Hardware

I'm not really quite sure what to talk about this week, so I hope you'll excuse me if this post ends up being a little brief. Neither lecture can really directly apply to my project, so I chose to speak a little bit about hardware, because it at least peripherally applies. As far as machine requirements go for OmniEXP, the most intensive aspect would definitely have to be the servers. The project is entirely dependent upon a high degree of web traffic in order to be successful, so we need to ensure that our servers are up to the task.

Now I don't know a lot about servers (yet), and the lecture for week three didn't really go into this area of computer hardware, so I won't pretend to have any idea what I'm talking about in this regard. I do know that, to progress this idea, I would have to learn quite a bit about servers or at the very least hire some people who do. We can work on design aesthetics, we can work on functionality, but if the site is never up, we're not going to last.

As far as work nodes for the actual project, we're not looking at anything too intensive. Maybe one or two truly high power machines for the sake of the designers. If it takes off, we might look into increasing the amount of aesthetic design that we put into the website. The more we try to evoke this feeling of gaming in the consumer, the more we would need a graphics heavy website. But we want to marry that with raw functionality. We don't want the consumer to need a high end machine just to be able to load the website efficiently.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much all I have to say. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of hardware in developing a successful social media website, but unfortunately I simply don't know enough about the type of hardware most critical in order to provide a more concrete output of thought.