Ethan wrote: >> | Dollar for dollar, network-based computers are faster. > > This is incorrect, based on my experience of working in a few data > centers. > > While it is possible to buy expensive hardware today that has more > performance than the average consumer machine, hardware is getting > better faster than purchasing decisions.
That's new hardware. There's tons of old hardware out there that people refuse to upgrade or replace. Why do you think that Microsoft has had such problems EOL'ing Windows 95? > Because the consumer market is both larger and growing faster than the > server market, and the machines less reliable, the average server is > older than the average client machine, and thus have less resources than > the average client. That's not my experience at all, and I've been a professional systems administrator for over sixteen years. Businesses tend to rapidly depreciate and replace hardware, much, much faster than individuals do at home -- by an order of magnitude or more, in some cases. This is why companies like Dell focus almost exclusively on the business market. > Even if you disagree with this point, there's one server for many > clients; the amount of resources available to devote to the task of an > individual user's web experience is almost always greater on their end > of the pipe. True, the number and power of clients can always overwhelm the number and power of servers. The [EMAIL PROTECTED] project certainly taught us that. And we knew that lesson at AOL before [EMAIL PROTECTED] came alone, because there were a number of incidences when a surprisingly small number of attackers could do serious damage to the service. But just because the number and power of clients can overwhelm the number and power of servers doesn't mean that they necessarily will always do so. If that were the case, then we'd all be permanently out of work. Moreover, although you might be right in general, you cannot assume that each specific user will always be in that same sort of situation. That would be like claiming that everyone is above average. > What it boils down to is that people perceive change at around 150msec; > very few net users get anywhere near this latency, and so for most, the > round-trip delay represents a substantial impediment to the > responsiveness of the interface. Right, and if they're running on an ancient Pentium computer with Windows 95 and their interface is dead-dog slow because you force-fed it too much stuff to process, they're not going to have a particularly good experience. The lesson that Yahoo! and Google teach is to keep everything as simple and light as humanly possible. They learned this from Colin Chapman and the guys at Lotus, whose motto was "Simplify and add lightness". That's all I'm looking for. Give me the Lotus Exige of interfaces. -- Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755 LOPSA member since December 2005. See <http://www.lopsa.org/>. _______________________________________________ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.027.htp