I find it amazing that the U.S. Department of Justice can continue to cover its eyes and ears while Microsoft is allowed to exert its monopolistic power over all hardware manufacturers.

About 20 months ago, I was able to purchase a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 from the lenovo.com website without an operating system installed. Today, I went to purchase a new Lenovo Thinkpad laptop, again without having to pay the Windows Tax. Turns out Lenovo has stopped offering this option. What a complete PILE OF SHIT. Somebody in Microsoft's "Business Development" or "Partners" team must have told Lenovo to stop offering its customers a simple choice of not having to pay the OEM license fees for Windows. And there's nothing anyone can do about it. Microsoft is

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A MySQL Software preview is available which allows you to write Lua scripts to control replication on a statement-by-statement basis. Note that this is prototype functionality and is not supported but feedback on its usefulness would be gratefully received.The final version would allow much greater functionality but this preview allows you to implement filters on either the master or slave to examine the statements being replicated and decide whether to continue

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We'll soon have our last MySQL University session for this year, followed by a winter break until the end of January 2010. So far there's only one session scheduled next year, but we'd like to have one session per week, so we need lots more speakers!

Anyone who has something technical to say about MySQL qualifies as a speaker. MySQL University sessions take place on Thursday afternoons European time, and normally have between 20 and 30 attendees, but quite a lot of people listen to the recordings when the live session time isn't convenient for them. We're using Dimdim as our conferencing system, so the setup for speakers is very simple: Just grab a headset,

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This Thursday (November 26th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia will present the Spider Storage Engine. This session was originally scheduled for October 15th but had to be postponed for technical reasons.

Here's from the abstract: Everybody needs sharding. Which is not easy to maintain. Being tied to the application layer, sharding is hard to export and to interact with. The Spider storage engine, a plugin for MySQL 5.1 and later, solves the problem in a transparent way. It is an extension of partitioning. Using this engine,

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I had an interesting discussion with 2 colleagues about the possible interest of putting the swap space of a system on a SSD.

If I consider the gain in latency that an SSD brings versus a capacity disk - in the region of 100x - the solution seems obvious. Swapping - or more precisely paging - must be much faster/ with an SSD. Since RAM is expensive versus SSD, I could even be tempted to design a system with a small amount of RAM and a large amount of swap space on SSDs. In other words, I can ask myself if trying to prevent my system to page is still a good fight?

Let's try to shed some light on these questions.

Paging takes place when my system runs out of RAM because more processes are created or because existing processes requires more memory (check this

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rance FORUM PHP 2009 was held last week in Paris (12th and 13th nov) at Cite des sciences et de l'industrie Thanks to LeMuG (the french MySQL User Group) MySQL has had a nice set of presentations : Michael Widenius aka Monty ( Monty Program Ab ) presented "MariaDB, the future of MySQL". Johannes Schluter (MySQL connectors dev team + release manager of PHP 5.3) has presented "PHP and MySQL - A good match" This was the closing presentation for the 2 days but audience stayed to hear about the nice functionalities of the mysqlnd driver. A lot of interest for the new features (some experimental) : persistent connections, performance statistics, asynchronous request, client side cache, streams + filter, statistics collection, PDO + mysqlnd good match.