, the Java language, or C/C++? The answer may surprise you — allocation in modern JVMs is far faster than the best performing malloc implementations. This article pokes some holes in the oft-repeated Java performance myth of slow allocation in JVMs.
Enlightenment

Submission + - Desktop vs Web Applications - Round n

Submitted by
brajesh
brajesh writes: "The Internet browser is the new OS. What if a "thin client application" becomes thicker than the "Thick"s of the lot. The problem with web applications- "[...]is that they have tried too hard to make the web into a complete application platform, to the point where they don't even bother holding themselves to the same standards by which desktop application developers are judged.""
Businesses

Submission + - Study contradicts RIAA on cause of CD sales drop

Submitted by IBuyManyCd
IBuyManyCd writes: A new research paper (PDF) published in the Journal of Political Economy contradicts the RIAA claim that illegal downloading is the main reason for the 25% drop in CD sales.
A quick overview of the article is presented on the University of Chicago Press site: Downloads are not the primary reason for the decline in music sales. "Researchers from Harvard and Kansas find that impact of P2P sharing on U.S. music sales is "statistically indistinguishable from zero".
The overview also quotes:
"We match an extensive sample of downloads to U.S. sales for a large number of albums", write Felix Oberholzer-Gee (Harvard University) and Koleman Strumpf (University of Kansas). "While file sharers downloaded billions of files in 2002, the consequences for the industry amounted to no more than 0.7% of sales."
The author compiled data on nearly 50,000 music downloads of popular songs (on pop charts) and across eleven genre from 2 major P2P servers. They then compared these with the same pop chart songs CD sales, "it is striking to see that more than 60% of the songs in our sample are never downloaded".
This underlines what many online users have lived first hand. If an album is good enough, reaching the pop chart, it will gladly be bought by fans.

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