the better I was refering to in my post was speciifally that a new VM is required. Plan9 talks via a published protocol [9p] implementable on any platform. I guess.NET is potentially available everywhere but we know it won't be.
You are right that some knowledge is required up front to know what commands to issue.
One of the main advatages is the standardisation. I presume you already know how to use cat, ls, grep, echo, > | & friends.
The use of familiair tools and a textual interface is to go with the "everything is a file" paradigm.
what to know where the mouse pointer is %cat/dev/mouse
play some audio
cat audio.pcm >/dev/audio
want to play it on another machine's soundcard ?
import -a machine/dev/audio/n/machine_audio cat audio.pcm >/n/machine_audio
(permissions permitting of course)
Plan 9 has more to offer than just a few file semantics.
If you really are interested than a set of papers & all the manual pages are available. Installation is fairly straight-forward [hardware permitting] and there is a VMWare image also available.
Plan 9 isn't trying to be on everyone's desktop, it's more a market of ideas.
I can particularly recommend the plumber. File associations are pretty limiting. Imagine a system where regular expressions and a few shell scripts do the work. I wrote a class browser for my PHP code so that right clicking $foo->bar(); would bring up the definition of ->bar from my PHP source code [which sits on a FreeBSD machine] and it took me about 15 minutes.
making a network connection, pah, who needs a socket library
echo 'connect slashdot.org!80' >/net/tcp/$n/ctl
Writing a user level file system to implement such things is a bit more complicated but again, once written *any* program can utilise them with the simple commands we all know and love : echo cat grep ls awk etc. etc.
A manic depressive who only ever sold one painting in his lifetime and suicided by shooting himself in the stomach and taking nearly a week to die an agonising death!
I wouldn't call that lucky.
Want cheap games? Buy the expensive ones instead of warezing them.;)
i think UK fuel tax runs at about 75% of the price.
which works out at about 80p per litre in total inc tax - which is about $1.30 per litre or $5 per US gallon.
We also pay £120 per year road fund licence for a car [it's more for a lorry but I don't know how much]
Reading back i slightly misrepresented the distance, it's 150 miles each way.
The train price is based on walk in and buy, you do get discount if you book over a week in advance and a further reduction if you buy a family travel card.
For the last 25 years the various UK govts. have been moving the taxation model from income to expenditure. Thus the lower your income the higher the proportion of it goes in taxation. Poorer people tend to spend all their money whereas if you have a few bob you can invest it.
Finding people that understand what's happening is quite rare so it's an issue that just isn't mentioned. I bet my MP hasn't even noticed.
We hear the lip service about the "War on Poverty" and "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" but the fiscal policy is in direct opposition to that. Crime is a market force, rising crime, particularly burglary & friends, means the cost of living is too high, it's that fucking simple.
Not only is it necessary to tighten up the Web Server's security but your whole system has to be configured with that premise in mind.
CGI here ends up running as $USER:www (you need to have ALL the web users in www so that non-cgi files & directories can be read by the server.)
I will be honest and confess that I've not finished experimenting with the possibilities. I was hoping that by setting ALL files outside of/www to be chmod nn0 the built in permission testing will take care of that. Hopefully there are no pitfalls in that direction.
maybe I'd be better going with OpenBSD's chroot'd & jailed Apache [I'm running on FreeBSD atm.]
anyhow I was also going to see if I could make a bin directory for each user so that they can only execute the files in that directory
Naturally I have no actual non-staff users with a login on the web server so I've got quite a licence to do whatever I feel is necessary, mis-guided or otherwise 8)
I only work there one day a week and they would rather me get other stuff done first.
We've seen this in the Cable companies. We've seen this in the TV companies We're about to see it with the mobile phone operators & the 3G rollout
When the Cable & TV franchies were auctioned off multiple vendors bidded and got the licences to operate, some paid huge fees.
10 Years later we have two big cable operators, both of whom are nearly bankrupt and are talking of merging. We have Two Big TV Companies, both of whom have financial trouble and are talking of merging.
Net result : private monopolies with huge debt from buying the licences and laying the cable etc. Short term middle income tax relief.
My last company was invited to work with the contractors for this. We'd done some work with the Criminal Records Bureau. The Congestion charging scheme was falling behind schedule and they were hoping for all the input they could muster.
The.NET bit was some sort of high-up choice, probably to do with Microsoft's cosying up to "New" Labour to roll out Passport based e-government services [since rolled back in again].
The web operation is supposed to be a front end to everything, tbh the diagrams we were shown were a right spaghetti.
I can't remember what questions I asked but they were answered with blank stares and shrugs.
I'm glad they found some contractors. I really didn't want to do it [I'd danced with the Devil back in IIS4 days and have burnt toes].
The charging wont really help congestion on it's own. London is the worst place in the UK to drive round. 1mph is not much fun on a daily basis. Yet London has the best mass transport system in the UK but then again it doesn't have much competition.
The root cause of Uk traffic problems are the insistence that the rail network should be open to competition so we have 8 rail operators competing by running trains to different destinations. How trains in the SE compete with trains in the NW is unclear to me. Instead of decent travel we have bare bones operations where cut corners cost lives.
The road freight operators and subsidised by other road users whereas the railways have to pay in full for their tracks.
A forward sighted govt. would realise that inter-city rail travel should be invested in for the benefit of the people but hey profits not people is the rally cry of the capitalists.
Rail travel should be the mode of choice over 50 miles. Instead it is cheaper to travel by car. I can drive the family from here to the capital and back [about 150 miles] for about £25. Take the train and we're looking at £120 for the four of us.
And then they wonder why the place of chock full of cars !
function add_links(&$db) {
foreach($db->get_links() as $url=>$txt) {
$this->add_href($url, $txt);
}
} }
$p = new page(); $db = new database('website'); $p->add_links($db); echo $p->get();
?>
which would generate a valid html page. Of course I've got the advantage of building up by database & html class over time but that's what re-usuable code is all about 8)
the thing that stands PHP apart from Perl is that the focus has been on Web development rather than a general purpose language [although recently development has added more command line functionality]. To this end the common things needed for web development are built into the distribution. Database access, IMAP access, treating http:// as a stream, etc.etc.
To non-programmers PHP is the sort of thing that is easy to pick up, I know this from the people I have met that use it. All the examples around have generally been about generating web pages. Perl source code is legendary for it's obscurity. PHP keeps things simple.
It's not a perfect beast. Passing by reference can be awkward, requiring extra non-anonymous variables, and the ugly face of backward comaptibility has meant that keywords & built-ins are inconsistent in name and parameter order. ( In particular the original array manipulating functions are called stuff like count() whereas if that was introduced today it would be called array_count().
parameter order is a subtle source of confusion
consider strpos ("abcdef", "d")
give me the position of "d" in "abcdef"
and explode(" ", "hello world")
split "hello world" using " "
the subject of the function is reversed
not a big deal but it often means a quick trip to the manual to find out which one it is this time.
)
If I was suggesting a programming language to learn programming PHP would not be it, Python or C or Limbo would be my suggestions there.
Up to 200,000 requests are made by investigators under false pretences to obtain health information on British patients each year. And most attempts succeed, according to the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).
consider even something as simple as a file write.
even with C most programs make plenty of assumptions.
When was the last time you wrote code that wrote the data to the kernel buffers, waited until the buffers flush and then read the data back uncached from the device and test it for integrity?
Sounds like Ganesh's law to me
on
Forget Moore's Law?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
web services are being built on HTTP *because* of proxies.
Why not just use Web proxies
on
Blocking Kazaa 2.0?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There's not much reason for most people to have any other net access than Web via proxy.
If you've got every box in the company NATd then you are being hoisted by your own petard really.
Giving Lusers software installation rights on terminals may save you some annoying "but I need MSN" bullshit but when they cram Bonzi Buddy and whatever other crap they can find in there you are risking your network and pushing your support costs up.
I'd rather be seen as some sort of network nazi than have to try and use ssh into a remote site at 1 second per character. I found who was running Napster and since that day I'm the annoying guy that curtails people's "rights" and "freedoms".
If you want a compromise let one machine be a p2p client. You can get Gnutella clients with a web front end so anyone on the LAN can submit queries on the same box and then throttle that box's bandwith during working hours & let it roam free when the bandwith is underutilized.
Slashdot Mirror
the better I was refering to in my post was speciifally that a new VM is required. Plan9 talks via a published protocol [9p] implementable on any platform. I guess .NET is potentially available everywhere but we know it won't be.
/dev/mouse
/dev/audio
/dev/audio /n/machine_audio /n/machine_audio
You are right that some knowledge is required up front to know what commands to issue.
One of the main advatages is the standardisation.
I presume you already know how to use cat, ls, grep, echo, > | & friends.
The use of familiair tools and a textual interface is to go with the "everything is a file" paradigm.
what to know where the mouse pointer is
%cat
play some audio
cat audio.pcm >
want to play it on another machine's soundcard ?
import -a machine
cat audio.pcm >
(permissions permitting of course)
Plan 9 has more to offer than just a few file semantics.
If you really are interested than a set of papers & all the manual pages are available. Installation is fairly straight-forward [hardware permitting] and there is a VMWare image also available.
Plan 9 isn't trying to be on everyone's desktop, it's more a market of ideas.
http://plan9.bell-labs.com/plan9
I can particularly recommend the plumber. File associations are pretty limiting. Imagine a system where regular expressions and a few shell scripts do the work. I wrote a class browser for my PHP code so that right clicking $foo->bar(); would bring up the definition of ->bar from my PHP source code [which sits on a FreeBSD machine] and it took me about 15 minutes.
http://www.solarnature.com/flashlights.html
It's not the language neutrality that's required it's the interfaces that need opening.
/net/tcp/$n/ctl
TK & Plan9 get this right by using character and not binary interfaces [Unicode in Plan9s case].
In Plan 9's once you've written a program and exposed it in the Plan 9 way you don't even need libraries & whatnot.
take a look at my IRC bot written in shell script
http://www.proweb.co.uk/~matt/chugly.rc
making a network connection, pah, who needs a socket library
echo 'connect slashdot.org!80' >
Writing a user level file system to implement such things is a bit more complicated but again, once written *any* program can utilise them with the simple commands we all know and love : echo cat grep ls awk etc. etc.
Here's one I wrote to do google searches
Now every program on my system can do a google search using simple file operations. Even programs compiled *before* I wrote mine, such as awk.
A manic depressive who only ever sold one painting in his lifetime and suicided by shooting himself in the stomach and taking nearly a week to die an agonising death!
;)
I wouldn't call that lucky.
Want cheap games? Buy the expensive ones instead of warezing them.
i think UK fuel tax runs at about 75% of the price.
which works out at about 80p per litre in total inc tax - which is about $1.30 per litre or $5 per US gallon.
We also pay £120 per year road fund licence for a car [it's more for a lorry but I don't know how much]
Reading back i slightly misrepresented the distance, it's 150 miles each way.
The train price is based on walk in and buy, you do get discount if you book over a week in advance and a further reduction if you buy a family travel card.
For the last 25 years the various UK govts. have been moving the taxation model from income to expenditure.
Thus the lower your income the higher the proportion of it goes in taxation. Poorer people tend to spend all their money whereas if you have a few bob you can invest it.
Finding people that understand what's happening is quite rare so it's an issue that just isn't mentioned. I bet my MP hasn't even noticed.
We hear the lip service about the "War on Poverty" and "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" but the fiscal policy is in direct opposition to that. Crime is a market force, rising crime, particularly burglary & friends, means the cost of living is too high, it's that fucking simple.
Sorry to go off but it makes me want to cry.
Luckily we've got tanks rolling along our streets to keep us distracted.
it's cheaper to build another PC !
Bochs, though admirable, isn't complete.
Plan9 won't run inside bochs for instance, as documented here.
which is a shame. Plan 9 runs in VMWare btw
Vegetarian is derived from the latin
vegetus -a -um [lively , vigorous, fresh]
perhaps you mean
herbivore n. An animal that feeds chiefly on plants.
you are right, of course.
/www to be chmod nn0 the built in permission testing will take care of that. Hopefully there are no pitfalls in that direction.
Not only is it necessary to tighten up the Web Server's security but your whole system has to be configured with that premise in mind.
CGI here ends up running as $USER:www (you need to have ALL the web users in www so that non-cgi files & directories can be read by the server.)
I will be honest and confess that I've not finished experimenting with the possibilities. I was hoping that by setting ALL files outside of
maybe I'd be better going with OpenBSD's chroot'd & jailed Apache [I'm running on FreeBSD atm.]
anyhow I was also going to see if I could make a bin directory for each user so that they can only execute the files in that directory
Naturally I have no actual non-staff users with a login on the web server so I've got quite a licence to do whatever I feel is necessary, mis-guided or otherwise 8)
I only work there one day a week and they would rather me get other stuff done first.
which eventually became too cutesy.
Even Outlook Express sets any From: you want
We've seen this in the Cable companies.
We've seen this in the TV companies
We're about to see it with the mobile phone operators & the 3G rollout
When the Cable & TV franchies were auctioned off multiple vendors bidded and got the licences to operate, some paid huge fees.
10 Years later we have two big cable operators, both of whom are nearly bankrupt and are talking of merging. We have Two Big TV Companies, both of whom have financial trouble and are talking of merging.
Net result : private monopolies with huge debt from buying the licences and laying the cable etc.
Short term middle income tax relief.
It's a shambles.
My last company was invited to work with the contractors for this. We'd done some work with the Criminal Records Bureau. The Congestion charging scheme was falling behind schedule and they were hoping for all the input they could muster.
.NET bit was some sort of high-up choice, probably to do with Microsoft's cosying up to "New" Labour to roll out Passport based e-government services [since rolled back in again].
The
The web operation is supposed to be a front end to everything, tbh the diagrams we were shown were a right spaghetti.
I can't remember what questions I asked but they were answered with blank stares and shrugs.
I'm glad they found some contractors. I really didn't want to do it [I'd danced with the Devil back in IIS4 days and have burnt toes].
The charging wont really help congestion on it's own. London is the worst place in the UK to drive round. 1mph is not much fun on a daily basis. Yet London has the best mass transport system in the UK but then again it doesn't have much competition.
The root cause of Uk traffic problems are the insistence that the rail network should be open to competition so we have 8 rail operators competing by running trains to different destinations. How trains in the SE compete with trains in the NW is unclear to me. Instead of decent travel we have bare bones operations where cut corners cost lives.
The road freight operators and subsidised by other road users whereas the railways have to pay in full for their tracks.
A forward sighted govt. would realise that inter-city rail travel should be invested in for the benefit of the people but hey profits not people is the rally cry of the capitalists.
Rail travel should be the mode of choice over 50 miles. Instead it is cheaper to travel by car.
I can drive the family from here to the capital and back [about 150 miles] for about £25. Take the train and we're looking at £120 for the four of us.
And then they wonder why the place of chock full of cars !
I managed to actually skip reading the words and skimmed over the content to see what general principles were being introduced.
That particular paragraph just made me laugh.
What a loser.
All that compiling and shuffling files around is markedly different from my experience.
PHP is inevitable, resistance is futile
no-one mention that PHP runs just fine on IIS
Is Larry a contraction of Lawrence?
I've been doing PHP development for nigh 6 years I think [since just after v4 was released]
:
....
:
php is oft derided for "mixing data & presentation" because in the Learn php in 24 hours style books you get examples like
<?php
if ($something) {
?>
<html> etc
<?php
} else {
?>
<html> otc....
<?php
}
?>
which is really bad style.
if you look through my [modern] code you would see something more like this simplistic example
<?
require_once 'html.class';
requre_once 'database.class';
class page extends html {
function add_links(&$db) {
foreach($db->get_links() as $url=>$txt) {
$this->add_href($url, $txt);
}
}
}
$p = new page();
$db = new database('website');
$p->add_links($db);
echo $p->get();
?>
which would generate a valid html page.
Of course I've got the advantage of building up by database & html class over time but that's what re-usuable code is all about 8)
the thing that stands PHP apart from Perl is that the focus has been on Web development rather than a general purpose language [although recently development has added more command line functionality]. To this end the common things needed for web development are built into the distribution. Database access, IMAP access, treating http:// as a stream, etc.etc.
To non-programmers PHP is the sort of thing that is easy to pick up, I know this from the people I have met that use it. All the examples around have generally been about generating web pages. Perl source code is legendary for it's obscurity. PHP keeps things simple.
It's not a perfect beast. Passing by reference can be awkward, requiring extra non-anonymous variables, and the ugly face of backward comaptibility has meant that keywords & built-ins are inconsistent in name and parameter order.
(
In particular the original array manipulating functions are called stuff like count() whereas if that was introduced today it would be called array_count().
parameter order is a subtle source of confusion
consider
strpos ("abcdef", "d")
give me the position of "d" in "abcdef"
and
explode(" ", "hello world")
split "hello world" using " "
the subject of the function is reversed
not a big deal but it often means a quick trip to the manual to find out which one it is this time.
)
If I was suggesting a programming language to learn programming PHP would not be it, Python or C or Limbo would be my suggestions there.
I prefer to use PHP in cgi mode and use SUXEC in Apache for virtual hosting.
I get mod_perl to read the config data in from a database when Apache starts up.
Our Apache setup (for multiple machines) is then automated with a few HTML forms.
It also give us the advantage of reducing insecurity with other cgi based programs.
not perfect performance wise but I think the tradeoff is acceptable.
not security
NHS patient privacy? What patient privacy!
By John Leyden
Posted: 11/02/2003 at 12:50 GMT
Up to 200,000 requests are made by investigators under false pretences to obtain health information on British patients each year. And most attempts succeed, according to the Foundation for Information Policy Research (FIPR).
consider even something as simple as a file write.
even with C most programs make plenty of assumptions.
When was the last time you wrote code that wrote the data to the kernel buffers, waited until the buffers flush and then read the data back uncached from the device and test it for integrity?
With all those hands
& also "Company Letterhead via fax"
I've encountered both of those as some sort of "security"
clue not required this end
web services are being built on HTTP *because* of proxies.
There's not much reason for most people to have any other net access than Web via proxy.
If you've got every box in the company NATd then you are being hoisted by your own petard really.
Giving Lusers software installation rights on terminals may save you some annoying "but I need MSN" bullshit but when they cram Bonzi Buddy and whatever other crap they can find in there you are risking your network and pushing your support costs up.
I'd rather be seen as some sort of network nazi than have to try and use ssh into a remote site at 1 second per character. I found who was running Napster and since that day I'm the annoying guy that curtails people's "rights" and "freedoms".
If you want a compromise let one machine be a p2p client. You can get Gnutella clients with a web front end so anyone on the LAN can submit queries on the same box and then throttle that box's bandwith during working hours & let it roam free when the bandwith is underutilized.
If people kick up a fuss, sack them.
which was hotly contested