The latest Star Trek wasn’t bad. I think Roberto Orci should hire an intern to remind him of how many times he writes scenes with the main characters weapon being knocked off a ledge (only twice in this one).
Anyway: I finally came to the conclusion that I can never truly like Star Trek. There’s that critical fork in the road of scifi fandom, and I just go the other direction. I’m a Firefly/BSG type. I just can’t take gross, mind-blowing inconsistency as a core part of the universe.
I realized today:
* I have not owned an Intel architecture PC since probably before 2000.
* I have never personally owned a computer with a clock speed equalling or exceeding 1.5Ghz. (By way of comparison, this year’s bottom-of-the-barrel Dell features a 2.3Ghz CPU)
* I have never personally owned a computer with multiple cores or multiple physical CPUs.
* I have never personally owned a computer with the ability to dual-head.
* I have never personally owned a computer with more than 2GB of RAM (2GB of RAM is standard on the Dell mentioned above.)
* I have never personally owned a computer that is 64-bit (Although in fairness 64-bit-ness “across the board” is relatively new, only post-2005 at the business level and post-2007 at the consumer level)
* I have never personally owned a computer capable of playing, even at the minimum, video games released in the Xmas season of the time of purchase.
I don’t generally play games or do A/V processing/editing. I know that having a PC capable of running Doom 3 w/ maximum graphics is in no way conducive to making better jQuery code, but sometimes it’s a total fucking drag when I think that the sum total of computer horsepower I have owned in my adult life will soon be eclipsed by the average smartphone. Which I will also never own.
Still. I’ve never had a computer that can play a Youtube video without sputtering. My work computer, an original Intel Macbook Pro, has dual-cores and a 2.1Ghz CPU, but is not a Core 2 Duo or whatever (no 64 bit, so no Java 6) and its mobo is still in the “what the fuck?” phase of AAPL hardware design, so I can’t put any more RAM in it (already maxed at 2GB). It can view Youtube w/o sputtering provided HD is off and nothing else is going on.
It’s kind of depressing. I’m at a point where I’m going to switch to Windows just to get access to cheaper hardware.
A few data points for your consideration:
Look, I’m not saying the world can’t turn without threads, and to the best of my knowledge there are no outstanding security problems with the latest Apache 1.3.x. It is unlikely that the threaded MPM will be the thing that people remark about on your site.
Still.
I understand the value of not chasing every last trend in the technology world but sometimes it feels like PHP is standing athwart progress, shouting ‘NO!’.
from http://blog.tabini.ca/2009/11/13/going-virtual/:
Every now and then, therefore, it happens that the fine folks at ServerBeach, who have hosted our systems for many years now, will drop us an e-mail to let us know that one or more of our machines has reached its End of Life and making us a special offer for switching to a newer server—one that won’t send them scrambling for parts when it goes belly-up.
We have tried this one more than one occasion; the machine the customer was hosted on was EOL, spare parts were becoming scarce, and in any event they’d outgrown their server.
The nicest response we’ve ever gotten to this was FUCK. YOU.
We still have a Sun v100 w/ Solaris 7 running an app last updated in 2002 live and in production. We told the customer, look, number one an iPhone has more CPU and number two, we can’t guarantee any sort of rapid turnaround as long as you stick with that.
We were told any downtime will result in a law suit.
I love my job.
It is a perfect indicator of where the “Values Voter” is, that Carrie Prejean is a featured speaker at their little conference, when she got fake tits she didn’t pay for and sends little movies of her jilling off to a man she is not married to.
A little-c conservative thinks there’s too much sex on TV.
A big-C Conservative wishes it was legal to stone abortion providers to death.
But this isn’t really about what you think god wants, is it? You’re using the bible as an excuse for your own prejudices, selectively quoting the parts you happen to agree with. The old testament also states that you’re not allowed to shave your beard and that you must stone adulterers and disobedient children. It forbids wearing cloth made out of a mix of wool and linen. It states that women who have their period must not be touched for seven days. So, how many disobedient children have you stoned recently?
(here)
Look, it’s real simple.
The root of the problem is that the Religious Right has been completely incapable of enacting serious change in American social policy for going on 35 years now. They have at best nipped the fringes.
Only recently have they been able to organize and fund-raise efficiently, enough to get a couple of half-ass bills “banning” gay marriage.
Make no mistake: those aren’t long-term changes. Americans will hip to it in due time. Miscegenation used to be illegal for the same “OMG it’s yucky” reasons, too.
Anyway, the root of the problem is they can’t enact the changes they want – the total banning of abortion, mandatory reciting of the 10 Commandments by students, putting actual Biblical quotes into law – so they nip at the fringes and exploit the prejudices of people that sometimes aren’t even religious in order to get something, anything passed.
So it’s not that they necessarily want to have children stoned to death, it’s that they can’t seem to accomplish anything. So they get what they can and that gives them the strength to stay the course.
Let us imagine a scenario.
1. Your sales team works very hard to convince someone to sign a contract – well more a “statement of intent”, really – for your services.
2. The customer will complete the sale – handing you a pile of money in return for us building them a web thing – as soon as we waive the startup fee.
It should be noted that we charge a startup fee. Like many service providers that fee is fixed, in the sense that it embodies a basic set of services, in return for a slightly lower monthly fee and no commitment in the contract. As well, like many service providers, we price the startup fee with the assumption that we regularly offer routine discounts, sales, etc.
3. After a long series of negotiations, we come to a minimum startup fee and services bundle for the customer, who declines it, saying they will begin service when the fee is waived.
At this point you’d think it would be over, right? Otherwise I’d not be posting, obviously.
4. Customer hits TEH GOOGLES and finds some other company offering a similar service for $49/month and NO SETUP FEE! Customer immediately signs up with this competing service.
5. We receive an angry call, positively fuming, from said customer, demanding service and support. They cannot get the web thingee working! There’s no way load their images, and their text, and it’s vitally important this get up and running now!
Now at this point, my business strategy would be to tell them to kindly fuck off and never, ever call us again; I’ll mail you the shredded copy of the signed contract so you can be sure we’ll never hold you to it. That’s also not the best strategy to grow and build a business, which is why I’m not speaking for said business in any capacity.
Still. It should illuminate just how nuts things are out there in the “long tail” and why I’m a little on the grumpy side most of the time.
http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-microsofts-online-operating-income-2009-10
1. It always amazes me that shareholders don’t revolt, as online is clearly a HUGE drag on the company.
2. This is also, of course, why I loathe MS and refuse to support them: they get to have giant strategic drags that would destroy everyone else in the business. Everyone else has to actually succeed, but not Microsoft.
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/10/26/new-york-times-windows-mobile-sinking-android-and-apple-benefi/
Microsoft owned the smartphone market for years, so it is a mystery to me why they fell so far behind.
How is it a mystery, you dummy. Here’s the Microsoft business plan in its entirety:
1. Enter into market late, after most everyone’s established on what works and what doesn’t.
2. Copy successful market leader(s).
3. Bundle/tie in with desktop OS, preferably for free.
4. When market dominance is achieved, stagnate.
They have done this with every single product. The only reason they can’t win with their online properties is because they didn’t have a rapidly-iterative culture; but that’s changing, and will allow them to get a foothold.
Apropos: notice how iPod, etc. were late entries that came to dominate? Yeah, AAPL learned a thing or two from their arch-nemesis. The trick is to innovate late. Let the punters sort out the hard details.
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