Only having Perl 5.10 is a problem, and it comes down to timing. 5.12 was released upstream in April, didn't get into Fedora until mid-June, by which point it had missed the deadline for entering RHEL 6 (because of the extensive QA that we would require).
If you're a customer and you need 5.12, be sure to open a support ticket and/or talk to your TAM.
Typing this on an 1810TZ and I agree. 3GB of RAM, reasonable processor, 1366x768 native resolution, 6-8 hours battery life depending on usage. Cost me £330, although I've swapped out the HD for an 80GB Intel X25M SSD which cost an extra £130 or so.
I use this as my primary machine, plugged into a 24" 1920x1200 monitor and a USB keyboard/mouse on my desk. It's easily fast enough for what I need.
Who benefits from IE9 being available for other platforms?
Not users. What would the ability to run IE9 add to the Linux or Mac desktop? Another web browser? Do we really need one?
Not Microsoft, who would have to invest massive amounts of effort into porting it, and large parts of the Windows codebase too.
Honestly, I wonder if the author of this article was deliberately trying to think of something to criticise about IE9, and this was the best he could do.
For non-web developers who use non-Windows operating systems, IE9 is an irrelevance.
For web developers who use any operating system, IE9 has to be a good thing, because it means more browsers out there that are closer to the standards.
Hey ! Thanks for taking the time to read and comment.
I'm sad that you think I was trying to come up with something - I just wrote about this strange (but honnest !) feeling I got, as people talking in nice terms about IE hasn't happenned in a while.
In fact I don't think I'm criticizing IE itself at all.
Perhaps I could re-phrase my point more simply: I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in the long run, since IE is still tied to Windows for strategic reasons.
You're of course right that it's a good thing for web devs right now, though.
That's what standards support is, it means that you can use IE9 on Windows and Opera on Linux and sites will still work and look the same. It makes no sense at all to say "IE9 is Windows-only so Microsoft can lock users in" when IE9 is standards compliant and any site built for IE9 will work the exact same way on Linux.
I don't think your argument makes any sense, sorry. If you were talking about IE6, I'd agree, but standards compliance means never having to use the exact same browser for anything.
OK, but you still never really answered the question. What's the benefit of having IE available to other platforms? How does say, a Mac user, benefit from having IE9 available for download to them over Safari?
They don't benefit now from using it over Safari. They benefit from it just as a promise from MS that they won't screw up the web just to sell more Windows PCs. As long as it's relatively easy to obtain IE for Mac, it's not a useful tool to sabotage the standards in a platform lock-in grab.
However, I agree with you that it seems totally unrealistic to expect MS to do this. Not because they're evil, but just because why bother?
"I don't think IE 9's standards support means "the web wins" in the long run, since IE is still tied to Windows for strategic reasons."
So what? How is the Web threatened or at risk or even _impacted at all_ by IE9 being Windows-only? With IE9 supporting standards so thoroughly, it very directly means that IE9 being Windows-only doesn't make a lick of difference anymore.
The game for the Web is standards. With all major browsers supporting standards, browser and platform themselves are irrelevant factors for the Web to prosper as a platform and a medium.
Sure. They probably followed a similar reasoning (example with fictional numbers, but probably close to reality):
* They have 64GB RAM hosts.
* They want to dedicate only up to 85% of the RAM to the Xen instances (keep 15% for the host OS, buffercache, etc).
* The Operations/Management team decides to target an overall rate of $1.82/hr per host to achieve desirable profits.
* The AWS marketing department has a requirement that instances be priced $.xx/hr (no fractional cents) to evoke "simplicity".
* At a first pricing attempt, they see they have the choice of charging $.02/hr and assigning 65536 * .85 / (1.82 / .02) = 612MB per instance
* ...or charging $.03/hr and assigning 65536 * 0.85 / (1.82 / .03) = 918MB per instance
* They select the first option (612MB/instance) because it is deemed sufficiently smaller than the existing "small" 1.7GB instance offering, whereas 918MB was not small enough.
That makes almost no sense. S3 is a purely network based file delivery service over HTTP, and pre-dates EC2 by a significant amount of time.
A Xen supervisor needs a fair amount of memory for its own operations, plus it can buffer the physical disks in the machine as well as any network attached storage. If these servers were also hosting S3 in their "spare time" it would degrade performance, and expose the system to potential vulnerabilities.
Great, except for when your users DNS resolvers cache the DNS entry longer than they're supposed to (many resolvers ignore TTL), and are unable to reach your site.
No. Amazon gives you an A record and asks you to make a CNAME for it. So when they change an ELB's IP, they update their A record. So in our case, we just make sure our A records follow along. Either way, a DNS cache holding onto a stale record too long would cause a problem.
Which is why Amazon keeps the ELB active on both the old and new IPs for a period of time.
