> retail POS generates a large amount of transactional data, and you need low latency for database syncing and credit card/loyalty card transactions.
I've always been curious about what sort of infrastructure the average big-box retail store actually needs. My local Walmart can't have anything but a wireless uplink, unless they actually installed 5+ miles of fiber or something when they built the store.
Also these stores basically couldn't exist without robust inventory management systems. There is probably more technology in the average big box than we realize.
I was told that every time an item is scanned at the register at any Walmart store, it updates an inventory database in near real-time (I assume there is some sort of message queue with that kind of volume and distribution). Then their system automatically places replenishment orders with their vendors when the inventory of that item goes below a certain level. They are a well-oiled machine, focused on making sure that they almost never lose any sales due to being out-of-stock, nor waste money on carrying excess inventory in their warehouses. Mismatching inventory to sales will drive a retailer out of business very quickly.
This is also part of the reason why they are able to push "everyday low prices" instead of discounts. Discounting is what you do with the excess inventory when you messed up and ordered too much of something.
Working for a regional grocery retailer from the mid-90's to the mid-2000's, I can assure you that not nearly enough consideration was given to bandwidth needs when designing and building new stores. I remember, as late as 2002, having an entire store run off of something like a 512kbps circuit.
We literally shipped register (paper) journal tapes back to the warehouse via truck mail.
More like time/date, UPC, quantity, item description, price, coupons, sale discounts, sales tax, rebate info, clerk info, customer info, payment info, and more. Times dozens of items per receipt, times dozens of registers. All continually operating 12+ hours a day. All needing low-latency access to master databases, credit card servers, and banks.
Trust me, retail is big. Like "Big Data" big. There is more data there than you think. ;)
Thank you, that's a better-written answer than anything I could get down.
I'd just like to add that (as the article does a pretty good job of saying) perl is /unparalleled/ as a text-processing language. There is no other language that even comes close to perl's ease and utility for string manipulation.
That's a good point. When I think over what I use Perl for in practice, it's usually some form of text processing. Perl is just the swiss army knife of I/O munging.
> First off, the Flash updater on Windows works quite well on modern Windows systems.
Speak for yourself; I only ever see it on system startup. I only reboot once every few months (and it doesn't respond to waking up from standby), but there's a new Adobe security panic every two weeks or so, so that's not really acceptable.
Plus it opens as a pop-under window for some reason, so I'm generally unaware of it until I've opened a browser, which I'll then have to close and reopen.
The 'stealing revenue' argument is definitely valid, but in Adobe's case it's such a hateful method that I can't sympathize at all.
I thought that Adobe's rolling out automatic updates for Flash Player might finally end my having to (endlessly) maintain it on my parents' computers. No dice... (It doesn't work -- at all, it often seems, or at least consistently nor in anything like a timely manner.)
After some horrible experiences with Adobe Support, I've decided that Adobe as a company is crapware. I am sorry for e.g. some of the engineering talent there that may be doing good work. But, they (you) seem to exist these days within a horrible company organization.
> The 'stealing revenue' argument is definitely valid, but in Adobe's case it's such a hateful method that I can't sympathize at all.
Is it? If their (Piriform, as in the original example) model is based around providing a service for a product they release for free, but someone else can provide that service better, then perhaps they need to re-think their business model. Either be way cheaper, or provide something that Ninite can't or won't. Maybe even partner with Ninite and explain that your product can't exist without that revenue, so why not just integrate deeper and share a bit of revenue, rather than having it fail and upset customers of both parties.
>I use keyboard shortcuts in Firefox, and occasionally dream of an Awesome Bar that works like bash.
This reminded me to check up on Ubiquity[1]. Mozilla doesn't even host a page for it anymore, but apparently someone adopted it[2]. I'm going to have to play around with this tomorrow; I'll be happy if it's half as useful as I remember.
I'm primarily a Windows user, though I dip into Linux pretty often. The first thing I do in any new install is to disable all but one or maybe two workspaces. Multiple workspaces just strikes me as a hack to get around poor panel design, or to facilitate running a modern PC on an ancient monitor.
If I leave >1 active I'm prone to losing windows on alternate workspaces; if I'd upped the number to 12 like the person who wrote that page, I couldn't even fill them all. You can see even he had trouble making them look "used" so he could take a screenshot. I've been using this PC daily for the 24 or so weeks it's been up, and I've only got 13 windows open.
I usually run eight desktops on my machine. Most of the time, half of them sit empty until I need to switch tasks. In my previous day job, I'd keep email up on one, a development set for my local machine (editor, logs, browser, etc.), windows for references on another. I leave a full set of window up, positioned exactly the way I want them, and move to a clean desktop to deal with incidental, "could you take a look at X" tasks.
Being able to spread out what I'm working on without minimizing or overlapping windows really helps segregate what's going on.
I do similar things with tab groups/stacks in Firefox and Opera (mainly to keep fewer than 20 tabs visible at once). Guess it just doesn't feel "right" to me to run my whole system that way.
I have to ask, what is the preoccupation with FOSS GPU drivers? Not just with boards like this, but even standard desktop hardware. Does anyone seriously think a firm like NVidia is going to illicitly slip spyware or something into their binaries?
I can compare fglrx (used it for 2 years) and radeon (used for 2 months). And besides worse performance in 3D and smaller power consumption, fglrx is much worse and causes some problems with my laptop.
Not to mention that when I used fglrx I was afraid to upgrade the kernel because it forces me to recompile fglrx module (with all the strange DKMS thingy which is very strange to me - I just want to "make install")
Open drivers are good for debugging and avoiding crashes, and for flexibility, re: Linux kernel versions and API changes over the lifetime of the device.
Actually you are right. The problem (from user point of view) is not licensing. The real issue is the drivers being out of tree, making them much more fragile. I'd like to be able to update kernel and/or xorg without having to worry if binary blobs explode on my face.
I think it's worth noting that even with several free alternative builds, some of them more frequently updated from source than the official binaries, people still buy and pirate the official one. I'd be really interested to compare how many people have paid for Xchat against download numbers for Xchat-WDK and Silverex.
From what's been said in the forums and implied in that email they sent to API users, they're leaving the functionality in and just no longer creating the folder on install.
My question is: How long is that functionality going to stick around for legacy users after it's been hidden by default?
YES!
For anyone with a high latency (huge swathes of the US are still stuck with satellite or mobile and the tech industry seems to have ignored this), twitter is a nightmare. The first pageload only pulls the empty 'framework' page, then a series of js requests pull the information. You can't walk away while it loads, either, because it will register the latency and display errors instead of content.
I've always been curious about what sort of infrastructure the average big-box retail store actually needs. My local Walmart can't have anything but a wireless uplink, unless they actually installed 5+ miles of fiber or something when they built the store.