I really want to switch back to FreeBSD, away from Red Hat. I really do. But until there's a native 1.4 JDK running on FreeBSD I can't. (No comments needed about the Linux compatibility mode, please. I know it sort of works. I also know it's hellishly slow.)
If Apple can provide a 1.4.2 JDK, certainly FreeBSD can as well. Please don't make me stick with Red Hat 9 of all things.
Lost in that.plan update is the expected date for the first 200MB patch to correct showstopper bugs. I believe the date August 6th has been thrown around...
Seriously, I'm looking at http://www.php.net/zend-engine-2.php and all that the eye can see is a nearly-identical syntax to Java. Classes, object cloning, Throwables, destructors, exceptions (albeit weak ones), statics... holy crap people, why not just switch to Java? It's all that PHP5 has and more.
I wasn't necessarily talking about removable storage, but if you insist... my understanding is that the journal -- unless you are actively writing to the disk -- will prevent the sort of corruption you're talking about if you forcibly remove the hardware from the system. OS X is especially good at this, too, as I have run lsof a few times, checked to see that my external Firewire drive has no open files, and then just yanked it offline. No problems whatsoever.
Ever since I switched, I realized just how much more intuitive the Apple designers / engineers really are. Microsoft has adopted the shotgun-like style of "throw a million options in front of the user and let them decide" when, 99% of the time, users don't want to decide, they just want their damned machine to work.
Honestly, who at Microsoft thought this was a good idea: "Start / Settings / Control Panel / Add/Remove Hardware / Next / Uninstall/Unplug a device / Next / Unplug/Eject a device / Next / Select device / Next"
...when the Apple engineers tell you: "Unplug the device from your Macintosh."
Simple: have Sendmail, Postfix, etc, all stick in a sleep() call before they spit out the mail acknowledgement! No spammer could possibly hope to send out a million e-mails when they can't open that many sockets on their machine.
Without Windows, x86 would be the busted platform that it really is. AMD probably wouldn't be a player at all, and Motorola would probably be where Intel is today. Let's not forget that when Windows came out, the Mac and the Amiga absolutely ruled the desktop GUI world. Chances are really good that DOS-based machines would have simply succumbed to the Mac paradigm, and Amiga might even still be alive today (Amiga zealots: flame off for a moment).
On the other hand, we almost certainly wouldn't see OS X in the form its in-- FreeBSD almost certainly wouldn't exist. Linux _might_ exist, in some strange Yellow Dog format, but I have no doubt that Apple would be the marketshare leader.
The better question is: what sort of power would computers of today have, if Microsoft didn't exist? Other than gameplay, Office and Windows are the two biggest reasons that Intel/AMD/etc make faster processors. Chances are really good that Apple and Motorola machines wouldn't be as fast as they are today, because there'd be no speed gap to close up.
My hypothesis: Sun on the server side, Apple on the client side, and small offerings from companies like Be, or Amiga, or other nontraditional platforms. (NeXT?)
Posting still images isn't the best way to point out video artifacts due to compression. Post five seconds of compressed material (all of this qualifies under fair use) and let the users see the artifacts themselves. The human eye is much more likely to spot the artifacts in a movie because of our perception of motion.
Because Windows Media wins the quality shootout, they say "check the site". You have to know that if DivX won the quality tests, it would be in all caps in the headline! Ha!
There's no treaty banning weapons in space, per se, but we will undoubtably see Pierce Brosnan in action to keep some terrorist organization from gaining control of the Goldeneye^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HUS-Space-Weapon.
The Internet is not now, never has been, and never will be about celebrity status. Justin Frankel is no more important than someone who contributes 2 lines of code to Apache.
In the end, the software is more important than the creator. See Gnutella/Frankel, Napster/Fanning, or Mosaic/Andreesen. I applaud RS for trying to put a human face to the music revolution, but let's face it, that piece came across as more of a bad history lesson. What's next, an edgy piece on Marconi?
Show me a PHP site that does completely transparent load balancing and failover of session data without hitting a database to re-load your session data on every request.
Show me a PHP application that uses session data that can scale to more than one machine, without hitting a database to re-load your session data on every request.
Any half-decent Java app server will do that sort of thing without requiring any supporting code.
Then I allowed iTunes to consolidate my library. It did the equivalent of an id3ren on my entire (4000+ tracks) library. Imagine my joy, when, instead of having to hunt through ten different directories, trying to figure out which song "01 - Track 1.mp3" really is, I just browsed through the iTunes Library and listened to what I wanted.
Additionally, Winamp, last I checked, didn't automatically normalize all of your music to the same volume level. That's one of the coolest features of iTunes.
If you are in the sort of situation where you are physically unable to replace a drive between time-of-failure for the first drive, and time-of-failure for the second drive, then a mirrored RAID5 configuration won't do you a lick of good, because your laziness/inability to get into the hosting center will just cascade onto any hardware setup you can think up.
Instead, consider going with fully managed SAN storage. Yes, it's immensely expensive, but then again you never need to worry about hardware failure-- the SAN will contact a technician and tell them to come fix it before it breaks. (EMC makes a killing on this sort of business)
Again, you're paying a heavy premium for this type of service, but if you feel that RAID level 5 isn't reliable enough for you, you're going to wind up paying through the nose for absurdly complex hardware solutions-- you might as well pay someone else to worry about it for you.
Actually, even the compiled-with-patches version of the 1.3 JDK was listed as not being production ready. Therefore, probably not safe to use for your applications.
If this is truly production ready 1.3 JDK (1.3, guys? Surely you could have gotten 1.4 done in the same time) then FreeBSD is once again a serious Java hosting environment.
(Every time I post this sort of message, I get +5. I hate karma whoring like this, but once again it's time for some education.)
"Amazon is hiring Perl programmers" leads the reader to believe that Amazon is running Perl in some major shape or form. They aren't. They are running Java servlets under... Weblogic, I believe.
"Slashdot...runs on Perl." leads the reader to believe that Slashdot is a complicated website. It isn't. Incidentally, have you clicked on the "Friends" tab on your user page lately? What an incredibly slow response (and that isn't a bandwidth issue).
None of the technologies you listed (mod_perl, Python, PHP, etc) handle any type of failure well at all. Show me a PHP-based site, hosted on multiple machines, that provides load-balanced and automatic failover of in-memory session data. I'll give you a clue: you won't find one, because it is impossible to do shared memory over a cluster of machines in PHP, mod_perl, Python, etc etc.
On the other hand, I can list off a whole slew of Java app servers that can do clustered, load-balanced, full-failover shared memory without even blinking. Resin is an awesome example of an extremely inexpensive application server that currently does nearly everything you need an app server to do.
Want to know a little secret? The PHP team is moving more towards an application-server architecture, because they know that the native compiled-in mod to Apache/iPlanet/etc is kludgy. They're cooperating with Sun and others on JSF so PHP will be able to speak with Java applications in a more efficient way.
mod_perl I won't even bother with. The MVC model simply won't work under mod_perl. Good luck with an implementation team of more than, say, 5 people.
Bus speed bandwidth, more efficient processors (Xeon vs whatever P4 desktop chip), more efficient memory access, faster disks, there are all sorts of reasons not to buy desktops.
However, I will give this advice: under no circumstances should you be using only one machine. You should have at the very least some level of failover built into your application.
...Munich went with Linux even though the price tag was higher than Microsoft's.
That is a huge win for Linux, far bigger than anyone here realizes. I don't think you can underestimate the significance of a massive IT user saying "we're willing to (initially) spend more for Linux". Powerful stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple can provide a 1.4.2 JDK, certainly FreeBSD can as well. Please don't make me stick with Red Hat 9 of all things.
Lost in that .plan update is the expected date for the first 200MB patch to correct showstopper bugs. I believe the date August 6th has been thrown around...
(Hurray for being modded as flamebait!)
I wasn't necessarily talking about removable storage, but if you insist... my understanding is that the journal -- unless you are actively writing to the disk -- will prevent the sort of corruption you're talking about if you forcibly remove the hardware from the system. OS X is especially good at this, too, as I have run lsof a few times, checked to see that my external Firewire drive has no open files, and then just yanked it offline. No problems whatsoever.
Honestly, who at Microsoft thought this was a good idea: "Start / Settings / Control Panel / Add/Remove Hardware / Next / Uninstall/Unplug a device / Next / Unplug/Eject a device / Next / Select device / Next"
Simple: have Sendmail, Postfix, etc, all stick in a sleep() call before they spit out the mail acknowledgement! No spammer could possibly hope to send out a million e-mails when they can't open that many sockets on their machine.
See the above list? Your post fits into:
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Also, accessibility, custom SMTP clients, yadda yadda yadda... but you've already realized your mistake so I'll stop now.
You need a COMMIT; in there to make sure your transaction runs, otherwise my base will still belong to me. For great zig! COMMIT;
On the other hand, we almost certainly wouldn't see OS X in the form its in-- FreeBSD almost certainly wouldn't exist. Linux _might_ exist, in some strange Yellow Dog format, but I have no doubt that Apple would be the marketshare leader.
The better question is: what sort of power would computers of today have, if Microsoft didn't exist? Other than gameplay, Office and Windows are the two biggest reasons that Intel/AMD/etc make faster processors. Chances are really good that Apple and Motorola machines wouldn't be as fast as they are today, because there'd be no speed gap to close up.
My hypothesis: Sun on the server side, Apple on the client side, and small offerings from companies like Be, or Amiga, or other nontraditional platforms. (NeXT?)
Posting still images isn't the best way to point out video artifacts due to compression. Post five seconds of compressed material (all of this qualifies under fair use) and let the users see the artifacts themselves. The human eye is much more likely to spot the artifacts in a movie because of our perception of motion.
Because Windows Media wins the quality shootout, they say "check the site". You have to know that if DivX won the quality tests, it would be in all caps in the headline! Ha!
There's no treaty banning weapons in space, per se, but we will undoubtably see Pierce Brosnan in action to keep some terrorist organization from gaining control of the Goldeneye^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HUS-Space-Weapon.
In the end, the software is more important than the creator. See Gnutella/Frankel, Napster/Fanning, or Mosaic/Andreesen. I applaud RS for trying to put a human face to the music revolution, but let's face it, that piece came across as more of a bad history lesson. What's next, an edgy piece on Marconi?
Show me a PHP application that uses session data that can scale to more than one machine, without hitting a database to re-load your session data on every request.
Any half-decent Java app server will do that sort of thing without requiring any supporting code.
Additionally, Winamp, last I checked, didn't automatically normalize all of your music to the same volume level. That's one of the coolest features of iTunes.
iTunes saw it immediately, and I was able to copy mp3s to it like any other device.
It isn't as easy as the iPod (you can't have it automatically sync on 3rd-party devices) but it will work for you.
Now, whether or not the Nomad supports AAC, I don't know.
Instead, consider going with fully managed SAN storage. Yes, it's immensely expensive, but then again you never need to worry about hardware failure-- the SAN will contact a technician and tell them to come fix it before it breaks. (EMC makes a killing on this sort of business)
Again, you're paying a heavy premium for this type of service, but if you feel that RAID level 5 isn't reliable enough for you, you're going to wind up paying through the nose for absurdly complex hardware solutions-- you might as well pay someone else to worry about it for you.
If this is truly production ready 1.3 JDK (1.3, guys? Surely you could have gotten 1.4 done in the same time) then FreeBSD is once again a serious Java hosting environment.
(Every time I post this sort of message, I get +5. I hate karma whoring like this, but once again it's time for some education.) "Amazon is hiring Perl programmers" leads the reader to believe that Amazon is running Perl in some major shape or form. They aren't. They are running Java servlets under... Weblogic, I believe. "Slashdot...runs on Perl." leads the reader to believe that Slashdot is a complicated website. It isn't. Incidentally, have you clicked on the "Friends" tab on your user page lately? What an incredibly slow response (and that isn't a bandwidth issue). None of the technologies you listed (mod_perl, Python, PHP, etc) handle any type of failure well at all. Show me a PHP-based site, hosted on multiple machines, that provides load-balanced and automatic failover of in-memory session data. I'll give you a clue: you won't find one, because it is impossible to do shared memory over a cluster of machines in PHP, mod_perl, Python, etc etc. On the other hand, I can list off a whole slew of Java app servers that can do clustered, load-balanced, full-failover shared memory without even blinking. Resin is an awesome example of an extremely inexpensive application server that currently does nearly everything you need an app server to do. Want to know a little secret? The PHP team is moving more towards an application-server architecture, because they know that the native compiled-in mod to Apache/iPlanet/etc is kludgy. They're cooperating with Sun and others on JSF so PHP will be able to speak with Java applications in a more efficient way. mod_perl I won't even bother with. The MVC model simply won't work under mod_perl. Good luck with an implementation team of more than, say, 5 people.
"It's worthless to me unless it plays MP3."
However, I will give this advice: under no circumstances should you be using only one machine. You should have at the very least some level of failover built into your application.