I totally agree. The Bush administration has really disappointed me. Bush is NOT a conservative by any measure EXCEPT possibly morality, only, I think that he's trying to continue to pander to Christians and conservative Jews to maintain support for the GOP. I'm a registered Republican but will be looking into the Libertarian party because I believe in true Conservatism:
- a small, limited government totally answerable to the people
- ALL government spending should be public and not obfuscated under code names to "protect" pet defense contractors and pork projects
- spending only what is absolutely NECESSARY
- No welfare, support for the unfortunate should be funded privately
- if ~50% of our pay were not extorted through taxes and "user fees" average folks could help the needy
- absence of welfare would encourage the lazy to work (the non-lazy but unemployable can be helped by private sources)
- the TRULY needy (disabled, etc.) should have SOME support
- NO legislation of morality
- As an example: marriage is a religious construct. Leave marriage up to churches and synogogues to decide. If a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman is "wrong" and "sinful" then let God sort it out if he exists. The state has no business in saying who can and cannot marry
- "victimless" crimes should not be crimes. If you want to fry your brain on LSD (like Syd Barrett:( ) then you should be free to do so, providing you don't hurt anyone else in the process. Drive while high/tripping/drunk though, and injure or kill someone, that should be a capital crime because it is no longer "victimless." Oh, and no blaming your addiction on your mommy, society, or schools, either
- Public schools should not exist. The Constitution says you have the right to an eductation, not that the government must foot the bill and provide it to you. They just cannot forbid you to get an education should you so desire. Government-funded eduction results in what we have now: lowering the standards so that "no child is left behind"
Given what the current administration has done through abuse of the executive order, ignoring the constitution at whim, and creating a bloated government, I am extremely disappointed in the GOP, which USED to stand for the principles that the Libertarians and costitutional-based parties now embrace.
CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest show the biases of the majority owners of each network, and not propoganda from the government. Granted, at times the media may pander to their preferred administration or against the administration they would rather not see in office, but that is not government-controlled and therefore not the same as what you imply is happening in the media.
Example of "propoganda:" state of the union address, however, the media companies nearly always follow such events up with their own recap which basically promote their own agendas, sometime in agreement with the administration, sometimes against, but in each case it shows that the media companies are their own entities and not government puppets.
At least, here in America. In Russia with state-funded Pravda (is Pravda still state run?), The UK with state-funded, BBC, etc. things may not be the same. Are those media companies invariably promoting the political elite of the minute, or do they criticize them? If the latter, then obviously media is in control and it's not government propoganda, but more of an issue of another entities "rah rah" proselytizing.
And, when they could not find the "criminal" they picked off some random joe for the newscast, because, you know, the government can't make a mistake.
Both Farenheit 451 and 1984 are great books and should be required reading for everyone. If everyone were to read those I bet more people would get out to vote, and would vote based on issues and constitutional concerns rather than "gee, that candidate is cute and reminds me of JFK"
I get enough spam as it is, and the color code for terrorist alerts don't change what I'm doing in the slightest. I'd rather not receive useless cry-wolf text messages and get charged for the displeasure of reading the "alerts"
Also, "emergency broadcast system" tests are annoying enough as it is when they already interrupt an on-demand movie I'm watching on digital cable. Please confine these to broadcast television, and put them on during commercial breaks, like broadcasters used to do. If I care to learn about homeland security's crying wolf, I'll tune to CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, or HN or check out their web sites.
In a related story, MPAA requests an injunction against a harvard professor in attempt to block production of a 50TB storage device for consumer PCs. When asked for the basis for such action, an MPAA spokesperson stated "There is absolutely no legitimate use for such large amounts of storage, the only use we can ascertain is hosting of illegal movie downloads for re-sharing on P2P networks."
Why are you stooping to baseless personal attacks rather than sticking to the issue? Who's the asshole here?
did you notice the ":-p" at the end of the line? Did you happen to read the rest of my post?>
If you meant it tongue in cheek, then a;-) would convey that. A:-p comes across as "I'm right you're wrong, you're an asshole" - in effect a personal attack. Or if you had intended it to be a sarcastic remark to be taken as tongue-in-cheek, you could mix the two and use a ";-p"
HTH, troll!
Oh and as far as this is concerned: I'm beginning to think you don't actually have a friend who insists on using Win 3.1. You're the troll, buddy.
It's one of my business partner's mother, and she is in her '70s. She likes her programs, she likes Windows 3.1, and she doesn't do any gaming or web surfing on that platform. If you like I can take a photograph of the computer running Windows 3.1 and include a screenshot of File Manager with timestamps on the files. Why should she dump a working computer and buy new applications (or go with OOo) when her existing computer WORKS, and aside from a HDD that was dying, has been largely problem-free for well over 10 years? She surfs the web on her Mac (running OS 9, they haven't bothered to upgrade yet), or if they need a newer computer to access something online, they visit the office and use one of our computers. What you are exhibiting is an elitist attitude, and makes me think you're either a Microsoft employee with a stake in forcing everyone to upgrade, or a Microsoft-flavor kool aid drinking fanboy. Windows 3.1, DOS, or even a commodore Vic-20 is perfectly adequate for some people's purposes. They're comfortable with the tools they have, don't need anything later and greater than that, so why should they be coerced by the likes of you to upgrade? I suggested they upgrade, but she plans to get a new Mac soon, but KEEP the Windows 3.1 machine running until it cannot be fixed any more. She LIKES it. You DON'T like it. Should people force you to LIKE Windows 3.1 and enjoy older applications? Why not? After all, others like it and so should you, right?
Nice troll again though. Let's stick to the issue, shall we?
Yeah, software is not lucrative, especially not office suites and operating systems. I mean there has never been ANY company which ever succeeded in that market without forcing the software to run only on closed-architecture hardware. Nope, NO one has ever succeded at that, and there have certainly never been any people who have become billionaires in that exact market. Nope, it's definitely a losing business strategy, certainly not anything you would ever see result in a Fortune 500 company. No, you're right, Apple is best off avoiding that market altogether and not focus on software licensing. It's a silly idea.;)
The TV Wonder (PCI) has support, but the first-generation tuner card (ISA/AMC) does not. I'm SOL with most of the ATI hardware I have. The ATI TV cards I have don't work, the AiW cards I have don't, at least not without a lot of jumping through hoops with GATO, and even then they don't work as well as, say, a Hauppauge tuner. Even so, for what I use that POS PC for, it's "good enough" for now.
Yes but now we have allowed our own government to tax:
- Property taxes (you think you OWN real estate? HA!)
- Fuel taxes
- Tolls on paid-for-by-taxes roads
- Agricultural subsidies
- Sales tax
- Income tax
- DOUBLE tax on income if you have a C-corp
- Death tax
- Misc taxes on utilities (which in turn receive subsidies or tax breaks, wtf?)
- Misc other "user fees" and taxes
Do we really have it any better here in America than the British do? We've kicked them out and then allowed our elected officials to force taxes upon us, and we haven't fought against it by voting those cretins out of office.
Wow, you mean she can actually get a CD burner to work in Windows 3.1?:-P
Did I say it has a CD burner?
Here's a shocker for you: hard drives can be removed and put into other machines to be backed up, and occasionally one can mount corrupt partitions with Linux or use data recovery programs from Win2K/XP to retrieve data, and burn that data to disc using the newer computer. OMFG!!;)
How would you compare failure rates then? If not over time and # of failed units / produced units, then by what metric? I was merely pointing out that the failure rate of the shuttle is higher by conventional metrics. It doesn't mean the shuttle program should be killed off. In fact it should be continued, but the existing shuttle should be replaced by a newer design, preferably another REUSABLE craft.
Face it. Space flights are dangerous, but how many of us wouldn't jump at the chance to go were it offered to us? I'd go in a heartbeat. I wasn't trying to FUD or slight the space program in any way, just pointing out that although many airlines' maintenance may be horrendous and their logs in some cases have been proven downright negligent or even fraudulent, their failure rate is still quite low compared to the shuttles which are largely rebuilt between each and every flight. They undergo far more than your typical aviation pre-flight check of "Ok, flap moves? No oil leaks? Oh wait, a few oil droplets, it `shouldn't` cause a problem so let's not ground it, just log that it requires further scruitiny. Oops, this bolt is a little loose, yeah, log that to be checked later. Okay, you're good to go." That kind of thing would not be allowed at ALL on the shuttle, and yet even with the uber-cheap maintenance budgets airlines allocate, their catastrophic failure rate is far, far below 20%. It should be even lower than it is (e/g., the ValueJet crash years ago was very preventable), but it is what it is, but is still very low-risk compared to space flight given the extremes (pressures, temperatures, etc.) the airframe and skin undergo each and every flight.
Yeah, I know, I have been trolled, and why am I responding to such an obvious troll? Oh well.
I'd like to see:
- Ability to enter metadata (description, keywords) when creating a bookmark
- A bookmark search facility (wait, wasn't this on the 2.0 roadmap before?)
- an extension garbage collection utility (when an extension monopolizes CPU time or memory, it should be killed and reloaded automagically)
- the search box to be resizable without having to install the "resize search box" extension
- All tab mix plus features to become standard in the browser
- Documentation of ALL command line options to be included in a readme file (or in the online help)
- Profile management should be accessible from the Tools menu or through edit->preferences
- Deployment to be better documented (to make it easier to deploy standard profiles for all users, be it on Windows, Linux, OS X, etc., in the All Users profile, or in/etc/skel, or whatever other mechanism the OS supports) without having to jump through hoops
More likely there is a problem with one of the drivers - NOT his fault. My Pentium 4 with an ATI Radeon card does NOT play DOS games like DOOM, DOOM II well with the Catalyst drivers installed. If the default drivers are installed, no problem, DOS games run just fine, but at a HUGE expense (no tuner suppoort, S-L-O-W 2D video performance, PAINFUL 3D performance in Windows apps). No matter though, I've rebooted to Windows only three times so far this year.;)
Er, no. Duck Tape is NOT an "inferior copy" of gaffers tape.
They have different adhesives and are designed for different purposes.
Duck Tape would stink in a studio where you need the tape to hold fabric, props, cables, etc. in place but CANNOT leave residue behind. Duck Tape also comes in handy in race applications (hence the moniker 200mph tape)
Gaffers tape would stink in an environment where you need the application to be waterproof, which is Duck Tape's forte. Also, being designed for studios, stages, etc. Gaffers tape is available in more colors ( http://www34.pair.com/harrison/thetapeworks.com/pr ogaff.htm - note I am not affiliated with them in any way; a google query turned them up). Folks who use Duck Tape for those purposes either don't know any better or grabbed Duck Tape in a pinch because the right stuff isn't readily available - or they're downright cheap and bought a dollar-store clone of Duck Tape)
Similar look, different adhesives, different purposes.
Not necessarily. You may not be aware (I wasn't until a few months ago) that Dells are so cheap because the consumer lines come bundled with spyware, er, "adware" so you're not really paying the entire cost of the machine and hardware. Until I heard that from a (now former) Dell reseller, I was bewildered as to how they can offer their hardware so damn cheap, even with all of the volume discounts they get from the manufacturers. Yeah, they spec out CHEAP motherboards, but they still won't get much below $40 for a board with all peripherals embedded, customized with proprietary sockets for their front-panel doodads, even with vast quantity orders, and Intel certainly is not going to take a loss on such a vast quantity of CPUs.
Sure, the documents can be read from Linux, and the applications might even run in dosbox or qemu/freedos, but users need to "think" a little more. Games usually work but not always perfectly. Some people LIKE old DOS apps, or even Windows 3.1 apps - a couple of months ago I replaced a HDD in a Windows 3.1 box for a friend who REFUSES to give up Windows 3.1. She likes the applications she has and has many hundreds of documents (poems she's written, lectures, financials, etc.) and does NOT want to learn a new system. Between DOS and Windows she DOES have 20 years worth of documents on that computer, and now she has a backup on CD as well.
If it works for her and is paid for, why dump it, and why force her to learn something she doesn't necessarily want to bother with? She doesn't care about free vs. free vs. proprietary, she cares that she can get to her documents.
There is a huge drawback to Boot Camp - to run that one Windows app to (OCR a file|Edit that Word doc|Foo the Bar) requires two reboots, whereas Parallels requires a click or two, run the app, then kill Windows and keep right on working, all without iTunes skipping a beat (pun intended;)).
Blah. I switched one machine from Linux back TO Windows 98 just so I could run my ATI Tuner card. All I run on it is the CHM viewer, ATI Multimedia, OOo.org, Paint Shop Pro, and Acrobat Reader. I WANTED inkscape on there, but Inkscape won't work with Windows 98 any more. I'd have stuck with Linux, but the ATI TV tuner won't work with Linux (I threw one of the original ISA tuners in that box since it has an embedded ATI Rage II chipset with the AMC header), and it (the Tuner) won't work with any version of Windows past Me. Many users still run Windows 98 because some of their hardware (be it some HP or Lexmark all-in-one printers, scanners, or in my case multimedia devices) just plain won't work with other operating systems. Windows 98 may suck, but it makes a damn good television for me while I do some work at home.
Others stick with it because THEY keep the Win2K or XP for their home office or study, and gave their kids their old Windows 98/Me/95(ack!) machines.
Not everyone with an older machine will wipe it to switch to Linux. Heck, many of them probably aren't even connected to the Internet any more. MOST won't switch to Linux, at least not on that machine - they'll keep it until it croaks, throw it away, then buy either a Windows or Mac PC. A minority might hear about this "Linux" thing and consider buying it.
It depends on a lot more than just "is it IIS/.Net or is it LAMP?"
On equivalent hardware, with equivalent RAM, if you're running MySQL with the MyISAM engine it will blow away SQL Server performance for most queries, but at a cost: You do not have stored procedures or transactions. When you switch to InnoDB you gain those but take a performance hit and that advantage over SQL Server disappears. On the plus side, MySQL is free/free (unless you need the commercial license - which in turn depends on whether you bundle it with your application AND how you interface with MySQL AND the "license" of your software).
As far as.Net itself vs. php or.jsp - it depends largely on several things:
- What is the architecture and how efficient is the code? If you use, say, DotNetNuke as an example, it's a good argument AGAINST using.Net because performance (of at least 1.x.x versions, I haven't worked with it since) absolutely sucks to almost any PHP application.
- How much RAM can you throw at it, and is caching appropriate for your application? With fully dynamic web sites where pages may display random content (rotating images, randomized quote of the day, etc.) unless you override the caching mechanism, the cache can effectively break your web site. However if caching IS appropriate and/or you override it when necessary,.Net can provide blazing performance. Your code has to be very efficient and you often need to throw a real large amount of RAM at it. Also, when you start a.Net application, it can take a while for it to serve up the first page - a concern for Tuesday updates when you were forced to reboot for patches to finish installing.
- (related to above) are you comparing a poorly-coded, inefficient, beastly PHP application to a lightweight highly-optimized.Net application? Say, OS Commerce vs. a custom single-purpose.Net eCommerce application? I'd darn well expect.Net to blow away the LAMP solution, because OS Commerce is an inefficient beast - the only thing going for it is is that it's a "swiss army knife" open source eCommerce application. It does EVERYTHING, but sacrifices efficiency due to its hacked-together design. (yes, I'm using "hacked" as in "that guy is a hack"). On the converse, if you compare, say, DotNetNuke to mambo or Drupal and set out to provide the same or similar functionality, chances are that the LAMP solution will blow away.Net by any load test metrics you can come up with.
What is my point? Unless you are comparing apples to apples, it's FUD or at best an amateur comparison. The way to test it is to implement the same task with a similar (as possible) architecture on each platform, with the application on each fully optimized, with both IIS and apache/tomcat/whatever fully tuned and streamlined to pull out every bit of performance from it, then load test both of those using the same sorts of tests. Comparing a highly-optimized single-purpose application to a general-purpose portal platform is not a fair test.
Also: Even though the article says "Even the most ardent PHP fans will admit that PHP is not designed with performance in mind," PHP performs damn well considering it's heritage, the fact that its primary platform is "a patchy server" and that it is FREE.
Why would one choose LAMP over.Net? Licensing. Hardware costs. Have you ever set up a Windows cluster? It's not cheap, and even if you can come up with a cheap way to do it, you don't WANT to because it will be unreliable. SQL Server licensing is EXPENSIVE (or if the db is real advantage of Microsoft's.Net platform? The development tools, NO one has an IDE which is better than Microsoft's. Zend's PHP Studio is darn good, but the level of integration with documentation, the debugging environment, the code completion, and keyboard navigation does not match Visual
Slashdot Mirror
s/space invaders/missile command/
I totally agree. The Bush administration has really disappointed me. Bush is NOT a conservative by any measure EXCEPT possibly morality, only, I think that he's trying to continue to pander to Christians and conservative Jews to maintain support for the GOP. I'm a registered Republican but will be looking into the Libertarian party because I believe in true Conservatism:
:( ) then you should be free to do so, providing you don't hurt anyone else in the process. Drive while high/tripping/drunk though, and injure or kill someone, that should be a capital crime because it is no longer "victimless." Oh, and no blaming your addiction on your mommy, society, or schools, either
- a small, limited government totally answerable to the people
- ALL government spending should be public and not obfuscated under code names to "protect" pet defense contractors and pork projects
- spending only what is absolutely NECESSARY
- No welfare, support for the unfortunate should be funded privately
- if ~50% of our pay were not extorted through taxes and "user fees" average folks could help the needy
- absence of welfare would encourage the lazy to work (the non-lazy but unemployable can be helped by private sources)
- the TRULY needy (disabled, etc.) should have SOME support
- NO legislation of morality
- As an example: marriage is a religious construct. Leave marriage up to churches and synogogues to decide. If a man marrying a man or a woman marrying a woman is "wrong" and "sinful" then let God sort it out if he exists. The state has no business in saying who can and cannot marry
- "victimless" crimes should not be crimes. If you want to fry your brain on LSD (like Syd Barrett
- Public schools should not exist. The Constitution says you have the right to an eductation, not that the government must foot the bill and provide it to you. They just cannot forbid you to get an education should you so desire. Government-funded eduction results in what we have now: lowering the standards so that "no child is left behind"
Given what the current administration has done through abuse of the executive order, ignoring the constitution at whim, and creating a bloated government, I am extremely disappointed in the GOP, which USED to stand for the principles that the Libertarians and costitutional-based parties now embrace.
With real chicken? What were Chicken McNuggets before?
There is a HUGE difference.
CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the rest show the biases of the majority owners of each network, and not propoganda from the government. Granted, at times the media may pander to their preferred administration or against the administration they would rather not see in office, but that is not government-controlled and therefore not the same as what you imply is happening in the media.
Example of "propoganda:" state of the union address, however, the media companies nearly always follow such events up with their own recap which basically promote their own agendas, sometime in agreement with the administration, sometimes against, but in each case it shows that the media companies are their own entities and not government puppets.
At least, here in America. In Russia with state-funded Pravda (is Pravda still state run?), The UK with state-funded, BBC, etc. things may not be the same. Are those media companies invariably promoting the political elite of the minute, or do they criticize them? If the latter, then obviously media is in control and it's not government propoganda, but more of an issue of another entities "rah rah" proselytizing.
And, when they could not find the "criminal" they picked off some random joe for the newscast, because, you know, the government can't make a mistake.
Both Farenheit 451 and 1984 are great books and should be required reading for everyone. If everyone were to read those I bet more people would get out to vote, and would vote based on issues and constitutional concerns rather than "gee, that candidate is cute and reminds me of JFK"
If it's outsourced to an Indian company it'll read "All your base are belonging to us!"
(Apologies to my Indian friends if you're reading this. I just couldn't resist.)
I get enough spam as it is, and the color code for terrorist alerts don't change what I'm doing in the slightest. I'd rather not receive useless cry-wolf text messages and get charged for the displeasure of reading the "alerts"
Also, "emergency broadcast system" tests are annoying enough as it is when they already interrupt an on-demand movie I'm watching on digital cable. Please confine these to broadcast television, and put them on during commercial breaks, like broadcasters used to do. If I care to learn about homeland security's crying wolf, I'll tune to CNN, MSNBC, FoxNews, or HN or check out their web sites.
Thanks for your understanding.
Insightful? Come on, how insightful is a joke?
It's slashdotted so no one can RTFA. :(
In a related story, MPAA requests an injunction against a harvard professor in attempt to block production of a 50TB storage device for consumer PCs. When asked for the basis for such action, an MPAA spokesperson stated "There is absolutely no legitimate use for such large amounts of storage, the only use we can ascertain is hosting of illegal movie downloads for re-sharing on P2P networks."
Why are you stooping to baseless personal attacks rather than sticking to the issue? Who's the asshole here?
Yeah, software is not lucrative, especially not office suites and operating systems. I mean there has never been ANY company which ever succeeded in that market without forcing the software to run only on closed-architecture hardware. Nope, NO one has ever succeded at that, and there have certainly never been any people who have become billionaires in that exact market. Nope, it's definitely a losing business strategy, certainly not anything you would ever see result in a Fortune 500 company. No, you're right, Apple is best off avoiding that market altogether and not focus on software licensing. It's a silly idea. ;)
But. . . they're keeping Solitaire, right? That's a major selling feature of Windows!
(I'm not kidding to some extent - I know a few people who are absolutely addicted to Windows solitaire)
The TV Wonder (PCI) has support, but the first-generation tuner card (ISA/AMC) does not. I'm SOL with most of the ATI hardware I have. The ATI TV cards I have don't work, the AiW cards I have don't, at least not without a lot of jumping through hoops with GATO, and even then they don't work as well as, say, a Hauppauge tuner. Even so, for what I use that POS PC for, it's "good enough" for now.
Yes but now we have allowed our own government to tax:
- Property taxes (you think you OWN real estate? HA!)
- Fuel taxes
- Tolls on paid-for-by-taxes roads
- Agricultural subsidies
- Sales tax
- Income tax
- DOUBLE tax on income if you have a C-corp
- Death tax
- Misc taxes on utilities (which in turn receive subsidies or tax breaks, wtf?)
- Misc other "user fees" and taxes
Do we really have it any better here in America than the British do? We've kicked them out and then allowed our elected officials to force taxes upon us, and we haven't fought against it by voting those cretins out of office.
Did I say it has a CD burner?
Here's a shocker for you: hard drives can be removed and put into other machines to be backed up, and occasionally one can mount corrupt partitions with Linux or use data recovery programs from Win2K/XP to retrieve data, and burn that data to disc using the newer computer. OMFG!!
Nice troll, though.
How would you compare failure rates then? If not over time and # of failed units / produced units, then by what metric? I was merely pointing out that the failure rate of the shuttle is higher by conventional metrics. It doesn't mean the shuttle program should be killed off. In fact it should be continued, but the existing shuttle should be replaced by a newer design, preferably another REUSABLE craft.
Face it. Space flights are dangerous, but how many of us wouldn't jump at the chance to go were it offered to us? I'd go in a heartbeat. I wasn't trying to FUD or slight the space program in any way, just pointing out that although many airlines' maintenance may be horrendous and their logs in some cases have been proven downright negligent or even fraudulent, their failure rate is still quite low compared to the shuttles which are largely rebuilt between each and every flight. They undergo far more than your typical aviation pre-flight check of "Ok, flap moves? No oil leaks? Oh wait, a few oil droplets, it `shouldn't` cause a problem so let's not ground it, just log that it requires further scruitiny. Oops, this bolt is a little loose, yeah, log that to be checked later. Okay, you're good to go." That kind of thing would not be allowed at ALL on the shuttle, and yet even with the uber-cheap maintenance budgets airlines allocate, their catastrophic failure rate is far, far below 20%. It should be even lower than it is (e/g., the ValueJet crash years ago was very preventable), but it is what it is, but is still very low-risk compared to space flight given the extremes (pressures, temperatures, etc.) the airframe and skin undergo each and every flight.
Yeah, I know, I have been trolled, and why am I responding to such an obvious troll? Oh well.
I'd like to see: /etc/skel, or whatever other mechanism the OS supports) without having to jump through hoops
- Ability to enter metadata (description, keywords) when creating a bookmark
- A bookmark search facility (wait, wasn't this on the 2.0 roadmap before?)
- an extension garbage collection utility (when an extension monopolizes CPU time or memory, it should be killed and reloaded automagically)
- the search box to be resizable without having to install the "resize search box" extension
- All tab mix plus features to become standard in the browser
- Documentation of ALL command line options to be included in a readme file (or in the online help)
- Profile management should be accessible from the Tools menu or through edit->preferences
- Deployment to be better documented (to make it easier to deploy standard profiles for all users, be it on Windows, Linux, OS X, etc., in the All Users profile, or in
More likely there is a problem with one of the drivers - NOT his fault. My Pentium 4 with an ATI Radeon card does NOT play DOS games like DOOM, DOOM II well with the Catalyst drivers installed. If the default drivers are installed, no problem, DOS games run just fine, but at a HUGE expense (no tuner suppoort, S-L-O-W 2D video performance, PAINFUL 3D performance in Windows apps). No matter though, I've rebooted to Windows only three times so far this year. ;)
Er, no. Duck Tape is NOT an "inferior copy" of gaffers tape.
r ogaff.htm - note I am not affiliated with them in any way; a google query turned them up). Folks who use Duck Tape for those purposes either don't know any better or grabbed Duck Tape in a pinch because the right stuff isn't readily available - or they're downright cheap and bought a dollar-store clone of Duck Tape)
They have different adhesives and are designed for different purposes.
Duck Tape would stink in a studio where you need the tape to hold fabric, props, cables, etc. in place but CANNOT leave residue behind. Duck Tape also comes in handy in race applications (hence the moniker 200mph tape)
Gaffers tape would stink in an environment where you need the application to be waterproof, which is Duck Tape's forte. Also, being designed for studios, stages, etc. Gaffers tape is available in more colors ( http://www34.pair.com/harrison/thetapeworks.com/p
Similar look, different adhesives, different purposes.
Not necessarily. You may not be aware (I wasn't until a few months ago) that Dells are so cheap because the consumer lines come bundled with spyware, er, "adware" so you're not really paying the entire cost of the machine and hardware. Until I heard that from a (now former) Dell reseller, I was bewildered as to how they can offer their hardware so damn cheap, even with all of the volume discounts they get from the manufacturers. Yeah, they spec out CHEAP motherboards, but they still won't get much below $40 for a board with all peripherals embedded, customized with proprietary sockets for their front-panel doodads, even with vast quantity orders, and Intel certainly is not going to take a loss on such a vast quantity of CPUs.
Games. Wordstar files. Lotus 1-2-3 files. dBase files.
Sure, the documents can be read from Linux, and the applications might even run in dosbox or qemu/freedos, but users need to "think" a little more. Games usually work but not always perfectly. Some people LIKE old DOS apps, or even Windows 3.1 apps - a couple of months ago I replaced a HDD in a Windows 3.1 box for a friend who REFUSES to give up Windows 3.1. She likes the applications she has and has many hundreds of documents (poems she's written, lectures, financials, etc.) and does NOT want to learn a new system. Between DOS and Windows she DOES have 20 years worth of documents on that computer, and now she has a backup on CD as well.
If it works for her and is paid for, why dump it, and why force her to learn something she doesn't necessarily want to bother with? She doesn't care about free vs. free vs. proprietary, she cares that she can get to her documents.
There is a huge drawback to Boot Camp - to run that one Windows app to (OCR a file|Edit that Word doc|Foo the Bar) requires two reboots, whereas Parallels requires a click or two, run the app, then kill Windows and keep right on working, all without iTunes skipping a beat (pun intended ;)).
Blah. I switched one machine from Linux back TO Windows 98 just so I could run my ATI Tuner card. All I run on it is the CHM viewer, ATI Multimedia, OOo.org, Paint Shop Pro, and Acrobat Reader. I WANTED inkscape on there, but Inkscape won't work with Windows 98 any more. I'd have stuck with Linux, but the ATI TV tuner won't work with Linux (I threw one of the original ISA tuners in that box since it has an embedded ATI Rage II chipset with the AMC header), and it (the Tuner) won't work with any version of Windows past Me. Many users still run Windows 98 because some of their hardware (be it some HP or Lexmark all-in-one printers, scanners, or in my case multimedia devices) just plain won't work with other operating systems. Windows 98 may suck, but it makes a damn good television for me while I do some work at home.
Others stick with it because THEY keep the Win2K or XP for their home office or study, and gave their kids their old Windows 98/Me/95(ack!) machines.
Not everyone with an older machine will wipe it to switch to Linux. Heck, many of them probably aren't even connected to the Internet any more. MOST won't switch to Linux, at least not on that machine - they'll keep it until it croaks, throw it away, then buy either a Windows or Mac PC. A minority might hear about this "Linux" thing and consider buying it.
It depends on a lot more than just "is it IIS/.Net or is it LAMP?"
.Net itself vs. php or .jsp - it depends largely on several things:
.Net because performance (of at least 1.x.x versions, I haven't worked with it since) absolutely sucks to almost any PHP application.
.Net can provide blazing performance. Your code has to be very efficient and you often need to throw a real large amount of RAM at it. Also, when you start a .Net application, it can take a while for it to serve up the first page - a concern for Tuesday updates when you were forced to reboot for patches to finish installing.
.Net application? Say, OS Commerce vs. a custom single-purpose .Net eCommerce application? I'd darn well expect .Net to blow away the LAMP solution, because OS Commerce is an inefficient beast - the only thing going for it is is that it's a "swiss army knife" open source eCommerce application. It does EVERYTHING, but sacrifices efficiency due to its hacked-together design. (yes, I'm using "hacked" as in "that guy is a hack"). On the converse, if you compare, say, DotNetNuke to mambo or Drupal and set out to provide the same or similar functionality, chances are that the LAMP solution will blow away .Net by any load test metrics you can come up with.
.Net? Licensing. Hardware costs. Have you ever set up a Windows cluster? It's not cheap, and even if you can come up with a cheap way to do it, you don't WANT to because it will be unreliable. SQL Server licensing is EXPENSIVE (or if the db is real advantage of Microsoft's .Net platform? The development tools, NO one has an IDE which is better than Microsoft's. Zend's PHP Studio is darn good, but the level of integration with documentation, the debugging environment, the code completion, and keyboard navigation does not match Visual
On equivalent hardware, with equivalent RAM, if you're running MySQL with the MyISAM engine it will blow away SQL Server performance for most queries, but at a cost: You do not have stored procedures or transactions. When you switch to InnoDB you gain those but take a performance hit and that advantage over SQL Server disappears. On the plus side, MySQL is free/free (unless you need the commercial license - which in turn depends on whether you bundle it with your application AND how you interface with MySQL AND the "license" of your software).
As far as
- What is the architecture and how efficient is the code? If you use, say, DotNetNuke as an example, it's a good argument AGAINST using
- How much RAM can you throw at it, and is caching appropriate for your application? With fully dynamic web sites where pages may display random content (rotating images, randomized quote of the day, etc.) unless you override the caching mechanism, the cache can effectively break your web site. However if caching IS appropriate and/or you override it when necessary,
- (related to above) are you comparing a poorly-coded, inefficient, beastly PHP application to a lightweight highly-optimized
What is my point? Unless you are comparing apples to apples, it's FUD or at best an amateur comparison. The way to test it is to implement the same task with a similar (as possible) architecture on each platform, with the application on each fully optimized, with both IIS and apache/tomcat/whatever fully tuned and streamlined to pull out every bit of performance from it, then load test both of those using the same sorts of tests. Comparing a highly-optimized single-purpose application to a general-purpose portal platform is not a fair test.
Also: Even though the article says "Even the most ardent PHP fans will admit that PHP is not designed with performance in mind," PHP performs damn well considering it's heritage, the fact that its primary platform is "a patchy server" and that it is FREE.
Why would one choose LAMP over