These days NASA is full of over-educated monkeys who cringe at their own shadow.
No, NASA is funded by congressional representatives that are too timid to explain the value of the program to their constituencies. And those people are voted into office by people too unaware of the role that science plays in their lives. And those people are raised by parents who think the schools should be the parents, so the schools are so busy teaching Johnny how to Share His Feelings that they never get around to teaching him where his Cartoon Network signal comes from. Don't blame NASA, blame parents.
have to keep a close eye on everything that our elected officials do so that they do not sneak unlawful provision into law
Um... it's not unlawful if it becomes a law. That's sort of the point of making laws: they define what's lawful. Then it's a question of whether or not it's constitutionally valid, and further more, whether it's in practical terms usable.
As for "sneaking"... your reps/senators work for you, on stuff that impacts your life. You should be keeping up with what they're doing, at least in areas that are interesting to you.
ETA were a possibility. They do fit the description "unhappy spaniards" rather well.
Well, they were a possibility (and they certainly are unhappy Spaniards), but you'll recall that the then-president of Spain also made that statement, which immediately turned out to be wrong, and he lost his office because of how wrong he was. There's a little more to it than that (in terms of Spanish politics in general), but there's certainly no question that it was Jihadists trying to change Spain's policy about supporting the take-down of Saddam's regime and the new form of government in Iraq. They made numerous arrests from the cell in Madrid, and a couple of the guys involved killed themselves (with another unused bomb) in their apartment rather than get arrested.
So, there's certainly a wide range of cranky bomb-using organizations out there (including ETA), but that's not who we're most worried about. ETA, by the way, tends to use bombings in more of symbolic way, or as an assasination tool. They're not as big into blowing up people in restaurants, not that that's any excuse for blowing up anything. Regardless, we're more worried about the ones who actually come out and say that their objective is the downfall of western democracy. People willing to "martyr" themselves in the pursuit of a new, globe-spanning caliphate, and who have lots of money to work with... they're a lot more of a threat than Basque separatists, however murderous they may be in their own back yard. ETA, for example, hasn't yet blown up anything in the US because the US has supported Spain's people in combatting them. If they did (attack in the US in an attempt to poison US relations with a European government), they'd be more on the same page with Al Queda. For now, though, that medieval-minded bunch of punks is sort of in a class by itself, and Spain knows that, too. Mind you, Al Queda's train bombings in Madrid were horrible enough (200+ dead later), but they actually botched it. Their intention was for all of the train bombs to go off at the same time in the train station, with the hope of bringing down the station structure on top of everyone inside it. If they'd been a little more careful/lucky, they'd have killed thousands, not hundreds. The Spaniards dodged a bigger bullet on that one.
but having a damned powerful computer in no way makes it easier for someone to design a bomb
Unless they know how to build a bomb, and their job would be easier (or produce more horrific results) with better tools.
Unless they're already a dems expert, it won't mean shit
You mean, like all sorts of ex-Soviet military scientists? Or some fairly-well-trained folks in Iran or North Korea?
And of course there is the little fact that it's fairly easy to build bombs bug enough to take out 100% of the US.
You must mean that it's possible to build enough bombs for that purpose. Or, that a handful of them, all in key cities, would be economically devastating enough to have that general effect.
which since I'm guessing you're using Bush's definition of terrorist (aka Arab)
Terrorists are as terrorists do. So far we're not running into a lot of Swedish or Japanese terrorists. The part of the world, culturally, that seems happy to blow up restaurants and buses because their religious leaders say that's what Allah wants them to do, seem to mostly be from the middle east. There are abberations (we've had a few domestic ones, and there's always the IRA, or those cultists in Japan a few years back), but it really makes the most sense to pay attention to places in the world where chanting "death to America" is part of every news broadcast, and where the more extreme margins of the cultures that support that attitude also have the time, money, and inclination to act on the urge (and have a demonstrated history of actually doing it). You didn't think that the people dead in Madrid were killed by unhappy Spaniards, did you?
You would think something like the VHS tape would destroy the movie industry. Just like downloading music has destroyed the music industry.
Err.... wait a minute... it didn't!
Come on, now, that's a cheesy analogy. In the VHS analogy, it's the hard drive we're talking about. VHS didn't trash the movie industry because you have the material delivered to you by basically paid-for means (like ad-supported broadcast or subscribed cable). And you can't take that VHS tape and make an absolutely perfect copy of it available to thousands of people instantly. Very, very different situation.
Actually... i butter my toast with margarine... as there is no suitable verb to express the spreading of margarine over toasted bread
I call that Marginalizing my toast. But Julia Childs is right: a little butter never hurt anyone. She lived to a ripe old age eating tons of it (and drinking the right amount of red wine to offset the damage).
[This morning, I found a new, better way to butter my toast. It's so revolutionary that it may be part of the anti-margerine ecosystem.]
How?
Exactly my point! The original article talks about Apple/Nokia participating in an "anti-microsoft ecosystem" as they work on this new phone project. That makes no more sense than my toast stupid-on-purpose-analogy.
If Apple and Nokia are going to put together something that fills a niche, and does it well/better than anything else out there, why must that be considered part of some "anti-Microsoft ecosystem?" How about it's just "better," and people will use it or not?
This morning, I found a new, better way to butter my toast. It's so revolutionary that it may be part of the anti-margerine ecosystem.
Wow. I'm lost for words. Seriously though, how do you have a job? This has to be the saddest architecture i've ever seen.
For crying out loud. All I'm doing it painting a very broad picture of a situation where somewhat faster local networking can improve performance. Of course I'm not describing it in greater detail (and don't really want to). There's pooling, caching, a middle tier (of redundant machines), load balancing on the web servers, failover clustering on the SQL side, and the whole thing's been running more or less like this for almost 5 years. It's kept patched, intrusion detection does a pretty good job, and the budget that paid for the architecture has actually paid itself back through actual use by real people paying real bills. Never been owned, doesn't go down. How do I have a job? The revenue that this (and other) systems generate more than pays for me. Is it perfect? No. But neither is it static, or written in stone. And it's paid for. Explore the rest of the thread a get a sense of the comparitively unusual nature of the pages being served, and the very difficult business rules being dealt with. You sure seem spoiling for a fight without much to go on - what axe did you think I was grinding, exactly?
If all of a sudden Microsoft targets YOUR magnum opus wouldn't you be pissed?
Why use the word "targets"? What, you think that MS is trying to take away Bram's "business"? First, it's a research paper, not a product or even an announcement about any intention of ever making it a product. Regardless, couldn't you say the same thing about BT having "targeted" other, older and less cool P2P systems at the time he developed it?
Have you looked at Sybase Replication Server which allows low-latency, "realtime" replication of data between various DBMS platforms (Sybase, MSSQL, Oracle, DB2 etc).
Haven't, no. Though I will. Part of the mandate has been to, as much as possible, keep the O/S, and everything running on it (other than scripts and the custom commerce app) totally vanilla MS. Introducing third party pieces to the puzzle can give some management and admin people hives, as you know. But, that's a lot better than down time or a suckingly slow web site, that's for sure.
If each page needs around a hundred or more queries, your application was very badly designed.
That's a pretty absolute conclusion to draw without your really knowing much about the nature of the data that's being pulled, how often it's changing, or what sort of business logic drives the aging (or not) of any of the data. More caching would be nice, but we've got it pretty well optimized. I'm guessing you've never built a business-to-business site that has to look at real-time inventory (to the second, not the minute), and which has to re-evaluate every aspect of every page (which might be displaying dozens of items) based on the current conditions of every other item, including the user's history, account status, and what other users on the account might be doing right that moment. Rendering a given page can involve over 1200 pieces of information, so grabbing only 100 of them from a database is pretty damn good.
Oh: and the whole thing is completely load balanced... so the user could be getting different pieces of different page views from different servers. That means trusting the database, not a local cache, for pretty much anything dynamic.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. You know how it goes: and architecture gets into a groove years before you know where it's really going to wind up... these things tend to grow organically. That being said, a lot of the cache-related (especially app-level) things you mention are in various stages of use, with more coming. It's really amazing how much optimization you can do, without changing the general architecture, if you look at the code again, and again, and again. We're still bumping into things that just seemed like no big deal several million records ago, but which now are, indeed Very Big Deals, performance-wise. The real lesson here is about being honest about how much scalability you're likely to need. On the other hand, if you budget to develop something on the expectation of huge operations, and in doing so eat up so much cash (on dev and platform) that you kill the business unit you're trying to launch, then that's no good either. Always the balancing act!
Only if your profit on the widgets is at least $1.37. Heheh.
Well, we actually lose $2 per sale, but we're going to make up for it in volume. We're so dot-commy!
Kidding. Some sales are $1000+ with 15-25% margin, so you betcha that a sale or two more every day at least partly driven by better performance is worth chasing.
Nope. All multi-tier MS stuff running on IIS, talking to SQL Server. Start the bash if you want, but it takes a punishing amount of traffic, can be administered by a single person with many other responsibilities, hasn't been cracked, and is making both those of us who run/sell it, and the merchants using it, a living. And I've got my pick of a huge army of coders, admins, analysts, content specialists, etc., who can walk right up to the platform and pitch in on changes, given its complete familiarity.
We're working on another flavor of it, and it may be *nix-powered, but that remains to be seen. We've had the current version doing business for 5 years, now - it started back in old timey ASP days, almost as a lark, and have been evolving since.
Perhaps, but I doubt that 1 sale per day will offset the costs you will incure to set it up properly, maintain it, and get a backup quickly when your network card crashes, or when joe hacker finds a security exploit in the card somewhere.
I can't comment on the product in question, just on the notion of faster interaction between the front and back ends of the system. Faster is always better.
As for selling more widgets... a typical transaction (in the case of the system I'm talking about, here) can range from perhaps $100 to $5000. So, if we can land 10 or 20 more of a set of those transactions, we're talking about a noticeable difference. Certainly enough to pay for swapping out a NIC. If the product is crap, of course, or a pain in the ass to actually put to work, well, I wouldn't do it any farther than the workbench.
Sounds like your database server is in the critical path, not your webservers.
Well, sure. The database is the most critical thing. It performs find, as will its hot standby if it pukes. The point of my comment is that we're doing business on the rig in question, and if the web servers can have a marginally faster conversation with the database server(s), then that's a good thing. When you're handling thousands of orders a day through the system, even a few people wandering off because a page is a little sluggish is something worth spending some money on.
Each page renders a hundred or more queries? Sounds like you're better off investing in a better design than better hardware.
It's a farm of servers that looks at incoming requests and renders the pages based on the host header name. The same boxes might be serving up transactional content for a couple dozen businesses off of a common code base, with all of them having wildly different look/feel and behavior. Much of what differentiates one merchant's presentation from another is data driven, to say nothing of a page that must pre-calculate municipal tax rates for each of maybe a hundred different types of items on an order, take into account the shopper's account status, order history, affiliate referals... to say nothing of real-time inventory availability checked on every page load, multi-language and currency behavior, intrusion and fraud detection, item kitting, etc. Grabbing a hundred scraps of data from the underlying database (including session management, and all sorts of other housekeeping, including writes traffic logging) is actually pretty minimal when you consider what it's all doing.
Add on top of that the layers that have to monitor all of that activity for the company that's running all of this for those merchants (and reporting to them on traffic, visitor search behavior in real time, and so on) and you'll see what I mean. So, sure, slightly faster 1GB ethernet cards can definately help out. Would a few slightly better designed stored procedures help? Maybe a tiny bit. But really complex online selling through a managed service with lots of users... there's a certain amount of complexity that can't be designed away.
if your internet connection is anything less than fiber, which is about 99.9% of all connections? Not to mention the fact that not many computers can actually handle that much data at once anyway
Listen, when I've got 30 web servers banging away on a single database server, I want each web server in and out as quickly as possible. Every bit of the handshake, query, and results is going to wrap up that much faster if things are faster, period. When you're dealing with a huge data-driven e-commerce site, where every page renders around a hundred or more queries, and there are dozens or hundreds of concurrent page views, this stuff really counts in the aggregate.
If you sell one more widget per day, all year long, because your web presentation layer is just a little more snappy, that's sure as hell going to pay for a $500 NIC.
All the while we billed them T-and-M. They went broke and dark within a month of their actual debut on the Web.
Hey, wait a minute. That was my client.
But seriously, it's hard to believe that after a jillion of these exact same profiles that any investor would pony up so much for exactly the same thing to happen. On the other hand, a lot of VCs (still!) assume that most of their projects are going to die young and in the red, so this isn't exactly anything new. The trick is to make sure that you've got copies of the work (to the extent that you're allowed to) because you sure as hell can't point to a working web site and say "I did that!" Especially since the domain name will probably get bought up bu a pr0n site.
One is left to assume that you'd rather people did not simply replace a hosed up machine, and that they instead sunk the time and money into it. OK, that's reasonable on the face of it, but depending on what you're doing with the machine, and who you are, and how valuable your time is, how old the machine is, and how many miles of gasoline someone will have to burn to make at least one round trip to help out... a lot less consumption and ultimately more utility may come from just retiring the cranky appliance and donating it after a burn-down.
The total righteousness of your comment is, like, totally righteous. Just this morning I was sitting out in the woods with my laptop, and a bear tried to kill me. I was like, "WTF?" And then I was like, "u r the r0xx0r! That bear saw that I was like, about to open some luser corporate file attachment from The Man that could have totally sucked, and he was like, dude, I'll show you what happens when you are stoopid."
OMG that bear was like a totally 1334 h@xx0r ursine.
it's great that industry, when faced with a lack of effort from the law and legislature, has the will and wherewithal to go after the scumbags
I can only imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that you'd hear from the/. crowd if we fonud out that government agencies (rather than the private sector) was doing something about this. The need to poke around in the traffic to see what's coming and going is central to finding the C&Cs, but that very poking around, when done by NSA, or DOJ, etc., causes people to Freak Out.
A consortium of interested parties in the private sector is probably a better solution anyway - they're going to be more agile, and more motivated.
I'd say that high-fallutin' use of Internet2 and HD-res cams/displays with quality stereo audio is going to make a more satisfying interaction for a long time before some jostling tennis-ball-sized blobs will do anything beside distract from the conversation.
If, however, there was ANY reasonably meaningful life detected (or evidence of past life), I think this would be a much more significant debate
Well, interesting perhaps in the academic sense... where we want to be sure that we don't poison ourselves, or disrupt a fascinating field of study (at least, not too early).
But I just spent the last week terraforming my back yard. I did give some thought, as was digging, about the worms I was disturbing, and about which way the water was going to flow. But by the time I'm done, it will be a significantly different spot, with different flora and fauna, and all because of Manifest Yard Destiny.
That whole "meaningful" issue is a tricky one, though. There are entire scientific careers built around the study of a single virus or bacterium. To those studying it, it's The Most Significant Thing Ever. Even the tiniest hint of something like that to study and it will be Nuclear Snail Darter Syndrome.
Slashdot Mirror
These days NASA is full of over-educated monkeys who cringe at their own shadow.
No, NASA is funded by congressional representatives that are too timid to explain the value of the program to their constituencies. And those people are voted into office by people too unaware of the role that science plays in their lives. And those people are raised by parents who think the schools should be the parents, so the schools are so busy teaching Johnny how to Share His Feelings that they never get around to teaching him where his Cartoon Network signal comes from. Don't blame NASA, blame parents.
There, I fixed it.
have to keep a close eye on everything that our elected officials do so that they do not sneak unlawful provision into law
Um... it's not unlawful if it becomes a law. That's sort of the point of making laws: they define what's lawful. Then it's a question of whether or not it's constitutionally valid, and further more, whether it's in practical terms usable.
As for "sneaking"... your reps/senators work for you, on stuff that impacts your life. You should be keeping up with what they're doing, at least in areas that are interesting to you.
ETA were a possibility. They do fit the description "unhappy spaniards" rather well.
Well, they were a possibility (and they certainly are unhappy Spaniards), but you'll recall that the then-president of Spain also made that statement, which immediately turned out to be wrong, and he lost his office because of how wrong he was. There's a little more to it than that (in terms of Spanish politics in general), but there's certainly no question that it was Jihadists trying to change Spain's policy about supporting the take-down of Saddam's regime and the new form of government in Iraq. They made numerous arrests from the cell in Madrid, and a couple of the guys involved killed themselves (with another unused bomb) in their apartment rather than get arrested.
So, there's certainly a wide range of cranky bomb-using organizations out there (including ETA), but that's not who we're most worried about. ETA, by the way, tends to use bombings in more of symbolic way, or as an assasination tool. They're not as big into blowing up people in restaurants, not that that's any excuse for blowing up anything. Regardless, we're more worried about the ones who actually come out and say that their objective is the downfall of western democracy. People willing to "martyr" themselves in the pursuit of a new, globe-spanning caliphate, and who have lots of money to work with... they're a lot more of a threat than Basque separatists, however murderous they may be in their own back yard. ETA, for example, hasn't yet blown up anything in the US because the US has supported Spain's people in combatting them. If they did (attack in the US in an attempt to poison US relations with a European government), they'd be more on the same page with Al Queda. For now, though, that medieval-minded bunch of punks is sort of in a class by itself, and Spain knows that, too. Mind you, Al Queda's train bombings in Madrid were horrible enough (200+ dead later), but they actually botched it. Their intention was for all of the train bombs to go off at the same time in the train station, with the hope of bringing down the station structure on top of everyone inside it. If they'd been a little more careful/lucky, they'd have killed thousands, not hundreds. The Spaniards dodged a bigger bullet on that one.
but having a damned powerful computer in no way makes it easier for someone to design a bomb
Unless they know how to build a bomb, and their job would be easier (or produce more horrific results) with better tools.
Unless they're already a dems expert, it won't mean shit
You mean, like all sorts of ex-Soviet military scientists? Or some fairly-well-trained folks in Iran or North Korea?
And of course there is the little fact that it's fairly easy to build bombs bug enough to take out 100% of the US.
You must mean that it's possible to build enough bombs for that purpose. Or, that a handful of them, all in key cities, would be economically devastating enough to have that general effect.
which since I'm guessing you're using Bush's definition of terrorist (aka Arab)
Terrorists are as terrorists do. So far we're not running into a lot of Swedish or Japanese terrorists. The part of the world, culturally, that seems happy to blow up restaurants and buses because their religious leaders say that's what Allah wants them to do, seem to mostly be from the middle east. There are abberations (we've had a few domestic ones, and there's always the IRA, or those cultists in Japan a few years back), but it really makes the most sense to pay attention to places in the world where chanting "death to America" is part of every news broadcast, and where the more extreme margins of the cultures that support that attitude also have the time, money, and inclination to act on the urge (and have a demonstrated history of actually doing it). You didn't think that the people dead in Madrid were killed by unhappy Spaniards, did you?
You would think something like the VHS tape would destroy the movie industry. Just like downloading music has destroyed the music industry.
Err.... wait a minute... it didn't!
Come on, now, that's a cheesy analogy. In the VHS analogy, it's the hard drive we're talking about. VHS didn't trash the movie industry because you have the material delivered to you by basically paid-for means (like ad-supported broadcast or subscribed cable). And you can't take that VHS tape and make an absolutely perfect copy of it available to thousands of people instantly. Very, very different situation.
Actually... i butter my toast with margarine... as there is no suitable verb to express the spreading of margarine over toasted bread
I call that Marginalizing my toast. But Julia Childs is right: a little butter never hurt anyone. She lived to a ripe old age eating tons of it (and drinking the right amount of red wine to offset the damage).
[This morning, I found a new, better way to butter my toast. It's so revolutionary that it may be part of the anti-margerine ecosystem.]
How?
Exactly my point! The original article talks about Apple/Nokia participating in an "anti-microsoft ecosystem" as they work on this new phone project. That makes no more sense than my toast stupid-on-purpose-analogy.
If Apple and Nokia are going to put together something that fills a niche, and does it well/better than anything else out there, why must that be considered part of some "anti-Microsoft ecosystem?" How about it's just "better," and people will use it or not?
This morning, I found a new, better way to butter my toast. It's so revolutionary that it may be part of the anti-margerine ecosystem.
Wow. I'm lost for words. Seriously though, how do you have a job? This has to be the saddest architecture i've ever seen.
For crying out loud. All I'm doing it painting a very broad picture of a situation where somewhat faster local networking can improve performance. Of course I'm not describing it in greater detail (and don't really want to). There's pooling, caching, a middle tier (of redundant machines), load balancing on the web servers, failover clustering on the SQL side, and the whole thing's been running more or less like this for almost 5 years. It's kept patched, intrusion detection does a pretty good job, and the budget that paid for the architecture has actually paid itself back through actual use by real people paying real bills. Never been owned, doesn't go down. How do I have a job? The revenue that this (and other) systems generate more than pays for me. Is it perfect? No. But neither is it static, or written in stone. And it's paid for. Explore the rest of the thread a get a sense of the comparitively unusual nature of the pages being served, and the very difficult business rules being dealt with. You sure seem spoiling for a fight without much to go on - what axe did you think I was grinding, exactly?
If all of a sudden Microsoft targets YOUR magnum opus wouldn't you be pissed?
Why use the word "targets"? What, you think that MS is trying to take away Bram's "business"? First, it's a research paper, not a product or even an announcement about any intention of ever making it a product. Regardless, couldn't you say the same thing about BT having "targeted" other, older and less cool P2P systems at the time he developed it?
Have you looked at Sybase Replication Server which allows low-latency, "realtime" replication of data between various DBMS platforms (Sybase, MSSQL, Oracle, DB2 etc).
Haven't, no. Though I will. Part of the mandate has been to, as much as possible, keep the O/S, and everything running on it (other than scripts and the custom commerce app) totally vanilla MS. Introducing third party pieces to the puzzle can give some management and admin people hives, as you know. But, that's a lot better than down time or a suckingly slow web site, that's for sure.
If each page needs around a hundred or more queries, your application was very badly designed.
That's a pretty absolute conclusion to draw without your really knowing much about the nature of the data that's being pulled, how often it's changing, or what sort of business logic drives the aging (or not) of any of the data. More caching would be nice, but we've got it pretty well optimized. I'm guessing you've never built a business-to-business site that has to look at real-time inventory (to the second, not the minute), and which has to re-evaluate every aspect of every page (which might be displaying dozens of items) based on the current conditions of every other item, including the user's history, account status, and what other users on the account might be doing right that moment. Rendering a given page can involve over 1200 pieces of information, so grabbing only 100 of them from a database is pretty damn good.
Oh: and the whole thing is completely load balanced... so the user could be getting different pieces of different page views from different servers. That means trusting the database, not a local cache, for pretty much anything dynamic.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. You know how it goes: and architecture gets into a groove years before you know where it's really going to wind up... these things tend to grow organically. That being said, a lot of the cache-related (especially app-level) things you mention are in various stages of use, with more coming. It's really amazing how much optimization you can do, without changing the general architecture, if you look at the code again, and again, and again. We're still bumping into things that just seemed like no big deal several million records ago, but which now are, indeed Very Big Deals, performance-wise. The real lesson here is about being honest about how much scalability you're likely to need. On the other hand, if you budget to develop something on the expectation of huge operations, and in doing so eat up so much cash (on dev and platform) that you kill the business unit you're trying to launch, then that's no good either. Always the balancing act!
Only if your profit on the widgets is at least $1.37. Heheh.
Well, we actually lose $2 per sale, but we're going to make up for it in volume. We're so dot-commy!
Kidding. Some sales are $1000+ with 15-25% margin, so you betcha that a sale or two more every day at least partly driven by better performance is worth chasing.
I'm assuming you're doing it in PHP then
Nope. All multi-tier MS stuff running on IIS, talking to SQL Server. Start the bash if you want, but it takes a punishing amount of traffic, can be administered by a single person with many other responsibilities, hasn't been cracked, and is making both those of us who run/sell it, and the merchants using it, a living. And I've got my pick of a huge army of coders, admins, analysts, content specialists, etc., who can walk right up to the platform and pitch in on changes, given its complete familiarity.
We're working on another flavor of it, and it may be *nix-powered, but that remains to be seen. We've had the current version doing business for 5 years, now - it started back in old timey ASP days, almost as a lark, and have been evolving since.
Perhaps, but I doubt that 1 sale per day will offset the costs you will incure to set it up properly, maintain it, and get a backup quickly when your network card crashes, or when joe hacker finds a security exploit in the card somewhere.
I can't comment on the product in question, just on the notion of faster interaction between the front and back ends of the system. Faster is always better.
As for selling more widgets... a typical transaction (in the case of the system I'm talking about, here) can range from perhaps $100 to $5000. So, if we can land 10 or 20 more of a set of those transactions, we're talking about a noticeable difference. Certainly enough to pay for swapping out a NIC. If the product is crap, of course, or a pain in the ass to actually put to work, well, I wouldn't do it any farther than the workbench.
Sounds like your database server is in the critical path, not your webservers.
Well, sure. The database is the most critical thing. It performs find, as will its hot standby if it pukes. The point of my comment is that we're doing business on the rig in question, and if the web servers can have a marginally faster conversation with the database server(s), then that's a good thing. When you're handling thousands of orders a day through the system, even a few people wandering off because a page is a little sluggish is something worth spending some money on.
Each page renders a hundred or more queries? Sounds like you're better off investing in a better design than better hardware.
It's a farm of servers that looks at incoming requests and renders the pages based on the host header name. The same boxes might be serving up transactional content for a couple dozen businesses off of a common code base, with all of them having wildly different look/feel and behavior. Much of what differentiates one merchant's presentation from another is data driven, to say nothing of a page that must pre-calculate municipal tax rates for each of maybe a hundred different types of items on an order, take into account the shopper's account status, order history, affiliate referals... to say nothing of real-time inventory availability checked on every page load, multi-language and currency behavior, intrusion and fraud detection, item kitting, etc. Grabbing a hundred scraps of data from the underlying database (including session management, and all sorts of other housekeeping, including writes traffic logging) is actually pretty minimal when you consider what it's all doing.
Add on top of that the layers that have to monitor all of that activity for the company that's running all of this for those merchants (and reporting to them on traffic, visitor search behavior in real time, and so on) and you'll see what I mean. So, sure, slightly faster 1GB ethernet cards can definately help out. Would a few slightly better designed stored procedures help? Maybe a tiny bit. But really complex online selling through a managed service with lots of users... there's a certain amount of complexity that can't be designed away.
if your internet connection is anything less than fiber, which is about 99.9% of all connections? Not to mention the fact that not many computers can actually handle that much data at once anyway
Listen, when I've got 30 web servers banging away on a single database server, I want each web server in and out as quickly as possible. Every bit of the handshake, query, and results is going to wrap up that much faster if things are faster, period. When you're dealing with a huge data-driven e-commerce site, where every page renders around a hundred or more queries, and there are dozens or hundreds of concurrent page views, this stuff really counts in the aggregate.
If you sell one more widget per day, all year long, because your web presentation layer is just a little more snappy, that's sure as hell going to pay for a $500 NIC.
All the while we billed them T-and-M. They went broke and dark within a month of their actual debut on the Web.
Hey, wait a minute. That was my client.
But seriously, it's hard to believe that after a jillion of these exact same profiles that any investor would pony up so much for exactly the same thing to happen. On the other hand, a lot of VCs (still!) assume that most of their projects are going to die young and in the red, so this isn't exactly anything new. The trick is to make sure that you've got copies of the work (to the extent that you're allowed to) because you sure as hell can't point to a working web site and say "I did that!" Especially since the domain name will probably get bought up bu a pr0n site.
BUY COMSUME, BUY CONSUME
One is left to assume that you'd rather people did not simply replace a hosed up machine, and that they instead sunk the time and money into it. OK, that's reasonable on the face of it, but depending on what you're doing with the machine, and who you are, and how valuable your time is, how old the machine is, and how many miles of gasoline someone will have to burn to make at least one round trip to help out... a lot less consumption and ultimately more utility may come from just retiring the cranky appliance and donating it after a burn-down.
The total righteousness of your comment is, like, totally righteous. Just this morning I was sitting out in the woods with my laptop, and a bear tried to kill me. I was like, "WTF?" And then I was like, "u r the r0xx0r! That bear saw that I was like, about to open some luser corporate file attachment from The Man that could have totally sucked, and he was like, dude, I'll show you what happens when you are stoopid."
OMG that bear was like a totally 1334 h@xx0r ursine.
it's great that industry, when faced with a lack of effort from the law and legislature, has the will and wherewithal to go after the scumbags
/. crowd if we fonud out that government agencies (rather than the private sector) was doing something about this. The need to poke around in the traffic to see what's coming and going is central to finding the C&Cs, but that very poking around, when done by NSA, or DOJ, etc., causes people to Freak Out.
I can only imagine the wailing and gnashing of teeth that you'd hear from the
A consortium of interested parties in the private sector is probably a better solution anyway - they're going to be more agile, and more motivated.
I'd say that high-fallutin' use of Internet2 and HD-res cams/displays with quality stereo audio is going to make a more satisfying interaction for a long time before some jostling tennis-ball-sized blobs will do anything beside distract from the conversation.
If, however, there was ANY reasonably meaningful life detected (or evidence of past life), I think this would be a much more significant debate
Well, interesting perhaps in the academic sense... where we want to be sure that we don't poison ourselves, or disrupt a fascinating field of study (at least, not too early).
But I just spent the last week terraforming my back yard. I did give some thought, as was digging, about the worms I was disturbing, and about which way the water was going to flow. But by the time I'm done, it will be a significantly different spot, with different flora and fauna, and all because of Manifest Yard Destiny.
That whole "meaningful" issue is a tricky one, though. There are entire scientific careers built around the study of a single virus or bacterium. To those studying it, it's The Most Significant Thing Ever. Even the tiniest hint of something like that to study and it will be Nuclear Snail Darter Syndrome.