I think the idea is that you can move the threshold on when to implement in Fortran/C(++) since you only have a '1x-5x slowdown' for most common application compare to the 20x-5000x slowdown with R/Python/Matlab/..
which is not particularly more heavy than your average bicycle. They are mostly used by elderly ladies and heavy-set women, so the Tesla marketing aspect is not huge.
That's just glib. People use lots of bitcoins on silk road every day with no interest in speculation. Bitcoins are a real currency with value backed by the interest in silk road products.
If you can only look at bitcoins from the viewpoint of turning a quick buck, then you are not able to see a substantial part of the elephant.
My guess is that bitcoins are mainly used for college students' and drug hobbyists' $50 purchases of LSD and the like on silk road and not for big transactions.
Exactly, OP does not understand the role RAM plays in computers.
It is a disappointment for me to see the link get so many points in this community where you would expect the baseline of knowledge of technology to be 'above the average'.
Static. On this site I host mostly huge-ass html files (about 1 MB per request) with apache 2 and mod_deflate :-)
There is also a wordpress site and another database-request-heavy site with 500 requests a day.
The problems I had was that the access.log and error.log quickly ate up the 5GB space of the micro instance :-) Causing mysql to stop operating and me to scratch my head for a few minutes.
5GB is not a lot .. you want ruby1.9 with the default setup? That will be 180MB, and so on :-)
On Facebook you buy ads for ~$1+ because you can set target demographic to something as specfic as "women; 42-47 years old; looking for relationships with other women; with a degree in biology or computer science; attened Harvard; Works at IBM; who likes horseback riding or skiing"
Imagine if google knew BOTH your search term and your complete personal history. Then the ad price and conversion would increase enormously.