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Just because 'most news sites' report it, doesn't make it true. IPv5 didn't become mainstream because of what it was designed for, NOT because it had an odd number.

Maybe you should Google what IPv5 was for. Here, I'll help. Read this.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2003/06/what_ever_happened_to_ipv5.html

It was assigned to an interesting, but ultimately not implemented, protocol.

Back in the day, ZOE was exactly what you're looking for. It's an open source, cross platform turn-key, solution (Simple Server is built-in) that is designed to archive, index and search your email (using the Apache Lucene search engine). Jon Udel has a good article on O'Reilly that includes some screen shots.

ZOE meets all of your requirements, though data import is a bit of a problem. There are several different strategies for data import, so one of them may meet your requirements.

Unfortunately, ZOE is abandonware so it's not for the faint of heart. The original author was on the bleeding edge and tended to make 'interesting' technology choices like Tapestry for the framework, and using his own, home-grown build system and a Creative Commons license that isn't usually used for software. He eventually abandoned Java development for Lua and let the registration for the home page lapse. As a result, it's difficult to recommend this for all but the most determined, high functioning users.

How does this hurt them on books where there is no audio version available?

It hurts them a lot. The authors only made money three or four times for the work they did once, and this read it out loud feature is preventing them from being paid yet again for the same work done long ago.

Apologies in advance for the flame, and even more so to the authors who disagree with the guild and I unfairly lump in with them...

But the fact they offer no product to compete with it is beside the point. Authors in the guild have stated time and time again that it is their god given right to control their works and get payments multiple times over for one job.

The fact they can't sit back and make more money by not creating new product doesn't occur to them as being their fault, they just see it as someone else stealing money from their pockets.

That is why they sued Google for making their books searchable followed by wanting to shut down the public library system, and why they sued Amazon for selling used books and not giving the authors money again and again and again for one sale of one book.

While this certainly isn't the stance of ALL authors, it most definitely is the stance of the loudest ones, which happen to be the ones that pack together in this guild to cry about how not making new product is causing them to starve out on the streets and how no one will ever write again if money isn't involved, since clearly no one writes for the enjoyment of it.

The greedy bastards in the guild would rather see all literature in the world no longer exist than to see someone else profit off 'their' work, despite the provisions in copyright law that (admittedly that everyone is forced into using nowadays) state the work belongs to the public domain in exchange for that copyright protection for a limited time.

And sold by BellSouth.

Nokia 9000 in 1996.

Smartphone 2002 announced by Microsoft in 2001 - defined as lacking a touchscreen.

Winner: IBM, by nearly a decade.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#History

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/feb02/02-19intelwirelesspr.mspx

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2002/feb02/02-19tismartphonepr.mspx

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2004/01/01/mpx2002.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_(phone)

There are almost too many to count when it comes to billion dollar companies involved in open source. They are the main motivator in new Linux kernel development and amongst 100's of other projects including Apache, Perl, MySQL etc you will find @email's from dozens of billion dollar companies in the dev-lists. O'Reilly himself squashed some of these rumors about open source himself over 11 years ago now, so why discuss this? It is just going to turn into a flame war about licenses and corporate responsibility.

You cannot get better than about half of your nominal throughput, at least on .11a or .11g. Ubiquiti advertises 100mbps of real throughput on their non-mimo .11n radios, which connect nominally at 150mbps. And yeah, that's combined up and down.

Really? So what do you make of this tech article from Adobe then? It starts off nice and promising:

Flash supports Apple's QuickTime API (which in turns supports many different codecs) and Microsoft's AVI file format and its related codecs. By leveraging these technologies, Flash is able to transcode video to and from Flash Video (FLV) format.

But then goes on to say:

Other limitations:

* Flash cannot import MPEG video streams through QuickTime
* Flash cannot import the audio track of MPEG video through QuickTime.

Clearly Adobe's use of the Quicktime API got 'nobbled', and that was back in 2005.

Then a year later in 2006 Apple delivered it's next knock-out punch. Apple used to support Flash natively in Quicktime until they suddenly and without any warning switched it off in QuickTime 7.1.3 and yanked the rug out from underneath its developers, leaving them no where to go.

Saw a great presentation at OSCON a few years back about the massive digitzation effort undertaken by David Rumsey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rumsey): See http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/where2005/view/e_spkr/1867 -- Drew a well-deserved standing ovation.

In the course of the talk, I think he said that he'd scanned the first 10,000 maps (though even 1,000 sounds ridiculous -- maybe it was 1,000) before hiring assistance.

Of course, he had more money to play with, so he probably had a pretty big scanner ;)

timothy

Go with clientless thinclients depending on how large your install base is.

Multiseat linux setups are rather easy to setup. There are even a few commercial applications. (My local library has one).

If they don't need DVI, there are some solutions which you just run a single USB cable and it carries sound, USB & VGA. If your work environment is setup so people are relatively close together, give each desk cluster a quad or octocore CPU and everyone their own X session.

I have a friend with a few kids (3-4) and the oldests are now starting to both want to use the computer. You can either 1) Buy 2 separate computers 2) Get 1 decent computer (dual core should be plenty for a 5 year old) and just setup 2 monitors side by side.

http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/12/multiseat_x_under_linux.html

SIP is a fun feature, but I think it has the potential to be more. I agree, it's "nothing more" than simple collocations, but I'm not sure how that's a critique. In the end, all software boils down to simple assembly instructions, nonetheless the magic emerges.

For further commentary, see this blog post. SIP is just simple collocations, but that's exactly what makes it so appealing. It's moving indexing and search in a more semantic direction, but in a way that's reasonable to design and implement.

This is probably premature, but I've even heard some pundits compare SIP to PageRank.

EVERY Mac OS X installation comes with Apache. It's off by default and you're never asked to turn it on (you can turn it on system preferences though). If the mere existence of a web server on a computer is security risk, then everyone with a mac is screwed!

I expect MS to heavily promote the "home digital hub" solution theyve been talking about for the past 3 or 4 years.

Oh, you mean this digital hub?

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/2425

Doesn't OS X already run ClamAV internally? At least as of 10.4, Server does but I haven't heard about client.

The problem with this is that those private companies want to extend their rights to neighboring rooftops. if I'm not mistaken, a lawsuit to forbid charging for admission to nearby roofs was successful. Next, they'll probably succeed in prohibiting the use of social network services in the neighborhood during their games.

Here.

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2007/09/when_was_the_exact_day_slashdo.html

OK, let's here it: why is user scripting a security hole?

With early versions of GreaseMonkey, the way the user scripts were applied to pages would allow the page to affect easily the GM in ways that could lead to cross-site attack vectors.

That is why GM had a fairly complete redesign around the middle of 2005, remove the issue(s) that affected all scripts, but individual scripts can still be vulnerable depending on their design - hence you should be careful not to let a script apply globally for security reasons as well as efficiency ones. For a decent description of the problems with earlier GM versions and problems that you can still create for yourself in the latest versions, this article does a decent job.

The other major problem with user scripting is using scripts from other sources without performing an exhaustive code review first. How do you know that the script you have just enabled isn't subject to one of the flaws? How do you know it isn't intentionally malicious? There have been several cases of this in the past, hence the warning message before you add a script to GM in recent versions and the warning message that appeared on userscipts.org for some time (as malicious scripts were found in their archive).

Like many things, user scripting isn't a problem if both programmers and users are educated, careful and care. There lies the problem.

I use GM myself, with scripts of my own devising or those from elsewhere that I have sufficiently reviewed, but I would not recommend it (or equivalents) to the general populous as they do not need any further ways to dig themselves into a malware riddled hole.

First off, how many incomplete outbound TCP-IP connections do you really need to have open inside of one second?

Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 are all DESKTOP OS, and the stated goal is to limit the spread of certain types of malware...

If you read the article referred to, the excessive outbound connection attempts are not dropped, they are delayed to maintain a manageable flow of information.

If I were to run a port scanner against a /24 subnet, that would mean it would take at least 2.6 seconds, since it would throttle the requests to each IP to a rate of 10 per second - what the heck is wrong with that? Must it be able to spew all 256 connection requests instantly?

A little research leads me to the conclusion that this is a meaningful effort to have a positive impact on the spread of malware on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 desktops.

There is (was) also a limit on in-bound connections, made popular when Tim O'Reilly published a hack to turn Windows NT Workstation into Windows NT Server, allowing more than 10 in-bound connections, allowing companies to deploy lower-cost Workstation OS as web servers. Here is a brief recap of those events.

"All smartphones have unlimited data (or "unlimited" as the case may be) anymore"

I assume you mean all smartphones have unlimited data NOW. How do you suppose that came about? It wasn't the case when the iPhone was released. So no, I'm not partially wrong. Here are some articles written around the time of the iPhone release. Unlimited data plans (particularly unlimited plans at reasonable prices) were not at all universal:

http://www.mobileindustryreview.com/2007/11/o2s_iphone_unlimited_data_unlimited_woo.html

http://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/9794

http://www.oreillynet.com/mac/blog/2007/06/iphone_unlimited_data.html

When the iPhone was released it almost required (maybe it did require in the US?) subscription to an unlimited plan. Read the last link. Either Apple told AT&T it was no deal without reasonably priced unlimited data plans for the iPhone or AT&T decided on their own (it's hard to say which). But if they're going to offer unlimited data at a low price, AT&T has to put some restrictions on it -- no tethering. Yes, it was probably short sighted not to offer ANY tethering option. Yes, it took a long time to fix that.

It's quite reasonable that AT&T won't let you tether your $30 unlimited iPhone data plan. You say yourself that you have to pay almost twice as much for a tethering plan!

I totally hear where a lot of people are coming from on this issue.

What is the fate of Web 1.0 development tools in a Web 2.0 world?

The problem is that a lot of Web 2.0 goodness, such as Ajax, dynamic content, and collaboration require databases and dynamic coding. The static HTML produced by WYSIWYG web authoring tools can never meet the user expectations of today for a better web experience.

So you could argue that WYSIWYG development tools are obsolete, and that portals and content management systems are the future, but I would only partially agree. Sure, the web is changing, but that does not mean Web user interface design, navigation design, usability, accessibility, information architecture, CSS, HTML, Web standards compliance, metadata, and cross-browser compatibility are dead. On the contrary - I would argue that tools like Dreamweaver are indispensible for ensuring that Web 2.0 applications remain "backwards compatible" with Web 1.0 standards and guidelines. :-)

As users take on an increasing level of ownership of their content, we need web designers more than ever to help ensure the aesthetics and the semantics of the web do not suffer as a consequence (anyone remember GeoCities?). Dreamweaver happens to be an excellent tool for standards-based visual Web design and development. It makes it easy to create attractive pages that pass W3C compliance tests, and with the right Dreamweaver extensions you can build full-featured, Ajax-enabled, dynamic, collaborative Web 2.0 applications much more easily.

I spent years evaluating different open-source portals and CMS systems written in different languages (ASP, PHP, Perl, and Java), and I found that they all imposed certain user interface design constraints and even the best web-based WYSIWYG editor required was still a lot less powerful than Dreamweaver. The nice thing about Dreamweaver is you get complete freedom to develop your Web user interface however you choose, without any design constraints imposed on you.

But how do you get Web 2.0 support out of a Web 1.0 development tools? Remember Tim O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme map?

The answer is components - rich, data-driven, Ajax-enabled, standards-compliant Web user interface components.

The component-based web development paradigm makes it easier to build content-driven, dynamic web applications with the latest Web 2.0 features. This is how desktop apps have been written for years, which is also consistent with the "Web as a platform" concept and the goal of making Web 2.0 applications more like desktop applications (that is, by building web applications the same way we build desktop software, we can make the web experience more like a desktop software experience).

Since I do mostly Java development today, I decided to learn JavaServer Faces, a component-based framework for building web apps. As a long-time Dreamweaver user, I also wanted to create my JSF pages in Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver had no built-in JSF support, so I decided to write JSFToolbox for Dreamweaver, a suite of design and coding Dreamweaver extensions that support JavaServer Faces development.

JSF is quite popular in the Java space today. We had our first conference last September. I spoke about using Dreamweaver for Web 2.0 development in my podcast from the conference - check it out if you like.

One of the great things about JSF is that you get Ajax support for free with a lot of UI components, so you can simply add a rich tree component to your page for example and you don't have to write a single line of JavaScript to get the partial page rendering behavior. Our tools allow you to create Ajax-enabled JSF pages in Dreamweaver both visually and intuitively. Personally I've designed and implemented many JSF We

Secondly, where did you get these figures from?

Thats a good question. But do you also ask yourself how statisticians can poll 1000 odd people and get a very accurate reading on 300 million? :) (I'm talking about the pre US elections polling)

Statistics can get fairly complicated and each poll can be model accurately with a low enough margin of error. As a simple example you can give different weights to statistics of browsers from different websites and them compile a grand total. So while given _ANY_ statistic you can find something wrong with it, you cant simply dismiss it as being inaccurate.

You might find these linux interesting:

http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/10/how_can_linux_market_share_be.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=598383

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)

Go to one of the SAGE conferences, and you will have a hard time finding a Windows notebook, other than the Microsoft employees. They are pretty scarce at the O'Reilly conferences as well. (Yes, I only use Linux on the desktop.)

People also would do well to note that, just like hard disk sizes, wireless speeds are a big fat lie.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2003/08/08/wireless_throughput.html

it's still a web client and still slower to work then Outlook.

Citation needed. I've had problems with it, but slowness was never one of them.

Second, many companies are not willing to turn over their email to outside party that they cannot control what they do with it.

My assumption was, there are very specific things they're allowed to do with it.

Besides which, the alternative is trusting Microsoft to not patch Outlook to send them copies of your inbox. If you don't suspect Microsoft of doing that, why do you suspect Google of doing something similar?

Zimbra is a nightmare

That's one of four that I was able to find. Haven't used any, though.

there is no reason to use Outlook as client but not use Exchange as backend.

The reason is, you want it to be a seamless upgrade. For example, replacing the Windows fileserver with Samba on Linux, done right, no one should notice except the admins. Similarly, adding webmail to an IMAP server, even if you have to change the underlying server quite a lot, is something the users shouldn't notice, unless they happen to like webmail.

So, if you have a legitimate reason to want to use something other than Exchange as a backend -- maybe better Linux compatibility, maybe it's easier to admin, maybe it has features Exchange doesn't -- it would be nice if the people using Outlook don't have to care. That's why you want to support Outlook as a client.

Chromatic tuner? actually, if you look up the DIY Cantenna on Google, it shows you. linky: http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448

Jpeg2000 supports lossless compression. Image won't degrade over time, as with normal jpegs, AFAIK.

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2003/11/14/digphoto_ckbk.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lossless_JPEG

A number of readers have correctly noted the poor logic in George Reese's article. Additionally there is some question as to his motives.

George Reese runs an early stage start-up called enStratus that doesn't offer auto-scaling capabilities. His competitors such as Right Scale offer auto-scaling as part of their applications.

I can certainly understand why someone whose company is missing a major feature, relative to the competition, would argue that the missing feature is not important.

[Where] has a major application of Philosophy developed in Computer Science in the last 2.5 years?

Sometimes I like to think of roles (or Smalltalk traits) as an exploration of Platonic ideals and Kantian noumena, in the idea that our means of interaction between objects depends solely on our understanding of their phenomena.

Okay, so you've answered my question about backups - you don't do them. Fine, presumably you've looked at the value of your data and the probability of Google losing it and decided that backing up would be more expensive. Now, what about security auditing and compliance with data protection laws? It's not just your data you're storing there, it's your customer's data and they have either moral or legal rights over it, depending on your jurisdiction.

He made the FBI's Top 10 most wanted list and is still a FBI cyber fugitive probably living in his native Morocco now.

Starting in 2003 he paid for DDoS attacks on his online Satellite TV retailer competition. These DDoS attacks did collateral damage on the various hosting and CDNs providers that these competitors turned to for support. The costs were estimated to be as high as $2,000,000 by Attorney General John Ashcroft. The prosecutor for the case, assistant U.S. attorney Arif Alikhan, head of the Los Angeles computer crimes section, said: "I think it's the first case of its kind involving a DDoS for commercial advantage or for hire, ..."

An update to older coverage. In 2005, criminal complaints against those techincally involved were dismissed

What the hell do you think HTML, XML, news stories, book descriptions, and reviews are? Are they not text?

Yahoo Shopping was written in Lisp. It was later rewritten, in sections at least, by a mixture of C++ and Perl. They wrote a Lisp interpreter in C++ to facilitate this.

Yahoo would have never happened without Perl.

Slashdot already ran a story about the BBC making a Rails-like framework for Perl because they liked Rails but prefer Perl as a language. The article at that second link says they're pretty dedicated to Perl for their whole Web infrastructure.

Amazon use Perl as a major component gluing the front end order-entry system to a back-end database, and also for part of their document authoring chain.

Amazon (for Amazon.com's own site) uses Mason (a Perl website templating system) as their official web development template system, and they're hiring for people with that skill set. They do use a lot of Java, too, apparently, but Perl is an important part of the site.

IMDb uses Linux, Apache, Perl and mod_perl to run pretty much the whole site, and is part of Amazon.

Google is using quite a bit of server-side JavaScript -- on the JVM as a replacement for Java in many cases.

Google uses C++, Python, and Java for most public-facing sites, and much of the management of the systems is done with Python.

This Google job (for a software engineer) lists C++ as a must and Python as a plus. This other job (for a software engineer) requires both one or more of C, C+, or Java and one or more of shell, Perl, PHP, or Python.

The nation of Scotland used Perl to migrate millions of land records between systems, which certainly is data munging, but a pretty important bit of it.

It was way back in 1999, but Agilent used Perl to build their big customer-facing e-commerce site.

Booking.com (part of Priceline) uses primarily Perl to run their site.

This PowerPoint presentation says Morgan Stanley in 2004 was using Perl written by over 500 developers on over 9000 (no, that's not a /b/ ism) systems to keep their network running smoothly, for a web front end development language, to develop middleware, and to develop backend applications.

ValueClick and TicketMaster make much use of Perl, too. That's along with the content management system -- Bricolage -- used by the Dean for President campaign, ETOnline, and the World Health Organization being written in Perl. You may have also heard of MovableType, which is a serious CMS from Six Apart. Or maybe you've heard of a site that runs it, called The Huffington Post, who right now is looking for someone to work on it?

What the hell do you think HTML, XML, news stories, book descriptions, and reviews are? Are they not text?

Yahoo Shopping was written in Lisp. It was later rewritten, in sections at least, by a mixture of C++ and Perl. They wrote a Lisp interpreter in C++ to facilitate this.

Yahoo would have never happened without Perl.

Slashdot already ran a story about the BBC making a Rails-like framework for Perl because they liked Rails but prefer Perl as a language. The article at that second link says they're pretty dedicated to Perl for their whole Web infrastructure.

Amazon use Perl as a major component gluing the front end order-entry system to a back-end database, and also for part of their document authoring chain.

Amazon (for Amazon.com's own site) uses Mason (a Perl website templating system) as their official web development template system, and they're hiring for people with that skill set. They do use a lot of Java, too, apparently, but Perl is an important part of the site.

IMDb uses Linux, Apache, Perl and mod_perl to run pretty much the whole site, and is part of Amazon.

Google is using quite a bit of server-side JavaScript -- on the JVM as a replacement for Java in many cases.

Google uses C++, Python, and Java for most public-facing sites, and much of the management of the systems is done with Python.

This Google job (for a software engineer) lists C++ as a must and Python as a plus. This other job (for a software engineer) requires both one or more of C, C+, or Java and one or more of shell, Perl, PHP, or Python.

The nation of Scotland used Perl to migrate millions of land records between systems, which certainly is data munging, but a pretty important bit of it.

It was way back in 1999, but Agilent used Perl to build their big customer-facing e-commerce site.

Booking.com (part of Priceline) uses primarily Perl to run their site.

This PowerPoint presentation says Morgan Stanley in 2004 was using Perl written by over 500 developers on over 9000 (no, that's not a /b/ ism) systems to keep their network running smoothly, for a web front end development language, to develop middleware, and to develop backend applications.

ValueClick and TicketMaster make much use of Perl, too. That's along with the content management system -- Bricolage -- used by the Dean for President campaign, ETOnline, and the World Health Organization being written in Perl. You may have also heard of MovableType, which is a serious CMS from Six Apart. Or maybe you've heard of a site that runs it, called The Huffington Post, who right now is looking for someone to work on it?

What the hell do you think HTML, XML, news stories, book descriptions, and reviews are? Are they not text?

Yahoo Shopping was written in Lisp. It was later rewritten, in sections at least, by a mixture of C++ and Perl. They wrote a Lisp interpreter in C++ to facilitate this.

Yahoo would have never happened without Perl.

Slashdot already ran a story about the BBC making a Rails-like framework for Perl because they liked Rails but prefer Perl as a language. The article at that second link says they're pretty dedicated to Perl for their whole Web infrastructure.

Amazon use Perl as a major component gluing the front end order-entry system to a back-end database, and also for part of their document authoring chain.

Amazon (for Amazon.com's own site) uses Mason (a Perl website templating system) as their official web development template system, and they're hiring for people with that skill set. They do use a lot of Java, too, apparently, but Perl is an important part of the site.

IMDb uses Linux, Apache, Perl and mod_perl to run pretty much the whole site, and is part of Amazon.

Google is using quite a bit of server-side JavaScript -- on the JVM as a replacement for Java in many cases.

Google uses C++, Python, and Java for most public-facing sites, and much of the management of the systems is done with Python.

This Google job (for a software engineer) lists C++ as a must and Python as a plus. This other job (for a software engineer) requires both one or more of C, C+, or Java and one or more of shell, Perl, PHP, or Python.

The nation of Scotland used Perl to migrate millions of land records between systems, which certainly is data munging, but a pretty important bit of it.

It was way back in 1999, but Agilent used Perl to build their big customer-facing e-commerce site.

Booking.com (part of Priceline) uses primarily Perl to run their site.

This PowerPoint presentation says Morgan Stanley in 2004 was using Perl written by over 500 developers on over 9000 (no, that's not a /b/ ism) systems to keep their network running smoothly, for a web front end development language, to develop middleware, and to develop backend applications.

ValueClick and TicketMaster make much use of Perl, too. That's along with the content management system -- Bricolage -- used by the Dean for President campaign, ETOnline, and the World Health Organization being written in Perl. You may have also heard of MovableType, which is a serious CMS from Six Apart. Or maybe you've heard of a site that runs it, called The Huffington Post, who right now is looking for someone to work on it?

What the hell do you think HTML, XML, news stories, book descriptions, and reviews are? Are they not text?

Yahoo Shopping was written in Lisp. It was later rewritten, in sections at least, by a mixture of C++ and Perl. They wrote a Lisp interpreter in C++ to facilitate this.

Yahoo would have never happened without Perl.

Slashdot already ran a story about the BBC making a Rails-like framework for Perl because they liked Rails but prefer Perl as a language. The article at that second link says they're pretty dedicated to Perl for their whole Web infrastructure.

Amazon use Perl as a major component gluing the front end order-entry system to a back-end database, and also for part of their document authoring chain.

Amazon (for Amazon.com's own site) uses Mason (a Perl website templating system) as their official web development template system, and they're hiring for people with that skill set. They do use a lot of Java, too, apparently, but Perl is an important part of the site.

IMDb uses Linux, Apache, Perl and mod_perl to run pretty much the whole site, and is part of Amazon.

Google is using quite a bit of server-side JavaScript -- on the JVM as a replacement for Java in many cases.

Google uses C++, Python, and Java for most public-facing sites, and much of the management of the systems is done with Python.

This Google job (for a software engineer) lists C++ as a must and Python as a plus. This other job (for a software engineer) requires both one or more of C, C+, or Java and one or more of shell, Perl, PHP, or Python.

The nation of Scotland used Perl to migrate millions of land records between systems, which certainly is data munging, but a pretty important bit of it.

It was way back in 1999, but Agilent used Perl to build their big customer-facing e-commerce site.

Booking.com (part of Priceline) uses primarily Perl to run their site.

This PowerPoint presentation says Morgan Stanley in 2004 was using Perl written by over 500 developers on over 9000 (no, that's not a /b/ ism) systems to keep their network running smoothly, for a web front end development language, to develop middleware, and to develop backend applications.

ValueClick and TicketMaster make much use of Perl, too. That's along with the content management system -- Bricolage -- used by the Dean for President campaign, ETOnline, and the World Health Organization being written in Perl. You may have also heard of MovableType, which is a serious CMS from Six Apart. Or maybe you've heard of a site that runs it, called The Huffington Post, who right now is looking for someone to work on it?

It's true that programmers fall victim to fad-ism, but the fact is that the learning curve of Perl is quite steep compared to that of PHP. PHP (and, arguably ASP) brought something to the table that Perl lacks -- readability, comprehensibility, expandability.

As far as RoR is concerned, it's nothing new -- it's simply a framework (a very young, immature one, at that, in terms of software maturity) that could have been written in ANY language (PHP on Rails, anyone?). This is why we're seeing RoR developers get frustrated and go back to PHP!

I haven't heard many PHP developers going back to Perl.

I'm not so sure that the CLR is better designed, probably it is (despite some horrendous decisions as expressed by one of the guys who wrote it - Chris Brumme, google for his blog. It, and he, is brilliant).

Of course, even if CLR is better designed, its still a managed platform with the IMHO poor design decisions like garbage collection and reflection in there. I remember when it first came out and we had to badger MS to realise that finalisers weren't as good as they said they were. Eventualy they implemented the IDispose design pattern, though that would have been much better as part of the language instead of a bodged-in standard interface.

Java supports more languages. VB for one though I don't know how good/wel/etc it is. Anyway here is a citation, and another.

Yes - http://news.cnet.com/2100-1016_3-6041804.html?hhTest=1
they - http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/03/windows_steals_top_server_os_s.html
actually - http://www.linuxinsider.com/story/32706.html
do - http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6041804.html

But thanks for coming out.

Here's an example from Derek Sivers. In his case, using RoR actually turned out to be a huge time and labor sink:

http://www.oreillynet.com/ruby/blog/2007/09/7_reasons_i_switched_back_to_p_1.html

The reasons I still use them are that I think the quality and utility outweigh the risk, and because my much-smaller web hosting company is more likely to do something bird-brained than Google is.

That's actually a foolish remark. Use google to search for things like "gmail outage" or "gmail issue". My favorite is "gmail security issue" with over 100k results.

I've heard stories personally about people logging into gmail and ending up in someone else's Inbox. Yes, that's right, full access to someone else's email. Or how about another goodie: mass deletes of random emails.

I don't understand why people have the idea that Google is better then competent system administrators - it's just plain foolish and naive.

Regards,

Mod parent insightful, instead of funny. Various people and some papers have suggested that upgrading network capacity is a better way to handle high traffic than trying to mess with QoS, because 1. it's cheaper 2. it actually works, which isn't really proven to be the case for QoS on a large ISP level network.

It sounds like multihomed routing is what you're looking for. there's a decent intro here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08/12/multihoming.html

Oh really? Because O'Reill seems to think it is, and I thought he was the main pusher of this terminology. Is the term Web 2.0 actually meaningful?

TFA: "Some languages made strange mistakes. For example Python is a great language but the idea of using indentation as block demarcation really is a cannon ball chained to its feet. While most of the pythonistas defend this idea with a lot of energy, the truth is this feature makes it really a dangerous tool in big, world wide distributed projects - and most important enterprise projects are big and distributed."

Elsewhere: "Python Creator Guido van Rossum now working at Google"

Well. Now I finally know how Google is dangerous.

CC.

Ok, I just did the following:

1) created a zip file.
2) encrypted said zip file with GPG.
3) attached that .zip.gpg file to an email and mailed it to one of my gmail accounts.

Worked fine.

Perhaps it's not so much a matter of gmail not liking encrypted attachments as it is gmail not liking .zip files.

At least others seem to have problems sending .zip files to gmail.

Ever heard of this?

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448

This should work the desired distance. This is just a sample google hit. search for Pringles antenna or similar.

There are many documented accounts of the use of a Pringles can to construct a directional antenna. Rob Flickenger made one in 2001. Gregory Rehm did one in 2003 and was Slashdotted. G4 TV's Patrick Norton posted one in 2002 on The Screen Savers. Andrew S. Clapp has a lot of technical information on his website as well as several links to others. I wonder if he is, in any way, related to Eric Clapton.

You CAN make reliable antennas that work well out of a pringle can. Here is the link http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448 However be aware that these are FAR from weather proof. Weatherproofing them should be relatively cheap, and if you don't want to do it yourself then I would recommend a directional antenna.

Just use a half decent router (a hacked linksys would be nice, so you can play with the xmit power settings), two can-tennas (buy for 20 bucks or make them yourself, no great skills necessary) and line-of-sight (could put the antennas on the rooftop, or up on a mast)