Time was, MySQL was an open source alternative to 'non-enterprise' DBs like FoxPro. Now it's a viable alternative to Oracle or DB2 in certain circumstances where the high end commercial features are overkill.
I get the feeling that Spore originally was meant to be more but Maxis has always had trouble delivering. SimCity of course were amazing games. For their time. It is the reason the francise died. Because as it aged, the graphics improved but the quality of the simulation didn't and we as players became aware that more was needed. More paths, more options, more choice.
My own feeling is that later versions of Sim City got bogged down in details. Yes I want my city to have a simulated water infrastructure - but I don't want to draw every pipe myself.
Yes, the practice was rife in green-field residential developments all over the country.
It happened that a few of my friends moved into such estates at around that time, so maybe I was exposed to the problem more than is entirely representative.
In my experience in IT here in the UK, if most/all of your work can be done from home then it will likely be outsourced to India, in which case the speed of household Internet connections in the UK is of little importance.
I appreciate that we're just trading in anecdotal evidence here, but while I myself am office based, a significant number of my UK colleagues are home workers, and yet more split their week between home working and coming to the office.
The IBM location in my town reduced its desk count, introduced mandatory hot-desking, and encouraged people to work from home some of the time.
I work in a UK satellite office, for a US based organisation. We have a VPN to the US servers, tunnelled over the internet. A faster internet connection could halve the time it takes me to do an Subversion update. It could halve the time it takes me to get a large trace file needed to solve a customer's problem. And it would make me less frustrated. All of these mean more productivity.
However, TFA is talking about household internet.
I can think of two ways businesses can benefit.
Firstly, employers of home workers, for the same reasons as office workers benefit.
Secondly, businesses that stand to gain from this are ones that are feeding rich content to home Internet users. Whether it's ad-supported Flash games, e-commerce sites with lots of supporting movies/sounds/images, or retailers of online content (e.g. iTunes), the faster your customer's pipe, the more enjoyable their experience becomes, and the more they're likely to spend (or gain you in ad revenue).
If all of them adopted fibre, the cost per household would therefore be £1750, which would need to be recouped in ISP charges etc. over the course of this generation of technology's lifetime. Maybe £350 a year over 5 years = £30 a month.
That's more than I currently pay for unmetered ADSL, and doesn't factor in any profits, nor all the other stuff ISPs do.
OTOH commerce and government get a lot of value out of the Internet, so it makes sense to me that the effort should be funded by the public purse and taxes on business.
In the early-ish days of ADSL in Britain, it was quite common to check for availability, only to be told "Oh sorry, there's fibre running to your property - ADSL needs copper".
So unless they were really stupid and removed it, there's already an awful lot of fibre under people's streets.
I never understood the problem. Surely nobody cares whether they have ADSL or some other technology, as long as the bytes get to their TCP stack. Either market some fibre-based endpoint, or mass-produce fibre-ADSL media convertors and install them at the appropriate point.
Oh yeah, and the Chrome comic is another Google brain-fart. Not only is it dry as a bone for a comic, but it also doesn't adhere to the "back" "forward" buttons because each page is flipped with javascript. Anyone that thinks a "comic" should be used to convey the technical reasoning for developing a new browser needs to be shot.
I agree about the Google Books UI, but the idea of using the comic book medium is brilliant. Sure, it's dry for a comic, but it's a lot less dry than the same content presented in a more traditional manner.
Adobe's buggy Flash player shouldn't be ABLE to crash the browser, or even temporarily lock it up! The Flash specs are all open now, so hopefully one of the open source projects will soon be able to update everything they couldn't reverse engineer and get something decent out the door, but if not, Chrome will surely mature within a few months to have most of the functionality I need on a MUCH better thought-out platform than FF.
Well, Chrome already supports the Flash plugin, but alas, in order to support (a subset of) Mozilla plugins, Google had to allow plugins to pierce the sandbox walls.
The comic suggests that a small amount of effort from plugin developers will allow them to play nicer.
The other hope is that this becomes a browser arms race that leads everyone to improve. Firefox gets better, simply because Chrome exists.
I was discussing this with a colleague at lunchtime. On Windows, spawning a process is a *lot* more expensive than creating a thread.
But it's the sort of cost you worry about when you're creating hundreds in a second (think of early Web servers, spawning a process for every request).
Spawning a process when a user wants a new browser tab? Not a big deal at all.
Some of the ideas for Chrome are good ones. But a lot of them seem to be reinventing the operating system
I'm not sure I agree. A big part of the Chrome design seems to be about giving responsibilities back to the OS. The whole process-per-tab thing, for example, relieves the browser code of lots of memory management and "border guarding". Let the OS manage memory. Operating systems are good at managing memory.
(OS is such an overloaded term, that I might have missed your point).
I feel your pain regarding multi-browser testing. But it seems like implementing standards - and having them clarified where needed - will only become more important as the number of browsers increases.
Exactly right. My approach would be that if I'm not doing anything exotic, my XHTML/CSS validates, and I don't get any JS warnings, then cross-browser testing is just a formality, when it comes to rational browsers.
Yes, you still have to jump through hoops for old versions of MSIE, but that's business as usual.
When I read the title, I thought, "XAMP". It's really the easiest way there is. I can't imagine what you'd have been doing with it to make it slow for development work.
And then, VMWare. Sounds like you have it working. What do you need it to do, that it's not already doing?
Unless I'm missing some vital transatlantic nuance, a pension is the smartest savings account there is, if you intend to ever retire. There's tax reasons, there's employer contributions.
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Time was, MySQL was an open source alternative to 'non-enterprise' DBs like FoxPro. Now it's a viable alternative to Oracle or DB2 in certain circumstances where the high end commercial features are overkill.
Would you replace Oracle with PostgreSQL if "all" you had in house were Oracle gurus?
I'd view that as being similar to replacing AIX or Solaris with Linux -- and that's something that plenty of companies have done successfully.
It does require retraining, it may involve buying support contracts, but it's proved worthwhile for many companies.
Without telling us what non-free applications are currently being used, it's a very difficult question to answer.
If I were starting a business tomorrow, I can't think of a single piece of commercial software I'd standardise on.
Partly because I'm stingy when it comes to software. Partly because I don't want license management to become a headache as the business grows.
That's an American thing
Ok, seriously. Do Americans have running water yet?
How can a country like America be so backward in respects to technology? Astonishing.
One of the driving forces in the UK was more channels. Terrestrial digital was/is the only way to get more than five channels without a subscription.
In contrast, Americans are used to having dozens of channels broadcast on analogue.
The primary reason I like the digital channels is that they are true 16:9 widescreen.
That's an American thing, where the broadcasters decided not to standardise on 16:9 or DVB until they could bundle it with HD.
In the UK (an probably the rest of Europe - not sure) 16:9 SD DVB-T has been broadcast since 1998, all new sets (for some years hence) can receive it.
The difference between a SD DVD and a HD-DVD is striking at first, but within 5 minutes of a film starting, I stop caring.
I gave up on TFA when I got to "increasingly more common".
Do you have any file in your computer whose MD5 hash matches the current Google logo?
Try: "Do you have any file in your computer whose MD5 hash matches any of the top 130,000 images in Picasa?"
But:
My Windows box has some 120,000 files on it. Let's round that up to 131,072 or 2^17.
Let's assume a perfect hashing algorithm that spreads its hashes through a 128 bit space.
So the chances of any of my files colliding with the hash of a single kiddie porn file are 2^17 / 2^128 = 1 / 2^111
If the police have a database of hashes that's also 2^17 items long, then the chances increase accordingly: 2^17 / 2^111 = 1 / 2^94
2^94 is a very large number.
Even if MD5 isn't perfect, the chances of an accidental false positive are vanishingly small.
Just thought I'd get some facts in. Personally, I still support due process in any criminal investigations.
I get the feeling that Spore originally was meant to be more but Maxis has always had trouble delivering. SimCity of course were amazing games. For their time. It is the reason the francise died. Because as it aged, the graphics improved but the quality of the simulation didn't and we as players became aware that more was needed. More paths, more options, more choice.
My own feeling is that later versions of Sim City got bogged down in details. Yes I want my city to have a simulated water infrastructure - but I don't want to draw every pipe myself.
Yes, the practice was rife in green-field residential developments all over the country.
It happened that a few of my friends moved into such estates at around that time, so maybe I was exposed to the problem more than is entirely representative.
In my experience in IT here in the UK, if most/all of your work can be done from home then it will likely be outsourced to India, in which case the speed of household Internet connections in the UK is of little importance.
I appreciate that we're just trading in anecdotal evidence here, but while I myself am office based, a significant number of my UK colleagues are home workers, and yet more split their week between home working and coming to the office.
The IBM location in my town reduced its desk count, introduced mandatory hot-desking, and encouraged people to work from home some of the time.
I work in a UK satellite office, for a US based organisation. We have a VPN to the US servers, tunnelled over the internet. A faster internet connection could halve the time it takes me to do an Subversion update. It could halve the time it takes me to get a large trace file needed to solve a customer's problem. And it would make me less frustrated. All of these mean more productivity.
However, TFA is talking about household internet.
I can think of two ways businesses can benefit.
Firstly, employers of home workers, for the same reasons as office workers benefit.
Secondly, businesses that stand to gain from this are ones that are feeding rich content to home Internet users. Whether it's ad-supported Flash games, e-commerce sites with lots of supporting movies/sounds/images, or retailers of online content (e.g. iTunes), the faster your customer's pipe, the more enjoyable their experience becomes, and the more they're likely to spend (or gain you in ad revenue).
From TOA - £28 billion fibre infrastructure bill.
Currently there are 16 million households with Internet access in Britain.
If all of them adopted fibre, the cost per household would therefore be £1750, which would need to be recouped in ISP charges etc. over the course of this generation of technology's lifetime. Maybe £350 a year over 5 years = £30 a month.
That's more than I currently pay for unmetered ADSL, and doesn't factor in any profits, nor all the other stuff ISPs do.
OTOH commerce and government get a lot of value out of the Internet, so it makes sense to me that the effort should be funded by the public purse and taxes on business.
In the early-ish days of ADSL in Britain, it was quite common to check for availability, only to be told "Oh sorry, there's fibre running to your property - ADSL needs copper".
So unless they were really stupid and removed it, there's already an awful lot of fibre under people's streets.
I never understood the problem. Surely nobody cares whether they have ADSL or some other technology, as long as the bytes get to their TCP stack. Either market some fibre-based endpoint, or mass-produce fibre-ADSL media convertors and install them at the appropriate point.
Oh yeah, and the Chrome comic is another Google brain-fart. Not only is it dry as a bone for a comic, but it also doesn't adhere to the "back" "forward" buttons because each page is flipped with javascript. Anyone that thinks a "comic" should be used to convey the technical reasoning for developing a new browser needs to be shot.
I agree about the Google Books UI, but the idea of using the comic book medium is brilliant. Sure, it's dry for a comic, but it's a lot less dry than the same content presented in a more traditional manner.
The professional designers at Design Less Better had things to say about the idea.
In Chrome, right click on a tab, and choose "Duplicate".
I can't find a keyboard shortcut though.
Adobe's buggy Flash player shouldn't be ABLE to crash the browser, or even temporarily lock it up! The Flash specs are all open now, so hopefully one of the open source projects will soon be able to update everything they couldn't reverse engineer and get something decent out the door, but if not, Chrome will surely mature within a few months to have most of the functionality I need on a MUCH better thought-out platform than FF.
Well, Chrome already supports the Flash plugin, but alas, in order to support (a subset of) Mozilla plugins, Google had to allow plugins to pierce the sandbox walls.
The comic suggests that a small amount of effort from plugin developers will allow them to play nicer.
The other hope is that this becomes a browser arms race that leads everyone to improve. Firefox gets better, simply because Chrome exists.
I never use the home button.
But if you want it:
- spanner
- options...
- Basic
- "Show home button on the toolbar"
I already have to deal with 2 (IE for sites that don't play nice, and FF as my preferred).
What, you haven't installed IETab?.
(I'm really liking Chrome, but I'm longing for the day IETab and GreaseMonkey get ported to it).
I was discussing this with a colleague at lunchtime. On Windows, spawning a process is a *lot* more expensive than creating a thread.
But it's the sort of cost you worry about when you're creating hundreds in a second (think of early Web servers, spawning a process for every request).
Spawning a process when a user wants a new browser tab? Not a big deal at all.
It sounds as if Chrome has something similar to Flock's full text indexing.
Some of the ideas for Chrome are good ones. But a lot of them seem to be reinventing the operating system
I'm not sure I agree. A big part of the Chrome design seems to be about giving responsibilities back to the OS. The whole process-per-tab thing, for example, relieves the browser code of lots of memory management and "border guarding". Let the OS manage memory. Operating systems are good at managing memory.
(OS is such an overloaded term, that I might have missed your point).
I feel your pain regarding multi-browser testing. But it seems like implementing standards - and having them clarified where needed - will only become more important as the number of browsers increases.
Exactly right. My approach would be that if I'm not doing anything exotic, my XHTML/CSS validates, and I don't get any JS warnings, then cross-browser testing is just a formality, when it comes to rational browsers.
Yes, you still have to jump through hoops for old versions of MSIE, but that's business as usual.
When I read the title, I thought, "XAMP". It's really the easiest way there is. I can't imagine what you'd have been doing with it to make it slow for development work.
And then, VMWare. Sounds like you have it working. What do you need it to do, that it's not already doing?
A pension *is* saving.
Unless I'm missing some vital transatlantic nuance, a pension is the smartest savings account there is, if you intend to ever retire. There's tax reasons, there's employer contributions.
"Containerizing" tabs is just an admission that you can't isolate/fix these bugs.
An admission which is made explicitly in the comic.