75 karma · joined January 5, 2011
The original analogy though is only accurate depending on where this is taking place. A person living in the suburbs would seem silly for wearing a bullet proof vest. A person walking into a war zone without a vest is an idiot. The question is, which of the two locations best describes the internet.
Not only that, but I seem to get a 2px gray line that fills the width of the page and scrolls with the content. Ever since the redesign, every time I stumble upon one of their pages I click the back button.
But if that was not enough, they traded a system where each site had its own look and feel for one where every site looks exactly the same (except for a small logo in the header).
The argument that MapMaker is harmful to open source efforts has a bit more merit. With MapMaker users contribute mapping information for free without the ability to actually make use of that data later on. OpenStreetMaps on the other hand provides a Creative Commons license for all of the map data.
Here is a link to the PDF version: http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1967009&type=pdf...
If the database is the bottleneck then the speed of web page matters much less. A page with a single 50 ms query will take %40 of the hardware (60 ms versus 150 ms).
This is even much less of an issue if you take into account how long it took for his test. PHP served 1500 requests per second vs Ruby's 250 requests per second which is equal to 0.7 ms per page and 4 ms per page. Assuming again you have a single 50 ms database query you are looking at 50.7 ms vs 54 ms which means you will need ~94% as much hardware. This is assuming that the database and webserver are on the same machine.
If one puts them on separate machines then the time of execution does not matter as long as the time it takes to query the database is less than the time it takes to render the page. Now this is bad in terms of page load as 50 ms + 49ms for page rendering is much more than 50 ms + 0.1 ms but in both cases you will be able to serve the same number of requests per second. This of course assumes that this is running in a multi threaded environment which allows one thread to sleep and other threads to start while waiting for a response from the database.