It's a no-brainer for any server. That's a pretty big market!
Servers are not desktops. Buying the fastest machine doesn't get you the fastest experience.
Google grew up buy chaining thousands of cheapo second hand caseless PC-s in a cluster. If they decided to spend their money on bleeding edge technology they'd probably have 3x faster servers, but twice less total computing power.
Especially since a huge bottleneck in servers are RAM and HDD IO (considering we don't put bandwidth in the equation which curiously is the first bottleneck a common server hits).
It's Foolish to Say...that many people won't need quad-core machines. They will be entry-level within five years
What you said just now is foolish. In five years it may as well be entry level, but it'll also be 5-6 times cheaper.
5-6 years is ages in computer technology. Maybe now 200GB disks are entry level, and I indeed have two 200GB disks here and 320GB external disk, but if I go back 15 years ago, I'd still buy myself a 20MB Seagate for my IBM PC and probably never find what to fill it up with.
Buying bleeding edge is not a rational choice, unless you need the technology now.
Given the negative press Google got for entering China, I am curious to see if it'll produce positive press for Microsoft. Gaahahaha... just kidding...
Still though, some things to consider:
- they say prosecution of bloggers can get bad enough so they can't provide services there: why though? - they say they don't plan filtering or selling products specifically to China: still though, short of Office and Windows, all their products target more specific crowds. I'm not sure why targeting a potentially huge market in China is any different.
I'm calling it a bluff for now, apparently they are letting those "threats" out to achieve a specific political purpose. What it is, I don't have enough information to know.
You just defeated your own logic by posting this on slashdot. You are a slashdotter aswell. You got modded +5. Why do you insist that 10^6 uids have the same opinion? They don't. Personally I even tend to see a slight bend towards posts like yours.
Before your head explodes, put my words in context. I didn't say "every single slashdotter", so I most likely the majority of those that post.
Interpreting casual human speech like you'd interpret C++ code isn't a very good choice to do.
The reason for this is that Microsoft wants to pretend it's shipping Vista in 2006, but no enterprise customers are going to install a brand new OS without months of testing. Microsoft knows this, so they're releasing to those customers, celebrating the faux RTM, then spending the next couple of months actually bugfixing and polishing Vista and "really" releasing next year on January 30.
Your theory is week. November 30-th is the day when the pressing of the disks for January 30-th begins as well.
So they won't have the chance to fix bugs until January 30-th and then release it. Of course, Vista has a new feature where it'll grab the patches off ms.com during setup, so in fact they have the chance to do as much bugfixing as they want, even after the release is done.
I dok suspect lots of known and unknown issues will have to be fixed before Vista could match the value a patched XP installation has right now, but it's coming, don't sweat about it.
The two "crashers" are the only publicly released vulnerabilities that have been confirmed by Mozilla in the week since Firefox 2 was launched. The issues are only minor, the organization has said...
They also added, that the reason the issues are minor, is because Firefox 1.5x and later releases of the popular Mozilla browser feature a special "issue shrinking" technology, patent pending, where no matter what happens, the issue becomes small.
This is opposition to Microsoft, which appears to ship all their products with "issue expanding" FUD generator technology, now considered by many specialists as obsolete, where never mind what's the trouble, it's blown out of proportions, and brings chaos and despair among geeky web users.
Immediately stop using Internet if you're using one of those browsers:
IE Firefox Safari Konqueror....
A new denial of service attack was discovered floating in the cyberspace, that can render any browser inoperable, and it has to be forcefully crashed and reopened. The signature of the exploit was reported to be:
while(true) alert('Hahaha, suckers!');
People are advised to immediately move to Lynx: the only browser known to be immune to this attack.
My question to everyone is, why is everyone so upset about how long it's taking for Windows Vista to come out?
The logic is simple. Slashdotters, and a lot news/blog sites just become artificially "upset" at everything Microsoft does. So don't be surprised.
Vista delayed? OMG we're upset! Vista release dates announced? OMG we're upset! Microsoft patents something? OMG we're upset! Microsoft opens the patent of something? OMG we're upset!
Basically never mind what Microsoft does, is quickly wrapped in conspiracy theories and doomsday scenarios, and frequently the logic is so weak, that the whole thing reads better as light attempts at sarcasm.
I'm sure that M$ will be releasing the source code to Vista soon, showing this face of openness is a new corporate stance.
Don't be so quick. Notice the massive differences in deployment of Windows CE versus the NT series. Windows isn't opening the source for the public to see, instead, they ship the source to those parties who license it for their devices.
This is not applicable to desktop machines (I don't think HP or Dell for example would need the source of Vista for ex.).
Of course what they did is commendable and definitely makes CE more competitive in the market. Don't forget that unlike NT series, CE doesn't have the majority of the market on mobile/industrial electronics.
For Microsoft to open the source of NT, you'd need some pretty major market shake up to happen. Like for example Vista failing miserable and people flocking to, say, Ubuntu. Which we're all aware won't happen, since Vista is a decent product.. and.. is Windows compatible... unlike any other OS out there (wine hacks notwithstanding).
There must a whole bunch of cheapskates here on slashdot
You have doubts that you wasted that much money on a failed project, and now all you're left with is to play with the "omg I'm so moral" card and be pissed at us, cheapskates.
It's hard to admit it that maybe the problem lies within the project itself.
Normal people don't throw money at everything that is labeled "good for the poor children". When you give money for something, you need more arguments than this, or you'll fall for thousands of scams that offer the same kind of evidence as to their impact on an issue.
Did you not consider than maybe paying three times for a single piece of hardware you don't need (to begin with) maybe isn't a way to start a project as groundbreaking as this.
They are eating the fruits of their own shortsightedness. They now have 4000 people who bought the poor children 8000 laptops. If they would price the laptop at $150 (so two people buy one laptop for a poor child), and with a better marketing/advertisement (yes, you need to get the word out there, even for charity projects), they could've made well over their 100k mark, which would result in 50k free laptops for the children.
Why are you jumping on the guy calling him a "jackass" and "idiot"? Why are you asking silly questions "but why is it in Flash"?
Does it matter? It's just a fun experimental site and nothing more. Most people replying here have an attitude that looks like they genuinely believe the author is going to sneak in their offices while they sleep and steal their mouse buttons.
Noone is taking away clicks from you, people! Click freely! Feeling better now?
I have the feeling even the author doesn't take his experiment too seriously. Go to EXPLORE: BUTTON LAB and try experiment 2.
The description says "click replaced by circular motion around the button, almost impossible to make a mistake". So I just move my pointer up and down randomly a little, and I activated the button unwillingly no less than 3 times.
So.. relax and have fun, or if you think it's not fun just forget about it.
Google says to Microsoft "give people choices", and to Apple "please keep giving them no choices".
To change the search engine used throughout Mac OSX from Google to something else, you need a hex editor to hack some binary files.
"But but but MS is monopoly"
But but but principle is principle, you shouldn't be forced by anti-monopoly laws to care for your users, Apple and Google show they are no different than Microsoft: corporations that change their philosophy according to how it affects their pocket.
Correct the misunderstanding that Iraq did not have WMD Correct the misunderstanding that the Iraq war did not actually end when GB said it did Correct the misunderstanding that Iraq is not a nice place to be now Correct the misunderstanding that several US interrogation techniques are actually torture Correct the misunderstanding that there are not hordes of rabid terrorists queueing up to kill each and every last one of us
I... I had to save this this as a TXT file and compress it... to see what compression ratio I'll get....
Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was. Also, is this just part of the developer suite, or is RoR support somehow built in to the OEM OS?
Do you have concrete links and facts to support your observation? I'm working (for a few months now) on a slightly RoR-like extension to PHP5 (and later), and I've also noticed some weaknesses of RoR which I'm trying to avoid in my designs.
It'll be interesting to point out what the RoR community is griping about.
Nice trick with 4 hostnames, but this means 4 security contexts for your content, which may make a lot of development hard (especially client based with JavaScript).
Why? Doesn't your javascript explicitly state document.domain to the common root?
Not to mention the management issues of having to link to content on 4 different domains in an efficient enough manner.
You mean creating four hostnames for the same address? Or do you mean changing a few src="" attributes?
This leaves us with pipelining on the client, which could results in much worse load peaks on the servers though.
Wrong. It leaves us with nothing. Didn't you read the article? HTTP Pipelining isn't enabled in the big two web browsers, so as far as "reality" is concerned it doesn't exist. It's like IPV6- who cares how much "better" it is if no one is using it?
From your tone I assume it was very important part of your day arguing with someone on Slashdot for the hell of it. If I were you, I'd take measures QUICK.
Nice trick with 4 hostnames, but this means 4 security contexts for your content, which may make a lot of development hard (especially client based with JavaScript). Not to mention the management issues of having to link to content on 4 different domains in an efficient enough manner.
This leaves us with pipelining on the client, which could results in much worse load peaks on the servers though.
In the end: let the page load a little slower, the workarounds are not worth it.
Obviously there are many cases where IE7 does something faster than Fx, just as there are many cases where Fx does something faster.
The problems with Firefox are these:
- Growing trend to bash FF for performance. No need to reiterate it again but I list it.
- Problems with differentiation.
FF claimed it's better than what's out there, and by what's out there it meant solely IE. Now IE magically gained most of the strong points of FF that the public cares about. You can't hang for performance, you can't hang for security, you can't hang for standards even (again, for what the public cares).
Why is FF better? Say, I move back to IE7. What has FF to offer me?
One single thing: plenty of extensions. And it's not that IE has no plugin/add-on layer, but the community created lots of FF extensions.
But extensions now come back to haunt FF, because the majority are badly written and cause FF's RAM usage to explode, and FF may become unstable.
So FF marketers claim: "Use FF, it's for the extensions!" and FF developers claim: "Disable all your extensions if you have stability issues".
Decisions are hard: would you let the extensions be the crap they are by letting be nothing more than patches to Firefox' Js/XUL code loaded at startup, or you'll revise the technology and thus kill most of the community initiative to write extensions, arriving at basically IE7's add-on layer.
Move the controls off the front of the device in order to allow the screen size to increase substantially. That's it.
Yea that's it. And it sucks. Apple has had a tendency to produce devices that look interesting and unique but are less usable in real life. They did it with the Mighty Mouse, and now they are back to this.
How is a thin strip on the edge of the screen better than a regular touch screen?
While a strip may be good for scrolling and scrubbing, I can see myself picking the wrong track with those little virtual hotspots they give us.
Well, Mr. Critic, have you actually *tried* Firefox 2? If you did, you'll see that it is noticeably faster than earlier incarnations of Firefox. Plus, it's faster than IE7 and uses less memory usage than IE7. Don't mistake the ravings of one misguided 9-reasons blog post for the opinion of the community, and don't make the mistake of thinking that FUD is actually representative of the real concerns surrounding FF2.
Well, Mr. Fanboy, yes, I'm posting this from Firefox 2. And it's hardly a better experience.
Again, maybe there are significant fixes, maybe countless nights were spent on bugfixes and improvements. But people are cruel and judge by the end result. So do I.
As for it being faster than IE7, I like to point people to this JS demo: Yoshi 3D.
It's truly weird how Firefox has faster HTML/CSS rendering, faster JavaScript, and yet this demo runs at around 30fps on Opera/IE, and 15 fps on Firefox 2 here.
Truly peculiar thing. I'm still banging my head on it. But I bet I shouldn't trust what I see in plain sight, I should trust benchmarks posted on someone's blog somewhere.
PS: I don't care for the 9 point blog. It's rubbish. I'm following the community feedback for months now, and there are quite a large chunk of them which are seriously getting pissed at Firefox's performance and stability.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a no-brainer for any server. That's a pretty big market!
Servers are not desktops. Buying the fastest machine doesn't get you the fastest experience.
Google grew up buy chaining thousands of cheapo second hand caseless PC-s in a cluster. If they decided to spend their money on bleeding edge technology they'd probably have 3x faster servers, but twice less total computing power.
Especially since a huge bottleneck in servers are RAM and HDD IO (considering we don't put bandwidth in the equation which curiously is the first bottleneck a common server hits).
It's Foolish to Say...that many people won't need quad-core machines. They will be entry-level within five years
What you said just now is foolish. In five years it may as well be entry level, but it'll also be 5-6 times cheaper.
5-6 years is ages in computer technology. Maybe now 200GB disks are entry level, and I indeed have two 200GB disks here and 320GB external disk, but if I go back 15 years ago, I'd still buy myself a 20MB Seagate for my IBM PC and probably never find what to fill it up with.
Buying bleeding edge is not a rational choice, unless you need the technology now.
Given the negative press Google got for entering China, I am curious to see if it'll produce positive press for Microsoft.
Gaahahaha... just kidding...
Still though, some things to consider:
- they say prosecution of bloggers can get bad enough so they can't provide services there: why though?
- they say they don't plan filtering or selling products specifically to China: still though, short of Office and Windows, all their products target more specific crowds. I'm not sure why targeting a potentially huge market in China is any different.
I'm calling it a bluff for now, apparently they are letting those "threats" out to achieve a specific political purpose. What it is, I don't have enough information to know.
You just defeated your own logic by posting this on slashdot. You are a slashdotter aswell. You got modded +5.
Why do you insist that 10^6 uids have the same opinion? They don't. Personally I even tend to see a slight bend towards posts like yours.
Before your head explodes, put my words in context. I didn't say "every single slashdotter", so I most likely the majority of those that post.
Interpreting casual human speech like you'd interpret C++ code isn't a very good choice to do.
The reason for this is that Microsoft wants to pretend it's shipping Vista in 2006, but no enterprise customers are going to install a brand new OS without months of testing. Microsoft knows this, so they're releasing to those customers, celebrating the faux RTM, then spending the next couple of months actually bugfixing and polishing Vista and "really" releasing next year on January 30.
Your theory is week. November 30-th is the day when the pressing of the disks for January 30-th begins as well.
So they won't have the chance to fix bugs until January 30-th and then release it. Of course, Vista has a new feature where it'll grab the patches off ms.com during setup, so in fact they have the chance to do as much bugfixing as they want, even after the release is done.
I dok suspect lots of known and unknown issues will have to be fixed before Vista could match the value a patched XP installation has right now, but it's coming, don't sweat about it.
Don't be so quick to assume the sheeple will flock to Vista
No sheeple flocked to Windows XP, but it's now at 80-90% share of all Win installs. How come so? Conspiracy?
Nope, it just comes with your next pc.
The two "crashers" are the only publicly released vulnerabilities that have been confirmed by Mozilla in the week since Firefox 2 was launched. The issues are only minor, the organization has said...
They also added, that the reason the issues are minor, is because Firefox 1.5x and later releases of the popular Mozilla browser feature a special "issue shrinking" technology, patent pending, where no matter what happens, the issue becomes small.
This is opposition to Microsoft, which appears to ship all their products with "issue expanding" FUD generator technology, now considered by many specialists as obsolete, where never mind what's the trouble, it's blown out of proportions, and brings chaos and despair among geeky web users.
Immediately stop using Internet if you're using one of those browsers:
.. ..
IE
Firefox
Safari
Konqueror
A new denial of service attack was discovered floating in the cyberspace, that can render any browser inoperable, and it has to be forcefully crashed and reopened. The signature of the exploit was reported to be:
while(true) alert('Hahaha, suckers!');
People are advised to immediately move to Lynx: the only browser known to be immune to this attack.
My question to everyone is, why is everyone so upset about how long it's taking for Windows Vista to come out?
The logic is simple. Slashdotters, and a lot news/blog sites just become artificially "upset" at everything Microsoft does. So don't be surprised.
Vista delayed? OMG we're upset!
Vista release dates announced? OMG we're upset!
Microsoft patents something? OMG we're upset!
Microsoft opens the patent of something? OMG we're upset!
Basically never mind what Microsoft does, is quickly wrapped in conspiracy theories and doomsday scenarios, and frequently the logic is so weak, that the whole thing reads better as light attempts at sarcasm.
I'm sure that M$ will be releasing the source code to Vista soon, showing this face of openness is a new corporate stance.
.. is Windows compatible... unlike any other OS out there (wine hacks notwithstanding).
Don't be so quick. Notice the massive differences in deployment of Windows CE versus the NT series. Windows isn't opening the source for the public to see, instead, they ship the source to those parties who license it for their devices.
This is not applicable to desktop machines (I don't think HP or Dell for example would need the source of Vista for ex.).
Of course what they did is commendable and definitely makes CE more competitive in the market. Don't forget that unlike NT series, CE doesn't have the majority of the market on mobile/industrial electronics.
For Microsoft to open the source of NT, you'd need some pretty major market shake up to happen. Like for example Vista failing miserable and people flocking to, say, Ubuntu. Which we're all aware won't happen, since Vista is a decent product.. and
There must a whole bunch of cheapskates here on slashdot
You have doubts that you wasted that much money on a failed project, and now all you're left with is to play with the "omg I'm so moral" card and be pissed at us, cheapskates.
It's hard to admit it that maybe the problem lies within the project itself.
Normal people don't throw money at everything that is labeled "good for the poor children". When you give money for something, you need more arguments than this, or you'll fall for thousands of scams that offer the same kind of evidence as to their impact on an issue.
Did you not consider than maybe paying three times for a single piece of hardware you don't need (to begin with) maybe isn't a way to start a project as groundbreaking as this.
They are eating the fruits of their own shortsightedness. They now have 4000 people who bought the poor children 8000 laptops. If they would price the laptop at $150 (so two people buy one laptop for a poor child), and with a better marketing/advertisement (yes, you need to get the word out there, even for charity projects), they could've made well over their 100k mark, which would result in 50k free laptops for the children.
50k > 8k, but they were greedy.
Not our fault.
Why are you jumping on the guy calling him a "jackass" and "idiot"?
Why are you asking silly questions "but why is it in Flash"?
Does it matter? It's just a fun experimental site and nothing more. Most people replying here have an attitude that looks like they genuinely believe the author is going to sneak in their offices while they sleep and steal their mouse buttons.
Noone is taking away clicks from you, people! Click freely! Feeling better now?
I have the feeling even the author doesn't take his experiment too seriously. Go to EXPLORE: BUTTON LAB and try experiment 2.
The description says "click replaced by circular motion around the button, almost impossible to make a mistake".
So I just move my pointer up and down randomly a little, and I activated the button unwillingly no less than 3 times.
So.. relax and have fun, or if you think it's not fun just forget about it.
They're all better than average applications, IMO, and certainly Maps and GMail have sparked major changes in competitor's products.
Do you know GMail is still "beta"....!?
Wow! you are one brave soul. I only wish fellow /.ers are as brave and conscientious.
I wasn't aware I was a brave soul, just teasing Google fan boys.
But thanks.
I'm off to fighting dragons now. See ya.
Google says to Microsoft "give people choices", and to Apple "please keep giving them no choices".
To change the search engine used throughout Mac OSX from Google to something else, you need a hex editor to hack some binary files.
"But but but MS is monopoly"
But but but principle is principle, you shouldn't be forced by anti-monopoly laws to care for your users, Apple and Google show they are no different than Microsoft: corporations that change their philosophy according to how it affects their pocket.
I... I had to save this this as a TXT file and compress it... to see what compression ratio I'll get....
What?
WHAT!?!?
Mac-o-Lantern! The new Mac-o-Lantern with unique turbo rotting action and redundant web cam RAID array!
It's the BEST computer in the WORLD!
Anyone think Apple jumped on the RoR bandwagon a little too soon? The whole "movement" has lost a lot of steam and it doesn't appear to be the silver bullet everyone originally thought it was. Also, is this just part of the developer suite, or is RoR support somehow built in to the OEM OS?
Do you have concrete links and facts to support your observation? I'm working (for a few months now) on a slightly RoR-like extension to PHP5 (and later), and I've also noticed some weaknesses of RoR which I'm trying to avoid in my designs.
It'll be interesting to point out what the RoR community is griping about.
From your tone I assume it was very important part of your day arguing with someone on Slashdot for the hell of it. If I were you, I'd take measures QUICK.
I'm extremely happy to announce that I can't understand a single word from the article OR comments!
Nice trick with 4 hostnames, but this means 4 security contexts for your content, which may make a lot of development hard (especially client based with JavaScript).
Not to mention the management issues of having to link to content on 4 different domains in an efficient enough manner.
This leaves us with pipelining on the client, which could results in much worse load peaks on the servers though.
In the end: let the page load a little slower, the workarounds are not worth it.
Gigapixel writes to point us to what is claimed to be the largest digital photo on the Net, at 8.6 Gigapixel.
Marketing annoyance is crossing a threshold.
Obviously there are many cases where IE7 does something faster than Fx, just as there are many cases where Fx does something faster.
The problems with Firefox are these:
- Growing trend to bash FF for performance. No need to reiterate it again but I list it.
- Problems with differentiation.
FF claimed it's better than what's out there, and by what's out there it meant solely IE. Now IE magically gained most of the strong points of FF that the public cares about. You can't hang for performance, you can't hang for security, you can't hang for standards even (again, for what the public cares).
Why is FF better? Say, I move back to IE7. What has FF to offer me?
One single thing: plenty of extensions. And it's not that IE has no plugin/add-on layer, but the community created lots of FF extensions.
But extensions now come back to haunt FF, because the majority are badly written and cause FF's RAM usage to explode, and FF may become unstable.
So FF marketers claim: "Use FF, it's for the extensions!" and FF developers claim: "Disable all your extensions if you have stability issues".
Decisions are hard: would you let the extensions be the crap they are by letting be nothing more than patches to Firefox' Js/XUL code loaded at startup, or you'll revise the technology and thus kill most of the community initiative to write extensions, arriving at basically IE7's add-on layer.
Move the controls off the front of the device in order to allow the screen size to increase substantially. That's it.
Yea that's it. And it sucks. Apple has had a tendency to produce devices that look interesting and unique but are less usable in real life. They did it with the Mighty Mouse, and now they are back to this.
How is a thin strip on the edge of the screen better than a regular touch screen?
While a strip may be good for scrolling and scrubbing, I can see myself picking the wrong track with those little virtual hotspots they give us.
Well, Mr. Fanboy, yes, I'm posting this from Firefox 2. And it's hardly a better experience.
Again, maybe there are significant fixes, maybe countless nights were spent on bugfixes and improvements. But people are cruel and judge by the end result. So do I.
As for it being faster than IE7, I like to point people to this JS demo: Yoshi 3D.
It's truly weird how Firefox has faster HTML/CSS rendering, faster JavaScript, and yet this demo runs at around 30fps on Opera/IE, and 15 fps on Firefox 2 here.
Truly peculiar thing. I'm still banging my head on it. But I bet I shouldn't trust what I see in plain sight, I should trust benchmarks posted on someone's blog somewhere.
PS: I don't care for the 9 point blog. It's rubbish. I'm following the community feedback for months now, and there are quite a large chunk of them which are seriously getting pissed at Firefox's performance and stability.