Could Benchmarks Make Things Worse?
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President Bush says that Iraq has had some success in meeting 18 U.S.-mandated benchmarks. But on the ground in Baghdad, the oil debate suggests that artificial milestones could make things worse.
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When it comes to the corporate customer, desktops are still king, particularly because they're the easiest and least expensive to upgrade with fast, power-hungry components. Yet one researcher predicts it will be five to seven years before only the "die-hard" desktop users are left. Is it time for you to make the switch?
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Once you leave the value flock, your performance will likely suffer.
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Felix Geisendorfer has a reminder from developers out there - "PHP 5.2.1 was an evil release":   While I was at php|works I heard a lot of people say how bad of a release 5.2.1 was and that I should stay away from it. Well I didn't take it to seriously at this point, but when I checked what version of PHP we are running on my client project recently it turns out it was 5.2.1.   They were seeing performance issues (database related) so they upgraded to the latest version, 5.2.4, and immediately saw a performance jump of forty to sixty percent and a much lower amount of CPU usage. Upon some further research, he found a certain bug in 5.2.1 that could have been the culprit.
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They're cheap, but is the timing right?
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Jonathan Street has a few tips for developers out there looking to speed things up on their site - seven tips towards "lightning fast sites".   I was recently creating a small tool in PHP and found myself hitting the max execution time and getting a fatal error. As it was only for my personal use I just bumped up the max execution time but it made me stop and think about how I could improve the speed of those scripts I do put up for public use. Most people aren't going to wait for 60 seconds for a page to load. Naturally I hit the internet looking for tips.    The tips he came across (each including the simple benchmarks to show the differences) were:   sizeof vs count is_int vs is_integer chop vs rtrim doubleval vs floatval fwrite vs fputs implode vs join ini_alter vs ini_set   Be sure to also check out his follow up post talking about building better benchmarks to test the sorts of tips he's given above.
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Or at least neutralizes their hype The Storage Performance Council (SPC) has issued a second benchmark meant to save customers from vendor spin hell.â¦
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Avoiding errors In a recent article here in The Register we saw some of the problems that result when floating point numbers are misused or chosen inappropriately.â¦
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In response to a previous article from the Symfony blog, Paul Jones has pulled together some thoughts to some of the comments they made.   As the author of a relatively popular benchmarking article, I feel compelled to respond to this bit of misguided analysis from the Symfony camp about benchmarks.   Paul talks about the "straw-man arguments" presented in the Symfony article, including some references to Paul's previous benchmarks. He's even broken it down into a point-by-point response to make each point clear.
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THERE is never a right time to buy technology. Something cheaper, faster and better specified will be on the market before you have even got your product out of its box.
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The scuttling of the chip raises the risk that Intel might fall behind AMD in the race to create the fastest processors. Some saw the move as desperate attempt to deal with the fact that
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Montalvo Systems has a multiple-core chip, but not all of the cores are the same. That in part explains why investors have put money into it.
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Irregular hors d'ouevres, scheduling mishaps, and the stockbroker's eternal dilemma.
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You might think that four cores will be twice as good as two cores for all your computing tasks, but PC World's tests of the new chip tell a different story.
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Open source has many good uses.  Beating up one's competitors shouldn't be the primary one.
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Will broad, long beta tests mean fast adoption? Others are doubtful.
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What you don't know can hurt your portfolio.