What good reason is there that would make Matlab insufficient for a physics major? What amount of programming does a physicist do on a given day at the job?
If a physics major wants to learn more about programming than is required to compute complex formulas in Matlab then they should probably minor or double major in Comp Sci.
I majored in Math and the only programming I did as part of my degree was in Matlab. And that was in applied classes. I was taught just enough Matlab to do the assignments.
C/Java courses would have been a waste of time. A physics major's time is best spent learning how to use existing tools rather than wasting time learning low level languages so they can reinvent Matlab functionality.
As long as you're deducting much of that time from time spent in the office then it wouldn't matter. So if you spend 4 hours getting to and from work but knocking 2-3 hours off the in-office time then it would be reasonable.
If you're working 12+ hours a day including the commute then you need to re-evalute what is important to you.
A book titled "wicked cool" may appeal to kids who havn't yet learned that programming will never be mistaken for "cool" but I don't think it will appeal to professionals. Of course PHP tends to be seen as a "script kiddie" language anyway.
From the review seeing "require_once" as the solution to including files shows that code organization is apparently not being taught. It's the "goto" of PHP. Instead of laying out the code in a clean logical fashion that avoids redundant includes you can simply use "require_once" and avoid that whole process.
A lot of time is spent on how to use a language but what really makes life easy on people who will have to fix your code later (including yourself) is how the code is organized.
That would be a good topic for beginner programmers who sometimes don't take the time to not only learn how to use a language better but also how to organize their code better.
Bunnies, http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/ (a Wolf3D clone) was originally written in Java. I then started translating it to C# and got about a 50% speed boost. I'm now able to do bump mapping, higher resolutions and still have playable framerates.
And this is just for Ray Casting which is much simpler than Ray Tracing.
During my development with Java I discovered that setting a pixel color to 0xFF000000 caused a slowdown. That's right, a black pixel would slow the framerate down. I had to set all pure black pixels to not quite black pixels.
I also found that Java is much slower at doing a "v++" than C.
Those quirks aren't a big deal when you're not trying to do a lot of math. But they will cripple a Ray Tracer. If Sun could optimize Java better it might be viable but for now Ray Tracing based games would have to be written at a lower level even with a small resolution.
Maybe people don't expect enough out of handhelds to notice that the graphics are "poor" and that they could be better. In that case you could probably get away with Java. People don't expect much out of a console until someone starts really pushing the limit and then everyone has to.
It was the lack of memory that was slowing it down. We know because that's all we changed and it runs great now. Opening a new safari window used to take several seconds. Now it's nearly instant.
Mobile harddrives are not that much slower than desktop drives.
"You'll probably still be saying it when it's the only machine still working when all the PCs you've bought since are failing in a couple of years time."
I build all my PCs from parts and they last as long as want them. I don't buy a new MB/CPU/Memory unless there's compatibility issues involved with getting a faster processor. I don't buy a new computer because the MB/CPU or memory failed.
When the 1.66GHz processor in the Mini doesn't cut it anymore we have no options. You have to buy a whole new Mac. You can't just spend $200 on a new MB/CPU and possibly some memory.
And like I said, since Apple tried to rip us off on memory I don't trust them anymore. I'd hate to buy a Mac and have to buy their parts. We got lucky this time.
We bought an $800 Mac Mini a year or two ago. The dual core intel version. It came with 512MB of ram. My wife would complain that the dual core was worthless because the thing wasn't any faster than my single core PC. And in fact seem slower. It would take forever for Safari to load for example.
We finally got around to bothering with it a month or so ago and asked an Apple rep from Apple.com what kind of memory the thing used. It was standard SODIMM stuff so we looked it up on NewEgg and found the exact memory that the rep mentioned for about $25 for 1GB.
The Mini is designed to not be easily upgradable by a user so I figured since it was only $25 for the memory I'd splurg and let the Apple Store take care of it. I figured $20 - $40 tops for the installation. I call them up and ask if they'll install a 3rd party memory module. Nope. So I ask how much for 1GB. They told me $150 dollars and the "installation is free." I told them that was ridiculous and hung up.
So we went ahead and risked opening up the thing to install the memory ourselves. There was a guide on-line we found. It wasn't too much trouble.
So this isn't an MS problem. It's a "cheap bastards" problem. They'd rather cut costs on the hardware to save a few bucks. At least with MS, you're working with a system that can be easily upgraded cheaply. I'd be annoyed with lack of memory from Dell but at least they don't make their system a pain to upgrade or mark up their prices astronomically.
We'll never buy a Mac again. The system is fine, we'll forgive them for not including enough memory for OS X by default but charging $150 for a $25 part is inexcusable.
The restriction for GPL and like licensing is for "the code included with these tutorials." In other words MY code.
In other words you can take my code and relicense it as a closed source commercial product for all I care but you can't turn it into viral code that forces all code that touches it to be a certain license.
You may not like it but AJAXing a command to the server is a lot more efficient than POSTing the exact same command and forcing you to wait for the entire page to reload.
If I put one line of GPL code into Bunnies, all of Bunnies would have to be GPL.
If you put one line of Bunnies code into you project you can use whatever license you want except the GPL since the GPL is a direct contradiction to what my license supports.
Bunnies http://bunnies.dawnofthegeeks.com/index.php?a=main&s=media& has been my pet project for awhile now and I've been using Safari on Windows to be able to edit large maps. It uses a lot of javascript/ajax to create a point and click interface to create maps. On IE7 it takes several seconds between clicking on a cell and the tile being placed. FireFox is a bit faster. Safari I think is the fastest. FF Beta 2 is pretty quick.
JavaScript is being used so much around the web now that it needs to be a focus for browser makers. It doesn't matter how fast you get the content to your user, if you use a lot of JS your site could appear to be slow and non-responsive.
"She knows that my younger brother has to endure strict parental control software that was installed on his machine without his consent."
I wasn't aware that parents needed consent from their kids before acting as a parent.
Format and Restore will take care of any password issue if the kid doesn't want to hand it over. You don't have to be computer savvy to know how to pop in a recovery disk.
Until WAN routers are cheap and reliable, it won't happen. I've had the same $30 Netgear router I've had for 5 years without any issues. My Belkin wireless router can't go a day without being unreliable. The Mac Mini had a hard time connecting to web-sites until we switched from wireless to LAN.
When you need 100% uptime you can go with a $30 router or spend significantly more than that for a wireless router and network card that won't ever drop your connection.
Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc are all widely used in large successful web-sites and are free to use by anyone. If you're feeling technologically savvy you can install Apache (again used by many large successful sites) on your own computer free of charge and run your own server out of house. If you want a database you can use MySQL which is used by many large successful sites for free on your own site.
The two main issues are the server and the network connection. Even the cheapest PC available from Dell (about $329) will be able to run the web and database server sufficiently until you need a second computer to split roles. A used PIII 933 is sufficient and what I use. By the time you need one system for Apache and one system for MySQL you should be making more than the cost of the additional computer per month in revenue. You do not need a Quad Xenon system from Intel to get started running a popular web-site. As use increases so does revenue. If it doesn't, then you're failing at business and need to find a new career path.
If you're lucky, port 80 is open on your home internet connection. If so, the possibilities are endless. If not, save yourself a lot of money and effort and use shared hosting with a company like GoDaddy. Then just configure a server in house for development.
Currently I spend all of about $50 a month running my web-sites including my home internet connection. I pull in around $5 per day in revenue. That's a 300% return. Two years ago I pulled in over $5500 in one year from a web-site that cost $9 for the domain and $7 a month for hosting at GoDaddy. I fully developed the site in 1 week.
There's very little that the amature can't get into with little to no investment and make a return. All it depends on is how much you're willing to learn or how much you're willing to pay someone else to learn for you. It takes personal talent and/or talented friends.
It is explicitly mentioned in the constitution (not the bill of rights or any amendments) as a privilage that can be revoked.
Freedom of Speech - First Amendment Gun Control - Second Amendment Civil Rights - Encompasses our rights
habeas corpus - revokable privilage
It's amazing how many arguments people have about "rights" they don't even have.
"men" at the time the constitution was written was a gender and racially neutral term. Only because of sexists and racists did "men" come to mean "white males" and only in the context of the constitution. As a result, we have amendments which forces "men" to be defined the same in the constitution as it was in every other context in that time period. So in essence we tacked on a lot more words to the constitution and added zero meaning.
We wasted years because no one wanted to just pick up a dictionary.
And now, we're wasting more time arguing about "habeas corpus" rather than focusing on ensuring that the rights we actually have, are enforced.
People would rather try to twist well defined terms to try to support their own agenda.
As long as you will die some day, time will always be a commodity with value. You don't always have a trinket I want in exchange for my time so I prefer cash that I can give to someone who has a trinket I feel is worth the time of my life it took to pay for.
Money is not a sign of poverty. It's a sign of mortality.
If you have a lot of high quality backlinks then I think Google would be smart enough to ignore the low quality backlinks that don't affect your score much. They don't have to punish you for links. They can ignore them. If you have few to no quality backlinks then a bunch of spam sites linking to you would maybe have more of an affect. Google would assume then that your site sucks and you're trying to game the system.
I was highly backlinked by spam sites after a bunch of bots ran through the fields of my DMOZ mirror. My rank in Google went way up.
I got into Google Hell for not doing a proper redirect from an old domain. I basically flooded the new domain with traffic from old unrelated sites that had gone under from a server crash. About 6 months later I was back out. I don't have nearly the traffic but I still rank decently.
Google is not stupid. They're going to take a lot of factors in before punishing you. I imagine this clown did a cocktail of stupid things and rightfully ended up hosed.
The slower the target system the more you have to optimize to make it fast. A fast server can decieve you into thinking your code is fast when in fact the system is just a crutch for your bad code.
MediaWiki looks fast running on Wikipedia's servers but that's only because of their servers. When it's run on a PIII 900Mhz system you realize very quickly what a bloated piece of garbage MediaWiki is.
Sure it does a lot of stuff. It's just very inefficient at doing it.
Universities should teach courses that require students get software that runs fast on modern systems to run just as fast on old systems without changing the quality of the output.
What does that have to do with anything?
on
Is Wikipedia Failing?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
MediaWiki is slow and therefore demands more resources than are actually necessary to do what they are doing.
This new project (Citizendium) is being developed on a fast server which hinders the ability to optimize code. Smart people start with low cost equipment and optimize the heck out of it to make it work for as long as possible. Only then do you start spending more on faster systems and more bandwidth. You don't spend rediculous amounts of money up front for resources you have no use for. You first find ways to reduce the amount of resources needed and only then do you increase resources.
People don't understand these simple concepts and that's why money is wasted and projects go bankrupt.
Cubia is starting simple. The goal is to see how complex it can get before a $7 GoDaddy account is insufficient to run it. The next step is user submitted articles.
Citizendium has the oppositite goal: see how much money they can waste until the demand matches the resources and then blow more money on more resources.
Cubia is a lightweight Wikipedia mirror running on a $7 GoDaddy account along with a bunch of other sites. I'm still importing the articles (2-3 million of 4.5 are already there) but it should be done today.
Until your project maxes out 1000GB of transfer per month and/or 100GB of space there's no reason to pay more than $7 a month to run your new project. I'm amazed at the ignorance that prompts people to waste 10's of thousands of dollars on equipment they won't possibly have a need for, for years. Meanwhile that money could be sitting in a high yeild savings account collecting interest and the interest alone could cover all the hosting costs needed while the project gets started.
Cubia will allow for user submitted content later this week. The first step was getting all the articles loaded up.
If Wikipedia fails it's because of stupidity. No one should ever develop software on a top of the line system. Especially web apps. It needs to be designed on old and busted systems to ensure that it is highly efficient to reduce costs. Cubia was started on a PIII 900Mhz system and it runs like a champ. MediaWiki (which is used by Wikipedia) is completely unusable on the same system. And that's why they spend so much money on servers.
Meanwhile, I'm mirroring it on a $7 GoDaddy account.
MediaWiki is a slow lumbering beast. I ran a wikipedia mirror with MediaWiki on a PIII 900 and it was virtually unusable. Just doing a simple redirect to the new server took seconds before I cut out the wiki initialization stuff that was happening prior to the 301 redirect.
Cubia is a lightweight wikipedia mirror hosted on a GoDaddy account. The pages are all split up between 256 tables using the first 2 characters of the md5 encoding of the page title to decide which table the page goes into.
Cubia on the PIII 900 is very responsive.
When costs go up generally it's a good idea to reconsider what your software is doing that requires so many resources. The whole wikipedia thing could probably be greatly simplified to cut down on bandwidth and computing power required if they just dumped MediaWiki and went with a custom streamlined front end.
The tutorials there show how to do software rendering in Javascript, PHP, C++ and Java. In Javascript, C++ and Java it gets into advanced raycasting. All three languages have a wolf3d clone.
The fjords of the southern part of the island were lush and had a warmer climate at that time, possibly due to what was called the Medieval Warm Period. These remote communities thrived and lived off farming, hunting and trading with the motherland, and when the Scandinavian monarchs converted their domains to Christianity, a bishop was installed in Greenland as well. The settlements seem to have coexisted relatively peacefully with the Inuit, who had migrated southwards from the Arctic islands of North America around 1200. In 1261, Greenland became part of the Kingdom of Norway. Norway in turn entered into the Kalmar Union in 1397 and later the personal union of Denmark-Norway.
After almost five hundred years, the Scandinavian settlements simply vanished, possibly due to famine during the fifteenth century in the Little Ice Age, when climatic conditions deteriorated, and contact with Europe was lost.
----------------
So Greenland used to be green. Then it froze. Now it's turning green again. It's almost like it's a natural cycle.
buy an additional DVD player. Sure, when DVD players first came out that would be prohibitivly expensive for most people but these days if you can afford to spend money om imports you can spend the additional $25-$30 to get a DVD player that will be used exclusively for the region the imports are coming from.
The only thing region encoding accomplished was putting more money in DVD manufactures' pockets.
I've also found that there's no shortage of how-tos on turning your cheap DVD player into a region 0 so it can play anything.
Slashdot Mirror
What good reason is there that would make Matlab insufficient for a physics major? What amount of programming does a physicist do on a given day at the job?
If a physics major wants to learn more about programming than is required to compute complex formulas in Matlab then they should probably minor or double major in Comp Sci.
I majored in Math and the only programming I did as part of my degree was in Matlab. And that was in applied classes. I was taught just enough Matlab to do the assignments.
C/Java courses would have been a waste of time. A physics major's time is best spent learning how to use existing tools rather than wasting time learning low level languages so they can reinvent Matlab functionality.
As long as you're deducting much of that time from time spent in the office then it wouldn't matter. So if you spend 4 hours getting to and from work but knocking 2-3 hours off the in-office time then it would be reasonable.
If you're working 12+ hours a day including the commute then you need to re-evalute what is important to you.
A book titled "wicked cool" may appeal to kids who havn't yet learned that programming will never be mistaken for "cool" but I don't think it will appeal to professionals. Of course PHP tends to be seen as a "script kiddie" language anyway.
From the review seeing "require_once" as the solution to including files shows that code organization is apparently not being taught. It's the "goto" of PHP. Instead of laying out the code in a clean logical fashion that avoids redundant includes you can simply use "require_once" and avoid that whole process.
A lot of time is spent on how to use a language but what really makes life easy on people who will have to fix your code later (including yourself) is how the code is organized.
That would be a good topic for beginner programmers who sometimes don't take the time to not only learn how to use a language better but also how to organize their code better.
Bunnies, http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/ (a Wolf3D clone) was originally written in Java. I then started translating it to C# and got about a 50% speed boost. I'm now able to do bump mapping, higher resolutions and still have playable framerates.
And this is just for Ray Casting which is much simpler than Ray Tracing.
During my development with Java I discovered that setting a pixel color to 0xFF000000 caused a slowdown. That's right, a black pixel would slow the framerate down. I had to set all pure black pixels to not quite black pixels.
http://www.dawnofthegeeks.com/index.php?page=blog&offset=58
I also found that Java is much slower at doing a "v++" than C.
Those quirks aren't a big deal when you're not trying to do a lot of math. But they will cripple a Ray Tracer. If Sun could optimize Java better it might be viable but for now Ray Tracing based games would have to be written at a lower level even with a small resolution.
Maybe people don't expect enough out of handhelds to notice that the graphics are "poor" and that they could be better. In that case you could probably get away with Java. People don't expect much out of a console until someone starts really pushing the limit and then everyone has to.
It was the lack of memory that was slowing it down. We know because that's all we changed and it runs great now. Opening a new safari window used to take several seconds. Now it's nearly instant.
Mobile harddrives are not that much slower than desktop drives.
"You'll probably still be saying it when it's the only machine still working when all the PCs you've bought since are failing in a couple of years time."
I build all my PCs from parts and they last as long as want them. I don't buy a new MB/CPU/Memory unless there's compatibility issues involved with getting a faster processor. I don't buy a new computer because the MB/CPU or memory failed.
When the 1.66GHz processor in the Mini doesn't cut it anymore we have no options. You have to buy a whole new Mac. You can't just spend $200 on a new MB/CPU and possibly some memory.
And like I said, since Apple tried to rip us off on memory I don't trust them anymore. I'd hate to buy a Mac and have to buy their parts. We got lucky this time.
We bought an $800 Mac Mini a year or two ago. The dual core intel version. It came with 512MB of ram. My wife would complain that the dual core was worthless because the thing wasn't any faster than my single core PC. And in fact seem slower. It would take forever for Safari to load for example.
We finally got around to bothering with it a month or so ago and asked an Apple rep from Apple.com what kind of memory the thing used. It was standard SODIMM stuff so we looked it up on NewEgg and found the exact memory that the rep mentioned for about $25 for 1GB.
The Mini is designed to not be easily upgradable by a user so I figured since it was only $25 for the memory I'd splurg and let the Apple Store take care of it. I figured $20 - $40 tops for the installation. I call them up and ask if they'll install a 3rd party memory module. Nope. So I ask how much for 1GB. They told me $150 dollars and the "installation is free." I told them that was ridiculous and hung up.
So we went ahead and risked opening up the thing to install the memory ourselves. There was a guide on-line we found. It wasn't too much trouble.
So this isn't an MS problem. It's a "cheap bastards" problem. They'd rather cut costs on the hardware to save a few bucks. At least with MS, you're working with a system that can be easily upgraded cheaply. I'd be annoyed with lack of memory from Dell but at least they don't make their system a pain to upgrade or mark up their prices astronomically.
We'll never buy a Mac again. The system is fine, we'll forgive them for not including enough memory for OS X by default but charging $150 for a $25 part is inexcusable.
The restriction for GPL and like licensing is for "the code included with these tutorials." In other words MY code.
In other words you can take my code and relicense it as a closed source commercial product for all I care but you can't turn it into viral code that forces all code that touches it to be a certain license.
Learn to read.
You may not like it but AJAXing a command to the server is a lot more efficient than POSTing the exact same command and forcing you to wait for the entire page to reload.
It saves both of us a lot of bandwidth.
If I put one line of GPL code into Bunnies, all of Bunnies would have to be GPL.
If you put one line of Bunnies code into you project you can use whatever license you want except the GPL since the GPL is a direct contradiction to what my license supports.
Bunnies http://bunnies.dawnofthegeeks.com/index.php?a=main&s=media& has been my pet project for awhile now and I've been using Safari on Windows to be able to edit large maps. It uses a lot of javascript/ajax to create a point and click interface to create maps. On IE7 it takes several seconds between clicking on a cell and the tile being placed. FireFox is a bit faster. Safari I think is the fastest. FF Beta 2 is pretty quick.
JavaScript is being used so much around the web now that it needs to be a focus for browser makers. It doesn't matter how fast you get the content to your user, if you use a lot of JS your site could appear to be slow and non-responsive.
how can we expect a bunch of amatures to do it?
It's going to be a lot harder to fake this one.
"She knows that my younger brother has to endure strict parental control software that was installed on his machine without his consent."
I wasn't aware that parents needed consent from their kids before acting as a parent.
Format and Restore will take care of any password issue if the kid doesn't want to hand it over. You don't have to be computer savvy to know how to pop in a recovery disk.
Until WAN routers are cheap and reliable, it won't happen. I've had the same $30 Netgear router I've had for 5 years without any issues. My Belkin wireless router can't go a day without being unreliable. The Mac Mini had a hard time connecting to web-sites until we switched from wireless to LAN.
When you need 100% uptime you can go with a $30 router or spend significantly more than that for a wireless router and network card that won't ever drop your connection.
I'll keep my wires thank you very much.
Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc are all widely used in large successful web-sites and are free to use by anyone. If you're feeling technologically savvy you can install Apache (again used by many large successful sites) on your own computer free of charge and run your own server out of house. If you want a database you can use MySQL which is used by many large successful sites for free on your own site.
The two main issues are the server and the network connection. Even the cheapest PC available from Dell (about $329) will be able to run the web and database server sufficiently until you need a second computer to split roles. A used PIII 933 is sufficient and what I use. By the time you need one system for Apache and one system for MySQL you should be making more than the cost of the additional computer per month in revenue. You do not need a Quad Xenon system from Intel to get started running a popular web-site. As use increases so does revenue. If it doesn't, then you're failing at business and need to find a new career path.
If you're lucky, port 80 is open on your home internet connection. If so, the possibilities are endless. If not, save yourself a lot of money and effort and use shared hosting with a company like GoDaddy. Then just configure a server in house for development.
Currently I spend all of about $50 a month running my web-sites including my home internet connection. I pull in around $5 per day in revenue. That's a 300% return. Two years ago I pulled in over $5500 in one year from a web-site that cost $9 for the domain and $7 a month for hosting at GoDaddy. I fully developed the site in 1 week.
There's very little that the amature can't get into with little to no investment and make a return. All it depends on is how much you're willing to learn or how much you're willing to pay someone else to learn for you. It takes personal talent and/or talented friends.
It is explicitly mentioned in the constitution (not the bill of rights or any amendments) as a privilage that can be revoked.
Freedom of Speech - First Amendment
Gun Control - Second Amendment
Civil Rights - Encompasses our rights
habeas corpus - revokable privilage
It's amazing how many arguments people have about "rights" they don't even have.
"men" at the time the constitution was written was a gender and racially neutral term. Only because of sexists and racists did "men" come to mean "white males" and only in the context of the constitution. As a result, we have amendments which forces "men" to be defined the same in the constitution as it was in every other context in that time period. So in essence we tacked on a lot more words to the constitution and added zero meaning.
We wasted years because no one wanted to just pick up a dictionary.
And now, we're wasting more time arguing about "habeas corpus" rather than focusing on ensuring that the rights we actually have, are enforced.
People would rather try to twist well defined terms to try to support their own agenda.
Or were you trying to say that voting machines are complex...
As long as you will die some day, time will always be a commodity with value. You don't always have a trinket I want in exchange for my time so I prefer cash that I can give to someone who has a trinket I feel is worth the time of my life it took to pay for.
Money is not a sign of poverty. It's a sign of mortality.
If you have a lot of high quality backlinks then I think Google would be smart enough to ignore the low quality backlinks that don't affect your score much. They don't have to punish you for links. They can ignore them. If you have few to no quality backlinks then a bunch of spam sites linking to you would maybe have more of an affect. Google would assume then that your site sucks and you're trying to game the system.
I was highly backlinked by spam sites after a bunch of bots ran through the fields of my DMOZ mirror. My rank in Google went way up.
I got into Google Hell for not doing a proper redirect from an old domain. I basically flooded the new domain with traffic from old unrelated sites that had gone under from a server crash. About 6 months later I was back out. I don't have nearly the traffic but I still rank decently.
Google is not stupid. They're going to take a lot of factors in before punishing you. I imagine this clown did a cocktail of stupid things and rightfully ended up hosed.
The slower the target system the more you have to optimize to make it fast. A fast server can decieve you into thinking your code is fast when in fact the system is just a crutch for your bad code.
MediaWiki looks fast running on Wikipedia's servers but that's only because of their servers. When it's run on a PIII 900Mhz system you realize very quickly what a bloated piece of garbage MediaWiki is.
Sure it does a lot of stuff. It's just very inefficient at doing it.
Universities should teach courses that require students get software that runs fast on modern systems to run just as fast on old systems without changing the quality of the output.
MediaWiki is slow and therefore demands more resources than are actually necessary to do what they are doing.
This new project (Citizendium) is being developed on a fast server which hinders the ability to optimize code. Smart people start with low cost equipment and optimize the heck out of it to make it work for as long as possible. Only then do you start spending more on faster systems and more bandwidth. You don't spend rediculous amounts of money up front for resources you have no use for. You first find ways to reduce the amount of resources needed and only then do you increase resources.
People don't understand these simple concepts and that's why money is wasted and projects go bankrupt.
Cubia is starting simple. The goal is to see how complex it can get before a $7 GoDaddy account is insufficient to run it. The next step is user submitted articles.
Citizendium has the oppositite goal: see how much money they can waste until the demand matches the resources and then blow more money on more resources.
Cubia is a lightweight Wikipedia mirror running on a $7 GoDaddy account along with a bunch of other sites. I'm still importing the articles (2-3 million of 4.5 are already there) but it should be done today.
Until your project maxes out 1000GB of transfer per month and/or 100GB of space there's no reason to pay more than $7 a month to run your new project. I'm amazed at the ignorance that prompts people to waste 10's of thousands of dollars on equipment they won't possibly have a need for, for years. Meanwhile that money could be sitting in a high yeild savings account collecting interest and the interest alone could cover all the hosting costs needed while the project gets started.
Cubia will allow for user submitted content later this week. The first step was getting all the articles loaded up.
If Wikipedia fails it's because of stupidity. No one should ever develop software on a top of the line system. Especially web apps. It needs to be designed on old and busted systems to ensure that it is highly efficient to reduce costs. Cubia was started on a PIII 900Mhz system and it runs like a champ. MediaWiki (which is used by Wikipedia) is completely unusable on the same system. And that's why they spend so much money on servers.
Meanwhile, I'm mirroring it on a $7 GoDaddy account.
MediaWiki is a slow lumbering beast. I ran a wikipedia mirror with MediaWiki on a PIII 900 and it was virtually unusable. Just doing a simple redirect to the new server took seconds before I cut out the wiki initialization stuff that was happening prior to the 301 redirect.
Cubia is a lightweight wikipedia mirror hosted on a GoDaddy account. The pages are all split up between 256 tables using the first 2 characters of the md5 encoding of the page title to decide which table the page goes into.
Cubia on the PIII 900 is very responsive.
When costs go up generally it's a good idea to reconsider what your software is doing that requires so many resources. The whole wikipedia thing could probably be greatly simplified to cut down on bandwidth and computing power required if they just dumped MediaWiki and went with a custom streamlined front end.
http://code.icarusindie.com/
The tutorials there show how to do software rendering in Javascript, PHP, C++ and Java. In Javascript, C++ and Java it gets into advanced raycasting. All three languages have a wolf3d clone.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland
The fjords of the southern part of the island were lush and had a warmer climate at that time, possibly due to what was called the Medieval Warm Period. These remote communities thrived and lived off farming, hunting and trading with the motherland, and when the Scandinavian monarchs converted their domains to Christianity, a bishop was installed in Greenland as well. The settlements seem to have coexisted relatively peacefully with the Inuit, who had migrated southwards from the Arctic islands of North America around 1200. In 1261, Greenland became part of the Kingdom of Norway. Norway in turn entered into the Kalmar Union in 1397 and later the personal union of Denmark-Norway.
After almost five hundred years, the Scandinavian settlements simply vanished, possibly due to famine during the fifteenth century in the Little Ice Age, when climatic conditions deteriorated, and contact with Europe was lost.
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So Greenland used to be green. Then it froze. Now it's turning green again. It's almost like it's a natural cycle.
buy an additional DVD player. Sure, when DVD players first came out that would be prohibitivly expensive for most people but these days if you can afford to spend money om imports you can spend the additional $25-$30 to get a DVD player that will be used exclusively for the region the imports are coming from.
The only thing region encoding accomplished was putting more money in DVD manufactures' pockets.
I've also found that there's no shortage of how-tos on turning your cheap DVD player into a region 0 so it can play anything.