Dude, the fact that _ANY_ system would allow 2005-02-31 as a valid date would fail just about any commercial QA process. The product would NOT GET VALIDATED AS FUNCTIONAL!!!
You can set strict checking on, but then the application can turn it off at will. Cute.
If you care about your data, you use an RDBMS. MySQL isn't one. Even Microsoft Jet has foreign keys and transactions on by default. Yes - MySQL is WORSE than Access folks.
Most scanners can scan at over 800 DPI, which is WAY higher than almost anybody needs for anything. 800DPI takes forever, and generates an enourmous image for an 8.5x11 sheet of paper (Think 60 Meg).
An classic example of a MySQL Idiot. You put things in the database so that they are _atomic_. You want things to either compmletely succeed or completely fail. Most application layers cannot do this successfully, and you end up with corrupt data.
And go ahead, tell my that having corupt data doesn't matter. Then I'll throw sarbanes-oxley at you and laugh.
Please do not confuse Perl and PHP with Python. The first two are scripting languages, the third is a programming language. Python was designed as a strongly dynamically typed language from the ground up with good OOP features. I have used Python for some serious distributed projects, and it is far far better than Java. You want RAD, Java dev time approaches C++ once you throw in J2EE. I've seen it first hand. Python is a very very powerfull language that is fast and effective.
But computers get faster, so it's ok to produce slow crappy code.
It's not that java is better, it's that java is easier, so you get more monkeys with no education who think they are programmers writing code.
Java can be fast, but there are too many idiots who think slow code is okay because computers will just get faster.
HELLO! Computers do 2.4 billion cycles per second, what possible excuse can any programmer have for anything but very complex scientific operations taking more than a couple of seconds to complete. Even network latency these days is low.
Get a grip people.
Waiting 60 seconds for an app to start is UNACCEPTABLE!!! It's pure crap.
Java promotes CRAP.
C++ means you actualy have to have a clue about what you are doing!
I'm tired of working in java going back over people's code who didn't have a clue and having to recommend to management that we have to re-write from the ground up because all we have is a stinking pile of mess.
My company spent $2mil developing an app that has to be re built because even the DB design is rubbish.
Wait - Sun has 12Billion in assets, and RedHat has only 400M, yet their stock is only worth 6x not the 27x??? does this say something about investor confidence?!!
I don't know about anyone else, but most programs in the real application world do alot of string manipulation, and I have seen some pretty shocking results of string manipulation benchmarks showing Java the worst with the C++ class second, and Python actualy leading the pack. It would be usefull to also see the overhead calcs for object management too. Java is so memory heavy we have problems with machines that have 4 Gig of RAM configured.
It's pretty stupid to run benchmarks for a language in a non native environment for the python marks.
Yet again OS News publishes a completely meaningless story.
Err.. European Free Trade association has only four members: Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Last time I checked none of these were members of the EU. What has the EFTA got to do with EU legislation?
Of course if NVidia and ATI et al did release source modules, they could use one another's optimizations, and this would benefit mostly us, the consumer. I don't understand why the average consumer isn't totaly for the GPL on everything. It ends up benefiting the consumers the most, and given that just about all of us are consumers, it seems pretty illogical that there is even a fight at all.
I would have to disagree with this also. I started programming when I was nine, and started to have trouble with my wrists when I hit 21 (also about two years after I learned how to touch type). I have since switched to an ergonomic keyboard which has cleared up the problem completely.
In Europe there are pretty strict regulations about the environment around VDU workers (people sitting at a computer). I have to wonder if many people's problem is not their environment. I have seen far too many people lower their chair practicaly to the floor, and then wonder why they get problems with their wrists. People also seem to think that it's okay to sit sideways at a desk looking at a screen on an angle, or at a screen with their head turned. This is a sure way to develop neck and back problems. A poor chair is another issue. They have to support your back properly so you can relax as you type, otherwise you will develop back problems. Your elbows should idealy be at the level of your wrists at the keyboard. If they are lower, you are asking for problems. A good friend of mine at University was studying physiotherapy, and they had found the wrist rests can actualy do more harm than good, as people tend to rest their wrists on them whilst typing. This is another way you can develop problems. Wrist rests are for resting your wrist on whilst you are not typing! All in all I have seen very few people who have good posture, and a well configured work environment have problems with RSI. This is not the first study like this to be published.
http://www.tifaq.com/archive/rsi_article.txt This is a link to an article published in the independant in 1993 that talks about RSI being totaly preventable by simply ensuring workers have well designed environment.
X server is too new to survey - no one has really deployed it yet, particularly in Fortune 500 companies. FreeBSD would be interesting. SGI, Alpha and Power 4 all have the same problem that Sun does (not forgetting HP/UX of course): Hardware cost. The cost per Processing Unit is WAY too high to take seriously unless you really really need it.
The '''Good''' Competitor might be FreeBSD here, but compared to RedHat 7.3, it's not as available or as easy to deal with for the Marketroids that mostly make decisions.
Is that most engineers like me don't like outlook, or any other integrated calendaring tools. We still use pine, or mutt or something.
There is no personal motivation to build such a product. The people who really have a motiviation are companies like RedHat who would benefit from the support contracts they could sell as a result of having this software in their suite.
Big Companies like support, and RedHat is selling. It doesn't help however if the product physicaly isn't out there.
Someone complained about there being no 'Standard' for a calendaring protocol. Why don't you draw up and RFC? It's not that hard (Sure beats the guy who wrote up a joke RFC for TCP/IP over XML or TCP/IP over carrier pigeon). If someone would pay my salary, I would start work on an exchange replacement tomorrow, open protocol or not. It's sad that Open Source or any UNIX software on the desktop falls at the last hurdle: Microsoft Office and affiliated products. Open Office is pretty good, but it still looks like crap on the standard RedHat distro, and like it or not, most corporates are buying RedHat.
I purchased Applixware years ago, and it was great! I did bunches of stuff in it. But it's not a Visio/Outlook replacement.
My Top Three reasons it's not happening:
No Integrated Calendaring/Email No Fonts No Visio
I can get by with open office for Excel replacement, and Word replacement, but I'm not a power user of those products to start with. I'd rather write a perl script to process data than a Word Macro or VB Script.
Perhaps someone (RedHat/Madrake/SuSe) should get out there and find out what people really want.
Of course this is assuming that they are targeting the windows market (which RedHat for one isn't).
I am a Linux user. I have been using Linux since 4.2. Working on windows 95 and windows NT was unbearable. They would crash all the time, the software wasn't that good, and vim sucked (have you ever tried running vim in a command window - not fun). So I used linux. Office productivity wasn't that big of a deal in my life, so it didn't matter that much that I couldn't read MS Word. Games were always a problem. You gotta have windows to play those games. Every time I would switch to working in a windows environment (mostly through being forced to as a course of my job), I quickly remembered why I ran linux. Sometimes things are a little tricky to get working, but once they do, they stay working.
Today. The state of the art has changed. Windows 2000 has been around for a bit now, and XP is here. I run linux at work because I'm a coderm but mostly at this point because my desktop is the DHCP server, and I spend my day coding. But at home I run Win2k with Cygwin. It doesn't crash often, if hardly ever. I can start up X, and run an xterm and vim. But it has IE, and all it's plugins. I'm sorry, but I like watching movie trailers for LOTR, and I like atomfilms.com, and I LIKE 3D games. Not only that but I have to use MS Word sometimes, because openoffice can't deal with the 120 page document with embedded diagrams and picutres that I was sent to review from a partner company. But worst of all. Visio. There is no Visio. Dia and Kivio both have key missing features, and neither is that stable.
Oh 3D... the all great new 3D stuff in linux. It hasn't worked with a single system I installed RedHat 7.2 or 7.3 on. People said NVidia sucked, and didn't work nice with free software, so I got a Radeon. I have an nvidia at work, and a radeon at home. I still can't play tux racer on either system. Odd that I used to play Quake 3 just fine on my vodoo card. That doesn't even work now.
I am a server programmer mostly. I want to write GUI programs, but I hate the gtk - we are going to use CORBA but write it in C a non-object oriented language. Qt is cool, but doesn't work with automake well, and the versions come out so fast there is no good book on it. It all kinda sucks really.
So I'm left in windows most of the time.
I like free software, and I will never be able to install XP with a clear consience. So I'm stuck with a crappy Linux GUI, and no games because MS are a bunch of assholes.
I am fluent in all these langauges and several others. I have written CGI/Mod scripts in all, including C/C++ and Java.
CGI is SLOW. There is now way around it. The perl _interpreter_ just takes too long to load to take seriously on any site that has a high throughput. mod_perl has memory leak issues, and just isn't for the faint hearted.
We don't need more books on CGI/Perl. We need more people lobying web hosts to have mod_python/PHP available.
So many people complain that PHP lacks templatization capability. it has include(), and it has a very good, and simple to implement XML parser that allows you to generate a very powerful template system. I know because I've built one, and I work for a web application design house, that doesn't do anything much under $10k jobs. We are a pure Linux/Solaris shop.
PHP has the best documentation in a centralised location. Perl doesn't, and neither does Python. I would much prefer to use mod_python, but documentation on python is difficult and confusing compared to PHP for junior developers.
You can certainly do more in Perl than PHP, but Perl faster?!! *rofl* that's a good one. I have built enterprise class websites in PHP for several years, and I have never once had a major problem with it's ""Lack of features"". It does everything you need, and more. The only problem with PHP is writing non CGI/Mod scripts. For that it sucks. I use Python. Perl has a poor OO model, and it's very slow. Perl is not a peach to debug, python has exceptions which rule. Python has been shown to be as fast as C++ in several benchmarks. It's garbage collection works, unlike Java which still seems to have issues.
One of our key products that is a very intensive search app outperforms every other company on the web today. It's written in PHP and Postgresql. Those other sites are mostly running Microsoft SQL Server with ASP, an ""Industry Standard"" on database machine four to eight times the size of ours. Please don't tell me PHP isn't mature enough, or featureful enough, thats crap. I hate the fact that it's not GPL, and I don't like it's object model, and I don't like some of the naming conventions. But it has the best documentation by far, and is the easiest to use. When you can produce a $27k website in two and a half weeks because it's that easy in PHP, what more can you say. I know Perl applications that were just so bogged down in variable issues, and namespace problems that they became unmaintainable, and lost the company they were written for real money, which could have been avoided if the project had just used a real language like Python or C++.
Perl is a great language for hacking up a text processing thingie, or a migration script, or any one of a hundred other small things. But you can't write serious apps in it. They are unmaintainable once the primary programmer disappears because everyone has their own Perl style, it's like Stravinsky trying to finish a piece of Mozart.
There is a reason they call it multibeam... This taken from the Zen website:
How does Zen break the speed barrier of variable speed 48X max drives?
Traditional CD and DVD drives employ a single laser beam directed at one track of information which forms a continuous spiral on the disc. Typically, increases in the X rating have been accomplished by physically spinning the disc at higher rotation speeds. Rather than directing a narrow laser beam at a single track of serial data on a CD or DVD, the Zen approach illuminates multiple tracks, detects them simultaneously, and reads them in parallel. Zen is able to increase drive speed ratings without increasing the drive's rate of rotation. Zen drives spin at a more manageable speed, allowing for less vibration, smoother operation, and greater reliability.
so it's not really 100x CLV, it's just multiple read heads.
I worked for starcd which recognises music from the radio. We got a quote to buy every album that a song had been played from on the radio in the last five years five or more times. It was just over $100k.
How can they possible justify a settlement of this size. This is the most unvelievable abuse the RIAA has demonstrated of it's corporate massivity. I have an mp3 repository, and I own every CD that I have a recording of. I would like someone to explain to me how this doesn't constitute fair use?
I bet they only settled because RIAA is too large to fight. So much for the American justice system. -
I have no idea what Slashdot draws in bandwidth, but during peaks usage I could easily imagine it drawing a full DS3/OC3 based on some rough calculations I did. A DS3/OC3 worth of bandwidth for a year is not that far off $600k, and you haven't payed any salaries yet! I have no issues with slashdot charging for a service. It's a service, if you like it, pay for it, because before long there aren't going to be any free news sites left. The only problem could be that Slashdot charges, and then so does the news site that it links too! Double Whammy! That could be really nasty. Perhaps slashdot should contemplate getting some kind of cost share program with other sites, as I'm sure that even some of the most stalwart sites like the BBC will soon charge once everyone is going there because they are the last free site left!
Thank you for posting this. I am looking for a firewall VPN product, and now I know not to go for SmoothWall. I hate moron on IRC who are just lame a-holes and kick people for asking reasonable questions. IRC sucks. There is no support on IRC.
I have personaly deployed over 50 Athlons in a remote server environment. We had very few problems with them. They run software that runs at 100% CPU most of the time because it's intense number crunching stuff. That's why we picked Athlon, it was the best performance price point by a long long way. Rack mount with a 3U/4U chasis and all the trimmings for a song. Besides based on the price, we can afford to have a redundant node if one fails because we didn't have to pay top dollar for P4. These boxes run 24/7.
I would have like Alpha, but at 12k a box. And not 10x the performance, it just wan't sane
Even though it lost every benchmark except the Quake III one, and the 3DMark by a mere 2%. The small fact that DDR SDRAM is barely half the price of P4 ram, and the entire system is not nearly as expensive. They still recommend it for gamming? This is unabashed Intel hype. Not to mention all that wonderfull waste in the third ALU, poor design, and abysmal FPU performance. The P4 is a joke. Look at the performance improvements made by AMD when they moved to 0.13 micron. They improved the prefetch and release a truley better CPU. 'Intel - we inch forward - leaps and bounds and we could hurt ourselves!' The P4 has nearly twice the memory bandwith, >20% higher clock speed and it's still loosing benchmarks! Pathetic - utterly Pathetic.
Clearcase is a piece of junk. It is slower than hell, and the locking system make it obsolete compared with CVS. I haven't worked on many project in the last 3 years that weren't concurrent development! Every project I've worked on in the last 18 months owes it's quick execution time to CVS and developers not having to negotiate file locks.
I have played a couple of games of CivIII now, although not to completetion, and I have to say that I'm not very impressed with the depth of the game as compared to CTP. Call To Power had so much more, it really felt like an extension to the Civ games, a real enhancement. Nice graphics, cool movies, deep tech tree, all the things a top notch release should have. So far CivIII feels like it's a five year old release. Cute graphics, but Age of Empires would give it a run for it's money.
The game engine however does seem quite improved, and having played all the previous Civ releases, Sid is right (surprise surprise). Old tactics just don't work. In both games I've got my butt kicked, or just barely survived. I'm learning that this is a much more realistic engine with regard to expansion and improvement. Expand too fast, and you spread your resources too thin.
I'm dissapointed that there is not more in this game, and that the improvements were mostly just improvements over an older game. However, having played a few days now, I'm beginning to feel the urge to come back that this game is generating. Although at first highly sceptical, I am now being won over by the subtleties of the new system.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you actualy read the SQL Standard - not even Oracle supports SQL 99 fully.
oh and by the way 'interval' is a reserved word in the SQL standard that does something important. It's an abstract function in MySQL.
MySQL does _not_ support the SQL standard, as do few other dbs out there.
Dude, the fact that _ANY_ system would allow 2005-02-31 as a valid date would fail just about any commercial QA process. The product would NOT GET VALIDATED AS FUNCTIONAL!!!
You can set strict checking on, but then the application can turn it off at will. Cute.
If you care about your data, you use an RDBMS. MySQL isn't one. Even Microsoft Jet has foreign keys and transactions on by default. Yes - MySQL is WORSE than Access folks.
Wow - the usual Slashdot STUPIDITY.
Most scanners can scan at over 800 DPI, which is WAY higher than almost anybody needs for anything. 800DPI takes forever, and generates an enourmous image for an 8.5x11 sheet of paper (Think 60 Meg).
An classic example of a MySQL Idiot. You put things in the database so that they are _atomic_. You want things to either compmletely succeed or completely fail. Most application layers cannot do this successfully, and you end up with corrupt data.
And go ahead, tell my that having corupt data doesn't matter. Then I'll throw sarbanes-oxley at you and laugh.
Please do not confuse Perl and PHP with Python. The first two are scripting languages, the third is a programming language. Python was designed as a strongly dynamically typed language from the ground up with good OOP features. I have used Python for some serious distributed projects, and it is far far better than Java. You want RAD, Java dev time approaches C++ once you throw in J2EE. I've seen it first hand. Python is a very very powerfull language that is fast and effective.
Wow - I am so sick of this argument.
But computers get faster, so it's ok to produce slow crappy code.
It's not that java is better, it's that java is easier, so you get more monkeys with no education who think they are programmers writing code.
Java can be fast, but there are too many idiots who think slow code is okay because computers will just get faster.
HELLO! Computers do 2.4 billion cycles per second, what possible excuse can any programmer have for anything but very complex scientific operations taking more than a couple of seconds to complete. Even network latency these days is low.
Get a grip people.
Waiting 60 seconds for an app to start is UNACCEPTABLE!!! It's pure crap.
Java promotes CRAP.
C++ means you actualy have to have a clue about what you are doing!
I'm tired of working in java going back over people's code who didn't have a clue and having to recommend to management that we have to re-write from the ground up because all we have is a stinking pile of mess.
My company spent $2mil developing an app that has to be re built because even the DB design is rubbish.
Wait - Sun has 12Billion in assets, and RedHat has only 400M, yet their stock is only worth 6x not the 27x??? does this say something about investor confidence?!!
I thought Haji was a prefix used to denote that someone had completed the Haj, one of the five pillars of Islam.
I don't know about anyone else, but most programs in the real application world do alot of string manipulation, and I have seen some pretty shocking results of string manipulation benchmarks showing Java the worst with the C++ class second, and Python actualy leading the pack. It would be usefull to also see the overhead calcs for object management too. Java is so memory heavy we have problems with machines that have 4 Gig of RAM configured.
It's pretty stupid to run benchmarks for a language in a non native environment for the python marks.
Yet again OS News publishes a completely meaningless story.
Err.. European Free Trade association has only four members: Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. Last time I checked none of these were members of the EU. What has the EFTA got to do with EU legislation?
Of course if NVidia and ATI et al did release source modules, they could use one another's optimizations, and this would benefit mostly us, the consumer.
I don't understand why the average consumer isn't totaly for the GPL on everything. It ends up benefiting the consumers the most, and given that just about all of us are consumers, it seems pretty illogical that there is even a fight at all.
I would have to disagree with this also. I started programming when I was nine, and started to have trouble with my wrists when I hit 21 (also about two years after I learned how to touch type). I have since switched to an ergonomic keyboard which has cleared up the problem completely.
In Europe there are pretty strict regulations about the environment around VDU workers (people sitting at a computer). I have to wonder if many people's problem is not their environment. I have seen far too many people lower their chair practicaly to the floor, and then wonder why they get problems with their wrists. People also seem to think that it's okay to sit sideways at a desk looking at a screen on an angle, or at a screen with their head turned. This is a sure way to develop neck and back problems. A poor chair is another issue. They have to support your back properly so you can relax as you type, otherwise you will develop back problems. Your elbows should idealy be at the level of your wrists at the keyboard. If they are lower, you are asking for problems. A good friend of mine at University was studying physiotherapy, and they had found the wrist rests can actualy do more harm than good, as people tend to rest their wrists on them whilst typing. This is another way you can develop problems. Wrist rests are for resting your wrist on whilst you are not typing!
All in all I have seen very few people who have good posture, and a well configured work environment have problems with RSI. This is not the first study like this to be published.
http://www.tifaq.com/archive/rsi_article.txt
This is a link to an article published in the independant in 1993 that talks about RSI being totaly preventable by simply ensuring workers have well designed environment.
You mean scum bags that make free software, and then make it unfree once it's finished.
Yeah right.
X server is too new to survey - no one has really deployed it yet, particularly in Fortune 500 companies. FreeBSD would be interesting. SGI, Alpha and Power 4 all have the same problem that Sun does (not forgetting HP/UX of course): Hardware cost. The cost per Processing Unit is WAY too high to take seriously unless you really really need it.
The '''Good''' Competitor might be FreeBSD here, but compared to RedHat 7.3, it's not as available or as easy to deal with for the Marketroids that mostly make decisions.
Is that most engineers like me don't like outlook, or any other integrated calendaring tools. We still use pine, or mutt or something.
There is no personal motivation to build such a product. The people who really have a motiviation are companies like RedHat who would benefit from the support contracts they could sell as a result of having this software in their suite.
Big Companies like support, and RedHat is selling. It doesn't help however if the product physicaly isn't out there.
Someone complained about there being no 'Standard' for a calendaring protocol. Why don't you draw up and RFC? It's not that hard (Sure beats the guy who wrote up a joke RFC for TCP/IP over XML or TCP/IP over carrier pigeon). If someone would pay my salary, I would start work on an exchange replacement tomorrow, open protocol or not. It's sad that Open Source or any UNIX software on the desktop falls at the last hurdle: Microsoft Office and affiliated products. Open Office is pretty good, but it still looks like crap on the standard RedHat distro, and like it or not, most corporates are buying RedHat.
I purchased Applixware years ago, and it was great! I did bunches of stuff in it. But it's not a Visio/Outlook replacement.
My Top Three reasons it's not happening:
No Integrated Calendaring/Email
No Fonts
No Visio
I can get by with open office for Excel replacement, and Word replacement, but I'm not a power user of those products to start with. I'd rather write a perl script to process data than a Word Macro or VB Script.
Perhaps someone (RedHat/Madrake/SuSe) should get out there and find out what people really want.
Of course this is assuming that they are targeting the windows market (which RedHat for one isn't).
I am a Linux user. I have been using Linux since 4.2. Working on windows 95 and windows NT was unbearable. They would crash all the time, the software wasn't that good, and vim sucked (have you ever tried running vim in a command window - not fun). So I used linux. Office productivity wasn't that big of a deal in my life, so it didn't matter that much that I couldn't read MS Word. Games were always a problem. You gotta have windows to play those games. Every time I would switch to working in a windows environment (mostly through being forced to as a course of my job), I quickly remembered why I ran linux. Sometimes things are a little tricky to get working, but once they do, they stay working.
Today. The state of the art has changed. Windows 2000 has been around for a bit now, and XP is here. I run linux at work because I'm a coderm but mostly at this point because my desktop is the DHCP server, and I spend my day coding. But at home I run Win2k with Cygwin. It doesn't crash often, if hardly ever. I can start up X, and run an xterm and vim. But it has IE, and all it's plugins. I'm sorry, but I like watching movie trailers for LOTR, and I like atomfilms.com, and I LIKE 3D games. Not only that but I have to use MS Word sometimes, because openoffice can't deal with the 120 page document with embedded diagrams and picutres that I was sent to review from a partner company. But worst of all. Visio. There is no Visio. Dia and Kivio both have key missing features, and neither is that stable.
Oh 3D... the all great new 3D stuff in linux. It hasn't worked with a single system I installed RedHat 7.2 or 7.3 on. People said NVidia sucked, and didn't work nice with free software, so I got a Radeon. I have an nvidia at work, and a radeon at home. I still can't play tux racer on either system. Odd that I used to play Quake 3 just fine on my vodoo card. That doesn't even work now.
I am a server programmer mostly. I want to write GUI programs, but I hate the gtk - we are going to use CORBA but write it in C a non-object oriented language. Qt is cool, but doesn't work with automake well, and the versions come out so fast there is no good book on it. It all kinda sucks really.
So I'm left in windows most of the time.
I like free software, and I will never be able to install XP with a clear consience. So I'm stuck with a crappy Linux GUI, and no games because MS are a bunch of assholes.
I think I'll become a landscape gardener.
I am fluent in all these langauges and several others. I have written CGI/Mod scripts in all, including C/C++ and Java.
CGI is SLOW. There is now way around it. The perl _interpreter_ just takes too long to load to take seriously on any site that has a high throughput. mod_perl has memory leak issues, and just isn't for the faint hearted.
We don't need more books on CGI/Perl. We need more people lobying web hosts to have mod_python/PHP available.
So many people complain that PHP lacks templatization capability. it has include(), and it has a very good, and simple to implement XML parser that allows you to generate a very powerful template system. I know because I've built one, and I work for a web application design house, that doesn't do anything much under $10k jobs. We are a pure Linux/Solaris shop.
PHP has the best documentation in a centralised location. Perl doesn't, and neither does Python. I would much prefer to use mod_python, but documentation on python is difficult and confusing compared to PHP for junior developers.
You can certainly do more in Perl than PHP, but Perl faster?!! *rofl* that's a good one. I have built enterprise class websites in PHP for several years, and I have never once had a major problem with it's ""Lack of features"". It does everything you need, and more. The only problem with PHP is writing non CGI/Mod scripts. For that it sucks. I use Python. Perl has a poor OO model, and it's very slow. Perl is not a peach to debug, python has exceptions which rule. Python has been shown to be as fast as C++ in several benchmarks. It's garbage collection works, unlike Java which still seems to have issues.
One of our key products that is a very intensive search app outperforms every other company on the web today. It's written in PHP and Postgresql. Those other sites are mostly running Microsoft SQL Server with ASP, an ""Industry Standard"" on database machine four to eight times the size of ours. Please don't tell me PHP isn't mature enough, or featureful enough, thats crap. I hate the fact that it's not GPL, and I don't like it's object model, and I don't like some of the naming conventions. But it has the best documentation by far, and is the easiest to use. When you can produce a $27k website in two and a half weeks because it's that easy in PHP, what more can you say. I know Perl applications that were just so bogged down in variable issues, and namespace problems that they became unmaintainable, and lost the company they were written for real money, which could have been avoided if the project had just used a real language like Python or C++.
Perl is a great language for hacking up a text processing thingie, or a migration script, or any one of a hundred other small things. But you can't write serious apps in it. They are unmaintainable once the primary programmer disappears because everyone has their own Perl style, it's like Stravinsky trying to finish a piece of Mozart.
There is a reason they call it multibeam...
This taken from the Zen website:
How does Zen break the speed barrier of
variable speed 48X max drives?
Traditional CD and DVD drives employ a single laser beam directed at one track of information which forms a continuous spiral on the disc. Typically, increases in the X rating have been accomplished by physically spinning the disc at higher rotation speeds. Rather than directing a narrow laser beam at a single track of serial data on a CD or DVD, the Zen approach illuminates multiple tracks, detects them simultaneously, and reads them in parallel. Zen is able to increase drive speed ratings without increasing the drive's rate of rotation. Zen drives spin at a more manageable speed, allowing for less vibration, smoother operation, and greater reliability.
so it's not really 100x CLV, it's just multiple read heads.
This fine is preposterous.
I worked for starcd which recognises music from the radio. We got a quote to buy every album that a song had been played from on the radio in the last five years five or more times. It was just over $100k.
How can they possible justify a settlement of this size. This is the most unvelievable abuse the RIAA has demonstrated of it's corporate massivity. I have an mp3 repository, and I own every CD that I have a recording of. I would like someone to explain to me how this doesn't constitute fair use?
I bet they only settled because RIAA is too large to fight. So much for the American justice system.
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I have no idea what Slashdot draws in bandwidth, but during peaks usage I could easily imagine it drawing a full DS3/OC3 based on some rough calculations I did. A DS3/OC3 worth of bandwidth for a year is not that far off $600k, and you haven't payed any salaries yet! I have no issues with slashdot charging for a service. It's a service, if you like it, pay for it, because before long there aren't going to be any free news sites left. The only problem could be that Slashdot charges, and then so does the news site that it links too! Double Whammy! That could be really nasty. Perhaps slashdot should contemplate getting some kind of cost share program with other sites, as I'm sure that even some of the most stalwart sites like the BBC will soon charge once everyone is going there because they are the last free site left!
Thank you for posting this. I am looking for a firewall VPN product, and now I know not to go for SmoothWall. I hate moron on IRC who are just lame a-holes and kick people for asking reasonable questions. IRC sucks. There is no support on IRC.
I have personaly deployed over 50 Athlons in a remote server environment. We had very few problems with them. They run software that runs at 100% CPU most of the time because it's intense number crunching stuff. That's why we picked Athlon, it was the best performance price point by a long long way. Rack mount with a 3U/4U chasis and all the trimmings for a song. Besides based on the price, we can afford to have a redundant node if one fails because we didn't have to pay top dollar for P4. These boxes run 24/7.
I would have like Alpha, but at 12k a box. And not 10x the performance, it just wan't sane
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Even though it lost every benchmark except the Quake III one, and the 3DMark by a mere 2%. The small fact that DDR SDRAM is barely half the price of P4 ram, and the entire system is not nearly as expensive. They still recommend it for gamming? This is unabashed Intel hype. Not to mention all that wonderfull waste in the third ALU, poor design, and abysmal FPU performance. The P4 is a joke. Look at the performance improvements made by AMD when they moved to 0.13 micron. They improved the prefetch and release a truley better CPU. 'Intel - we inch forward - leaps and bounds and we could hurt ourselves!' The P4 has nearly twice the memory bandwith, >20% higher clock speed and it's still loosing benchmarks! Pathetic - utterly Pathetic.
Sorry - but I'm not buying Intel anytime soon.
Clearcase is a piece of junk. It is slower than hell, and the locking system make it obsolete compared with CVS. I haven't worked on many project in the last 3 years that weren't concurrent development! Every project I've worked on in the last 18 months owes it's quick execution time to CVS and developers not having to negotiate file locks.
I have played a couple of games of CivIII now, although not to completetion, and I have to say that I'm not very impressed with the depth of the game as compared to CTP. Call To Power had so much more, it really felt like an extension to the Civ games, a real enhancement. Nice graphics, cool movies, deep tech tree, all the things a top notch release should have. So far CivIII feels like it's a five year old release. Cute graphics, but Age of Empires would give it a run for it's money.
The game engine however does seem quite improved, and having played all the previous Civ releases, Sid is right (surprise surprise). Old tactics just don't work. In both games I've got my butt kicked, or just barely survived. I'm learning that this is a much more realistic engine with regard to expansion and improvement. Expand too fast, and you spread your resources too thin.
I'm dissapointed that there is not more in this game, and that the improvements were mostly just improvements over an older game. However, having played a few days now, I'm beginning to feel the urge to come back that this game is generating. Although at first highly sceptical, I am now being won over by the subtleties of the new system.
M