I'm good with the command line; I use bash all the time at home and telnetted into a Solaris system all the time in college. How is FreeBSD in terms of maintainability of things like NFS, Samba and Apache servers?
The last release of FreeBSD I've used was 4.3 STABLE and I prefer it over Linux as a server OS. I'm just as comfortable on the command line as I am with a GUI so configuring the daemons (NFS, Samba, Apache, Snort, etc.) was rather easy. I've always been able to find documentation for the OS and any packages I chose to install along with it. If you can't find answers to questions in the documentation, there are numerous people on the FreeBSD mailing lists willing to help out. Just make sure you search the mailing list archives before you post a question. Many of the people on the list are professionals working with the OS daily and don't have time to answer the same question 10 times. FreeBSD has proven to be very easy to work with and configure, IMHO. I think you'll be happy with it.
Come on! This guy is the kernel maintainer? I know I will probably get modded down as flamebait because I am not singing his praises about being concise and to the point, but that interview was awful! I can't believe he is suppose to be the point of contact of anybody (read IBM, HP etc) that want to submit patches to be in the 2.4 tree. It looks like he spent about 10 minutes answering these questions, I can only hope he takes his job maintaining the kernel seriously. This interview certainly doesn't instill confidence in his ability to maintain the tree.
Look at it this way, maybe he was preoccupied with kernel updates (or a game of CS) at the same time he attempted to answer the interview questions. If that is the case, he has good concentration at the very least.
I know you are looking for something not language specific to explain programming concepts but I'm not aware of a book that doesn't use a specific language to give examples of its concepts. Therefore, I'd like to offer when I feel is the next best thing for a new programmer. I read through Learning Python a few months ago and I found it to be a very easy-reading tutorial for the Python programming language, which is simple to learn in itself. The Python tutorial does a decent job of explaining the features and syntax of Python but it may be a little too raw for nonprogrammers. The book on the other hand does a thorough job of explaining the language. Many people agree that Python is an ideal first language because it keeps things simple and teaches the basics of OOP well. I sort of wish I had started out with Python as my first language instead of learning C++, as learning C++ and other more advanced/complicated languages would have been much easier to grasp the first time around. Your mileage may vary.
I agree that SQL should be the first language to learn since almost everything on the web is database driven. I've used the following tutorial to brush up on my SQL skills and it has helped me tremendously. I especially like the online interpreter so you can build queries and see their results online without having to install a database locally on your computer. Check it out!
I doubt Chiropractors claimed to be able to cure deafness, and if so, I would guess it was as foolish as when medical doctors used blood-letting to cure damn near everything a long time ago when medical science was in its infancy.
However, we do offer a class to cure cowadice so you don't have to hide behind your AC posts.
...that I would recommend chiropractic, proper stretching techniques, and massage long before I would recommend drugs. Pain killers and muscle relaxers don't fix the problem, they just mask it. Most people who sit a computer all day have poor posture and much of their pain would be relieved if they corrected their posture.
Here is a bad analogy for you: If the CPU fan in your PC started making a bunch of noise, would you rather put head phones on so you can't hear the noise or would you rather fix the problem before the fan dies and your CPU overheats?
The last link above may prove to be the most useful as it looks at the problem of back pain not only from holistical view but also from a medicinal view.
I'm in the same position that you are in but instead of looking for online courses, I purchased a book. Let me recommend Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig. It's very easy to read and starts by teaching you how to program in C++ using the STL. It takes a rather uncommon approach to teaching C++ in that it doesn't teach C principles before diving into the guts of C++. While taking a full class load at college and working part time, reading a book works better for me than an online class would. With an online course, as in a virtual classroom environment, I'd have trouble fitting that into my crazy schedule. The book I can read wherever I am whether I have a computer around or not. Not only that but I believe you only have access to the online courses for a period of time after which you need to pay again if you'd like to take the courses a second time in the future. With a book, you can go back and read it over and over again.
Being brand new to Java programming and not knowing the specifics of your project, I definitely wouldn't be the best authority on this. But the question I have is this: couldn't you write the application in Java and use it both as an applet and a standalone application? It seems to me that this would appease both parties in this case as well as eliminate a lot of porting efforts if you ever decide to roll out your application to other platforms.
I love to ask questions like these to telemarketers and refuse to tell them who they are speaking with unless they first tell me who they are. Unfortunately, they usually hang up before you can get your questions answered. That is why I wish there was some way to tell where they were calling from and who was calling. Telemarketers should be forced to use Caller ID that spans all phone companies so you never see the "Out of Area" message on your Caller ID display just because the telemarketer has another phone provider or is in another state. That's my $0.02.
I assume that what you mean by "catholic rules" is that they enforce filtering by default. If you had cared to do any investigation you may have found rather quickly in their FAQ that you have the option of opting out of being subjected to "catholic rules" (filtering). Are you still having the Church's rules forced on you if you are able to opt out of them and roam the Internet unfiltered?
Then where would you draw the line? Should we stop any form of health care since curing someone's ailments "is a step toward immortality," is it not?
Virtually all of the cures for disease and common ailments have been the result of experiments and studies that are an example of "a step toward immortality," in your own words.
Who is to say that they are not hiding things from us? I would be extremely suprised if the government WASN'T hiding anything from us. They may have more devious methods of intercepting information (i.e. Echelon) that we do not know about (yet) and are not about to tell us because of "National Security" or the fear of an even greater backlash than the one legislation like that detailed above will cause. All I'm saying is that when have we known our government to fully disclose what they were doing or planned on doing? And if there were cases of where they practiced full discloser, how would we know?
As one person has already commented, this proposed idea of forcing people to give over their keys and installing mandatory back doors in ISPs for the government in NZ is like taking guns away from American citizens -- only law enforcement and criminals would have weapons. In this case, government would have access through your ISP's back door, but it's only a matter of time before crackers figure out how to slip through the back door as well. If government thinks that won't happen, they are foolish. Hackers have repeatedly been able to penetrate their defenses without a back door. Cracking ISPs will just become all that much easier.
It's sad that governments that don't understand technology or more specifically, the Internet have to pass legislation to impede its growth so they can catch up with the times.
We decided on Webpipe.net to host our local soccer league's web site. Webpipe.net has proven themselves to be very capable of hosting small, medium, and large sites alike. Our entire site was up and running within an hour of when we paid our first monthly installment. Their support staff is very professional and very helpful with any change we needed to make (administrative-wise) while we tweaked our set up. Let's face it, if the support staff isn't excellent then it really doesn't matter what services they offer or the price you pay to have your site hosted by them, does it? Webpipe offers all of the services you'd usually find in a hosting service - Linux web servers running Apache, PHP, SSL, Perl, MySQL, Postgres, Java, unlimited web-based e-mail accounts, POP3 accounts, etc.
My house has bars on the windows put there by the landlord. They do a reliable job of protecting me against petty theives. But I would not appreciate neighbors breaking into my house by picking the locks to demonstrate to me that it could be done. I already know it isn't perfect. So in following the logic of your analogy, you would rather ignore the potential security issues of your house and run the risk of a malicious intruder breaking in instead of a non-malicious neighbor. If your neighbor had not have broken into your house and TOLD you about it, there was a very good chance that a malicious person could have been breaking into your house without your knowledge for some time, putting you and everyone else in your house in danger. Do you follow my analogy? Yes, public disclosure of security vulnerabilities does make people with malicious intent aware of the problem. But public disclosure also helps resolve security vulnerabilities quicker since the corporations have customers putting pressure on them to fix the problem. It also informs the masses who may be able to come up with a solution much quicker than the corporation whose product is affected. Granted, public disclosure does "open the door" for anyone until a patch is available, but who is to say that a malicious person hasn't already found the security vulnerability and has been using it to his advantage? In that scenerio, public disclosure might be the only thing that directs attention to the problem. That's my take on the subject at least.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm good with the command line; I use bash all the time at home and telnetted into a Solaris system all the time in college. How is FreeBSD in terms of maintainability of things like NFS, Samba and Apache servers?
The last release of FreeBSD I've used was 4.3 STABLE and I prefer it over Linux as a server OS. I'm just as comfortable on the command line as I am with a GUI so configuring the daemons (NFS, Samba, Apache, Snort, etc.) was rather easy. I've always been able to find documentation for the OS and any packages I chose to install along with it. If you can't find answers to questions in the documentation, there are numerous people on the FreeBSD mailing lists willing to help out. Just make sure you search the mailing list archives before you post a question. Many of the people on the list are professionals working with the OS daily and don't have time to answer the same question 10 times. FreeBSD has proven to be very easy to work with and configure, IMHO. I think you'll be happy with it.
Come on! This guy is the kernel maintainer? I know I will probably get modded down as flamebait because I am not singing his praises about being concise and to the point, but that interview was awful! I can't believe he is suppose to be the point of contact of anybody (read IBM, HP etc) that want to submit patches to be in the 2.4 tree. It looks like he spent about 10 minutes answering these questions, I can only hope he takes his job maintaining the kernel seriously. This interview certainly doesn't instill confidence in his ability to maintain the tree.
Look at it this way, maybe he was preoccupied with kernel updates (or a game of CS) at the same time he attempted to answer the interview questions. If that is the case, he has good concentration at the very least.
I know you are looking for something not language specific to explain programming concepts but I'm not aware of a book that doesn't use a specific language to give examples of its concepts. Therefore, I'd like to offer when I feel is the next best thing for a new programmer. I read through Learning Python a few months ago and I found it to be a very easy-reading tutorial for the Python programming language, which is simple to learn in itself. The Python tutorial does a decent job of explaining the features and syntax of Python but it may be a little too raw for nonprogrammers. The book on the other hand does a thorough job of explaining the language. Many people agree that Python is an ideal first language because it keeps things simple and teaches the basics of OOP well. I sort of wish I had started out with Python as my first language instead of learning C++, as learning C++ and other more advanced/complicated languages would have been much easier to grasp the first time around. Your mileage may vary.
I agree that SQL should be the first language to learn since almost everything on the web is database driven. I've used the following tutorial to brush up on my SQL skills and it has helped me tremendously. I especially like the online interpreter so you can build queries and see their results online without having to install a database locally on your computer. Check it out!
As a BS destroyer, I have to say... http://www.chirobase.org/
As an open-minded person, I have to say... click here for a nonbiased look at chiropractic.
See this site for an unbiased view of the strengths and weaknesses of Chiropractic.
I doubt Chiropractors claimed to be able to cure deafness, and if so, I would guess it was as foolish as when medical doctors used blood-letting to cure damn near everything a long time ago when medical science was in its infancy.
However, we do offer a class to cure cowadice so you don't have to hide behind your AC posts.
...that I would recommend chiropractic, proper stretching techniques, and massage long before I would recommend drugs. Pain killers and muscle relaxers don't fix the problem, they just mask it. Most people who sit a computer all day have poor posture and much of their pain would be relieved if they corrected their posture.
Here is a bad analogy for you: If the CPU fan in your PC started making a bunch of noise, would you rather put head phones on so you can't hear the noise or would you rather fix the problem before the fan dies and your CPU overheats?
I can't speak as intelligently on the topic as a DC yet so I will offer you a few links to people who can:. html b ack-pain.htm
http://www.chiroweb.com/find/tellmeabout/backpain
http://www.holisticonline.com/Chiropractic/chiro_
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/backpain.html
The last link above may prove to be the most useful as it looks at the problem of back pain not only from holistical view but also from a medicinal view.
I'm in the same position that you are in but instead of looking for online courses, I purchased a book. Let me recommend Accelerated C++ by Andrew Koenig. It's very easy to read and starts by teaching you how to program in C++ using the STL. It takes a rather uncommon approach to teaching C++ in that it doesn't teach C principles before diving into the guts of C++. While taking a full class load at college and working part time, reading a book works better for me than an online class would. With an online course, as in a virtual classroom environment, I'd have trouble fitting that into my crazy schedule. The book I can read wherever I am whether I have a computer around or not. Not only that but I believe you only have access to the online courses for a period of time after which you need to pay again if you'd like to take the courses a second time in the future. With a book, you can go back and read it over and over again.
Being brand new to Java programming and not knowing the specifics of your project, I definitely wouldn't be the best authority on this. But the question I have is this: couldn't you write the application in Java and use it both as an applet and a standalone application? It seems to me that this would appease both parties in this case as well as eliminate a lot of porting efforts if you ever decide to roll out your application to other platforms.
I love to ask questions like these to telemarketers and refuse to tell them who they are speaking with unless they first tell me who they are. Unfortunately, they usually hang up before you can get your questions answered. That is why I wish there was some way to tell where they were calling from and who was calling. Telemarketers should be forced to use Caller ID that spans all phone companies so you never see the "Out of Area" message on your Caller ID display just because the telemarketer has another phone provider or is in another state. That's my $0.02.
I assume that what you mean by "catholic rules" is that they enforce filtering by default. If you had cared to do any investigation you may have found rather quickly in their FAQ that you have the option of opting out of being subjected to "catholic rules" (filtering). Are you still having the Church's rules forced on you if you are able to opt out of them and roam the Internet unfiltered?
Then where would you draw the line? Should we stop any form of health care since curing someone's ailments "is a step toward immortality," is it not?
Virtually all of the cures for disease and common ailments have been the result of experiments and studies that are an example of "a step toward immortality," in your own words.
Who is to say that they are not hiding things from us? I would be extremely suprised if the government WASN'T hiding anything from us. They may have more devious methods of intercepting information (i.e. Echelon) that we do not know about (yet) and are not about to tell us because of "National Security" or the fear of an even greater backlash than the one legislation like that detailed above will cause. All I'm saying is that when have we known our government to fully disclose what they were doing or planned on doing? And if there were cases of where they practiced full discloser, how would we know?
As one person has already commented, this proposed idea of forcing people to give over their keys and installing mandatory back doors in ISPs for the government in NZ is like taking guns away from American citizens -- only law enforcement and criminals would have weapons. In this case, government would have access through your ISP's back door, but it's only a matter of time before crackers figure out how to slip through the back door as well. If government thinks that won't happen, they are foolish. Hackers have repeatedly been able to penetrate their defenses without a back door. Cracking ISPs will just become all that much easier.
It's sad that governments that don't understand technology or more specifically, the Internet have to pass legislation to impede its growth so they can catch up with the times.
Try Webpipe.net. They offer Postgres, Apache + PHP4 (among other mods), and allow you to use SSH to connect to their Linux web server.
I've been very pleased with the level of support and performance I've received so far.
We decided on Webpipe.net to host our local soccer league's web site. Webpipe.net has proven themselves to be very capable of hosting small, medium, and large sites alike. Our entire site was up and running within an hour of when we paid our first monthly installment. Their support staff is very professional and very helpful with any change we needed to make (administrative-wise) while we tweaked our set up. Let's face it, if the support staff isn't excellent then it really doesn't matter what services they offer or the price you pay to have your site hosted by them, does it? Webpipe offers all of the services you'd usually find in a hosting service - Linux web servers running Apache, PHP, SSL, Perl, MySQL, Postgres, Java, unlimited web-based e-mail accounts, POP3 accounts, etc.
My house has bars on the windows put there by the landlord. They do a reliable job of protecting me against petty theives. But I would not appreciate neighbors breaking into my house by picking the locks to demonstrate to me that it could be done. I already know it isn't perfect. So in following the logic of your analogy, you would rather ignore the potential security issues of your house and run the risk of a malicious intruder breaking in instead of a non-malicious neighbor. If your neighbor had not have broken into your house and TOLD you about it, there was a very good chance that a malicious person could have been breaking into your house without your knowledge for some time, putting you and everyone else in your house in danger. Do you follow my analogy? Yes, public disclosure of security vulnerabilities does make people with malicious intent aware of the problem. But public disclosure also helps resolve security vulnerabilities quicker since the corporations have customers putting pressure on them to fix the problem. It also informs the masses who may be able to come up with a solution much quicker than the corporation whose product is affected. Granted, public disclosure does "open the door" for anyone until a patch is available, but who is to say that a malicious person hasn't already found the security vulnerability and has been using it to his advantage? In that scenerio, public disclosure might be the only thing that directs attention to the problem. That's my take on the subject at least.