1,514 karma · joined July 16, 2013
It's really obvious on Windows Phone what is a button and what is not apart from a few shitty 3rd party apps. This is regurgitating one of the many fables about WP.
[OS] -> App
Cheaper, less administrative overhead, less abstraction, less vendor tie in (if you go POSIX for example).
I think that might upset the virtualization proponents though...
They are pretty good :)
// And God said: "let there be....shite"!
All other comments are pointful, well described and useful.
Sarcasm aside, BBM in the UK is relegated to children at school. I imagine it's pretty much the same across the rest of Europe at least. SMS is pretty much free here so we just use that or email.
As a result of this, I don't get why this is touted as a super-important move for RIM/BlackBerry/Whatever they are called now.
Accountants and financial advisers are cheap bastards who have to deal with crap loads of regulatory compliance rules and complicated software that integrates with lots of other companies and governments, costs a fortune and never works properly.
People who package up all this shit and stick it on the web so the end user maintenance cost isn't there are winning over standalone PC software vendors these days.
And it all works via a web browser (which conveniently doesn't require windows).
Even if you bag Office 365 for comms which is typical at the moment from what I've seen, it works on anything.
I've seen IFA's and accountants wholly running off ChromeBooks and iPads in the UK. The only complaint they have is printing and even that's pretty much solved.
I had a Sun 1000E [1] for 3 years as a workstation from 1996. 8x 50MHz CPU, 2Gb of RAM, 16Gb disk array. It was made in'93 and was approx 12U for the unit and array. Things weren't that big in the 90's. 80's yes...
The funniest has to be the engineering company which I used to work with (not for thank fuck) back in the 90's (when 100Gb was big data!). They managed to bag 2x full 42U racks full of HP N-Class HPUX UNIX kit, PDU systems and separate disk arrays for just over £1,000,000 supplied with one full time UNIX monkey to keep the plates spinning.
Turns out they had only 10 CAD/engineering staff and about 8Gb of data in an Oracle DB which a single Sun Ultra desktop (<£10,000) could have handled without a problem at the time.
Why? Because someone is responsible for it at the end of the day and they don't want any data protection and security audits to show them up. That's the only reason.
This is fine until I want to do this, at which point C++ becomes a memory management bastard:
void f(int n, int x) {
Gadget g = new Gadget(n);
// ...
if (x < 100) throw new GadgetException("Gadget broke", x);
if (x < 200) return;
// ...
} void f(int n, int x) {
Gadget p = new Gadget(n);
// ...
if (x < 100) throw new Exception("Weird!); // no leak
if (x < 200) return;
// ...
}
It is only trendy when people don't have to take responsibility for their data security.
As a UK resident, we're knee deep in this sort of crap as well.
Your global namespace would be so incredibly polluted.
Relatively cheap and can lead into an interesting hobby (plus you can take them to bits and modify them!)
Fuck 'em all.
Kid with a BB gun is a natural predator.
It's on a bell curve. We're regionally tied so we have 80,000,000 requests, 90% of which are over a 5 hour period so we can hit 5000 requests a second on a fun day :)
We do this on 10 servers. 4 front end, 4 back end, 2 database nodes. They are all hefty machines (FE=8xXeon,16Gb;BE=16xXeon,32Gb,DB=48xXeon,96Gb;Storage=12TiB SAN).
Our peak cluster load is about 20% (the sweet spot).
We don't need async, even if we lost half of our nodes.