The problem with load testing is that it's as much an exercise in testing resources as in the application's efficiency. When it comes time to simulate a million users' load on the server, Amazon or Google could just spin up a few thousand virtual machines on their spare capacity, and simulate a few thousand users on each one. Smaller companies have to make do with what they have - probably a few old servers running a few hundred simulations.
Both Amazon and Google will let anyone use thier spare capacity for a reasonable fee, so big load spikes are no longer a valid excuse for web servers going down.
Now, even if you've got something against putting all that healthcare data on the cloud, they could have at least stored the static content in S3 or some CDN. A quick glance at healthcare.gov shows that the front page HTML is about 60 KB but there is also about 200 KB of static images and another 200 KB of static JavaScript. That's a quick win right there and I'm surprised they didn't even bother to do that.
Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”
Wow, they really need to revisit this idea now. The world has changed since 2007, and Apple now has a lot more money, resources and competition from a range of Android phones, big and small. I personally prefer the "small" 4 inch screens, but I know that most of the market wants gigantic phablets. It made sense back in 2007 to have all the wood behind one arrow, but now they've just got all their eggs in one basket.
Is this going to be like some kind of shoddy Microsoft elevator, which would send him up a few flights before crashing and sending him tumbling down again?:)
Microsoft used to be all about preserving backwards compatibility, even resorting to crazy hacks in Windows 95 to make sure games like Sim City would run despite bugs in the game. But that Microsoft doesn't exist anymore.
It started with VB.net not being compatible with VB6, and continued with other products too. Microsoft obviously doesn't care about making sure IE10 works with old web apps targeted to IE6, Vista broke the old crappy XP apps that didn't understand non-admin users, and Office often has problems getting the formatting right for documents created in older versions. Those are the obvious examples, but there are many more smaller and more obscure ones.
Not saying I disagree with all of the decisions - e.g. the old insecure XP apps were broken anyway. But Sim City was also undeniably broken, and yet the old Microsoft took ownership of the issue and fixed it anyway.
And in Apple's defence, they did bring out Rosetta when they started making Intel Macs, and supported it for about 5 or 6 years. Microsoft did no such thing with Windows RT.
What makes you think that it isn't configurable? If you look at the commit diff (linked in the article) you might notice that it is a one line change to disable this functionality. That's because it is a configurable setting; the commit simply changes the default behavior.
Isn't it obvious? Because network infrastructure is more economic to build in densely populated areas, and growing food requires more space and forces people to live farther apart. I wouldn't say that high tech and growing your own food are mutually exclusive but it's hard to have both without spending a lot of money.
It's sad that going to the moon six times is worth less in preparatory work than what had been done up to 1961. We've lost so much knowledge and experience that we've regressed as a species, at least in terms of human space exploration. Hopefully this time around we never forget how to do it.
That may be true in this case, but Australians get a whole lot more value for money than Americans do when it comes to healthcare. Just look at the numbers:
Why Americans aren't using their 2nd amendment rights already to get rid of all these corrupt fucks is beyond me.
Because the government has far bigger and better weapons than the 2nd amendment allows private citizens to bear! As a tool to overthrow a corrupt government, the 2nd amendment is pretty much useless.
I live in NYC and transit costs a lot in subsidies. Fares only cover 25% to 50% of costs
I really don't understand why so many people insist that public transit systems should be a fully profitable business, independent of the government. Do you think that the roads are somehow not subsidized?
I don't have anything against Qt, but what makes you think that it "won"? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major open source desktop applications that use Qt (other than those bundled with KDE). They all use GTK+: Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome(ium), Gimp, Gnome, Eclipse and every Java app that uses SWT (and every Java app that uses Swing emulates GTK+ not Qt).
You seem to be implying that it's only the naive young kids who want to live in San Francisco, and the older wiser folks are the only ones smart enough to make the decision to live in the suburbs. Maybe you prefer the suburbs, and that's fine, but here's why your younger coworkers prefer San Francisco:
The problem with suburbs in general, and Silicon Valley in particular, is that suburbs don't scale. This wasn't as much of a problem for previous generations, but these days Silicon Valley has grown to a point where it is. The traffic along highway 101 is terrible and is not easy to avoid. Caltrain doesn't go everywhere and the connecting buses are slow and poorly timed. The place is too sparse to get by without a car, so you absolutely have to get one. On the other hand, San Francisco has good public transport within the city (although not so much out of it heading into the valley). And that's only if you need it - it's also the second most walkable city in the country after New York. I think cars were once viewed as a symbol of freedom to previous generations, but these days they are seen as a ball and chain which ironically ends up limiting your mobility.
Also you may disagree with this, but to me it's also a much more pleasant environment - the Victorian housing, the city skyline, the parks and the waterfront along the Embarcadero and the Marina look beautiful compared to the suburban houses, office parks, shopping plazas and the freeways that connect them.
The article is not great, but it's more based around the idea that there is a generational trend towards urban living. It's wrong to think of it as either "everyone wants to live in the suburbs" or "everyone wants to live in the city", but when compared to previous generations more of Generation Y prefers city living.
Offtopic much? The article is about an opt-in browser toolbar, not unlike the Google or MSN Toolbar. By using it you can earn frequent flyer points. But you don't have to use it, even if you are a Qantas Frequent Flyer member.
FYI, when people are talking about a browser toolbar, and you launch into a paranoid rant about "rights", "armed revolt", terrorists, the NRA and NSA, it makes you sound like a nutjob. This makes it harder to get people to listen to you later if you want to talk about real issues like PRISM.
The problem with the article is that the author has a shallow, consumer-oriented view of technology. To him, things like Linux and cloud computing are not innovative because they aren't consumer facing. He even says that cloud computing is just a "side bonus of the search and social-networking revolutions" - never mind that AWS grew out of a retail company, and launched before Facebook was even open to the general public.
He still thinks Google is nothing more than a search engine, and that its last innovation was AdSense. I doubt he realizes how far they pushed the web as a platform for rich Internet applications, with things like Gmail, Maps and Chrome, and how much behind-the-scenes innovation was required to do this. And he can't see how "self-driving cars...will affect Google's operations anytime soon"? When the general public has access to self-driving cars, not only will it change Google as a company, but it will change society and the way we configure our cities.
And Apple is just as innovative now as it ever was. If you compare this year's WWDC with say, 2006's, it's not all that different:
2013: new Mac Pro, Mac OS X Mavericks, iOS 7 2006: new Mac Pro (to replace the Power Mac G5), Mac OS X Leopard
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 was an outlier, and to expect that sort of thing to come out of Apple (or any company) with any sort of regularly is silly.
Have a look on Amazon or eBay for an "extended battery". It's basically an oversized battery and usually comes with a new back plate for your phone's case, to make extra room for the larger battery.
I personally wouldn't buy one due to the extra bulk but it might be what you're after.
I second the advice of not exposing external customers to internal processes. If developers want to use an agile process internally, fine, but talking about agile processes like Scrum to clients is bound to make them uncomfortable. I'm not surprised at all that users hate agile.
Customers don't want to hear that their feature request will need to be made into a Story and put in the Icebox, and that afterwards you'll play Planning Poker and put it in the next Sprint. It's really just elaborate way of saying "OK we'll write it down and do it later", and doesn't really give anyone any assurance that 1) you know what you're doing from a technical POV or 2) that they will have what they need by the time they need it.
Non-committal is a big issue for agile. If you want, do all that Scrum shit internally with your team, but just tell the clients in plain English that you need to figure out how much work is involved, and that you'll give them a timeline and will stick to that deadline.
Another part of the problem is stupid terminology like "epics", "planning poker" and "ScrumMaster" (TM). Personally I find it embarassing to our profession - real engineers use technical jargon to describe the systems they are building and how they operate. But software engineers are completely obsessed with process and methodology - and are only able to talk about these things. It's amazing how we understand so little about the businesses we automate.
From what I remember of the 80s, Amstad, Amiga, Sinclar, Atari were tiny players in the PC market that didn't amount to much. Kind of like where Windows, Blackberry, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch are now on phones.
I don't think that phones now are any worse compared to PCs in the 80s. In fact it's better because both of the major OSes use a significant amount of free software.
Well, WOOFYGOOFY was calling him "a typical middle manager of no distinction", and my point was that he is more distinguished than a lot of people who hold postgraduate computer science degrees.
He co-authored lex, which gives him some geek cred IMO. Sure, he moved into management pretty early in his career, and then into executive roles, but the guy can code.
This would be substantially less likely to work in the US because terrorists know that such acts of violence would very likely end with them being met with a hail of bullets from bystanders or the police.
You do know that it did end in a hail of bullets from police, right?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with load testing is that it's as much an exercise in testing resources as in the application's efficiency. When it comes time to simulate a million users' load on the server, Amazon or Google could just spin up a few thousand virtual machines on their spare capacity, and simulate a few thousand users on each one. Smaller companies have to make do with what they have - probably a few old servers running a few hundred simulations.
Both Amazon and Google will let anyone use thier spare capacity for a reasonable fee, so big load spikes are no longer a valid excuse for web servers going down.
Now, even if you've got something against putting all that healthcare data on the cloud, they could have at least stored the static content in S3 or some CDN. A quick glance at healthcare.gov shows that the front page HTML is about 60 KB but there is also about 200 KB of static images and another 200 KB of static JavaScript. That's a quick win right there and I'm surprised they didn't even bother to do that.
Jon Rubinstein, Apple’s top hardware executive at the time, says there were even long discussions about how big the phone would be. “I was actually pushing to do two sizes — to have a regular iPhone and an iPhone mini like we had with the iPod. I thought one could be a smartphone and one could be a dumber phone. But we never got any traction on the small one, and in order to do one of these projects, you really need to put all your wood behind one arrow.”
Wow, they really need to revisit this idea now. The world has changed since 2007, and Apple now has a lot more money, resources and competition from a range of Android phones, big and small. I personally prefer the "small" 4 inch screens, but I know that most of the market wants gigantic phablets. It made sense back in 2007 to have all the wood behind one arrow, but now they've just got all their eggs in one basket.
Is this going to be like some kind of shoddy Microsoft elevator, which would send him up a few flights before crashing and sending him tumbling down again? :)
Microsoft used to be all about preserving backwards compatibility, even resorting to crazy hacks in Windows 95 to make sure games like Sim City would run despite bugs in the game. But that Microsoft doesn't exist anymore.
It started with VB.net not being compatible with VB6, and continued with other products too. Microsoft obviously doesn't care about making sure IE10 works with old web apps targeted to IE6, Vista broke the old crappy XP apps that didn't understand non-admin users, and Office often has problems getting the formatting right for documents created in older versions. Those are the obvious examples, but there are many more smaller and more obscure ones.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html
Not saying I disagree with all of the decisions - e.g. the old insecure XP apps were broken anyway. But Sim City was also undeniably broken, and yet the old Microsoft took ownership of the issue and fixed it anyway.
And in Apple's defence, they did bring out Rosetta when they started making Intel Macs, and supported it for about 5 or 6 years. Microsoft did no such thing with Windows RT.
What makes you think that it isn't configurable? If you look at the commit diff (linked in the article) you might notice that it is a one line change to disable this functionality. That's because it is a configurable setting; the commit simply changes the default behavior.
https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkSettings.html#GtkSettings--gtk-enable-primary-paste
Isn't it obvious? Because network infrastructure is more economic to build in densely populated areas, and growing food requires more space and forces people to live farther apart. I wouldn't say that high tech and growing your own food are mutually exclusive but it's hard to have both without spending a lot of money.
Awesome idea. Reminds me of Atlassian's portal:
http://blogs.atlassian.com/2011/12/developer-lives-saved-with-portal-device/
It's sad that going to the moon six times is worth less in preparatory work than what had been done up to 1961. We've lost so much knowledge and experience that we've regressed as a species, at least in terms of human space exploration. Hopefully this time around we never forget how to do it.
To be fair Gates is comparing his foundation to Google's philanthropic arm, Google.org.
That may be true in this case, but Australians get a whole lot more value for money than Americans do when it comes to healthcare. Just look at the numbers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_health_expenditure_(PPP)_per_capita
Healthcare costs are about 50% cheaper per capita than in the US, and Australias get far, far better services.
Why Americans aren't using their 2nd amendment rights already to get rid of all these corrupt fucks is beyond me.
Because the government has far bigger and better weapons than the 2nd amendment allows private citizens to bear! As a tool to overthrow a corrupt government, the 2nd amendment is pretty much useless.
I live in NYC and transit costs a lot in subsidies. Fares only cover 25% to 50% of costs
I really don't understand why so many people insist that public transit systems should be a fully profitable business, independent of the government. Do you think that the roads are somehow not subsidized?
I don't have anything against Qt, but what makes you think that it "won"? Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major open source desktop applications that use Qt (other than those bundled with KDE). They all use GTK+: Firefox, LibreOffice, Chrome(ium), Gimp, Gnome, Eclipse and every Java app that uses SWT (and every Java app that uses Swing emulates GTK+ not Qt).
Wow you have a home theater that you only use for the "occasional good flick"?
You seem to be implying that it's only the naive young kids who want to live in San Francisco, and the older wiser folks are the only ones smart enough to make the decision to live in the suburbs. Maybe you prefer the suburbs, and that's fine, but here's why your younger coworkers prefer San Francisco:
The problem with suburbs in general, and Silicon Valley in particular, is that suburbs don't scale. This wasn't as much of a problem for previous generations, but these days Silicon Valley has grown to a point where it is. The traffic along highway 101 is terrible and is not easy to avoid. Caltrain doesn't go everywhere and the connecting buses are slow and poorly timed. The place is too sparse to get by without a car, so you absolutely have to get one. On the other hand, San Francisco has good public transport within the city (although not so much out of it heading into the valley). And that's only if you need it - it's also the second most walkable city in the country after New York. I think cars were once viewed as a symbol of freedom to previous generations, but these days they are seen as a ball and chain which ironically ends up limiting your mobility.
Also you may disagree with this, but to me it's also a much more pleasant environment - the Victorian housing, the city skyline, the parks and the waterfront along the Embarcadero and the Marina look beautiful compared to the suburban houses, office parks, shopping plazas and the freeways that connect them.
And as for crime and homelessness, if you exclude the bad neighbourhoods (Tenderloin, the dodgy part of SoMa west of 6th and the dodgy part of the Mission east of Valencia), then there's really not a lot of it. There are also an idea that, despite perceptions, the extra driving that comes with living in the suburbs is more dangerous than the crime in the city.
The article is not great, but it's more based around the idea that there is a generational trend towards urban living. It's wrong to think of it as either "everyone wants to live in the suburbs" or "everyone wants to live in the city", but when compared to previous generations more of Generation Y prefers city living.
Offtopic much? The article is about an opt-in browser toolbar, not unlike the Google or MSN Toolbar. By using it you can earn frequent flyer points. But you don't have to use it, even if you are a Qantas Frequent Flyer member.
FYI, when people are talking about a browser toolbar, and you launch into a paranoid rant about "rights", "armed revolt", terrorists, the NRA and NSA, it makes you sound like a nutjob. This makes it harder to get people to listen to you later if you want to talk about real issues like PRISM.
The problem with the article is that the author has a shallow, consumer-oriented view of technology. To him, things like Linux and cloud computing are not innovative because they aren't consumer facing. He even says that cloud computing is just a "side bonus of the search and social-networking revolutions" - never mind that AWS grew out of a retail company, and launched before Facebook was even open to the general public.
He still thinks Google is nothing more than a search engine, and that its last innovation was AdSense. I doubt he realizes how far they pushed the web as a platform for rich Internet applications, with things like Gmail, Maps and Chrome, and how much behind-the-scenes innovation was required to do this. And he can't see how "self-driving cars...will affect Google's operations anytime soon"? When the general public has access to self-driving cars, not only will it change Google as a company, but it will change society and the way we configure our cities.
And Apple is just as innovative now as it ever was. If you compare this year's WWDC with say, 2006's, it's not all that different:
2013: new Mac Pro, Mac OS X Mavericks, iOS 7
2006: new Mac Pro (to replace the Power Mac G5), Mac OS X Leopard
The launch of the iPhone in 2007 was an outlier, and to expect that sort of thing to come out of Apple (or any company) with any sort of regularly is silly.
Have a look on Amazon or eBay for an "extended battery". It's basically an oversized battery and usually comes with a new back plate for your phone's case, to make extra room for the larger battery.
I personally wouldn't buy one due to the extra bulk but it might be what you're after.
I second the advice of not exposing external customers to internal processes. If developers want to use an agile process internally, fine, but talking about agile processes like Scrum to clients is bound to make them uncomfortable. I'm not surprised at all that users hate agile.
Customers don't want to hear that their feature request will need to be made into a Story and put in the Icebox, and that afterwards you'll play Planning Poker and put it in the next Sprint. It's really just elaborate way of saying "OK we'll write it down and do it later", and doesn't really give anyone any assurance that 1) you know what you're doing from a technical POV or 2) that they will have what they need by the time they need it.
Non-committal is a big issue for agile. If you want, do all that Scrum shit internally with your team, but just tell the clients in plain English that you need to figure out how much work is involved, and that you'll give them a timeline and will stick to that deadline.
Another part of the problem is stupid terminology like "epics", "planning poker" and "ScrumMaster" (TM). Personally I find it embarassing to our profession - real engineers use technical jargon to describe the systems they are building and how they operate. But software engineers are completely obsessed with process and methodology - and are only able to talk about these things. It's amazing how we understand so little about the businesses we automate.
From what I remember of the 80s, Amstad, Amiga, Sinclar, Atari were tiny players in the PC market that didn't amount to much. Kind of like where Windows, Blackberry, Firefox OS, Ubuntu Touch are now on phones.
http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/
http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/
http://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/
I don't think that phones now are any worse compared to PCs in the 80s. In fact it's better because both of the major OSes use a significant amount of free software.
Well, WOOFYGOOFY was calling him "a typical middle manager of no distinction", and my point was that he is more distinguished than a lot of people who hold postgraduate computer science degrees.
He co-authored lex, which gives him some geek cred IMO. Sure, he moved into management pretty early in his career, and then into executive roles, but the guy can code.
This would be substantially less likely to work in the US because terrorists know that such acts of violence would very likely end with them being met with a hail of bullets from bystanders or the police.
You do know that it did end in a hail of bullets from police, right?
Not sure about that. I spend about 8 hours a day producing content at work, and fewer than 8 hours a day consuming content in my free time.
If you want personal computers and the internet, child porn is inevitably going to be distributed too. Should we stop trying to control that?!
Crime in general is the inevitable result of society. That doesn't mean we should give up trying to minimize it.