Business types always want to fill positions with the exact requirements and experience but nothing more so they can maximize profits. The other thing they want is someone who does one task well. Why not require this of MBA's? Require them to specialize in major industries while they're in college. They have to actually learn about the tech sector, retail or whatever they're going to go into. This way, they at least have some knowledge to back their crazy logic.
I'm not saying a small app == big app, but everyone is acting like they're just going to flip the switch without QA, testing, etc. I realize that facebook doesn't normally do QA and they have small groups of users test. For something of this magnitude that would not work. They'd have to do it correctly.
You don't use an ORM layer for performance, you use it for flexibility. ORMs are slow. I'm not arguing that. In PHP, PDO is not that much slower than using mysql or mysqli. Based on my experience with PHP and a silicon valley startup, I can tell you that this is doable. They're not the size of facebook, obviously, but the software is similar. I doubt they'll even have to touch the memcache part of the code at all. It's very easy to use in PHP and they've probably wrapped that logic anyway.
Facebook can afford to hire a consultant to help them get the most out of a new database system and train their people (if they don't know already) how to tune the new system. A testbed allows them to find the right environment and test it. I don't think facebook would be done in two weeks, but it's not going to require rewriting the whole application and six years either.
They're not doomed.
For the record, the application I ported stores every math paper on the planet in it and it's distributed across mirrors all over the world. It's not a tiny application.
How ten years ago of you. You do realize that MySQL and Postgres are getting rather close on feature parity right? Both of them have been adding features the other lacked. MySQL 5.5 has stored procedures, views, triggers, etc.
The biggest selling point with Postgres for me is the schema handling/support. One database can have many schemas.
It's fine if you like postgres, but saying that technologically advanced in every way is wrong. There are benefits to both systems.
Regarding the marketshare comments, I'm not so sure I buy that. Postgres is a good alternative to MySQL because it's the other commonly used database in the FOSS world. Many apps work with both databases. If you have an Ingres database, you'd beg for Postgres. The marketshare of Ingres is a joke. Few apps work with it. So quality is not determined by marketshare, but usefulness might be.
And if you need to use memcache, then it doesn't matter what database you're using. You can scale out read only nodes with most larger database systems, but it's not always a good idea.
Usually the issue is write performance. You can only write to one MySQL server in a cluster (unless using the newer mysql cluster storage engine). Some other commercial products let you partition data across multiple servers and write to different servers.
If you have a lot of read only nodes then all that data has to get replicated back out to them and that can get very slow if you're huge like facebook. I bet they use some type of crazy manual partition scheme to pull it off.
This isn't true. I just migrated an application from MySQL 4.1 to Postgresql 9.0 at work. It took me about two weeks, but certainly not a complete rewrite from scratch. It varies greatly on the application, the language it's written in, frameworks in use, and the number of product specific features in use. This was a perl / mason app.
If an application was making extensive use of stored procedures, then it would require a lot of effort to rewrite those, but not the whole application. If the application were written in C, it would be a lot of work to change. I think facebook uses PHP and that's not too hard to change out especially if they were sane and used an abstraction layer like PDO.
If the app were written in Java or.NET and using an ORM, it would be TRIVIAL to change to another database.
With my experience, the biggest problems were date functions and the fact that MySQL embeds index creation in the create table syntax whereas postgres requires it be separate and the names of indexes are global. This meant that I had some work cut out for me changing index names. There were also a few quirks with some join queries as MySQL is not picky about ordering in the from clause.
You are correct that they'll have to tune queries and things, but it's not a total rewrite if they wrote their app in a reasonable way.
For the record, Postgresql 9 is faster for many of our queries but seems slower doing INSERT. YMMV
Google and Microsoft are quite similar. No matter what I do, there are one or two products that I end up using or needing anyway. It just takes one event for people to change their mind about tech companies. For most people, Google hasn't done anything wrong yet. That's the difference between Microsoft and Google. I think in most people's eyes, Microsoft's pricing and activation as well as failures with vista have been more of a reputation fail than the antitrust trial or IE ever were. Young people don't think of Microsoft as fun or cool either. No one wants a windows phone.
The problem will be for google to stay "young". There's a whole group of graduating seniors that have grown up with social networking for almost half their life now. (counting blogging) Google + is a huge improvement to facebook, but it's old hat to them. Smart phones are still somewhat trendy, but I mostly hear older people buying tablets/pads.
I had a 2008 iMac with a Core 2 Duo that would have worked fine as it was a 64bit capable CPU. (emt64) This only applies to the very early Intel iMacs that were white and not aluminum. Most likely some early MacBook or Mac Mini systems are also 32bit only.
Not a shocker. I've heard time and time again from NoSQL fans that it's ok to put your database on the public internet over HTTP with no locks. In fact, early versions of CouchDB didn't have security.
Another problem is that many novice programmers forget to secure their AJAX endpoints.. when you have 20 calls happening all over returning json, you often forget to check session or ensure authentication + authorization.
During my computer science courses, very few times did security come up. I had one professor who cared enough to discuss input validation, authentication, etc. It's this magic thing that we'll just figure out right?
What reality are you in? All modern operating systems are bloated and big. It's a fact. Most Linux distros install a bunch of crap the user will never use. Even KDE and Gnome (especially gnome) are rather large. The QT4 push helped, but when the SOURCE CODE to qt4 is over 100MB, what do you think the compiled result is going to be. Gnome is now using a lot of python scripts and changing their minds all the time, that's even worse.
This is just the state of computing.. people have heard disk and ram are cheap and they keep pushing it. disk is no longer cheap if you actually like SSD. I see the cost of storage going up over time until the technology to make SSDs huge (density) evolves in the next ten years. Let me clarify I mean this in context of replacing spinning disks, not that SSD prices are going to go up as that would be foolish.
The problem with getting a geek at Microsoft is that they need the power to fight with ballmer. He shouldn't be chariman and ceo of microsoft, only one role and the other guy should be in the other role. That way they have to agree on some things to move forward. Ballmer lost his check and balance when the antitrust trial hit and things have been going downhill since then. Microsoft acts in a very conservative business sense most of the time now and it's hurting them. That's not how tech companies operate. It only works for IBM because they're a consulting company now and their customer base wants the stability. By acting conservative, Microsoft is no longer cool, no longer interesting to young people and frankly the un-apple. Microsoft has also lost it's way with developers by the recent WIndows 8 comments and then silence. Developers now like open source, and they deal with apple due to popularity.
Microsoft has an image problem they can't shake no matter what they do in marketing. I don't blame the marketing department, they're only reacting to ballmer's mistakes. He needs to go or be put in check.
I do a lot of small and large commits for MidnightBSD. ports work or web based projects often generate a lot of commits. I tend to do small, logic commits.
There is a balance between process and actually getting things done. Most companies never find it. The biggest problem I have is when this is used to audit progress on a task. For instance, I am a consultant for a company just starting to get out of startup mentality. There's been a push for more process and they've implemented their version of Agile. One of my first tasks was to write a script to dump data from Agile Zen so they could run reports on how fast developers are finishing stories.
Fail #1: All stores are not the same size! Fail #2: Each team has different rules for stories and use agile zen differently. How do you compare them? Fail #3: About half my time is spent in meetings, writing stories, fighting with QA to test things (not enough people). I'm supposed to do the same amount of work in half the time?... Fail #n: You're doing it wrong
The worst part is that when we had PRDs, at least there was a big picture loosely discussed. Now we get stories that don't integrate with each other and a big ugly mess.
You must not work with recent, lazy CS graduates then. Many feel they learned everything they need in school. Others think they only need to learn one or two technologies and specialize in them. What happens when those technologies become irrelevant? You propose they will learn new stuff. Some will, some will change careers. When you're in it for the money, you're also not interested in computing. When things get too hard, it's not done.
You're example is flawed anyway. The in it for the money type don't want to learn the new way to do it and will use the deprecated function call.
Since you shared your experience with me, I will explain my perspective. I live in a new subdivision. Houses form a semi circle around a pond. My next door neighbor experiments with tesla coils and other types of gadgets regularly. Everyone in the neighborhood has a wireless router.
I was able to use a wireless connection in an apartment building with two apple airport express devices bridging the network, and that was enough to stream on an apple tv or use a wii plus 2 laptops. It wasn't great, but it was usable.
In the house, I have difficulty getting a wireless signal in the next room. I assumed the airport express unit(s) were getting old and tried upgrading to airport extreme base stations. I've tried different channels. I've tried interface robustness. I've tried nearly every combination of settings, moving the wireless routers, etc. I suspect in addition to interference, some of the materials used in my home or the design could be impacting the signal. It's a two story home with a basement built last year.
I regret not wiring my house (with cat5e) when it was built. I assumed wireless would just work. I have most of my serious computing devices in the basement and have a run up the stairs to the living room where my wifi router is currently located. In the next room, I sometimes have drops with Netflix streaming or Apple tv use. These same drops happen on the wii in the same room or the ps3 upstairs. Wifi adaptors on a desktop pc, an iMac, a MBP and a Toshiba laptop with a realtek usb internal 802.11n device all exhibit these problems. One could blame the apple gear I'm using, but I've seen apple gear work where cisco and dlink devices did not. Wireless often will work for casual browsing, but anything requiring a constant connection such as a video stream fails several times while streaming a simple tv show at mediocre quality. Streaming the same content on a wired connection works fine. I have a business class cable package here so it's not the pipe. At this point, I've resorted to running cat 5 cable from the basement to the second floor using the airport extreme as a switch in the living room. My wife won't agree to let me put "holes in the wall" to run cat5 upstairs. I heard nothing but complaints until I ran this cable from her as she couldn't maintain a connection to battle.net for her WoW. Nothing pisses the wife off more than getting disconnected during a raid.
I've seen wireless work in some places quite well. Various coffee shops and bookstores I visit, for example, have exceptional connections. I just don't think it works without planning for it in ways most people can't control. Perhaps really high end equipment from cisco or another vendor might work here but I just have lost patience for it. If I'm doing something wrong, I'd love to know what.
I do run WPA2 / 802.11g/n
I've seen some crazy things with wireless tech. My former employer could not get a wireless signal through the entire office (1 floor of a modest sized building) using several repeaters with cisco equipment. The reason was the old building had massive interference from the elevator shaft which happened to be in the middle. After running cable past the elevator and setting up POE, we were able to get a signal there but it was never that great. Dead zones happen. At that same location, we couldn't get decent signal strength for cable tv runs to two sets mounted on the wall. Comcast had amp up the signal and then get cable boxes as close to the tvs as possible to even get a picture.
Not only that, but encryption adds additional overhead to an already slower technology. I can't even live with wifi in my home as the primary connection. Interference from my neighbors pet projects can kill the signal. If I can't maintain two computers connected at a reasonable speed, how can an entire office run on it?
In fact, one of the first questions I've used in interviews is "Have you worked on any open source projects?" Experience with open source demonstrates team work (sometimes), coding skills, and a general love of programming. When someone interviews for a position and they tell me they never code in their spare time, I immediately think they're just in it for the money and don't really keep up with new technologies. I wonder if this person will contribute to the team in a meaningful way.
Obviously someone working in industry may not have time to work on extra projects. I do expect college students will have done something even on their own. I managed to run a gaming clan, work on a blogging site and operating system project and port a game mod to the Mac while in college. A little mod for joomla shouldn't be a stretch!
I don't think most people run consumer AMD motherboards in servers. We have to do it running open source projects, but I would never consider it for a mission critical server in an organization.
My package building machine is an AMD Athlon II X4 with an Asus board (AMD770), but even I've got an HP Proliant server (xeon 3430) running CVS and other services.
I do for some systems. Usually my main desktop gets one CPU upgrade during it's life cycle. I tend to do incremental updates to my desktop every year. My current desktop was built about 2 years ago and it has gone through two RAM upgrades, a transition from an AMD crossfire GPU setup to a single nvidia card (which is much faster sadly), 4 additional hard drives, a raid controller, etc. I'm planning on buying a new hexacore CPU this year to replace the Phenom 9600.
Part of the fun for me is upgrading systems; it's not the most cost effective but I enjoy it.
There's a difference here. AMD is already pricing their chips fairly. I feel like I should buy them to help with R&D costs. They are trying to compete with Intel after all!. Until rather recently the price for a 6 core Intel CPU was $600+ US. AMD's high-end consumer chip is around $230. I don't feel bad buying AMD even when the chip is new.
I think the most expensive component of a computer is the video card now unless you buy Intel CPUs. Sure some people can use cheap onboard video but they can also get a $30 single core AMD chip to go with it. Word doesn't take much to run.
I have two use cases for a real CPU... compiling software and gaming. Before anyone makes a comment about compiling, consider that I build packages for an OS project on my computer and it's taking a few days to build a few thousand packages. You want to help an open source project out, donate build nodes for their respective package systems!
What was the point of buying Sun again? Aside from the hardware, the whole company was built around open source software. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Java, Solaris, MySQL or OpenOffice or a smaller project. If Oracle can't figure out how to handle open source, they wasted their money.
They've already scared developers away from Java. It's only going to get worse.
Or they could get a test server running the same linux environment as production? Hell, it could even be a vm instance for each developer. Why do you have to run the code on your mac at all?
You're wrong. The big 3 BSD projects all innovate and improve. The only reason we're behind is that linux got a head start due to the UCB lawsuit years ago. Think about how many people work on the linux kernel and how many times they have to rewrite things because they rushed into something without thinking it out. Linus does a good job, but other people screw things up a lot. BSD projects are usually much more mature. They have older developers. They like software engineering.
I'll give you that my project is not going that fast and a few of the other smaller BSDs, but trying to say that FreeBSD or NetBSD is slow is just insane. They don't target the same things as the Linux community.
Apple will drop OS X for iOS at some point. It's inevitable. The question is will MidnightBSD, PC-BSD, GhostBSD or some other desktop focused BSD catch up to Linux or Mac OS at some point and get competative. I don't know.
My iPhone 3G just got out of the 2 year contract last month. Apple was still selling these things less than 2 years ago. That's why they need to give me the safari security patches! I don't care about the new features. I am forced to upgrade my phone if i want to get security patches. Since they don't tell me how long it will be supported, I'm taking a gamble that $200 will buy me a phone that is patched for 2 years.
Slashdot Mirror
Business types always want to fill positions with the exact requirements and experience but nothing more so they can maximize profits. The other thing they want is someone who does one task well. Why not require this of MBA's? Require them to specialize in major industries while they're in college. They have to actually learn about the tech sector, retail or whatever they're going to go into. This way, they at least have some knowledge to back their crazy logic.
I'm not saying a small app == big app, but everyone is acting like they're just going to flip the switch without QA, testing, etc. I realize that facebook doesn't normally do QA and they have small groups of users test. For something of this magnitude that would not work. They'd have to do it correctly.
You don't use an ORM layer for performance, you use it for flexibility. ORMs are slow. I'm not arguing that. In PHP, PDO is not that much slower than using mysql or mysqli. Based on my experience with PHP and a silicon valley startup, I can tell you that this is doable. They're not the size of facebook, obviously, but the software is similar. I doubt they'll even have to touch the memcache part of the code at all. It's very easy to use in PHP and they've probably wrapped that logic anyway.
Facebook can afford to hire a consultant to help them get the most out of a new database system and train their people (if they don't know already) how to tune the new system. A testbed allows them to find the right environment and test it. I don't think facebook would be done in two weeks, but it's not going to require rewriting the whole application and six years either.
They're not doomed.
For the record, the application I ported stores every math paper on the planet in it and it's distributed across mirrors all over the world. It's not a tiny application.
How ten years ago of you. You do realize that MySQL and Postgres are getting rather close on feature parity right? Both of them have been adding features the other lacked. MySQL 5.5 has stored procedures, views, triggers, etc.
The biggest selling point with Postgres for me is the schema handling/support. One database can have many schemas.
It's fine if you like postgres, but saying that technologically advanced in every way is wrong. There are benefits to both systems.
Regarding the marketshare comments, I'm not so sure I buy that. Postgres is a good alternative to MySQL because it's the other commonly used database in the FOSS world. Many apps work with both databases. If you have an Ingres database, you'd beg for Postgres. The marketshare of Ingres is a joke. Few apps work with it. So quality is not determined by marketshare, but usefulness might be.
And if you need to use memcache, then it doesn't matter what database you're using. You can scale out read only nodes with most larger database systems, but it's not always a good idea.
Usually the issue is write performance. You can only write to one MySQL server in a cluster (unless using the newer mysql cluster storage engine). Some other commercial products let you partition data across multiple servers and write to different servers.
If you have a lot of read only nodes then all that data has to get replicated back out to them and that can get very slow if you're huge like facebook. I bet they use some type of crazy manual partition scheme to pull it off.
This isn't true. I just migrated an application from MySQL 4.1 to Postgresql 9.0 at work. It took me about two weeks, but certainly not a complete rewrite from scratch. It varies greatly on the application, the language it's written in, frameworks in use, and the number of product specific features in use. This was a perl / mason app.
If an application was making extensive use of stored procedures, then it would require a lot of effort to rewrite those, but not the whole application. If the application were written in C, it would be a lot of work to change. I think facebook uses PHP and that's not too hard to change out especially if they were sane and used an abstraction layer like PDO.
If the app were written in Java or .NET and using an ORM, it would be TRIVIAL to change to another database.
With my experience, the biggest problems were date functions and the fact that MySQL embeds index creation in the create table syntax whereas postgres requires it be separate and the names of indexes are global. This meant that I had some work cut out for me changing index names. There were also a few quirks with some join queries as MySQL is not picky about ordering in the from clause.
You are correct that they'll have to tune queries and things, but it's not a total rewrite if they wrote their app in a reasonable way.
For the record, Postgresql 9 is faster for many of our queries but seems slower doing INSERT. YMMV
Google and Microsoft are quite similar. No matter what I do, there are one or two products that I end up using or needing anyway. It just takes one event for people to change their mind about tech companies. For most people, Google hasn't done anything wrong yet. That's the difference between Microsoft and Google. I think in most people's eyes, Microsoft's pricing and activation as well as failures with vista have been more of a reputation fail than the antitrust trial or IE ever were. Young people don't think of Microsoft as fun or cool either. No one wants a windows phone.
The problem will be for google to stay "young". There's a whole group of graduating seniors that have grown up with social networking for almost half their life now. (counting blogging) Google + is a huge improvement to facebook, but it's old hat to them. Smart phones are still somewhat trendy, but I mostly hear older people buying tablets/pads.
Core duo != core 2 duo
I had a 2008 iMac with a Core 2 Duo that would have worked fine as it was a 64bit capable CPU. (emt64) This only applies to the very early Intel iMacs that were white and not aluminum. Most likely some early MacBook or Mac Mini systems are also 32bit only.
Yeah, too bad the GNU decided to change the license on GCC so many of us can't use it anymore.
Long live compilers with decent licensing.
Not a shocker. I've heard time and time again from NoSQL fans that it's ok to put your database on the public internet over HTTP with no locks. In fact, early versions of CouchDB didn't have security.
Another problem is that many novice programmers forget to secure their AJAX endpoints.. when you have 20 calls happening all over returning json, you often forget to check session or ensure authentication + authorization.
During my computer science courses, very few times did security come up. I had one professor who cared enough to discuss input validation, authentication, etc. It's this magic thing that we'll just figure out right?
What reality are you in? All modern operating systems are bloated and big. It's a fact. Most Linux distros install a bunch of crap the user will never use. Even KDE and Gnome (especially gnome) are rather large. The QT4 push helped, but when the SOURCE CODE to qt4 is over 100MB, what do you think the compiled result is going to be. Gnome is now using a lot of python scripts and changing their minds all the time, that's even worse.
This is just the state of computing.. people have heard disk and ram are cheap and they keep pushing it. disk is no longer cheap if you actually like SSD. I see the cost of storage going up over time until the technology to make SSDs huge (density) evolves in the next ten years. Let me clarify I mean this in context of replacing spinning disks, not that SSD prices are going to go up as that would be foolish.
The problem with getting a geek at Microsoft is that they need the power to fight with ballmer. He shouldn't be chariman and ceo of microsoft, only one role and the other guy should be in the other role. That way they have to agree on some things to move forward. Ballmer lost his check and balance when the antitrust trial hit and things have been going downhill since then. Microsoft acts in a very conservative business sense most of the time now and it's hurting them. That's not how tech companies operate. It only works for IBM because they're a consulting company now and their customer base wants the stability. By acting conservative, Microsoft is no longer cool, no longer interesting to young people and frankly the un-apple. Microsoft has also lost it's way with developers by the recent WIndows 8 comments and then silence. Developers now like open source, and they deal with apple due to popularity.
Microsoft has an image problem they can't shake no matter what they do in marketing. I don't blame the marketing department, they're only reacting to ballmer's mistakes. He needs to go or be put in check.
I do a lot of small and large commits for MidnightBSD. ports work or web based projects often generate a lot of commits. I tend to do small, logic commits.
https://www.ohloh.net/accounts/laffer1
11737 just on MidnightBSD since ~2006.
That doesn't imply that I've done more work, or that my contributions are better than anyone else's.
There is a balance between process and actually getting things done. Most companies never find it. The biggest problem I have is when this is used to audit progress on a task. For instance, I am a consultant for a company just starting to get out of startup mentality. There's been a push for more process and they've implemented their version of Agile. One of my first tasks was to write a script to dump data from Agile Zen so they could run reports on how fast developers are finishing stories.
Fail #1: All stores are not the same size! ...
Fail #2: Each team has different rules for stories and use agile zen differently. How do you compare them?
Fail #3: About half my time is spent in meetings, writing stories, fighting with QA to test things (not enough people). I'm supposed to do the same amount of work in half the time?
Fail #n: You're doing it wrong
The worst part is that when we had PRDs, at least there was a big picture loosely discussed. Now we get stories that don't integrate with each other and a big ugly mess.
You must not work with recent, lazy CS graduates then. Many feel they learned everything they need in school. Others think they only need to learn one or two technologies and specialize in them. What happens when those technologies become irrelevant? You propose they will learn new stuff. Some will, some will change careers. When you're in it for the money, you're also not interested in computing. When things get too hard, it's not done.
You're example is flawed anyway. The in it for the money type don't want to learn the new way to do it and will use the deprecated function call.
Since you shared your experience with me, I will explain my perspective. I live in a new subdivision. Houses form a semi circle around a pond. My next door neighbor experiments with tesla coils and other types of gadgets regularly. Everyone in the neighborhood has a wireless router.
I was able to use a wireless connection in an apartment building with two apple airport express devices bridging the network, and that was enough to stream on an apple tv or use a wii plus 2 laptops. It wasn't great, but it was usable.
In the house, I have difficulty getting a wireless signal in the next room. I assumed the airport express unit(s) were getting old and tried upgrading to airport extreme base stations. I've tried different channels. I've tried interface robustness. I've tried nearly every combination of settings, moving the wireless routers, etc. I suspect in addition to interference, some of the materials used in my home or the design could be impacting the signal. It's a two story home with a basement built last year.
I regret not wiring my house (with cat5e) when it was built. I assumed wireless would just work. I have most of my serious computing devices in the basement and have a run up the stairs to the living room where my wifi router is currently located. In the next room, I sometimes have drops with Netflix streaming or Apple tv use. These same drops happen on the wii in the same room or the ps3 upstairs. Wifi adaptors on a desktop pc, an iMac, a MBP and a Toshiba laptop with a realtek usb internal 802.11n device all exhibit these problems. One could blame the apple gear I'm using, but I've seen apple gear work where cisco and dlink devices did not. Wireless often will work for casual browsing, but anything requiring a constant connection such as a video stream fails several times while streaming a simple tv show at mediocre quality. Streaming the same content on a wired connection works fine. I have a business class cable package here so it's not the pipe. At this point, I've resorted to running cat 5 cable from the basement to the second floor using the airport extreme as a switch in the living room. My wife won't agree to let me put "holes in the wall" to run cat5 upstairs. I heard nothing but complaints until I ran this cable from her as she couldn't maintain a connection to battle.net for her WoW. Nothing pisses the wife off more than getting disconnected during a raid.
I've seen wireless work in some places quite well. Various coffee shops and bookstores I visit, for example, have exceptional connections. I just don't think it works without planning for it in ways most people can't control. Perhaps really high end equipment from cisco or another vendor might work here but I just have lost patience for it. If I'm doing something wrong, I'd love to know what.
I do run WPA2 / 802.11g/n
I've seen some crazy things with wireless tech. My former employer could not get a wireless signal through the entire office (1 floor of a modest sized building) using several repeaters with cisco equipment. The reason was the old building had massive interference from the elevator shaft which happened to be in the middle. After running cable past the elevator and setting up POE, we were able to get a signal there but it was never that great. Dead zones happen. At that same location, we couldn't get decent signal strength for cable tv runs to two sets mounted on the wall. Comcast had amp up the signal and then get cable boxes as close to the tvs as possible to even get a picture.
Not only that, but encryption adds additional overhead to an already slower technology. I can't even live with wifi in my home as the primary connection. Interference from my neighbors pet projects can kill the signal. If I can't maintain two computers connected at a reasonable speed, how can an entire office run on it?
In fact, one of the first questions I've used in interviews is "Have you worked on any open source projects?" Experience with open source demonstrates team work (sometimes), coding skills, and a general love of programming. When someone interviews for a position and they tell me they never code in their spare time, I immediately think they're just in it for the money and don't really keep up with new technologies. I wonder if this person will contribute to the team in a meaningful way.
Obviously someone working in industry may not have time to work on extra projects. I do expect college students will have done something even on their own. I managed to run a gaming clan, work on a blogging site and operating system project and port a game mod to the Mac while in college. A little mod for joomla shouldn't be a stretch!
I don't think most people run consumer AMD motherboards in servers. We have to do it running open source projects, but I would never consider it for a mission critical server in an organization.
My package building machine is an AMD Athlon II X4 with an Asus board (AMD770), but even I've got an HP Proliant server (xeon 3430) running CVS and other services.
I do for some systems. Usually my main desktop gets one CPU upgrade during it's life cycle. I tend to do incremental updates to my desktop every year. My current desktop was built about 2 years ago and it has gone through two RAM upgrades, a transition from an AMD crossfire GPU setup to a single nvidia card (which is much faster sadly), 4 additional hard drives, a raid controller, etc. I'm planning on buying a new hexacore CPU this year to replace the Phenom 9600.
Part of the fun for me is upgrading systems; it's not the most cost effective but I enjoy it.
There's a difference here. AMD is already pricing their chips fairly. I feel like I should buy them to help with R&D costs. They are trying to compete with Intel after all!. Until rather recently the price for a 6 core Intel CPU was $600+ US. AMD's high-end consumer chip is around $230. I don't feel bad buying AMD even when the chip is new.
I think the most expensive component of a computer is the video card now unless you buy Intel CPUs. Sure some people can use cheap onboard video but they can also get a $30 single core AMD chip to go with it. Word doesn't take much to run.
I have two use cases for a real CPU... compiling software and gaming. Before anyone makes a comment about compiling, consider that I build packages for an OS project on my computer and it's taking a few days to build a few thousand packages. You want to help an open source project out, donate build nodes for their respective package systems!
Actually measure power consumption on an AMD system. It's better than you think.
What was the point of buying Sun again? Aside from the hardware, the whole company was built around open source software. It doesn't matter if we're talking about Java, Solaris, MySQL or OpenOffice or a smaller project. If Oracle can't figure out how to handle open source, they wasted their money.
They've already scared developers away from Java. It's only going to get worse.
Compare it to a full record and you will see ..
Or they could get a test server running the same linux environment as production? Hell, it could even be a vm instance for each developer. Why do you have to run the code on your mac at all?
You're wrong. The big 3 BSD projects all innovate and improve. The only reason we're behind is that linux got a head start due to the UCB lawsuit years ago. Think about how many people work on the linux kernel and how many times they have to rewrite things because they rushed into something without thinking it out. Linus does a good job, but other people screw things up a lot. BSD projects are usually much more mature. They have older developers. They like software engineering.
I'll give you that my project is not going that fast and a few of the other smaller BSDs, but trying to say that FreeBSD or NetBSD is slow is just insane. They don't target the same things as the Linux community.
Apple will drop OS X for iOS at some point. It's inevitable. The question is will MidnightBSD, PC-BSD, GhostBSD or some other desktop focused BSD catch up to Linux or Mac OS at some point and get competative. I don't know.
My iPhone 3G just got out of the 2 year contract last month. Apple was still selling these things less than 2 years ago. That's why they need to give me the safari security patches! I don't care about the new features. I am forced to upgrade my phone if i want to get security patches. Since they don't tell me how long it will be supported, I'm taking a gamble that $200 will buy me a phone that is patched for 2 years.