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This to me is a sure sign of a guy stuck in academia.

• Teaching Computer Science at MIT. How many of you would be asked to teach Computer Science at the most prestigious tech school on Earth?
• Founded ArsDigita, and wrote large tracts of the ArsDigita Community System in TCL. That company and product became the foundation for many Fortune 500 companies' websites.
• Through his evangelism, course developments at MIT, and the ArsDigita University, helped to bring web courses like MIT's 6.171 to mainstream university teaching.
• Wrote two of the best technical books I have ever read, and put them up for free in HTML on his website: Internet Application Workbook and Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Created and developed Photo.net, which averages 6 million hits/day. See more statistics here.

Why do we care about his opinion? Did he build any large scale scalable web application? Was he involved in maintaining and supporting any commerical projects? Did he make any critical insight of the strength and weakness of these development tools? Sounds like he draw his conclusion mostly from some student project. In that case I would say Microsoft wins hands down. Microsoft is very good at making and packaging complete development tools and is relative easy for novice to learn and use. Does it make VB the best programming language over other alternatives? I won't make that conclusion.

This to me is a sure sign of a guy stuck in academia.

• Teaching Computer Science at MIT. How many of you would be asked to teach Computer Science at the most prestigious tech school on Earth?
• Founded ArsDigita, and wrote large tracts of the ArsDigita Community System in TCL. That company and product became the foundation for many Fortune 500 companies' websites.
• Through his evangelism, course developments at MIT, and the ArsDigita University, helped to bring web courses like MIT's 6.171 to mainstream university teaching.
• Wrote two of the best technical books I have ever read, and put them up for free in HTML on his website: Internet Application Workbook and Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Created and developed Photo.net, which averages 6 million hits/day. See more statistics here.

Why do we care about his opinion? Did he build any large scale scalable web application? Was he involved in maintaining and supporting any commerical projects? Did he make any critical insight of the strength and weakness of these development tools? Sounds like he draw his conclusion mostly from some student project. In that case I would say Microsoft wins hands down. Microsoft is very good at making and packaging complete development tools and is relative easy for novice to learn and use. Does it make VB the best programming language over other alternatives? I won't make that conclusion.

Oh please, of course he knows that JSP is a part of J2EE.

Does he? Maybe so, but I doubt very seriously that he understands what J2EE really is if he's using the term in this way. It's like saying "The Internet is broken." His resume doesn't seem to mention any Java or J2EE experience. And the fact that he's having his students put Java code in their JSPs speaks volumes about his level of expertise with J2EE (which seems to be on the level of your average Visual Basic code monkey).

Improper use of terminology is the first sign that you don't really know what you're talking about. If he wanted to say that using EJBs and Servlets is too complicated, he should have just said it. The way he phrased it makes it seem like JSPs are an alternative to J2EE, which is like saying that drinking Evian is an alternative to water.

In about 1997, Phil Greenspun wrote in his How to be a Web Whore Just like Me book in Chapter 8:
"You should learn Java. I predict that it will gradually supplant C over the next ten years. Java is going to be big. You heard it here first."

In this particular post, he is not saying that Java is not ever useful or practical. He merely states that people who develop in Java are often using a tool that is not especially suited to the task -- that it's not always the right tool for the job. This is exactly like a single guy who does nothing with his SUV except do a one hour commute to work and home -- it works, but there are more practical solutions.

In about 1997, Phil Greenspun wrote in his How to be a Web Whore Just like Me book in Chapter 8:
"You should learn Java. I predict that it will gradually supplant C over the next ten years. Java is going to be big. You heard it here first."

In this particular post, he is not saying that Java is not ever useful or practical. He merely states that people who develop in Java are often using a tool that is not especially suited to the task -- that it's not always the right tool for the job. This is exactly like a single guy who does nothing with his SUV except do a one hour commute to work and home -- it works, but there are more practical solutions.

Well, one thing you have to aknowledge that for change philg is not pushing Tcl as scripting solution. You *do* know what he thinks (used to?) about Perl, don't you? :)

Didn't even attempt to find out who Greenspun is, huh? Check out his resume. He is a Ph.D. in Comp Sci and teaches Comp Sci courses in MIT. Do you happen to teach Comp Sci at MIT?

One of the HTML presentation editors I saw was Phil Greenspun's (Link), which is hosted/server-based, and lets people log in to edit or display their presentations. It looks pretty 1990's until you apply one of the CSS styles to it.

Of course, it's possible that a standalone editor would suit many people better, but then doesn't KPresent export as HTML?

understand that every single person in Canada pays a tax which goes in a fund for the labels

Ah - wrong. As others have pointed out, it's a levy, not a tax. Subtle difference.

And it's not "every single person in canada" - it's "every single person who buys blank audio CDs and tapes in Canada" BIG difference.

it has been suggested that we adopt something similar here

I think you'll note that it has not only been suggested, but it's been implemented as well, as part of the 1991 Audio Home Recording Act. (Of course, in this case, it actually is a tax.)

Berkeley, finds that most of those who earn a PhD are relatively satisfied with their career 10 to 13 years later.

+1 funny -1 setting up your own joke.

On a serious note, another study done by Stanford and RAND has concluded that there are too many PhDs produced in the US, and that graduate schools continue to admit students to satisfy their need for teaching and research assistants, not because there are jobs waiting for graduates. Unemployment among persons with PhDs is low but, it is asserted, the reason for low unemployment is because many persons with PhDs are underemployed or employed in jobs that do not use the research skills they acquired.

The Stanford-Rand study concluded that there are, in fields such as computer science, 50 percent too many PhDs being produced, 44 percent too many mechanical engineering PhDs, and 30 percent too many physics, chemistry, and mathematics PhDs. The report concluded that increased federal funding for science and engineering will only aggravate the situation by delaying the needed shrinking of PhD programs.

Then of course you have Philip Greenspun's site which provides interesting content in regards to PhDs, specifically the bit about No PhDs need apply.

Berkeley, finds that most of those who earn a PhD are relatively satisfied with their career 10 to 13 years later.

+1 funny -1 setting up your own joke.

On a serious note, another study done by Stanford and RAND has concluded that there are too many PhDs produced in the US, and that graduate schools continue to admit students to satisfy their need for teaching and research assistants, not because there are jobs waiting for graduates. Unemployment among persons with PhDs is low but, it is asserted, the reason for low unemployment is because many persons with PhDs are underemployed or employed in jobs that do not use the research skills they acquired.

The Stanford-Rand study concluded that there are, in fields such as computer science, 50 percent too many PhDs being produced, 44 percent too many mechanical engineering PhDs, and 30 percent too many physics, chemistry, and mathematics PhDs. The report concluded that increased federal funding for science and engineering will only aggravate the situation by delaying the needed shrinking of PhD programs.

Then of course you have Philip Greenspun's site which provides interesting content in regards to PhDs, specifically the bit about No PhDs need apply.

Before you think about shorting anything, read this.

I found SQLZoo.net an extremeley useful tutorial. One of the cool things is you can pick the SQL engine used for the exercises, including MySQL, Postgres, Oracle and SQLServer.

Before going hands-on, Philip Greenspun's SQL for Web Nerds offers a relatively speedy but deep overview.

So basically, you're rehashing the rest of my message while appearing to argue with me. I'm unclear as to what exactly I said that you disagree with, quite frankly.

As far as I could tell, stonecypher appeared to be using overwhelming, excessive, way-over-the-top sarcasm to make a point. And you still missed it :-).

The point of stonecypher's statement(s) is that while you could write "a massively OO object exchange system in assembly"... or indeed implement any other kind of software development project in an utterly inappropriate programming language... it would be ludicrous to do so.

Implying that all programming languages are equally powerful because they're all Turing equivalent is - well, it's nonsense. Paul Graham explains it much better than I can in his article Beating the Averages. Focus on the section labelled "The Blub Paradox", although the rest of the article is also good.

Essentially, just because two programming languages are Turing equivalent, that doesn't mean anything about how powerful they are. Similarly, just because two human-controllable vehicles both have wheels and travel along the ground doesn't mean you can equate a skateboard to a car.

A good line I've heard a few times about these sort of language non-comparisons is something like "yeah, you can do this in C, but only by writing a Lisp interpreter in C and then writing the rest in Lisp!" Codified (slightly) more formally as Greenspun's Tenth Law/Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

Unbalanced emoticons are sometimes correct.

See this thread for reference.

I can't believe anybody in their right mind would put a DB and a webserver on the same box.

Huh? Microsoft even recommends it in some cases. Hosting companies such as Ventures Online do this. For that matter, they're resellers -- there is another company behind them that provides the servers to them and hundreds of other hosting companies like 100 Megs. And I couldn't find any significant reported problems about this with relation to open-source DBs, such as MySQL or Postgres. It seems the only significant comment that I can find is that putting the DB and Web server on the same box can be slower than giving each their own box. Well, duh. A server farm would be even faster.

That's a serious design flaw, not to mention huge security risk.

Give examples of risks that come from having MySQL and Apache on the same box. Unique risks -- ones that would magically "go away" if the DB were on its own box. I'll go out on a limb and say that you're wrong. If anything, security is better with the DB & webserver on the same box, because logins won't go across ethernet. In fact, Philip Greenspun has a big article about interfacing with a database, and in it he talks about preventing direct connections, and suggests, "But for many Web sites, there is no reason why you can't run the database and Web server on the same box." Because then, you guessed it, the DB doesn't even have to listen on a port or accept any connections via TCP/IP.

5000 queries a sec should be no sweat for most databases.

See the title of your own post.

I agree very much with Randolpho's post. Ditch PHP if you really want an elegent architecture. If you really need to stick with PHP, try out Midgard. Otherwise, you really ought to at least look at the alternatives. Zope and OpenACS are probably the best open source web application systems/environments/architectures, whatever you want to call it. I prefer OpenACS (there's just something about using a system that was built primarily by highly intelligent MIT and CalTech alumni...).

OpenACS is based on AOLServer (probably the best, and first application-oriented web server out there, which was GPL'd by AOL thanks to Phil Greenspun's nagging. it's multi-threaded, it has database pooling, a healthy set of modules/plugins, and a wonderful community.), Tcl (you'll get used to it, really ;), and either Oracle or PostgreSQL. Thought it was designed for use with Oracle, and was ported to PostgreSQL, the architecture in OpenACS permits you to easily swap in support for other databases. Though, you'd have an extremely tough time getting it to work in MySQL as it relies on numerous high-end and complex relational databases features, most of which MySQL does not support.

OpenACS is highly modular, built entirely out of smaller packages, with its own package management system. There is a core package, the ACS Kernel, ACS Tcl (which contains most of the utility code, etc.), and there are various packages built on top of that which provide both specific application functionality, but also services that other packages can use. The documentation is built into the code and is available online in every OpenACS installation. Higher up packages include web page creation, bulletin board systems, blogging, content management, etc. You can "mount" these packages at various locations in the site map for your web site / application. E.g., you could mount an instance of the bulletin board at mysite.com/forum, and add a second one at mysite.com/techsupport. You can create subsites, such as mysite.com/internal/. There is an extensive and incredibly powerful permissions system so you can completely control access to every part of your system. There is also a built-in templating system which provides a simple separation between logic and display code, as well as theming capabilities.

I'm sure there's a lot that I've neglected to mention here. But I think you can get the point. OpenACS is a very mature platform that's be in development and production for many years now (hell, take a look at what Ars Digita was able to accomplish, they were making millions selling this system, and they gave the code away for free under the GPL). Don't take my word for it, go to the website and read about it. The only drawback to it that I see is that it does have a high learning curve. It took me a few months of reading and experimenting with it to really understand how the system works, but it's definitely worth it. There are a few hosting providers out there (Acorn Hosting and Zill.net) that offer affordable hosting packages, but it's also easy to setup your own server. OpenACS also has the ability to run multiple server boxes in a load balanced environment, so if you need to scale out, you can. Oh yeah, this is also a descendant of the same ACS system that RedHat's Enterprise Applications are descended from (RedHat got that technology when they bought the remains of ArsDigita.

Philip and Alex covers the same topic (building a website with a database backend). It has a large number of pages which are not at all useful because they are colour photographs of Alex or of various parts of North America. And others are random sidetracks or rants against the stupidity of web designers or 'junkware'. But they are not wasted pages because they are entertaining to read or look at.

To avoid are books with a large number of pages which are neither useful nor entertaining - like most of the 500-page monsters you see in bookshops. ('Teach Yourself To Be A Dummy In 24 Hours' - Philip.)

Phil and Alex's guide to web publishing makes a good point about flash - search engines won't index it (yet). So people are going to have a hard time trying to find your content online.

(a copy of the relevant chapter can be found here. The whole book should be compulsory reading for any web developer)

And that's exactly the way it ought to be. I feel so sad for these guys here who feel like they're being taken advantage of.

I liked Paul Graham's observation about italian teenagers in his article on nerd unpopularity. The italians don't have as many seriously disturbed nerdy teens, in large part because their families support each other and become the most important part of their lives.

Of course there's always Philip Greenspun's guide to Java Monkeys to support those of us who are being taken advantage of.

I helped my Fiancee buy a used laptop for her mom. Yes, I've spent several hours on "tech support" over the phone from 3000 miles away. I just feel that it's more than enough to repay them for the way they treat me when I fly out for holidays, and the interesting things I learn from them.

I also think it's worth it because they obviously get a lot out of internet access. Her mom is a library fiend, constantly checking out books on myriad topics, now she also has access to a world of information that doesn't require reserving books, or driving out in 3 feet of snow.

If you're really getting steamed about tech support, perhaps it's time to take more control over how it works?

there's nothing that beats Knoppix for ease of use, easy recovery, and local and remote administration.

Phillip Greenspun of arstechnica and photo.net fame. Sure, he's a computer nerd, but he's also a photography nerd -- that's about as far away from the keyboard as you can get. We're talking real photography here -- no computer-enhancement, USB-linked digital cameras. Medium format film, tubs of chemicals, racks of drying negatives.

I'm not a guru, but I'm also in the same category. Sure, I work as a Unix sysadmin and I program in my free time, but I'm also a photography nerd, cooking nerd, and physical activity nerd. I got picked on in high school, got over it, and I'm now having a lot more fun with my life than most of the "popular" crowd -- not because I make more money (I do), or because I'm better looking (I don't have a potbelly; most of them do), or because I've got more friends (Lost count and don't care). I'm happier because I've got tangible things that I enjoy devoting my life to -- my photography, my algorithms, and my tiramisu, whereas the "popular crowd" is still chasing "popularity" and "coolness" like they were in high school.

Um, CEO candidate from Bulgaria? Do you have any idea what CEO's do for a living? CEO's are not hired for their brains or vision or technical ability. They're hired for their ability to make deals, which means using their political and business connections which they didn't get in Bulgaria. Do you really think Dick Cheney would have become CEO of Halliburton if he hadn't first been Secretary of Defense so he could sell Halliburton services to the military? That George W. Bush would have been on the board of Harken without first being the son of a Congressman? Of course there are exceptions, but for the most part these connections come from the boardrooms and the golf courses, and get started by being born into the right families and getting "legacy" admissions to the right universities so they can connect up with other such scions (think of GWB at Andover and Yale). The CEO business is not a meritocracy. It's much closer to a hereditary nobility. Our society is much closer to feudalism than we like to imagine. See the article How to become as rich as Bill Gates to learn how you can join in. Having connected parents is the one thing that can't be outsourced.

Inspiration: http://www.scorecard.org. This is a server that gets 30 requests/second at peak hours (it was a top story on ABC News, in Newsweek, in the New York Times, etc.). Each request does between 1 and 5 Oracle queries. It just about uses up an old pizza-box size Unix machine (Sun Ultra 2 with dual 167 MHz CPUs). If you use Oracle 8 intelligently (and connect to Oracle 8 intelligently; we use AOLserver), there is no scalability problem for Internet sites (though you can create one and increase your job security by purchasing an application server).

While it's all too chic right now to bag on the US and the UK for their positions on the upcoming war on Iraq, the Patriot Act, and other debatable topics, I hope everyone takes a deep breath and realizes that the very fact that we are debating these topics proves the openness of these societies.

And I ask, what are we talking about, Openness, ala Glasnost, or Authoritarinaism? Let's all go to the article for a definition:

When elections and legal opposition parties are present but elections are rigged, rules are manipulated, or power is wielded so that there is no real competition for elected office, the political regime is best described as semi-authoritarian...

I suppose the competition in the US and the UK between two eternal and indistiguishable parties makes a choice. In theory an elected person can make a difference too. All you have to do is convince people that you are correct by presenting proper facts to back your opinions. Hmmm, how to get past the government/industry controled mass media that can twist anything anyone ever said or did Could it be that the internet can provide that alternate less controled route of truth in public debate? Or will the internet just get bowled over by established interests and become another outlet of bullshit?

Let's see, using the Clinton sex scandal as an example. Do you remember anything more than the name Monica Lewenski? The name you should remember but will have a hard time finding in print is Paula Jones, the real story sunk under a cartoon of an old man screwing a willing but mentally unstable intern. I take an excellent serries of articles from Vanity Fair and the New York Times as my baseline of, "the truth.": Jones was assulted in a hotel shortly after taking a job , repeatedly harrased, denied promotion and bothered. Later, the American Spectator published and article claiming she had consentual sex with her accoster. She appeared in public presuring him for an appology and a retraction, which were never recieved. Her cause was taken up by others who wished to damage Clinton's political credibility and punish a real wrong. A case was built up showing a patern of behavior of Clinton towards women who worked for under his authority. Clinton's efforts to quash the investigation included payoffs and perjury. The purgury was caught on tape and the whole thing led to impechement which failed to remove Clinton from office. A little google searching finds mostly BS, much like the stuff shoveled out by the AP and networks at the time: the Lewinski Cartoon.

First the searches

• clinton sex scandal 91,400 hits of total crap topped off by an MSN cartoon site.
• Clinton sex scandal lewinsky 19,600 hits.
• Paula Jones 65,400 hits.
• "monica lewinsky" 188,000 hits. ("lewinky" alone had half a million)
  

Now what you see:

• Supportive site, short on details
  
• typical dismissive summary.
  
• The complaint Bing! lots of details, and at last, Jones's story.
  

While the details are there, it seems obvious that those details are still difficult to find, even for a relatively informed person. Despite the best efforts of Google and others to organize and present valid and useful information, it seems that the internet can be manipulated by simple flood. Other facts, which draw less public attention, are easier to obscure and burry.

The idea that internet will defeat tyrany is preffaced on the simple fact that tyranies support themselves with lies and lose all foundation and support when the truth is known and repeated. The internet may yet be able to provide the truth with a forum, but it can be discredited, drowned and otherwise removed even in relatively free situations. Here in the US, the internet is under attack and the attackers have the government's blessing. As you and my ability to connect to the internet as peers goes away, the likelyhood of impartial third party reporting goes. This is happening, despite the internet and few people care.

Perhaps it is because Microsoft really is doing *nothing* new. Name one innovative product to come out of Microsoft that they have not purchased from someone else or outright copied........Clippy? Bob? Please. People are reluctant to want to support Microsoft because of bloated and inefficient programming and third rate design and implementation among many other reasons.

Um I challenge you to name anything that anyone has ever done that is completely new. EVER.

"If I have seen further, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants..." -- Isaac Newton

All inventions are based on things that were developed before them.

But to satisfy you, here's an innovation from which I'd like to quote Philip Greenspun, no MS fan by any stretch.

"Ironically this approach to distributed computing over the Internet was ignored by most of the rest of the world except for one company: Microsoft! If you look at Microsoft .NET you'll see that it provides extensive support for building applications like this wealth clock." -- from the Bill Gates Wealth Clock

Innovation isn't just the invention of something new (which MS earns millions of patents for a year), but the ability to distribute it to the public in a new way.

I don't give a fuck what your or my national origin is; that's immaterial to the argument. The term is offensive to some people, and has offensive roots. The fact that you know a few people that are not offended by the term does not scale to everyone.

As for your argument that you only use the term in the company of people that you know aren't offended by it . . . do you carefully check with each person within range before saying it? Including the vast hordes of Slashdot readers that may or may not have been reading our little discussion?

You can use this handy wealthclock kindly provided by Philip Greenspun to see just how much that might be, or just to stare in disgusted silence as you realise that Bill Gates is worth more than most countries on earth

1.) MS Windows installed (dual boot), in which case I pay Bill Gates

2.) No MS Windows, in which case I pay Bill Gates.

The Vendor told me he was NOT able to obtain ANY laptops without MS on them, so had to pass the MS tax on to me, with the understanding that maybe somewhere somehow I might get a refund; it happened once but don't get your hopes up. So if anybody has had success with refunds from buying VAIO's please let me know. Also if there is any Refund Day protests in the Wash. DC area please let me know.

P.S. To the people in this discussion who say "vote with your dollars!": Please check here to see the winner of your proposed election.

chris{AT}dtm.ciw.edu

Cringley killed his kid!

He admitted it died right in his arms. He is also an obsessive-compulsive egomaniac who lives under a false identity. Not to mention, his failed-techie-cum-author stylings remind me a lot of Philip Greenspun!

See here for a concise biography of Gates, in particular the history of the wealth of the Gates family of Washington State. Summarizing he's always been upper class, he was already from one of the wealthiest families in Washington State at birth. As an aside many "entrepreneurs" came from upper class backgrounds: the Walton family (yeah Sam started off running a mom and pop grocery but it's been growing exponentially since the early 70's, by the time Wal-Marts started popping up like dandelions Walton was already among the wealthiest people in Arkansas) and Donald Trump (second generation scion of a New York real estate millionaire) and Ted Turner (he bet the already considerable family fortune on cable television in the early 70's).

Really there are two kinds of "entrepreneur" those who entered the world without access to significant capital (Larry Ellison, don't know about Jobs, Mark Cuban) and those who risked significant personal wealth (Turner, Gates et al.) to move from being merely very wealthy (as in top1 or 2% of the population) to extremely wealthy (as in the number of individuals with similar wealth on the entire planet numbers less than 1000). Given that the very wealthy can afford to make great sacrifices (gamble) because often they will still be very wealthy even if they fail it's really not that remarkable that sometimes they succeed. For example Gates sacrificed a Harvard degree (and the concommitant access it provides) to move to New Mexico where all he had to fall back on was a $1 million trust fund ($1 million in 1979 remember, invested conservatively at 6% that's $3.8 million today a far cry from $1 billion but I'm sure Bill would find a way to survive on it).

• Debian Effort
  
• iPacking it
  
• Handhelds.org sports all these Platforms
  

Why? So you can compile programs and walk around with them and have access to all the free software goodness you might need. Oh yeah, it also makes sure that you own your handheld rather than donate it to the cause.

But if you are impatient, you could drop by Office Depot and buy an Zaurus today. I got one and like the form factor. I have not used it enough to really comment on it, but the interface is slick and works well enough. I liked my handspring visor's graphiti system, but I'm told that I'll get proficient with my thumbs on that keyboard. Having compact flash and SD interfaces rocks. Work out your program, what have you, on your laptop then drop it into compact flash and it's in your pocket.

One things for sure, I'de wait for a Linux port (if indeed there is none yet) before purchasing one of these. The WinCE and Pocket PC handwriting sucks eggs and the Windowz interface did NOT scale well at all. Hard to use big, impossible to use small, you gotta toss it out.

It just so happens, WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT, that Mr. Gates is very very rich. And you know what; even if 98% of what his company does is wrong; getting there was not as wrong as you think. And that man worked hard to get where he is; and deserves an ounce of your respect for that.

Please. That man was very, very lucky. When he dropped out of Harvard to start selling software, he had a million dollar trust fund in his back pocket to fall back on. When he started selling DOS (an application he stole, let's not forget) to IBM, it's because his mommy set up the meeting with then-CEO John Opel. Yeah, he's rich, but respect isn't something he deserves from me.

Read all about it.

Tuition isn't really related to the university's costs in any concrete sense. Consider the concept of need-based financial aid: one way to look at it is that schools are nobly helping students who can't afford to pay, but another, more accurate version is that they are simply taking all your money (if you're not rich) or as much as they think they can get away with (if you are). Here, read this.

Maybe you won't believe me, but will you believe an actual website claiming to be authoritive?

LOL--It really is true. The slug is the British unit of mass--pound is the unit of force.

See Charles Ferguson's High Stakes, No Prisoners (1999) for a longer explanation of how hired-gun CEOs manage to kill software products companies.

From the DHMO FAQ, in the website you mention:

Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is a colorless and odorless chemical compound, also referred to by some as Dihydrogen Oxide, Hydrogen Hydroxide, Hydronium Hydroxide, or simply Hydric acid.

I am not a chemist, so I searched all those names in the best source I know (which is here), and found that Dihydrogen Oxide is a fancy name of water (H2O).

scorecard.org (founded by Philip Greenspun, by the way) contains a whole lot of information about pollutants. They maintain a list of suspected neurotoxicants (the section about mercury compounds is a little scary).

Lessee...

The wave-your-card thing isn't very sensitive--I've generally had to actually touch the windshield to get it to register. I think the tech is the same that a lot of companies are using for ID cards these days--a radio pulse, if memory serves, that the cards reflect in a particular way.

Flexcar is a direct competitor in DC now.

The web signup form is pretty slick, They're trying to setup a phone signup as well, but it's not available yet.

I'm a new driver--just got my license this summer. My girlfriend's car is a stickshift, which kind of scares me. I'm in the habit of getting around by bus & bike. Apart from direct utility, Zipcar is giving me a chance to get practice driving every couple weeks.

My second session with with Prius Pam at Alewife, which was fun! People who enjoy riding different kinds of cars might want to get a trial membership just to muck around, particularly once they get the Mini Cooper in.

Don't believe me? Check out the ruling in US v. LaMacchia and a related case, Dowling v. US, which is discussed extensively in the LaMacchia ruling. In particular, read Justice Blackmun's analysis on the difference between theft and violation of copyright.

LaMacchia broke the law, no doubt about it. Congress even moved to close the so-called "LaMacchia loophole" some time after this case was decided. But it still doesn't change the fact that the two crimes in question are fundamentally different.

if your machine crashes half way through executing a DB update, all the locks in the world won't help you to guarantee a consistent state after restart.

The classic example cited by Philip Greenspun is an online bank. If someone transfers $1000 from checking to savings, you need to be absolutely certain that the transfer is ONLY completed if savings is credited AND checking is debited. If someone pulls the power cord halfway through, neither you nor your customer want to be out $1000.

So locking absolutely doesn't equal transactions. To "fake" transactions you would need to record what you are about to do, then delete that record only after you do it. That way, the transaction can be "rolled back."

Ars Digita founder Phillip Greenspun has been crusading for MIT to stop charging tuition for some time. I'm just amazed that his name is never brought up with this story, seeing as MIT finally seems to be doing what he has been trying to do for years, and in some small way perhaps moving toward being tuition-free...

• Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists -- a humour look at the role of education in job seeking. Not very serious, but a good read and actually very thought provoking
• How I Became a Scum-Sucking Yuppie Materialist and his advice on investing are a good and geeky introduction to money.

• Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists -- a humour look at the role of education in job seeking. Not very serious, but a good read and actually very thought provoking
• How I Became a Scum-Sucking Yuppie Materialist and his advice on investing are a good and geeky introduction to money.

• Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists -- a humour look at the role of education in job seeking. Not very serious, but a good read and actually very thought provoking
• How I Became a Scum-Sucking Yuppie Materialist and his advice on investing are a good and geeky introduction to money.

• Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists -- a humour look at the role of education in job seeking. Not very serious, but a good read and actually very thought provoking
• How I Became a Scum-Sucking Yuppie Materialist and his advice on investing are a good and geeky introduction to money.

Click here for a bad joke that that reminds me of.

Read SQL for Web Nerds. It's done from the perspective of someone using Oracle, but you should be able to get the idea.

I really like this on line sql book, by Philip Greenspun. I doens't waste time.

I enjoyed Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing and it's free.

How about disruption of 911 service? power outages at major nodes of the network in major cities? Mess with traffic lights at key intersections at rush hour? A virus in the computers at the NYSE? Remember the Y2K bug stories - even though hardly anything actually happened, a lot of the scenarios described were not that outlandish, and in fact a lot of near disasters were prevented.

(One in particular was noteworthy - in Los Angeles, a y2k test at a water reclamation plant led to some 4 million gallons of raw sewage spilling into the streets. Had this occurred on New Year's eve, there would have been 150,000 or so in that park for a millennium celebration. Hehe... 150,000 Angelenos covered in shit on New Year's eve....

Regarding the upcoming user-tracking features of Longhorn, Phil Greenspun was already waving this flag in 1997 in this essay. I quote from one of Greenspun's techno-utopia scenarios:


[Jane's] desktop machine knows that she's sent a bunch of e-mail today to friends asking for tips on places to visit in California. It can listen to her phone line and figure out that she has called 10 numbers in California today. You'd think that her desktop machine could put all of this together to say, "Jane, you should probably check out http://photo.net/ca/. I also note that you've been typing at the keyboard on this machine for an average of 11 hours every day for the last two weeks. You ought to relax tonight. I notice from your calendar program that you don't have any appointments. I notice from your Quicken database that you don't have any money so you probably shouldn't be going to the theater. I notice that Naked Gun is on cable tonight. I don't see any payments in your Quicken database to a cable TV vendor so I assume you aren't a Cable Achiever. I remember seeing some e-mail from your friend David two months ago containing the words "invite" and "cable TV" so I assume that David has cable. I see from watching your phone line's incoming caller line ID that he has called you twice in the last week from his home phone so I assume he is in town. Call him up and invite yourself over."

There is it in a nutshell: useful user-tracking - as opposed to tracking user prefs for marketing purposes. Greenspun's ideas seem so simple and realizeable but only now we're beginning to look into this direction. Why? Perhaps because MS has throttled development with its uninnovative OSs; perhaps because such technologies seem to suit the consumer first and Big Business second.

I hope that with Longhorn, Bill has finally caught on to the idea that technology - by definition - should either simplify what we can already do or enable us to do stuff we couldn't before. And that's all.