Why worry? The more the Indian economy grows, the more employees it needs, the more salaries get driven up. Large Indian software companies are already helping drive up the cost of outsourcing IT jobs to India. Fair enough, it will mean more competition to some extent, but more likely it will long term drive up demand for IT skills worldwide (outsources are already scouring China, and even African countries are seeing investment - some Indian outsourcing companies are even sub-contracting to companies in these countries).
I think you're confusing the client and the server. With X, the server is the process that actually displays the screen, and the client is the application that displays something on the server. With client-side font rendering, the rendering is happening on the host that runs the application, and you are sending the graphics, NOT the text.
There are benefits to client-side font rendering, but reduced bandwidth usage when used over the network is not one of them.
In fact, in many (most?) countries in western Europe at least, home computers massively dominated for most of the 80's and consoles were a niche. Most kids I knew considered consoles as something for people that couldn't afford a full fledged computer until at least the Super Nintendo, which was the first one I remember people talking about without being embarrassed for not getting something better.
(At least part of this I think came from parents delusion that if they bought a home computer it'd get used for a lot more than games, which was untrue for maybe 90%+ of the kids that got the).
The C64 (and VIC 20 before the launch of C64), Amigas and Atari ST's dominated in Scandinavia (pretty much in that order in terms of volume), with Spectrum and Amstrad as lesser players. Elsewhere in Europe Spectrum, Amstrad and BBC did comparatively better. Acorn Archimedes also didn't do too badly in the late 80's.
In fact, I've never seen most of the consoles you list before 1991 apart from in pictures despite being in and out of the local tech stores as often as I could (probably almost daily from '85-'90 or so) and reading all related magazines I could get my hand on - none of my friends ever had them.
I remember seeing a wide variety of home computers in the computer stores near where I lived (in Norway) in the early 80's, including Commodore PET's, Dragon 32's, Spectravideo, Oric, the odd MSX and other rarities - some larger stores or specialist stores would have other models, but I can't recall ever seeing any of them sell any consoles until the late 80's (I'm sure I ignored some, by virtue of our complete lack of interest in them).
By 1985 most shops around me had stopped stocking any other 8 bit home computers than C64 and Spectrum, with some selling Amstrad CPC's. Then the Amiga's and Atari ST's and the occasional console slowly started showing up.
At least Commodore's massive popularity here was a uniquely European thing - Commodore's European sales far outpaced it's US sales, and the sheer volume probably was part of "stunting" the importance of consoles in Europe in the 80's significantly.
But there's NO reason why someone's OpenId would also need to be their "screen name" on a specific service. Many services let you log in with your e-mail address today without plastering your e-mail all over their site.
It is like that in the US as a result of the tradition of free local calls. Since people were used to being able to call local numbers without being charged, the idea was that charging the receiver for cellphone calls would prevent surprises for the caller, just like for calls from abroad in Europe.
In Europe, caller paying has always been the norm, and cellphones were just allocated different number series to make the callers aware that the rates will be different.
There's a variety of different ways - most providers operate a messaging gateway supporting a simple protocol to send them messages, some provide e-mail to SMS/MMS gateways but those are usually meant for personal use, most also support "direct" connectivity via trunk / data lines for large volumes, or you can attach a GSM modem to your machine. Most developers these days instead interface with an intermediary who handles the mess of interfacing with each provider and usually presents simple gateways using HTTP or other protocols to let you send to anyone.
The days of free gateways is mostly gone - there are a few left, but they are usually restricted to a few providers or specific countries, or the aforementioned e-mail to SMS gateways which often has to be enabled on a customer by customer basis. Developers generally have to pay anywhere from 2 to 20 cents per SMS sent, depending on volume, delivery guarantees (many providers offers cheap services for bulk messages where losing a few is no big deal, and more expensive services for individualized messages that must be delivered) etc., more for MMS.
Stopping whaling? Not going to happen, thanks to Greenpeace and other, more extreme, protesters that have pissed off the Norwegian public to the point that it's now a symbolic action to keep it going.
Whale meat used to be a cheap alternative to beef when I was a kid. That was the only reason we ate it, as it's damn tough and needs a lot of work to get tender, and needs to be cooked properly to get it to taste nice - you used it when you couldn't afford beef.
Thanks to the way opposition to whaling acted, however, whale meat is now being sold as an expensive delicacy, and people have really romanticized it. Which of course makes it more interesting to ramp up whaling, not less.
It's a classic example of how NOT to handle things. In fact, if anything it looks like things are now set for an eventual return to allowing commercial whaling of some species.
Have you tried managing racks worth of servers in many locations?
That said, most cloud services today ARE very expensive. EC2, for example, can be trivially beaten with managed hosting, and in some cases totally crushed by maintaining your own servers.
What cloud services give you (and you pay through the nose for) is the ability to scale quickly. Trouble is, most people never need to scale that quickly.
Using clouds for "overflow" from a cheaper base setup is not a new idea, and it's definitively a good one. Particularly since it allows you to cut it a lot closer with your base setup. Without overflow capacity elsewhere, you need enough extra capacity in your base setup to handle reasonable growth plus any spikes. With overflow capacity using a cloud service, you only need to handle enough of your daily traffic that whatever you end up using of the overflow capacity is cheaper than adding more servers to your base. As soon as it isn't, you add more servers.
"Stopping" would imply they started in the first place. Unless said person has a UK visa, flashing a Nigerian passport would get them deported, not put on welfare. Even WITH a valid visa, most visa's issued have constraints as to activity, and if it's a work visa and they can't provide for themselves they'd also get deported.
As an immigrant to the UK, I could still be deported if I lost my job even though I'm from an EEA country (Norway) - I can go "only" go on welfare for about 6 months I believe before the UK could legally send me back, but that's it. Given that I've paid far more tax than the average UK worker for the last 8 years, that's not much. For people from non EEA countries deportation can happen much quicker. This despite the fact that I own a house in the UK, and is married to a British citizen (due to the latter I would be allowed to apply for a marriage visa and reenter even without a job, though).
The exception is that if you have lived in the UK legally for more than 4 years, whether on a visa or because you're from an EEA member state or as a dependent of a legal resident, you can apply for "indefinite leave to remain", which means just what it says, or for British citizenship. Neither are guaranteed.
I would use NAT even with the availability of unlimited IP's. Why? Because it means accidentally exposing servers that should stay private becomes harder. Misconfiguring a firewall by accident is easy, but by having your sensitive servers on addresses that are not publicly routed at all the barrier to making a mistake that makes any difference is a lot higher.
At my newest work setup I need to explicitly set up NAT/PAT to grant access to a server. Even if I should accidentally open up a port on the firewall, unless I also replicated the same mistake in forwarding those ports to a server deeper into the network, it would have minimal impact as any traffic destined for the private IP's wouldn't get past our ISP's routers.
Without the NAT/PAT a single misconfiguration could expose them. With it I now need to make two mistakes that must "match" in order to place the servers at risk.
I don't care if this was not the original purpose of NAT - it gives me benefits entirely separate from hiding multiple hosts behind one IP.
Try installing that RPM on 10 different distros or versions of distros, and tell me again we don't still have problems.
I've dealt with dependency problems far more than I'd care to - often even being able to rebuild a source RPM on a newer version of the same distro turns into a nightmare, much less trying to massage a binary RPM into place.
How often do you get spam where the "From" address is someone you know? Nothing is stopping you from doing this today - in fact there are many packages providing "greylisting" which improves on it by sending a message back allowing the sender to "prove" they are not a spammer - no real spammers take the hassle (if the from address is even genuine).
It's one of those things I genuinely think would be more interesting to watch than do, given the effort you'd need to expend to avoid flying all over the place, and all kinds of fluids spreading all over the room...
The ONLY communication I'd like between tabs is shared cookies and possibly bookmarks. In fact, I don't even use the browser bookmarks anymore, so even that isn't needed.
And you are right, the crash of a tab is not acceptable, but it is unrealistic to expect a complex piece of software to ever be bug free. A large part of why we have process separation and memory protection between applications in the first place is because it increases the overall robustness of the system.
Todays usage of browsers is more like running a large number of applications - most of the tabs I leave running for a long time ARE running applications like Gmail and other complex javascript apps - and I want them fully isolated.
There's just no excuse for not isolating them - it's a throwback to the pre-memory protection days when people where whining about how adding memory protection to their operating systems would be so slow and would just be a crutch for developers.
In fact, I'd be perfectly ok with no shared sessions too - just don't force me to use different profiles to start multiple Firefox processes (i.e. bother to implement locking when writing to the bookmarks for example).
Address space is not fixed per application on modern OSes or on UNIX-based OSes,
No, but it IS limited to one per process, which was GP's point.
If Chrome has a bad memory leak (when e.g. it destroys a flash object) and you restrict your use to one window only without opening new windows or tabs, you will eventually notice it just as much as you would in Firefox.
No, you won't, since Chrome also (at least according to the comic) throws away the process in certain other situations as well, such as when loading a page from a new domain. But that is irrelevant: If it only affects a single tab, the "cost" of a restart is minimal: You have to close that tab and load a single page again, instead of reload every single tab (in my case often 40-50).
The fact that Chrome's design means it uses the OS as a crutch and it steps in and throws everything out when a window or tab is closed does not mean Chrome's design is inherently good, it just means it's more robust at the cost of the extra baggage the OS needs to maintain separate processes (extra memory, slower speed).
More robust == better. That "extra baggage" is mostly the cost of memory protection, which was accepted by most people as good in the early 90's at the latest. The ONLY place where we've put up with the kind of poor isolation that we've seen in the browsers have been in the browsers. That may have been acceptable when they were mostly used as document viewers, but no longer now when they have become application platforms. Todays browsers are throwbacks to Windows 3.1, AmigaOS and old MacOs version prior to memory protection.
I think FF3, Opera, and Safari will go with threads, IE8 will go with processes, and Google will have a decision to make with regards to benchmarks when memory usage and new tab/window response time places them closer to IE8 than it does to the competition.
I very much doubt that. The cost of multiple processes here is minimal. In fact, with multiple cores becoming more and more common, designing for less shared data structures will reduce cache coherency and locking issues and may end up being faster. It is in any case an overhead that is small enough that the extra protection is worth it.
When a tab or a window is destroyed in Firefox the application cleans up the memory.
Except it doesn't. Part of the problem may very well be fragmentation (as the Mozilla people claim). But the reason for that is that they've ignored decades of experience in avoiding it. It's TRIVIAL: When you have a bunch of objects with similar lifetimes that are all bounded by the lifetime of a single object, you use separate allocation arenas. In this case all objects related to a tab and the documents in it could be allocated in separate arenas, and the memory issue would have been taken care of.
However that only solve the memory issue. Firefox also suffers from a number of other bugs that include CPU hogging etc., and the easiest way of prevent them from affecting users is multiple processes, which effectively give you the "arena" behavior for free.
Thank you. You can add Amiga fans to that list as well. As much as I loved my Amigas, I found the resistance to trying to fix obvious limitations like lack of memory protection extremely annoying.
I've had exactly the same memory problems with NO extensions and plugins installed. FF3 is significantly better than FF2 - I can no sometimes let it run for a couple of days at the time vs. 6-8 hours before, but it's still far from acceptable.
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Why worry? The more the Indian economy grows, the more employees it needs, the more salaries get driven up. Large Indian software companies are already helping drive up the cost of outsourcing IT jobs to India. Fair enough, it will mean more competition to some extent, but more likely it will long term drive up demand for IT skills worldwide (outsources are already scouring China, and even African countries are seeing investment - some Indian outsourcing companies are even sub-contracting to companies in these countries).
Personally I think they used binary.
There are benefits to client-side font rendering, but reduced bandwidth usage when used over the network is not one of them.
I've yet to meet any non-Scandinavian that likes it, though apparently they sell they stuff in the Netherlands and Germany too.
(At least part of this I think came from parents delusion that if they bought a home computer it'd get used for a lot more than games, which was untrue for maybe 90%+ of the kids that got the).
The C64 (and VIC 20 before the launch of C64), Amigas and Atari ST's dominated in Scandinavia (pretty much in that order in terms of volume), with Spectrum and Amstrad as lesser players. Elsewhere in Europe Spectrum, Amstrad and BBC did comparatively better. Acorn Archimedes also didn't do too badly in the late 80's.
In fact, I've never seen most of the consoles you list before 1991 apart from in pictures despite being in and out of the local tech stores as often as I could (probably almost daily from '85-'90 or so) and reading all related magazines I could get my hand on - none of my friends ever had them.
I remember seeing a wide variety of home computers in the computer stores near where I lived (in Norway) in the early 80's, including Commodore PET's, Dragon 32's, Spectravideo, Oric, the odd MSX and other rarities - some larger stores or specialist stores would have other models, but I can't recall ever seeing any of them sell any consoles until the late 80's (I'm sure I ignored some, by virtue of our complete lack of interest in them).
By 1985 most shops around me had stopped stocking any other 8 bit home computers than C64 and Spectrum, with some selling Amstrad CPC's. Then the Amiga's and Atari ST's and the occasional console slowly started showing up.
At least Commodore's massive popularity here was a uniquely European thing - Commodore's European sales far outpaced it's US sales, and the sheer volume probably was part of "stunting" the importance of consoles in Europe in the 80's significantly.
Wikipedia lists Knightlore as being published in 1984, which means Zaxxon beat it by 2 years...
But there's NO reason why someone's OpenId would also need to be their "screen name" on a specific service. Many services let you log in with your e-mail address today without plastering your e-mail all over their site.
... like it'd go well with a Darth Vader suit.
In Europe, caller paying has always been the norm, and cellphones were just allocated different number series to make the callers aware that the rates will be different.
The days of free gateways is mostly gone - there are a few left, but they are usually restricted to a few providers or specific countries, or the aforementioned e-mail to SMS gateways which often has to be enabled on a customer by customer basis. Developers generally have to pay anywhere from 2 to 20 cents per SMS sent, depending on volume, delivery guarantees (many providers offers cheap services for bulk messages where losing a few is no big deal, and more expensive services for individualized messages that must be delivered) etc., more for MMS.
Whale meat used to be a cheap alternative to beef when I was a kid. That was the only reason we ate it, as it's damn tough and needs a lot of work to get tender, and needs to be cooked properly to get it to taste nice - you used it when you couldn't afford beef.
Thanks to the way opposition to whaling acted, however, whale meat is now being sold as an expensive delicacy, and people have really romanticized it. Which of course makes it more interesting to ramp up whaling, not less.
It's a classic example of how NOT to handle things. In fact, if anything it looks like things are now set for an eventual return to allowing commercial whaling of some species.
What do you think happens to the glucose?
Have you tried managing racks worth of servers in many locations?
That said, most cloud services today ARE very expensive. EC2, for example, can be trivially beaten with managed hosting, and in some cases totally crushed by maintaining your own servers.
What cloud services give you (and you pay through the nose for) is the ability to scale quickly. Trouble is, most people never need to scale that quickly.
Using clouds for "overflow" from a cheaper base setup is not a new idea, and it's definitively a good one. Particularly since it allows you to cut it a lot closer with your base setup. Without overflow capacity elsewhere, you need enough extra capacity in your base setup to handle reasonable growth plus any spikes. With overflow capacity using a cloud service, you only need to handle enough of your daily traffic that whatever you end up using of the overflow capacity is cheaper than adding more servers to your base. As soon as it isn't, you add more servers.
As an immigrant to the UK, I could still be deported if I lost my job even though I'm from an EEA country (Norway) - I can go "only" go on welfare for about 6 months I believe before the UK could legally send me back, but that's it. Given that I've paid far more tax than the average UK worker for the last 8 years, that's not much. For people from non EEA countries deportation can happen much quicker. This despite the fact that I own a house in the UK, and is married to a British citizen (due to the latter I would be allowed to apply for a marriage visa and reenter even without a job, though).
The exception is that if you have lived in the UK legally for more than 4 years, whether on a visa or because you're from an EEA member state or as a dependent of a legal resident, you can apply for "indefinite leave to remain", which means just what it says, or for British citizenship. Neither are guaranteed.
At my newest work setup I need to explicitly set up NAT/PAT to grant access to a server. Even if I should accidentally open up a port on the firewall, unless I also replicated the same mistake in forwarding those ports to a server deeper into the network, it would have minimal impact as any traffic destined for the private IP's wouldn't get past our ISP's routers.
Without the NAT/PAT a single misconfiguration could expose them. With it I now need to make two mistakes that must "match" in order to place the servers at risk.
I don't care if this was not the original purpose of NAT - it gives me benefits entirely separate from hiding multiple hosts behind one IP.
Gee, you've just described the LSB.
I've dealt with dependency problems far more than I'd care to - often even being able to rebuild a source RPM on a newer version of the same distro turns into a nightmare, much less trying to massage a binary RPM into place.
How often do you get spam where the "From" address is someone you know? Nothing is stopping you from doing this today - in fact there are many packages providing "greylisting" which improves on it by sending a message back allowing the sender to "prove" they are not a spammer - no real spammers take the hassle (if the from address is even genuine).
The obvious question is whether you were relieved or disappointed when you realized your mistake.
It's one of those things I genuinely think would be more interesting to watch than do, given the effort you'd need to expend to avoid flying all over the place, and all kinds of fluids spreading all over the room...
And you are right, the crash of a tab is not acceptable, but it is unrealistic to expect a complex piece of software to ever be bug free. A large part of why we have process separation and memory protection between applications in the first place is because it increases the overall robustness of the system.
Todays usage of browsers is more like running a large number of applications - most of the tabs I leave running for a long time ARE running applications like Gmail and other complex javascript apps - and I want them fully isolated.
There's just no excuse for not isolating them - it's a throwback to the pre-memory protection days when people where whining about how adding memory protection to their operating systems would be so slow and would just be a crutch for developers.
In fact, I'd be perfectly ok with no shared sessions too - just don't force me to use different profiles to start multiple Firefox processes (i.e. bother to implement locking when writing to the bookmarks for example).
Address space is not fixed per application on modern OSes or on UNIX-based OSes,
No, but it IS limited to one per process, which was GP's point.
If Chrome has a bad memory leak (when e.g. it destroys a flash object) and you restrict your use to one window only without opening new windows or tabs, you will eventually notice it just as much as you would in Firefox.
No, you won't, since Chrome also (at least according to the comic) throws away the process in certain other situations as well, such as when loading a page from a new domain. But that is irrelevant: If it only affects a single tab, the "cost" of a restart is minimal: You have to close that tab and load a single page again, instead of reload every single tab (in my case often 40-50).
The fact that Chrome's design means it uses the OS as a crutch and it steps in and throws everything out when a window or tab is closed does not mean Chrome's design is inherently good, it just means it's more robust at the cost of the extra baggage the OS needs to maintain separate processes (extra memory, slower speed).
More robust == better. That "extra baggage" is mostly the cost of memory protection, which was accepted by most people as good in the early 90's at the latest. The ONLY place where we've put up with the kind of poor isolation that we've seen in the browsers have been in the browsers. That may have been acceptable when they were mostly used as document viewers, but no longer now when they have become application platforms. Todays browsers are throwbacks to Windows 3.1, AmigaOS and old MacOs version prior to memory protection.
I think FF3, Opera, and Safari will go with threads, IE8 will go with processes, and Google will have a decision to make with regards to benchmarks when memory usage and new tab/window response time places them closer to IE8 than it does to the competition.
I very much doubt that. The cost of multiple processes here is minimal. In fact, with multiple cores becoming more and more common, designing for less shared data structures will reduce cache coherency and locking issues and may end up being faster. It is in any case an overhead that is small enough that the extra protection is worth it.
When a tab or a window is destroyed in Firefox the application cleans up the memory.
Except it doesn't. Part of the problem may very well be fragmentation (as the Mozilla people claim). But the reason for that is that they've ignored decades of experience in avoiding it. It's TRIVIAL: When you have a bunch of objects with similar lifetimes that are all bounded by the lifetime of a single object, you use separate allocation arenas. In this case all objects related to a tab and the documents in it could be allocated in separate arenas, and the memory issue would have been taken care of.
However that only solve the memory issue. Firefox also suffers from a number of other bugs that include CPU hogging etc., and the easiest way of prevent them from affecting users is multiple processes, which effectively give you the "arena" behavior for free.
Thank you. You can add Amiga fans to that list as well. As much as I loved my Amigas, I found the resistance to trying to fix obvious limitations like lack of memory protection extremely annoying.
I've had exactly the same memory problems with NO extensions and plugins installed. FF3 is significantly better than FF2 - I can no sometimes let it run for a couple of days at the time vs. 6-8 hours before, but it's still far from acceptable.