Alternate Endings?
July 29th, 2008
I’ve received mixed reactions to my “Happily Ever After?” blog. Those who have followed the MySQL story found it amusing; those who didn’t assumed that I’d had one Heineken too many before posting it.
The fairytale was inspired by Brian Aker’s announcement at OSCON last week that he was forking the code and creating a stripped-down version of MySQL called Drizzle, which is a Web 2.0 database architected specifically for cloud deployment. Drizzle will take MySQL back to what it was intended to be—a database designed to support Web 2.0 applications. Drizzle removes many features that were added to compete with the more traditional RDBMS such as views, procedures and triggers. As I see it, Brian’s attempting to give the MySQL story an alternate ending and I wish him luck with it.
Speaking of alternate endings, have you seen that Microsoft is trying to rewrite the Vista story? Those of you who are regular readers of my blog will know that I run Vista on one of my machines, and those of you who have witnessed me use that particular machine to present or to demonstrate a piece of software will suspect that I must have somewhat masochistic tendencies. Earlier today I read that Microsoft had conducted an experiment where they took “non-believers” and asked them what they thought of Vista and caught their mostly negative comments on video. They then introduced them to “a new Windows release” called Mojave, which was actually Vista, in a tightly controlled demonstration environment, and made a video collage of their far more positive comments which you can view here: Mojave Experiment.
My mom pulled a similar trick on me when I was a kid. Largely influenced by my older brother Eamon, I decided that I hated Brussels sprouts before I’d even tried them. One day my mom put some on my plate and told me they were “fairy cabbages.” She figured that if she gave them a new name she could change my perception. One bite and I knew that I’d been duped. They were every bit as vile as I had imagined. I think I was in my twenties before I tried them again.
Once the folks in the Mojave Experiment start using Vista on a daily basis they will no doubt be left with the same bad taste in their mouths as the Brussels sprouts left in mine.
July 29th, 2008 at 12:25 pm
Hi Emma,
Joe Mentioned this experiment to me yesterday and I thought it was funny b/c one of the things that people object to on Vista is their so to say “heightened security” (aka UAC) which is overwhelming users with constant pop ups. UAC has created an enormous amount of hoops that Vista programmers now have to jump through.
However, with UAC off Vista is just another XP with nicer GUI interface (that is assuming user doesn’t open Task Manager and doesn’t notice how power hungry Vista is). The performance of the operating system, also, largely depends on the hardware, load enough RAM and a descent graphics card and it works great, but put it on a basic ex-XP hardware and it looks like my Vista machine, which is moving backwards in time and running 1 handoffqa test per half hour (slightly exaggerated :)).
As I told Joe I thought this experiment was a bit bogus. They probably loaded up the machines with RAM and high end graphics card, turned off UAC and Vola!!
But realistically speaking all applications must run with UAC on and off and application developers/users have to deal with performance shortcomings.
Viktoriya…
July 29th, 2008 at 11:39 pm
I ran my own experiment when I bought my kids a laptop, hardware specified for and preloaded with Vista. I kept UAC and added parental controls for their respective ages and after 1 week they were begging for something else. One of their many criticisms was that it was slow to start or to do anything even with high performance index as measured by Vista.
The only advantage that they’ve found with Vista and Office 2007; sorry sir, I didn’t save my homework in Office 2003 format. Their schools are slow to moved and don’t seem to install the converters.
The laptop is now dual boot with Ubuntu Hardy Heron and has installed compiz fusion to manage the desktops, which they love.
One tip though, use Vista’s disk manager to to resize the disk partition before doing anything else as Vista will put system files toward the end making it difficult to shrink later on.
I did notice that my family tended to use more Web based applications to avoid hvaing to use the Vista programs; making it an expensive terminal and the switch to Ubuntu even easier. Next on their wish list is iTunes on Linux.
The down side is that now my family is more comfortable with Linux, I’ve had to give up some capacity on my OpenSuSE server for media streaming to the PS3….
… maybe I’ll switch them back to Vista.
July 30th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Ray - the one thing keeping me from running a Linux distribution as my primary environment at home is the lack of iTunes support for Linux!
July 30th, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Hi Emma,
I was one of the lab rats that Ray experimented on with Vista, and I have to say I would never use Vista ever. Its such a hassle to use as it is exceptionally slow, but I have to put up with it as I cannot use my webcam on Ubuntu, due to the lack of msn capabilities.
It took me approximately 3 months to get my webcam to work on Vista, as there was no driver software available from Microsoft, which annoyed me as I had specifically bought a webcam that was supposedly “Vista friendly”. That’s an oxymoron if ever I heard one. And don’t even talk to me about the problems we had install the wireless printer. Not good.
I saw the Mojave experiment, and I must say that the people it was tested on must have not known what they were looking for because there is no way you could give Vista 10 out of 10 for anything really apart from aesthetics, which to be honest aren’t that great. Obviously they did not try to upload any software like drivers onto the PC as they, like me, would have been seriously frustrated after 12 failing attempts and would have been contemplating throwing the hardware out of the window.
…and whatever my dad says about switching us back to Vista, I’m not listenening - I’m saving up for an Apple Mac!
August 7th, 2008 at 10:34 am
so the question is: do you eat brussel sprouts now? With Heineken?
August 7th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Do I eat brussel sprouts now?
I discovered that the problem was with my mom’s (over) cooking technique and not with the brussel sprouts themselves
With Heineken?
Everything goes well with Heineken
August 20th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Huh. He mentioned his project over lunch, but I didn’t know he was going to such lengths. I guess that’s what I get for missing an OSCON.
I read your post about open source and security over on ZD (http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1763).
I felt that it should be noted that although most of the points you mentioned regarding peer review and high quality standards are often true, but almost as often not. WordPress suffered a rash of poor review bugs over the early years of development as have many other projects. Sometimes open source projects suffer from the same sort of “first to market” syndrome that any other project sees.
Lalala. I enjoyed reading your article. Keep it up