First of all, I'm with you, I also don't understand what it is about these mythical accounting processes that takes so damn long to process.
I guess it's like everything else in the software industry:
- software built by programmers for programmers runs quickly - software built by programmers for non-programmers is incoherent - software built by non-programmers for non-programmers is slow as molasses - software built by non-programmers for programmers is never executed!
In that case, they should build one ESX cluster for a container, in which they create VMs running ESX instances, themselves running the final VMs.
Virtualize the virtual environment./sarcasm
No, but seriously, while I would like to see the feature available from a purist's perspective, I still fail to see why you would actually want multiple ESX clusters. It kind-of goes against the very philosophy of VM consolidation, politics be damned.
The big deal is that his adsense blog gets a good slashdotting this way.
Nevermind the fact that he isn't showing any code, so in theory he could have done the whole thing with commercial software, then written a few keyword-rich paragraphs to troll us.
It's not specifically the book business that's obsolete, it's the concept of money that's long removed from its fundamental purpose.
Money was created as a currency to represent work/effort. Millenia ago, humans used to hunt their own food, their survival depended on it. Well you and I no longer have to hunt to stay alive, so we do other things like programming and writing and pumping gas. We get paid for the effort.
Authors, "artists", movie stars... they get paid for their popularity and performance, and that's the big hole in this economy. They don't earn $x.00 per hour, their compensation has little or no relation to the effort involved. It's all aboug being "big".
A person could theoretically write one book, in one month, and make it big, living off the royalties for the rest of their life. Where is the logic and fairness in that ? Who cares whether they're good or not ? Who cares that we've had the Harry Potter empire shoved down our throats with advertising and propaganda ? A job is a job is a job, and should be paid fairly.
The lovely mess the U.S. has created for itself is a direct result of this total lack of equilibrium. When celebrities and bankers siphon all the money away into their little vaults (and/or exclusive real estate), the government has to inject more money at the bottom of the pyramid to keep things flowing.
Excessive personal wealth is no different from slavery. Everyone beneath a certain threshold is effectively shackled, but instead of having leather-clad gimps with whips, we have interest rates and inflation and rising taxes. At least a slave has the possibility of slaying their master. How the hell are you going to slay the status quo ?
Sure, premature optimization is a rookie mistake, and our industry is overflowing with rookies.
Doing basic preloading and flow-level optimization is a high-level, simple process where little can go wrong. You can't compare a predictive disk cache to a full-on multi-threaded Gigabyte-per-second game engine.
Fact is, I could practically build my own mindless disk cache and hook it early-on in the boot process. Fact is, that's precisely what many Linux distros are doing these days. Fact is, Microsoft apparently doesn't even care to copy that technique.
That's funny, I've been scaling for years, and my host has been around since the last 90's.
I don't deal in anything that has such dramatic spikes as to discredit my system. I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that my machines are 80% idle during off-peak times. I'm far more concerned with issues like network congestion and Apache hogging because my traffic is bandwidth-bound, not CPU bound.
Just because all the kids today are writing hungry RoR apps, doesn't mean I'm bound by such ridiculous bottlenecks. Just one of my boxes can serve roughly 100 requests per second, which is why I have to use squid frontends, else the clients end up tying all my Apache threads waiting to finish.
Designing my app to be easily distributed means I can scale Google-style, by adding cheap servers as needed. I also spread out my servers geographically around the globe, with plentiful bandwidth at each location. With EC2, you're sharing the pipe with everyone else. You can't get dedicated bandwidth, and from what I've seen the capacity just isn't there (yet?).
Yes, I'm talking about serving pr0n. Next question.
Are you even aware that the x86 instruction set includes BCD opcodes ?
If the compiler developers haven't been using them, that's not the languages' fault. Hardware BCD support is built into every desktop computer sold today.
The real question is: how much money will be spent developing and maintaining this workaround ?
If the cost of the developer's time approaches or exceeds the cost of getting a license, then you just pay the goddamned license and get on with your life.
You're not working for one of those Wikipedia scrapers, are you ?:P
Fortunately your civil rights are not limited by your mental capacity
Maybe they should be. There will always be 90% of the population that's too stupid to perform basic tasks. That means 90% of the vote is from mentally inept voters. Maybe that's what's wrong with the system... you can blame the representatives all day long, someone put them there. Millions of people allow it to happen every single day. The voting process pales in significance.
It's not so much the computer as it is the speakers themselves. The long cheap unshielded speaker wires pick up GSM interference, whose lower harmonics result in that distinctive buzzing sound. The speaker wire basically acts as an antenna.
Digital speakers obviously don't suffer from this phenomenon, but they're hard to find outside of pro-audio circles and the occasional cheapo USB speaker set.
Teenagers are doing more of everything these days, not just lame DDoS. If I had to pull an explanation out of my ass, I'd blame it on the increasingly pussy parents failing to keep their kids in line, and the historic legal loophole where minors can get away with anything, with just a slap on the wrist and/or a brief stint in juvey.
The attitude is that if you're going to do stupid shit, do it before you're eligible for PMITA federal prison.
Just because you don't use them, doesn't mean they're useless. I use bitwise operators all the time, it's called LOGIC and that's what branching is built upon.
Would you rather use a half-dozen nested IFs ? Or and($somecond,and($somecond2,and($someothercond,... ?
If I wanted a literate language, err... well I'd use something other than PHP!
Actually what's probably going to happen is a repeat of PHP 5.0's release: people are just going to stick with the old, non-stupid version.
How can the people behind one of most popular scripting languages in the world FAIL to see how dumb it is to use the escape-slash as anything but an escape ? It's already a character to cope with ambiguous situations, why did they go and make it irreparably ambiguous ? This is going to break a TON of scripts, for no good reason.
what if I really want to type "$myvar\nsometexton2ndline", you know, like in lists ? will I have to double-escape my control characters ?
If it's so damned hard for them to parse:: or:::, maybe these kids shouldn't be designing a language.
All these human-interaction pauses could be parallelized.
Does Windows really have to wait until I make a decision before reading files off the disk ? If you push the actual branching point further, you can do a whole bunch of stuff in the meantime while still accepting input. In the very worst case, you could at least cache all the files in memory.
The real issue is all this concurrency and preloading requires planning and effort, two "fuzzy" things that come far after "does it run" on the list of shipping priorities. Optimizing performance has always been a neglected task in the software development model. Profiling, refactoring, thread sync... all pains in the ass so nobody does it unless it is business-critical.
our team is kinda thought of as "elite" (as one employee recently told me)
Okay... slow down cowboy. Exactly how "non-tech" is this place ? I mean, if I were the only I.T. guy in a car wash, everyone would think of me as the Stephen Hawking of PCs.
And who the hell uses the term "elite" outside of warez groups and awesomely bad 90's hacker movies ?
It sounds like you're bending over backwards for a handful of techies. Hey, I'm a techie, and I'd like to not be dealing with angry/insane people on a daily basis, but if you're in a non-tech business, exactly how much value does this royal I.T. department add to the company's bottom line ?
If the company doesn't want to spend mad money on their techs, maybe there's a good reason for it, and maybe you shouldn't go around behind "the company's" back with your own funding. There are far easier and cheaper ways to get laid.
$40/month isn't the sort of amount you want to be spending on non-necessary things like internet access.
OUT! Leave your geek card at the security desk.
How can you honestly call the internet "non-necessary" ? Yes, there's a lot of garbage on here, but how could any tech-savvy individual dismiss the evolutionary leap of the global information network ? Computers and the internet are the more significant achievements of our century, because they unlock a million other uses and are the first step toward unifying humankind.
What, you think all this man-vs-man, you-don't-know-what-I-know hate-breeding business is the path to enlightenment ? *cough* Wehell... thanks for nothing!
Add to that the cost.. In our cost comparisons we found EC2 costing the same or more than managed dedicated servers with tier 1 providers.
BAM! That's what turned me off of Amazon as well. Anything they can do, I can do cheaper elsewhere with "conventional" servers. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of hosting companies just dying to lease you a $49/mo dedicated server that runs circles around any EC2 VPS, and most of them have at least 500gb of traffic included in the base price.
For ~$150 I have 10mbit unmetered, on a dual-core Xeon. Actually I have several, with reverse proxies and what-have-you, just like the Amazon cats do when they want to scale. The big differences are: I have static IPs, and my costs are lower. I am at risk of hardware failures, but then again I can afford an extra box or two for redundancy/backups.
I could see EC2 being worthwhile for small or short-lived jobs, but the moment you start talking about multiple instances and pound/squid nodes, you might as well move to a dedicated box.
Or you can do what Rogers does and hijack HTTP requests to insert the bandwidth warning, which broke a whole pile of automated stuff on my end, until I completely opted out of those dumb warnings.
Yeah, that was just so dumb, but considering Rogers doesn't do email anymore (they farm it out to Yahoo), it's probably the best they could manage.
The biggest problem with major ISPs is that they are almost entirely staffed with imbecilic managers, shackling the technical gurus down with politics.
Mods, if you can read English, I'd like to bring your attention to a very useful tool: Sarcasm.
The parent post is an example of this wonderful linguistic device. Study, learn and master it.
And stop downmodding perfectly valid comments just because your lives are too dull and closeted to grasp the double-edged humor that is sarcasm. Sometimes the only way to properly express a problem is to turn it inside out like this.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, I'm with you, I also don't understand what it is about these mythical accounting processes that takes so damn long to process.
I guess it's like everything else in the software industry:
- software built by programmers for programmers runs quickly
- software built by programmers for non-programmers is incoherent
- software built by non-programmers for non-programmers is slow as molasses
- software built by non-programmers for programmers is never executed!
In that case, they should build one ESX cluster for a container, in which they create VMs running ESX instances, themselves running the final VMs.
Virtualize the virtual environment. /sarcasm
No, but seriously, while I would like to see the feature available from a purist's perspective, I still fail to see why you would actually want multiple ESX clusters. It kind-of goes against the very philosophy of VM consolidation, politics be damned.
The big deal is that his adsense blog gets a good slashdotting this way.
Nevermind the fact that he isn't showing any code, so in theory he could have done the whole thing with commercial software, then written a few keyword-rich paragraphs to troll us.
The best part is we'll never know.
It's not specifically the book business that's obsolete, it's the concept of money that's long removed from its fundamental purpose.
Money was created as a currency to represent work/effort. Millenia ago, humans used to hunt their own food, their survival depended on it. Well you and I no longer have to hunt to stay alive, so we do other things like programming and writing and pumping gas. We get paid for the effort.
Authors, "artists", movie stars... they get paid for their popularity and performance, and that's the big hole in this economy. They don't earn $x.00 per hour, their compensation has little or no relation to the effort involved. It's all aboug being "big".
A person could theoretically write one book, in one month, and make it big, living off the royalties for the rest of their life. Where is the logic and fairness in that ? Who cares whether they're good or not ? Who cares that we've had the Harry Potter empire shoved down our throats with advertising and propaganda ? A job is a job is a job, and should be paid fairly.
The lovely mess the U.S. has created for itself is a direct result of this total lack of equilibrium. When celebrities and bankers siphon all the money away into their little vaults (and/or exclusive real estate), the government has to inject more money at the bottom of the pyramid to keep things flowing.
Excessive personal wealth is no different from slavery. Everyone beneath a certain threshold is effectively shackled, but instead of having leather-clad gimps with whips, we have interest rates and inflation and rising taxes. At least a slave has the possibility of slaying their master. How the hell are you going to slay the status quo ?
Sure, premature optimization is a rookie mistake, and our industry is overflowing with rookies.
Doing basic preloading and flow-level optimization is a high-level, simple process where little can go wrong. You can't compare a predictive disk cache to a full-on multi-threaded Gigabyte-per-second game engine.
Fact is, I could practically build my own mindless disk cache and hook it early-on in the boot process. Fact is, that's precisely what many Linux distros are doing these days. Fact is, Microsoft apparently doesn't even care to copy that technique.
That's funny, I've been scaling for years, and my host has been around since the last 90's.
I don't deal in anything that has such dramatic spikes as to discredit my system. I'm perfectly comfortable with the fact that my machines are 80% idle during off-peak times. I'm far more concerned with issues like network congestion and Apache hogging because my traffic is bandwidth-bound, not CPU bound.
Just because all the kids today are writing hungry RoR apps, doesn't mean I'm bound by such ridiculous bottlenecks. Just one of my boxes can serve roughly 100 requests per second, which is why I have to use squid frontends, else the clients end up tying all my Apache threads waiting to finish.
Designing my app to be easily distributed means I can scale Google-style, by adding cheap servers as needed. I also spread out my servers geographically around the globe, with plentiful bandwidth at each location. With EC2, you're sharing the pipe with everyone else. You can't get dedicated bandwidth, and from what I've seen the capacity just isn't there (yet?).
Yes, I'm talking about serving pr0n. Next question.
That's right. We can help the willing, but it's not our business to go tell them what's right or wrong.
Who's to say our reality is better than theirs anyway ? Find me an impartial judge.
Are you even aware that the x86 instruction set includes BCD opcodes ?
If the compiler developers haven't been using them, that's not the languages' fault. Hardware BCD support is built into every desktop computer sold today.
You could easily replace that with a local Geo-IP database. You can find free databases on the web, use your Google.
The real question is: how much money will be spent developing and maintaining this workaround ?
If the cost of the developer's time approaches or exceeds the cost of getting a license, then you just pay the goddamned license and get on with your life.
You're not working for one of those Wikipedia scrapers, are you ? :P
Fortunately your civil rights are not limited by your mental capacity
Maybe they should be. There will always be 90% of the population that's too stupid to perform basic tasks. That means 90% of the vote is from mentally inept voters. Maybe that's what's wrong with the system... you can blame the representatives all day long, someone put them there. Millions of people allow it to happen every single day. The voting process pales in significance.
It's not so much the computer as it is the speakers themselves. The long cheap unshielded speaker wires pick up GSM interference, whose lower harmonics result in that distinctive buzzing sound. The speaker wire basically acts as an antenna.
Digital speakers obviously don't suffer from this phenomenon, but they're hard to find outside of pro-audio circles and the occasional cheapo USB speaker set.
Teenagers are doing more of everything these days, not just lame DDoS. If I had to pull an explanation out of my ass, I'd blame it on the increasingly pussy parents failing to keep their kids in line, and the historic legal loophole where minors can get away with anything, with just a slap on the wrist and/or a brief stint in juvey.
The attitude is that if you're going to do stupid shit, do it before you're eligible for PMITA federal prison.
Just because you don't use them, doesn't mean they're useless. I use bitwise operators all the time, it's called LOGIC and that's what branching is built upon.
Would you rather use a half-dozen nested IFs ? Or and($somecond,and($somecond2,and($someothercond,... ?
If I wanted a literate language, err... well I'd use something other than PHP!
Actually what's probably going to happen is a repeat of PHP 5.0's release: people are just going to stick with the old, non-stupid version.
How can the people behind one of most popular scripting languages in the world FAIL to see how dumb it is to use the escape-slash as anything but an escape ? It's already a character to cope with ambiguous situations, why did they go and make it irreparably ambiguous ? This is going to break a TON of scripts, for no good reason.
what if I really want to type "$myvar\nsometexton2ndline", you know, like in lists ? will I have to double-escape my control characters ?
If it's so damned hard for them to parse :: or :::, maybe these kids shouldn't be designing a language.
So how do you like scamming your ads off of Wikipedia's content ?
Just when I thought the human race couldn't get any more pathetic, I get proven wrong.
All these human-interaction pauses could be parallelized.
Does Windows really have to wait until I make a decision before reading files off the disk ? If you push the actual branching point further, you can do a whole bunch of stuff in the meantime while still accepting input. In the very worst case, you could at least cache all the files in memory.
The real issue is all this concurrency and preloading requires planning and effort, two "fuzzy" things that come far after "does it run" on the list of shipping priorities. Optimizing performance has always been a neglected task in the software development model. Profiling, refactoring, thread sync... all pains in the ass so nobody does it unless it is business-critical.
Congrats on trolling Ask Slashdot. I'd like to point out that you failed to generate lulz. Back to Kuro5hin you go!
our team is kinda thought of as "elite" (as one employee recently told me)
Okay... slow down cowboy. Exactly how "non-tech" is this place ? I mean, if I were the only I.T. guy in a car wash, everyone would think of me as the Stephen Hawking of PCs.
And who the hell uses the term "elite" outside of warez groups and awesomely bad 90's hacker movies ?
It sounds like you're bending over backwards for a handful of techies. Hey, I'm a techie, and I'd like to not be dealing with angry/insane people on a daily basis, but if you're in a non-tech business, exactly how much value does this royal I.T. department add to the company's bottom line ?
If the company doesn't want to spend mad money on their techs, maybe there's a good reason for it, and maybe you shouldn't go around behind "the company's" back with your own funding. There are far easier and cheaper ways to get laid.
$40/month isn't the sort of amount you want to be spending on non-necessary things like internet access.
OUT! Leave your geek card at the security desk.
How can you honestly call the internet "non-necessary" ? Yes, there's a lot of garbage on here, but how could any tech-savvy individual dismiss the evolutionary leap of the global information network ? Computers and the internet are the more significant achievements of our century, because they unlock a million other uses and are the first step toward unifying humankind.
What, you think all this man-vs-man, you-don't-know-what-I-know hate-breeding business is the path to enlightenment ? *cough* Wehell... thanks for nothing!
Add to that the cost.. In our cost comparisons we found EC2 costing the same or more than managed dedicated servers with tier 1 providers.
BAM! That's what turned me off of Amazon as well. Anything they can do, I can do cheaper elsewhere with "conventional" servers. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of hosting companies just dying to lease you a $49/mo dedicated server that runs circles around any EC2 VPS, and most of them have at least 500gb of traffic included in the base price.
For ~$150 I have 10mbit unmetered, on a dual-core Xeon. Actually I have several, with reverse proxies and what-have-you, just like the Amazon cats do when they want to scale. The big differences are: I have static IPs, and my costs are lower. I am at risk of hardware failures, but then again I can afford an extra box or two for redundancy/backups.
I could see EC2 being worthwhile for small or short-lived jobs, but the moment you start talking about multiple instances and pound/squid nodes, you might as well move to a dedicated box.
Or you can do what Rogers does and hijack HTTP requests to insert the bandwidth warning, which broke a whole pile of automated stuff on my end, until I completely opted out of those dumb warnings.
Yeah, that was just so dumb, but considering Rogers doesn't do email anymore (they farm it out to Yahoo), it's probably the best they could manage.
The biggest problem with major ISPs is that they are almost entirely staffed with imbecilic managers, shackling the technical gurus down with politics.
Dubya is the most powerful corporate sock puppet in the world, it's perfectly believable
There, fixed it for you.
Dubya does not have intrinsic power, he merely acts as the avatar for his nation's $tronge$t intere$t$.
If she stood up there in K-mart clothes people would have perceived her as less sophisticated
Actually, if she stood up there in K-mart clothes while keeping her mouth shut, I think people would actually perceive her as more sophisticated.
Mods, if you can read English, I'd like to bring your attention to a very useful tool: Sarcasm.
The parent post is an example of this wonderful linguistic device. Study, learn and master it.
And stop downmodding perfectly valid comments just because your lives are too dull and closeted to grasp the double-edged humor that is sarcasm. Sometimes the only way to properly express a problem is to turn it inside out like this.