How severely do you think AI research is hampered by the very narrow, vertical nature of technology available to researchers. For instance, what if analog computers were widely available or if the linear "fetch-execute" paradigm was not the be-all-end-all constraint of chip design?
Not sure if this is what you mean but I know with AOLserver you can register URL to tcl library routines so that dynamic contents from a query looks static. For instance, you register the script my_write to handle all requests under the fake directory/query:
ns_register_proc/query my_write
Then inside the body of the tcl procedure my_write you parse the rest of the URL and generate the appropriate dynamic content. Lets say you wanted to do some content based on 2 values, instead of a GET URL that looked like:
http://mysite.com/query?val1=x&val2=y
You would have one that looks like:
http://mysite.com/query/x/y/dyn.html
Note that the directory hierarchy and the file name in the URL are completely ficticious (the have no relation to the filesystem of the webserver).
eBay has, in fact, agreements in place with other "meta-auctions" that allow the complying companies to index eBay items. One of eBays concerns was the increasing load being placed on their servers by constant spidering (with 3.5 million items currently up, that's a significant amount of queries). The other, more insidious (or smart business, depending on your point of view) aspect of the agreement that I checked out was that the meta-auction had to display eBay's items on a separate tab from the unwashed masses of Yahoo! and the FreeMarket cartel items. So it isn't really a proper meta-auction after all...
I'm getting in on this a little late but I'm not sure that I agree that the bubble is going to burst. People have been saying that for years now and it hasn't happened. The rules have changed - first mutual funds then on-line trading have made the stock market available to alot of people. Where are these people going to put their money? Are they all going to take it out and put it under their mattress? I think that people are doing that but then they feel stupid after they see everyone making money hand over fist so they put it back in to create the positive feedback loop.
Its doesn't have anything to do with market valuations - its about supply and demand.
Check out that deal that Bruce Perens is running now (unless he's thrown up his hands in disgust and moved on to another project - just kidding Bruce). Technocrat.net or something.
It looks just like Slashdot but its a standard Zope add-on IIRC.
I didn't want to spring all the coin for an office, [T1|T3], servers and all the nonsense that goes along with it. Especially as I didn't know if the idea would work or even what it would take to get it going (I'm good on the geek stuff but am picking up the business stuff as I go). I work from home as a consultant and have a regular income but no large wad of sheckles to jump off the deep end right away. So I figured I'd dip my toes in first to test the water. My rationale was that if it took off I could always get the offices with picture windows looking over the harbor and a net connection as big around as a firehose. But if I borrowed a bunch of money to put the carriage before the horse, the clock would be loudly ticking from day 1.
My first thought was to run the web server from my home over my cable modem but I got some pretty bad vibes off the Roadrunner gal when I called her. She knew what kind of antics I was up to and was not too forthcoming with a static IP address so I moved on.
I decided on AOLserver as my server platform after poking around and finally reading Phil Greenspun's So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs. It is a free (beer and speech) web server that plays nice with different databases, runs on Linux (and other Unices, but not NT) and has some groovy web-based admin features (at least it did til they went open source... but I digress). I found an outfit that would set me up on one of their boxes with a shell account and my own server process (I think a flower shop also has a couple of static pages on the same box, but they are good neighbors and don't make much noise). The price was very reasonable, certainly within the range that if it was a total flop I would consider the money well spent on the experience gained. I'd imagine that if I cashed in my 401(k) and borrowed a bunch of money off of friends and family and it flopped I would be rather bitter. This way I got the chance to design and develop my software in a pretty pressure-free environment which was nice. Oh, and the guys that run the hosting deal do all my backups for me (at least they tell me that they do:) ).
The setup I've evolved is that one of the Linux machines in my office (at my house) is my development platform. It is configured as closely as I can get it to the one at the hosting service. Since the application is live now, I do all my development on this machine, test everything out and then check it into CVS. I then telnet over to the live machine and update the tcl scripts over there. It seems to work out well, I always have the most up-to-date code on opposite ends of the continent and there is a minimum of disruption to the service.
There was certainly a lot more to the process than I suspected when I first started on this back in January. While I was able to design and build a rugged application in the time that I allocated, other things like marketing, support and all the other parts that go into making a business go are a new challenge. I'm not pulling the all-night code-a-thons like I was in the first six months but there are always new challenges popping up.
On the whole, I don't know if this was the way to go as the story is really just starting. From what I hear in other discussions here and elsewhere there aren't that many big piles of money lying around for geeks with little business experience and a good idea so I'm not sure as I had much of a choice. I *have* heard stories about people with good ideas wasting a lot of time chasing this money, only to have it yanked away at the last minute so I've just steered clear of it for the time being. I guess I am at a point now that I can start looking around for a CEO and the rest of a team that can take me to the next step.
As far as advice goes, I can only suggest you go for it. Read forums like this (I really enjoyed the VC/. discussion a while back) but take what you get here with a grain of salt. People who advise you as to particular machine configurations obviously have already completed the long journey to having a successful business or (more likely) are just working for someone who has and only see the finished product. You have a lot more important things to worry about than how much memory your webserver has! Your development environment is a biggie and is worth spending the time to get something you are comfortable with (php seems pretty sweet, and no-one can talk bad about the old PERL/Apache warhorse).
Me, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. I'm not getting crushed with hits yet, though traffic has been increasing as I get the hang of the marketing thing (left to my own devices I would rather code than talk on the phone). My site has a solid revenue model and the backend design can be tweaked to fit lots of different applications if I decide to follow the gourd rather than the sandle. I currently haven't had to give any of it away to keep it afloat. I have had to push back my IPO schedule a bit though.;) I've been promoted from "geek with good idea asking for advice" to "geek with nifty web application". Now for the next step up to "stinky rich geek with Ferraris and tropical island". Hmmm.
Re:All sorts of exciting new security implications
on
RoboFly
·
· Score: 1
Its not insignificant in large scale applications. The overhead of starting a new process, creating any database connections necessary, doing whatever processing necessary, closing the database connection and destroying the process is pretty significant when compared to keeping an interpreter and set of scripts in memory. Its also easier to pool database connections in the interpreted model.
IANAL, but there really seems to be two levels that this conversation is moving on. On the one hand is the GPL giving equal footing to all men (and women). On the other is the almighty Linus sprinkling "holy penguin pee" to make patches "official". When Linus dies (as most of us tend to do at one time or another), is there going to be gourds and sandals left and right to follow? What if AC and Linus are on the same plane that crashes?
(did you notice I squeezed 2 Monty Python references into 1 post?)
The real reason for the population rate decline in advanced society is the advances in public health, sanitation, etc.
In typical pre-modern civilizations where the was no social safety net to look after older individuals who could no longer support themselves, people counted on adult children to care for them in their old age.
It therefore behooved you to make sure that you had children who reached adulthood and were therefore around to care for you when you got old. In societies with very high infant mortality rates and low life expectancies you had to have 7 or 8 kids to statistically expect to have one of them be around for you after 30+ years.
When public health, sanitation, etc. suddenly improves in countries, you have a whole generation of families with all 7 or 8 kids reaching adulthood. Hence your population explosion.
The flat birthrates of established 1st world countries reflects the general recognition of this principle and within a generation or two of the other areas of the globe reaching prosperity we will see the global population decline, then steady.
Therefore one must conclude that sharing the wealth between the haves and the have-not nations benefits us all. Do what you can to promote economic parity in the world!
Re:This book changed my life
on
Snow Crash
·
· Score: 1
Ask Neil Stephenson is a great idea!
I finished reading this book a couple of weeks ago and very much enjoyed it (I'm into the Diamond Age now). The virus stuff was a bit of a stretch I thought. Though there was plenty of excellent history that took you from Eden forward (it was obvious that this was the central theme that the novel was crafted around), the crisis the characters deal with in the book seemed loosely tacked on to this solid core idea. There seemed to be a couple of different (related?) viruses going on, plus some sort of meta-virus. While Neil really blows you out of the water with his interpretations of the future and his often amusing style, I thought he could have sewn together the storyline a bit better. My feeling at the end was that of
Neil's brother spends many years at university studying ancient civilizations and the various Fall from Eden variations shared by them.
Neil and his brother get drunk in a bar one night and his brother starts going on about it.
Neil remembers much of it the next day and when he gets home has his brother mail him some notes
Neil uses said notes as the librarian's script and cobbles together his rocking world around them.
This is all, unfortunately, going to come back to Visa and MasterCard. As part of the electronic transaction where you type your credit card number in to get your new pair of duck boots from LL Bean, the verification/charging process will include the application of the appropriate taxes by the credit card middle men (there are actually several players behind this curtain). The vendor won't have to deal with it at all (which they don't want to anyway) and the big transaction managers will have a couple of pennies stick to their hands as the money goes into the appropriate government coffers.
Remember the Microsoft eWallet story that was floating around the other day? I can assure you that there are eyes in Talking Moon fixed firmly on this issue right now.
Solid has a nice "black box" database that is pretty easy to run right out of the box. Their web-site is solidtech.com. They have had Linux support for a long time but have recently gotten a bit big for their britches and declared that they aren't really interested in selling small licensing packages any more. No one has really been able to figure out exactly what they are up to, and there have been some very heated threads on the Solid support list lately.
My experience is that Solid is a very robust, easy to set up, low maintenance RDBMS (with referential integretity checks, transactions, etc.) that isn't open source. They seem to now be fancying themselves a new Oracle so I'd just stick with Oracle if you need something out of this class. Kinda sad because Solid has been around with Linux since the early days as a low cost solution, but new management has come in determined to tear the company down, it would appear...
Is it just my Netscape 4.04 or is their site garbled all to hell?
Also, am I just retarded in not being able to figure out how to post a top level reply to a story? I am looking at the story in nested mode with a threshold of 0.
The "tug" is towards the sun, but that can just mean a slowing of the orbital speed, not necessarily a gravital explanation.
What about this dark matter that you hear mutterings about on occasion. IIRC, they came out a while back with the theory that there was a lot more of it than they had originally thought.
Slashdot Mirror
ns_register_proc /query my_write
Then inside the body of the tcl procedure my_write you parse the rest of the URL and generate the appropriate dynamic content. Lets say you wanted to do some content based on 2 values, instead of a GET URL that looked like:
http://mysite.com/query?val1=x&val2=y
You would have one that looks like:
http://mysite.com/query/x/y/dyn.html
Note that the directory hierarchy and the file name in the URL are completely ficticious (the have no relation to the filesystem of the webserver).
On-line auction fundraisers!
Its doesn't have anything to do with market valuations - its about supply and demand.
Just my uninformed 2 euros.
It looks just like Slashdot but its a standard Zope add-on IIRC.
http://communitybids.com
I didn't want to spring all the coin for an office, [T1|T3], servers and all the nonsense that goes along with it. Especially as I didn't know if the idea would work or even what it would take to get it going (I'm good on the geek stuff but am picking up the business stuff as I go). I work from home as a consultant and have a regular income but no large wad of sheckles to jump off the deep end right away. So I figured I'd dip my toes in first to test the water. My rationale was that if it took off I could always get the offices with picture windows looking over the harbor and a net connection as big around as a firehose. But if I borrowed a bunch of money to put the carriage before the horse, the clock would be loudly ticking from day 1.
My first thought was to run the web server from my home over my cable modem but I got some pretty bad vibes off the Roadrunner gal when I called her. She knew what kind of antics I was up to and was not too forthcoming with a static IP address so I moved on.
I decided on AOLserver as my server platform after poking around and finally reading Phil Greenspun's So you want to join the world's grubbiest club: Internet entrepreneurs. It is a free (beer and speech) web server that plays nice with different databases, runs on Linux (and other Unices, but not NT) and has some groovy web-based admin features (at least it did til they went open source... but I digress). I found an outfit that would set me up on one of their boxes with a shell account and my own server process (I think a flower shop also has a couple of static pages on the same box, but they are good neighbors and don't make much noise). The price was very reasonable, certainly within the range that if it was a total flop I would consider the money well spent on the experience gained. I'd imagine that if I cashed in my 401(k) and borrowed a bunch of money off of friends and family and it flopped I would be rather bitter. This way I got the chance to design and develop my software in a pretty pressure-free environment which was nice. Oh, and the guys that run the hosting deal do all my backups for me (at least they tell me that they do :) ).
The setup I've evolved is that one of the Linux machines in my office (at my house) is my development platform. It is configured as closely as I can get it to the one at the hosting service. Since the application is live now, I do all my development on this machine, test everything out and then check it into CVS. I then telnet over to the live machine and update the tcl scripts over there. It seems to work out well, I always have the most up-to-date code on opposite ends of the continent and there is a minimum of disruption to the service.
There was certainly a lot more to the process than I suspected when I first started on this back in January. While I was able to design and build a rugged application in the time that I allocated, other things like marketing, support and all the other parts that go into making a business go are a new challenge. I'm not pulling the all-night code-a-thons like I was in the first six months but there are always new challenges popping up.
On the whole, I don't know if this was the way to go as the story is really just starting. From what I hear in other discussions here and elsewhere there aren't that many big piles of money lying around for geeks with little business experience and a good idea so I'm not sure as I had much of a choice. I *have* heard stories about people with good ideas wasting a lot of time chasing this money, only to have it yanked away at the last minute so I've just steered clear of it for the time being. I guess I am at a point now that I can start looking around for a CEO and the rest of a team that can take me to the next step.
As far as advice goes, I can only suggest you go for it. Read forums like this (I really enjoyed the VC /. discussion a while back) but take what you get here with a grain of salt. People who advise you as to particular machine configurations obviously have already completed the long journey to having a successful business or (more likely) are just working for someone who has and only see the finished product. You have a lot more important things to worry about than how much memory your webserver has! Your development environment is a biggie and is worth spending the time to get something you are comfortable with (php seems pretty sweet, and no-one can talk bad about the old PERL/Apache warhorse).
Me, I'm just kind of making it up as I go along. I'm not getting crushed with hits yet, though traffic has been increasing as I get the hang of the marketing thing (left to my own devices I would rather code than talk on the phone). My site has a solid revenue model and the backend design can be tweaked to fit lots of different applications if I decide to follow the gourd rather than the sandle. I currently haven't had to give any of it away to keep it afloat. I have had to push back my IPO schedule a bit though. ;) I've been promoted from "geek with good idea asking for advice" to "geek with nifty web application". Now for the next step up to "stinky rich geek with Ferraris and tropical island". Hmmm.
Its not insignificant in large scale applications. The overhead of starting a new process, creating any database connections necessary, doing whatever processing necessary, closing the database connection and destroying the process is pretty significant when compared to keeping an interpreter and set of scripts in memory. Its also easier to pool database connections in the interpreted model.
(did you notice I squeezed 2 Monty Python references into 1 post?)
In typical pre-modern civilizations where the was no social safety net to look after older individuals who could no longer support themselves, people counted on adult children to care for them in their old age.
It therefore behooved you to make sure that you had children who reached adulthood and were therefore around to care for you when you got old. In societies with very high infant mortality rates and low life expectancies you had to have 7 or 8 kids to statistically expect to have one of them be around for you after 30+ years.
When public health, sanitation, etc. suddenly improves in countries, you have a whole generation of families with all 7 or 8 kids reaching adulthood. Hence your population explosion.
The flat birthrates of established 1st world countries reflects the general recognition of this principle and within a generation or two of the other areas of the globe reaching prosperity we will see the global population decline, then steady.
Therefore one must conclude that sharing the wealth between the haves and the have-not nations benefits us all. Do what you can to promote economic parity in the world!
I finished reading this book a couple of weeks ago and very much enjoyed it (I'm into the Diamond Age now). The virus stuff was a bit of a stretch I thought. Though there was plenty of excellent history that took you from Eden forward (it was obvious that this was the central theme that the novel was crafted around), the crisis the characters deal with in the book seemed loosely tacked on to this solid core idea. There seemed to be a couple of different (related?) viruses going on, plus some sort of meta-virus. While Neil really blows you out of the water with his interpretations of the future and his often amusing style, I thought he could have sewn together the storyline a bit better. My feeling at the end was that of
Remember the Microsoft eWallet story that was floating around the other day? I can assure you that there are eyes in Talking Moon fixed firmly on this issue right now.
My experience is that Solid is a very robust, easy to set up, low maintenance RDBMS (with referential integretity checks, transactions, etc.) that isn't open source. They seem to now be fancying themselves a new Oracle so I'd just stick with Oracle if you need something out of this class. Kinda sad because Solid has been around with Linux since the early days as a low cost solution, but new management has come in determined to tear the company down, it would appear...
-Marv Albert
Also, am I just retarded in not being able to figure out how to post a top level reply to a story? I am looking at the story in nested mode with a threshold of 0.
What about this dark matter that you hear mutterings about on occasion. IIRC, they came out a while back with the theory that there was a lot more of it than they had originally thought.