Your property is either a) ridiculously small or b) you use too much energy.
I've already got proof of concept if I cover 1/2 of my roof and 1/2 of my garage roof I will be putting energy back onto the grid from sunup to sun down, enough of an offset that during the night my usage from the grid will not exceed what I put on the grid during the day. I will get a check every month and be self sufficient.
Granted, all of my light bulbs are florescent, I have gas water heater, dryer, stove/oven, and furnace. My greatest usage by far is in the summer with the AC. But even at peak, I'm only drawing 2500W. I can put 4kW of solar on the roof space I mentioned. Granted if these new cells have abysmal efficiency I'll have to put more up.
Unfortunately, at current cell prices it would cost me about 40k to do this (a 200W panel is ~$1000, so $10k/1kW). If the price really does come down to $1/Watt I can do it for ~4k. That is insanely attractive.
I don't have an overly large house (2200 sq ft not including the garage) or an overly large property (.1 acre lot). I have had 3 different solar installation companies give me quotes and do feasibility studies.
That article says the material they use can achieve UP TO 19.5%. That is a theoretical maximum. That will never actually be achieved by any cell using this material. So, they are getting less than 19.5%, and probably much less (I'd bet 10-12%).
First of all, nothing does well in a collision with an 18 wheeler. I saw an accident earlier this year where a range rover had its entire cabin area removed by an 18 wheeler. 18 wheelers will always kill people and completely maim cars when involved in accidents with passenger vehicles, unless we want like.5mpg tanks with 1ft of armor plating... even then I'd give the 18 wheeler a 50/50 shot.
It states in the article that this car passed government testing in a 45mph frontal offset collision. I don't know what other tests they've done, but it passed that one.
They also state that the side panels/doors all pass government testing. As for repairs the whole car is made of modular panels which can be snapped in place by 3 people. They say the panels are economical to produce, they don't state a price though... so it could be 5-10k to replace a panel, although I doubt it, cause they have more than 5 panels in the car, and they've gotta make money (26-29k won't make money if the panels alone cost 25k).
Obviously if you are in a serious enough accident that it bends the chassis, snapping these panels on will become much more arduous. I don't represent the company, I got all this information from the article, I can imagine that it will be expensive to repair after an accident, but so is every other car I've driven/seen. My brother was in a 15mph collision earlier this year, the damage to his subaru cost 9500 to repair. Incidentally this collision was with a semi truck...
didn't read the article did you! lol, yes it would be that hard. The reason this car is efficient is because it is a) light and b) extremely aerodynamic.
You cannot make "cars" that look like "cars" aerodynamic enough.
That being said, this thing is going on sale next year at 26-29k, I really think I might buy one. I'm spending ~$300/mo for gasoline, I'd gladly exchange that for a car payment at this point.
The 120 mile range would get me to work and back every day. It would be a problem for road trips but, I'd keep at least one gas powered car around for that...
I consider myself a pretty heavy user, I run multiple tabs (more than 5 always, more than 10 regularly) and normally multiple windows (2-3 each with 5-10 tabs) all day every day for work. I have never seen this abysmal memory performance people complain of.
When I open 5-10 tabs in 2-3 windows of IE I see the exact same memory consumption, same with Safari. By exact same they are all taking up 2-300MB of RAM, sure IE is a little better (maybe 1-3MB of ram per tab less than firefox) but it is nothing horrible.
I've never had my machine start swapping because of firefox. Granted, I do close all my browser windows at the end of the day, so max length of time open is ~8 hours. To see true memory leak behavior I'd probably need to keep the windows open much longer...
I'm sure some people have memory problems with firefox, I don't use very many extensions (firebug is pretty much the only one). But I really don't think firefox's memory problems are as widespread or severe as you are making them out to be.
I've been browsing in firefox for > 3 years exclusively, all three platforms (windows, linux, OSX).
I would simply ask, what other browser has memory profiling built in? Can you open a window in IE and kill a stray activeX process or see how much memory its using?!?
Opera doesn't provide these features either.
I don't think IE is threaded by tabs, I'm sure safari isn't. I guess I don't see where firefox is so massively behind the other browsers. It doesn't use an inordinate amount of RAM, it is comparable in speed to safari, IE and opera.
The very first one on the list for Dec is a whole in Adobe Flash Player, and on the page it lists an MS security advisory for the bug which says windows is vulnerable, AND its still not included in the count for MS bugs... Joke indeed
Every major tech development is on that list as most disappointing. Lets see, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, The entire security industry, the entire cell phone industry, the entire social networking space, the entire VoIP industry are all on the list. Google isn't on the list, probably only because they didn't really release a *New* product in 2007, if they had, they'd be right up there. Both Microsoft and Apple made the list twice, Microsoft for Office and Windows, Apple for OS X and the iPhone... I guess we'd all be happier if these companies had just sat on their thumbs this year?
This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?
The blurb is very misleading, this isn't about serving ads faster, or even about banner ads reporting their load times. It isn't about routing bottlenecks either, it is about distributed loads, and dynamic resource allocation on the server side.
The methodology used is this: you have a server farm, this server farm is serving up many different sites. Internal to the server farm is an "ad board" for lack of a better term. When Site A's load spikes it's dedicated server can post an ad to the "ad board" which other servers in the farm can see. Then, servers which are dedicated to other sites, but are basically sitting idle can pick up the ad, say "oh I can help out this site over here" and somehow join the load balancing cluster that is server Site A's content. If necessary, the second (and however many other servers) can also place an ad on the board, getting more and more servers included serving up Site A.
As Site A's traffic decreases, less and less servers will be needed, so they will stop posting ads, and fewer and fewer servers will be serving Site A.
This is about dynamically allocating resources across a large data center/cluster not serving ads on the internet or even about optimal routing of traffic on the internet, instead of having a single server dedicated to serving 1 site, you have many servers which dynamically based on load decide which sites to serve.
I find your argument at least somewhat misleading. I'm not a RoR fan, prefer Django, but this argument is the same in both.
I have worked on large J2EE projects and I absolutely hate going through other people's code in java, especially in a J2EE stack where you've got a class structure 15 layers deep, so you have to jump through 30 function calls to get back to the base class that is actually causing some problem, or which is actually performing the action. The whole J2EE system to me is completely over engineered and clunky. making changes is so horridly difficult as you have to understand exactly what this whole tree of classes is doing before you can safely make a change, and it seems like at least 90% of the class structure is just there to comply with the J2EE/EJB standards. Lots of busy work not much actual working code.
RoR and Django both induce much nicer code to read and understand. As I stated I've got more experience with Django, but I work daily with 3rd party django apps written by other people. It is trivially easy to look at the code, figure out what it is doing, and fix/extend/whatever. None of the J2EE apps I've worked with has had this property.
Now Django is probably a little more explicit than RoR. You actually define your model class members (as opposed to RoR which introspects this directly from the DB, the magic you mention). But, because all of this backend infrastructure type stuff is hidden from you, the only code you see is the code which is ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING. Whereas, in Java, you get to wade through thousands of lines of code that is doing absolutely nothing but keeping the environment happy.
well, I'm glad that you ruby guys have changed your recommended web server AGAIN! (from apache to nginx I guess?)
Seriously if I had deployed a production site on Rails 1 year ago, to stay current with the "recommended" solution I would have had to change my entire web architecture 4 times (apache+fcgi, lighttpd+fcgi, apache+mongrel, now nginx+mongrel). That my friend is the definition of instability.
Alternatively, I set up apache+mod_python 1 year ago... and what do you know, I haven't had to make any architecture changes or update anything in my production setup and it just keeps cranking along and its still the recommended solution. It is widely supported, well documented, and dead simple to set up (2 lines in httpd.conf)
yes, benchmarks are dangerous, sure, they aren't the end all be all. But it is widely accepted that python is faster than ruby. Sure YMMV and maybe your code sits perfectly in one of ruby's few sweet spots where it shines performance wise (by shines I mean it is almost as fast as python, and therefore almost useable). Besides these benchmarks which show 2-4 times speedups for python, I have seen other specific real world code benchmarks which show huge performance problems in Ruby (I'm talking 2 orders of magnitude 100x's speedups using python over Ruby). I've seen a few benchmarks where Ruby is at or slightly faster than python, but I've never seen a single benchmark that shows Ruby massively faster than Python, and I've seen many the other way around. I know that the next version of Ruby shows some improvements in performance, but I still prefer the django framework over rails. The database layer specifically is much more powerful and intuitive to me. Maybe Rails has improved since I dropped it 4 months ago, but Django does a much better job of fully supporting legacy databases. It doesn't mandate "build your DB this way or Rails won't be happy". Django's built in admin is scaffolding on steroids, with full on data validation built in automatically. It is true DRY as you build your model class and DB at the same time in the same file (as opposed to Rails where you build your database in a file, and then go to a different file to define validation and write convenience functions, and trust rails to introspect your DB to build your models). Rails had as of 4 months ago nothing that could touch Django's newforms library which makes building and validating HTML forms a dream and a breeze.
Maybe I'm retarded, probably I am, but I don't want to be learning/implementing a new web architecture every 3 months. I don't want to be beating my head against some brain dead "convention" when a properly set up "configuration" system will more powerfully and flexibly achieve the same thing. I don't like the way Rails tries to dictate the end all be all of project design. Sometimes the right choice is to cut a corner or not explicitly follow MVC. With Rails I constantly felt like if I wanted to do something differently or in any way strayed from the "Hansson way" that I was in a narrow canyon with 500ft shear cliffs on either side. With Django those walls are gone. Sure, everything I write might not be the best, and maybe I make some bad decisions, but, on the whole, I can get more done, and I can refactor things and get things into a sane setup when the need arises. In rails you do it right or you don't do it, which is great if all your coders are braindead monkeys, but if you're just trying to prototype something in a hurry, I don't want to have to explicitly follow MVC to a T, I want to get something up in front of the customer ASAP.
I'm not surprised that there is a more performant solution, my point was simply that a workable production environment is very easy to set up using standard things that are installed on almost any linux server.
In rails, a production server MEANS jumping through hoops and compiling things and testing, and having things totally broken for days... At least this was my experience.
My main reason for endorsing apache+mod_python is because I know apache pretty much inside and out, I've spent 10 years working with apache web servers, I understand apache. I haven't spent the time to feel comfortable with lighttpd. As I said, I'm sure there is a more performant solution, but there is a basic production level setup that is a couple of apache config lines away. You can't find that in Rails.
Sure the wind doesn't stop everywhere at once. You propose putting a turbine every 50 feet all over the country to be able to *ALWAYS* provide enough power no matter where the wind is blowing? As the GP stated, you'd need 3600 turbines to replace a single nuke plant. That is a lot of turbines and will require A WHOLE LOT more land than a nuke plant. Land is expensive and scarce, especially land in accessible mountain passes (you need accessible to be able to reach and maintain the turbines, and mountain passes generally provide the best wind conditions), unfortunately accessible mountain passes are either a) highly sought after for vacation properties and therefore very expensive or b) protected by environmentalists hence building a big wind farm there is right out.
That is the problem, there are only a few places where the wind blows nearly constantly, even then it isn't *CONSTANT* not like a nuclear plant or coal fired plant. Even if the wind *SLOWS DOWN* the production from the turbines will decrease. If it stops raining that doesn't stop or slow down a hydro-electric plant because hyrdo plants are built on BIG rivers that don't stop flowing (or even noticeably decrease in volume) without a LARGE drought over many months or years.
Your original argument was that a single turbine could replace a single oil well in energy extracted. GP's point was that it doesn't make any sense to compare the energy from a barrel of oil to the energy produced from a single turbine because we don't use oil to produce electricity. How many wind turbines do you need to replace the energy from a single large coal mine? The average coal mine? How many do you need to replace a single nat gas production facility? How many do you need to replace a single nuke plant? Those are appropriate questions whose answers may be relevant.
I don't think RoR has scalability issues. People say it does, but scaling isn't the issue, it is raw performance that is lacking. And, it isn't Ruby on Rails fault, it is simply Ruby. the Ruby interpreter is slow (2-5 times slower than perl, php, or python interpreters (its about 50-100 times slower than java or c++, but then so are the rest of the interpreted languages).
That being said, a RoR application will need 2-5 times the power behind it to serve the same number of users that a perl, python, or PHP app can handle.
Sure you can set up a RoR app in a cluster and you can make it scale, just like you can with a perl, php, python, java, or c++ app. You're just going to have to do it much sooner with RoR because of the performance issues of the ruby interpreter.
Obviously this isn't an exhaustive comparision, but over at the language benchmark game http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/, there isn't a single benchmark where ruby is faster than python, perl, or php that I could find.
Re:I guess they didn't fix the scalability issues
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Ruby on Rails 2.0 is Done
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I prefer django over RoR hands down. I drank the RoR cool aid about 8 months ago, started working on a couple projects... after the initial "oh wow, that was easy to get started" RoR got significantly more difficult, I didn't find the documentation particularly helpful, and things that I thought intuitively would work and made sense were "not allowed" because the RoR conventions forbade them.
Enter django. Wow, all the power, none of the "Hansson said this is how it should be, so no other way is possible" handcuffs.
To me django is a much better designed framework, it has in my opinion a much more powerful database abstraction layer, it is more intuitive too. working in Rails for > 4 months I still had to look up the syntax for doing activerecord queries every single time. django's query syntax just makes sense to me, and is much more intuitive. And what can I say, I've never enjoyed making HTML forms more than using the newforms library that builds them for you (oh yeah, and validates them for you, and marshals form input into objects automatically...).
Also, the simplicity of setting up a production django server is so much easier than RoR. Sure, once you start having lots of traffic, building a fully scalable system is probably going to be similar. But to set up a single server for a low traffic site, or a small company intranet, apache+mod_python is great. mod_ruby has huge performance issues, ror+fastcgi in apache is atrocious, mongrel can be ok.. but then you still have to set up apache in front of it, and its not a simple apache set up as you have to configure all the proxy stuff...
Besides the fact that python is ~10 times faster than ruby (just at the interpreter level) and you've got yourself a nice little powerful system with django.
Maybe once django hits version 1.0 they'll get a bit more hype, but I've actually seen more posts on this story saying "check out django" than I've seen people saying they absolutely love rails.
Check out django. As that article mentions MVC efforts can become overly restrictive very easily. If you ask me, Ruby on Rails has already crossed that line. django is mvc as well so someday might go down this path, but it hasn't yet.
django provides all of the ease of Ruby on Rails, it is powerful, it provides even more tools than Ruby on Rails in my opinion specifically for web work. And I don't feel like I have handcuffs on when I'm developing in it.
I started building 2 projects in Ruby on Rails ~8 months ago. These were existing PHP systems which had become overly cumbersome and were in serious need of a redesign/rewrite. Rails seemed to provide everything I needed, began porting... got about 30% done and started running into serious roadblocks that were there by design in Rails.... I aborted the porting, and started looking for another framework, found django... the 2 projects are now 100% ported (took less than 1 month each).
django was also significantly easier to set up for production than my experiences with rails (apache? lighthttpd? mongrel? the recommended web server for rails changes every week...) modpython+apache is dead simple to set up and rock solid (apache+rails requires fastcgi which was constantly crashing, unstable, and basically doesn't work)
obviously I'll get flamed for this as RoR has way too many fanboys, but as far as a concise, powerful, well documented, easy to use, flexible, and enjoyable development experience nothing gets close to the last 2-3 months working with django.
This guy cannot possibly infringe on a patent because he doesn't actually produce anything. So Apple, MS, IBM can have millions of patents and they wouldn't be able to use them defensively here.
I find that reformatting does increase speed dramatically. After a reformat and clean install of all of the software I use on a daily basis, my windows pc runs much faster. The problem comes through testing. I install and then uninstall a lot of software (probably 2-3 apps a week). I don't run a lot of software on my PC, but I do install things for 2-3 days to test them, and at least 95% of that software I uninstall almost immediately. Unfortunately in windows uninstalling does not remove all pieces of an application, and over time the cruft and left over crap cripples the computer.
we'll agree to disagree, I abhor vista as well (used it for about a week). I still use windows and know the system, I just have found more reliability from my mac, and it lets me get more work done (like writing long posts on slashdot)
I'm sorry if I come across as a mac fanboy, I wasn't a computer user in the IIe/original mac days (well they had some macs at my elementary school...).
I'm much more frustrated by Microsoft's recent attitude and tactics. I have horror stories about support from HP, Dell, IBM, and Apple. No computer company is perfect. In fact generally hardware support I equate with telecom companies, they all suck, if the hardware breaks, you're screwed.
My favorite ( not a hardware problem, just my favorite dell horror story) a small company I support purchased 5 new Dell PCs, the PCs showed up with no OS installed (should have winxp pro) pull the hard drives and put them in a running PC nothing shows up on the drives, not formatted, no partitions, nothing. No OS install CDs in the box, call Dell give them the support tag, Dell says "those PCs are still in our assembly plant". Took about 10 hours of phone calls over 3 days to actually convince them we actually had the PCs in our possession, and that they were shipped from Dell. In fact during most of this time they were accusing us of stealing the PCs from their plant somehow. Then another 5 hours and 2 days to get them to agree to pay for shipping back to the factory and out to us again... Dell would only agree to ground shipping (even though they paid for overnight on the original order), so a week and a half later, we finally got the PCs back in working order.
I will say in 14 years of IT support, network admin, and software development, 13 using PCs and windows and 1 using OSX on a powerbook I'm much more satisfied in the last year. I spend so much less time messing with my own computer issues now, I turn on my computer, it boots up, Connects to wireless networks flawlessly, I install software, uninstall it, fill up the hard drive, delete things, write code, test it, blow things up in general... the thing just keeps running. I recently went 12 months without reformatting/reinstalling (clean install with 10.5). That is a record for me, my windows boxes rarely made it past 6 months before they were so slow and registry bloated that they couldn't operate. I'm sure if my hard drive crashes or my motherboard dies, I'll be dealing with incompetent customer service reps and it will be a headache, but I've accepted that as part of dealing with computers in general, just like dealing with the phone company is never a pleasant experience.
How is iTunes crippled? If you're referring to DRM how is windows media player any better? Granted, I don't do much but rip my CDs and listen to MP3s in it... I don't buy music or video from the iTunes music store... but it seems much less crippled than windows media player.
In short, Apple isn't perfect, but they are way better than MS. Is their hardware fool proof? No its all built by the same people in Taiwan and China. A macbook has the same parts as a Dell. Your original post raised concerns about OS X, in your rebuttal to my post you don't mention OS X once... You mention a hardware problem (bad mobo) and a business decision made in the early 80's.
My question is what does MS have to do to piss you off and get you off their platform forever? And when that happens where will you turn? Since apparently in your world once a company makes a single mistake they are blacklisted for life, how do you still receive services from any companies? Or, alternatively, can you provide me your list of "perfect" companies that have never made a mistake? I'd like to get service from as many of those companies as possible.
how did you suffer badly *many* years ago from OSX its only been out for 6 years, I wouldn't say that is many, and even then it was 10.0, so of course it sucked. Apple's "tactics" hurt you as a child?! wow, that's funny that you were scarred for life by a computer company's tactics when you were 6.
It states that the brown 30GB zune is on sale for $134, and that it is at the top of the amazon list. However on amazon's site, it is currently 14th on the list of top sellers and is priced at $189.
The best selling zune is the 80GB for $248.99 it is in 9th place, behind almost every ipod model available. Of the top 10 sellers 7 are ipods, and 9 and 10 are 2 of the non-ipod players. that means 7 of the top 8 are ipods.
I don't know how you can call this "real competition" or even "a" competition.
I gladly would join you, however, my only choice for internet is comcast. Qwest refuses to invest in a DSLAM for my CO... so No DSL, my community refuses to invest in the local community fiber project, so no FTTH, wireless just plain sucks all around... So its comcast or no internet for me.
I plugged in my usb hard drive, it said "do you want to use it for time machine" I said "yes" and it started backing up. Maybe if you're trying to do something advanced the config isn't as intuitive, but from the trips I've taken through the settings for time machine it doesn't seem like there is much to configure except how often it backs up and selecting files to backup.
When I reinstalled (to de-select a few options in the install, and do a clean install instead of an upgrade), it asked "do you want to restore something from a time machine backup" I said "yes" I plugged in the drive, selected what I wanted and it restored all my files, music, and amazingly enough to me all of my apps, it took less than 10 minutes to restore ~30GB of data and apps... I've never had a cleaner backup restore in my life.
Granted I haven't used vista's "image" based backup, and maybe that is just as slick, but somehow I think I could take my time machine backup and restore it to a completely new machine, and I'd be willing to bet just about anything that vista's "image" would blue screen on a new pc. At the very least it would be completely disabled until I called MS and got it to register again.
I've used every version of windows built in backup (except Vista), veritas, an emc backup system... None of them could restore APPLICATIONS to the hard drive. I'm sure the registry has something to do with that, and maybe this "image" backup in vista is really slick... But I won't go through the pain of the rest of Vista to find out. Also I've never found any backup software to be "easy" or "intuitive" to set up properly. I would argue that is a main reason why so many PCs go without backups.
Don't get me wrong, Leopard is not a perfect OS, I have had some stability issues, gmail seemed to invariably crash firefox before the.1 release, I've seen a few more app crashes than usual. I have not had a complete system crash. I am running firefox 3 beta, other than that I pretty much run production ready software not all the crazy beta and alpha stuff he lists in his article. Apple will have 10.5.2 released in short order I'm sure, and it will fix more issues.
Comparing Leopard to Vista really isn't too smart I don't think though. I tried to use Vista for a week, it was so entirely painful I went back to XP. I don't have time to relearn where every setting in the entire OS is located now. While a couple things changed from Tiger to Leopard, I haven't felt lost once. Really his complaints (aside from the stability issue) seem like a huge stretch to me, yeah the blue dots aren't as clear as the black arrows, but comparing that to "we changed 2 clicks to 12 to change your IP address" is just not in the same league. OSs shouldn't crash, and its unfortunate that leopard isn't the best platform for alpha testing software yet, it will be in less than 6 months.
I've gone through every version of OS X since 10.1... its been the same each time, 10.1-4.0 were all much less stable once they get to 10.x.3-4 though everything settles down and it is rock solid. All in all, since about 10.4.4 I have been about 90% mac and 10% windows user, Leopard has not changed that usage pattern, and its not going to.
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Your property is either a) ridiculously small or b) you use too much energy.
I've already got proof of concept if I cover 1/2 of my roof and 1/2 of my garage roof I will be putting energy back onto the grid from sunup to sun down, enough of an offset that during the night my usage from the grid will not exceed what I put on the grid during the day. I will get a check every month and be self sufficient.
Granted, all of my light bulbs are florescent, I have gas water heater, dryer, stove/oven, and furnace. My greatest usage by far is in the summer with the AC. But even at peak, I'm only drawing 2500W. I can put 4kW of solar on the roof space I mentioned. Granted if these new cells have abysmal efficiency I'll have to put more up.
Unfortunately, at current cell prices it would cost me about 40k to do this (a 200W panel is ~$1000, so $10k/1kW). If the price really does come down to $1/Watt I can do it for ~4k. That is insanely attractive.
I don't have an overly large house (2200 sq ft not including the garage) or an overly large property (.1 acre lot). I have had 3 different solar installation companies give me quotes and do feasibility studies.
That article says the material they use can achieve UP TO 19.5%. That is a theoretical maximum. That will never actually be achieved by any cell using this material. So, they are getting less than 19.5%, and probably much less (I'd bet 10-12%).
First of all, nothing does well in a collision with an 18 wheeler. I saw an accident earlier this year where a range rover had its entire cabin area removed by an 18 wheeler. 18 wheelers will always kill people and completely maim cars when involved in accidents with passenger vehicles, unless we want like .5mpg tanks with 1ft of armor plating... even then I'd give the 18 wheeler a 50/50 shot.
It states in the article that this car passed government testing in a 45mph frontal offset collision. I don't know what other tests they've done, but it passed that one.
They also state that the side panels/doors all pass government testing. As for repairs the whole car is made of modular panels which can be snapped in place by 3 people. They say the panels are economical to produce, they don't state a price though... so it could be 5-10k to replace a panel, although I doubt it, cause they have more than 5 panels in the car, and they've gotta make money (26-29k won't make money if the panels alone cost 25k).
Obviously if you are in a serious enough accident that it bends the chassis, snapping these panels on will become much more arduous. I don't represent the company, I got all this information from the article, I can imagine that it will be expensive to repair after an accident, but so is every other car I've driven/seen. My brother was in a 15mph collision earlier this year, the damage to his subaru cost 9500 to repair. Incidentally this collision was with a semi truck...
didn't read the article did you! lol, yes it would be that hard. The reason this car is efficient is because it is a) light and b) extremely aerodynamic.
You cannot make "cars" that look like "cars" aerodynamic enough.
That being said, this thing is going on sale next year at 26-29k, I really think I might buy one. I'm spending ~$300/mo for gasoline, I'd gladly exchange that for a car payment at this point.
The 120 mile range would get me to work and back every day. It would be a problem for road trips but, I'd keep at least one gas powered car around for that...
I consider myself a pretty heavy user, I run multiple tabs (more than 5 always, more than 10 regularly) and normally multiple windows (2-3 each with 5-10 tabs) all day every day for work. I have never seen this abysmal memory performance people complain of.
When I open 5-10 tabs in 2-3 windows of IE I see the exact same memory consumption, same with Safari. By exact same they are all taking up 2-300MB of RAM, sure IE is a little better (maybe 1-3MB of ram per tab less than firefox) but it is nothing horrible.
I've never had my machine start swapping because of firefox. Granted, I do close all my browser windows at the end of the day, so max length of time open is ~8 hours. To see true memory leak behavior I'd probably need to keep the windows open much longer...
I'm sure some people have memory problems with firefox, I don't use very many extensions (firebug is pretty much the only one). But I really don't think firefox's memory problems are as widespread or severe as you are making them out to be.
I've been browsing in firefox for > 3 years exclusively, all three platforms (windows, linux, OSX).
I would simply ask, what other browser has memory profiling built in? Can you open a window in IE and kill a stray activeX process or see how much memory its using?!?
Opera doesn't provide these features either.
I don't think IE is threaded by tabs, I'm sure safari isn't. I guess I don't see where firefox is so massively behind the other browsers. It doesn't use an inordinate amount of RAM, it is comparable in speed to safari, IE and opera.
wrong, this is the "Embrace" stage... extend and destroy comes next.
The very first one on the list for Dec is a whole in Adobe Flash Player, and on the page it lists an MS security advisory for the bug which says windows is vulnerable, AND its still not included in the count for MS bugs... Joke indeed
Every major tech development is on that list as most disappointing. Lets see, Amazon, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, The entire security industry, the entire cell phone industry, the entire social networking space, the entire VoIP industry are all on the list. Google isn't on the list, probably only because they didn't really release a *New* product in 2007, if they had, they'd be right up there. Both Microsoft and Apple made the list twice, Microsoft for Office and Windows, Apple for OS X and the iPhone... I guess we'd all be happier if these companies had just sat on their thumbs this year?
This list is just bizarre, what are their top 10 products of 07?
The blurb is very misleading, this isn't about serving ads faster, or even about banner ads reporting their load times. It isn't about routing bottlenecks either, it is about distributed loads, and dynamic resource allocation on the server side.
The methodology used is this:
you have a server farm, this server farm is serving up many different sites. Internal to the server farm is an "ad board" for lack of a better term. When Site A's load spikes it's dedicated server can post an ad to the "ad board" which other servers in the farm can see. Then, servers which are dedicated to other sites, but are basically sitting idle can pick up the ad, say "oh I can help out this site over here" and somehow join the load balancing cluster that is server Site A's content. If necessary, the second (and however many other servers) can also place an ad on the board, getting more and more servers included serving up Site A.
As Site A's traffic decreases, less and less servers will be needed, so they will stop posting ads, and fewer and fewer servers will be serving Site A.
This is about dynamically allocating resources across a large data center/cluster not serving ads on the internet or even about optimal routing of traffic on the internet, instead of having a single server dedicated to serving 1 site, you have many servers which dynamically based on load decide which sites to serve.
I find your argument at least somewhat misleading. I'm not a RoR fan, prefer Django, but this argument is the same in both.
I have worked on large J2EE projects and I absolutely hate going through other people's code in java, especially in a J2EE stack where you've got a class structure 15 layers deep, so you have to jump through 30 function calls to get back to the base class that is actually causing some problem, or which is actually performing the action. The whole J2EE system to me is completely over engineered and clunky. making changes is so horridly difficult as you have to understand exactly what this whole tree of classes is doing before you can safely make a change, and it seems like at least 90% of the class structure is just there to comply with the J2EE/EJB standards. Lots of busy work not much actual working code.
RoR and Django both induce much nicer code to read and understand. As I stated I've got more experience with Django, but I work daily with 3rd party django apps written by other people. It is trivially easy to look at the code, figure out what it is doing, and fix/extend/whatever. None of the J2EE apps I've worked with has had this property.
Now Django is probably a little more explicit than RoR. You actually define your model class members (as opposed to RoR which introspects this directly from the DB, the magic you mention). But, because all of this backend infrastructure type stuff is hidden from you, the only code you see is the code which is ACTUALLY DOING SOMETHING. Whereas, in Java, you get to wade through thousands of lines of code that is doing absolutely nothing but keeping the environment happy.
well, I'm glad that you ruby guys have changed your recommended web server AGAIN! (from apache to nginx I guess?)
Seriously if I had deployed a production site on Rails 1 year ago, to stay current with the "recommended" solution I would have had to change my entire web architecture 4 times (apache+fcgi, lighttpd+fcgi, apache+mongrel, now nginx+mongrel). That my friend is the definition of instability.
Alternatively, I set up apache+mod_python 1 year ago... and what do you know, I haven't had to make any architecture changes or update anything in my production setup and it just keeps cranking along and its still the recommended solution. It is widely supported, well documented, and dead simple to set up (2 lines in httpd.conf)
yes, benchmarks are dangerous, sure, they aren't the end all be all. But it is widely accepted that python is faster than ruby. Sure YMMV and maybe your code sits perfectly in one of ruby's few sweet spots where it shines performance wise (by shines I mean it is almost as fast as python, and therefore almost useable). Besides these benchmarks which show 2-4 times speedups for python, I have seen other specific real world code benchmarks which show huge performance problems in Ruby (I'm talking 2 orders of magnitude 100x's speedups using python over Ruby). I've seen a few benchmarks where Ruby is at or slightly faster than python, but I've never seen a single benchmark that shows Ruby massively faster than Python, and I've seen many the other way around. I know that the next version of Ruby shows some improvements in performance, but I still prefer the django framework over rails. The database layer specifically is much more powerful and intuitive to me. Maybe Rails has improved since I dropped it 4 months ago, but Django does a much better job of fully supporting legacy databases. It doesn't mandate "build your DB this way or Rails won't be happy". Django's built in admin is scaffolding on steroids, with full on data validation built in automatically. It is true DRY as you build your model class and DB at the same time in the same file (as opposed to Rails where you build your database in a file, and then go to a different file to define validation and write convenience functions, and trust rails to introspect your DB to build your models). Rails had as of 4 months ago nothing that could touch Django's newforms library which makes building and validating HTML forms a dream and a breeze.
Maybe I'm retarded, probably I am, but I don't want to be learning/implementing a new web architecture every 3 months. I don't want to be beating my head against some brain dead "convention" when a properly set up "configuration" system will more powerfully and flexibly achieve the same thing. I don't like the way Rails tries to dictate the end all be all of project design. Sometimes the right choice is to cut a corner or not explicitly follow MVC. With Rails I constantly felt like if I wanted to do something differently or in any way strayed from the "Hansson way" that I was in a narrow canyon with 500ft shear cliffs on either side. With Django those walls are gone. Sure, everything I write might not be the best, and maybe I make some bad decisions, but, on the whole, I can get more done, and I can refactor things and get things into a sane setup when the need arises. In rails you do it right or you don't do it, which is great if all your coders are braindead monkeys, but if you're just trying to prototype something in a hurry, I don't want to have to explicitly follow MVC to a T, I want to get something up in front of the customer ASAP.
I'm not surprised that there is a more performant solution, my point was simply that a workable production environment is very easy to set up using standard things that are installed on almost any linux server.
In rails, a production server MEANS jumping through hoops and compiling things and testing, and having things totally broken for days... At least this was my experience.
My main reason for endorsing apache+mod_python is because I know apache pretty much inside and out, I've spent 10 years working with apache web servers, I understand apache. I haven't spent the time to feel comfortable with lighttpd. As I said, I'm sure there is a more performant solution, but there is a basic production level setup that is a couple of apache config lines away. You can't find that in Rails.
Sure the wind doesn't stop everywhere at once. You propose putting a turbine every 50 feet all over the country to be able to *ALWAYS* provide enough power no matter where the wind is blowing? As the GP stated, you'd need 3600 turbines to replace a single nuke plant. That is a lot of turbines and will require A WHOLE LOT more land than a nuke plant. Land is expensive and scarce, especially land in accessible mountain passes (you need accessible to be able to reach and maintain the turbines, and mountain passes generally provide the best wind conditions), unfortunately accessible mountain passes are either a) highly sought after for vacation properties and therefore very expensive or b) protected by environmentalists hence building a big wind farm there is right out.
That is the problem, there are only a few places where the wind blows nearly constantly, even then it isn't *CONSTANT* not like a nuclear plant or coal fired plant. Even if the wind *SLOWS DOWN* the production from the turbines will decrease. If it stops raining that doesn't stop or slow down a hydro-electric plant because hyrdo plants are built on BIG rivers that don't stop flowing (or even noticeably decrease in volume) without a LARGE drought over many months or years.
Your original argument was that a single turbine could replace a single oil well in energy extracted. GP's point was that it doesn't make any sense to compare the energy from a barrel of oil to the energy produced from a single turbine because we don't use oil to produce electricity. How many wind turbines do you need to replace the energy from a single large coal mine? The average coal mine? How many do you need to replace a single nat gas production facility? How many do you need to replace a single nuke plant? Those are appropriate questions whose answers may be relevant.
I don't think RoR has scalability issues. People say it does, but scaling isn't the issue, it is raw performance that is lacking. And, it isn't Ruby on Rails fault, it is simply Ruby. the Ruby interpreter is slow (2-5 times slower than perl, php, or python interpreters (its about 50-100 times slower than java or c++, but then so are the rest of the interpreted languages).
That being said, a RoR application will need 2-5 times the power behind it to serve the same number of users that a perl, python, or PHP app can handle.
Sure you can set up a RoR app in a cluster and you can make it scale, just like you can with a perl, php, python, java, or c++ app. You're just going to have to do it much sooner with RoR because of the performance issues of the ruby interpreter.
Obviously this isn't an exhaustive comparision, but over at the language benchmark game http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/, there isn't a single benchmark where ruby is faster than python, perl, or php that I could find.
I prefer django over RoR hands down. I drank the RoR cool aid about 8 months ago, started working on a couple projects... after the initial "oh wow, that was easy to get started" RoR got significantly more difficult, I didn't find the documentation particularly helpful, and things that I thought intuitively would work and made sense were "not allowed" because the RoR conventions forbade them.
Enter django. Wow, all the power, none of the "Hansson said this is how it should be, so no other way is possible" handcuffs.
To me django is a much better designed framework, it has in my opinion a much more powerful database abstraction layer, it is more intuitive too. working in Rails for > 4 months I still had to look up the syntax for doing activerecord queries every single time. django's query syntax just makes sense to me, and is much more intuitive. And what can I say, I've never enjoyed making HTML forms more than using the newforms library that builds them for you (oh yeah, and validates them for you, and marshals form input into objects automatically...).
Also, the simplicity of setting up a production django server is so much easier than RoR. Sure, once you start having lots of traffic, building a fully scalable system is probably going to be similar. But to set up a single server for a low traffic site, or a small company intranet, apache+mod_python is great. mod_ruby has huge performance issues, ror+fastcgi in apache is atrocious, mongrel can be ok.. but then you still have to set up apache in front of it, and its not a simple apache set up as you have to configure all the proxy stuff...
Besides the fact that python is ~10 times faster than ruby (just at the interpreter level) and you've got yourself a nice little powerful system with django.
Maybe once django hits version 1.0 they'll get a bit more hype, but I've actually seen more posts on this story saying "check out django" than I've seen people saying they absolutely love rails.
Check out django. As that article mentions MVC efforts can become overly restrictive very easily. If you ask me, Ruby on Rails has already crossed that line. django is mvc as well so someday might go down this path, but it hasn't yet.
django provides all of the ease of Ruby on Rails, it is powerful, it provides even more tools than Ruby on Rails in my opinion specifically for web work. And I don't feel like I have handcuffs on when I'm developing in it.
I started building 2 projects in Ruby on Rails ~8 months ago. These were existing PHP systems which had become overly cumbersome and were in serious need of a redesign/rewrite. Rails seemed to provide everything I needed, began porting... got about 30% done and started running into serious roadblocks that were there by design in Rails.... I aborted the porting, and started looking for another framework, found django... the 2 projects are now 100% ported (took less than 1 month each).
django was also significantly easier to set up for production than my experiences with rails (apache? lighthttpd? mongrel? the recommended web server for rails changes every week...) modpython+apache is dead simple to set up and rock solid (apache+rails requires fastcgi which was constantly crashing, unstable, and basically doesn't work)
obviously I'll get flamed for this as RoR has way too many fanboys, but as far as a concise, powerful, well documented, easy to use, flexible, and enjoyable development experience nothing gets close to the last 2-3 months working with django.
A defensive patent would do nothing in this case.
This guy cannot possibly infringe on a patent because he doesn't actually produce anything. So Apple, MS, IBM can have millions of patents and they wouldn't be able to use them defensively here.
I find that reformatting does increase speed dramatically. After a reformat and clean install of all of the software I use on a daily basis, my windows pc runs much faster. The problem comes through testing. I install and then uninstall a lot of software (probably 2-3 apps a week). I don't run a lot of software on my PC, but I do install things for 2-3 days to test them, and at least 95% of that software I uninstall almost immediately. Unfortunately in windows uninstalling does not remove all pieces of an application, and over time the cruft and left over crap cripples the computer.
we'll agree to disagree, I abhor vista as well (used it for about a week). I still use windows and know the system, I just have found more reliability from my mac, and it lets me get more work done (like writing long posts on slashdot)
I'm sorry if I come across as a mac fanboy, I wasn't a computer user in the IIe/original mac days (well they had some macs at my elementary school...).
I'm much more frustrated by Microsoft's recent attitude and tactics. I have horror stories about support from HP, Dell, IBM, and Apple. No computer company is perfect. In fact generally hardware support I equate with telecom companies, they all suck, if the hardware breaks, you're screwed.
My favorite ( not a hardware problem, just my favorite dell horror story) a small company I support purchased 5 new Dell PCs, the PCs showed up with no OS installed (should have winxp pro) pull the hard drives and put them in a running PC nothing shows up on the drives, not formatted, no partitions, nothing. No OS install CDs in the box, call Dell give them the support tag, Dell says "those PCs are still in our assembly plant". Took about 10 hours of phone calls over 3 days to actually convince them we actually had the PCs in our possession, and that they were shipped from Dell. In fact during most of this time they were accusing us of stealing the PCs from their plant somehow. Then another 5 hours and 2 days to get them to agree to pay for shipping back to the factory and out to us again... Dell would only agree to ground shipping (even though they paid for overnight on the original order), so a week and a half later, we finally got the PCs back in working order.
I will say in 14 years of IT support, network admin, and software development, 13 using PCs and windows and 1 using OSX on a powerbook I'm much more satisfied in the last year. I spend so much less time messing with my own computer issues now, I turn on my computer, it boots up, Connects to wireless networks flawlessly, I install software, uninstall it, fill up the hard drive, delete things, write code, test it, blow things up in general... the thing just keeps running. I recently went 12 months without reformatting/reinstalling (clean install with 10.5). That is a record for me, my windows boxes rarely made it past 6 months before they were so slow and registry bloated that they couldn't operate. I'm sure if my hard drive crashes or my motherboard dies, I'll be dealing with incompetent customer service reps and it will be a headache, but I've accepted that as part of dealing with computers in general, just like dealing with the phone company is never a pleasant experience.
How is iTunes crippled? If you're referring to DRM how is windows media player any better? Granted, I don't do much but rip my CDs and listen to MP3s in it... I don't buy music or video from the iTunes music store... but it seems much less crippled than windows media player.
In short, Apple isn't perfect, but they are way better than MS. Is their hardware fool proof? No its all built by the same people in Taiwan and China. A macbook has the same parts as a Dell. Your original post raised concerns about OS X, in your rebuttal to my post you don't mention OS X once... You mention a hardware problem (bad mobo) and a business decision made in the early 80's.
My question is what does MS have to do to piss you off and get you off their platform forever? And when that happens where will you turn? Since apparently in your world once a company makes a single mistake they are blacklisted for life, how do you still receive services from any companies? Or, alternatively, can you provide me your list of "perfect" companies that have never made a mistake? I'd like to get service from as many of those companies as possible.
how did you suffer badly *many* years ago from OSX its only been out for 6 years, I wouldn't say that is many, and even then it was 10.0, so of course it sucked. Apple's "tactics" hurt you as a child?! wow, that's funny that you were scarred for life by a computer company's tactics when you were 6.
It states that the brown 30GB zune is on sale for $134, and that it is at the top of the amazon list. However on amazon's site, it is currently 14th on the list of top sellers and is priced at $189.
The best selling zune is the 80GB for $248.99 it is in 9th place, behind almost every ipod model available. Of the top 10 sellers 7 are ipods, and 9 and 10 are 2 of the non-ipod players. that means 7 of the top 8 are ipods.
I don't know how you can call this "real competition" or even "a" competition.
Only the TELCOMS have/need common carrier status.
Cable companies don't get that.
I gladly would join you, however, my only choice for internet is comcast. Qwest refuses to invest in a DSLAM for my CO... so No DSL, my community refuses to invest in the local community fiber project, so no FTTH, wireless just plain sucks all around... So its comcast or no internet for me.
I plugged in my usb hard drive, it said "do you want to use it for time machine" I said "yes" and it started backing up. Maybe if you're trying to do something advanced the config isn't as intuitive, but from the trips I've taken through the settings for time machine it doesn't seem like there is much to configure except how often it backs up and selecting files to backup.
.1 release, I've seen a few more app crashes than usual. I have not had a complete system crash. I am running firefox 3 beta, other than that I pretty much run production ready software not all the crazy beta and alpha stuff he lists in his article. Apple will have 10.5.2 released in short order I'm sure, and it will fix more issues.
When I reinstalled (to de-select a few options in the install, and do a clean install instead of an upgrade), it asked "do you want to restore something from a time machine backup" I said "yes" I plugged in the drive, selected what I wanted and it restored all my files, music, and amazingly enough to me all of my apps, it took less than 10 minutes to restore ~30GB of data and apps... I've never had a cleaner backup restore in my life.
Granted I haven't used vista's "image" based backup, and maybe that is just as slick, but somehow I think I could take my time machine backup and restore it to a completely new machine, and I'd be willing to bet just about anything that vista's "image" would blue screen on a new pc. At the very least it would be completely disabled until I called MS and got it to register again.
I've used every version of windows built in backup (except Vista), veritas, an emc backup system... None of them could restore APPLICATIONS to the hard drive. I'm sure the registry has something to do with that, and maybe this "image" backup in vista is really slick... But I won't go through the pain of the rest of Vista to find out. Also I've never found any backup software to be "easy" or "intuitive" to set up properly. I would argue that is a main reason why so many PCs go without backups.
Don't get me wrong, Leopard is not a perfect OS, I have had some stability issues, gmail seemed to invariably crash firefox before the
Comparing Leopard to Vista really isn't too smart I don't think though. I tried to use Vista for a week, it was so entirely painful I went back to XP. I don't have time to relearn where every setting in the entire OS is located now. While a couple things changed from Tiger to Leopard, I haven't felt lost once. Really his complaints (aside from the stability issue) seem like a huge stretch to me, yeah the blue dots aren't as clear as the black arrows, but comparing that to "we changed 2 clicks to 12 to change your IP address" is just not in the same league. OSs shouldn't crash, and its unfortunate that leopard isn't the best platform for alpha testing software yet, it will be in less than 6 months.
I've gone through every version of OS X since 10.1... its been the same each time, 10.1-4.0 were all much less stable once they get to 10.x.3-4 though everything settles down and it is rock solid. All in all, since about 10.4.4 I have been about 90% mac and 10% windows user, Leopard has not changed that usage pattern, and its not going to.