Either the Zend port, or PHP itself is clearly unsuitable for production use on large indexes.
You phrase this in such a way as to imply an exclusion, when really both are often true. We've ported our PHP application to Rails (which provides a different, but workable, set of problems), and we've rid ourselves of the Zend engine in return for Ferret; I'm a proponent of replacing that with SOLR, but we've yet to go down that path.
Great, now all we need to do is find some way to prevent the gravitational forces of the black hole from gobbling everything up, and prevent the black hole from evaporating due to the release of Hawking radiation, and do this all with less than the power that we'd get out of a black hole, and get enough power that the danger and complexity is worthwhile, and we're golden.
RMS is enough of a revolutionary lunatic that he'd most likely destroy the country. Judging from his ideas, he'd make illegal software patents, as well as commercial software, since 'information wants to be free'.
RMS's intentions are great, but putting him in a position of power would be as ill-advised as doing the same for Theodore Kaczynski.
Microsoft will refuse to support it, at first, but Firefox has sufficient market share that there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
Wholly unlikely. What will hopefully happen is that HTM5's video element will be supported in major browsers, and then people can use (and download) whatever codecs they want. If someone wants to use Ogg and is willing to encourage people to download the codec before being able to watch movies or listen to audio, then fine.
More likely, everyone will use h.264, which provides great compression for a wide range of bitrates and filetypes, and which all major OSes natively support (as of Windows 7).
Chances are that either 1) those patents will never be enforced; 2) They were applied for before the relevant product came out; 3) They don't cover the examples given; or 4) if they were enfored, they would lose the patent.
Keep in mind that in the US, the general litigious environment means that you need to do everything you can to protect yourself. If Apple didn't have boatloads of patents, like every other major tech company, they would stand a real chance of infringing upon some other obscure, obvious-but-granted-anyway patent that some patent troll company had. I don't recall Apple suing Amazon over Mechanical Turk, but you can bet that patent trolls would definitely do so.
Apple protects its innovations; multi-touch isn't new, but no one else did anything with it. Apple brought it to market and has made millions because of it. Good for them. That's the whole point of capitalism.
If you don't like the current 'patent the obvious' environment in the US, I hope you don't buy at Amazon. Their absurd one-click patent could be argued to have started this preposterous mess in the first place.
Right, because Apple's been well-known lately to rest on its laurels.
The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation. I don't recall having seen anything like the iPhone until the iPhone came out; all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon, and generally doing so pretty poorly.
The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface - unless, of course, no one else out there is up to the task of innovating.
Touchscreen devices are far older than 2001; the distinction here, I believe, is that it detects 'one or more' touches and applies heuristics to them (presumably to determine gestures such as pinch, twist, etc.), and then acts on the results of those heuristics.
But this reflects poorly on KDE as well. A point release should be a full release, not a beta release in disguise. The pure selfish irresponsibility of the KDE people to say 'Here, KDE is done*' with a footnote saying 'But it's not ready for real-world use yet' has burned a lot of bridges, and a lot of people are angry about it.
The KDE team seems basically to have decided that 'If we trick people into running an unstable version, we'll get more and better feedback faster than if we just kept testing it', with the reality being 'People who install KDE4 expecting it to be release-worthy will find it's an unstable, incomplete mess and get frustrated, until they find out they've been deceived and get angry.'
Don't blame Fedora for taking KDE's claims at face value - KDE screwed up, and Fedora's paying the price. I'd stop using KDE as well, if only because the core team is irresponsible with other people's machines.
Well, my Macbook boots in about 20 seconds, and has 16,384 times the memory. Whereas before you could fit your entire operating system AND an application AND a few documents on a single 400k floppy, now our OS comes on a 7 GB DVD, drives a 1600x1200 display instead of 512x384 at 24 bpp instead of 1.
Think about that: 24 kilobytes of memory for the screen back then, vs. 5.4 megabytes today â" and that's just the screen! Modern OSes do all their compositing in hardware, so you're got a backing store for every window, which could quintuple or more your total memory used.
The OS maps gigabytes of data into memory, runs services whose config file parsers take up more space in memory than previous computers ran.
Or, to summarize it all up in a simple way: If a modern computer did no more with its resources than a 128k Mac did, it would be a shame. But your factor of 5000 ignores the sheer amount of things our computers do for us that previous computers hadn't the remotest chance of doing after a decade.
It's not like we're not getting something for it all, you know?
The thing is, a lot of the 'under the hood' problems VIsta had were related to things like hardware support, drivers, and so on. Given that a lot of those issues are largely fixed now, putting a better UI on it (and it IS a lot better), people will give it another try, and maybe this time, they won't have as many issues.
That's the basic concept behind most 'netbooks'. You get local storage for your OS, a keyboard, a display, and an internet connection. Seems like extending it to a tablet wouldn't be too far off. Especially if they can use the tech in WebKit designed for this exact thing (for the iPhone).
So if you spend $100,000 buying a DRM package, but it only gets you $50,000 in additional sales, it was a lousy buy because you actually lost money. If it then also loses you $25,000 more sales from people who can't play, well then it was a REALLY lousy buy.
We'll never really know for sure, but I'd love to hear the numbers of cost vs. benefit for Spore. The most pirated game in history, because of draconian DRM? Pretty funny.
Among other things, it has better IPv6 support, a more modern browser, a better security model, more support for modern networking features (e.g. autodiscovery), a more robust driver model, an updated TCP stack, better support for things like wireless networking, and so on.
I find it more than a little discouraging that people look at the new UI of e.g. Vista or Windows 7 and say 'Oh, it's just XP with a prettier/uglier theme', despite fairly significant usability enhancements, while ignoring substantial under-the-hood improvements because they're not immediately obvious.
Even Vista had a lot of new and enhanced features that weren't user-visible or weren't immediately obvious, but those were so quickly overshadowed by its pretty substantial flaws. Windows 7 has further UI and under-the-hood enhancements, and is actually looking like a respectable OS (and this coming from a 17-year Mac user!).
I'd be lying if I said I didn't have ulterior motives. The more people who switch to Windows 7, the fewer IE6 installations out there, and the less we'll have to worry about designing the same website twice, and that's great. Likewise, we won't have to worry about getting infected with Blaster before we've even finished the install (which happened to a university professor I knew).
We'll also have better, more robust support for newer hardware, so all the Windows machines I manage won't need a USB key full of drivers just so they can get on Windows Update to get newer/better versions of drivers and all the patches they need.
It may not be perfect; heck, it may turn out to be complete garbage. Still, I'm looking forward to it, because it's progress, like it or not.
To heck with 802.11a, get 802.11n draft hardware. I went from essentially no internet in my house to being able to max out my network drive's transfer rate. Haven't had any real problems with it except my iPhone not working, and I solve that by running a separate 802.11g network.
I talk to a lot of people, and this is the advice I give them all. Haven't had any unsatisfied users yet.
This isn't completely uncommon though. Over the years, I've seen a LOT of 'linux advocates' who tell anyone who'll listen (and some who won't) that their lives would be better, a pristine utopia, if only they used Linux. Give up MS Office for OpenOffice, give up Photoshop for the GIMP, give up games entirely, and bam!
But when people have problems? These are the first ones to jump into the fray, telling people that they did something stupid and wrong, or that they just have to do one simple 14-step procedure, or that they just need to recompile something, and so on.
This attitude has been getting better, but it's still prevalent in a lot of circles. Linux is better, therefore if you can't use it you're dumb. Never mind that a lot of people are clueless about computers, and want something that will work the way they expect it to (or close enough), and never mind that many college kids today are not just used to XP, they have been using XP for seven years (nearly a third of their lives), Linux is obviously better and if it doesn't work for you you're stupid, so get a clue dumbass and join the revolution, because it's better, idiot.
There are lots of reasons I've stopped using Linux; the userbase is one of the big ones. I don't want to be associated with the vocal minority that spouts this nonsense.
The world would be a better place if browsers ignored document.write/writeln and forced people to generate their objects via the DOM (or at least via obj.innerHTML).
It would be a shame if someone broke into their unprotected servers and found the code sitting in a hidden directory that they thought only they knew about, and then used it to cleanse the world. Like, tragic.
The only reason to block ads for most people is because they are distracting.
The reason that I block ads, aside from being ugly and distracting from content, or from being intrusive, is because 99% of the time when a page is insanely slow to load, it's because it's waiting on some Javascript or image from the ad server, which is apparently overloaded.
Most of the time when I try to load a page and it won't load, it's an indicator that ad blocking is off. I also block Google Analytics and Digg badges as well.
I don't, and I suspect most people don't, ever block text based ads. I've no problem with them. Thus Google's ads get through. Google understands that text based ads do not bug most people, hence it's always been their ideology to use them.
'Most people' (that use ads) use predefined ad lists, which include Google ads. Unless a covenant was reached to remove Google from those lists, they'd stay there; the only other option would be for Google to make its own adblock list without its own ads and ship that to the browser.
Though imagine if a company that was the biggest ad provider on the internet released software that let users browse the internet with only their own ads. I can see some people getting pissed off about that.
GUI programming and inter-process communication are vastly different on Windows than Linux/Mac; a lot of their code for Chrome was to make the existing code (WebKit) work with this design, but a lot of the rest was code that has to be completely rewritten - and chances are, a lot of the code that they wrote that they can keep needs to be updated to work on more than just Windows as well.
Speaking as someone who shows off his iPhone at every opportunity, who has used Macs for 2/3 of his life, and who stood in line for the iPhone 3G when it was available in his country...
The Palm Pre looks amazing. The interface is beautiful, the gestures are simple, and from all the videos and hands-on I've seen, it's fast. Like, really fast. It's way faster than my iPhone is, and it's far, far better at multitasking, which is probably the biggest failing of the iPhone so far.
Until yesterday, I was wishing Palm would just die and get it over with. Now, if this phone does what it looks like it does, it might well save Palm.
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Either the Zend port, or PHP itself is clearly unsuitable for production use on large indexes.
You phrase this in such a way as to imply an exclusion, when really both are often true. We've ported our PHP application to Rails (which provides a different, but workable, set of problems), and we've rid ourselves of the Zend engine in return for Ferret; I'm a proponent of replacing that with SOLR, but we've yet to go down that path.
Great, now all we need to do is find some way to prevent the gravitational forces of the black hole from gobbling everything up, and prevent the black hole from evaporating due to the release of Hawking radiation, and do this all with less than the power that we'd get out of a black hole, and get enough power that the danger and complexity is worthwhile, and we're golden.
RMS is enough of a revolutionary lunatic that he'd most likely destroy the country. Judging from his ideas, he'd make illegal software patents, as well as commercial software, since 'information wants to be free'.
RMS's intentions are great, but putting him in a position of power would be as ill-advised as doing the same for Theodore Kaczynski.
Microsoft will refuse to support it, at first, but Firefox has sufficient market share that there will be enough websites that use OGG to force Microsoft to add the support.
Wholly unlikely. What will hopefully happen is that HTM5's video element will be supported in major browsers, and then people can use (and download) whatever codecs they want. If someone wants to use Ogg and is willing to encourage people to download the codec before being able to watch movies or listen to audio, then fine.
More likely, everyone will use h.264, which provides great compression for a wide range of bitrates and filetypes, and which all major OSes natively support (as of Windows 7).
Chances are that either 1) those patents will never be enforced; 2) They were applied for before the relevant product came out; 3) They don't cover the examples given; or 4) if they were enfored, they would lose the patent.
Keep in mind that in the US, the general litigious environment means that you need to do everything you can to protect yourself. If Apple didn't have boatloads of patents, like every other major tech company, they would stand a real chance of infringing upon some other obscure, obvious-but-granted-anyway patent that some patent troll company had. I don't recall Apple suing Amazon over Mechanical Turk, but you can bet that patent trolls would definitely do so.
Apple protects its innovations; multi-touch isn't new, but no one else did anything with it. Apple brought it to market and has made millions because of it. Good for them. That's the whole point of capitalism.
If you don't like the current 'patent the obvious' environment in the US, I hope you don't buy at Amazon. Their absurd one-click patent could be argued to have started this preposterous mess in the first place.
Right, because Apple's been well-known lately to rest on its laurels.
The whole point of patents is to reward and encourage innovation. I don't recall having seen anything like the iPhone until the iPhone came out; all the companies since are just jumping on the bandwagon, and generally doing so pretty poorly.
The patent seems like it might be pretty broad, but it seems to basically cover touch 'gestures'. Developers should be able to innovate their way around that specific interface - unless, of course, no one else out there is up to the task of innovating.
Touchscreen devices are far older than 2001; the distinction here, I believe, is that it detects 'one or more' touches and applies heuristics to them (presumably to determine gestures such as pinch, twist, etc.), and then acts on the results of those heuristics.
But this reflects poorly on KDE as well. A point release should be a full release, not a beta release in disguise. The pure selfish irresponsibility of the KDE people to say 'Here, KDE is done*' with a footnote saying 'But it's not ready for real-world use yet' has burned a lot of bridges, and a lot of people are angry about it.
The KDE team seems basically to have decided that 'If we trick people into running an unstable version, we'll get more and better feedback faster than if we just kept testing it', with the reality being 'People who install KDE4 expecting it to be release-worthy will find it's an unstable, incomplete mess and get frustrated, until they find out they've been deceived and get angry.'
Don't blame Fedora for taking KDE's claims at face value - KDE screwed up, and Fedora's paying the price. I'd stop using KDE as well, if only because the core team is irresponsible with other people's machines.
Use HTML.
Well, my Macbook boots in about 20 seconds, and has 16,384 times the memory. Whereas before you could fit your entire operating system AND an application AND a few documents on a single 400k floppy, now our OS comes on a 7 GB DVD, drives a 1600x1200 display instead of 512x384 at 24 bpp instead of 1.
Think about that: 24 kilobytes of memory for the screen back then, vs. 5.4 megabytes today â" and that's just the screen! Modern OSes do all their compositing in hardware, so you're got a backing store for every window, which could quintuple or more your total memory used.
The OS maps gigabytes of data into memory, runs services whose config file parsers take up more space in memory than previous computers ran.
Or, to summarize it all up in a simple way: If a modern computer did no more with its resources than a 128k Mac did, it would be a shame. But your factor of 5000 ignores the sheer amount of things our computers do for us that previous computers hadn't the remotest chance of doing after a decade.
It's not like we're not getting something for it all, you know?
The thing is, a lot of the 'under the hood' problems VIsta had were related to things like hardware support, drivers, and so on. Given that a lot of those issues are largely fixed now, putting a better UI on it (and it IS a lot better), people will give it another try, and maybe this time, they won't have as many issues.
That's the basic concept behind most 'netbooks'. You get local storage for your OS, a keyboard, a display, and an internet connection. Seems like extending it to a tablet wouldn't be too far off. Especially if they can use the tech in WebKit designed for this exact thing (for the iPhone).
Could be interesting.
Maybe the thing boots into WebKit instead of Gecko.
So if you spend $100,000 buying a DRM package, but it only gets you $50,000 in additional sales, it was a lousy buy because you actually lost money. If it then also loses you $25,000 more sales from people who can't play, well then it was a REALLY lousy buy.
We'll never really know for sure, but I'd love to hear the numbers of cost vs. benefit for Spore. The most pirated game in history, because of draconian DRM? Pretty funny.
Among other things, it has better IPv6 support, a more modern browser, a better security model, more support for modern networking features (e.g. autodiscovery), a more robust driver model, an updated TCP stack, better support for things like wireless networking, and so on.
I find it more than a little discouraging that people look at the new UI of e.g. Vista or Windows 7 and say 'Oh, it's just XP with a prettier/uglier theme', despite fairly significant usability enhancements, while ignoring substantial under-the-hood improvements because they're not immediately obvious.
Even Vista had a lot of new and enhanced features that weren't user-visible or weren't immediately obvious, but those were so quickly overshadowed by its pretty substantial flaws. Windows 7 has further UI and under-the-hood enhancements, and is actually looking like a respectable OS (and this coming from a 17-year Mac user!).
I'd be lying if I said I didn't have ulterior motives. The more people who switch to Windows 7, the fewer IE6 installations out there, and the less we'll have to worry about designing the same website twice, and that's great. Likewise, we won't have to worry about getting infected with Blaster before we've even finished the install (which happened to a university professor I knew).
We'll also have better, more robust support for newer hardware, so all the Windows machines I manage won't need a USB key full of drivers just so they can get on Windows Update to get newer/better versions of drivers and all the patches they need.
It may not be perfect; heck, it may turn out to be complete garbage. Still, I'm looking forward to it, because it's progress, like it or not.
To heck with 802.11a, get 802.11n draft hardware. I went from essentially no internet in my house to being able to max out my network drive's transfer rate. Haven't had any real problems with it except my iPhone not working, and I solve that by running a separate 802.11g network.
I talk to a lot of people, and this is the advice I give them all. Haven't had any unsatisfied users yet.
In their defence, the system would scale fine if all the processes weren't stuck in iowait.
I can pick one up for about $160. I remember not too long ago that could only get me 80GB.
Pfft, I remember not too long ago that could only get me 16% of a 20M drive.
This isn't completely uncommon though. Over the years, I've seen a LOT of 'linux advocates' who tell anyone who'll listen (and some who won't) that their lives would be better, a pristine utopia, if only they used Linux. Give up MS Office for OpenOffice, give up Photoshop for the GIMP, give up games entirely, and bam!
But when people have problems? These are the first ones to jump into the fray, telling people that they did something stupid and wrong, or that they just have to do one simple 14-step procedure, or that they just need to recompile something, and so on.
This attitude has been getting better, but it's still prevalent in a lot of circles. Linux is better, therefore if you can't use it you're dumb. Never mind that a lot of people are clueless about computers, and want something that will work the way they expect it to (or close enough), and never mind that many college kids today are not just used to XP, they have been using XP for seven years (nearly a third of their lives), Linux is obviously better and if it doesn't work for you you're stupid, so get a clue dumbass and join the revolution, because it's better, idiot.
There are lots of reasons I've stopped using Linux; the userbase is one of the big ones. I don't want to be associated with the vocal minority that spouts this nonsense.
I for one welcome our homicidal cellular underlings.
The world would be a better place if browsers ignored document.write/writeln and forced people to generate their objects via the DOM (or at least via obj.innerHTML).
It would be a shame if someone broke into their unprotected servers and found the code sitting in a hidden directory that they thought only they knew about, and then used it to cleanse the world. Like, tragic.
The only reason to block ads for most people is because they are distracting.
The reason that I block ads, aside from being ugly and distracting from content, or from being intrusive, is because 99% of the time when a page is insanely slow to load, it's because it's waiting on some Javascript or image from the ad server, which is apparently overloaded.
Most of the time when I try to load a page and it won't load, it's an indicator that ad blocking is off. I also block Google Analytics and Digg badges as well.
I don't, and I suspect most people don't, ever block text based ads. I've no problem with them. Thus Google's ads get through. Google understands that text based ads do not bug most people, hence it's always been their ideology to use them.
'Most people' (that use ads) use predefined ad lists, which include Google ads. Unless a covenant was reached to remove Google from those lists, they'd stay there; the only other option would be for Google to make its own adblock list without its own ads and ship that to the browser.
Though imagine if a company that was the biggest ad provider on the internet released software that let users browse the internet with only their own ads. I can see some people getting pissed off about that.
GUI programming and inter-process communication are vastly different on Windows than Linux/Mac; a lot of their code for Chrome was to make the existing code (WebKit) work with this design, but a lot of the rest was code that has to be completely rewritten - and chances are, a lot of the code that they wrote that they can keep needs to be updated to work on more than just Windows as well.
Speaking as someone who shows off his iPhone at every opportunity, who has used Macs for 2/3 of his life, and who stood in line for the iPhone 3G when it was available in his country...
The Palm Pre looks amazing. The interface is beautiful, the gestures are simple, and from all the videos and hands-on I've seen, it's fast. Like, really fast. It's way faster than my iPhone is, and it's far, far better at multitasking, which is probably the biggest failing of the iPhone so far.
Until yesterday, I was wishing Palm would just die and get it over with. Now, if this phone does what it looks like it does, it might well save Palm.