The world wouldn't be better off without inventions like the car, mobile phones, the graphical user interface or fast food. The world was a terrible place before we started to invent those things.
I think the real reason people innovate is not because of convenience, but out of efficiency. You can easily confuse the two, but the real reason anything useful is invented is so we can spend less time on doing things we don't like and thus are not useful and spending more time on things we do like and are more useful, thus spending our time more efficiently.
Our entire civilization is built upon this principle and you should embrace it because it's great. The drive for efficiency made nomads into villagers. They made gatherers into farmers. We built cities, bridges and roads out of efficiency, as well as all forms of travel, mass media, computers and the internet.
Every time we convert a mundaine and time consuming task into something more efficient by creating an invention, we progress onto taking away the next mundaine and time consuming task until eventually every single useless task is taken care of and we can all finally relax and read Slashdot all day.
The problem is not that Flash is inefficient or unavailable on other platforms than Windows. The problem is that Flash technology is not open, so nobody except Adobe can do something about it.
I really don't understand what the issues are, and would like to know.
A good web page holds two important properties: it uses open standards and it provides semantic information about itself. Flash provides neither.
The first one is pretty straight forward. Flash is not open. The content of a Flash file is known only by Adobe. Only Adobe can reliably produce an application to write and play Flash files. This is in contrast with the openness of the web. This is important to ensure that web content will work on every platform. Flash content will not work on platforms not supported by Adobe, instead of not supported by any community. A good example of how bad this is, is that most Flash objects won't play on mobile devices, since Adobe has yet to produce proper Flash plugins for those platforms.
Secondly, the semantics. Instead of neatly fitting into the DOM and providing sementaic information about it's content like every other proper element, a Flash object is simply a blob of binary data. It's impossible for an automated system to find out what the object is about, thus providing difficulties with indexability, making it hard to find out information about the object using search engines.
Erm...unless the phone wanders into range of a wifi network, and gets on that, in which case the phone company firewalling the phone network is hardly going to do anything.
Of course. But then you're not on their network, so they have no responsibility there.
Where do you get the iPhone has a large market share? The latest numbers from IDC suggest Apple has about 17% market share in the smartphone market. In the entire phone market, they're probably not even in the double digits.
As a response to this, T-Mobile is now in the progress of installing firewall software so phones on their network can't communicate with each other, making similiar hacks in the future a lot more difficult.
The problem is not in the jailbreaking or unlocking of the phone. The problem is people installing OpenSSH but not changing the password (which it does ask you to) and thus allowing SSH-connections to their phone by everyone.
Only people who deliberately installed OpenSSH through Cydia and didn't change the default password are affect by this "virus". If you haven't installed OpenSSH, you're not a target.
Ooooh... efficiency.. I'm curious what the net savings is.. compared to buying more cheap hardware.
We're talking about Google here. They have dozens of datacenters all over the globe, filled with hundreds of thousands of servers. Some estimate even a million servers or more.
So lets assume they have indeed a million servers and they need 5% more efficiency out of their server farms. Following your logic, it would be better to add 50,000 (!) cheap servers which consume space, power and require cooling and maintenance, but I'll bet you paying a handful of engineers to tweak your software is *a lot* cheaper. Especially since Google isn't "a project" or something. They're here for the long run. They're here to stay and in order to make that happen, they need to get the most from their platform as possible.
Like Microsoft made a monopoly by bundling IE with Windows, so too does Apple create a monopoly by bundling Safari and iTunes with Mac OSX, thus shutting out Firefox, Real Player, Napster, etc.
Monopolies aren't created by bundling products. Apple doesn't hold significant market share in the desktop computer market, so there's no monopoly. It's that simple.
Apple limits what machines can run Mac OSX, which is in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
No they don't, because there is no monopoly.
This is the argument that Psystar is trying to make in that Apple has created their own virtual Mac Monopoly and shut out all competitors by making it so that only Apple machines can run OSX and nobody else.
So you're saying they have a monopoly on their own products. Just like Sony has a monopoly on PlayStations.
. Mac OSX is based on the MACH kernel and *BSD Unix, which was designed for running on all sorts of machines and devices, but Apple violated the BSD license by only running OSX on only Apple brand computers.
Apple doesn't violate any licenses. The BSD license explicitly states you can do with the code whatever you desire.
Apple has a monopoly on iPhones and iPods, and other hand held devices because they have a large marketshare
You can't have a monopoly on your own products. Obviously nobody else makes your products. Now for the handheld/phone market, the iPhone doesn't have enough market share at all to be called a monopolist. All of the iPod procuts probably do have enough market share to be called a monopolist, but since the only iPod running OS X (sorta) is the iPod Touch, I don't think they could be called a monopolist in that market either in regard to their operating system.
A much heard argument for not upgrading IE6 to something more up to date is the fact a lot of legacy intranet applications don't seem to work with anything else than IE6. I wonder if this will prevent businesses from adopting Windows 7 as well, as IE6 is not available for that platform.
Why is all of the responsibility coming down to the ISP? Why should they make sure none of their customers uploads illegal content to e.g. YouTube and why should they remove it if noticed?
Is Google in this case the "ISP" or do they actually mean to folks providing you with an internet connection?
So, to summarise, if you lump all the versions of FF together, they're more popular than IE, as long as you don't allow the numbers IE to do the same....?
Exactly. And since the lump sum of FF means "mostly the latest FF", this is quite relevant for future trends, because the lump of IE means "mostly a very old IE". Of course nobody is saying FF is more popular than IE, that would make no sense whatsoever.
And where do you get these statistics from?
Net Applications. The same source the article referrers to.
- but as stated before, I find it highly unlikely that all the users/ sites I visit just happen to be the ones that have upgraded to IE7/8.
Why? Your own personal experience has little to do with the world as a whole. I know only a few people who use any version of IE at all, but I don't doubt IE's popularity.
Still, even going on those old figures, IE7 and 8 combined make up 36%, so I'm not sure why you think they haven't caught on.
You are right when you say that combining the usage of different versions of Internet Explorer results in quite hefty market share. But not a single version of IE is more popular than version 6. And now Firefox (yes, versions combined) is now popular than every single version of IE, including the most popular version 6.
The article isn't stating Firefox is now more popular than IE, because obviously Microsoft still holds a very dominant position in the browser market. The interesting thing is that the most popular version of IE is a very old one and the most popular version of any other browser is the most recent one.
But then again, the browser market is quite different now than it was a few years ago, because large corporations like Google and Apple have hit the scene and Opera became an actual free browser. So while IE6 market share has been declining for years, they haven't all switched to the same product. There used to be only two or three major browsers out there, but in these days you can be the biggest player out there by having a little over 20% market share.
IE6 used to be the biggest browser out there until last month, but actually the vast majority of the surfers were using something else already.
It is quite relevant, because IE6 is actually the most used browser in the world. Despite the release of newer versions of Internet Explorer, none of them have caught on enough to change that situation.
This is radically different with all other browsers, where the lastest versions are also the most popular versions of the product.
What's most interesting about IE's market share is that version 6 (this oldest one indeed) is actually the most used version of Internet Explorer. Both version 7 (released 3 years ago) and version 8 (released about half a year ago) have not caught on enough to overtake IE6's position as the number one browser out there in sheer market share.
These figures are unlike all other browsers, where the more recent versions have way more market share than the older ones. The usage of Firefox 1 and 2 for example is virtually nothing, while 3.5 is the most popular version. So "all versions of Firefox" actually mean "mostly Firefox 3.5, a bit Firefox 3 and really nothing else", while "all of Internet Explorer" means "Mostly IE6, some IE7 and some IE8".
You are absolutely right that all versions combined, IE is still very dominant, but IE-users are way less inclined to upgrade to more recent versions. Just like Windows XP is still the most popular version of Windows. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing with Microsoft Office. Microsoft just doesn't seem to be able to sell their latest products anymore. This is why it quite significant that Firefox with it's latest product is able to have more market share than Microsoft with it's old version, because the old versions of Microsoft products are the relevant ones.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. With all of the megabit and gigabit links being thrown around, surely a major line like this should have more bandwith than a mere few terabits?
I find it very hard to believe the folks running Wikipedia, YouTube or Facebook wouldn't care if some of their content would disappear every once in a while, just for the sake of a little speed.
Either there is another great benefit about using MySQL, or it doesn't really lose data all that often, if ever. Either way, it's clearly not as worthless as the GP suggests.
It doesn't really matter what they use it for, now does it? The fact that they choose to use MySQL at all shows they put an amount of faith into it. You don't store data in a database because you want to lose it, right?
But, to answer your question, a quick Google learns Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia store all of their important data in MySQL databases. I know Google doesn't use MySQL for searches, but they do store other stuff. I'm not sure what Nokia does, but they do seem to like MySQL a lot.
Well... that's just stupid. What's the benefit of running your database in a cloud if you don't pay for just how much you use it? Isn't that the whole point to begin with?
Slashdot Mirror
The world wouldn't be better off without inventions like the car, mobile phones, the graphical user interface or fast food. The world was a terrible place before we started to invent those things.
I think the real reason people innovate is not because of convenience, but out of efficiency. You can easily confuse the two, but the real reason anything useful is invented is so we can spend less time on doing things we don't like and thus are not useful and spending more time on things we do like and are more useful, thus spending our time more efficiently.
Our entire civilization is built upon this principle and you should embrace it because it's great. The drive for efficiency made nomads into villagers. They made gatherers into farmers. We built cities, bridges and roads out of efficiency, as well as all forms of travel, mass media, computers and the internet.
Every time we convert a mundaine and time consuming task into something more efficient by creating an invention, we progress onto taking away the next mundaine and time consuming task until eventually every single useless task is taken care of and we can all finally relax and read Slashdot all day.
The problem is not that Flash is inefficient or unavailable on other platforms than Windows. The problem is that Flash technology is not open, so nobody except Adobe can do something about it.
I really don't understand what the issues are, and would like to know.
A good web page holds two important properties: it uses open standards and it provides semantic information about itself. Flash provides neither.
The first one is pretty straight forward. Flash is not open. The content of a Flash file is known only by Adobe. Only Adobe can reliably produce an application to write and play Flash files. This is in contrast with the openness of the web. This is important to ensure that web content will work on every platform. Flash content will not work on platforms not supported by Adobe, instead of not supported by any community. A good example of how bad this is, is that most Flash objects won't play on mobile devices, since Adobe has yet to produce proper Flash plugins for those platforms.
Secondly, the semantics. Instead of neatly fitting into the DOM and providing sementaic information about it's content like every other proper element, a Flash object is simply a blob of binary data. It's impossible for an automated system to find out what the object is about, thus providing difficulties with indexability, making it hard to find out information about the object using search engines.
That is why Flash is bad.
Erm...unless the phone wanders into range of a wifi network, and gets on that, in which case the phone company firewalling the phone network is hardly going to do anything.
Of course. But then you're not on their network, so they have no responsibility there.
Where do you get the iPhone has a large market share? The latest numbers from IDC suggest Apple has about 17% market share in the smartphone market. In the entire phone market, they're probably not even in the double digits.
As a response to this, T-Mobile is now in the progress of installing firewall software so phones on their network can't communicate with each other, making similiar hacks in the future a lot more difficult.
The problem is not in the jailbreaking or unlocking of the phone. The problem is people installing OpenSSH but not changing the password (which it does ask you to) and thus allowing SSH-connections to their phone by everyone.
Encryption isn't very useful if everyone uses the same key.
Only people who deliberately installed OpenSSH through Cydia and didn't change the default password are affect by this "virus". If you haven't installed OpenSSH, you're not a target.
Ooooh... efficiency.. I'm curious what the net savings is.. compared to buying more cheap hardware.
We're talking about Google here. They have dozens of datacenters all over the globe, filled with hundreds of thousands of servers. Some estimate even a million servers or more.
So lets assume they have indeed a million servers and they need 5% more efficiency out of their server farms. Following your logic, it would be better to add 50,000 (!) cheap servers which consume space, power and require cooling and maintenance, but I'll bet you paying a handful of engineers to tweak your software is *a lot* cheaper. Especially since Google isn't "a project" or something. They're here for the long run. They're here to stay and in order to make that happen, they need to get the most from their platform as possible.
Like Microsoft made a monopoly by bundling IE with Windows, so too does Apple create a monopoly by bundling Safari and iTunes with Mac OSX, thus shutting out Firefox, Real Player, Napster, etc.
Monopolies aren't created by bundling products. Apple doesn't hold significant market share in the desktop computer market, so there's no monopoly. It's that simple.
Apple limits what machines can run Mac OSX, which is in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
No they don't, because there is no monopoly.
This is the argument that Psystar is trying to make in that Apple has created their own virtual Mac Monopoly and shut out all competitors by making it so that only Apple machines can run OSX and nobody else.
So you're saying they have a monopoly on their own products. Just like Sony has a monopoly on PlayStations.
. Mac OSX is based on the MACH kernel and *BSD Unix, which was designed for running on all sorts of machines and devices, but Apple violated the BSD license by only running OSX on only Apple brand computers.
Apple doesn't violate any licenses. The BSD license explicitly states you can do with the code whatever you desire.
Apple has a monopoly on iPhones and iPods, and other hand held devices because they have a large marketshare
You can't have a monopoly on your own products. Obviously nobody else makes your products. Now for the handheld/phone market, the iPhone doesn't have enough market share at all to be called a monopolist. All of the iPod procuts probably do have enough market share to be called a monopolist, but since the only iPod running OS X (sorta) is the iPod Touch, I don't think they could be called a monopolist in that market either in regard to their operating system.
A much heard argument for not upgrading IE6 to something more up to date is the fact a lot of legacy intranet applications don't seem to work with anything else than IE6. I wonder if this will prevent businesses from adopting Windows 7 as well, as IE6 is not available for that platform.
Why is all of the responsibility coming down to the ISP? Why should they make sure none of their customers uploads illegal content to e.g. YouTube and why should they remove it if noticed?
Is Google in this case the "ISP" or do they actually mean to folks providing you with an internet connection?
So, to summarise, if you lump all the versions of FF together, they're more popular than IE, as long as you don't allow the numbers IE to do the same....?
Exactly. And since the lump sum of FF means "mostly the latest FF", this is quite relevant for future trends, because the lump of IE means "mostly a very old IE". Of course nobody is saying FF is more popular than IE, that would make no sense whatsoever.
And where do you get these statistics from?
Net Applications. The same source the article referrers to.
- but as stated before, I find it highly unlikely that all the users/ sites I visit just happen to be the ones that have upgraded to IE7/8.
Why? Your own personal experience has little to do with the world as a whole. I know only a few people who use any version of IE at all, but I don't doubt IE's popularity.
Still, even going on those old figures, IE7 and 8 combined make up 36%, so I'm not sure why you think they haven't caught on.
You are right when you say that combining the usage of different versions of Internet Explorer results in quite hefty market share. But not a single version of IE is more popular than version 6. And now Firefox (yes, versions combined) is now popular than every single version of IE, including the most popular version 6.
The article isn't stating Firefox is now more popular than IE, because obviously Microsoft still holds a very dominant position in the browser market. The interesting thing is that the most popular version of IE is a very old one and the most popular version of any other browser is the most recent one.
But then again, the browser market is quite different now than it was a few years ago, because large corporations like Google and Apple have hit the scene and Opera became an actual free browser. So while IE6 market share has been declining for years, they haven't all switched to the same product. There used to be only two or three major browsers out there, but in these days you can be the biggest player out there by having a little over 20% market share.
IE6 used to be the biggest browser out there until last month, but actually the vast majority of the surfers were using something else already.
Firefox has already passed all other versions of Internet Explorer, except until very recently, IE6.
It is quite relevant, because IE6 is actually the most used browser in the world. Despite the release of newer versions of Internet Explorer, none of them have caught on enough to change that situation.
This is radically different with all other browsers, where the lastest versions are also the most popular versions of the product.
What's most interesting about IE's market share is that version 6 (this oldest one indeed) is actually the most used version of Internet Explorer. Both version 7 (released 3 years ago) and version 8 (released about half a year ago) have not caught on enough to overtake IE6's position as the number one browser out there in sheer market share.
These figures are unlike all other browsers, where the more recent versions have way more market share than the older ones. The usage of Firefox 1 and 2 for example is virtually nothing, while 3.5 is the most popular version. So "all versions of Firefox" actually mean "mostly Firefox 3.5, a bit Firefox 3 and really nothing else", while "all of Internet Explorer" means "Mostly IE6, some IE7 and some IE8".
You are absolutely right that all versions combined, IE is still very dominant, but IE-users are way less inclined to upgrade to more recent versions. Just like Windows XP is still the most popular version of Windows. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing with Microsoft Office. Microsoft just doesn't seem to be able to sell their latest products anymore. This is why it quite significant that Firefox with it's latest product is able to have more market share than Microsoft with it's old version, because the old versions of Microsoft products are the relevant ones.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. With all of the megabit and gigabit links being thrown around, surely a major line like this should have more bandwith than a mere few terabits?
I suppose not.
The funny thing is that Firefox is now considered quite bloated by some and projects like K-Meleon strive to create a lightweight variant of Firefox.
I find it very hard to believe the folks running Wikipedia, YouTube or Facebook wouldn't care if some of their content would disappear every once in a while, just for the sake of a little speed.
Either there is another great benefit about using MySQL, or it doesn't really lose data all that often, if ever. Either way, it's clearly not as worthless as the GP suggests.
It doesn't really matter what they use it for, now does it? The fact that they choose to use MySQL at all shows they put an amount of faith into it. You don't store data in a database because you want to lose it, right?
But, to answer your question, a quick Google learns Facebook, YouTube and Wikipedia store all of their important data in MySQL databases. I know Google doesn't use MySQL for searches, but they do store other stuff. I'm not sure what Nokia does, but they do seem to like MySQL a lot.
OTOH with EC2 you pay by the hour of uptime, rather than by processor usage, so CPU usage isn't of the essence for many applications.
Ah, right. It seems I understood incorrectly how Amazon's service works.
Well... that's just stupid. What's the benefit of running your database in a cloud if you don't pay for just how much you use it? Isn't that the whole point to begin with?