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It needs AOLserver (free, open-source) and Oracle 8 (not free, not open-source). You may also be interested in InterBase or Postgres port.

Ticket Tracker, ACS module, may come very handy for managing tasks/issues/resolutions.

Also note that Greenspun walks the walk. A nice, simple layout, wrapped around some nifty photos presented in an easily digestable thumb-nail format. My only complaint is that he uses white backgrounds as a default. (I will never understand why people do this... It's a computer, it doesn't *have* to look like paper, and having a CRT shining it's high beams in your face does not make for a pleasant reading experience).

What you want is atomicity. However, rollback sort of goes hand in hand with it. If you try to group together a select and a delete from one table with an insert into another table and your insert should fail for any reason, the dbms must roll back the select and the delete. While I agree that transactions (atomicity) would be nice the developers will need to implement at least an internal rollback mechanism in order for it to work. I'm sure it's been mentioned here already but do check out PHOTO.NET. Philip explains it all and he's funny too.

On a related note, Zero Knowledge Systems sell a 'total internet privacy' program called Freedom. Have a look at the FAQ. Has anyone experience of this product? What are your impressions?

raw cod annoy sumo

You can choose which sites can set cookies, e.g. Slashdot. Some sites like mail.com do require cookies to be set to function. This can be subverted by allowing the cookie to be set but not stored, by making the cookie file read only.

THere's an informative chapter on User Tracking at the Web Tools Review. Have a gander at Erik Rossen's advice in the Reader's Comments section at the article's end.

raw cod annoy sumo

Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).

Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net

So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and
http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html

Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html

Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.

Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.

By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.

And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all :-)

___
DC

P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash) :-)

P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:

Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.

Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).

Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net

So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and
http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html

Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html

Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.

Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.

By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.

And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all :-)

___
DC

P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash) :-)

P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:

Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.

Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).

Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net

So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and
http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html

Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html

Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.

Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.

By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.

And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all :-)

___
DC

P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash) :-)

P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:

Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.

Re: few outsiders working with ACS While there aren't as many people as I would like using it on the outside just yet, there are people who are not working for Ars Digita who are working on the system. You can find these people pretty easily, as they show up at http://www.photo.net/bboard/q- and-a.tcl?topic=web/db, where people discuss using ACS, AOLServer, etc. I think that one of the primary reasons that the system has not been embraced by the open source community is simply that Oracle, while free for development use, is very expensive once you want to go live. However, because of this, a bunch of people decided to port it over to Postgresql--there is now a beta of this effort, available here: http://acspg.benadida.com This means that it is now possible to do development of ACS using 100% free, open-source components (AOLServer 3+ is open-source too, thanks to Philip and Hal Abelson at MIT).

Re: AOLServer not being popular and/or proven Hello? The reason it is called AOLServer is because AOL uses it they bought NaviSoft, makers of NaviServer, which they renamed to AOLServer). That by itself makes it popular and proven--AOL handles 28,000 hits a second using it. Of course there are other people using it too, and not just Ars Digita clients. There are even a few hosting services that'll host AOLServer, like these guys: http://www.am.net

So, what's so great about AOLServer? The nice thing about AOLServer is that out of the box it is ready to handle connections to relational databases. No need to make ODBC calls, etc. AOLServer sets up connections when it starts up and your web pages can get handles from a pool of these connections, use them, then recycle those handles. Again: no overhead for database access. Each AOLServer can handle 8 simultaneous database accesses per second, that is, it can serve up 8 database-backed pages a second. And that's on top of serving up *static* pages, which are an entirely different matter. AOLServer is nice also in that certain high level features are built right in--you can send an email with a one-line command for example or grab a web page from someplace else with a one line command (helpful for doing things like Philip's Bill Gates Wealth Clock, for example) and there's a one line command for scheduling stuff to run (like cron)from the web server. And the Tcl interpreter is built in, too, so no CGI overhead. If you want to read more about AOLServer and how it stacks up to Apache, check this out for a few quick paragraphs from Philip's book about AOLServer or for more information, go to http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-1.html and
http://www.photo.net/wtr/aol server/introduction-2.html

Re: ACS no longer being the greatest thing since sliced bread Well, it does quite a lot out of the box and it is being used to create real, serious, heavy-duty websites. Given that at the moment they are busy expanding like crazy and doing work for clients, it isn't so hard to understand why they may not be driving the toolkit as hard as they could, there's lots in there already, including monitoring services in addition to just a site-building toolkit. And new modules do show up in the toolkit even so and there's a list of possible future improvements on the arsdigita site somewhere with more stuff. And Philip is thinking about this stuff, don't doubt it. In any case, if you want to see for yourself what the toolkit has, check out this page and see if it meets your needs: http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/ toolkit/modules.html

Re: Philip's book Definitely worth reading. Funny, smart, sharp. Definitely look at the technical stuff, though, even if you aren't using ACS, since at the very least the stuff on relational databases is important.

Re: Using Tcl Tcl sucks? Well, you get used to it--now that Tcl 8 has the complete Perl regular expression package, it sucks less. But, an important point is this: when you use AOLServer, you will be using a bunch of AOLServer commands in your Tcl code to get stuff done. So you won't be programming in straight Tcl. There are utility procedures that are part of the ACS toolkit that help too. And over time there will probably be some tools to do some of the grunt work (they already have one out called The Prototyper). But in any event, once you get over a few quirks, it's like programming in any other scripting language. One nice thing is that the language is pretty small, so you can learn it very quickly and get going.

By the way, at Scriptics, the company founded by Tcl's inventor John Ousterhout to support Tcl, Brent Welch, author of one of the better Tcl books and a well known "name" in the Tcl community, has built the Tcl developer's site, dev.scriptics.com, using the Ars Digita toolkit.

And, if you want to learn how to use ACS, Ars Digita offers free 3 week bootcamps in Cambridge, MA and in several other places--look on their site for a "bootcamp" link. Or you can get the problem sets used at bootcamp off their site and learn the stuff at home (if you install everything on your own machine and do the 3 problem sets (note: PS 3 has been replaced with PS 5), you get a $10,000 sign on bonus if you decide to work for Ars Digita--and speaking of working for Ars Digita--check out their salary structure (http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/j obs/tech-jobs.html). Might make you want to start learning Tcl after all :-)

___
DC

P.S. If you decide to work for them, please mention me so I can get a shot at the Ferrari (actually, I'd just as soon take it in cash) :-)

P.P.S. More seriously, if you want to do the problem sets or a bootcamp, here are a few pages I put together for people like you:

Problem Set Zero This is meant to help people bone up on what they'll need to do the problem sets/bootcamp. Meta Cheat Sheet lists a bunch of useful cheat sheets that I and other bootcampers put together and some other stuff.

Excellent suggestion... I'm working through the course description right now... http://photo.net/teaching/one-term-web. html is where you really want to go if you have the time. As far as using open source goes, I'm using this course with linux, AOLserver, and the trial copy of Oracle, but when I actually build a site for public consumption I'm going to try and use PostgreSQL.

• Phlip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Web Tools Review
• ArsDigita Server Architecture
• Free One Day Web Courses
• ArsDigita Community System - An opensource toolkit for building database driven websites
• Web Nerds Bookshelf
• Photo.net discussion forums
• AOLserver

• Phlip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Web Tools Review
• ArsDigita Server Architecture
• Free One Day Web Courses
• ArsDigita Community System - An opensource toolkit for building database driven websites
• Web Nerds Bookshelf
• Photo.net discussion forums
• AOLserver

• Phlip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Web Tools Review
• ArsDigita Server Architecture
• Free One Day Web Courses
• ArsDigita Community System - An opensource toolkit for building database driven websites
• Web Nerds Bookshelf
• Photo.net discussion forums
• AOLserver

• Phlip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Web Tools Review
• ArsDigita Server Architecture
• Free One Day Web Courses
• ArsDigita Community System - An opensource toolkit for building database driven websites
• Web Nerds Bookshelf
• Photo.net discussion forums
• AOLserver

• Phlip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Web Tools Review
• ArsDigita Server Architecture
• Free One Day Web Courses
• ArsDigita Community System - An opensource toolkit for building database driven websites
• Web Nerds Bookshelf
• Photo.net discussion forums
• AOLserver

• Phlip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing
• Web Tools Review
• ArsDigita Server Architecture
• Free One Day Web Courses
• ArsDigita Community System - An opensource toolkit for building database driven websites
• Web Nerds Bookshelf
• Photo.net discussion forums
• AOLserver

That's what philg says anyway. And he should know.

If memory serves me correct, photo.net, ala Phil Greenspun, has always advocated non-bloated web pages, just look at his entire site! Now if someone could convince him to use apache instead of aolserver/tcl..yech

From that page:

• "I sent people to the amazon site 2,651 times. Only 4 of those people ignored the 25 extra links and bought books off the very first page. One of them bought a special order book for which the dogs at Angell got nothing. Bottom line: The standard Internet price for a clickthrough is 10 cents; it would have cost amazon.com $265 per week to get these users by purchasing ads on other folks' sites; amazon got them from me for $3.95."

You can speed up your learning process by going to The Web Tools Review. Philip Greenspun is somebody who obviously 'gets it', and he'll be happy to tell you about all the mistakes he has made in the past so that you can learn from them.

Highly recommended reading.

In netscape, you can disable cookies from other hosts than the page being viewing. This effectively blocks Internet-wide tracking like doubleclick.net.

Sorry to shout, but I fear many people share the same misapprehension. Cookies can be attached to images as well as to web pages. By attaching cookies to banner ads or invisible GIFs served from a common source, servers can pass information about you between themselves. Since the cookie comes from the same source as the image, the "Only accept cookies originating from the same server" option will gladly accept them. You must block or delete cookies if you wish to prevent this tracking. (Also note that even the mighty, mighty Junkbuster won't protect you fully - cookies can still get thru in Javascript and SSL.)

For a detailed explanation see Chapter 9 of Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (scroll down about halfway for the relevant section).

Was I the only one thinking a visit by photo.net would have helped a couple of those photos?

First, congrats!

Guys, why don't you upload the files to Philip Greenspun's server? See if his HP/AOLserver/tcl setup can be slashdotted! :)

Here's a list of links to online books:

Books On-line, Listed by Title

Free Books from Samizdat Press

Free Online Books At The Free Well

Hard Sci-Fi Stories

ITLibrary

Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

PROJECT GUTENBERG - ETEXT LISTINGS

The On-Line Books Page

The page with these links is:
http://members.axion.net/~enrique/book.html
and if anyone would like to add links to that list, please email me at:
perez_enrique@yahoo.com

Several causes suggest themselves:

• BillG was being prophetic :-)

  Nope - don't believe a word of that!

• BillG's opinions at that time, have become the prevailing legal opinions due to the influence of Microsoft.

  I'd judge this to be partly true; it could be argued that one of the few true Microsoft innovations is the outgrowth of shrinkwrapped software licensing as we know it today. (I'm not saying that it is an unalloyed benefit; merely that it is a result of their activities.)

  ...But this is not a complete picture. It doesn't provide any reason, outside of BillG's stridency, for his views to have prevailed.

  We have to head on to...

• William H. Gates III's views, in 1980, were, with little doubt, informed by the fact that his father, William H. Gates Jr, was an intellectual property lawyer.

  The Official W. H. Gates III bio provides a little indication of this; How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates describes it in more detail as does E-Mail from Bill.

  The point here is that it is manifestly clear that "Trey's" positions are informed by the fact that his father was a corporate lawyer, one of the founders of Preston Gates & Ellis, LLP.

  Many high tech companies have tended to have a hate-hate relationship with lawyers; I don't think it is any coincidence that Microsoft has had huge legal successes in the past when involvement with law was to some degree pervasive in the young Gate's life.

It's their banner, nobody else can get the information about me, and as long as I don't give them personal information, they don't even really know who I am - I'm just a visitor number.

It's their banner, nobody else can get the information about me, and as long as I don't give them personal information, they don't even really know who I am - I'm just a visitor number.

Ha ha. That sample image is composed _entirely_ of gradients. It would be nice to se some results from a standard image. Most of the work I've done is in video compression, but we always used a set of standard images. Lena, Suzie, Mother + Daughter, and the news crew. I'm sure the still picture groups have a standard image set too.

I created a still image compression program for the IOCCC about a month ago. I didn't have access to any standard images so I used this one.[1] It has gradients, steps, fine textures, and most everything else you could want, except color.

[1] Thanks to Phil Greenspun and his great photo site. He is a photographer and a CS professor at MIT. See his work at Photo.net

Ryan

Ha ha. That sample image is composed _entirely_ of gradients. It would be nice to se some results from a standard image. Most of the work I've done is in video compression, but we always used a set of standard images. Lena, Suzie, Mother + Daughter, and the news crew. I'm sure the still picture groups have a standard image set too.

I created a still image compression program for the IOCCC about a month ago. I didn't have access to any standard images so I used this one.[1] It has gradients, steps, fine textures, and most everything else you could want, except color.

[1] Thanks to Phil Greenspun and his great photo site. He is a photographer and a CS professor at MIT. See his work at Photo.net

Ryan

This is more a concept than an answer, but my thinking on search engines and their ilk is that they are becoming (if not already are) useless. 800 million web sites? Two billion? Twelve trillion? How far will it go? Who knows? We could eat up every MIP of processing and every bit of bandwidth trying to keep current in search engine indexing... and in the end, you'll have a mess.

The answer? I don't know, but I have an idea. Berners-Lee talked in his book about a "web of trust" -- mostly talking about security and e-commerce and such -- but the concept can be expanded to apply here.

For example, I trust /. to provide me with useful, timely information, and act as a great resource for all things nerdly. If /. provided a search engine for a few specific sites that the /. content owners felt were worthy of inclusion, I'd use it quite a bit. /. becomes responsible for maintaining those connections, and monitoring the output to ensure relevancy. The outside content owners provide hooks into their data, tailored to the idiosyncracies of the /. community (plenty of RMS, no MSG).

Censorship? Depends on your definition. If you trust /. to provide good info, you also trust (implicitly, if not overtly) their editorial judgements. It's a human-to-human connection, facilitated, not replaced, by the computer.

I liken it to a bibliography. When I do dead-trees library research, I like to find the appropriate section, pull a book down and skim it. If it looks appropriate, I'll then check the bibliography to see what other books the authors found appropriate. Hey, they've just done research for me! Neat! Go to those books, the books under those, etc. I now have a web of sources, all culled from a (basically) random book pulled from the shelves.

Expanding that to the Web, /. trusts theOnion to provide the latest in useful headlines around the world (I know I do...). The Onion provides, through a "Bibliomatic" link (TM, (c) me me me me ... are you reading this Amazon? :), hooks into their data with published calls to pull appropriate, timely keywords relating to their content, with the ability to search archived content as well.

Everything goes swimmingly, until The Onion IPOs and starts to be run by MBAs, and the content-o-meter drops to zero. Mr. Taco gets innundated with a million emails complaining about how the /. results for The Onion all return "Make $$$ Fast with 18 year old transvestites having anal sex with dogs". Taco dumps all calls to The Onion's content, fires off a letter threatening Armageddon, informs them that they are off the list, and starts using somebody else.

Some things we got right the first time around. Car doors that open forward (not up), radios with volume dials (not tiny, fiddly buttons) with a real potentiometer behind them, and bibliographies. Those search engines that don't incorporate at least some aspects of this become obsolete, or relegated to searching for obscure content.

What about mailing list archives? Those are GREAT resources -- better than the FAQ usually. Getting to that data is more problematic, but not impossible. You can index the subject lines and provide a hook to that -- if /. chooses to use that hook, great. You can index the whole mess and force content owners to search it -- which will put you on the blacklist pretty quickly when people get a jillion results that all have "Im hafing problems wif Winblows" as their title. Or you can send a link with each possibly appropriate query to your own search engine that will locally search the mess.

I think the One True Search Engine is a pipe dream. As for myself, I try Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista in that order. Most of the time, I'm looking for someplace I've already been, and can't remember the URL, so I can customize my query to bring that particular site up in the rankings. I've tried doing pure general searches, but I'm always daunted by "Your querey returned 12,486 results." Yeah, right.

For more on-topic information, try Philip's book. He had the same problem as discussed here, and he solved it with a few lines of TCL code inside AOLserver. That's the short answer...

Philip Greenspun, da man of open-source cool-ass online communities says, in an absolutely brilliant chapter on user tracking:

"I want to know the age, sex, and zip code of every person who visited my site so that I can prepare a brochure for advertisers."

The traditional answer to this request is "All you can get is the IP address; HTTP is an anonymous peer-to-peer protocol." Then Netscape came out with the Magic Cookie protocol in 1994. It looked pretty innocent to me. The server gives me a cookie. My browser gives it back to the server. Now I can have a shopping basket. My friends all said, "This is the end of privacy on the Internet, Greenspun, and you're a pinhead if you can't figure out why."

The thing to remember with cookies is that the information comes from the server.

Cookies are only a problem for the ultra-paranoid.

If not wanting my browsing habits tracked this way makes me "ultra-paranoid", sign me up.

The thing to remember with cookies is that the information comes from the server.

Cookies are only a problem for the ultra-paranoid.

If not wanting my browsing habits tracked this way makes me "ultra-paranoid", sign me up.

It is NOT easy to grab a credit card number on-line. Sniffing packets, intercepting e-mails, grabbing cookies, etc. is bloody hard work. Especially since you could spend 5 minutes raking in the bins at your local mall and get 100 numbers.

I am willing to bet $50 that Mr. Schmidt has at some point in the last 6 months handed over his credit card in a restaurant. Doing that is opening up his card number to a wider audience than using it on Amazon.com ever could.

However, it is helluva easy to use a credit card number online, once you have it. Go on, fill in a few forms, and it doesn't matter if you're a 13-year-old boy in Arseville, Tenessee -- you can use that card number from the 70-year-old woman in Alaska who wouldn't know a modem if it bit her on the arse.

Last week, I found a $60 Amazon.com charge on my card which wasn't mine. I don't blame the internet. I don't blame Amazon. I don't blame cookies, SSL, e-mail, or Elvis.

I don't even care that much. So what? I shout a bit, get my $60 back, and carry on like nothing ever happened. No big deal.

This kind of thing has been happening for years on the phone. This is nothing new, except for the sheer volume of fake transactions. But until the card companies make it easier to verify transactions on the fly (see Philip Greenspun's excellent book for a description of how pathetic the whole thing is), it's not going to get better any faster.

Just don't forget to burn your carbons.

rOD.

--

Have a look at photo.net/bg. The author quotes the book "Hard Drive" in saying that while Paul Allen did write most of the emulator, a Harvard student named Monte Davidoff wrote the floating point operations part. Paul Allen did do some cool stuff, though.

Please, if they wish to attach the GNU name to anything, they should call themselves GNU/Debian or Debian/GNU. There is NO justification for calling it GNU/FreeBSD.

Tired of politics? View a nude.

If you haven't already, you should read some of Philip Greenspun's thoughts about this here. He's an MIT CS prof interested in concepts like this and has put together a toolkit that could be used to build it.

photo.net

http://communitybids.com

I didn't want to spring all the coin for an office, [T1|T3], servers and all the nonsense that goes along with it. Especially as I didn't know if the idea would work or even what it would take to get it going (I'm good on the geek stuff but am picking up the business stuff as I go). I work from home as a consultant and have a regular income but no large wad of sheckles to jump off the deep end right away. So I figured I'd dip my toes in first to test the water. My rationale was that if it took off I could always get the offices with picture windows looking over the harbor and a net connection as big around as a firehose. But if I borrowed a bunch of money to put the carriage before the horse, the clock would be loudly ticking from day 1.

My first thought was to run the web server from my home over my cable modem but I got some pretty bad vibes off the Roadrunner gal when I called her. She knew what kind of antics I was up to and was not too forthcoming with a static IP address so I moved on.

I decided on AOLserver as my server platform after poking around and finally reading Phil Greenspun's So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs. It is a free (beer and speech) web server that plays nice with different databases, runs on Linux (and other Unices, but not NT) and has some groovy web-based admin features (at least it did til they went open source... but I digress). I found an outfit that would set me up on one of their boxes with a shell account and my own server process (I think a flower shop also has a couple of static pages on the same box, but they are good neighbors and don't make much noise). The price was very reasonable, certainly within the range that if it was a total flop I would consider the money well spent on the experience gained. I'd imagine that if I cashed in my 401(k) and borrowed a bunch of money off of friends and family and it flopped I would be rather bitter. This way I got the chance to design and develop my software in a pretty pressure-free environment which was nice. Oh, and the guys that run the hosting deal do all my backups for me (at least they tell me that they do :) ).

The setup I've evolved is that one of the Linux machines in my office (at my house) is my development platform. It is configured as closely as I can get it to the one at the hosting service. Since the application is live now, I do all my development on this machine, test everything out and then check it into CVS. I then telnet over to the live machine and update the tcl scripts over there. It seems to work out well, I always have the most up-to-date code on opposite ends of the continent and there is a minimum of disruption to the service.

There was certainly a lot more to the process than I suspected when I first started on this back in January. While I was able to design and build a rugged application in the time that I allocated, other things like marketing, support and all the other parts that go into making a business go are a new challenge. I'm not pulling the all-night code-a-thons like I was in the first six months but there are always new challenges popping up.

On the whole, I don't know if this was the way to go as the story is really just starting. From what I hear in other discussions here and elsewhere there aren't that many big piles of money lying around for geeks with little business experience and a good idea so I'm not sure as I had much of a choice. I *have* heard stories about people with good ideas wasting a lot of time chasing this money, only to have it yanked away at the last minute so I've just steered clear of it for the time being. I guess I am at a point now that I can start looking around for a CEO and the rest of a team that can take me to the next step.

As far as advice goes, I can only suggest you go for it. Read forums like this (I really enjoyed the VC /. discussion a while back) but take what you get here with a grain of salt. People who advise you as to particular machine configurations obviously have already completed the long journey to having a successful business or (more likely) are just working for someone who has and only see the finished product. You have a lot more important things to worry about than how much memory your webserver has! Your development environment is a biggie and is worth spending the time to get something you are comfortable with (php seems pretty sweet, and no-one can talk bad about the old PERL/Apache warhorse).

Me, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. I'm not getting crushed with hits yet, though traffic has been increasing as I get the hang of the marketing thing (left to my own devices I would rather code than talk on the phone). My site has a solid revenue model and the backend design can be tweaked to fit lots of different applications if I decide to follow the gourd rather than the sandle. I currently haven't had to give any of it away to keep it afloat. I have had to push back my IPO schedule a bit though. ;) I've been promoted from "geek with good idea asking for advice" to "geek with nifty web application". Now for the next step up to "stinky rich geek with Ferraris and tropical island". Hmmm.

You WILL want to colocate. End of story.

Use RAID 0+1 and learn how to set it up yourself in software if you're running a database.

Don't run a database where it isn't necessary; they're slow. Replicate them where you do run them, and develop a real backup strategy.

Run what works best for you -- Sun, FreeBSD, Linux, NT, whatever. Ignore the bigots, they're not the ones risking their financial futures on a venture. But don't get suckered by marketing.

Favor security over convenience, but don't lose sight of what it is that's valuable enough to secure. In other words, don't go to either extreme. (it's very easy to forget this!)

Good luck.

If you're really serious about getting into web stuff, study http://arsdigita.com/ and http://photo.net/, as there's stuff like an entire book online on how to set up a serious e-commerce site. And the author's an entertaining writer, too.

If you're really serious about getting into web stuff, study http://arsdigita.com/ and http://photo.net/, as there's stuff like an entire book online on how to set up a serious e-commerce site. And the author's an entertaining writer, too.

What law? Some unConstitutional law created by anti-capatalist socialists in the middle of this most bloody of all centuries (soon to end, thankfully!).

One is always on dangerous grounds when deciding to flaunt a law because "it's unConstitutional anyway." You need to be willing to run the risk that the Supreme Court will not agree with your legal analysis.

Besides, I think it's pretty clear that Bill and MSFT flaunted the anti-trust laws out of their own "greed, envy, and will-to-power," rather than out of some selfless, Constitution-upholding principle.

Your Red-baiting aside, whatever you think of the politics of supporters of anti-trust legislation, the reality today is that anti-trust laws were passed, by popular demand, by the democratically-elected Legislature, and have been upheld by the Executive-appointed Judiciary. All three branches of our "checks and balances" involved.

Monopolies cannot continue in the real world without government support. If the GSA decided today that Microsoft products were not on the GSA schedule, Microsoft would go down like a lead balloon.

True, and the GSA ought to do just this, but irrelevant to the questions of whether MSFT has broken the law and should suffer the consequences.

Far better had the GSA taken that route than the Justice Department brought this greedy and envious suit against America's most successful entrepreneur.

I agree that it would have been better if the GSA had been serious about "open systems" in procurement. Perhaps there would have been no need for an antitrust trial by this point.

But "most successful entrepeneur"? Give me a break. Check out How to Become As Rich As Bill Gates. Bill was never without an economic safety net, his product was not an innovation in any sense, and he had family connections in getting that fateful first IBM contract. I have much more respect for the thousands of mom-and-pop entrepeneurs who actually take some risks and whose livelihoods depend on customer satisfaction than for Bill's (admittedly masterful) skill in predatory business tactics and monopoly creation/exploitation.

But it is clearly greed, envy, and will-to-power that drives Janet Reno and her murderous (remember Waco?) minons to browbeat the world's greatest wealth creator.

Unlike you, I have no ability to peer into the soul of Janet Reno and discern her true motivation for having her department do its job.

"World's greatest wealth creator"? Bah humbug. BillG is the world's greatest (private) wealth concentrator. But he and his company have become so wealthy through the exercise of monopoly power (as Judge Jackson's FoF testify), not through building better software mousetraps. Denying one's competitors entry into the marketplace to protect the profit margin of your product can hardly qualify as "wealth creation." Extortion, perhaps, but not creation.

"Big Business and State Socialism are very much alike, especially Big Business."
-- G. K. Chesterton

2. Using a page server, a method of providing real-time responses to user requests for customized pages, the method comprising the steps of: [etc., rest deleted]

I have a cold today, so my virus-addled mind may be missing something here, but it would appear that this claim really amounts to a description of a data-base view on a transactions-oriented database that just happens to be executed over-the-web? Or does the claim hinge on the notion that the view was "user-generated" (also pretty weak, given current DB products)?

Presumably the idea of a database view cannot be patentable these days given a metric buttload of prior art, but is the "mere" webification of such an idea legally patentable, given the theory that it wasn't trivial to do since database-backed web sites didn't exist from day one?

If so, I note that this patent was filed on June 12, 1997, and I am therefore virtually certain it is invalid due to the specific prior art of Philip Greenspun's online version of the bookDatabase Backed Web Sites, which originally appeared on the web before it's 1997 publication, and was republished as Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing in 1999. Chapter 10 ("Sites that are really programs") and Chapter 11 ("Sites that are really databases") being te most relevant pieces.

Really, I think Greenspun's prior art tells you exactly how to achieve the central claim of this patent, so I would be very interested to see somebody argue how the Yahoo claim holds any water at all, even in the "we webified it!" sense.

Another GNU GPL "module" or "component" structured system is being built up by Arsdigita.
For more information check out:
the guide to the Arsdigita Community system,
Arsdigita.com,
and the photo.net web tools review

Another GNU GPL "module" or "component" structured system is being built up by Arsdigita.
For more information check out:
the guide to the Arsdigita Community system,
Arsdigita.com,
and the photo.net web tools review

I read some comment from web guru Philip Greenspun that claimed Yahoo Stores' backend code was written in Common Lisp. Just a fun bit of trivia. :-)

One thing to consider is that CGI scripts impose a large delay in processing just because they have to fork off a process. Whether you use C or Perl may not matter if the time to invoke the script is significantly longer than the actual processing time. Perl is easier to use and faster for development (as mentioned by others), so it's better than C for scripting. Also, Perl is interpreted (rather than compiled), so bug fizes and patches are far easier to deploy. btw, you ca improve performance by abandoning CGI scripts altogether and looking at processes that use web-server threads (check out Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing for info).

There is a driver so you can use ACS with InterBase, which I am given to understand is a free RDBMS on Linux. Read about that here

As the site below points out, there are other drivers for the AOLServer and then you'd just need to port the SQL that the ACS toolkit uses, since there are some differences in SQL implementations amongst the database vendors.

http://www.alexium.com/wab/arsdigita.html

This site (the best one page FAQ/summary of what ACS is, etc.) that I've yet seen, is actually running ACS, so you can see what ACS looks like, and how AOLServer performs, on a cheap Linux box. (on his status page, http://www.alexium.com/status.html, he says he is running the system on a $500 linux box with a $49/month DSL connection. Runs pretty well, I think).

___
DC

As alexium.com mentions, Philip Greenspun's book on database-backed web-sites, which describes how to think (and how not to think) about doing this sort of stuff, is available on-line, complete with all the photographs: http://www.photo.net/wtr/thebook (and go up and check out http://www.photo.net/wtr, where Philip Greenspun for lots more stuff).

There is a driver so you can use ACS with InterBase, which I am given to understand is a free RDBMS on Linux. Read about that here

As the site below points out, there are other drivers for the AOLServer and then you'd just need to port the SQL that the ACS toolkit uses, since there are some differences in SQL implementations amongst the database vendors.

http://www.alexium.com/wab/arsdigita.html

This site (the best one page FAQ/summary of what ACS is, etc.) that I've yet seen, is actually running ACS, so you can see what ACS looks like, and how AOLServer performs, on a cheap Linux box. (on his status page, http://www.alexium.com/status.html, he says he is running the system on a $500 linux box with a $49/month DSL connection. Runs pretty well, I think).

___
DC

As alexium.com mentions, Philip Greenspun's book on database-backed web-sites, which describes how to think (and how not to think) about doing this sort of stuff, is available on-line, complete with all the photographs: http://www.photo.net/wtr/thebook (and go up and check out http://www.photo.net/wtr, where Philip Greenspun for lots more stuff).