It out performs apache on static file transfers. It's when you start doing serverside processing that Apaches strengths begin to show. Given that both will happily saturate a T1 anyway, I suggest you use other factors to decide
With all this support of deCSS and the like, representing the entire anti-censorship movement, i am curuous as to why the article was censored and posted as "F*cked..."
Because the headlines are syndicated round hundreds of websites, many of whom do not want swearing on their site. You will notice that in the body, which is not syndicated, there is no censorship.
Or maybe I made that up and it's all a big conspiracy
so you must somehow get the MD5 sums from a trusted host (https:// for example).
Since when does running an SSL webserver mean that it is trusted? All it means is that the connection is encrypted, not that the information is any good.
Normally I wouldn't nitpick about this, but in an article about security risks, you'd expect the distinction to be made. Ho Hum
That evening, your service recommends a great restaurant near the hotel and allows you to book a ticket for a concert at Tivoli. Such services exist today for computer users, but combining this with mobile devices opens up new possibilities.
my first thought on reading this was "Tivoli do concerts as well as software?".
My second was "great, more advertising pushed on me". Seriously, why use a mobile phone to look for a restaurant in a street when you can just walk down the street and see what you find? Any restaurant that needs to advertise in tourist guides is a restaurant not worth going to (imho), especially when there are shedloads of fantastic places to eat in all major cities if you look more than ten meters away from the beaten track. If you're in your home town, why rely on an advertising service when you can use the same phone to speak to your friends and ask for recommendations?
The same is true of every other use for WAP. People often joke that there is no point using a WAP website to check something, when it is cheaper and faster to phone the company directly and ask the person at the other end. It's also a hell of a lot more flexible.
Even the next big thing in wap, the idea of location specific content, is already available over SMS or Audio to users of Vodafones traffic system in the UK. And nobody uses it.
The idea of inventing a technology, then working out what it is useful for creates things that aren't useful for anything. Creating technology that there is a demand for creates things that people use. It's the difference between WAP and the internet.
The very fact that this question is being asked says more about WAP than any answers ever could
So the government wants to make programmer liable for lots of new things. So loads of people are going to think to themselves "Shit, it could cost me millions in damages to code something that I loose control of". So nobody is going to code anymore. So you loose a large chunk of the innovation of the largest and most profitable industies in America, which after several years criplles the industry. So they drop the laws and everything works out again.
BLOBS are generally considered a bad thing by DB gurus. There are several reasons for this:
Adding several gigabytes of binary data to a db file makes it a hell of a lot slower to search, and prevents the DB from keeping the whole database in memory
An image stored in a database can't be easily opened by photoshop and the like, wheras a file on a conventional disk (hd, cdrom, tape, whatever) is easy to open
If your database is corrupted you can kiss all that data goodbye (as you say).
Why would anyone leave several gigabytes of archived photos open for an idiot to move around?
Of course, for a home photo album linked to a website you can probably get away with Blobs. For the scale the question seems to be asking about (some kind of professional publication/agency) I don't think they'd be suitable.
Just call it Mozilla 6.0 and release the damn thing. It'll have it's fair share of bugs. So does everything else on the planet. Features that haven't been finalised yet can just be left undocumented. Noone need know that it's not perfect and it'll shut the critics up...
I can only speak from experience of the UK, where CCTV is everywhere. This might not be the case near you, so this probably won't apply.
Now, every major road junction in most major towns/cities in the UK has CCTV cameras watching the traffic flow (you can even watch them in London on the BBC website). These images are being watched (almost) 24/7 for traffic buildup, and the people watching them have to power to change tarffic light sequences on any of the big junctions (and other measures such as lowering speed limits further up the road to reduce traffic buildup etc)
Obviously the lights are sequenced to do the best they can automatically (and change their timings throughout the day to suit traffic flow in/out of the cities), but by putting a human in the loop you can solve problems that computer programmers never envisioned (eg, car accident right next to the junction). Every so often they manually tweak the standard settings to take account of overrides done in the last month
I find it hard to see how a computer system could possibly match this. How can it tell whether a queue building up is caused by bad traffic light sequences or a car breaking down in the middle of the road? How will it know when to give up trying to tweak the lights and just call in a traffic policeman to sort out the mess? How will it know when to phone Local Radio stations to get drivers to avoid the area? How will it know to clear a road so an ambulance can get through? How will it envision one off problems (eg the Superbowl being held in a city probably screws with the traffic that day).
The trick they need to work on is creating systems that assist humans in controlling traffic flow, not trying to do the things humans do best.
Sure, if you want to do something fairly mundane, like deleting entire directories then typing rm -rf foo is the best way to do it. And tasks like deleting specific files from a badly organised filesystem (like some of my harddrives:) is quite often easiest to do in a GUI (click on icon, view file, select it, move on to the next, delete selction). But even something simple like deleting files could sometimes be best done in a Q+A style manner:
# select all image files files selected: foo.gif bar.jpg qux.tiff # not foo.gif "not" is not understood # unselect foo.gif files selected: bar.jpg qux.tiff # select all html documents containing images [...] # backup and delete
Obvioulsy this is a simplistic example, much better would be "backup everything relating to my finances" or "upload customer x's website" followed by a prompt confirming that the computer has understood you, and it happens.
It's more like a RPG than a command line, in that it doesn't use all of english but with a little tiny bit of effort you can adapt to quirks in particular systems (much like you quickly learnt how to use new RPGS). Every step is confirmed and you are aware of what you are doing and where you can go from there, unlike a cli, where you have to lookup command syntax and once a command is typed there is (normally) no prompting for confirmation.
Any systems that do work like this are going to be woefully inefficient at first (much like the first GUI's) and they won't be good for everything, but it'll be great with voice recognition or those times when you don't want to give the computer your undivided attention (like most users most of the time). Anyway, there's no reason why a conventional GUI can't coexist with a system like this.
And if you want linux/bsd/somefreeOS to remain relevant in the next 20 years, I suggest we stop thinking that Bash is the answer to everything and start innovating...
How about a WAP interface? All the major news sites have them BBC, CNN etc.
Go to slashdot.org with a wap phone and you get a wap version of Slashdot. It's only the headlines but who would want to read the comments on a phone anyway?
And surely it can't be too hard to do as I'm sure the slashdot guys would have had the foresight to do all their content management in XML and therefore just need to knock up a quick XSL to do the translation into WML...
Obviously, three years ago they had the foresight to use XML. XML isn't the only way to do things, and it's as easy to dynamicly create WAP pages from a db as it is from XML, and due to some speed issues with XML::Parser in perl, it's a hell of a lot faster too
You know how loads of people moan about/. on a regular basis? "CmdrTaco doesn't do y", "There's too much z", "This is offtopic" etc? Well, in line with the open source ethic, Rusty decided to actually do something about it, and set up his own take on what Slashdot could be.
After about 6 months it had grown and changed massively, with a few thousand users and loads of good discussion. Talk was the emphaisis, rather than news, although it beat Slashdot on several stories. Rusty was trying not to make the mistakes he saw that/. had made. It attracted a good crowd, with loads of good discussion and very little trolling (which was totally deleted rather than being moderated down).
The best thing about it was that the story queue was open; all users were editors too. It worked really well, with everyone willing to accept that a story had got onto the site by merit and not prejudice.
It was great, and if it doesn't return I have no doubt that something else will fill it's place.
(btw, Rusty, if you're reading this, thanks and good luck)
I noticed this earlier. Is it perhaps a precursor to a feature that will allow filtering out of comments with a UID above a specific number(eg 50000)? Could be interesting...
So because some of us lurked for a lot longer before signing up for an account, we're somehow less qualified to comment than someone who signed up for account number 2 but does nothing with it but troll?
As linux became more mainstream, many moaned about various changes that took place within both the system, and the community that surrounds it. Do people really want this to happen to BSD as well?
For example, the UK Academic Network (Janet) is linked to the US using Teleglobe with two (maybe three?) separate fibres. If they go down then we are, in principle, sunk since there are no peering arrangements with other networks.
How ironic that routing problems at teleglobe have left most of the US unavialable from Janet for most of this week:-)
Purchasing connectivity from multiple networks would certainly be the way to go, if 100% uptime is an absolute must. If 99.99% uptime and compensation will do, you might be OK with one.
Ps: I have no idea what I am talking about here, ignore me
Hardly, there is more or less a permanant shortage of WAP phones in the UK due to the high uptake.
Why are Tiny, PC-world, Genie et al giving away these phones for free then? Why does every mobile phone shop I walk past have them piled up in the windows? Why was the consumer price dropped by over a hundred pounds since launch?
The uptake, by both consumers and websites, is not high. But I guess you have to read between the lines of the press-release propoganda of a typical newsroom to work that out.
Wap is wasted on a PDA, especially those that can run something like Advant-Go.
European GSM phones only give you about 2k of bandwidth, so any websurfing (even with WAP) is very slooooow.
WAP really hasn't taken off at all, at least not in the UK. Nokia can't give away the 7110. At the moment, it really isn't a standard that needs supporting.
What's wrong with a Palm Pilot or Handspring Visor? Assuming they work with your mobile phone, they'll do everything you want them to do, and more. Open Source Development tools and a large body of software are already available for them. And they'll work with the mobile you buy next year too. I'm not convinced this Siemens PDA is anything other than a proprietry device. (although I'm probably wrong)
Are you really that desperate to check Slashdot:-)
As internic doesn't have a monopoly on tld's anymore, and there are authorities outside the US, i'm assuming that.mil,.gov &.edu could be obtained internationally nowadays. Anyone know about this?
Nope, they're still controlled by whoever controlled them before, and like.ac.uk or.gov.uk they are almost totally impossible to get hold of unless you are an educational/military/government organisation.
Recent events with internic, icann etc only affected.com,.net and.org, and not any other tlds.
It makes way too much money to go totally non-commercial.
The net as it is wouldn't exist without commercial funding. And it certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as useful. So a totally non-commercial net would be as bad.
It all depends on whether the corparate side of the net can see that if they overregulate the net for their own personal gains they'll be destroying it at the same time.
As long as the net doesn't become nothing but a bland advertsing exercise then interesting things will continue to happen. Otherwise, everyone with any innovation left in them will get bored and start looking for "the next big thing". Which would be a shame cos there's still loads of innovating left to do online.
meanwhile, more saavy users will shun commercial areas (in part) to frequent more obscure websites with informative but more importantly LESS BIASED content.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.quietpc.com
It out performs apache on static file transfers. It's when you start doing serverside processing that Apaches strengths begin to show. Given that both will happily saturate a T1 anyway, I suggest you use other factors to decide
With all this support of deCSS and the like, representing the entire anti-censorship movement, i am curuous as to why the article was censored and posted as "F*cked..."
Because the headlines are syndicated round hundreds of websites, many of whom do not want swearing on their site. You will notice that in the body, which is not syndicated, there is no censorship.
Or maybe I made that up and it's all a big conspiracy
so you must somehow get the MD5 sums from a trusted host (https:// for example).
Since when does running an SSL webserver mean that it is trusted? All it means is that the connection is encrypted, not that the information is any good.
Normally I wouldn't nitpick about this, but in an article about security risks, you'd expect the distinction to be made. Ho Hum
That evening, your service recommends a great restaurant near the hotel and allows you to book a ticket for a concert at Tivoli. Such services exist today for computer users, but combining this with mobile devices opens up new possibilities.
my first thought on reading this was "Tivoli do concerts as well as software?".
My second was "great, more advertising pushed on me". Seriously, why use a mobile phone to look for a restaurant in a street when you can just walk down the street and see what you find? Any restaurant that needs to advertise in tourist guides is a restaurant not worth going to (imho), especially when there are shedloads of fantastic places to eat in all major cities if you look more than ten meters away from the beaten track. If you're in your home town, why rely on an advertising service when you can use the same phone to speak to your friends and ask for recommendations?
The same is true of every other use for WAP. People often joke that there is no point using a WAP website to check something, when it is cheaper and faster to phone the company directly and ask the person at the other end. It's also a hell of a lot more flexible.
Even the next big thing in wap, the idea of location specific content, is already available over SMS or Audio to users of Vodafones traffic system in the UK. And nobody uses it.
The idea of inventing a technology, then working out what it is useful for creates things that aren't useful for anything. Creating technology that there is a demand for creates things that people use. It's the difference between WAP and the internet.
The very fact that this question is being asked says more about WAP than any answers ever could
(like a DVD player into it why the hell do you need to run a DVD player on a video game machine?)
Erm, to play DVDs?
So the government wants to make programmer liable for lots of new things. So loads of people are going to think to themselves "Shit, it could cost me millions in damages to code something that I loose control of". So nobody is going to code anymore. So you loose a large chunk of the innovation of the largest and most profitable industies in America, which after several years criplles the industry. So they drop the laws and everything works out again.
(A simplified view, but...)
BLOBS are generally considered a bad thing by DB gurus. There are several reasons for this:
Of course, for a home photo album linked to a website you can probably get away with Blobs. For the scale the question seems to be asking about (some kind of professional publication/agency) I don't think they'd be suitable.
.02k
Just call it Mozilla 6.0 and release the damn thing. It'll have it's fair share of bugs. So does everything else on the planet. Features that haven't been finalised yet can just be left undocumented. Noone need know that it's not perfect and it'll shut the critics up...
I can only speak from experience of the UK, where CCTV is everywhere. This might not be the case near you, so this probably won't apply.
Now, every major road junction in most major towns/cities in the UK has CCTV cameras watching the traffic flow (you can even watch them in London on the BBC website). These images are being watched (almost) 24/7 for traffic buildup, and the people watching them have to power to change tarffic light sequences on any of the big junctions (and other measures such as lowering speed limits further up the road to reduce traffic buildup etc)
Obviously the lights are sequenced to do the best they can automatically (and change their timings throughout the day to suit traffic flow in/out of the cities), but by putting a human in the loop you can solve problems that computer programmers never envisioned (eg, car accident right next to the junction). Every so often they manually tweak the standard settings to take account of overrides done in the last month
I find it hard to see how a computer system could possibly match this. How can it tell whether a queue building up is caused by bad traffic light sequences or a car breaking down in the middle of the road? How will it know when to give up trying to tweak the lights and just call in a traffic policeman to sort out the mess? How will it know when to phone Local Radio stations to get drivers to avoid the area? How will it know to clear a road so an ambulance can get through? How will it envision one off problems (eg the Superbowl being held in a city probably screws with the traffic that day).
The trick they need to work on is creating systems that assist humans in controlling traffic flow, not trying to do the things humans do best.
Sure, if you want to do something fairly mundane, like deleting entire directories then typing rm -rf foo is the best way to do it. And tasks like deleting specific files from a badly organised filesystem (like some of my harddrives:) is quite often easiest to do in a GUI (click on icon, view file, select it, move on to the next, delete selction). But even something simple like deleting files could sometimes be best done in a Q+A style manner:
# select all image filesfiles selected: foo.gif bar.jpg qux.tiff
# not foo.gif
"not" is not understood
# unselect foo.gif
files selected: bar.jpg qux.tiff
# select all html documents containing images
[...]
# backup and delete
Obvioulsy this is a simplistic example, much better would be "backup everything relating to my finances" or "upload customer x's website" followed by a prompt confirming that the computer has understood you, and it happens.
It's more like a RPG than a command line, in that it doesn't use all of english but with a little tiny bit of effort you can adapt to quirks in particular systems (much like you quickly learnt how to use new RPGS). Every step is confirmed and you are aware of what you are doing and where you can go from there, unlike a cli, where you have to lookup command syntax and once a command is typed there is (normally) no prompting for confirmation.
Any systems that do work like this are going to be woefully inefficient at first (much like the first GUI's) and they won't be good for everything, but it'll be great with voice recognition or those times when you don't want to give the computer your undivided attention (like most users most of the time). Anyway, there's no reason why a conventional GUI can't coexist with a system like this.
And if you want linux/bsd/somefreeOS to remain relevant in the next 20 years, I suggest we stop thinking that Bash is the answer to everything and start innovating...
How about a WAP interface? All the major news sites have them BBC, CNN etc.
Go to slashdot.org with a wap phone and you get a wap version of Slashdot. It's only the headlines but who would want to read the comments on a phone anyway?
And surely it can't be too hard to do as I'm sure the slashdot guys would have had the foresight to do all their content management in XML and therefore just need to knock up a quick XSL to do the translation into WML...
Obviously, three years ago they had the foresight to use XML. XML isn't the only way to do things, and it's as easy to dynamicly create WAP pages from a db as it is from XML, and due to some speed issues with XML::Parser in perl, it's a hell of a lot faster too
We obviously need meta-meta-moderation
Obviously. And meta-meta-meta-meta-moderation. That'll solve the problem. Yup.
</sarcasm >
You know how loads of people moan about /. on a regular basis? "CmdrTaco doesn't do y", "There's too much z", "This is offtopic" etc? Well, in line with the open source ethic, Rusty decided to actually do something about it, and set up his own take on what Slashdot could be.
After about 6 months it had grown and changed massively, with a few thousand users and loads of good discussion. Talk was the emphaisis, rather than news, although it beat Slashdot on several stories. Rusty was trying not to make the mistakes he saw that /. had made. It attracted a good crowd, with loads of good discussion and very little trolling (which was totally deleted rather than being moderated down).
The best thing about it was that the story queue was open; all users were editors too. It worked really well, with everyone willing to accept that a story had got onto the site by merit and not prejudice.
It was great, and if it doesn't return I have no doubt that something else will fill it's place.
(btw, Rusty, if you're reading this, thanks and good luck)
and it appears I now have a +1 bonus, even though my karma is well below 25. Even stranger...
I noticed this earlier. Is it perhaps a precursor to a feature that will allow filtering out of comments with a UID above a specific number(eg 50000)? Could be interesting...
So because some of us lurked for a lot longer before signing up for an account, we're somehow less qualified to comment than someone who signed up for account number 2 but does nothing with it but troll?
interesting logic going on there...
As linux became more mainstream, many moaned about various changes that took place within both the system, and the community that surrounds it. Do people really want this to happen to BSD as well?
just wondering...
not that anyone is ever going to read this comment, but:
I'm not convinced this Siemens PDA is anything other than a proprietry device. (although I'm probably wrong)
looks like I was
For example, the UK Academic Network (Janet) is linked to the US using Teleglobe with two (maybe three?) separate fibres. If they go down then we are, in principle, sunk since there are no peering arrangements with other networks.
How ironic that routing problems at teleglobe have left most of the US unavialable from Janet for most of this week :-)
Purchasing connectivity from multiple networks would certainly be the way to go, if 100% uptime is an absolute must. If 99.99% uptime and compensation will do, you might be OK with one.
Ps: I have no idea what I am talking about here, ignore me
Hardly, there is more or less a permanant shortage of WAP phones in the UK due to the high uptake.
Why are Tiny, PC-world, Genie et al giving away these phones for free then? Why does every mobile phone shop I walk past have them piled up in the windows? Why was the consumer price dropped by over a hundred pounds since launch?
The uptake, by both consumers and websites, is not high. But I guess you have to read between the lines of the press-release propoganda of a typical newsroom to work that out.
Still, why argue? Time will tell.
just some thoughts
As internic doesn't have a monopoly on tld's anymore, and there are authorities outside the US, i'm assuming that .mil, .gov & .edu could be obtained internationally nowadays. Anyone know about this?
Nope, they're still controlled by whoever controlled them before, and like .ac.uk or .gov.uk they are almost totally impossible to get hold of unless you are an educational/military/government organisation.
Recent events with internic, icann etc only affected .com, .net and .org, and not any other tlds.
It makes way too much money to go totally non-commercial.
The net as it is wouldn't exist without commercial funding. And it certainly wouldn't be anywhere near as useful. So a totally non-commercial net would be as bad.
The problem is striking the right balance
It all depends on whether the corparate side of the net can see that if they overregulate the net for their own personal gains they'll be destroying it at the same time.
As long as the net doesn't become nothing but a bland advertsing exercise then interesting things will continue to happen. Otherwise, everyone with any innovation left in them will get bored and start looking for "the next big thing". Which would be a shame cos there's still loads of innovating left to do online.
or maybe I'm being optimistic...
meanwhile, more saavy users will shun commercial areas (in part) to frequent more obscure websites with informative but more importantly LESS BIASED content.
What, really unbiased places like Slashdot?
:-)