Here at work we used to have a little side business where we assembled PCs from wholesale parts, using IDE drives. We put maybe one together a week, tops, and we've got a drawer completely full of SATA cables.
I'd never choose PHP over Java, when it comes to writing server software, such as an IRC server, or a MUD.
I'd never choose Java/JSP over PHP when it comes to writing form-based web applications.
They're tools with totally different uses! True, you can do PHP-like things in java/JSP, and PHP is better at them. You might as well say hammers are useless, because of the invention of the screwdriver.
It's the people on the network that keep me signing on. My family uses Yahoo, a few friends use MSN, and a few use AIM. (In the past AIM was great because you could use it to talk to AOL users for free, but these days, I don't know any)
If I want to talk to all of them, I have use all three clients. In my experience most people install IM clients for the same reason -- a friend says, "You should download [AIM/Y!M/MSN] and chat with me! My screenname is veronica696969". No one really cares how many custom smilies any given client supports -- they're mostly all Good Enough at their basic job -- rapid transport of small snippits of text.
On a completely unrelated note, the following AOL screennames are already taken: veronica69 veronica6969 veronica696969 veronica69696969...Appearantly, the Veronicas of the world are a rather uncreative bunch.
My subdivision has some 500 houses in it. If half of them get high speed internet in some form, at $50/month they are paying out some $12,500 a month collectively for high speed internet access.
What if our subdivision decided to set up it's own WiFi network?
$50 here gets you 6 Mbit downstream, and about 1 Mbit upstream.
500 of those gets you 3 gbit down, 0.5 gbit up. That's a lot more bandwidth than splitting 6 Mbit 500 ways.
In fact, 6 Mbit split 500 ways is, what... 12Kbit/sec each? (and 2 KBit/sec downstream)
Hell, to offer the 512Kbit mentioned here to 500 people, you'd need a 1/4 Gigabit connection. We're talking dual OC-3s which may well cost as much or more than the $12,500 for cable.
There's a fundemental flaw with the "People who listened to X also listened to Y" model, though!
You'll find that people who listen to a song that's played on a top 40 station are likely to listen to other things played by that same top 40 station.
Thus, rather than finding artists who actually produce similar music, you'll just get a reproduction of that top 40 station's playlist.
This "Pandora" tool produces a lot more independant, underground results than the "People who listened to X also listened to Y" algorithm ever will -- the masses aren't a very good indicator of what's similar, only what's similarly popular.
I'm just trying to see how a corporation justifies the expenses.
We're talking about very high value stuff here. I'm sure the whole of the market is willing to pay thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars for these things, and insurance might cover them in some cases (although that may be a long shot).
From this FAQ: There were 1,285,000 persons in the U.S. living with the limb loss (excluding fingers and toes) in 1996.
And of course, this is an international market -- extending beyond the US.
If you could sell a million of these things at $1,000 each, you're looking at a billion dollars in revenue. I'd say there's a niche here.
You don't need bleeding edge hardware these days. My girlfriend picked up a AMD 3 GHZ laptop with 512 meg of ram for about a grand. We didn't even look at the video card specs at the time. Turns out the thing has some random ATI Mobility card (X200?). At any rate, I installed Guild Wars and it ran great.
So, your standard, middle of the road laptop runs most modern games just fine these days. You don't have to blow $3k on a "Gaming" laptop, as long as you don't mind playing at less-than-max settings, with moderate frame rates.
I don't really understand the guys who opt for 100 FPS at max res anyway. I can frag your ass just fine at 1024x768 at 30 FPS -- and spend the $1500+ I saved on shit that matters.
Why not take this further? If you can write data twice as fast by simultaneously writing to two internal flash chips, why not use 4? or 8? Hell, then you can even internally RAID 5 'em!
And don't even start with the "What, aren't flash drives fast enough already!?" line. My company was tasked with setting up a accounting firm to cheaply work from home, via USB thumb drives. Copying 3 meg spread across a few thousand small files took something on the order of 15 minutes. It's pretty hard to get people to synch nightly on their way out the door with times like that.
It costs more than a CD The audio's lower quality It doesn't work in my car... And if everyone released music like this, I'd have 128Meg USB drives laying around my house all over the place.
That's only slightly more practical than releasing your album on the first 600 meg of a 500 gig drive, for $200 each.
Since we were "one of the violent mobs" he mentions, many of the changes were directed at us and others like us specifically
I think you've misunderstood some old MUD lingo. The only use of the term "mob" in TFA is:
Additionally, we have made it so that non-combat professions do not agro within the game, so that players who do not choose to fight will be able to move about the game world without worrying about aggressive mobs.
Wikipedia's definition of this type of "Mob":
A mob is a non-player character (NPC) or monster in a computer role-playing game (especially MUDs and MMORPGs). It is widely accepted as being short for mobile object or simply mobile, stemming from its use in the earliest text-based MUDs, and is commonly written either mob or MOB (the latter more often considered an acronym of Movable Object Block, a term for any on-screen moving object, or sprite)
Long story short, they're saying Bantha's won't attack your Dancer, no matter how close you walk to them now. They weren't talking about player killers.
Not every book has a Dewey Decimal number, not every dewey decimal number is in amazon's database (they don't even have a full set of weight/dimension data), and dewey decimal doesn't even do everything tags do.
A tag could tell me if this book is part of the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" series, and searching by that tag could net me a list of all books in the series. Dewey Decimal can't do that.
I don't get it. Are you arguing that the best AJAX solution is one that works even when javascript is disabled? You do realize that the J in AJAX stands for Javascript, don't you?
>What about web browsers without javascript...AJAX doesn't work very well for them, does it? Kind of moot. Ever tried visiting google maps with javascript off? You get a "Your browser is not supported" message.
>And don't give me that java "platform independent" nonsense.
What can I say? The live server software was running on Unix boxes; meanwhile half of us developed from PCs. The server software we had worked on both platforms.
I think most of the complaints about java not being truly platform independent are GUI related. That doesn't apply to server software.
>What about web browsers without javascript...AJAX doesn't work very well for them, does it? Kind of moot. Ever tried visiting google maps with javascript off? You get a "Your browser is not supported" message.
>And don't give me that java "platform independent" nonsense.
What can I say? The live server software was running on Unix boxes; meanwhile half of us developed from PCs. The server software we had worked on both platforms.
I think most of the complaints about java not being truly platform independent are GUI related. That doesn't apply to server software.
Still, I haven't seen a good, platform-independent, integrated sever- and client-side solution yet.
I worked for a startup called "State Software", which offered the "State Application Framework" back in 2000-2002 -- which did just that. Platform independent (on both the server AND client side), and relatively easy to use. It was basically a java back end, with a great browser-independent javascript client library.
Long story short, 2002 was a very bad time to be a startup, and VC funding wasn't quite as easy to get as it had been in the mid/late nineties. Additionally they had the technology long before anyone even coined the term "AJAX", so suffice it to say, it wasn't a popular movement just yet. They got some attention from the biggest names in ecommerce, but no one ever put up any money.
If the number of transistors on the chip doubles every 18 months, it seems pretty logical that the power consumption and heat output would increase similarly. More transistors probably take more power to operate. Otherwise, on top of doubling transistor count, we're also doubling the efficiecy of transistors.
And there's no arguing that today's 3 ghz processors run hotter than a 486/33. Those things didn't even have fans. They were air cooled.
Yes, chances are the efficiency is higher, but the claim is not not that efficiency has decreased. The claim is that power consumption and heating are increasing.
how many times on IRC did you get responses along the lines of "sort it out for yourself, n00b, the rest of us googled our way through..."
Personally, I offer a lot of tech support on message boards. When someone comes to the board once in a blue moon with a really difficult tech issue, I'm more than happy to help. But there's a certain class of user who will continually post questions that can be answered with 30 seconds of googling. Questions like "Can I use this 1MB SIMM in my P4 box?".
It's rather akin to someone walking in to the emergency room with a paper cut... 4 times a day. The "experts'" time is better spent on those who have more severe problems. Learn to apply your own bandages, dammit!
There's a difference between needing help with a truly obscure problem after conducting your own exhaustive research, and being completely unwilling to learn at all. Believe it or not, if you're willing to take the time to research, and learn on your own, you can do just about anything. If you decide that you don't understand computers, never will, and shouldn't even bother trying... Well, that's a self fulfilling prophesy, and a waste of my time.
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Here at work we used to have a little side business where we assembled PCs from wholesale parts, using IDE drives. We put maybe one together a week, tops, and we've got a drawer completely full of SATA cables.
These things are worse than AOL CD's!
Seriously man, did Rasmus Lerdorf systematically kill off every one of your remaining family members, or something?
Seriously man. These are all CyricZ PHP trolls from THIS MONTH. I skipped a good 10 that were all on the "PHP5 Recipes" thread, for sanity's sake.
I'd never choose PHP over Java, when it comes to writing server software, such as an IRC server, or a MUD.
I'd never choose Java/JSP over PHP when it comes to writing form-based web applications.
They're tools with totally different uses! True, you can do PHP-like things in java/JSP, and PHP is better at them. You might as well say hammers are useless, because of the invention of the screwdriver.
Flawed? I promise you doubleclick receives more GETs every day than 99% of the net.
Their rankings aren't flawed. They just don't represent what you want them to.
It's a raw count of GETs/POSTs, which includes pop-up advertising and such. It's not a ranking based on 'popularity'.
Funny you should mention that.
The first time I installed redhat on my P2 233, the BIOS's "boot virus detection" freaked out about LILO.
I've noticed you post a very similar PHP security troll on every PHP thread.
I have to ask -- do you also point out C++'s flaws, in the realm of buffer overflows? It is, after all, an inherently insecure language.
Which languages do you consider secure? Java?
It's the people on the network that keep me signing on. My family uses Yahoo, a few friends use MSN, and a few use AIM. (In the past AIM was great because you could use it to talk to AOL users for free, but these days, I don't know any)
...Appearantly, the Veronicas of the world are a rather uncreative bunch.
If I want to talk to all of them, I have use all three clients. In my experience most people install IM clients for the same reason -- a friend says, "You should download [AIM/Y!M/MSN] and chat with me! My screenname is veronica696969". No one really cares how many custom smilies any given client supports -- they're mostly all Good Enough at their basic job -- rapid transport of small snippits of text.
On a completely unrelated note, the following AOL screennames are already taken:
veronica69
veronica6969
veronica696969
veronica69696969
Don't ask me why I know that.
A goodly number of those are present in 1.0.7, I believe.
Namely, the last 3.
My subdivision has some 500 houses in it. If half of them get high speed internet in some form, at $50/month they are paying out some $12,500 a month collectively for high speed internet access. What if our subdivision decided to set up it's own WiFi network?
$50 here gets you 6 Mbit downstream, and about 1 Mbit upstream.
500 of those gets you 3 gbit down, 0.5 gbit up. That's a lot more bandwidth than splitting 6 Mbit 500 ways.
In fact, 6 Mbit split 500 ways is, what... 12Kbit/sec each? (and 2 KBit/sec downstream)
Hell, to offer the 512Kbit mentioned here to 500 people, you'd need a 1/4 Gigabit connection. We're talking dual OC-3s which may well cost as much or more than the $12,500 for cable.
There's a fundemental flaw with the "People who listened to X also listened to Y" model, though!
You'll find that people who listen to a song that's played on a top 40 station are likely to listen to other things played by that same top 40 station.
Thus, rather than finding artists who actually produce similar music, you'll just get a reproduction of that top 40 station's playlist.
This "Pandora" tool produces a lot more independant, underground results than the "People who listened to X also listened to Y" algorithm ever will -- the masses aren't a very good indicator of what's similar, only what's similarly popular.
I'm just trying to see how a corporation justifies the expenses.
We're talking about very high value stuff here. I'm sure the whole of the market is willing to pay thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars for these things, and insurance might cover them in some cases (although that may be a long shot).
From this FAQ: There were 1,285,000 persons in the U.S. living with the limb loss (excluding fingers and toes) in 1996.
And of course, this is an international market -- extending beyond the US.
If you could sell a million of these things at $1,000 each, you're looking at a billion dollars in revenue. I'd say there's a niche here.
You don't need bleeding edge hardware these days. My girlfriend picked up a AMD 3 GHZ laptop with 512 meg of ram for about a grand. We didn't even look at the video card specs at the time. Turns out the thing has some random ATI Mobility card (X200?). At any rate, I installed Guild Wars and it ran great.
So, your standard, middle of the road laptop runs most modern games just fine these days. You don't have to blow $3k on a "Gaming" laptop, as long as you don't mind playing at less-than-max settings, with moderate frame rates.
I don't really understand the guys who opt for 100 FPS at max res anyway. I can frag your ass just fine at 1024x768 at 30 FPS -- and spend the $1500+ I saved on shit that matters.
Why not take this further? If you can write data twice as fast by simultaneously writing to two internal flash chips, why not use 4? or 8? Hell, then you can even internally RAID 5 'em!
And don't even start with the "What, aren't flash drives fast enough already!?" line. My company was tasked with setting up a accounting firm to cheaply work from home, via USB thumb drives. Copying 3 meg spread across a few thousand small files took something on the order of 15 minutes. It's pretty hard to get people to synch nightly on their way out the door with times like that.
It costs more than a CD ... And if everyone released music like this, I'd have 128Meg USB drives laying around my house all over the place.
The audio's lower quality
It doesn't work in my car
That's only slightly more practical than releasing your album on the first 600 meg of a 500 gig drive, for $200 each.
The average computer uses as much as the Mayflower worth of coal to run on any given day
I don't know how much a "Mayflower" of coal is, but unless it's on the order of 10 pounds, you're way off, buddy.
We've been through this before.
Since we were "one of the violent mobs" he mentions, many of the changes were directed at us and others like us specifically
I think you've misunderstood some old MUD lingo. The only use of the term "mob" in TFA is:
Additionally, we have made it so that non-combat professions do not agro within the game, so that players who do not choose to fight will be able to move about the game world without worrying about aggressive mobs.
Wikipedia's definition of this type of "Mob":
A mob is a non-player character (NPC) or monster in a computer role-playing game (especially MUDs and MMORPGs). It is widely accepted as being short for mobile object or simply mobile, stemming from its use in the earliest text-based MUDs, and is commonly written either mob or MOB (the latter more often considered an acronym of Movable Object Block, a term for any on-screen moving object, or sprite)
Long story short, they're saying Bantha's won't attack your Dancer, no matter how close you walk to them now. They weren't talking about player killers.
Not every book has a Dewey Decimal number, not every dewey decimal number is in amazon's database (they don't even have a full set of weight/dimension data), and dewey decimal doesn't even do everything tags do.
A tag could tell me if this book is part of the "Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy" series, and searching by that tag could net me a list of all books in the series. Dewey Decimal can't do that.
I don't get it. Are you arguing that the best AJAX solution is one that works even when javascript is disabled? You do realize that the J in AJAX stands for Javascript, don't you?
>What about web browsers without javascript ...AJAX doesn't work very well for them, does it? Kind of moot. Ever tried visiting google maps with javascript off? You get a "Your browser is not supported" message.
>And don't give me that java "platform independent" nonsense.
What can I say? The live server software was running on Unix boxes; meanwhile half of us developed from PCs. The server software we had worked on both platforms.
I think most of the complaints about java not being truly platform independent are GUI related. That doesn't apply to server software.
>What about web browsers without javascript ...AJAX doesn't work very well for them, does it? Kind of moot. Ever tried visiting google maps with javascript off? You get a "Your browser is not supported" message.
>And don't give me that java "platform independent" nonsense.
What can I say? The live server software was running on Unix boxes; meanwhile half of us developed from PCs. The server software we had worked on both platforms.
I think most of the complaints about java not being truly platform independent are GUI related. That doesn't apply to server software.
Still, I haven't seen a good, platform-independent, integrated sever- and client-side solution yet.
I worked for a startup called "State Software", which offered the "State Application Framework" back in 2000-2002 -- which did just that. Platform independent (on both the server AND client side), and relatively easy to use. It was basically a java back end, with a great browser-independent javascript client library.
Long story short, 2002 was a very bad time to be a startup, and VC funding wasn't quite as easy to get as it had been in the mid/late nineties. Additionally they had the technology long before anyone even coined the term "AJAX", so suffice it to say, it wasn't a popular movement just yet. They got some attention from the biggest names in ecommerce, but no one ever put up any money.
It would seem the time to renew is now!
So, seems 18 million records is too much for poor little SQL Server, hmm? I bet Oracle could help, or maybe MySQL/PostgreSQL.
18 million records is a lot for mysql too.
If the number of transistors on the chip doubles every 18 months, it seems pretty logical that the power consumption and heat output would increase similarly. More transistors probably take more power to operate. Otherwise, on top of doubling transistor count, we're also doubling the efficiecy of transistors. And there's no arguing that today's 3 ghz processors run hotter than a 486/33. Those things didn't even have fans. They were air cooled. Yes, chances are the efficiency is higher, but the claim is not not that efficiency has decreased. The claim is that power consumption and heating are increasing.
how many times on IRC did you get responses along the lines of "sort it out for yourself, n00b, the rest of us googled our way through..."
Personally, I offer a lot of tech support on message boards. When someone comes to the board once in a blue moon with a really difficult tech issue, I'm more than happy to help. But there's a certain class of user who will continually post questions that can be answered with 30 seconds of googling. Questions like "Can I use this 1MB SIMM in my P4 box?".
It's rather akin to someone walking in to the emergency room with a paper cut... 4 times a day. The "experts'" time is better spent on those who have more severe problems. Learn to apply your own bandages, dammit!
There's a difference between needing help with a truly obscure problem after conducting your own exhaustive research, and being completely unwilling to learn at all. Believe it or not, if you're willing to take the time to research, and learn on your own, you can do just about anything. If you decide that you don't understand computers, never will, and shouldn't even bother trying... Well, that's a self fulfilling prophesy, and a waste of my time.