Aside from the Bond datacenter fulfilling those requirements (give or take), chances are that if they're a legitimate concern then you've got other more pressing issues to deal with. Such as your impending vaporization.
So fucked up, in fact, that I couldn't even save it trying to hack the thing in Firebug. Or Safari's inspector. I mean... I've seen websites that fail outside of IE before, but never like this. It somehow even managed to override it's own inline styles for the table width - by several thousand pixels, no less.
The one time I try to RTFA and this is what I get. I should have known better.
Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are changing the way people interact. Whether it's for better or worse is a matter of opinion, and irrelevant to the discussion. Facebook has a larger userbase than all but about five countries have citizens - and many people in that userbase are more involved with Facebook than their own communities. If Zuckerberg wanted to get something done politically, he could easily broadcast a message out to hundreds of millions of people. He could make up some sort of complete nonsense and tell people to write their senator or else, and if even a tenth of a percent of the users acted on it, you'd be able to fill an entire room with the envelopes. Twitter of course currently has a much smaller (but overall, probably even more involved) userbase, which is also growing at incredible rates - and it could pull off a similar stunt.
When an entity comes out of thin air and expands to over two hundred million users in five years, that deserves media attention. Their growth rate is so fast that it will become unsustainable because not enough people on the planet are connected to the internet.
Self-proclaimed SEO experts are just people who market bullshit - or, rather, see no issue in selling bullshit. I could do the same thing, but I'd feel like a scumbag for charging $500/hr for tips like "set page titles that people will want to click on when they search for your topic"*, "use your keywords in header tags", and "don't have broken links".
The best part of the nonsense is that nobody seems to doubt self-proclaimed SEO experts, and companies are happy to justify the exorbitant rate with the thinking that spending a few grand for half a day with an expert will double sales (it may; it may not; either way the SEO expert is headed to the bank with the "nobody knows google's search algorithm so while these techniques may have worked, there's no guarantee" out).
*technically that's SERP optimization so it doesn't really qualify as traditional SEO, but having the top hit is no good if you drive people to click elsewhere because your page title is stupid/irrelevant.
Have you considered increasing the DPI/PPI in your graphics settings? It's there specifically to counter the tiny font sizes you normally encounter using high-resolution (PPI, not pixel count) displays.
I don't think it will help graphics at all, but it should affect most fonts.
It's not like the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, we don't have a "-1, Boring as hell" to counter the opposite end of the spectrum.
Some people like feedback that they did, indeed, lock their car. Mine doesn't beep unless I press the lock button on the remote twice, but unless I hear it go I don't know whether it locked on the first press. Of course I live in an area where I could leave the car unlocked with a GPS or iPod in clear view and come back several hours later with it still there so it's mostly a non-issue, but the remote works so unreliably even at short distances that I wouldn't trust it having locked unless I actually hear the confirmation honk.
The problem isn't people posting their own idiotic adventures online - the problem is people getting tagged in other people's photos and videos. It's easy for me to control what I post online about myself; it's very, very difficult for me to control what other people post about me online, and even more difficult to remove material that I find inappropriate.
In my tests between Win2k and WinXP on the same computer, Win2k is about 15% faster for most CPU-limited games. (Warcraft III, Left4Dead (when on single-core), etc.)
You may want to consider getting a computer made in the last five years. Not to flamebait, but you can't expect all the developers in the world to stick with legacy technology because you don't want to get recent hardware and software. Computers aren't like toasters - they get outdated. If you want to run the latest apps, you're going to need technology to support them.
If you prefer Win2k over XP due to some behaviors, fine - everyone's entitled to their own opinions about how software should work. But it's very unreasonable these days to complain about performance of CPU-limited games on your single-core system when dual-core chips have been standard for several years and even quad-core chips have been available for at least a year.
Just knowing the HTML tags is pretty damn basic, sure. Actually being able to make something useful out of them takes some amount of skill, and doing it in a way that's actually maintainable and efficient certainly takes more than a week of experience. I've seen plenty of markup that's the HTML equivalent of "SELECT * FROM content", in the sense that yes it works but holy lord is it an awful way to get the job done in every aspect imaginable.
And straight people aren't allowed to be angry at the decision/"glitch"?
Probably less than 1% of Amazon's userbase even heard about this happening, but I'll bet a very significant portion (50%+) of those users had at least some amount of negative feelings towards the incident.
PHP, as a language, is more than capable of handing four requests per second (which can be said of pretty much anything other than punch cards).
Writing bad code in PHP, however, will of course slow things way down. Just like not having indexes on your databases, or doing stupid/unnecessary JOINs. Or not caching properly (see: Wordpress). Writing fast and efficient code in any language is easy enough provided you're a skilled programmer. Facebook, unfortunately, started off as Zuckerberg paying a friend with some web skills to build out a system, and it grew so quickly that replacing the code (or, rather, the DB schema) with something that doesn't suck probably became near-impossible. If you write code with scalability in mind, it's not a tremendous problem.
Of course, nothing is going to cope well with the sheer volume that Facebook deals with. There's plenty you can do along the way to help yourself out, which Facebook may or may not have done. You can bet that nobody thought the site would ever have 200MM users when the first lines of code were written; they probably never expected 1% of that. Writing intelligent code is the most important part of scalability - writing smart DB queries and minimizing the number required probably being the biggest part of that. Have your MySQL servers instead of PHP do some calculations in queries (hashes, query-related math, etc) usually doesn't hurt since you're generally offloading CPU-intensive operations to a disk-bound machine (i.e., has spare cycles).
There's all sorts of tricks and optimizations. Some are language-specific, and some aren't. But making bad decisions early on is a lot harder to fix than an inefficient foreach loop.
If your site infrastructure is influencing how you design, you've made some sort of monolithic error along the way. Good code completely separates the content from the design. It's not like they've just hacked up a Wordpress install (which seems to go out of its way to tie content and design together) - Facebook employs hundreds if not now thousands of programmers; it's pretty safe to assume there's at least one UI/UX specialist on board as well.
All things considered, I'd actually say that Facebook's design is pretty decent, but that's of course a matter of opinion. A lot of the code that went into that design sucks, but that's what happens when you have to support IE6. Regardless, I think it's great that they're sharing knowledge about how they've managed to use and customize an infrastructure to support 200,000,000 users, especially with the amount of traffic they have to deal with. That's well beyond the scale that many governments have to worry about!
Yeah. I wait until it's safe to pass and not kill myself, rather than risk my life and that of oncoming traffic (not to mention my $100k sports car) hoping that my awesome acceleration will fix that problem for me.
This is the problem with performance vehicles - they put stupid ideas in people's heads. Just because you might be able to pull off some sort of reckless stunt that you certainly couldn't in a normal vehicle doesn't mean you should.
And many Explorers had problems, not just one. You've missed the point that the issues have been solved. There were many well-publicized incidents, followed by a recall, and nothing notable to speak of since.
Spend $60/yr on a Smugmug medium-level account. They don't give a damn what you host (so long as it's legal, obviously), and as a bonus they don't compress the hell out of it like Youtube and all of the other flash-based sites.
You lose out on the potential viral aspect of Youtube, but honestly there's so much crap on youtube anyways that it's practically irrelevant. And not having the youtube audience commenting is priceless.
They can, but it's very unlikely they will as it will probably result in a courtroom battle (and no, you can't restore the content until they either fail to respond to your counter-notice or the court has made a decision). The upside is that you could end up pressing perjury charges against your accuser for a false accusation (if it's determined that it was intentional, which will NOT happen), but more likely than not you've just misunderstood what "fair use" includes and will have wasted a lot of time and money.
IANAL, but I was reading about this exact scenario about 15 minutes ago.
All of the ones I've tried burned out in under a day.
Of course, our house is notoriously mean to CFLs (I expect it's some flaky wiring causing them to flicker and eating into the lifetime of the ballast), but in theory dimmables should be more resistant to spikes and sags in the power than normal CFL bulbs, not less.
Let me know when Alexa takes the once-a-minute API calls to Twitter into account. Or even has vaguely accurate numbers, for that matter. Google Analytics data (while not being publicly available) would be reasonably accurate on the page views front, but my four or five page views a day to twitter.com are irrelevant next to the 60 API calls an hour my desktop client makes every hours of the day.
All you've really done are cite examples of bad programming, not scaling problems tied to a specific language. Obviously when you're dealing with a user base in the millions (Facebook, Twitter), scalability is going to be an issue no matter what language you're using. The rails framework probably doesn't help them, because then they have the overhead of a framework in the mix.
Good development practices are far more important than choosing the right language 99% of the time. If you plan with scalability in mind, you could run the damn app on punch cards and still have it work better than plenty of the PHP horror stories out there. The issue with PHP (and increasingly, Rails) is that it's so accessible to newbie developers that there's a ton more bad code out there that seasoned developers wouldn't make. Yes, when I was first using databases, I managed to pull off something to the effect of "SELECT * FROM.. WHERE.. LIMIT 1" in a loop that ran through about 2100 times, and it was REALLY damn slow. It should have been a single DB query using COUNT with a GROUP BY clause. Because I was first getting started (and was also crunched for time, given the nature of the project), I had written some truly awful code. Everyone's done it before. Now I've got highly reusable personal code libraries that can automatically handle caching and master/slave replicated DBs, rather than attempting to open a connection to the database 90 times per page load.
Look at Wordpress, for god's sake. It must be one of the worst-scaling applications ever written, and even the caching plugins are rather poorly done (they work, but they have to be made in very stupid ways to deal with WPs architecture). But then again, look how big the install is for how much functionality you get. Users, posts, comments, and some of the strangest plugin and template architecture I've seen in my life. It's certainly not that simple anymore, but FFS it just took 6 seconds for it to render the page HTML from LOCALHOST! A high-spec MBP with an upgraded hard drive should NOT take that long to read three rows from a DB table.
Well that's just the problem - it probably was coded in an afternoon (or at least the initial app; not so much on the more recent functionality, namely search). And if you've coded an app in an afternoon, then you didn't give half a thought to scalability when designing the thing.
There are tremendous scaling issues with any site that has millions of users. Doubly so for a site where most of those millions of users are hitting the API about once a minute, every hour of the day (thanks to the plethora of third-party clients). The issue isn't so much with RoR I expect, but probably their DB architecture. When you use these frameworks that do the thinking for you, it's easy to make stupid oversights that wouldn't have come about had it been done by hand by a competent coder. This could cover anything from adding indexes to de-normalizing tables to crazy-advanced SQL replication customization and memcached usage (a la Facebook).
Not to mention that a RAMSAN-based DB is going to be crazy effing expensive - certainly not something they could have accessed before getting stupid amounts of VC funding. I'd suggest that using cloud-based infrastructure might have worked better (since they've already done most of the leg-work for both application scalability and hardware), but that comes with plenty of its own pitfalls. And of course crappy programming is still going to keep costs unnecessarily high when you're being billed by the compute cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
Aside from the Bond datacenter fulfilling those requirements (give or take), chances are that if they're a legitimate concern then you've got other more pressing issues to deal with. Such as your impending vaporization.
So fucked up, in fact, that I couldn't even save it trying to hack the thing in Firebug. Or Safari's inspector. I mean... I've seen websites that fail outside of IE before, but never like this. It somehow even managed to override it's own inline styles for the table width - by several thousand pixels, no less.
The one time I try to RTFA and this is what I get. I should have known better.
Like it or not, Facebook and Twitter are changing the way people interact. Whether it's for better or worse is a matter of opinion, and irrelevant to the discussion. Facebook has a larger userbase than all but about five countries have citizens - and many people in that userbase are more involved with Facebook than their own communities. If Zuckerberg wanted to get something done politically, he could easily broadcast a message out to hundreds of millions of people. He could make up some sort of complete nonsense and tell people to write their senator or else, and if even a tenth of a percent of the users acted on it, you'd be able to fill an entire room with the envelopes. Twitter of course currently has a much smaller (but overall, probably even more involved) userbase, which is also growing at incredible rates - and it could pull off a similar stunt.
When an entity comes out of thin air and expands to over two hundred million users in five years, that deserves media attention. Their growth rate is so fast that it will become unsustainable because not enough people on the planet are connected to the internet.
Self-proclaimed SEO experts are just people who market bullshit - or, rather, see no issue in selling bullshit. I could do the same thing, but I'd feel like a scumbag for charging $500/hr for tips like "set page titles that people will want to click on when they search for your topic"*, "use your keywords in header tags", and "don't have broken links".
The best part of the nonsense is that nobody seems to doubt self-proclaimed SEO experts, and companies are happy to justify the exorbitant rate with the thinking that spending a few grand for half a day with an expert will double sales (it may; it may not; either way the SEO expert is headed to the bank with the "nobody knows google's search algorithm so while these techniques may have worked, there's no guarantee" out).
*technically that's SERP optimization so it doesn't really qualify as traditional SEO, but having the top hit is no good if you drive people to click elsewhere because your page title is stupid/irrelevant.
Have you considered increasing the DPI/PPI in your graphics settings? It's there specifically to counter the tiny font sizes you normally encounter using high-resolution (PPI, not pixel count) displays.
I don't think it will help graphics at all, but it should affect most fonts.
It's not like the two concepts are mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, we don't have a "-1, Boring as hell" to counter the opposite end of the spectrum.
Some people like feedback that they did, indeed, lock their car. Mine doesn't beep unless I press the lock button on the remote twice, but unless I hear it go I don't know whether it locked on the first press. Of course I live in an area where I could leave the car unlocked with a GPS or iPod in clear view and come back several hours later with it still there so it's mostly a non-issue, but the remote works so unreliably even at short distances that I wouldn't trust it having locked unless I actually hear the confirmation honk.
I'm no biblical scholar, but I believe that falls under "making shit up to cover your previous nonsense."
The problem isn't people posting their own idiotic adventures online - the problem is people getting tagged in other people's photos and videos. It's easy for me to control what I post online about myself; it's very, very difficult for me to control what other people post about me online, and even more difficult to remove material that I find inappropriate.
Or it would be if I had a social life, anyways.
In my tests between Win2k and WinXP on the same computer, Win2k is about 15% faster for most CPU-limited games. (Warcraft III, Left4Dead (when on single-core), etc.)
You may want to consider getting a computer made in the last five years. Not to flamebait, but you can't expect all the developers in the world to stick with legacy technology because you don't want to get recent hardware and software. Computers aren't like toasters - they get outdated. If you want to run the latest apps, you're going to need technology to support them.
If you prefer Win2k over XP due to some behaviors, fine - everyone's entitled to their own opinions about how software should work. But it's very unreasonable these days to complain about performance of CPU-limited games on your single-core system when dual-core chips have been standard for several years and even quad-core chips have been available for at least a year.
Or is $2m a day money well spent when it comes to keeping the word 'Google' on the tip of everybody's tongue? /thinkingoutloud
Given how often I associate Youtube with Google outside of the context of these kinds of discussions, I seriously doubt it.
Just knowing the HTML tags is pretty damn basic, sure. Actually being able to make something useful out of them takes some amount of skill, and doing it in a way that's actually maintainable and efficient certainly takes more than a week of experience. I've seen plenty of markup that's the HTML equivalent of "SELECT * FROM content", in the sense that yes it works but holy lord is it an awful way to get the job done in every aspect imaginable.
And straight people aren't allowed to be angry at the decision/"glitch"?
Probably less than 1% of Amazon's userbase even heard about this happening, but I'll bet a very significant portion (50%+) of those users had at least some amount of negative feelings towards the incident.
More like 25c these days. Because obviously the telcos' costs are going up.
PHP, as a language, is more than capable of handing four requests per second (which can be said of pretty much anything other than punch cards).
Writing bad code in PHP, however, will of course slow things way down. Just like not having indexes on your databases, or doing stupid/unnecessary JOINs. Or not caching properly (see: Wordpress). Writing fast and efficient code in any language is easy enough provided you're a skilled programmer. Facebook, unfortunately, started off as Zuckerberg paying a friend with some web skills to build out a system, and it grew so quickly that replacing the code (or, rather, the DB schema) with something that doesn't suck probably became near-impossible. If you write code with scalability in mind, it's not a tremendous problem.
Of course, nothing is going to cope well with the sheer volume that Facebook deals with. There's plenty you can do along the way to help yourself out, which Facebook may or may not have done. You can bet that nobody thought the site would ever have 200MM users when the first lines of code were written; they probably never expected 1% of that. Writing intelligent code is the most important part of scalability - writing smart DB queries and minimizing the number required probably being the biggest part of that. Have your MySQL servers instead of PHP do some calculations in queries (hashes, query-related math, etc) usually doesn't hurt since you're generally offloading CPU-intensive operations to a disk-bound machine (i.e., has spare cycles).
There's all sorts of tricks and optimizations. Some are language-specific, and some aren't. But making bad decisions early on is a lot harder to fix than an inefficient foreach loop.
If your site infrastructure is influencing how you design, you've made some sort of monolithic error along the way. Good code completely separates the content from the design. It's not like they've just hacked up a Wordpress install (which seems to go out of its way to tie content and design together) - Facebook employs hundreds if not now thousands of programmers; it's pretty safe to assume there's at least one UI/UX specialist on board as well.
All things considered, I'd actually say that Facebook's design is pretty decent, but that's of course a matter of opinion. A lot of the code that went into that design sucks, but that's what happens when you have to support IE6. Regardless, I think it's great that they're sharing knowledge about how they've managed to use and customize an infrastructure to support 200,000,000 users, especially with the amount of traffic they have to deal with. That's well beyond the scale that many governments have to worry about!
Yeah. I wait until it's safe to pass and not kill myself, rather than risk my life and that of oncoming traffic (not to mention my $100k sports car) hoping that my awesome acceleration will fix that problem for me.
This is the problem with performance vehicles - they put stupid ideas in people's heads. Just because you might be able to pull off some sort of reckless stunt that you certainly couldn't in a normal vehicle doesn't mean you should.
And many Explorers had problems, not just one. You've missed the point that the issues have been solved. There were many well-publicized incidents, followed by a recall, and nothing notable to speak of since.
Spend $60/yr on a Smugmug medium-level account. They don't give a damn what you host (so long as it's legal, obviously), and as a bonus they don't compress the hell out of it like Youtube and all of the other flash-based sites.
You lose out on the potential viral aspect of Youtube, but honestly there's so much crap on youtube anyways that it's practically irrelevant. And not having the youtube audience commenting is priceless.
They can, but it's very unlikely they will as it will probably result in a courtroom battle (and no, you can't restore the content until they either fail to respond to your counter-notice or the court has made a decision). The upside is that you could end up pressing perjury charges against your accuser for a false accusation (if it's determined that it was intentional, which will NOT happen), but more likely than not you've just misunderstood what "fair use" includes and will have wasted a lot of time and money.
IANAL, but I was reading about this exact scenario about 15 minutes ago.
Please - I regularly work with HS students learning how to design websites, and that comparison really isn't fair to the students.
All of the ones I've tried burned out in under a day.
Of course, our house is notoriously mean to CFLs (I expect it's some flaky wiring causing them to flicker and eating into the lifetime of the ballast), but in theory dimmables should be more resistant to spikes and sags in the power than normal CFL bulbs, not less.
Let me know when Alexa takes the once-a-minute API calls to Twitter into account. Or even has vaguely accurate numbers, for that matter. Google Analytics data (while not being publicly available) would be reasonably accurate on the page views front, but my four or five page views a day to twitter.com are irrelevant next to the 60 API calls an hour my desktop client makes every hours of the day.
All you've really done are cite examples of bad programming, not scaling problems tied to a specific language. Obviously when you're dealing with a user base in the millions (Facebook, Twitter), scalability is going to be an issue no matter what language you're using. The rails framework probably doesn't help them, because then they have the overhead of a framework in the mix.
Good development practices are far more important than choosing the right language 99% of the time. If you plan with scalability in mind, you could run the damn app on punch cards and still have it work better than plenty of the PHP horror stories out there. The issue with PHP (and increasingly, Rails) is that it's so accessible to newbie developers that there's a ton more bad code out there that seasoned developers wouldn't make. Yes, when I was first using databases, I managed to pull off something to the effect of "SELECT * FROM .. WHERE .. LIMIT 1" in a loop that ran through about 2100 times, and it was REALLY damn slow. It should have been a single DB query using COUNT with a GROUP BY clause. Because I was first getting started (and was also crunched for time, given the nature of the project), I had written some truly awful code. Everyone's done it before. Now I've got highly reusable personal code libraries that can automatically handle caching and master/slave replicated DBs, rather than attempting to open a connection to the database 90 times per page load.
Look at Wordpress, for god's sake. It must be one of the worst-scaling applications ever written, and even the caching plugins are rather poorly done (they work, but they have to be made in very stupid ways to deal with WPs architecture). But then again, look how big the install is for how much functionality you get. Users, posts, comments, and some of the strangest plugin and template architecture I've seen in my life. It's certainly not that simple anymore, but FFS it just took 6 seconds for it to render the page HTML from LOCALHOST! A high-spec MBP with an upgraded hard drive should NOT take that long to read three rows from a DB table.
But that's not PHP's fault.
Well that's just the problem - it probably was coded in an afternoon (or at least the initial app; not so much on the more recent functionality, namely search). And if you've coded an app in an afternoon, then you didn't give half a thought to scalability when designing the thing.
There are tremendous scaling issues with any site that has millions of users. Doubly so for a site where most of those millions of users are hitting the API about once a minute, every hour of the day (thanks to the plethora of third-party clients). The issue isn't so much with RoR I expect, but probably their DB architecture. When you use these frameworks that do the thinking for you, it's easy to make stupid oversights that wouldn't have come about had it been done by hand by a competent coder. This could cover anything from adding indexes to de-normalizing tables to crazy-advanced SQL replication customization and memcached usage (a la Facebook).
Not to mention that a RAMSAN-based DB is going to be crazy effing expensive - certainly not something they could have accessed before getting stupid amounts of VC funding. I'd suggest that using cloud-based infrastructure might have worked better (since they've already done most of the leg-work for both application scalability and hardware), but that comes with plenty of its own pitfalls. And of course crappy programming is still going to keep costs unnecessarily high when you're being billed by the compute cycle.