I tend to think of computer programs as a race track where each lane is a physical processor. I then imagine painting a series of blocks on each lane to represent computational time for every operation on the system.
A thread pool where one thread is hammered with embarrassingly parallel computations (think any scientific data crunching) and one is mostly sitting in an idle loop (think a GUI one) is perfectly fine in emulated multi-threaded environments, but it's not efficient parallelism.
Cool. It grabs 5 images from a yahoo images search and picks the most prominent colours.
Is it just me, or has "the cloud" become a buzzword for "scalable web hosting"? In that context, I think talking about whether the software is open source hardly matters, as we're talking more about server cluster infrastructure.
If it weren't for the hardware infrastructure, then any box running PHP would qualify as a "open source competitor" to cloud hosting providers. Or am I missing something?
I know way too many programmers that don't know this stuff. Then again, I only learned about it myself when I built a server from scratch during my spare time. Hi, Jeff Atwood.
So I saw some comments about Azure and how supposedly a lot of people seem to think that vendor lock-in is a bad thing.
I don't understand why anyone would put down vendor lock-ins as a bad thing; you're locked-in regardless of what technology you pick: you choose PHP and good luck getting asynchronous server processes to work. You forgo flash and no streaming videos for you. You abuse proprietary SQL extensions mostly because they're worth it.
I'm not saying any of these are bad, nor that they are a must have. The point is that if you're going to wait for the perfect environment, you'll never get anything done. And on a related note, if you are just finding an excuse to defend your favorite blub technology against the powers of evil, then chances are that you're not actually doing anything worth anyone's time :)
For the rest of us, the show must go on, so let's get on with the program, shall we?
Article. Another article. At these times, I feel like I'm a kid watching an alien ant farm.
Interesting article. I need to learn more about the javascript error / img behavior attacks.
