No need to write your own template engine, there are several out there to choose from.
Regaring non-DB caching, that it an excellent point. However, it's not really that hard of a problem to solve, either. It's nice to have it solved for you (Dynamo, etc.), but as long as you have everything running in the same JVM, you can cache data in a HashMap (keyed by user ID or whatever), just make sure to watch threading issues.
On the other hand, the pages served by/. are quite large by common web standards... lots of query results/test per page especially for Nested or Flat mode on a story with 400 comments. Definately not your average web "hit".
140,000 pages per day is a pretty small, load. A very small load for a custom C webserver. You could handling 140,000 pages a day easily with ASP and VBScript, for that matter.
The company which installed the wiring for our PBX and network appeared to be competent up-front. Then they put in RJ-45s for both phone and network throughout the building... even though the phone system they sold us used RJ-11 (only one wire pair for that matter).
When asked, they said "oh, the little plugs fit OK in the big sockets". Then they labelled the jacks as "1" and "2", not as "phone" and "computer".
We explained the idiocy to them, and insisted the replace all the phone jacks with RJ11s. They agreed after some cajoring.
To me, the more notable thing is that you can buy a RAID controller for $65... the ability to get it in a clandestine manner for $20 instead is not as interesting, IMHO.
Why do otherwise reasonable people let their lawyers put stupidity like that in? It just makes them look bad. What are they going to do, sue me because I told Epinions I like my VCR, and I also told Slashdot readers? Sure.
By acheiving the in 2000s what the U.S. acheived in the 60s? Oooh, big deal.
(Of course, the politician and most everyone else don't seem bothered by the fact that the U.S. can no longer do the things in space that were done in the 60s. Instead of pressing on, we collectively spent the last 30 years finding more and more expensive ways to get to earth orbit.)
I mentioned this in another reply, but it is worth repeated.
Any of the other companies you mention could be on each others' shopping lists. It's only a matter of time before these behemoths realize they would be even strong together than apart.
The big problem I see with this, is that if taking on the cellphone should be illegal, should't it also be illegal to have an engaging conversation with someone in the car with you? Certainly a good conversation with a person in the car could be more distracting and therefore more dangerous than a dull conversation with someone on the phone.
It gets worse. Anyone that has kids knows that having kids of any age (crying, fighting, whatever) certainly could be a lot more distracting than a phone conversation.
1) wow, you got a free job posting on Slashdot. That has a LOT of value in and of itself. You might get the person you need just from this article.
2) Otherwise, hire a really bright programmer with vaguely related experience. Someone who has worked at the systems level in Linux or UNIX should be able to move over to the NT world - the details would be different, but the underlying ideas would come over.
The key idea is that someone checks things out, fixes problems before they become big problems, etc. I don't think it is absolutley necessary that they be onsite to do this. NT is not as easy as Unix/etc. to admin offsite, but it can be done.
Certainly they should not need a person there working in it all the time.
I'm an MCSE (and heavy user of Linux), and will speak against the "party line" by pointing out that you can easily run the PDC and SQL on the same (decent) server, your network will very likely be just fine since it is supporting the accounting software now, and you don't need a full-timer on staff to keep it running.
Pay a competent NT/SQL admin get it up and running, then have them periodically come back or dial in to verify everything is working OK, etc.
If they are also moving all the client to Windows, Colin is right, you need to include the cost of a bunch of new PCs etc.
NT has more than it's share of Issues, but it works fine with good people at the helm. Can you really say that Linux or Unix tolerate incompetent sysadmins any better than NT? I can't.
I third this. Go with what they spec (SQL7 on NT) or get a new package.
You don't stand a ice cube's chance in hell of seamlessly moving someone else's front end over to talk to a different DB they don't support without having the source code and programmers who can adjust for differences in SQL dialects.
SQL7 doesn't seem bad at all for what we run it for (to back up SalesLogix). It has been reliable (no crashes) and fast.
An excellent and important point. A point that I make to people and they do not remotely understand.
I've had to tell my bank twice that they do NOT have my permission to issue a credit card that comes out of my account.
I don't know where the idea came from the "check cards" are in any way superior to credit cards... it's completely wrong. A check card is both more risky for the reason you state, and more expensive because you pay right now, not 30 days later with no interest.
Good points. There is already plenty of motivation to get a computer education, namely a high chance of a good paying job. CS grads are already near the top of the heap in post-graduation pay.
The fact that few college students choose a computer career is very likely NOT to to difficulty paying for it.
Inprise could not push Interbase too hard to "political" reasons. Many of their products are used widely to interface to non-Inprise database; for example, they make a big deal about Delphi 5's Oracle support, and Oracle even based their Java tool on Inprise JBuilder 2.
It would be unwise to put their own database too hard, since that would interfere with being database-neutral.
MySQL is great for a large class of problems, but it is no so great for another large class of problems: those which benefit from major, important database features that it does not have: transactions, stored procs, triggers, etc.
(all the way down to running on a Windows 95 machine)
What makes this particularly useful is that when it scales up and down, it really does work exactly the same; it's NOW a situation where there is a "lite" version, "standard", and "enterprise", all of which behaving slighly differently.
Slashdot Mirror
No need to write your own template engine, there are several out there to choose from.
Regaring non-DB caching, that it an excellent point. However, it's not really that hard of a problem to solve, either. It's nice to have it solved for you (Dynamo, etc.), but as long as you have everything running in the same JVM, you can cache data in a HashMap (keyed by user ID or whatever), just make sure to watch threading issues.
I read an article recently stating tha VA Linux will be working with TCX to add "real" (non-"hack") replication to MySQL.
On the other hand, the pages served by /. are quite large by common web standards... lots of query results/test per page especially for Nested or Flat mode on a story with 400 comments. Definately not your average web "hit".
140,000 pages per day is a pretty small, load. A very small load for a custom C webserver. You could handling 140,000 pages a day easily with ASP and VBScript, for that matter.
This sounds bogus to me. Slashdot runs on MySQL... Slashdot get a LOT of traffic, and those hits involve a LOT of database access.
Delphi ships with the source code to the VCL. Study it all you want!
The company which installed the wiring for our PBX and network appeared to be competent up-front. Then they put in RJ-45s for both phone and network throughout the building... even though the phone system they sold us used RJ-11 (only one wire pair for that matter).
When asked, they said "oh, the little plugs fit OK in the big sockets". Then they labelled the jacks as "1" and "2", not as "phone" and "computer".
We explained the idiocy to them, and insisted the replace all the phone jacks with RJ11s. They agreed after some cajoring.
To me, the more notable thing is that you can buy a RAID controller for $65... the ability to get it in a clandestine manner for $20 instead is not as interesting, IMHO.
That doesn't sound very non-exclusive.
Why do otherwise reasonable people let their lawyers put stupidity like that in? It just makes them look bad. What are they going to do, sue me because I told Epinions I like my VCR, and I also told Slashdot readers? Sure.
By acheiving the in 2000s what the U.S. acheived in the 60s? Oooh, big deal.
(Of course, the politician and most everyone else don't seem bothered by the fact that the U.S. can no longer do the things in space that were done in the 60s. Instead of pressing on, we collectively spent the last 30 years finding more and more expensive ways to get to earth orbit.)
It would be difficult to show damages, since the content is available on their site for free.
(It is nonetheless a violation of their copyright, though.)
Eventually Napster Inc. is going to start thinking about a revenue model.
:-)
So you left out the word "Yet"
I mentioned this in another reply, but it is worth repeated.
Any of the other companies you mention could be on each others' shopping lists. It's only a matter of time before these behemoths realize they would be even strong together than apart.
Unless you plan to buy the others, too.
The media industry has become very consolidated, and a few more big, big deals could unite a large portion of it.
Any TV networks for sale? If AOL still has the stock price to do it, they could be shopping.
The big problem I see with this, is that if taking on the cellphone should be illegal, should't it also be illegal to have an engaging conversation with someone in the car with you? Certainly a good conversation with a person in the car could be more distracting and therefore more dangerous than a dull conversation with someone on the phone.
It gets worse. Anyone that has kids knows that having kids of any age (crying, fighting, whatever) certainly could be a lot more distracting than a phone conversation.
Two thoughts:
1) wow, you got a free job posting on Slashdot. That has a LOT of value in and of itself. You might get the person you need just from this article.
2) Otherwise, hire a really bright programmer with vaguely related experience. Someone who has worked at the systems level in Linux or UNIX should be able to move over to the NT world - the details would be different, but the underlying ideas would come over.
The key idea is that someone checks things out, fixes problems before they become big problems, etc. I don't think it is absolutley necessary that they be onsite to do this. NT is not as easy as Unix/etc. to admin offsite, but it can be done.
Certainly they should not need a person there working in it all the time.
It's not that bad.
I'm an MCSE (and heavy user of Linux), and will speak against the "party line" by pointing out that you can easily run the PDC and SQL on the same (decent) server, your network will very likely be just fine since it is supporting the accounting software now, and you don't need a full-timer on staff to keep it running.
Pay a competent NT/SQL admin get it up and running, then have them periodically come back or dial in to verify everything is working OK, etc.
If they are also moving all the client to Windows, Colin is right, you need to include the cost of a bunch of new PCs etc.
NT has more than it's share of Issues, but it works fine with good people at the helm. Can you really say that Linux or Unix tolerate incompetent sysadmins any better than NT? I can't.
I third this. Go with what they spec (SQL7 on NT) or get a new package.
You don't stand a ice cube's chance in hell of seamlessly moving someone else's front end over to talk to a different DB they don't support without having the source code and programmers who can adjust for differences in SQL dialects.
SQL7 doesn't seem bad at all for what we run it for (to back up SalesLogix). It has been reliable (no crashes) and fast.
Check cards can deplete your account (making your house payment bounce) when the card is stolen/copied/fraudulently used.
Use a credit card, you will out $50 (at most, generally 0) if it is stolen, and your house payment won't bounce.
An excellent and important point. A point that I make to people and they do not remotely understand.
I've had to tell my bank twice that they do NOT have my permission to issue a credit card that comes out of my account.
I don't know where the idea came from the "check cards" are in any way superior to credit cards... it's completely wrong. A check card is both more risky for the reason you state, and more expensive because you pay right now, not 30 days later with no interest.
Good points. There is already plenty of motivation to get a computer education, namely a high chance of a good paying job. CS grads are already near the top of the heap in post-graduation pay.
The fact that few college students choose a computer career is very likely NOT to to difficulty paying for it.
Inprise could not push Interbase too hard to "political" reasons. Many of their products are used widely to interface to non-Inprise database; for example, they make a big deal about Delphi 5's Oracle support, and Oracle even based their Java tool on Inprise JBuilder 2.
It would be unwise to put their own database too hard, since that would interfere with being database-neutral.
MySQL is great for a large class of problems, but it is no so great for another large class of problems: those which benefit from major, important database features that it does not have: transactions, stored procs, triggers, etc.
(all the way down to running on a Windows 95 machine)
What makes this particularly useful is that when it scales up and down, it really does work exactly the same; it's NOW a situation where there is a "lite" version, "standard", and "enterprise", all of which behaving slighly differently.