Most developers probably don't even know how to search CPAN or install a module from it (or PEAR for PHP). So they roll their own inferior solution. Those who have spent the three minutes reading the docs are getting an incredible benefit.
I think this is true. Add Java to that list -- which is ironic because Java was supposed to make code reuse so much easier. Better, more descriptive, more searchable docs would help. Not that I'm any better. I wish I knew better how to find what I need.
Don't *bring* a computer to college. Wait until you get there, see what you need, and see what's available. Because there's so much demand, college towns are always full of cheap computers, new and used. Plus every school has it geek crowd, who are always buying, selling, upgrading, and trading. So cheap computers are everywhere. It's even better if you don't need the latest/greatest. If all you need is email, word processing, and netsurfing, you can make use of the cast-offs that people have trouble *giving* away.
If this turns out *not* to be the case, you can always order what you need from Dell, IBM, or whoever. Save money by ordering refurbs, and don't forget the official company auctions on eBay, where you get a full warranty and everything.
Honestly, I don't know why Red Hat and others include sendmail.
Because for better or worse, it's "the standard." It's the one most professional sysadmins are familiar with, and it's the one most other internet apps are integrated with.
I've been using Postfix, and it's a lot less complex. Theoretically that makes it easier and better. But every new admin/programmer has to learn it, while they already know Sendmail.
There are dozens of Outlook work-alikes, and they're all alike enough that no "retraining" should be necessary. If people can operate an elevator well enough to get to the right floor, they can operate these programs. Geez.
I wonder if any bank would lend me 25 billion dollars to build one?
No, but if you have some collateral like a farm, they might lend you a million or so for a big windmill. That will take care of all your personal power needs, and pay for itself with what you can sell back to the grid. Plenty of wind in Oklahoma...
They just covered this topic on Ted Koppel's Nightline. Barry Diller (who is *against* this deregulation, BTW) appeared along with 1 or 2 other big players. Michael Powell was supposed to appear too, but conveniently cancelled. I say "conveniently" because I really think he's trying to quell the debate now that it's gathered steam, and move forward June 2 with no resistance.
No one in Hollywood pays taxes. Half the film industry runs "under the table", and the other half is always showing losses. And now with file sharing, they'll never have profits!
There are those of us who would actually use cheeper more eco-friendly forms of transportation if it was available. People like my self would invest the the expence of using natural gas if it wasn't for the lack of filling stations. But I personaly can't refuel on it unless I drive roughly 40miles away, making it none too practical.
You *can* have convenience with natural gas -- by installing a refueling compressor in your garage. They *are* available for home users. I'm not sure how much they cost -- probably a couple thousand bucks. Of course it should cost less, but that's how it goes with these things -- they're always marked up several hundred percent. The bigger hassle is probably road taxes. Depending on which state you're in, you may have to file a road tax return, and/or get your mileage verified by some nitwit inspector who doesn't return phone calls, etc.
I really thought that Venice was a really inappropriate example. I've spent a couple of days there, but it seems it's not really much of a real, functioning city. All the businesses I saw there were ice cream shops, jewelry stores, little restaurants, or museums. Just touristy stuff....and homes worth many millions of dollars that have been in families for generations. It's definately not the real world, or a place where "worker bees" reside. It's a lousy example.
Better to look at places like Hamburg or Amsterdam, or the original parts of Irvine, CA. Or look at Victoria, BC, which has more bike commuters than any city in North America.
Ever try and ride a bike with 10 bags of groceries?
I do it all the time, and it's simply not a problem. Maybe not 10 bags, but the equvalent of 5 easily. If I bought one of those little trailers I could do 10 if I wanted to.
Conspiracy theories abound about GM and Big Oil breaking up LA's trolley system. The fact is that ridership had fallen to near zero because practically everyone was driving by the late 1940s. The city kept the trolleys running at a tremendous loss for several years because "it was the right thing to do." The final death knell came when angry auto commuters pressured City Hall to remove the damned trolleys because they were blocking traffic.
GM and Standard Oil did buy the trolley lines way before that -- not to break them up, but to get a piece of the transportation pie in a rapidly growing city. By getting their foot in the door with the trolley system, GM ensured getting other city contracts for buses, fire trucks, etc. And oil companies back then were invested in everything under the sun, especially commercial real estate ventures which the trolley lines served.
Here's the problem. Make all the claims you want about the great convenience of public transportation, but nothing--nothing--NYC has beats the convenience of getting in your car, pulling right into a parking spot 100ft from the store (one of dozens of spots available), putting your purchases in your trunk, and then pulling right back up to your abode. This is city life in Atlanta. You don't walk anywhere, ever.
Yeah, that's why everyone in Atlanta weighs 300LB! In the rest of the South, too. I believe Houston is statistically the fattest city in America, followed by Richmond, VA. That's what you get when you have good-old-boy, no-rules, auto-centric development. No one walks, and everyone's fat. It breaks my heart to see middle aged (not old) people in Wal-Mart, riding those electric scooter things because they're too fat to walk. You just don't see that in NY, LA, SF, London or Paris. But in the South it's everywhere.
What you want is a content management system, or CMS. These do exactly what you're talking about. There are a whole slew of them out there, free and not free. Furthermore, there are some general web services toolkits with good CMS modules. Find one that comes closest to meeting your needs, then modify it to get exactly what you want. Some that I've used are Zope, OpenACS, Redhat CCM, OpenCMS, MMBase, and Vignette.
Of all of these, I like OpenACS the best, mostly because of its developer community. There are a lot of great people involved, and there's a high signal to noise ratio on the developer forums. Even though OpenACS probably has the least of what you're looking for, it might be the easiest to develop. OpenACS runs on top of Postgres or Oracle, and is written in Tcl.
Redhat CCM is basically a Java rewrite of the original OpenACS. Its CMS modules are supposedly more mature. It runs on a Redhat version of Postgres, and I think Oracle too.
Zope is a whole lotta product, and probably has most of what you're looking for. However, I find it kind of murky, difficult to figure out. YMMV.
These three are the most promising in terms of developer community. This is a bigger undertaking than it might seem at the outset. You'll need all the help you can get, and getting involved with these communities will spare you from trying to reinvent the wheel.
Of course, I'd love to have you guys use and extend the OpenACS toolkit, and share your efforts with the community!
The idea is to *encourage* value added activity, and you don't do this by taxing it.
As bad as things are in CA now, they've been a lot worse. And they're certainly better than in places where VAT is the coin of the realm (ie, Europe/UK).
I am an adjunct professor at a local community college. Most of the brightest students I have are actually 30-40+.
I noticed the same thing when I was in college. I worked the whole time, so I took a lot of night classes, etc., where many of the older students were. And the best students were almost always the older ones -- usually people in their 40s. This was true not only in engineering classes (I was an ME major), but in the more demanding general ed classes like Calculus and Chemistry, where one might assume young minds would shine.
It's funny, though, how older students are still looked down upon, like there must be something wrong with them for not having finished college when they were younger. Even professors seem to have this bias -- practically ignoring their best students in order to fawn over the "brilliant, young..."
Granted, this isn't always the case, but the tendancy is that the older individuals actually *want* to learn.
That's true, but there's more to it than that. Older students have a lifetime of knowledge to draw on. It's amazing how much one learns just by living, even about specialized technical subjects. Second, older people have learned how to learn, and had many years to practice the craft. Finally, and most important, older students are more mature, make better use of their time, focus on the task at hand, and follow things through to completion.
These things all translate to the workplace. Better educated kids are usually better workers. Conversely, there's nothing worse than trying to make a deadline while depending on a 25 year old graphic artist (apparently, the favored career of the young and flaky).
I've been using Popfile too. It doesn't seem to slow things down any, downloading 3-400 messages a day over a cable modem (most of which is spam, and is successfully marked as such). FWIW I have a 700 Mhz machine, and use Win2k Pro w/ Outlook Express.
Now that I'm looking to deal with all my mail from a server, I'm trying to find a way to use the Popfile filters I've so carefully trained over the last few months!
BTW, my Popfile's accuracy is also just under 99%.
If a tone of people start doing this they are going to find the veggie oil costs a HELL of a lot more than diesel. (Anyone ever price out biodiesel?)
Commercially-produced biodiesel is indeed more expensive, 2-3 times more than petro. Running a small co-operative is one thing. True commercial production is another -- you have equipment costs, plant safety/environmental standards that have to be met, etc. There are taxes to collect. And there are administrative costs associated with all of this.
So it's a far cry from a few 55 gal. drums in your backyard -- although you could do that and share with a few friends if you wanted to. It wouldn't make sense for most people, but for farmers, fishermen, etc., who use lots of diesel it might.
I've been using Quanta for a few years now. My favorite HTML editor used to be Homesite, but it got too bloated. Then I found Quanta, which was like the older versions of Homesite, but has steadily improved while Homesite has gotten more and more bloated. Quanta has been my favorite HTML editor, on any platform, for quite awhile. Thanks, guys!
BTW, I also think KDE is a better Windows than Windows.
So according to the article, HTML-encoding the email addresses on your web pages can keep them from being harvested by spammers. E-Cloaker is a nice little free utility to do this for you.
By most accounts I've seen in the last 5 years, Norway has the world's highest standard of living. And I'm sure it's a nicer place to live than most of the US, as long as you can stand the cold. Imagine a whole country that's like one big upper middle class village...
Most developers probably don't even know how to search CPAN or install a module from it (or PEAR for PHP). So they roll their own inferior solution. Those who have spent the three minutes reading the docs are getting an incredible benefit.
I think this is true. Add Java to that list -- which is ironic because Java was supposed to make code reuse so much easier. Better, more descriptive, more searchable docs would help. Not that I'm any better. I wish I knew better how to find what I need.
...is Monday morning quarterbacking, then doing things your own, "better" way. The other half is having someone pay you to do this.
Don't *bring* a computer to college. Wait until you get there, see what you need, and see what's available. Because there's so much demand, college towns are always full of cheap computers, new and used. Plus every school has it geek crowd, who are always buying, selling, upgrading, and trading. So cheap computers are everywhere. It's even better if you don't need the latest/greatest. If all you need is email, word processing, and netsurfing, you can make use of the cast-offs that people have trouble *giving* away.
If this turns out *not* to be the case, you can always order what you need from Dell, IBM, or whoever. Save money by ordering refurbs, and don't forget the official company auctions on eBay, where you get a full warranty and everything.
Honestly, I don't know why Red Hat and others include sendmail.
Because for better or worse, it's "the standard." It's the one most professional sysadmins are familiar with, and it's the one most other internet apps are integrated with.
I've been using Postfix, and it's a lot less complex. Theoretically that makes it easier and better. But every new admin/programmer has to learn it, while they already know Sendmail.
There are dozens of Outlook work-alikes, and they're all alike enough that no "retraining" should be necessary. If people can operate an elevator well enough to get to the right floor, they can operate these programs. Geez.
...and you'll save even more money.
I wonder if any bank would lend me 25 billion dollars to build one?
No, but if you have some collateral like a farm, they might lend you a million or so for a big windmill. That will take care of all your personal power needs, and pay for itself with what you can sell back to the grid. Plenty of wind in Oklahoma...
They just covered this topic on Ted Koppel's Nightline. Barry Diller (who is *against* this deregulation, BTW) appeared along with 1 or 2 other big players. Michael Powell was supposed to appear too, but conveniently cancelled. I say "conveniently" because I really think he's trying to quell the debate now that it's gathered steam, and move forward June 2 with no resistance.
...now that everyone's unemployed!
No one in Hollywood pays taxes. Half the film industry runs "under the table", and the other half is always showing losses. And now with file sharing, they'll never have profits!
Slashdot readers interested in this stuff should read EV World regularly. Support its dedicated editor by purchasing a subscription if possible.
There are those of us who would actually use cheeper more eco-friendly forms of transportation if it was available. People like my self would invest the the expence of using natural gas if it wasn't for the lack of filling stations. But I personaly can't refuel on it unless I drive roughly 40miles away, making it none too practical.
You *can* have convenience with natural gas -- by installing a refueling compressor in your garage. They *are* available for home users. I'm not sure how much they cost -- probably a couple thousand bucks. Of course it should cost less, but that's how it goes with these things -- they're always marked up several hundred percent. The bigger hassle is probably road taxes. Depending on which state you're in, you may have to file a road tax return, and/or get your mileage verified by some nitwit inspector who doesn't return phone calls, etc.
All good points. The fact is that driving is heavily subsidized, and what we pay to drive doesn't even begin to cover the cost.
I really thought that Venice was a really inappropriate example. I've spent a couple of days there, but it seems it's not really much of a real, functioning city. All the businesses I saw there were ice cream shops, jewelry stores, little restaurants, or museums. Just touristy stuff. ...and homes worth many millions of dollars that have been in families for generations. It's definately not the real world, or a place where "worker bees" reside. It's a lousy example.
Better to look at places like Hamburg or Amsterdam, or the original parts of Irvine, CA. Or look at Victoria, BC, which has more bike commuters than any city in North America.
Ever try and ride a bike with 10 bags of groceries?
I do it all the time, and it's simply not a problem. Maybe not 10 bags, but the equvalent of 5 easily. If I bought one of those little trailers I could do 10 if I wanted to.
Conspiracy theories abound about GM and Big Oil breaking up LA's trolley system. The fact is that ridership had fallen to near zero because practically everyone was driving by the late 1940s. The city kept the trolleys running at a tremendous loss for several years because "it was the right thing to do." The final death knell came when angry auto commuters pressured City Hall to remove the damned trolleys because they were blocking traffic.
GM and Standard Oil did buy the trolley lines way before that -- not to break them up, but to get a piece of the transportation pie in a rapidly growing city. By getting their foot in the door with the trolley system, GM ensured getting other city contracts for buses, fire trucks, etc. And oil companies back then were invested in everything under the sun, especially commercial real estate ventures which the trolley lines served.
Here's the problem. Make all the claims you want about the great convenience of public transportation, but nothing--nothing--NYC has beats the convenience of getting in your car, pulling right into a parking spot 100ft from the store (one of dozens of spots available), putting your purchases in your trunk, and then pulling right back up to your abode. This is city life in Atlanta. You don't walk anywhere, ever.
Yeah, that's why everyone in Atlanta weighs 300LB! In the rest of the South, too. I believe Houston is statistically the fattest city in America, followed by Richmond, VA. That's what you get when you have good-old-boy, no-rules, auto-centric development. No one walks, and everyone's fat. It breaks my heart to see middle aged (not old) people in Wal-Mart, riding those electric scooter things because they're too fat to walk. You just don't see that in NY, LA, SF, London or Paris. But in the South it's everywhere.
Of all of these, I like OpenACS the best, mostly because of its developer community. There are a lot of great people involved, and there's a high signal to noise ratio on the developer forums. Even though OpenACS probably has the least of what you're looking for, it might be the easiest to develop. OpenACS runs on top of Postgres or Oracle, and is written in Tcl.
Redhat CCM is basically a Java rewrite of the original OpenACS. Its CMS modules are supposedly more mature. It runs on a Redhat version of Postgres, and I think Oracle too.
Zope is a whole lotta product, and probably has most of what you're looking for. However, I find it kind of murky, difficult to figure out. YMMV.
These three are the most promising in terms of developer community. This is a bigger undertaking than it might seem at the outset. You'll need all the help you can get, and getting involved with these communities will spare you from trying to reinvent the wheel.
Of course, I'd love to have you guys use and extend the OpenACS toolkit, and share your efforts with the community!
The idea is to *encourage* value added activity, and you don't do this by taxing it.
As bad as things are in CA now, they've been a lot worse. And they're certainly better than in places where VAT is the coin of the realm (ie, Europe/UK).
I am an adjunct professor at a local community college. Most of the brightest students I have are actually 30-40+.
I noticed the same thing when I was in college. I worked the whole time, so I took a lot of night classes, etc., where many of the older students were. And the best students were almost always the older ones -- usually people in their 40s. This was true not only in engineering classes (I was an ME major), but in the more demanding general ed classes like Calculus and Chemistry, where one might assume young minds would shine.
It's funny, though, how older students are still looked down upon, like there must be something wrong with them for not having finished college when they were younger. Even professors seem to have this bias -- practically ignoring their best students in order to fawn over the "brilliant, young..."
Granted, this isn't always the case, but the tendancy is that the older individuals actually *want* to learn.
That's true, but there's more to it than that. Older students have a lifetime of knowledge to draw on. It's amazing how much one learns just by living, even about specialized technical subjects. Second, older people have learned how to learn, and had many years to practice the craft. Finally, and most important, older students are more mature, make better use of their time, focus on the task at hand, and follow things through to completion.
These things all translate to the workplace. Better educated kids are usually better workers. Conversely, there's nothing worse than trying to make a deadline while depending on a 25 year old graphic artist (apparently, the favored career of the young and flaky).
I've been using Popfile too. It doesn't seem to slow things down any, downloading 3-400 messages a day over a cable modem (most of which is spam, and is successfully marked as such). FWIW I have a 700 Mhz machine, and use Win2k Pro w/ Outlook Express.
Now that I'm looking to deal with all my mail from a server, I'm trying to find a way to use the Popfile filters I've so carefully trained over the last few months!
BTW, my Popfile's accuracy is also just under 99%.
If a tone of people start doing this they are going to find the veggie oil costs a HELL of a lot more than diesel. (Anyone ever price out biodiesel?)
Commercially-produced biodiesel is indeed more expensive, 2-3 times more than petro. Running a small co-operative is one thing. True commercial production is another -- you have equipment costs, plant safety/environmental standards that have to be met, etc. There are taxes to collect. And there are administrative costs associated with all of this.
So it's a far cry from a few 55 gal. drums in your backyard -- although you could do that and share with a few friends if you wanted to. It wouldn't make sense for most people, but for farmers, fishermen, etc., who use lots of diesel it might.
I've been using Quanta for a few years now. My favorite HTML editor used to be Homesite, but it got too bloated. Then I found Quanta, which was like the older versions of Homesite, but has steadily improved while Homesite has gotten more and more bloated. Quanta has been my favorite HTML editor, on any platform, for quite awhile. Thanks, guys!
BTW, I also think KDE is a better Windows than Windows.
So according to the article, HTML-encoding the email addresses on your web pages can keep them from being harvested by spammers. E-Cloaker is a nice little free utility to do this for you.
By most accounts I've seen in the last 5 years, Norway has the world's highest standard of living. And I'm sure it's a nicer place to live than most of the US, as long as you can stand the cold. Imagine a whole country that's like one big upper middle class village...