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One of the first lessons I learned, ever, is that DB abstraction layers suck in general.

The first line of the article "If Joseph Zawodny, a senior scientist at NASAâ(TM)s Langley Research Center, is correct" is misleading. Zawodny hasn't stated that it works or that he thinks it's definitely a real effect.

Let's look at what Zawodny actually has stated before:

Many extraordinary claims have been made in 2010. In my scientific opinion, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I find a distinct absence of the latter. So let me be very clear here. While I personally find sufficient demonstration that LENR effects warrant further investigation, I remain skeptical. Furthermore, I am unaware of any clear and convincing demonstrations of any viable commercial device producing useful amounts of net energy.

http://joe.zawodny.com/index.php/2012/01/14/technology-gateway-video/

That he still holds this opinion is consistent with the quotes in the gizmag article:

I'm interested in understanding whether the phenomenon is real, what it's all about. ... All we really need is that one bit of irrefutable, reproducible proof that we have a system that works.

Well, it looks like Dr. Joe Zawodny himself agrees with you that the extraordinary evidence to prove this even works has yet to be demonstrated:

http://joe.zawodny.com/ That's his private blog, and an interesting read. Looks like he's into model rocketry too.

Why can't you use a browser like normal people?

For personal reasons, I do not browse the web from my computer. (I also have not net connection much of the time.) To look at page I send mail to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to me. It is very efficient use of my time, but it is slow in real time.

citation

...especially if they were sane and used an abstraction layer like PDO.

Fail.

DB abstraction layers invariably create more problems than they purport to solve.

I think I'm the only Java developer in the world that just doesn't *get* JPA...

According to this guy, you might actually be one of the few who *does* 'get it'.

People have lots of free time. Atleast Facebook means they're engaged in communicating with other people.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010218.html

> QuickTime no longer enables the system tray icon by default and has not for a long time.

Good to see some progress. But they're not going to get in my good books so easily. After all:

> The QuickTime installer only contains QuickTime, the iTunes installer contains both iTunes and QuickTime.

Sure maybe TODAY it does. But every now and then Apple "thinks different" see:

1) http://www.digitalhomethoughts.com/news/show/92938/want-quicktime-apple-forces-you-to-install-itunes-to-get-it.html

2) http://digg.com/software/Download_Quicktime_7_Without_Being_Forced_to_Install_iTunes

3) http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005533.html

So, no thanks.

Maybe I'll switch if Adobe started forcing people to install Acrobat Reader even though they only want Flash Player...

Copy and paste from a blog. Solid rant though!

Any other way to cut out AT&T to reliably send and receive SMS messages is something they would stop immediately.

They can't stop the cheaper alternative called email unless they do something stupid with their data plans. They're fresh out of luck - the world moves on (thankfully).

It's actually quite fun to see major monopolies suddenly lose their ability to gloriously rip people off - especially since they have been behaving like it's an entitlement.

Since I have yet to see an airline that weighs carry-on luggage, I can see why you would like this policy. The only real criteria for the carry-on is that you must be able to fit it in an overhead bin and be able to lift it there.

I have yet to see this in the continental US, but I have heard that European airports often do (but I have nothing to back that statement up). I know that most airlines have a weight limit but don't enforce it currently (https://www.aa.com/aa/i18nForward.do?p=/travelInformation/baggage/carryOnAllowance.jsp40lbs for American Airlines). I for one would love to see this enforced as my bag usually weighs around 30lbs, which I weigh to ensure if it was checked I would be fine.

Flying now, it is quite obvious there is a lot more carry-on luggage

True, I'll agree with you on that point.

but the airplane has exactly the same amount of luggage as it would have before the charges started.

That can't possibly be true. Similar amounts maybe, but exactly? I know that if I took as much as I used to I would be lugging around 100lbs in one bag plus my personal item laptop bag full, much more than I could reasonably carry. I do believe carry-on luggage has increased but since in my case carry-on weight is around 30-40% of what my total weight used to me I can't see it going anywhere but down. Let's just say I'm a big proponent of this guys idea of http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/010438.htmlWeight Based Pricing You had better believe I'd travel lighter.

This is mixed news for me.

Currently, a big plane will show up on radar as a blip. The pilot will call control, and state his/her identity and position. Controller will then make an educated guess as to which plane is which dot on the radar scope, and assign you a 4-digit "Squawk" code (Say, 1234). Pilot enters the squawk code in to his instruments, and the instruments then start broadcasting "Aircraft 1234 is at 32,000ft" on the radio. This then lets the radar display aircraft identification and altitude beside each blip. Simple, yes? Prone to human error?

So obviously, we need something less vulnerable to human error, and more vulnerable to programmer error. That's how the world works.

With ADS-B, the aircraft pulls down GPS coordinates and altitude, and then broadcasts them in cleartext on open frequencies to everyone. "Aircraft C-FBQN is at 10,000ft at N45.4870947 & W75.0967026 travelling at 121kts heading 180 True."

So, targeting your ground-to-air missiles just got a whole bunch easier.

The advantage, though, is that you can become much safer in the areas where there's no radar coverage. Hudson's Bay, North Atlantic, etc. Those are busy places with lots of planes and sleepy pilots.

Also, the aircraft I mentionned earlier in my example is C-FBQN. I love that baby, but she doesn't show up on radar. With ADS-B, my flying can get much safer.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/007288.html

And I don't have to even worry about the missiles, as I have no heat signature and don't show up on radar, so they'll be able to get really close, and never actually hit me.

Rather than "posting DVDs" I'd go for something like Amazon's S3 and just dump the backup to them. Here is a list of S3 Backup solutions that would do the job.

I've personally moved away from hard-media as much as possible because the issue on restore is normally about the speed to get it back on the server and its there that online solutions really win as they have the peering arrangements to get you the bandwidth.

http://www.phpied.com/files/opml2html/opml2html.html
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/misc/opml2html.pl.txt

Or, get a backup tool that supports S3 and back everything up there. IIRC, 300GB costs $30/month for highly available, geographically dispersed, off-site storage that's potentially available from any web browser.

I'm sure the editors here would disagree.

In order to install the current version of Exchange you pretty much have to become a directory services expert. You need to know Active Directory pretty well

You talk about that like it's a bad thing. Active Directory is the best thing to happen to user management since NDS. And I really think it compares well to other full-featured groupware systems (like Domino and Groupwise), especially in terms of ease-of-use. If all you want is a POP3 email server, yeah, recent versions of Exchange are way over the top.

And not to be petty, but Citadel really isn't a replacement for Exchange. It has only basic calendaring, no apparent built-in mobile device support for IM or calendaring, and doesn't talk to 3rd-party IM, which pretty much locks out mobile support unless you've built a Pocket PC and/or Palm client. I suspect the web-interface is far to slow and complicated for a mobile device. You don't support S/MIME, or any sort of encrypted email it seems.

You're also using IMAP, which is basically broken. If it's Web 2.0 why aren't you using SOAP? In fact, I just looked for "IMAP sucks" on Google and this is one of the very first links I found:

"Art Cancro said:
It's not the software's fault. IMAP is a horribly designed protocol. I wrote the IMAP implementation for the Citadel groupware server (do take Citadel for a spin if you haven't seen it yet, it's great) and I can tell you without a doubt, it's because the protocol semantics are so convoluted that the software implementing it ends up being so quirky.

It's not a simple protocol, which is a shame because it could be. You need fairly sophisticated language parsers at both ends of the link, you need to translate data formats, you need to understand how to handle the same data in several different formats ... it's a BIG mess.

Simple protocols tend to be implemented reliably because they're straightforward. That's why POP3 is so easily implemented. IMAP is way too complex. The only reason it's a standard is because Marc Crispin was in the right place at the right time."
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/004841.htm l

Don't get me wrong, Cittadel definitely looks attractive if you want something cheap/free and seems almost ideal for it's target market (bulletin boards), but corporate users are a lot more demanding.

And like Google's "Upgrade to IE7" page!

That's not the case... If you take a close look at the screenshot from the Google page, and zoom on on the left side of the toolbars on the tiny screenshot on the page, you can see the remains of the Yahoo! logo.

Seriously, click those images and look at the full-sized versions. They're remarkably similar. And I've checked with our PR group to make sure that this wasn't just a template that Microsoft gave to all partners. It's not.

As a hard-working college student, plagiarism really makes me sick. You know what else ticks me off?

Not only that Google made their own IE, but...so did Yahoo!, but that never gets mentioned on Slashdot.

And of course, the fact that Google's IE download page was a direct ripoff of Yahoo! also somehow doesn't seem be mentioned anywhere.

...so did Yahoo!, but that never gets mentioned on Slashdot.

And of course, the fact that Google's IE download page was a direct ripoff of Yahoo! also somehow doesn't seem be mentioned anywhere.

Can you say plagiarism?

yes.

If you look closely at the pictures, you can even see where they blurred out the "Y!" logo in the IE7 screenshot.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big Google supporter, but someone dropped the ball on this. (It's since been fixed.)

On the subject of them "copying" a Yahoo page:

Has anyone thought that maybe, just maybe, that's a template provided by Microsoft? You know, since it's pitching the IE7 upgrade and all that.


From the article,
Quote "And I've checked with our PR group to make sure that this wasn't just a template that Microsoft gave to all partners. It's not." Unquote.

> Y!M is miles ahead of anything else.

Ha ha ha ha ha *choke* ha ha.

YIM is a bloated piece of shit (message to Yahoo: I DON'T need streaming music built into my IM, thankyouverymuch) that to this day has trouble with corporate firewalls. See also inscrutable UI. If you want a decent IM client, use Google Talk. If you want a decent client with bells and whistles use MSN messenger (and use MessPatch to remove the ads and streamline the UI).

...plans for a complete project redesign, a focus on adult users and a newly awarded patent for social networking. [emphasis mine] That reminds me -- I need to delete my Friendster account.

Wasnt this the site that gained a bunch of hoopla when they rewrote it PHP? And according to other posts on this list they are still having problems? And they are rewriting it *again*? Someone's eating crow here methinks...

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/002150.htm l

Tip to developers: Steer clear of the consultant who tells you "oh, it's appserver X that's the reason why our performance sucks, we'll port it to Appserver Y and everything will be smashing!"

[off topic, sorta]

Frank Kramer from OC's Frosty Heidi and Frank show would tend to agree

Speaking as a 'real software engineer' who writes 'real software', web developers have always been looked down upon has untalented hacks. I think with the Web maturing as an application platform we are seeing quite a bit of indignant snobbery from traditional engineers.

Speaking as a web developer who is perfectly capable of writing "real software", I can tell you that this is certainly nothing new. The trouble lies with some ignorant software developers who view all web development as if it were in the same league as the time they cobbled together a few pages to see what the fuss was about. That's like a web developer's perspective on software engineering if all he's ever touched is JavaScript rollovers.

Even if you don't consider the latest "Web 2.0" applications, serious web development has always been more than simply throwing a few pages together. It's complex stuff. Jeremy Zawodny has written a couple of times on this topic.

Speaking as a 'real software engineer' who writes 'real software', web developers have always been looked down upon has untalented hacks. I think with the Web maturing as an application platform we are seeing quite a bit of indignant snobbery from traditional engineers.

Speaking as a web developer who is perfectly capable of writing "real software", I can tell you that this is certainly nothing new. The trouble lies with some ignorant software developers who view all web development as if it were in the same league as the time they cobbled together a few pages to see what the fuss was about. That's like a web developer's perspective on software engineering if all he's ever touched is JavaScript rollovers.

Even if you don't consider the latest "Web 2.0" applications, serious web development has always been more than simply throwing a few pages together. It's complex stuff. Jeremy Zawodny has written a couple of times on this topic.

* lon3st4r*

Are you saying there really is no Barbie Linux ? :-( :-(
I WANT MY BARBIE LINUX !!! .. or a Pony

No, you can't have a pony.

You better re-examine your idea of security here. For starters, your ISP that you connect your server to can easily store both sides of a conversation...it has to pass through their server *both ways* for you to communicate.

Well, no.

If you truly run your own mail server, with MX records rather than using your ISP's POP box as a store-and-forward, then it isn't going through their server. Technically ;>. The only real difference this makes is that your communications clearly fall under the Pen Register rules rather than the Wiretap rules when the authorities try to legally obtain info about your communications.

It does still go through their network. But that's a (slightly) different matter. Yes, they can still sniff the traffic both ways. This is where StartTLS comes in. If your mail server offers StartTLS, and the remote mail server is willing to try it, then everything except the EHLO of the SMTP transaction is encrypted just as HTTPS web pages are.

You can easily set up most mail servers to run "Opportunistic" StartTLS. That is to say, "Offer it, and take advantage if someone else offers it, but don't require it." For the purposes of encryption, it doesn't matter that most people will use self-signed certificates. (Yes, that kills authentication.)

You can also require StartTLS, but that would impact your ability to send and receive mail to sites not configured to do StartTLS. (But for the paranoid, it bears mentioning.)

Google quickly found a few sites for various mail transfer agent configurations:

• Postfix
• Sendmail
• Exim
• Qmail
• Exchange (no good link, and may not allow opportunistic)

In short... my mail server secures mail with anyone else who cares to do so. If you are enough to run your own server, consider caring enough to offer and take advantage of StartTLS encryption.

N.B. - If self-signed certs are a pain (and they are), look into CAcert.

Funny, when I saw Zawodny at OSCON, IIRC the gist was that Yahoo used MySQL where it needs scale and Oracle where it needs superior data integrity?

More:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000593.htm l
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/cat_mysql. html (interesting discssion of how Livejournal scales:

"LJ relies pretty heavily on caching nowadays. None of the stuff in MySQL was quite what they needed, so they built memcached. Used by LJ, Slashdot, Wikipedia, others use it now. Original version in Perl, now written in C. Lots of O(1) operations inside make it quite fast. The client can do multi-server parallel fetching (kick ass!). They run multiple instances on boxes with more than 4GB RAM. They have a 90-93% hit rate on the cache."

Funny, when I saw Zawodny at OSCON, IIRC the gist was that Yahoo used MySQL where it needs scale and Oracle where it needs superior data integrity?

More:
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/000593.htm l
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/cat_mysql. html (interesting discssion of how Livejournal scales:

"LJ relies pretty heavily on caching nowadays. None of the stuff in MySQL was quite what they needed, so they built memcached. Used by LJ, Slashdot, Wikipedia, others use it now. Original version in Perl, now written in C. Lots of O(1) operations inside make it quite fast. The client can do multi-server parallel fetching (kick ass!). They run multiple instances on boxes with more than 4GB RAM. They have a 90-93% hit rate on the cache."

My small business is dealing with so much spam - plus the difficulty of using several machines to check our mail on - that we're actually forwarding our stuff through Gmail in order to filter spam. Not only that, but the interface is far more usable than alternatives we've used.

I keep saying "I wish we could use Gmail for our business email without having an @gmail.com in there."

This is very exciting to me.

Sites like Digg and Reddit, are burying Slashdot. Not to mention the cesspool of a forum each article creates (I am aware of the irony - no flames please), which most of the time aren't even on topic - I do my best to moderate - but 5 moderator points is meager. Here's a graph showing the traffic comparison of Digg and Slashdot. Now we have front page stories made of the kind of he-said she-said BS that I expect from a high school newspaper, and I feel things are only going to get worse.

Maybe it's time Slashdot innovated, and came up with a new format. Perhaps something like reddit or digg, but giving priority to 'classic submitters' (the Slashdot staff).

Yep, and this is a big reason why people are flocking to sites like digg.com and reddit.com.

Google has done some very good things, but I think people should give Yahoo a little credit for having come out with a very large number of services, often beating others (including Google) to the web with that service.

I completely agree with you here. Google has clearly done a lot to change the way people look at the web and monetization, but it has little that's truly unique anymore. Google spent years building its search engine and produced some incredible results. When Yahoo launched their own proprietary engine in early 2004, they produced a product with results that were nearly as good. I love Gmail for its interface, but is still playing catch-up for features with Yahoo, and they have a brand new interface that will be released soon. Google Maps did a great job and re-invigorating the maps market, but Yahoo's new Maps Beta is really much better. Overture could use some work as compared to AdWords/Adsense, but it's quite good.

In 2003, Google had better than 80% search share in the US. Now it's almost half of that, and there's even more to play out. To me, Yahoo also has the right mindset about Web 2.0 communities -- look at its recent acquisitions of del.icio.us and Flickr -- and these will be important in the future. Google has a lot going for it, but Yahoo isn't just the funky homepage it used to be.

Unless they've had a recent policy change, that's completely untrue. At least one guy has been fired (the article itself is a bit iffy on if he was fired for that reason but this blog clears up any ambiguity).

Or perhaps Google simply censors those who don't say good things about google (and if you don't think firing people for speaking has a censoring effect on free speech I've got a bridge to sell to you).

Yeah you did. It is talking about the new Yahoo! Mail which is about to be released and has been subject to previewing for the last few months. It is not talking about the Yahoo! Mail that has been around for years.

Here is a screenshot.

Frankly, using Outlook here at work is something I consider *painful* because the UI is so clunky, so I certainly won't be going over to Yahoo any time soon.
I assume you don't use Thunderbird, Eudora, Mulberry, or any other 3 pane mail client as they are all like outlook (or is it the other way around?). I use Thunderbird, and while it's conceptually like outlook, it fits me slightly better (type down find, extensions to customize it to meet my usage pattern, threading, decent IMAP support, etc). As I read Mossberg's comments, it seems to me that he is indicating that it feels like a desktop email application, of which Outlook is the most commonly used. Screenshots like these clearly point to some differences from outlook (tabs, snippets, search highlighting...)

Big shock, huh? Slashdot, known for their world-class editorial standards, cited the recent BusinessWeek story about Yahoo and decided that I was complaining about Yahoo! supporting adware.

Of course, I wasn't. Neither site bothered to link to my blog post about it (for fear their readers would form their own opinions, perhaps?) or the surrounding context--the two stories I quoted heavily in my own post (1, 2).

What I was commenting on is bundling of one download with another and, more specifically, the fact that one installs the other or makes "helpful" changes (like default search engine or home page) by default rather than being an opt-in process.

Of all the people I asked recently, nobody can find any evidence that I was writing about spyware, adware, or malware. Well, nobody except the folks at Slashdot, I guess.

If you read the BusinessWeek story carefully you likely get what I was complaining about. But not so on the short tidbit posted to Slashdot. Luckily the average BusinessWeek reader is likely to be a bit more thoughtful about such things.

Is Slasholes a word yet?

At least I've got a place where I can attempt to correct their lack of information (and links). Guys, this is 2005! We're supposed to link to sources we cite on the web. Didn't you get that memo?

The funny part is that I really expected to hear from Yahoo! PR, Legal, or Terry Semel's body guard (just kidding) about this stuff. But I didn't. Not a peep. I did hear from a lot of my co-workers and it sparked several very interesting discussions. But nobody from on high said, "you know, we really wish you hadn't written that." Maybe it's because they know that I know that already.

No, the thing that got me... motivated enough to say something now was seeing my name and my words used on Slashdot to paint the company I work for in a more negative way than is justified.

Sorry to disappointed the rationally thinking Slashdot crowd, but there's no adware, malware, or spyware in our software. If you want to perpetuate the "Google is Good but all other Big Companies are Evil" thinking, feel free. But try to use facts instead of fiction. It really makes you look more lame than you already are.

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005386.htm l

Not sure if anyone noticed, but Jeremy Zawodny made some comments about these /. discussions in his blog, claiming that his words were twisted: Slashdot Twists My Words about Yahoo

Great article, it almost got the context of Zawodny's comments correct. In his post he was talking about the bundling of the Yahoo Search Toolbar with other Yahoo products. Adware was not mentioned once. http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005121.htm l

http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/005121.htm l

Um, why don't you just write it?

"Spending an hour or two" writing a CMS is not going to result in a very good CMS. Will it have a GUI for updating pages? Does it handle caching well? What about granular permissions, where somebody in one department can edit their subsection but not another subsection? And so on... there are a lot of little things that you forget about when saying "it'll only take a few hours" that mature CMSs do that your quick hack won't.

you know what happens to time when you code, even when it's just web design.

"Just" web design is pretty difficult. You have to cope with severe deficiencies in multiple browsers, memorise weird, counter-intuitive hacks to get things working in Internet Explorer, code three different ways depending on what features are available, remember to avoid some parts of the specification because they are unreliable, and remember to do the complete opposite of what the specification says in other instances because nobody bothers reading it, and so on.

I know it's trendy to think of web developers as lesser beings than "real" programmers, but we've got to put up with a hell of a lot of crap. Jeremy Zawodny (the Yahoo/MySQL guy) blogged about this: Respect for Web Developers - read the comments for a bit of insight.

"This is anecdotal at best. I actually don't know anyone who uses MSN messenger (or windows messenger). So he's getting modded up insightful for being surrounded by n00bs?"

MSN is used pretty much exclusively by everyone who isn't in the US.

US domestic IM usage stats

OS X has also migrated away from userthreads

OS X never had userthreads. The article corrects that misconception from the previous article:

Readers pointed out that there were two errors in this sentence. The first one is that Mac OS X does use kernelthreads, and this is completely true. My confusion came from the fact that FreeBSD 4.x and older - which was part of the OS X kernel until Tiger came along - did not implement kernelthreads; rather, only userthreads. It was one of the reasons why MySQL ran badly on FreeBSD 4.x and older. In the case of userthreads, it is not the kernel that manages the threads, but an application running on top of the kernel in userspace.

Apple Tech Note from which the picture that was in the article at this point was taken

However, this is not the case of Mac OS X. Pthreads, available to the programmer, map directly to a Mach thread, and thread handling is the very heart of the Mach kernel inside the OS X kernel.