It really depended on what you were doing too. Alpha's were built for raw speed and were good for certain tasks. Company I worked for back then used them for Lightwave rendering circa 1996/1997. But I believe the average box was somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 - $50,000 a pop for Dual 500 Mhz, 2GB of RAM and pretty much were all render nodes. Most of the workstations were SGI/IRIX and in the early days there were even quite a few Amiga around.
I would have said the same thing a year ago, but today I find myself using mostly devices at home. I have a Mac Mini at home, but I've been using it hooked up to my TV for several years. Even then, I mostly use my XBox for streaming movies now from Netflix. I gave up my laptop at work to a new hire and have been using my iPad & iPhone since May for most of my work. I still have an iMac at the office. I use it for code reviews and I still step in to help fix things with a couple of our products that I developed early on, but increasingly I find devices do exactly what I need.
I frankly don't see myself buying another desktop for home use unless I get back into video editing or 3D as hobby again. If I'm not working around code anymore in another 18 months, I may not be buying a new laptop either. I found two years ago my iPhone did about 90% of what I needed. The iPad seems to fill the other 10%.
If I didn't need to do coding, I could handle pretty much all the business work I need to do on my iPad with iWork. It handles spreadsheets and word processing just fine with a docking station. And the amount of coding work I'm doing is decreasing every year as I focus more on the business side of the house.
At work I still need a desktop machine for coding. But as an example, currently my dad has an iMac that I bought him a couple years ago. I bought him an iPad 3G for fathers day because he does travel a lot. Talking with him over thanksgiving, he rarely turns on his iMac any more. Only time he does is to update investments or work on his taxes. The rest of the time he uses the iPad with docking station.
I still have my older Mac Mini hooked up to my TV. I have since 2005, but in the last year or so my XBox360 has taken over as it had HD output. I know the newer MacMini's have HDMI, but my HDTV is 10 years old and still uses HD component. When the MacMini kicks the bucket I'm not sure if I'll replace it. My iPad does pretty much all I need at home.
What is a poor member of the Bin Laden family worth? $50 Million, $100 Million? Any family with that much money has power. There is no where on this planet one could hide if someone actually did something to Bin Laden. Sure they may publicly disavow him because of politics, but if you provided information that lead to the death or capture of Bin Laden, what do you think would happen to you and/or your family?
Maybe, but then you start having to support multiple distribution points, chances are with their own rules, and own payout rules, etc.. That starts to be a hassle. One thing that Apple makes easy is one place that handles all the hosting and payments. Yeah, 30% sounds like a lot, but right now the costs of maintaining our own servers and doing our own marketing for our desktop app accounts for 40% of the costs. I have one full-time employee doing nothing but handling the payments and another maintaining our servers and E-Commerce store.
[ ] Ingestion of strange radioactive material that most folks have never heard of... [ ] Sudden Massive Heart Attack.... [ ] Small caliber gun shot to the back of the head... [ ] Hemlock poisoning....
And at the end of the day no body really sure who exactly were the ones who did it, but chances are, they all had a hand in it. If nothing else just by saying/doing nothing to stop it.
I haven't dealt with blender or any other 3D packages much in about 2 years. Prior to that I spent a lot of time around Lightwave from 1998 - 2005 and Blender from circa 2000 - 2007 and then went back to Lightwave even for the hobby work I do on the side because I didn't have the time to relearn Blender every few months when I had time to do 3D work. I'd much rather spend my time creating rather than relearning the program.
Here are my problems with Blender:
1) The interface changes too often. It seems like just as I got used to the layout and where everything was in the UI, a new release would come along and suddenly everything changed. This seemed to be happening about every 6 months to a year. The basic interface for Lightwave hasn't changed that much from when I began with Lightwave 5.6 to Lightwave 9. Hell, I didn't even use Lightwave for a couple years and was able to pick up the latest version (9 at the time) again in just a couple days. Recently I downloaded Blender 2.5 and it was like having to relearn the entire application. I loaded some of my old files and found all the careful particle animations I had no longer work on the new version.
2) It could take days to reproduce the same quality of results with Blender that I could produce in minutes to a couple hours with Lightwave. Especially with lighting. I could get better results in Lightwave than Blender in half the time.
3) Functionality suddenly breaking. I had a lot of Lightwave Models. In the 2.2/2.3 versions prior to 2.37(?) they had a LWO importer that worked extremely well for importing meshes including textures. The last couple versions I used, the feature was broken. I would have to keep an old version of blender around to import models, save as a.blend, then import those files into the lastest version of blender. It was a PITA especially when I have 3 - 4 hours on the weekend to work on 3D stuff. I know there are new and better formats these days, but back then this was a problem.
I'm the same way. I don't even want to tweak the machines I use on a daily basis hence why I buy Apple products. Although I had to laugh the first time I heard one of my engineering friends talk about "Jail breaking" his android phone to do something he wanted.
I wonder if the iPhone was available for Verizon or Sprint, how many of my friends currently with Android phones would have iPhones instead.
Something I've often wondered is if they had some sort of damning stuff about the Israelis or say Putin if they would be as keen to release it. The US is more about character assassination and working the propaganda angles. Mossad will just kill you and the KGB(or whatever three letter acronym they're using these days) will find a creative way of killing you.
Assrange should take a lesson from Gerald Bull. Eventually, if you piss off enough of these people, one of them will come for you. And in the end, the only question will be, whom actually did it with enough plausible deniability for all.
More likely it's the Verizon's, Sprints, AT&T, and Telstra's of the world that will say no. They're already starting to lock down android phones they carry. There is too much money in "apps" that they don't get piece of, at least not with Apple and not with the google marketplace. And in the cell phone worlds it's all about revenue per customer.
I own a small company with 12 employees. We run 90% Macs, either iMac's or Mac Mini's. (The windows machines are all test hardware). All the iMacs have Parallels and either XP or Windows 7 available as well. We also have a Mac Pro with OSX-Server as the office file server and probably the most important component is the Juniper SRX210 router + switch with 3G back up. Now our email/website is hosted on a managed dedicated server from Pair Networks. SVN/bug tracking/Developers portal we pay $50 a month to have hosted.
So far in 2 years, the only thing we've done is upgrade the Macs to OS 10.6. The only time we've had server problems with Pair Networks, I was on the phone from pick up until fixed a total of 8 minutes. In fact they've emailed me more often with a "Hey we've detected a harddrive is going to go bad, we'll replace it tomorrow. Might be 15 minutes of down time".
I like PostgreSQL a lot. We use it now as the database that runs all of our company's software and those we deploy to clients. It's overkill for our point of sale product, but it's fast and stable. But PostgreSQL has lacked some features that made deploying it for very large databases not that attractive. There were three features that kept it out of the running: Lack of built in clustering, lack of Hot-Standby, no vender that could support both hardware and software under one roof (and could be sued if shit hit the fan). PostgreSQL 9 just addressed two of these drawbacks.
That last criteria was probably the single biggest factor for these organizations. Where I went to college and got my first jobs out of school had a lot of AS/400's. Three major Fortune 1000 companies used DB/400, all the colleges used them, all the local hospitals used them, and IBM had an office in the town of 150k people staffed with about 50 AS/400 techs. Most of whom worked on site at the folks who had 200 - 500 AS/400's. (Estimate Total number of AS/400's in the area at the time was something like 1500)
Given my past 12 years between working at consultancies and start ups, I've seen this a few times. It's usually not a technical hurdle, it's a "We can't solve this problem within our budget" problem. Either by going out and hiring someone who is an expert at performance tuning with their DB of choice or moving from certain db's to real databases that could handle the work like MSSQL, DB2, Oracle, or in some cases Teradata if dealing with Data warehousing.
Because I've worked around some very large database installs in my day. Every time the scaling question/problem came up, it was solvable with RDBMS's, but the solution wasn't cheap.
Bingo. If I look at my home computing needs, my iPad basically does everything I need with a dock for a full keyboard. If I didn't need to fire up Netbeans every once in a while and dive into code, it would a replacement for my work computer as well. I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV mainly as a media center to watch iTunes movies and shows.
I don't think so either. I gave up my MacBookPro at work for an iPad and glad I did. I have a docking station at the office and one at home. If I need to write longer emails to people I can. The only machine I have left at home now is the Mac Mini attached to the TV and that's mainly used as a media center.
I got my Dad a iPad3G for his birthday and a docking station. He loves it as he travels a lot while he is still able and can keep up with emails. I don't think he even turns on his iMac anymore unless he's doing tax related stuff.
My understanding is that when install an android app it gives a list of permissions of what it needs to access. Problem is, according to those I know who have the phone, barely anyone pays any attention and just clicks "okay". Also, most Android users are not geeks and wouldn't know the first steps towards compiling or installing an OS update on their phones. So when the phone manufactures stop supporting that model phone, they are SOL.
As far as app stores are concerned, if this continues to be a "problem" we'll just see the carriers go back to each having their own "store" with their own "rules", submissions process, and billing terms, and then Android suddenly becomes an even bigger PITA for smaller developers.
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It really depended on what you were doing too. Alpha's were built for raw speed and were good for certain tasks. Company I worked for back then used them for Lightwave rendering circa 1996/1997. But I believe the average box was somewhere in the neighborhood of $35,000 - $50,000 a pop for Dual 500 Mhz, 2GB of RAM and pretty much were all render nodes. Most of the workstations were SGI/IRIX and in the early days there were even quite a few Amiga around.
But which version? 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2 and what interface? Motorola's, Samsungs, HTC, LG...
I would have said the same thing a year ago, but today I find myself using mostly devices at home. I have a Mac Mini at home, but I've been using it hooked up to my TV for several years. Even then, I mostly use my XBox for streaming movies now from Netflix. I gave up my laptop at work to a new hire and have been using my iPad & iPhone since May for most of my work. I still have an iMac at the office. I use it for code reviews and I still step in to help fix things with a couple of our products that I developed early on, but increasingly I find devices do exactly what I need.
I frankly don't see myself buying another desktop for home use unless I get back into video editing or 3D as hobby again. If I'm not working around code anymore in another 18 months, I may not be buying a new laptop either. I found two years ago my iPhone did about 90% of what I needed. The iPad seems to fill the other 10%.
If I didn't need to do coding, I could handle pretty much all the business work I need to do on my iPad with iWork. It handles spreadsheets and word processing just fine with a docking station. And the amount of coding work I'm doing is decreasing every year as I focus more on the business side of the house.
At work I still need a desktop machine for coding. But as an example, currently my dad has an iMac that I bought him a couple years ago. I bought him an iPad 3G for fathers day because he does travel a lot. Talking with him over thanksgiving, he rarely turns on his iMac any more. Only time he does is to update investments or work on his taxes. The rest of the time he uses the iPad with docking station.
I still have my older Mac Mini hooked up to my TV. I have since 2005, but in the last year or so my XBox360 has taken over as it had HD output. I know the newer MacMini's have HDMI, but my HDTV is 10 years old and still uses HD component. When the MacMini kicks the bucket I'm not sure if I'll replace it. My iPad does pretty much all I need at home.
What is a poor member of the Bin Laden family worth? $50 Million, $100 Million? Any family with that much money has power. There is no where on this planet one could hide if someone actually did something to Bin Laden. Sure they may publicly disavow him because of politics, but if you provided information that lead to the death or capture of Bin Laden, what do you think would happen to you and/or your family?
Maybe, but then you start having to support multiple distribution points, chances are with their own rules, and own payout rules, etc.. That starts to be a hassle. One thing that Apple makes easy is one place that handles all the hosting and payments. Yeah, 30% sounds like a lot, but right now the costs of maintaining our own servers and doing our own marketing for our desktop app accounts for 40% of the costs. I have one full-time employee doing nothing but handling the payments and another maintaining our servers and E-Commerce store.
I'm waiting for the headline:
Julian Assange found dead (or dying of):
[ ] Ingestion of strange radioactive material that most folks have never heard of...
[ ] Sudden Massive Heart Attack....
[ ] Small caliber gun shot to the back of the head...
[ ] Hemlock poisoning....
And at the end of the day no body really sure who exactly were the ones who did it, but chances are, they all had a hand in it. If nothing else just by saying/doing nothing to stop it.
I haven't dealt with blender or any other 3D packages much in about 2 years. Prior to that I spent a lot of time around Lightwave from 1998 - 2005 and Blender from circa 2000 - 2007 and then went back to Lightwave even for the hobby work I do on the side because I didn't have the time to relearn Blender every few months when I had time to do 3D work. I'd much rather spend my time creating rather than relearning the program.
Here are my problems with Blender:
1) The interface changes too often. It seems like just as I got used to the layout and where everything was in the UI, a new release would come along and suddenly everything changed. This seemed to be happening about every 6 months to a year. The basic interface for Lightwave hasn't changed that much from when I began with Lightwave 5.6 to Lightwave 9. Hell, I didn't even use Lightwave for a couple years and was able to pick up the latest version (9 at the time) again in just a couple days. Recently I downloaded Blender 2.5 and it was like having to relearn the entire application. I loaded some of my old files and found all the careful particle animations I had no longer work on the new version.
2) It could take days to reproduce the same quality of results with Blender that I could produce in minutes to a couple hours with Lightwave. Especially with lighting. I could get better results in Lightwave than Blender in half the time.
3) Functionality suddenly breaking. I had a lot of Lightwave Models. In the 2.2/2.3 versions prior to 2.37(?) they had a LWO importer that worked extremely well for importing meshes including textures. The last couple versions I used, the feature was broken. I would have to keep an old version of blender around to import models, save as a .blend, then import those files into the lastest version of blender. It was a PITA especially when I have 3 - 4 hours on the weekend to work on 3D stuff. I know there are new and better formats these days, but back then this was a problem.
I'm the same way. I don't even want to tweak the machines I use on a daily basis hence why I buy Apple products. Although I had to laugh the first time I heard one of my engineering friends talk about "Jail breaking" his android phone to do something he wanted.
I wonder if the iPhone was available for Verizon or Sprint, how many of my friends currently with Android phones would have iPhones instead.
Something I've often wondered is if they had some sort of damning stuff about the Israelis or say Putin if they would be as keen to release it. The US is more about character assassination and working the propaganda angles. Mossad will just kill you and the KGB(or whatever three letter acronym they're using these days) will find a creative way of killing you.
Assrange should take a lesson from Gerald Bull. Eventually, if you piss off enough of these people, one of them will come for you. And in the end, the only question will be, whom actually did it with enough plausible deniability for all.
In the US, the justice department has this handy legal billy club called RICO...
Probably not if you're donating $5 or $10, but if you were donating a large sum of money, say $10,000, then....
Other countries have Security Services...some of which are known for their ruthless efficiency.
Not as bad as the trouble Duke's going to be in for releasing the Bushes baked beans recipe.
You maybe from the midwest, but you Sir are not from the Show-me State. It's New MAH-drid. Just like Nevada Mo is Ne-VADA.
The license FreeBSD ships with is more restrictive than linux?
More likely it's the Verizon's, Sprints, AT&T, and Telstra's of the world that will say no. They're already starting to lock down android phones they carry. There is too much money in "apps" that they don't get piece of, at least not with Apple and not with the google marketplace. And in the cell phone worlds it's all about revenue per customer.
There needs to be a browser that exposes in JavaScript a common API for phone I/O: accelerometer, multi-touch, camera, GPS. etc.
Um that part already exists: http://www.phonegap.com/
I own a small company with 12 employees. We run 90% Macs, either iMac's or Mac Mini's. (The windows machines are all test hardware). All the iMacs have Parallels and either XP or Windows 7 available as well. We also have a Mac Pro with OSX-Server as the office file server and probably the most important component is the Juniper SRX210 router + switch with 3G back up. Now our email/website is hosted on a managed dedicated server from Pair Networks. SVN/bug tracking/Developers portal we pay $50 a month to have hosted.
So far in 2 years, the only thing we've done is upgrade the Macs to OS 10.6. The only time we've had server problems with Pair Networks, I was on the phone from pick up until fixed a total of 8 minutes. In fact they've emailed me more often with a "Hey we've detected a harddrive is going to go bad, we'll replace it tomorrow. Might be 15 minutes of down time".
I like PostgreSQL a lot. We use it now as the database that runs all of our company's software and those we deploy to clients. It's overkill for our point of sale product, but it's fast and stable. But PostgreSQL has lacked some features that made deploying it for very large databases not that attractive. There were three features that kept it out of the running: Lack of built in clustering, lack of Hot-Standby, no vender that could support both hardware and software under one roof (and could be sued if shit hit the fan). PostgreSQL 9 just addressed two of these drawbacks.
That last criteria was probably the single biggest factor for these organizations. Where I went to college and got my first jobs out of school had a lot of AS/400's. Three major Fortune 1000 companies used DB/400, all the colleges used them, all the local hospitals used them, and IBM had an office in the town of 150k people staffed with about 50 AS/400 techs. Most of whom worked on site at the folks who had 200 - 500 AS/400's. (Estimate Total number of AS/400's in the area at the time was something like 1500)
Given my past 12 years between working at consultancies and start ups, I've seen this a few times. It's usually not a technical hurdle, it's a "We can't solve this problem within our budget" problem. Either by going out and hiring someone who is an expert at performance tuning with their DB of choice or moving from certain db's to real databases that could handle the work like MSSQL, DB2, Oracle, or in some cases Teradata if dealing with Data warehousing.
Because I've worked around some very large database installs in my day. Every time the scaling question/problem came up, it was solvable with RDBMS's, but the solution wasn't cheap.
Bingo. If I look at my home computing needs, my iPad basically does everything I need with a dock for a full keyboard. If I didn't need to fire up Netbeans every once in a while and dive into code, it would a replacement for my work computer as well. I have a Mac Mini hooked up to the TV mainly as a media center to watch iTunes movies and shows.
I don't think so either. I gave up my MacBookPro at work for an iPad and glad I did. I have a docking station at the office and one at home. If I need to write longer emails to people I can. The only machine I have left at home now is the Mac Mini attached to the TV and that's mainly used as a media center.
I got my Dad a iPad3G for his birthday and a docking station. He loves it as he travels a lot while he is still able and can keep up with emails. I don't think he even turns on his iMac anymore unless he's doing tax related stuff.
Did the lobbyist pay their balances.....check!
My understanding is that when install an android app it gives a list of permissions of what it needs to access. Problem is, according to those I know who have the phone, barely anyone pays any attention and just clicks "okay". Also, most Android users are not geeks and wouldn't know the first steps towards compiling or installing an OS update on their phones. So when the phone manufactures stop supporting that model phone, they are SOL.
As far as app stores are concerned, if this continues to be a "problem" we'll just see the carriers go back to each having their own "store" with their own "rules", submissions process, and billing terms, and then Android suddenly becomes an even bigger PITA for smaller developers.