Exactly. I haven't downloaded the newest version yet but the version I have, and google maps sat view on the web has an empty field where my neighborhood is. My neighborhood has been here for almost 4 years. In a rural area that makes some sense but I'm in Dallas.
What's worse they haven't even updated the street map itself, so even though the Google van did street view recently (not all the way where I am) they couldn't be bothered to update streets that they still don't show on the map. Those have been there for more than 2 years.
Because a car for the mainstream must be able to use freeways. 15-20 seconds is TOO SLOW and risk accidents as you try to merge. I have no love for idiots who do 30 on the on-ramp when traffic is moving at 70+.
I live in Dallas. The speed-limit of 60 on the freeways is meaningless. Unless there is a traffic jam people are going 70+ in the slow lane. Most large cities are the same way.
Also if your car can't go 100. How's it going to have the power to stay with traffic on a hill.
Speed doesn't hurt you. Its stupid driving that causes accidents and traffic jams: tail-gating, lane swapping, cutting in or out of exit only lanes. However I'd also suggest that all of the bad driving habits can usually be partially attributed to someone else who's not moving the speed of traffic and/or refuses to vacate the left lane, or doesn't accelerate or move fast enough.
Yeah, Microsoft killed Hotmail so thoroughly that it remains nearly the biggest player in Webmail and has a market share considerably larger than Gmail.
I don't think I compared Hotmail to Gmail. I'm talked about what happened to Hotmail. Hotmail *ahem* MSN mail is big because there are a lot more people on the web now than when they were bought. Their market growth is due only to the fact that there are users that don't know better and they get it FREE with their MSN account.
And I am talking about all the technology that Yahoo offers, I gave hotmail as an example. MSN offers similar technology to almost everything on that list. Do you really think that Microsoft isn't going to kill basically everything Yahoo has done and switch the users to MSN services? Anything they don't already have they'll port to.NET and slap some glassy windows vista looking toolbars, some side bars, 200 more ads and shrink the actual viewing area to 1/10th the size.
MSN is the default on new computers so the only people that use it are the ones that don't know any better. On the other hand pretty much everyone who uses Yahoo does so because they chose to do so. Microsoft has too much hubris to keep Yahoo's technology, they're going to change it all to Windows and.NET and just like what happened with Hotmail it will suck in then end.
Where are those users going to go? I'd wager the vast majority of them will go straight to Google.
Google doesn't need to buy Yahoo, they're going to get the users anyway
Other than using and safeguarding secure root passwords, not much can be done at this time to be proactive in preventing servers from being compromised,
Turn off root's log in and get rid of cPanel and similar programs as well. I understand the need for an easy to use remote admin tool (as much as I'd love people to actually learn the shell), but can't we do better than a web-based program for this stuff?
I'm pretty sure I signed up around the end of 98. Probably in Nov or December and my UID is quite high so you had to be at least a few months ahead of me. Though it seems/. was growing really fast around that time.
Personally with UIDs as high as they are now, it seems that even with my barely six-digit ID, there are many more n00bs than gurus:)
I don't think I said that PHP is popular because Windows is popular. I said its popular for the same reasons. Also Microsoft didn't really use dirty underhanded tactics until after they became a monopoly. Windows spread yes because of price and secondly because of ease of use and easy to develop for (no pesky security concerns to worry about).
Yes PHP and Perl are both free, but look at cost of development. (ignoring the fact that a good PHP developer that will do your program right the first time is going to be as much as the Perl guy:) ). Perl isn't forgiving of errors. PHP is. CGI scripts in Perl can cause a lot of overhead on a system, so especially when hardware was more expensive the shared hosting companies wanted something else. Unfortunately mod_perl is tied directly into Apache, making it insecure for shared hosting (the memory is shared) so PHP was the natural choice.
Basically just like Windows, PHP was in the right place at the right time. Easier learning curve, easier deployment on a shared hosting environment and cheaper developers. It dominates because of that, not because its a superior product.
The best apps are the ones that were written to be extended. If I can write my own module that plugs into a codebase without touching that codebase then it doesn't matter what their code looks like.
That said, the last place I worked had some pretty decent code. A few perl modules I've worked on, such as HTML::Template were pretty nicely done as well.
My pointers for good code:
good indentation. Tabs are preferable but if you use spaces, use just spaces! I can't count the times where I opened a source file and one developer used spaces and another used tabs, or $obscure_editor which completely screws up the flow and makes it nearly impossible to figure out what block a particular line is supposed to be in.
Good variable naming schemes. The name of the variable should tell me something about what it contains. I'm sure every developer has run into the cute guy who thought it would be fun to start at $a and end at $z. Or $obj1, $obj2... $obj27. (I hope there's a special place in hell for that guy)
Keep it simple. If $language has a short-cut for doing something, learn the shortcut instead of adding 40 lines for how it would be done in C. Don't reinvent the wheel. Also while speed is important, no one cares that your clever algorithm web app 2 nanoseconds faster than the built-in function would. It probably took you 3 extra days of time anyway.
Keep it consistent. If the developer before you used camel case and you don't like it. Suck it up and use camel case. Same for anything else. Code religion can be fought by the water color or in the coding guidelines meetings. In the source files it just creates a mess for everyone else.
For the same reason that Windows is the most popular OS. It was easy to use and available and now we're stuck with it.
Large hosting companies like it because its an easy way to give a scripting language to their customers. Everyone now uses it so the hosting companies arent' going to switch.
The big CMS folks that you mentioned were smart to use PHP since that's what all the hosting companies have. Not to mention that those projects started out as open source projects probably by people who didn't have a lot of programming experience and PHP is easy to learn and forgiving in terms of mistakes (far too forgiving IMHO)
Personally I can't stand any of the packages you've mentioned. Sure they're great for putting up your blog but you wouldn't believe how many customers I get who want wizz-bang sites built on top of one of those, when a custom solutions would be so much easier.
Same issue here. Really I think this is a problem with PHP more than with CentOS. The Cent folks try very hard to make sure that updates don't break your stuff and they are very good at that. One of the main reason I use it.
The PHP folks dug themselves a hole by making a language that's so fundamentally broken as to require breaking everything with an upgrade.
So what, if the winning candidate runs Linux it doesn't matter if they pass laws that take more of our freedom, give more handouts to large corporations, or generally muddle in the lives of general people and pandering to the rich and famous?
Good thing they run linux or they'd be truly evil.
Which creates a huge problem for people like me who do domain hosting and would like to use SPF to let others verify that mail from my domains is legitimate. If every ISP starts blocking 25 then customers can't use my server to send mail and I can't publish an SPF record because I never know what outgoing server they are using. Not to mention the training involved in trying to help the customers figure out the outbound server settings on a multitude of ISPs.
SPF is a great solution if people would just adopt it.
Oh brother. I don't even use mailing lists and I think that's a stupid argument.
Your grandma doesn't know what RSS is, let alone how to subscribe to it (or NNTP for that matter, as someone else suggested). Attempting to equate a legitimate use of email does nothing to solve the real problem.
Debit cards give you NO such protection. If your debit card is stolen and used to drain your bank account, you have no recourse but to eat the losses.
People keep parroting this line and yet while I've been a customer of many banks I've never found it to be true. Its a pain not having money for a couple of days but they will give you the money back. Maybe its true at your bank. If it were me I'd not give them my business any more.
That is highly unrealistic. The biggest reason is that as soon as Microsoft pushes Starlight as a 'critical update' (as they did for IE 7) its market share will take a massive jump to over 60%. The best Linux/OSS could manage in an initial stage would be 10% and that is a WILDLY OPTIMISTIC estimate.
So? That doesn't mean that 60% of the content providers are going to suddenly start supporting it. We use online video in a project I'm involved with. Even if this did support Linux, I'm not going to change because FLV already meets my needs! I'm guessing that most providers are going to feel the same way. Also the article says nothing about how its served, though it does talk about.NET so I'm guessing its going to require Windows + IIS. I doubt this will get off the ground.
If I were a media manager, considering the current penetration of Flash, I might think about targeting a platform with a 60% share in addition to Flash
Why would you say this? Flash has something like 95% of the market. Even at 60% a provider would still have to maintain a version in Flash. Unless there is just some mind-blowing amazing feature that comes with this I just don't see providers rushing to convert to it.
Actually I own a web company and we do all our layouts with CSS only... thanks for playing. But hey if enough people think it can't be done they'll keep paying people like me to do it:)
I'm really not sure what your argument is... that CSS becomes tag soup as well or that tables are better for layout in general because you can do things other than columns? I hope its the former.. though I would argue if your CSS becomes tag soup then you aren't doing it right.
If you're arguing that tables are better then it simply makes no sense. All you get with tables is columns and rows, which seems worse since even if your assertion about CSS were true, you still don't get the separation of content and presentation.
I still design pages using HTML 3.2 standard. Life was happy when pages were small and simple.
Unless you're just putting text on a white page, HTML 3.2 doesn't make anything small and simple... doing a decent layout with just HTML requires tables which in the end creates tag-soup because they weren't designed for page layout. CSS eliminates that problem.
I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript.
Like what exactly? The:hover pseudo class? That's about the only thing I can think that you might be talking about and its CSS, not HTML.
Further, people no longer appear interested in the size of the footprint their pages make and the bandwidth necessary to download them.
See my first point. An external stylesheet can get cached, table-soup cannot. Besides, its not like people not caring about bandwidth is a new problem.
We rail away at Microsoft and anyone else who adds bloat to software, but the web is now plagued by page bloat and overly clever designs which render poorly at times, take over the browser and sometimes crash it.
HTML hasn't really changed that much.. in fact they've removed more than they've added, unless you're talking about CSS again. I'm not sure what you mean by "clever designs" unless you're talking about something other than text on a white background. I suppose we should get rid of images as well. Heck we might as well go back to using Gopher.
I'm not going to deny that bad sites can crash browsers but that's a problem with the page and arguably the browsers themselves, not with the standards.
Behaviour is becomming terrible, but as pages are done by authors who do not really care, so long as it looks like it should and does the basics, they care not what a wreck have created.
I can't remember a time that this hasn't been the case. Blame the browsers for trying to render tag-soup instead of enforcing the standards from the beginning.
"Hi, we assume you have the latest browser and all the plugins!"
I'm sorry but I'd guess that better than 95% of people have some kind of modern browser(if you can consider IE6 modern... which is another debate) and better than 90% of people have Flash. Heck even Linux has Flash 9 available. Coding for a single browser is one thing but keeping legacy code for browsers that worked in 1997 is ridiculous. I code my pages to downgrade gracefully but I don't have the time to go and test Netscape 3 for you.
People want the web to be more than pretty pictures and Geocities home-pages. They want it to do something, they want to buy things and they want to contribute. New technology makes all that easier. You don't have to do that but don't complain when the rest of us do.
seriously I can't figure out why they are the largest provider in this area. I guess colleges like software that sucks.
Look, I'm not an MS fan but why should they be responsible if software doesn't work with their new release? The betas have been out for months, plenty of time for BB to test and fix these problems. Besides if your web app relies on the OS then you're doing it wrong!/rant
At least with Wal-Mart even though the stuff you buy is crap the prices really are low. At "Best Buy" the stuff is still crap and you pay a premium for it.
I had looked at going with Speakeasy about a year ago. I'm so very glad I didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
Downloading the new version and indeed my neighborhood is finally there.
Still not on the online map though which I really find weird. They have the data, why aren't they using it everywhere?
Exactly. I haven't downloaded the newest version yet but the version I have, and google maps sat view on the web has an empty field where my neighborhood is. My neighborhood has been here for almost 4 years. In a rural area that makes some sense but I'm in Dallas.
What's worse they haven't even updated the street map itself, so even though the Google van did street view recently (not all the way where I am) they couldn't be bothered to update streets that they still don't show on the map. Those have been there for more than 2 years.
Because a car for the mainstream must be able to use freeways. 15-20 seconds is TOO SLOW and risk accidents as you try to merge. I have no love for idiots who do 30 on the on-ramp when traffic is moving at 70+.
I live in Dallas. The speed-limit of 60 on the freeways is meaningless. Unless there is a traffic jam people are going 70+ in the slow lane. Most large cities are the same way.
Also if your car can't go 100. How's it going to have the power to stay with traffic on a hill.
Speed doesn't hurt you. Its stupid driving that causes accidents and traffic jams: tail-gating, lane swapping, cutting in or out of exit only lanes. However I'd also suggest that all of the bad driving habits can usually be partially attributed to someone else who's not moving the speed of traffic and/or refuses to vacate the left lane, or doesn't accelerate or move fast enough.
SLOW KILLS!
Yeah, Microsoft killed Hotmail so thoroughly that it remains nearly the biggest player in Webmail and has a market share considerably larger than Gmail.
.NET and slap some glassy windows vista looking toolbars, some side bars, 200 more ads and shrink the actual viewing area to 1/10th the size.
I don't think I compared Hotmail to Gmail. I'm talked about what happened to Hotmail. Hotmail *ahem* MSN mail is big because there are a lot more people on the web now than when they were bought. Their market growth is due only to the fact that there are users that don't know better and they get it FREE with their MSN account.
And I am talking about all the technology that Yahoo offers, I gave hotmail as an example. MSN offers similar technology to almost everything on that list. Do you really think that Microsoft isn't going to kill basically everything Yahoo has done and switch the users to MSN services? Anything they don't already have they'll port to
MSN is the default on new computers so the only people that use it are the ones that don't know any better. On the other hand pretty much everyone who uses Yahoo does so because they chose to do so. Microsoft has too much hubris to keep Yahoo's technology, they're going to change it all to Windows and .NET and just like what happened with Hotmail it will suck in then end.
Where are those users going to go? I'd wager the vast majority of them will go straight to Google.
Google doesn't need to buy Yahoo, they're going to get the users anyway
Exactly. Also this gem from the article:
Other than using and safeguarding secure root passwords, not much can be done at this time to be proactive in preventing servers from being compromised,
Turn off root's log in and get rid of cPanel and similar programs as well. I understand the need for an easy to use remote admin tool (as much as I'd love people to actually learn the shell), but can't we do better than a web-based program for this stuff?
what's hard about:
body {
font: normal 12px Arial, sans-serif;
}
?
The people who rail against CSS are the people who don't have the first clue about how to use it.
I'm pretty sure I signed up around the end of 98. Probably in Nov or December and my UID is quite high so you had to be at least a few months ahead of me. Though it seems /. was growing really fast around that time.
:)
Personally with UIDs as high as they are now, it seems that even with my barely six-digit ID, there are many more n00bs than gurus
A n00b admin is going to get a server that's already installed with Apache already configured.
I don't think I said that PHP is popular because Windows is popular. I said its popular for the same reasons. Also Microsoft didn't really use dirty underhanded tactics until after they became a monopoly. Windows spread yes because of price and secondly because of ease of use and easy to develop for (no pesky security concerns to worry about).
:) ). Perl isn't forgiving of errors. PHP is. CGI scripts in Perl can cause a lot of overhead on a system, so especially when hardware was more expensive the shared hosting companies wanted something else. Unfortunately mod_perl is tied directly into Apache, making it insecure for shared hosting (the memory is shared) so PHP was the natural choice.
Yes PHP and Perl are both free, but look at cost of development. (ignoring the fact that a good PHP developer that will do your program right the first time is going to be as much as the Perl guy
Basically just like Windows, PHP was in the right place at the right time. Easier learning curve, easier deployment on a shared hosting environment and cheaper developers. It dominates because of that, not because its a superior product.
The best apps are the ones that were written to be extended. If I can write my own module that plugs into a codebase without touching that codebase then it doesn't matter what their code looks like.
... $obj27. (I hope there's a special place in hell for that guy)
That said, the last place I worked had some pretty decent code. A few perl modules I've worked on, such as HTML::Template were pretty nicely done as well.
My pointers for good code:
good indentation. Tabs are preferable but if you use spaces, use just spaces! I can't count the times where I opened a source file and one developer used spaces and another used tabs, or $obscure_editor which completely screws up the flow and makes it nearly impossible to figure out what block a particular line is supposed to be in.
Good variable naming schemes. The name of the variable should tell me something about what it contains. I'm sure every developer has run into the cute guy who thought it would be fun to start at $a and end at $z. Or $obj1, $obj2
Keep it simple. If $language has a short-cut for doing something, learn the shortcut instead of adding 40 lines for how it would be done in C. Don't reinvent the wheel. Also while speed is important, no one cares that your clever algorithm web app 2 nanoseconds faster than the built-in function would. It probably took you 3 extra days of time anyway.
Keep it consistent. If the developer before you used camel case and you don't like it. Suck it up and use camel case. Same for anything else. Code religion can be fought by the water color or in the coding guidelines meetings. In the source files it just creates a mess for everyone else.
For the same reason that Windows is the most popular OS. It was easy to use and available and now we're stuck with it.
Large hosting companies like it because its an easy way to give a scripting language to their customers. Everyone now uses it so the hosting companies arent' going to switch.
The big CMS folks that you mentioned were smart to use PHP since that's what all the hosting companies have. Not to mention that those projects started out as open source projects probably by people who didn't have a lot of programming experience and PHP is easy to learn and forgiving in terms of mistakes (far too forgiving IMHO)
Personally I can't stand any of the packages you've mentioned. Sure they're great for putting up your blog but you wouldn't believe how many customers I get who want wizz-bang sites built on top of one of those, when a custom solutions would be so much easier.
Same issue here. Really I think this is a problem with PHP more than with CentOS. The Cent folks try very hard to make sure that updates don't break your stuff and they are very good at that. One of the main reason I use it.
The PHP folks dug themselves a hole by making a language that's so fundamentally broken as to require breaking everything with an upgrade.
So what, if the winning candidate runs Linux it doesn't matter if they pass laws that take more of our freedom, give more handouts to large corporations, or generally muddle in the lives of general people and pandering to the rich and famous?
Good thing they run linux or they'd be truly evil.
Which creates a huge problem for people like me who do domain hosting and would like to use SPF to let others verify that mail from my domains is legitimate. If every ISP starts blocking 25 then customers can't use my server to send mail and I can't publish an SPF record because I never know what outgoing server they are using. Not to mention the training involved in trying to help the customers figure out the outbound server settings on a multitude of ISPs.
SPF is a great solution if people would just adopt it.
Oh brother. I don't even use mailing lists and I think that's a stupid argument.
Your grandma doesn't know what RSS is, let alone how to subscribe to it (or NNTP for that matter, as someone else suggested). Attempting to equate a legitimate use of email does nothing to solve the real problem.
Or maybe they'll learn something from the tech and be able to recreate it in a smaller and lighter bot that can go to Europa.
Nah, that's too obvious. All scientists are about getting more money. Evil scientists.
No, not "informative". -1 DRTFA (when are we getting that mod?)
... that's it. The government has NOTHING to do with it.
A private company using the card as an ID number
Debit cards give you NO such protection. If your debit card is stolen and used to drain your bank account, you have no recourse but to eat the losses.
People keep parroting this line and yet while I've been a customer of many banks I've never found it to be true. Its a pain not having money for a couple of days but they will give you the money back. Maybe its true at your bank. If it were me I'd not give them my business any more.
Sounds a lot like Deus City
(yes its a shameless plug)
That is highly unrealistic. The biggest reason is that as soon as Microsoft pushes Starlight as a 'critical update' (as they did for IE 7) its market share will take a massive jump to over 60%. The best Linux/OSS could manage in an initial stage would be 10% and that is a WILDLY OPTIMISTIC estimate.
.NET so I'm guessing its going to require Windows + IIS. I doubt this will get off the ground.
So? That doesn't mean that 60% of the content providers are going to suddenly start supporting it. We use online video in a project I'm involved with. Even if this did support Linux, I'm not going to change because FLV already meets my needs! I'm guessing that most providers are going to feel the same way. Also the article says nothing about how its served, though it does talk about
If I were a media manager, considering the current penetration of Flash, I might think about targeting a platform with a 60% share in addition to Flash
Why would you say this? Flash has something like 95% of the market. Even at 60% a provider would still have to maintain a version in Flash. Unless there is just some mind-blowing amazing feature that comes with this I just don't see providers rushing to convert to it.
Actually I own a web company and we do all our layouts with CSS only ... thanks for playing. But hey if enough people think it can't be done they'll keep paying people like me to do it :)
... that CSS becomes tag soup as well or that tables are better for layout in general because you can do things other than columns? I hope its the former .. though I would argue if your CSS becomes tag soup then you aren't doing it right.
I'm really not sure what your argument is
If you're arguing that tables are better then it simply makes no sense. All you get with tables is columns and rows, which seems worse since even if your assertion about CSS were true, you still don't get the separation of content and presentation.
Damn kids get off my lawn?
... doing a decent layout with just HTML requires tables which in the end creates tag-soup because they weren't designed for page layout. CSS eliminates that problem.
:hover pseudo class? That's about the only thing I can think that you might be talking about and its CSS, not HTML.
.. in fact they've removed more than they've added, unless you're talking about CSS again. I'm not sure what you mean by "clever designs" unless you're talking about something other than text on a white background. I suppose we should get rid of images as well. Heck we might as well go back to using Gopher.
... which is another debate) and better than 90% of people have Flash. Heck even Linux has Flash 9 available. Coding for a single browser is one thing but keeping legacy code for browsers that worked in 1997 is ridiculous. I code my pages to downgrade gracefully but I don't have the time to go and test Netscape 3 for you.
I still design pages using HTML 3.2 standard. Life was happy when pages were small and simple.
Unless you're just putting text on a white page, HTML 3.2 doesn't make anything small and simple
I'm very put-off by the way HTML now can do things formerly reserved for javascript.
Like what exactly? The
Further, people no longer appear interested in the size of the footprint their pages make and the bandwidth necessary to download them.
See my first point. An external stylesheet can get cached, table-soup cannot. Besides, its not like people not caring about bandwidth is a new problem.
We rail away at Microsoft and anyone else who adds bloat to software, but the web is now plagued by page bloat and overly clever designs which render poorly at times, take over the browser and sometimes crash it.
HTML hasn't really changed that much
I'm not going to deny that bad sites can crash browsers but that's a problem with the page and arguably the browsers themselves, not with the standards.
Behaviour is becomming terrible, but as pages are done by authors who do not really care, so long as it looks like it should and does the basics, they care not what a wreck have created.
I can't remember a time that this hasn't been the case. Blame the browsers for trying to render tag-soup instead of enforcing the standards from the beginning.
"Hi, we assume you have the latest browser and all the plugins!"
I'm sorry but I'd guess that better than 95% of people have some kind of modern browser(if you can consider IE6 modern
People want the web to be more than pretty pictures and Geocities home-pages. They want it to do something, they want to buy things and they want to contribute. New technology makes all that easier. You don't have to do that but don't complain when the rest of us do.
seriously I can't figure out why they are the largest provider in this area. I guess colleges like software that sucks.
/rant
Look, I'm not an MS fan but why should they be responsible if software doesn't work with their new release? The betas have been out for months, plenty of time for BB to test and fix these problems. Besides if your web app relies on the OS then you're doing it wrong!
At least with Wal-Mart even though the stuff you buy is crap the prices really are low. At "Best Buy" the stuff is still crap and you pay a premium for it.
I had looked at going with Speakeasy about a year ago. I'm so very glad I didn't.