So, if anything shows up on my systems that shouldn't be, I can blame virus-of-the-week on it?This almost gives me motivation to keep one of my boxes around the house running Windows. Almost.
I've noticed that quite a few of my fellow Unix sysadmin-type critters were TRS-80 folks, rather than, for instance, Apple or Commodore people. I wonder if this isn't related to the fact that, for much of what we wanted to do, we had to "roll our own", rather than just go to the corner computer store and buy the latest game.
Ah, and our BASIC had an "ELSE" statement...how can you program in BASIC without an "else"?
Agreed - I bought it mainly because it was published by O'Reilly, and to be honest it's the only book from them that I've ever bought and don't keep going back to.
With most technical books, I'll give them a cursory read-through, and then they go onto the shelf for constant referencing (referral? refferation? Whatever), but this one is just mouldering off in a corner somewhere. Pretty much that whole book can be summed up with "It's FreeBSD, more or less".
I wonder if this could be expanded to use as a tech-support mechanism - something like PC Anywhere - where instead of playing the "OK, and now what do you see? No, the other backslash..." games, to connect directly into a terminal window session.
While programming is one use of it, I could see this kind of thing being expanded to support, maybe some interactive gaming, who knows.
Well, I'm not saying it's a bad technology, or a bad technique, but that for sitting on someone's desk it's fixing a problem that doesn't exist. Sure, it'd be great to have a PDA/cellphone that uses this (or would it? What does that solve that a speaker/mic does not?)? I could see combining this with a touchscreen for a kiosk-type system, but again, speakers are pretty cheap - what problem exists that this solves in a unique, or even superior, way?
Sure, it's interesting, but it seems like another inappropriate use of technology. Just because something is possible to do, doesn't mean it's worth doing.
Just like the combined TV/VCR units, sure, it's nice when both functions work well, but if either function takes a dive, you're left with something that's less useful than either would have been if bought separately.
Maybe it'll be fine for people who don't particularly care about sound (and/or visual) quality, but I think this is another time when discrete components are the appropriate way to do it. It's not like the world has been sadly lacking for want of a speaker-monitor.
One question: what happens when you turn it up to 11?
If you trust the software developers who wrote this to be good an careful and honest, and their QA department that the software is secure, and that they're not doing anything sneaky, great. Me, I'd prefer the ability to see the source code. Even if I personally am not going to go through every line to see what it's doing, with an open-source product, I know that *someone* has done just that. Further, the nature of open-source is that developers expect others to be looking at their code under a microscope; I feel this adds a sense of responsibility, *and* accountability.
I like how Ambrosia handles the shareware fee reminders. Instead of crippling major features of the game (some are blocked until you pay, but when you're new, you're not ready to use them anyway), and they have a guy in a spaceship who will fly in, remind you to pay (before your 30 days is up), and after the 30 days is up, he'll fly in and attack you if you haven't paid yet. It's done in a non-annoying way, IMHO.
In any case, I'll be happy to give them another 30 bucks for the PC version once that's available. Don't have an apple laptop yet, and it'll be nice to be able to play this in the recliner.
So, they won't be naming this one after a ButtHead Astronomer, then?
I just wonder what happens when they run out of big-cat names. I mean, lynx is taken aready for something else, bobcat is a piece of construction equipment, tiger sounds too cute-sy, and tabby is too underwhelming. I certainly hope that Apple has mapped this out, so they don't end up looking silly as they get up towards OS XI.
Actually, if you're rendering on the fly, but using static objects that are fetched separately (render the HTML, let it tell the browser which static objects to go fetch), you can still cache those static objects. Depending on the page, that could be dozens or hundreds of them. For something like a news article, with the same picture for everyone, and say 5 different languages that the text could be in, then you just have it get the text for whatever language, get the picture which is for all of 'em, and tell it to fetch from i.cnn.com (er, for instance). So, even though the layout of the page can be customized, the objects that you point to can still be set up so that you can take advantage of cacheing.
While a proxy-cache takes care of the server load issues, it just fixes half of the problem. Your cache then becomes the limiting factor, and the same problems with servicing the connections and load just gets displaced from one box to another.
Page load times can be vastly improved by hiring someone with a bunch of capacity spread around the country/world, and having the content served from the closest server to the user. Akamai is one provider, there are probably others. Effectively, it gives you thousands of webservers to handle your load. Beats trying to predict when and how much the load is going to spike. (I wonder if any akamaized sites have been slashdotted, and how the usage graphs for that look?)
Slashdot Mirror
So, if anything shows up on my systems that shouldn't be, I can blame virus-of-the-week on it?This almost gives me motivation to keep one of my boxes around the house running Windows. Almost.
I've noticed that quite a few of my fellow Unix sysadmin-type critters were TRS-80 folks, rather than, for instance, Apple or Commodore people. I wonder if this isn't related to the fact that, for much of what we wanted to do, we had to "roll our own", rather than just go to the corner computer store and buy the latest game.
Ah, and our BASIC had an "ELSE" statement...how can you program in BASIC without an "else"?
At last - a way to get back at spammers. Read the headers, do some digging, and WHAM - 14,000 volts right to 'em.
Agreed - I bought it mainly because it was published by O'Reilly, and to be honest it's the only book from them that I've ever bought and don't keep going back to.
With most technical books, I'll give them a cursory read-through, and then they go onto the shelf for constant referencing (referral? refferation? Whatever), but this one is just mouldering off in a corner somewhere. Pretty much that whole book can be summed up with "It's FreeBSD, more or less".
I wonder if this could be expanded to use as a tech-support mechanism - something like PC Anywhere - where instead of playing the "OK, and now what do you see? No, the other backslash..." games, to connect directly into a terminal window session.
While programming is one use of it, I could see this kind of thing being expanded to support, maybe some interactive gaming, who knows.
Well, I'm not saying it's a bad technology, or a bad technique, but that for sitting on someone's desk it's fixing a problem that doesn't exist. Sure, it'd be great to have a PDA/cellphone that uses this (or would it? What does that solve that a speaker/mic does not?)? I could see combining this with a touchscreen for a kiosk-type system, but again, speakers are pretty cheap - what problem exists that this solves in a unique, or even superior, way?
Sure, it's interesting, but it seems like another inappropriate use of technology. Just because something is possible to do, doesn't mean it's worth doing.
Just like the combined TV/VCR units, sure, it's nice when both functions work well, but if either function takes a dive, you're left with something that's less useful than either would have been if bought separately.
Maybe it'll be fine for people who don't particularly care about sound (and/or visual) quality, but I think this is another time when discrete components are the appropriate way to do it. It's not like the world has been sadly lacking for want of a speaker-monitor.
One question: what happens when you turn it up to 11?
If you trust the software developers who wrote this to be good an careful and honest, and their QA department that the software is secure, and that they're not doing anything sneaky, great. Me, I'd prefer the ability to see the source code. Even if I personally am not going to go through every line to see what it's doing, with an open-source product, I know that *someone* has done just that. Further, the nature of open-source is that developers expect others to be looking at their code under a microscope; I feel this adds a sense of responsibility, *and* accountability.
I like how Ambrosia handles the shareware fee reminders. Instead of crippling major features of the game (some are blocked until you pay, but when you're new, you're not ready to use them anyway), and they have a guy in a spaceship who will fly in, remind you to pay (before your 30 days is up), and after the 30 days is up, he'll fly in and attack you if you haven't paid yet. It's done in a non-annoying way, IMHO. In any case, I'll be happy to give them another 30 bucks for the PC version once that's available. Don't have an apple laptop yet, and it'll be nice to be able to play this in the recliner.
So, they won't be naming this one after a ButtHead Astronomer, then? I just wonder what happens when they run out of big-cat names. I mean, lynx is taken aready for something else, bobcat is a piece of construction equipment, tiger sounds too cute-sy, and tabby is too underwhelming. I certainly hope that Apple has mapped this out, so they don't end up looking silly as they get up towards OS XI.
Actually, if you're rendering on the fly, but using static objects that are fetched separately (render the HTML, let it tell the browser which static objects to go fetch), you can still cache those static objects. Depending on the page, that could be dozens or hundreds of them. For something like a news article, with the same picture for everyone, and say 5 different languages that the text could be in, then you just have it get the text for whatever language, get the picture which is for all of 'em, and tell it to fetch from i.cnn.com (er, for instance). So, even though the layout of the page can be customized, the objects that you point to can still be set up so that you can take advantage of cacheing.
While a proxy-cache takes care of the server load issues, it just fixes half of the problem. Your cache then becomes the limiting factor, and the same problems with servicing the connections and load just gets displaced from one box to another.
Page load times can be vastly improved by hiring someone with a bunch of capacity spread around the country/world, and having the content served from the closest server to the user. Akamai is one provider, there are probably others. Effectively, it gives you thousands of webservers to handle your load. Beats trying to predict when and how much the load is going to spike. (I wonder if any akamaized sites have been slashdotted, and how the usage graphs for that look?)