So Multitouch screen software, ditto, ditto, ditto, VS upgrade, Novelty receptionist blah blah blah
Where is the innovation?
I'm sorry. It seems you have confused "Microsoft Labs" with the "Microsoft Acquisition Legal Team and License Investigations Querying Unlicensed Operating system Review". (M.A.L.T. L.I.Q.U.O.R.)
At Microsoft, innovation happens in the acquisitions department. Small wonder (ahem!) for a company whose name is roughly synonymic with a flat wee-wee...
I just don't get what the big deal is. Bad? Yes. New? NO!
I write network applications for a living. This type of coordination with a large number of hosts is precisely the kind of thing that I write professionally. While it takes some work to get this kind of coordination in place, it's probably a man-week with standard tools and commonly available information for somebody who understands how to write network applications.
Years ago (2002?) I saw similar behavior in what I called a "spam attack". I was the sysadmin for a small-mid sized ISP. (about 10,000 clients) I witnessed behavior exactly like this delivering SPAM. It would come in waves, over a 4-6 hour period, clearly targeting addresses on our mail server cluster. I logged thousands of IP addresses over this 4-6 hour period. And then, after a half day or so, it would just... stop.
With this many IP addresses, it's pretty obvious that the 3 Mb dual-bonded T1 bandwidth that the mail cluster was on could be DDOS'd trivially. Yet other than an occasional perl-based IRC client bot uploaded by some client's vulnerable script, DDOS attacks of any kind were pretty rare.
BTW: Greylisting killed these spam attacks deader than dead. Blocked virtually everything in a spam attack so effectively that the load on the mail cluster didn't rise even noticeably. Our mail cluster ran Qmail-LDAP, so to get greylisting to work we had two sendmail/greylisting relays as the primary MX, which then relayed in to the mail cluster. (which had no MX published for it) Although the greylisting relays were just cheap hardware, we had to bump up the RAM since the Greylisting database (kept in RAM) grew to be pretty large.
If you are curious: http://hcpnet.free.fr/milter-greylist/ I use it to this day, because it's virtually zero administration and it works very, very well.
This article summary is an example of what's wrong with soundbites and their effect on responsible media.
Here we have a sound-bite sized message: "Apple makes green laptop", followed by another sound-biter: "Greenpeace say Apple bad mojo". But then, in the interest of "full disclosure", several snippets back and forth are quoted: "Greenpeace not perfect", and "Greenpeace attacks Apple for publicity".
The net effect comes as a custerfluck of conflicting messages leaving me with a blank stare - and I really don't care about the message.
And this is bad for responsible media - those with their own axe to grind will only soundbite the stuff they want. EG: Apple might soundbite: "Apple makes green laptop". Greenpeace soundbite: "Apple bad mojo".
See how much more palatable each message is all by itself?
But when you try to combine responsible media with soundbites, you end up just confusing the !@# out of everyone, and the special interests win.
I am surprised that you would consider landing a 172 at an airport used by heavy jets at all. Small airports are much more convenient, and the landing charges are lower.
There are no landing fees at any airport I've flown to. Ever. Landing fees apply to larger planes almost exclusively (over 12,500 lbs gross weight) The only one I know of with a landing fee for my itty bitty is SFO, and I just don't go there. For every SUPER MAJOR OMG airport (EG: SFO, LAX) there are many, many "largish" airports (EG: Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Oakland) that are plenty busy, with lots of big jets, but also take a fair amount of General Aviation private planes.
I doubt the hassle of dealing with air side security at a major airport is worth the trouble.
Hassle?!?! Once you are known to be a pilot, the rules are suddenly very different. Not only can you keep your shoes on, they'll open the gate so you can drive your car out to the tarmac to load up! The bathrooms not only have paper, they have cloth towels, decorative plants, and free razors. The lady behind the counter is not only polite, but offers free pizza and cookies, and offers you his/her phone number for advance notice. They reserve a taxi for you before you even land.
You didn't mention separation standards for a light wake turbulence aircraft following a medium or heavy aircraft. That can put a lot of delay into the system as well.
That's because there really isn't any special separation standard for wake turbulence. (that I'm aware of!) Wake turbulence moves downward and outward from the wings of the plane. When following a "big bird" you simply stay above the approach path of the plane in front of you, and make sure to land after it touches down. When I follow a big bird, I usually hear something like "Cessna NNN, cleared to land, 1-4 left. Caution wake turbulence." from the tower. That's it - I would respond with "Clear to land, watch for wake turbulence, Cessna NNN".
My little mosquito of a plane has never had any trouble at all stopping after touching down 1/3 down the runway on such an extended final. Big birds need a good mile of runway, I can get by with about a quarter of that.
Building a new airport opens up new arrival and departure trajectories and pushes down house prices. Eventually the whole airport has to move and that can get very expensive.
Who said anything about new airports? I'm only talking about more runways at EXISTING airports...
I have an affluent household. We have several TVs and a Dish DVR that records our favorite shows. And it's nice. So much better than life without a DVR. Ask me six months ago, and I would have raved about my beautiful Dish DVR. Being in control of the TV experience is just... amazing.
But then, something new happened - Netflix released on-demand for Mac OSX. Now, the Mac Mini is the computer upstairs, next to the nice, big, sound system, with a nice, big monitor on it. And so, it was little effort to install Netflix and start watching (older) movies on it immediately.
And I thought DVR had it good!
Quality is good - "feels like DVD" and the hassle factor is just GONE. This is how home media should be. The DVR gets sorta close, but it's just not there. Good quality video, good quality sound, only occasionally noticeable artifacting, and no DVDs to return or lose, no trip to the local video store... just click, wait about 10 seconds, and voila!
I don't give one whit about resolution higher than this if I have to deal with discs, trips, and per-movie charges. Especially if the equipment is expensive.
I bought a projector for a few hundred on eBay that will render the Netflix vids at enormous 5' viewing on a home-projector style fold-out screen.
On demand. No hassle. Big screen. Decent resolution. Great sound. No more "gotchas". Just click, and play!
On demand - it's for me! (now, if only they had a Linux port...)
The problem of air traffic in the United States is a combination of a number of things: insufficient airport runway capacity, overused "super hubs", predictive overselling of tickets, and antiquated air traffic control systems. All these factors contribute, some (much) more than others.
I'm a private pilot, so let's be honest - there's plenty of room the air. I fly through very busy (Sacramento and San Fransisco, CA) airspace frequently, I've never had a "near miss". Nag about 40-year-old technology all you want; it works rather well. And in the small-ish airplanes I fly, there are lots of small airports for me to fly to where there is no congestion, no hope of congestion, and rarely any other aircraft "in the pattern". (Airports have an expected approach and landing sequence, usually based around an imaginary box shape around the runways, this is called 'the pattern' by pilots)
But when you are talking about congestion, you are really talking about runway capacity, because although there's plenty of room in the sky, there are a relatively small number of airports. Combine that with the tendency of airlines to create "mega hub" airports for connecting flights (EG: Atlanta, GA) and the problem of runway shortages become paramount.
A decent runway is about 1 or 2 miles long. It's basically a 2-4 lane freeway for just a mile or so. Adding more runways dramatically increases air capacity. A 1.5 mile runway is vastly cheaper than 100 miles of railroad, but services a similar amount of traffic over the same distance. Aviation infrastructure is ridiculously cheap compared to highways, trains, and other forms of travel. (except maybe by boat, which is cheaper still but much slower)
Why is this hard to understand?
Many large, busy airports have 2 or more runways, and often they split traffic based on type. My small, single-engine 4-seat Cessna 172 with its landing speed of about 60 Knots gets the short runway, while SouthWest airlines flight NNN with its landing speed of 125 Knots gets the big one.
Notice that my small plane takes 2x as long to approach the runway as the big jet? Adding a small, short, "General Aviation" runway to this large, busy airport adds as much as 3x the capacity anytime a small plane (like mine) lands there. (my plane, plus the two commercial planes that would have landed there, anyway)
Technology advances in combination with commercial flight restrictions (show me your SHOES!) mean that there are more small-medium sized planes in the sky, flying shorter trips, and generating more traffic where it counts - at the runways.
Add runways. They are cheap, especially when compared to the cost of other forms of infrastructure....
GetALawyer. Right there in the tagging. If what you are doing has a ghost of a chance of success, you should ensure that you are on a solid legal footing. The few hundred bux you spend now on competent legal advice will probably save you your company later on.
I don't think you understand what this new electrical grid is all about. This project is about a dynamic grid, one that uses constant-update price changes and continuous feedback systems to self-stabilize.
Let's say that you plug your car in when you get home, at about 6:00 PM. You know, when everybody and their uncle is busy burning power for home heating, TVs, and getting ready for dinner. The price of electricity is high, and your car, in constant communication with the grid, doesn't begin charging until the price of electricity drops around 10 PM.
This continuous feedback loop can tie in through your home heating, your refrigerator, etc. so that they shut off during periods when the electricity is in peak demand, and work extra when juice is cheap.
This reduces strain on the power grid, and makes better use of existing resources which are today massively overbuilt simply to handle the 10 minutes during the year when load is at its highest.
This solves a number of very real problems. For example, Wind power is very bad for power grids when it supplies more than about 10% of the total power fed into the grid - wind gusts cause voltage surges and low-grade brownouts that destabilize the power grid.
However, if you had a large number of distributed, high-amperage charge/discharge power storage units (such as a bunch of electric cars!) you could use them to act as electrical inertia to absorb sudden spikes in power.
The net effect will be a cheaper, more reliable power grid, one that could even stay running for short periods of time even if the mains to the power plants are cut, simply because the affected area would see a dramatic spike in the price of electricity, causing everything non-essential to shut off, while the electric vehicles would start backfeeding electricity, earning a profit for their owners.
Yeah, Turning engine/Turing engine, joke funny, ha ha. (My laptop's hostname is, BTW: "turing")
But what really does constitute a "machine"? It's easy to name examples that ARE machines, such as the BMW parked in front of my office. That's a machine; no contest.
On the other hand, a math function written in polynomial notation is definitely NOT a machine. That's been found over and over again.
But computers combine the two; It's easily possible to create a "virtual machine" in software, using a 3D toolkit. Not a "virtual machine" like VMWare, I mean a 3D representation of a physical machine. For example, you can simulate engine parts, pistons, bearings, etc. You could, using a 3D toolkit, create a fully functional copy, part-by-part, of the BMW parked in front of my office. You could compute the air compression within the cylinder walls, you could compute the coefficient of drag, in short, it IS a machine, rendered in software.
You can look at it, and using a joystick/keyboard, interact with it; you can enter it and "drive". Since you can even take it apart with virtual "tools", put it back together again, and since it obeys the laws of physics within its virtual world, how is it NOT a machine?
Auto manufacturers do this all the time - "create" cars virtually for crash, drag-coefficient, and general performance testing prior to making prototypes. It saves billions of dollars annually, as well as dramatically reducing time to market.
But is that a machine from the perspective of the patent office? Based on my understanding, the answer is probably no.
Your question is sorta like: "I hear a noise coming from my engine - what should I do to fix it?". There are many variables to consider. If you are unsure, start with the cheapest option and expand from there as needed!
I use VMs AND hardware, as the need dictates. And actually, I think parent poster has a point.
Virtualization has its benefits, but when the chips are down, performance tanks. Badly. Virtualization is awesome for testing installers, for testing functionality on multiple operating systems and/or environments periodically. (EG: as part of a release process)
But as a day-to-day environment: no way, unless you are fond of Windows 95.
I have a dual-core laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB, 5400 RPM HDD. I can run 1, maybe 2 VMs of Windows 2000 before it becomes slow enough that I start to get frustrated. Even with only 1 Windows 2000 VM, recovering from a suspend is rather painful. And that's with Windows 2000. Running Vista/32 in a VM is just ridiculously painful. Don't bother - it's not worth your time.
On the other hand, if you ask around, you can pick up P4 1.0+ Ghz systems for about $50 a pop, with 20-40 GB HDDs and 256 MB of RAM. For my needs, I have several of these that rotate around as needed for dev systems, emergency replacements, and home use. (Mine are all Desktop Dells) There's no replacement for a cable that you can plug/unplug to test an outage when developing clustered applications. =)
VMs are great - I use them - but my own dev environment is neither all VM or all used hardware. Use both, as it makes sense.
You need more than that. You need time, a lot of time, often more than a full-time job will allow. You need basic charisma, both to obtain supporters and to be able to talk to the players. You need connections, to get you access to those people in the first place. And you need to not have an opponent who simply outclasses you. It's not enough to learn the rules to the game; you have to be able to act on those rules.
And you know this because.... ????
Please, please take a look (again!) at Mrs. Bev Harris. She's a mom - no particular political connections to begin with. She had plenty of classy and well-oiled salesmen opposing her. She had to learn the rules of the game, and she has a distinctly "Roseanne" air about her - not exactly polished, charismatic "leader".
Yet, she's managed to turn the tide of history. She is an unsung hero, somebody who changed the world in a very real, subtle way that few really recognize but is appreciated by many. Her actions have resulted in, among many other things: parody by the infamous Simpsons. Small victory? Perhaps not - Obama won by a landslidein an election closely watched in no small part due to her efforts.
Say thanks to Bev! Throw her $100, or $50, or $10 if that's all you have. Be glad you did - your $10 will go farther than $100 you'll pay in taxes, and she deserves it! (I donated - several times over the past few years!)
Ever look at a city from the sky? No, not some 707 that jumps to 30,000 feet in a matter of seconds, but in a small plane? Google Earth is an approximation - but you lose the depth of everything, and all you see is rooftops. Go up in a small plane at 2000 feet above a medium-sized city (100,000 and up) or bigger. As a private pilot, I get plenty of chances to do so.
One of the things that never ceases to surprise me is just how... fractal most cities are. Houses are lined up in neat rows along streets that are usually either straight or follow some landmark, EG: a river. Most towns (in California) have an older "downtown" that is always a grid with closely packed, multi-story buildings, alongside an "uptown" that widely spread out, grid-shaped buildings with large parking lots, surrounded by the "burbs", older homes on wide, grid-shaped streets and newer homes on windy, curved streets that tend to roughly follow landmarks. New cities (built in the last 50 years or so) don't have a "downtown", just an "uptown", but they all have an uptown.
Freeways mostly go between the downtown/uptown areas, and then spread out in a roughly bicycle-wheel shape, towards the nearest large community. Like I said, it's not a great substitute, but ste here's a stereotype California city.
I don't know, but these basic development patterns hold true down to the very substance of the buildings themselves... Older buildings use lots of brick or wood, newer buildings tend to be stucco and wood-based plywood paneling. Larger new buildings tend to be steel and concrete, larger old buildings tend to be... brick.
If you created a pattern based on the age of the parts of town, and then applied a fractal pattern based on age, you could probably come up with an extremely realistic-looking city with very little effort. Automatically, with roads that make sense (EG: don't lead nowhere) and houses that look like real neighborhoods, etc.
Combined with a bit of a "noise factor" and the results would likely be indistinguishable from a real city. Heck, you might not even need to save the actual city - if the results are generated by a fractal math function, you'd just need to store a seed, an integer or somesuch so that the city can be auto-generated on demand.
Two points I'd like to address here, GP and Parent posts...
The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.
In order for open government to work, it doesn't have to be watched by everybody, or even most people. Most of gov. work *IS* tedium, it's dry, boring, highfalutin stuff. But by making it open to everybody, it's open to the few people that are paying attention, the few that make a difference.
And don't think that it takes more than a few. Take a look at the heroic work done at Black Box Voting - seriously, she's a middle-aged, overweight mom with no particularly special credentials. Google images for Bev Harris - yes that's her - and you'll see what I mean. But she's paying attention and she's making a difference. In my book, she is one of the greatest heroes there are, today, in the United States.
As a private pilot, I recently attended a meeting of my local City Council regarding the handling of traffic and fuel at the local airport. It's a meeting dryer than the Sahara in August, small-time politicians discussing a matter that's fundamentally small-time in a small town, in a meeting where the decisions to be made were made elsewhere. Yet it concerned me enough to speak, to be present, and to be heard. I was not alone. And although 99.99% of the local community didn't care, the fact that I did was enough.
If you want govt. to be as interesting as an episode of Survivor, please, pray tell, don't live in or have influence in my community!
But the laws aren't actually made there, either, except in a few rare cases. The laws are written by lobbyists and decided upon in behind the scenes deals; the committee meetings usually just ratify the deals already made.
Yes, it's a soap opera. And to believe that merely attending a meeting will make a huge difference is naive. It won't. But the meetings are the "action points" - they let you know how hard you have to work, and with whom, in order to coordinate your activities. In my previous example, discussing airport politics at the local city council meeting, do you not think that I'd discussed the issues at hand numerous times with other people involved? Why do you think that I was brought in, except for being known as somebody who's fairly noisy and politically active in my community?
Meetings are for coordination, not for decisions. This is true in business as much as it is true for government. Which is why: always be wary of a meeting for which no agenda has been published - it's very possible you are going to be ambushed.
And in those rare cases, the committee meets in closed session.
Thus, the cry for an open government. For the most part, you *have* an open government, if you are willing to get involved. See example of political hero Bev Harris above for how to do this.
When you realize that the power to influence government is actually wielded by a precious few who are paying attention, you will be stunned at just how much power you really have! Just pay attention, and put in the time to learn the rules of the game.
I believe that OOo provides all the features that 95%+ of the users will want. Really I'd like to see Sun/Novell/Whomever to focus on stripping legacy code, making OOo more modular (don't load every aspect of the program unless it is needed at boot, move some features/aspects into libraries that can be loaded later if needed) and improve the interface.
At the heart of it all, I understand that OOo's immodularity is rather fundamental. Remember that it used to come with its own "Desktop" that would literally replace your desktop with its own when you launched it - think GEM if you go back that far. It *is* a very nice application from the user's perspective - but as far as modularity goes, it left alot to be desired since it was written to NOT be modular.
They've done a great job with what they started with, I wish them good luck as they continue...
Oh, and at my software company, Foxit is on our "Recommended Software" downloads list...
Why exactly do we need to spend government money on flying cars that will most likely burn a lot more fuel than our current gas guzzlers?
I learned to fly in a Cessna 172, a four-seat airplane built in 1976. (It's typical for airplanes to be quite old - they just fix them forever since new ones are so expensive) Despite its age, it travels about 120 MPH and burns about 9 GPH doing it. When you factor in an average 20% reduction in actual travel distance (because you fly straight from origin to destination, rather than along whatever twisty highway that happens to be available, and you find that you get a rather respectable 15 MPG or so.
No, this doesn't directly compare to a Prius, but for a plane built in 1976 that flies and travels an average speed more than twice what you can expect from your car, it's really quite respectable.
More modern planes (typically, experimental class) can do almost twice as well, despite there being very little funding for research in building efficient small airplanes. For example, there's theRutan-based Cozy Mk IV that runs the same engine (and thus, the same 9 GPH burn rate) as the venerable Cessna but flies almost twice as fast, (190 knots vs 105 knots) at much higher altitudes.
There are safety benefits - it's actually rather difficult to stall a canard, for example, although this may be offset by the fact that actual crashes are more likely to be fatal.
Now, with massive research, cars can now reach 40 MPG, while personal aircraft approach 30, with 1/100 the research funding. Gas guzzlers indead - I'd say they're doing quite well!
But wait: there's more!
The 9 GPH figure above is quoted at "cruise speed", about about 80% power. Basically, it's the fastest that you can fly the plane over long distances without prematurely burning out the engine - not a particularly fuel-efficient setting. Cut the fuel burn-rate back, to maybe 60% power, and you'll find a nice range increase (as much as 25%!) with the resulting fuel efficiency improvement. The Cessna slows from 105 Knots to 90 Knots or so, and the Cozy Mark IV slows from 190 Knots to 160 or so - about 175 miles per hour.
Suddenly, the 4-seat Canard Cozy is holding its own rather well against a late-model Hybrid in fuel efficiency, while traveling at 3x the speed!
Except that you won't catch me flying a para-car, the disadvantages are many.
PLUS: ~) it's cheap; fairly easy to implement.
MINUS: ~) Parawings have a tendency to fold when you turn too sharply. ~) It does poorly in windy conditions. ~) Slow, inefficient, high drag. ~) Tendency to "rip". ~) Takeoff is difficult. ~) An in-flight rainstorm is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, by definition. ~) Poor handling in engine-out / emergency circumstances.
I'll pass, thanks! Even as a VFR pilot, I've flown in rain many times, and at 150 MPH, it happens surprisingly quickly... I can only imagine what the power-fail glide slope is on something like this. (7:1 for a Piston Cessna, as high as 20:1 for jets, often as poor as 2:1 for an ultralight/paraglider - you sink like a STONE when the power goes out!)
Yes, but not right away. There's a very strict limit to how much "economy" the government can directly fund.
But the bridges and roads built during the 30's depression are the infrastructure that the automotive boom of the 1950's was based upon. Much more was built in the 1950s and 1960s, along with an extensive power grid, telephone system, and power plants, nuclear and otherwise. Many of these freeways, highways, power lines, and power plants remain today, gridlocked or overloaded, essentially the same as they were in 1965. For 40 years, we've been milking the massive infrastructure built during an era of the United States when we were boldly looking forward.
If we don't start looking forward again soon, our aging infrastructure will continue to crumble and groan under the burden of our much larger population. We blow 700 billion bailing out a bunch of white guys who were caught feeding at the trough of the public good, while other nations spend a similar amount remaking themselves into super powers.
Tisk tisk. We should be spending 700 billion on rebuilding bridges, roads, power lines, and green energy. We could be energy independent in just 10 years if we pushed it, and the cost of doing so would create a strong economic and political power base for the United States for generations to come.
Every day we don't, we squander the strength our fathers left for us. We should return the favor for our progeny.
I live in Chico, CA. The local Circuit City ROCKS!!! The sales people actually have a clue, they are always courteous, their prices are generally very good, and their service is excellent.
I've seen/heard horror stories from teh Intarnetz about just how bad CC is, but I haven't seen it... at all. I probably spend about $2000 a year in various stuff there, and am perfectly happy to spend it there!
Here's my most recent story:
I wanted a decent sounding stereo system for my Halloween party. It was literally the day OF the party. I already had a decent pair of speakers, I just needed a receiver to put it all together. Nothing fancy, just enough watts to make it sound nice. I walked in to CC and found a floor model for sale, just $77. I snatched it up immediately, and bought it right away. Total time in the store was less than 5 minutes. I took it home and found that it didn't work, so I took it back.
They exchanged the dead floor model with a working new model, and didn't even make me pay the difference in price!
In my line of work, I consume lots of data, and I use USB HDDs like backup tapes. I have lots of them, labeled with dates, and I find that CC usually has USB drives for sale about as cheap as I can find at pricewatch.com - and I don't have to wait 4 days to get my goods. I've also a flat-panel monitor, computer speakers, flash memory, and several digital cameras in the last year alone - all at Circuit City, and all with excellent prices and service.
I hope Circuit City pulls out of this funk - I rather like my local store.
Tell me about this SMS "message" that was sent when you were out of the country... did it cry alot, look alot like your best friend, and come with a child-support payment?
As a hosted application provider, we provide no less than THREE separate geographical locations for DR of the data: the redundant, primary hosting cluster, a smaller, backup hosting cluster, and a non-hosted "if it gets this bad it's really, really bad" backup. Offsite backups happen automatically every night, so at any point, you'll never lose more than 24 hours worth of data. We've always offered this level of redundancy.
In a few months, we'll bring this 24 hour maximum latency down to less than 5 minutes!
You can argue "data security" all you want, but we've had a number of customers sign up when they lost all their data due to data security issues. In one case, their servers were actually stolen! (ie: physically GONE, no backups, geez...) If you choose a competent hosting provider, a hosted application can dramatically improve the security and reliability of access to your data.
...and having to spend time at bps rates lower than 9600 when performing tasks, you clearly don't appreciate the speed increases over the years the same as some of us.
I started telecommunications at 1200 bps, so I think I can appreciate the benefits of speed. I remember using a crossover serial cable with Artisoft's LANtastic over a 19,200 BPS interface on DOS 3.x. I remember waiting 20 minutes to load a program while the cassette tape played...
I get really sad when I see wasteful memory and cpu bloat. Perhaps these will become scarce resources again with the mobile trend, and people will do a better job watching their consumption. Oh well.
Here's where we differ. Look to the cost of this "bloat", because that's the only real factor that matters. Today's "bloated" 20 GB Operating System is much, much cheaper than Windows 3.0 was on a 10 MB hard drive, simply because the disk space used by Windows 3.0 cost around $100 while the disk space used by Windows Vista costs about $5.
That's not "bloat" - that's putting your money where it counts - features rather than being "lean" which offers little actual value.
Really: What is the difference between a "prototype" and "working code"? Do you actually write a prototype and then rewrite it later after you've proven the concept?
The fact is that in most cases, the prototype and the release are both the same code base, except that one has had more testing and development than the other, as evidenced by your own statement:
"... every time I've ever done a prototype it is invariably shipped as a product minutes later."
This is not a bad thing! But it does require you, as a developer, to take this into consideration and develop your prototypes with a useful API and infrastructural support/optimization so that when it becomes "production code" minutes after you are "done" with your prototype, it can hold up. Let me repeat myself...
The prototype and the release are both the same code base, except that one has had more testing and development than the other.
Slashdot Mirror
And, all this time, we thought viagra gave old people a gun to shoot...
Now they take it all literal and stuff?
So Multitouch screen software, ditto, ditto, ditto, VS upgrade, Novelty receptionist blah blah blah
Where is the innovation?
I'm sorry. It seems you have confused "Microsoft Labs" with the "Microsoft Acquisition Legal Team and License Investigations Querying Unlicensed Operating system Review". (M.A.L.T. L.I.Q.U.O.R.)
At Microsoft, innovation happens in the acquisitions department. Small wonder (ahem!) for a company whose name is roughly synonymic with a flat wee-wee...
I just don't get what the big deal is. Bad? Yes. New? NO!
I write network applications for a living. This type of coordination with a large number of hosts is precisely the kind of thing that I write professionally. While it takes some work to get this kind of coordination in place, it's probably a man-week with standard tools and commonly available information for somebody who understands how to write network applications.
Years ago (2002?) I saw similar behavior in what I called a "spam attack". I was the sysadmin for a small-mid sized ISP. (about 10,000 clients) I witnessed behavior exactly like this delivering SPAM. It would come in waves, over a 4-6 hour period, clearly targeting addresses on our mail server cluster. I logged thousands of IP addresses over this 4-6 hour period. And then, after a half day or so, it would just... stop.
With this many IP addresses, it's pretty obvious that the 3 Mb dual-bonded T1 bandwidth that the mail cluster was on could be DDOS'd trivially. Yet other than an occasional perl-based IRC client bot uploaded by some client's vulnerable script, DDOS attacks of any kind were pretty rare.
BTW: Greylisting killed these spam attacks deader than dead. Blocked virtually everything in a spam attack so effectively that the load on the mail cluster didn't rise even noticeably. Our mail cluster ran Qmail-LDAP, so to get greylisting to work we had two sendmail/greylisting relays as the primary MX, which then relayed in to the mail cluster. (which had no MX published for it) Although the greylisting relays were just cheap hardware, we had to bump up the RAM since the Greylisting database (kept in RAM) grew to be pretty large.
If you are curious: http://hcpnet.free.fr/milter-greylist/ I use it to this day, because it's virtually zero administration and it works very, very well.
So fork it! Give it a new name, like GenFS, NexFS, or something happy sounding. Then, see what kind of adoption it gets...
This article summary is an example of what's wrong with soundbites and their effect on responsible media.
Here we have a sound-bite sized message: "Apple makes green laptop", followed by another sound-biter: "Greenpeace say Apple bad mojo". But then, in the interest of "full disclosure", several snippets back and forth are quoted: "Greenpeace not perfect", and "Greenpeace attacks Apple for publicity".
The net effect comes as a custerfluck of conflicting messages leaving me with a blank stare - and I really don't care about the message.
And this is bad for responsible media - those with their own axe to grind will only soundbite the stuff they want. EG: Apple might soundbite: "Apple makes green laptop". Greenpeace soundbite: "Apple bad mojo".
See how much more palatable each message is all by itself?
But when you try to combine responsible media with soundbites, you end up just confusing the !@# out of everyone, and the special interests win.
I am surprised that you would consider landing a 172 at an airport used by heavy jets at all. Small airports are much more convenient, and the landing charges are lower.
There are no landing fees at any airport I've flown to. Ever. Landing fees apply to larger planes almost exclusively (over 12,500 lbs gross weight) The only one I know of with a landing fee for my itty bitty is SFO, and I just don't go there. For every SUPER MAJOR OMG airport (EG: SFO, LAX) there are many, many "largish" airports (EG: Sacramento, Stockton, Fresno, Oakland) that are plenty busy, with lots of big jets, but also take a fair amount of General Aviation private planes.
I doubt the hassle of dealing with air side security at a major airport is worth the trouble.
Hassle?!?! Once you are known to be a pilot, the rules are suddenly very different. Not only can you keep your shoes on, they'll open the gate so you can drive your car out to the tarmac to load up! The bathrooms not only have paper, they have cloth towels, decorative plants, and free razors. The lady behind the counter is not only polite, but offers free pizza and cookies, and offers you his/her phone number for advance notice. They reserve a taxi for you before you even land.
You didn't mention separation standards for a light wake turbulence aircraft following a medium or heavy aircraft. That can put a lot of delay into the system as well.
That's because there really isn't any special separation standard for wake turbulence. (that I'm aware of!) Wake turbulence moves downward and outward from the wings of the plane. When following a "big bird" you simply stay above the approach path of the plane in front of you, and make sure to land after it touches down. When I follow a big bird, I usually hear something like "Cessna NNN, cleared to land, 1-4 left. Caution wake turbulence." from the tower. That's it - I would respond with "Clear to land, watch for wake turbulence, Cessna NNN".
My little mosquito of a plane has never had any trouble at all stopping after touching down 1/3 down the runway on such an extended final. Big birds need a good mile of runway, I can get by with about a quarter of that.
Building a new airport opens up new arrival and departure trajectories and pushes down house prices. Eventually the whole airport has to move and that can get very expensive.
Who said anything about new airports? I'm only talking about more runways at EXISTING airports...
I have an affluent household. We have several TVs and a Dish DVR that records our favorite shows. And it's nice. So much better than life without a DVR. Ask me six months ago, and I would have raved about my beautiful Dish DVR. Being in control of the TV experience is just... amazing.
But then, something new happened - Netflix released on-demand for Mac OSX. Now, the Mac Mini is the computer upstairs, next to the nice, big, sound system, with a nice, big monitor on it. And so, it was little effort to install Netflix and start watching (older) movies on it immediately.
And I thought DVR had it good!
Quality is good - "feels like DVD" and the hassle factor is just GONE. This is how home media should be. The DVR gets sorta close, but it's just not there. Good quality video, good quality sound, only occasionally noticeable artifacting, and no DVDs to return or lose, no trip to the local video store... just click, wait about 10 seconds, and voila!
I don't give one whit about resolution higher than this if I have to deal with discs, trips, and per-movie charges. Especially if the equipment is expensive.
I bought a projector for a few hundred on eBay that will render the Netflix vids at enormous 5' viewing on a home-projector style fold-out screen.
On demand. No hassle. Big screen. Decent resolution. Great sound. No more "gotchas". Just click, and play!
On demand - it's for me! (now, if only they had a Linux port...)
You understand wrong.
The problem of air traffic in the United States is a combination of a number of things: insufficient airport runway capacity, overused "super hubs", predictive overselling of tickets, and antiquated air traffic control systems. All these factors contribute, some (much) more than others.
I'm a private pilot, so let's be honest - there's plenty of room the air. I fly through very busy (Sacramento and San Fransisco, CA) airspace frequently, I've never had a "near miss". Nag about 40-year-old technology all you want; it works rather well. And in the small-ish airplanes I fly, there are lots of small airports for me to fly to where there is no congestion, no hope of congestion, and rarely any other aircraft "in the pattern". (Airports have an expected approach and landing sequence, usually based around an imaginary box shape around the runways, this is called 'the pattern' by pilots)
But when you are talking about congestion, you are really talking about runway capacity, because although there's plenty of room in the sky, there are a relatively small number of airports. Combine that with the tendency of airlines to create "mega hub" airports for connecting flights (EG: Atlanta, GA) and the problem of runway shortages become paramount.
A decent runway is about 1 or 2 miles long. It's basically a 2-4 lane freeway for just a mile or so. Adding more runways dramatically increases air capacity. A 1.5 mile runway is vastly cheaper than 100 miles of railroad, but services a similar amount of traffic over the same distance. Aviation infrastructure is ridiculously cheap compared to highways, trains, and other forms of travel. (except maybe by boat, which is cheaper still but much slower)
Why is this hard to understand?
Many large, busy airports have 2 or more runways, and often they split traffic based on type. My small, single-engine 4-seat Cessna 172 with its landing speed of about 60 Knots gets the short runway, while SouthWest airlines flight NNN with its landing speed of 125 Knots gets the big one.
Notice that my small plane takes 2x as long to approach the runway as the big jet? Adding a small, short, "General Aviation" runway to this large, busy airport adds as much as 3x the capacity anytime a small plane (like mine) lands there. (my plane, plus the two commercial planes that would have landed there, anyway)
Technology advances in combination with commercial flight restrictions (show me your SHOES!) mean that there are more small-medium sized planes in the sky, flying shorter trips, and generating more traffic where it counts - at the runways.
Add runways. They are cheap, especially when compared to the cost of other forms of infrastructure....
GetALawyer. Right there in the tagging. If what you are doing has a ghost of a chance of success, you should ensure that you are on a solid legal footing. The few hundred bux you spend now on competent legal advice will probably save you your company later on.
I don't think you understand what this new electrical grid is all about. This project is about a dynamic grid, one that uses constant-update price changes and continuous feedback systems to self-stabilize.
Let's say that you plug your car in when you get home, at about 6:00 PM. You know, when everybody and their uncle is busy burning power for home heating, TVs, and getting ready for dinner. The price of electricity is high, and your car, in constant communication with the grid, doesn't begin charging until the price of electricity drops around 10 PM.
This continuous feedback loop can tie in through your home heating, your refrigerator, etc. so that they shut off during periods when the electricity is in peak demand, and work extra when juice is cheap.
This reduces strain on the power grid, and makes better use of existing resources which are today massively overbuilt simply to handle the 10 minutes during the year when load is at its highest.
This solves a number of very real problems. For example, Wind power is very bad for power grids when it supplies more than about 10% of the total power fed into the grid - wind gusts cause voltage surges and low-grade brownouts that destabilize the power grid.
However, if you had a large number of distributed, high-amperage charge/discharge power storage units (such as a bunch of electric cars!) you could use them to act as electrical inertia to absorb sudden spikes in power.
The net effect will be a cheaper, more reliable power grid, one that could even stay running for short periods of time even if the mains to the power plants are cut, simply because the affected area would see a dramatic spike in the price of electricity, causing everything non-essential to shut off, while the electric vehicles would start backfeeding electricity, earning a profit for their owners.
This is for real!
Yeah, Turning engine/Turing engine, joke funny, ha ha. (My laptop's hostname is, BTW: "turing")
But what really does constitute a "machine"? It's easy to name examples that ARE machines, such as the BMW parked in front of my office. That's a machine; no contest.
On the other hand, a math function written in polynomial notation is definitely NOT a machine. That's been found over and over again.
But computers combine the two; It's easily possible to create a "virtual machine" in software, using a 3D toolkit. Not a "virtual machine" like VMWare, I mean a 3D representation of a physical machine. For example, you can simulate engine parts, pistons, bearings, etc. You could, using a 3D toolkit, create a fully functional copy, part-by-part, of the BMW parked in front of my office. You could compute the air compression within the cylinder walls, you could compute the coefficient of drag, in short, it IS a machine, rendered in software.
You can look at it, and using a joystick/keyboard, interact with it; you can enter it and "drive". Since you can even take it apart with virtual "tools", put it back together again, and since it obeys the laws of physics within its virtual world, how is it NOT a machine?
Auto manufacturers do this all the time - "create" cars virtually for crash, drag-coefficient, and general performance testing prior to making prototypes. It saves billions of dollars annually, as well as dramatically reducing time to market.
But is that a machine from the perspective of the patent office? Based on my understanding, the answer is probably no.
Your question is sorta like: "I hear a noise coming from my engine - what should I do to fix it?". There are many variables to consider. If you are unsure, start with the cheapest option and expand from there as needed!
I use VMs AND hardware, as the need dictates. And actually, I think parent poster has a point.
Virtualization has its benefits, but when the chips are down, performance tanks. Badly. Virtualization is awesome for testing installers, for testing functionality on multiple operating systems and/or environments periodically. (EG: as part of a release process)
But as a day-to-day environment: no way, unless you are fond of Windows 95.
I have a dual-core laptop with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB, 5400 RPM HDD. I can run 1, maybe 2 VMs of Windows 2000 before it becomes slow enough that I start to get frustrated. Even with only 1 Windows 2000 VM, recovering from a suspend is rather painful. And that's with Windows 2000. Running Vista/32 in a VM is just ridiculously painful. Don't bother - it's not worth your time.
On the other hand, if you ask around, you can pick up P4 1.0+ Ghz systems for about $50 a pop, with 20-40 GB HDDs and 256 MB of RAM. For my needs, I have several of these that rotate around as needed for dev systems, emergency replacements, and home use. (Mine are all Desktop Dells) There's no replacement for a cable that you can plug/unplug to test an outage when developing clustered applications. =)
VMs are great - I use them - but my own dev environment is neither all VM or all used hardware. Use both, as it makes sense.
*ahem*
That's nukular family to yoozall.
(speaking to wrist microphone)
What's that? We voted an INTELLIGENT presidente - er, president? No, that couldn't be! But what about the - you mean, we're going to follow the law?
*ahem*
The world's oldest known nuclear family...
You need more than that. You need time, a lot of time, often more than a full-time job will allow. You need basic charisma, both to obtain supporters and to be able to talk to the players. You need connections, to get you access to those people in the first place. And you need to not have an opponent who simply outclasses you. It's not enough to learn the rules to the game; you have to be able to act on those rules.
And you know this because.... ????
Please, please take a look (again!) at Mrs. Bev Harris. She's a mom - no particular political connections to begin with. She had plenty of classy and well-oiled salesmen opposing her. She had to learn the rules of the game, and she has a distinctly "Roseanne" air about her - not exactly polished, charismatic "leader".
Yet, she's managed to turn the tide of history. She is an unsung hero, somebody who changed the world in a very real, subtle way that few really recognize but is appreciated by many. Her actions have resulted in, among many other things: parody by the infamous Simpsons. Small victory? Perhaps not - Obama won by a landslidein an election closely watched in no small part due to her efforts.
Say thanks to Bev! Throw her $100, or $50, or $10 if that's all you have. Be glad you did - your $10 will go farther than $100 you'll pay in taxes, and she deserves it! (I donated - several times over the past few years!)
Oh, and in case you are watching: thanks Bev!
Ever look at a city from the sky? No, not some 707 that jumps to 30,000 feet in a matter of seconds, but in a small plane? Google Earth is an approximation - but you lose the depth of everything, and all you see is rooftops. Go up in a small plane at 2000 feet above a medium-sized city (100,000 and up) or bigger. As a private pilot, I get plenty of chances to do so.
One of the things that never ceases to surprise me is just how... fractal most cities are. Houses are lined up in neat rows along streets that are usually either straight or follow some landmark, EG: a river. Most towns (in California) have an older "downtown" that is always a grid with closely packed, multi-story buildings, alongside an "uptown" that widely spread out, grid-shaped buildings with large parking lots, surrounded by the "burbs", older homes on wide, grid-shaped streets and newer homes on windy, curved streets that tend to roughly follow landmarks. New cities (built in the last 50 years or so) don't have a "downtown", just an "uptown", but they all have an uptown.
Freeways mostly go between the downtown/uptown areas, and then spread out in a roughly bicycle-wheel shape, towards the nearest large community. Like I said, it's not a great substitute, but ste here's a stereotype California city.
I don't know, but these basic development patterns hold true down to the very substance of the buildings themselves... Older buildings use lots of brick or wood, newer buildings tend to be stucco and wood-based plywood paneling. Larger new buildings tend to be steel and concrete, larger old buildings tend to be... brick.
If you created a pattern based on the age of the parts of town, and then applied a fractal pattern based on age, you could probably come up with an extremely realistic-looking city with very little effort. Automatically, with roads that make sense (EG: don't lead nowhere) and houses that look like real neighborhoods, etc.
Combined with a bit of a "noise factor" and the results would likely be indistinguishable from a real city. Heck, you might not even need to save the actual city - if the results are generated by a fractal math function, you'd just need to store a seed, an integer or somesuch so that the city can be auto-generated on demand.
Two points I'd like to address here, GP and Parent posts...
The problem with accessible government is that no-one's interested. Even where there are dedicated TV channels (e.g. in the UK) hardly anyone watches them. Why's that? Because the work of government is almost 100% pure tedium. No-one wants to watch what happens in committee meeting - even if that's where the laws are actually made, nor do are they prepared to sit through hours of televised debate.
In order for open government to work, it doesn't have to be watched by everybody, or even most people. Most of gov. work *IS* tedium, it's dry, boring, highfalutin stuff. But by making it open to everybody, it's open to the few people that are paying attention, the few that make a difference.
And don't think that it takes more than a few. Take a look at the heroic work done at Black Box Voting - seriously, she's a middle-aged, overweight mom with no particularly special credentials. Google images for Bev Harris - yes that's her - and you'll see what I mean. But she's paying attention and she's making a difference. In my book, she is one of the greatest heroes there are, today, in the United States.
As a private pilot, I recently attended a meeting of my local City Council regarding the handling of traffic and fuel at the local airport. It's a meeting dryer than the Sahara in August, small-time politicians discussing a matter that's fundamentally small-time in a small town, in a meeting where the decisions to be made were made elsewhere. Yet it concerned me enough to speak, to be present, and to be heard. I was not alone. And although 99.99% of the local community didn't care, the fact that I did was enough.
If you want govt. to be as interesting as an episode of Survivor, please, pray tell, don't live in or have influence in my community!
But the laws aren't actually made there, either, except in a few rare cases. The laws are written by lobbyists and decided upon in behind the scenes deals; the committee meetings usually just ratify the deals already made.
Yes, it's a soap opera. And to believe that merely attending a meeting will make a huge difference is naive. It won't. But the meetings are the "action points" - they let you know how hard you have to work, and with whom, in order to coordinate your activities. In my previous example, discussing airport politics at the local city council meeting, do you not think that I'd discussed the issues at hand numerous times with other people involved? Why do you think that I was brought in, except for being known as somebody who's fairly noisy and politically active in my community?
Meetings are for coordination, not for decisions. This is true in business as much as it is true for government. Which is why: always be wary of a meeting for which no agenda has been published - it's very possible you are going to be ambushed.
And in those rare cases, the committee meets in closed session.
Thus, the cry for an open government. For the most part, you *have* an open government, if you are willing to get involved. See example of political hero Bev Harris above for how to do this.
When you realize that the power to influence government is actually wielded by a precious few who are paying attention, you will be stunned at just how much power you really have! Just pay attention, and put in the time to learn the rules of the game.
I believe that OOo provides all the features that 95%+ of the users will want. Really I'd like to see Sun/Novell/Whomever to focus on stripping legacy code, making OOo more modular (don't load every aspect of the program unless it is needed at boot, move some features/aspects into libraries that can be loaded later if needed) and improve the interface.
At the heart of it all, I understand that OOo's immodularity is rather fundamental. Remember that it used to come with its own "Desktop" that would literally replace your desktop with its own when you launched it - think GEM if you go back that far. It *is* a very nice application from the user's perspective - but as far as modularity goes, it left alot to be desired since it was written to NOT be modular.
They've done a great job with what they started with, I wish them good luck as they continue...
Oh, and at my software company, Foxit is on our "Recommended Software" downloads list...
Why exactly do we need to spend government money on flying cars that will most likely burn a lot more fuel than our current gas guzzlers?
I learned to fly in a Cessna 172, a four-seat airplane built in 1976. (It's typical for airplanes to be quite old - they just fix them forever since new ones are so expensive) Despite its age, it travels about 120 MPH and burns about 9 GPH doing it. When you factor in an average 20% reduction in actual travel distance (because you fly straight from origin to destination, rather than along whatever twisty highway that happens to be available, and you find that you get a rather respectable 15 MPG or so.
No, this doesn't directly compare to a Prius, but for a plane built in 1976 that flies and travels an average speed more than twice what you can expect from your car, it's really quite respectable.
More modern planes (typically, experimental class) can do almost twice as well, despite there being very little funding for research in building efficient small airplanes. For example, there's theRutan-based Cozy Mk IV that runs the same engine (and thus, the same 9 GPH burn rate) as the venerable Cessna but flies almost twice as fast, (190 knots vs 105 knots) at much higher altitudes.
There are safety benefits - it's actually rather difficult to stall a canard, for example, although this may be offset by the fact that actual crashes are more likely to be fatal.
Now, with massive research, cars can now reach 40 MPG, while personal aircraft approach 30, with 1/100 the research funding. Gas guzzlers indead - I'd say they're doing quite well!
But wait: there's more!
The 9 GPH figure above is quoted at "cruise speed", about about 80% power. Basically, it's the fastest that you can fly the plane over long distances without prematurely burning out the engine - not a particularly fuel-efficient setting. Cut the fuel burn-rate back, to maybe 60% power, and you'll find a nice range increase (as much as 25%!) with the resulting fuel efficiency improvement. The Cessna slows from 105 Knots to 90 Knots or so, and the Cozy Mark IV slows from 190 Knots to 160 or so - about 175 miles per hour.
Suddenly, the 4-seat Canard Cozy is holding its own rather well against a late-model Hybrid in fuel efficiency, while traveling at 3x the speed!
Except that you won't catch me flying a para-car, the disadvantages are many.
PLUS:
~) it's cheap; fairly easy to implement.
MINUS:
~) Parawings have a tendency to fold when you turn too sharply.
~) It does poorly in windy conditions.
~) Slow, inefficient, high drag.
~) Tendency to "rip".
~) Takeoff is difficult.
~) An in-flight rainstorm is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, by definition.
~) Poor handling in engine-out / emergency circumstances.
I'll pass, thanks! Even as a VFR pilot, I've flown in rain many times, and at 150 MPH, it happens surprisingly quickly... I can only imagine what the power-fail glide slope is on something like this. (7:1 for a Piston Cessna, as high as 20:1 for jets, often as poor as 2:1 for an ultralight/paraglider - you sink like a STONE when the power goes out!)
Did this actually help with the depression?
Yes, but not right away. There's a very strict limit to how much "economy" the government can directly fund.
But the bridges and roads built during the 30's depression are the infrastructure that the automotive boom of the 1950's was based upon. Much more was built in the 1950s and 1960s, along with an extensive power grid, telephone system, and power plants, nuclear and otherwise. Many of these freeways, highways, power lines, and power plants remain today, gridlocked or overloaded, essentially the same as they were in 1965. For 40 years, we've been milking the massive infrastructure built during an era of the United States when we were boldly looking forward.
If we don't start looking forward again soon, our aging infrastructure will continue to crumble and groan under the burden of our much larger population. We blow 700 billion bailing out a bunch of white guys who were caught feeding at the trough of the public good, while other nations spend a similar amount remaking themselves into super powers.
Tisk tisk. We should be spending 700 billion on rebuilding bridges, roads, power lines, and green energy. We could be energy independent in just 10 years if we pushed it, and the cost of doing so would create a strong economic and political power base for the United States for generations to come.
Every day we don't, we squander the strength our fathers left for us. We should return the favor for our progeny.
I live in Chico, CA. The local Circuit City ROCKS!!! The sales people actually have a clue, they are always courteous, their prices are generally very good, and their service is excellent.
I've seen/heard horror stories from teh Intarnetz about just how bad CC is, but I haven't seen it... at all. I probably spend about $2000 a year in various stuff there, and am perfectly happy to spend it there!
Here's my most recent story:
I wanted a decent sounding stereo system for my Halloween party. It was literally the day OF the party. I already had a decent pair of speakers, I just needed a receiver to put it all together. Nothing fancy, just enough watts to make it sound nice. I walked in to CC and found a floor model for sale, just $77. I snatched it up immediately, and bought it right away. Total time in the store was less than 5 minutes. I took it home and found that it didn't work, so I took it back.
They exchanged the dead floor model with a working new model, and didn't even make me pay the difference in price!
In my line of work, I consume lots of data, and I use USB HDDs like backup tapes. I have lots of them, labeled with dates, and I find that CC usually has USB drives for sale about as cheap as I can find at pricewatch.com - and I don't have to wait 4 days to get my goods. I've also a flat-panel monitor, computer speakers, flash memory, and several digital cameras in the last year alone - all at Circuit City, and all with excellent prices and service.
I hope Circuit City pulls out of this funk - I rather like my local store.
Tell me about this SMS "message" that was sent when you were out of the country... did it cry alot, look alot like your best friend, and come with a child-support payment?
As a hosted application provider, we provide no less than THREE separate geographical locations for DR of the data: the redundant, primary hosting cluster, a smaller, backup hosting cluster, and a non-hosted "if it gets this bad it's really, really bad" backup. Offsite backups happen automatically every night, so at any point, you'll never lose more than 24 hours worth of data. We've always offered this level of redundancy.
In a few months, we'll bring this 24 hour maximum latency down to less than 5 minutes!
You can argue "data security" all you want, but we've had a number of customers sign up when they lost all their data due to data security issues. In one case, their servers were actually stolen! (ie: physically GONE, no backups, geez...) If you choose a competent hosting provider, a hosted application can dramatically improve the security and reliability of access to your data.
...and having to spend time at bps rates lower than 9600 when performing tasks, you clearly don't appreciate the speed increases over the years the same as some of us.
I started telecommunications at 1200 bps, so I think I can appreciate the benefits of speed. I remember using a crossover serial cable with Artisoft's LANtastic over a 19,200 BPS interface on DOS 3.x. I remember waiting 20 minutes to load a program while the cassette tape played...
I get really sad when I see wasteful memory and cpu bloat. Perhaps these will become scarce resources again with the mobile trend, and people will do a better job watching their consumption. Oh well.
Here's where we differ. Look to the cost of this "bloat", because that's the only real factor that matters. Today's "bloated" 20 GB Operating System is much, much cheaper than Windows 3.0 was on a 10 MB hard drive, simply because the disk space used by Windows 3.0 cost around $100 while the disk space used by Windows Vista costs about $5.
That's not "bloat" - that's putting your money where it counts - features rather than being "lean" which offers little actual value.
Really: What is the difference between a "prototype" and "working code"? Do you actually write a prototype and then rewrite it later after you've proven the concept?
The fact is that in most cases, the prototype and the release are both the same code base, except that one has had more testing and development than the other, as evidenced by your own statement:
"... every time I've ever done a prototype it is invariably shipped as a product minutes later."
This is not a bad thing! But it does require you, as a developer, to take this into consideration and develop your prototypes with a useful API and infrastructural support/optimization so that when it becomes "production code" minutes after you are "done" with your prototype, it can hold up. Let me repeat myself...
The prototype and the release are both the same code base, except that one has had more testing and development than the other.