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People are making the 640k connection a few times so far in the comments I have read so far. How about something a little bit closer to today?

Bill Gates published "The Road Ahead" in 1996. The Intenet was not mentioned.

Will DVD's still be for sale/popular in 10 years? Maybe not. That being said, a prediction from Bill should not be given much weight on it's own.

-Pete

It's already been mentioned a little, but a second server kept up to date with rsync may be a cheap way to go depending on how big your server is. While I don't know how much data you are talking about, I would expect rsync could sync a few times a day easily via a cron job.

I would suggest springing an extra $90 to get two extra gigabit ethernet cards and a crossover cable for a dedicated connection for rsync which doesn't compete with office traffic.

Using rsync as a basis, the solution could be made as low tech and simple or automated complex as you feel is needed.

-Pete
Do woodworking? 50 Router Bits

I am an Amazon Associate who has experience with the Alexa Crawler. I believe the crawl is intended to find broken links, or links to products that are no longer stocked.

The Amazon Associates program has been around long enough for "page rot" to kick in, and I am sure there are many sites out there with links to non-existant products, such as old editions of books, etc. Historically, associates had to build static links (for the most part) by hand, and embedded them in more or less static page.

The problem comes in due to the recent introduction of their web services, where sites can build essentially unlimited pages based on dynamic real-time queries to amazon. I don't believe their intent is to "thrash around" in these sites, which is what is occuring.

A few month ago, I asked to have the Alexa bot crawl my site, (StarvingMind.net) , I was curious about the reports it was able to generate. The bot ended up in endless loops and had to be manually stopped by someone at Alexa. They spent an impressive amount of time trying to identify and fix the problem my site was creating for their bot. I don't know whether my specific problem was ever resolved, but I have the impression the bug was found and fixed. I also have the impression that the bot is very immature code and buggy.

Based on the personal and public responses I have seen from the Amazon and Alexa people involved, they actually do care about these issues very much, and don't wish to cause harm by the bots use. I believe their goal is to eliminate the link rot that has accumulated on associate sites over the years, manytimes with the site owner unaware of the problem.

Web services threw a curve into the mix, and that is where the major problems are occuring. The post I a replying to seems to imply Amazon may want to "use then throw out" the associates. I think that is pure speculation without any knowledge of the fact. Amazon has recently gone from what appeared to be no fulltime staff to a team of people dedicated to supporting and running the associates program. I believe they consider it a very cost effective way of advertising, and I expect it is doing quite well for them. Based on their recent actions, I believe they are trying to build a strong long term relationship with the active ones of us, as we bring them a fair amount of business.

Another post has pointed out they have stopped the crawl while the issues talked about here are looked into. They realize they may have made a mistake, and are trying to figure out how to address the problem. They have been responsive (with me at least) resolving problems like this in the past, they deserve a chance to resolve it this time as well. They have started down the right path, by stopping the crawl.

-Pete

I have compiled a list of books I think should be on every web developers bookshelf. While I don't cover perl (I'm a PHP/JSP guy), if you are interested in this topic, you may find my page of interest. (http://www.starvingmind.net/tech.jsp)

For the Perl/Java tech argument. Well designed java pages can be just as fast, or faster then poor perl cgi's, and vis versa. I too have seen very slow JSP/servlet's. JSP's should not be programmed the same way as a language like PHP or perl in many cases, it will be slow. Perl ranks third for me, but not totally off the charts.

I for one would argue JSP based development makes more sense for most sites, due to development productivity, and language functionality. And as I said before, a well design Java site can execute as fast or faster than some perl CGI sites. PHP ranks right behind JSP's in my mind, since they don't provide as much functionality, although they are very fast for simple things.

Perl should be a tool in your developer's toolbox, although I believe PHP or JSP's are in most cases a better tool for the job of making dynamic web sites.

-Pete

I'm a J2EE developer. I mostly use JSP/Servlets, but I have a couple EJB container apps where it makes sense. I've made a selection of books I think people interesting in getting into this market should own.

Go to http://www.starvingmind.net/tech.php and check them out.

Changing topics, I have been experimenting with a servlet container called Resin, which people in the industry seem to regard as the fastest for JSP/Servlet apps. Development License is free, production license is $500 IIRC. Worth looking into once JSP/Servlet performance becomes an issue for you. It is not Open Source, but it looks to be a very high quality product, which runs fine on Linux.

-Pete

While it is not $15, Casio has fit a black and white digital camera into a watch that can save 100 pictures, if memory serves me.

About $250 I believe
Casio's Camera Watch.

-Pete

I have a list of titles I think people should have if they do Web Development, especially JSP/Servlet programming.

Check out http://www.starvingmind.net/tech.php

I am an amazon affilate. I'm love business and tech books, and have quite a collection of both. I'm am trying to build up a site that will make enough in sales on a regular basis to pay for site hosting on a real provider...right now it's on my cable modem.

A little project of mine. I plan to expand it into a much more complete site as time goes on. Kinda the slashdot for tech and business books. Has a long way to go, it's only been up three weeks, so don't be to hard on my lack of features and content yet.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be happy to add them.

-Pete