Sounds nice, but I think the truth is that most people on non-db-server workloads don't really write a lot of random data in the first place. For them, start up speed is probably more important. I know it is to me.:)
That's because it doesn't do anything good for hard drives. There was a paper about it some years ago, I'm too lazy to google it up, but even 32 MB is too much (I think the sweet spot was around 2 MB).
If you think about it, it's not surprising, what good would it do that the disk cache in main memory managed by the OS didn't already do?
Large on-disk cache would only make sense if it was combined with a battery or something so you don't loose data on crashes.
Putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, one that is hosted God knows where, is an even worse idea.
But what if it turns out that it's much cheaper and less eggs break?:)
Of course, the other thing that can happen is that cloud infrastructure gets so mature that you can run your own cloud. Bonus points if runs in a peer-to-peer fashion without requiring maintenance of a server. Now that would be neat.
This sort of thinking is usually cured at the moment the pipe connects with the occipital bone while having your laptop/wallet/cellphone/car stolen.
Which is why civilized countries have a system of courts for determining punishment. Because somebody was clever enough to realize that feelings of revenge should not cloud a decision of imprisonment.
Some men are feral. Whether by choice (misanthropes) or training (via our welfare state) they are indeed primitive and irredeemable.
Actually, I think you're right. In Denmark where the maximum penalty is 14 years in prison (I believe), there is a special provision for lifetime prison for people who are judged to be too dangerous to let out. Even here, the case must reevaluated.
However, this is an extremely small minority. For the rest, this kind of thinking just makes it harder to turn the criminals into productive members of society.
Maybe it's just me, but if it provides the equivalent of a college text book, 49 USD actually sounds pretty cheap to me.
Of course, it's still more expensive than free. And they probably will get competition from free material in due time from people like you. Thank good for that.:)
I'm sorry but you just made all that up, didn't you?
Deserts are deserts because they are arid. That means they lack water. Why? Because it doesn't rain enough to sustain a high level of plant growth.
On a grand scale, deserts come and go because the rain patterns change. For instance, a mountain range may pop up and block the wet air so it releases the rain before reaching a spot in the mainland.
If you doubt this is true, grab a book on biology and read up on it yourself, I did that recently, very interesting stuff (my field is computer science).
Douglas Crockford has some weird recommendations that seem to come from him being bitten by evil hacks by a real nutjob once upon a time (maybe himself?). I don't think he represents the majority of Javascript programmers.
It's a bit like if you were in a C++ team and someone thought it would be fun to overload the + operator to do weird things on ints. Afterwards you're so scared that you go around advocating people use c_mathlibrary_plus(a, b) instead of using + since someone might have hacked the +. IMHO that's not relevant advice for most people.
Of course, some people think that languages where you can mess with things are evil. But it's not that easy. To take the operator overloading example: If you've ever tried expressing an algorithm involving lots of vector and matrix math in a language that doesn't allow overloading of operators, you'll see what I mean. It's true, of course, that most of the time you should stay far away from that sort of magic, and it's just plain stupid that C++ hints that frivolous operator overloading is okay by doing it in the standard I/O library.
Same thing with Javascript. The basic stuff will get you through 99.9% of the cases.
You're right about the trade alliance. In fact, it's my impression that EU is mostly about trade laws, consumer protection and giving money to support local development and cross-European research, although the euro necessarily has some requirements on the economies of the member states. With Greece it's obvious now why those requirements are necessary. And of course there's some foreign policy involved too since it makes sense to gang up when you're trying to strong-arm other countries.
But the EU doesn't really decide how much you pay in tax, what the vast majority of that bucketload of money goes to, etc.
I think the current system works quite well. Trade laws really do benefit from being international. It makes for a more efficient society. It's too bad that some of the more strict laws here in the Nordic countries (e.g. regarding food additives) get overturned by EU directives, and that still a so large part of the EU budget goes to farming subsidies. But give and take some. I think giving up national parliaments for the sake of a cleaner model is a nonsensical goal. When I look at the city council meetings in the local county, people just happen to be much more practical and realistic when they're talking about their back yard.
It also helps to be a girl. At Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, for example, only 14% of the computer science majors are women, so it's easier for female applicants to stand out from the pack. [...]
What kind of advice does that lead to?
"MISC NOTES FROM APPLICANT: He walks like a girl, swims like a girl and talks like a girl! Also he likes being called Ada!"
Well, Javascript is actually the language that's supposed to do the interactive stuff, that's why it was introduced in the first place. Note that the new tags come with a Javascript API for manipulating them. As I gather, Flash is based on a Javascript dialect to a certain extent.
If you actually bother looking around, I think you'll find there are lots of Javascript libraries out there these days for doing animations and widgets and all that sort of stuff. And many of them are actually quite elegant because the competition on the web is fierce.
It's true that there's not the all-encompassing huge class library, but you know what - some people actually think that's an improvement over the old toolkit line of thinking with a gazillion of classes that it can take many years to actually get to know. HTML is simpler. Sometimes less is more.
As a web app developer, the biggest problem IMHO for the web, aside for missing support for some things as mentioned by grandparent, is that the DOM is still not über responsive (usually the problem is not slow Javascript, but slow DOM updates). But the browser makers have started working on that through hardware acceleration.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way...
In Denmark, we do. I think it's the same for several other European countries. Denmark supported wind power way back and as a result have the world's largest wind turbine company despite a population of only 5.5 mio. As I gather, their percent-wise market share has been dwindling over the last years, perhaps because the former government (2001-2011) killed most of publicly-supported home-market initiative out of what was probably ideological (libertarian) reasons.
EU has a goal of 30% of the energy usage from renewable sources in 2020 I think.
As demonstrated by the priest referred to above, the religious may also use facts, proof and logic. They just don't do so on religious matters, there they have articles of faith.
The last parts sounds wrong to me. As far as I'm aware, lots of logic, proving and what was thought to be facts has gone into theological thinking over the years, trying to reconcile apparent problems in say the bible. Especially back in the days by monks before the approach of the natural sciences (i.e. go out and study instead of sitting on you arse thinking up air castles) got more popular. Why do you think there are so many fractions within say Christianity?
Of course, here we're talking about people who studied and learned Latin and Greek and Hebrew, unlike some brain-washed morons of today who've never opened a book.
"A single computer powered on 24X7 would consume that much." - why would you have a 200 W computer turned on 24x7? I bought energy-conserving parts last time, the computer is probably on 8-12 hours a day. Lighting are all energy-efficient compact fluorescent bought before LEDs arrived. We cook with an electric stove every day. No cooling (except the fridge and freezer, both of which are relatively energy efficient:). Washing machine and tumble dryer aren't included, though, there's a common washing house 50 meters away.
Heating is through what is called remote heating in Denmark - there's a coal power plant not far away that provides heating from waste heat in a 50 km radius relatively cheap. That's why I quoted heating separately. For the record, it's a 85 sq meter apartment (that's about 900 sq ft as far as I can tell). According to Danish standards, I think the insulation level is medium. New buildings here must have much better insulation.
In any case, for me it's certainly feasible to cover the electricity bill through solar panels. The only reason I haven't done it yet is that it is a rented apartment and frankly solar isn't really big in Denmark so it's not easy to get the parts. I know from the electricity company that our electricity usage is in the low end, but definitely not abnormal in Denmark. I just checked, for October we spent 147 kWh.
It sounds like you're spending most of your energy on cooling down the house? Maybe you need to investigate better insulation first?
Then it did its job, I think. It is probably intended to spur your interest, not really inform you.
Note that you are allowed to use your mouse to click through to the other information on that site. For instance, try clicking the link below in the blue box leading to their wiki. Plenty of information there.
100KWh per day! We use about 1900 KWh of electricity per year (I think heating is about 4000 KWh/year, this is in Denmark). Are you running a steel mill in your kitchen?
Not that I necessarily disagree with the conclusion (running Debian here:), but I don't think you can compare Red Hat and Windows Server licensing in that manner. It's not the same offerings. Red Hat has batteries included.
4 Insightful? Come on! No offense, but personal computing was going to happen, Jobs or Gates or not.
Sure, Jobs has made a difference by insisting on design all along (like it or not), and usability. No argument there.
AS400 happened in 1988 according to Wikipedia. My father had a Samsung IBM clone (Intel 8088 processor) with MSDOS before that. According to Wikipedia, the original IBM PC was introduced 1981. I don't think you have your facts straight.
Most IKEA buyers I've heard from seem to think it's quite durable (lasting 10 - 20 - 30 years). As I understand it, this is part of their success, selling okay stuff cheaply.
Maybe it's the other way around, you been trained by expensive furniture shops (that pay the same for their goods as IKEA but take a profit of 500-1000%) to think that cheap = shoddy?
I'm not an IKEA apologetic, don't like the style nor own any IKEA stuff, I just think this was a cheap shoddy shot.:)
Eh, you forgot that this does not have to be done by one country alone. Also, you seem to expect the price to stay the same when many of these industries are still in their infancy.
The truth is that nobody knows how all the problems will be solved yet because it is going to depend on what's most economical in the long run, which is hard to predict beforehand given advances in technology. For instance regarding storage tech: once you have a big lump of almost free surplus electricity, building some sort of energy storage plant can become a very lucrative business, buying energy when it is in surplus and almost free and selling it again later.
Of course, it will require advances in technology, but there are plenty of ideas out there just waiting for the market to show up.
Eh, I co-own a small business in Denmark. Maybe the rules are different in the US, but over here, if you actually spend the money say on an employee the same year you earn them, you don't have to pay tax on the them. Even if you spend them the year after, you can deduct the loss (if you have one, which is not likely if you earned 1 million dollars last year:) in future tax payments.
Are you sure about that? I don't know how it's like in America, but in Europe, bandwidth isn't really that expensive. For instance, here at Hetzner you can get 1 extra TB per month for app. 8 USD without any negotiations. That's about 0.16 USD for one 20 GB Blueray movie. I would imagine the royalties to the studios are much larger than that?
Slashdot Mirror
You drive the tech sector? The same idiots who said the iPhone and iPad would fail?
They will. We have just not gotten to that point yet. :-P
People, do yourself a favour and go watch the video. It does look pretty hilarious.
In some way, it reminds me of my 2-month old baby, actually.
What? Then how do you watch Monty Python?
Sounds nice, but I think the truth is that most people on non-db-server workloads don't really write a lot of random data in the first place. For them, start up speed is probably more important. I know it is to me. :)
That's because it doesn't do anything good for hard drives. There was a paper about it some years ago, I'm too lazy to google it up, but even 32 MB is too much (I think the sweet spot was around 2 MB).
If you think about it, it's not surprising, what good would it do that the disk cache in main memory managed by the OS didn't already do?
Large on-disk cache would only make sense if it was combined with a battery or something so you don't loose data on crashes.
Putting all your eggs in someone else's basket, one that is hosted God knows where, is an even worse idea.
But what if it turns out that it's much cheaper and less eggs break? :)
Of course, the other thing that can happen is that cloud infrastructure gets so mature that you can run your own cloud. Bonus points if runs in a peer-to-peer fashion without requiring maintenance of a server. Now that would be neat.
This sort of thinking is usually cured at the moment the pipe connects with the occipital bone while having your laptop/wallet/cellphone/car stolen.
Which is why civilized countries have a system of courts for determining punishment. Because somebody was clever enough to realize that feelings of revenge should not cloud a decision of imprisonment.
Some men are feral. Whether by choice (misanthropes) or training (via our welfare state) they are indeed primitive and irredeemable.
Actually, I think you're right. In Denmark where the maximum penalty is 14 years in prison (I believe), there is a special provision for lifetime prison for people who are judged to be too dangerous to let out. Even here, the case must reevaluated.
However, this is an extremely small minority. For the rest, this kind of thinking just makes it harder to turn the criminals into productive members of society.
Maybe it's just me, but if it provides the equivalent of a college text book, 49 USD actually sounds pretty cheap to me.
Of course, it's still more expensive than free. And they probably will get competition from free material in due time from people like you. Thank good for that. :)
I'm sorry but you just made all that up, didn't you?
Deserts are deserts because they are arid. That means they lack water. Why? Because it doesn't rain enough to sustain a high level of plant growth.
On a grand scale, deserts come and go because the rain patterns change. For instance, a mountain range may pop up and block the wet air so it releases the rain before reaching a spot in the mainland.
If you doubt this is true, grab a book on biology and read up on it yourself, I did that recently, very interesting stuff (my field is computer science).
Douglas Crockford has some weird recommendations that seem to come from him being bitten by evil hacks by a real nutjob once upon a time (maybe himself?). I don't think he represents the majority of Javascript programmers.
It's a bit like if you were in a C++ team and someone thought it would be fun to overload the + operator to do weird things on ints. Afterwards you're so scared that you go around advocating people use c_mathlibrary_plus(a, b) instead of using + since someone might have hacked the +. IMHO that's not relevant advice for most people.
Of course, some people think that languages where you can mess with things are evil. But it's not that easy. To take the operator overloading example: If you've ever tried expressing an algorithm involving lots of vector and matrix math in a language that doesn't allow overloading of operators, you'll see what I mean. It's true, of course, that most of the time you should stay far away from that sort of magic, and it's just plain stupid that C++ hints that frivolous operator overloading is okay by doing it in the standard I/O library.
Same thing with Javascript. The basic stuff will get you through 99.9% of the cases.
I think you have to be an American to think that it's fine to pay as much for waging wars as for social security in your own country.
You're right about the trade alliance. In fact, it's my impression that EU is mostly about trade laws, consumer protection and giving money to support local development and cross-European research, although the euro necessarily has some requirements on the economies of the member states. With Greece it's obvious now why those requirements are necessary. And of course there's some foreign policy involved too since it makes sense to gang up when you're trying to strong-arm other countries.
But the EU doesn't really decide how much you pay in tax, what the vast majority of that bucketload of money goes to, etc.
I think the current system works quite well. Trade laws really do benefit from being international. It makes for a more efficient society. It's too bad that some of the more strict laws here in the Nordic countries (e.g. regarding food additives) get overturned by EU directives, and that still a so large part of the EU budget goes to farming subsidies. But give and take some. I think giving up national parliaments for the sake of a cleaner model is a nonsensical goal. When I look at the city council meetings in the local county, people just happen to be much more practical and realistic when they're talking about their back yard.
From the article:
It also helps to be a girl. At Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, for example, only 14% of the computer science majors are women, so it's easier for female applicants to stand out from the pack. [...]
What kind of advice does that lead to?
"MISC NOTES FROM APPLICANT: He walks like a girl, swims like a girl and talks like a girl! Also he likes being called Ada!"
Well, Javascript is actually the language that's supposed to do the interactive stuff, that's why it was introduced in the first place. Note that the new tags come with a Javascript API for manipulating them. As I gather, Flash is based on a Javascript dialect to a certain extent.
If you actually bother looking around, I think you'll find there are lots of Javascript libraries out there these days for doing animations and widgets and all that sort of stuff. And many of them are actually quite elegant because the competition on the web is fierce.
It's true that there's not the all-encompassing huge class library, but you know what - some people actually think that's an improvement over the old toolkit line of thinking with a gazillion of classes that it can take many years to actually get to know. HTML is simpler. Sometimes less is more.
As a web app developer, the biggest problem IMHO for the web, aside for missing support for some things as mentioned by grandparent, is that the DOM is still not über responsive (usually the problem is not slow Javascript, but slow DOM updates). But the browser makers have started working on that through hardware acceleration.
Nobody wants to cut back on emissions in any meaningful way ...
In Denmark, we do. I think it's the same for several other European countries. Denmark supported wind power way back and as a result have the world's largest wind turbine company despite a population of only 5.5 mio. As I gather, their percent-wise market share has been dwindling over the last years, perhaps because the former government (2001-2011) killed most of publicly-supported home-market initiative out of what was probably ideological (libertarian) reasons.
EU has a goal of 30% of the energy usage from renewable sources in 2020 I think.
As demonstrated by the priest referred to above, the religious may also use facts, proof and logic. They just don't do so on religious matters, there they have articles of faith.
The last parts sounds wrong to me. As far as I'm aware, lots of logic, proving and what was thought to be facts has gone into theological thinking over the years, trying to reconcile apparent problems in say the bible. Especially back in the days by monks before the approach of the natural sciences (i.e. go out and study instead of sitting on you arse thinking up air castles) got more popular. Why do you think there are so many fractions within say Christianity?
Of course, here we're talking about people who studied and learned Latin and Greek and Hebrew, unlike some brain-washed morons of today who've never opened a book.
"A single computer powered on 24X7 would consume that much." - why would you have a 200 W computer turned on 24x7? I bought energy-conserving parts last time, the computer is probably on 8-12 hours a day. Lighting are all energy-efficient compact fluorescent bought before LEDs arrived. We cook with an electric stove every day. No cooling (except the fridge and freezer, both of which are relatively energy efficient :). Washing machine and tumble dryer aren't included, though, there's a common washing house 50 meters away.
Heating is through what is called remote heating in Denmark - there's a coal power plant not far away that provides heating from waste heat in a 50 km radius relatively cheap. That's why I quoted heating separately. For the record, it's a 85 sq meter apartment (that's about 900 sq ft as far as I can tell). According to Danish standards, I think the insulation level is medium. New buildings here must have much better insulation.
In any case, for me it's certainly feasible to cover the electricity bill through solar panels. The only reason I haven't done it yet is that it is a rented apartment and frankly solar isn't really big in Denmark so it's not easy to get the parts. I know from the electricity company that our electricity usage is in the low end, but definitely not abnormal in Denmark. I just checked, for October we spent 147 kWh.
It sounds like you're spending most of your energy on cooling down the house? Maybe you need to investigate better insulation first?
Then it did its job, I think. It is probably intended to spur your interest, not really inform you.
Note that you are allowed to use your mouse to click through to the other information on that site. For instance, try clicking the link below in the blue box leading to their wiki. Plenty of information there.
100KWh per day! We use about 1900 KWh of electricity per year (I think heating is about 4000 KWh/year, this is in Denmark). Are you running a steel mill in your kitchen?
Not that I necessarily disagree with the conclusion (running Debian here :), but I don't think you can compare Red Hat and Windows Server licensing in that manner. It's not the same offerings. Red Hat has batteries included.
4 Insightful? Come on! No offense, but personal computing was going to happen, Jobs or Gates or not.
Sure, Jobs has made a difference by insisting on design all along (like it or not), and usability. No argument there.
AS400 happened in 1988 according to Wikipedia. My father had a Samsung IBM clone (Intel 8088 processor) with MSDOS before that. According to Wikipedia, the original IBM PC was introduced 1981. I don't think you have your facts straight.
Why are they shoddy?
Most IKEA buyers I've heard from seem to think it's quite durable (lasting 10 - 20 - 30 years). As I understand it, this is part of their success, selling okay stuff cheaply.
Maybe it's the other way around, you been trained by expensive furniture shops (that pay the same for their goods as IKEA but take a profit of 500-1000%) to think that cheap = shoddy?
I'm not an IKEA apologetic, don't like the style nor own any IKEA stuff, I just think this was a cheap shoddy shot. :)
Eh, you forgot that this does not have to be done by one country alone. Also, you seem to expect the price to stay the same when many of these industries are still in their infancy.
The truth is that nobody knows how all the problems will be solved yet because it is going to depend on what's most economical in the long run, which is hard to predict beforehand given advances in technology. For instance regarding storage tech: once you have a big lump of almost free surplus electricity, building some sort of energy storage plant can become a very lucrative business, buying energy when it is in surplus and almost free and selling it again later.
Of course, it will require advances in technology, but there are plenty of ideas out there just waiting for the market to show up.
Eh, I co-own a small business in Denmark. Maybe the rules are different in the US, but over here, if you actually spend the money say on an employee the same year you earn them, you don't have to pay tax on the them. Even if you spend them the year after, you can deduct the loss (if you have one, which is not likely if you earned 1 million dollars last year :) in future tax payments.
Their costs are mostly on bandwidth...
Are you sure about that? I don't know how it's like in America, but in Europe, bandwidth isn't really that expensive. For instance, here at Hetzner you can get 1 extra TB per month for app. 8 USD without any negotiations. That's about 0.16 USD for one 20 GB Blueray movie. I would imagine the royalties to the studios are much larger than that?