According to the linked article (which neither the editor nor the submitter took the time to read, apparently) Paypal has not been charged under the PATRIOT act. Instead, "the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri claims the company's PayPal operation violated part of the USA Patriot Act", which is an entirely different thing.
Wake me up when the bat-shit insane puritan who runs the Justice Department decides to file real charges, instead of just sending out thinly veiled extortion letters.
Many others of us have a very capable and dynamic cross-platform language which is well-suited to writing web-based apps, and we're not tied to a language which was shoehorned into a webserver against its will.
No, you a poorly written, poorly thought out toy language, shoehorned into a third-rate web framework.
I'm not a huge fan of ASP, but it's a marginally better framework than PHP. Of course, you can write ASP programs in Perl, Javascript, VBScript, and any other language that uses Window's active scripting framework.
I'll gladly admit that nothing else freely available is as simple to get started with as PHP. That's not praise. In my mind, PHP serves as a perfect example of the reasons open-source software simply can not fill every need. A lot of people want a well-thought out, well documented, stable, relatively secure, and very simple to use web framework, similar to ASP. Unfortunately, no competent programmer wants such a thing badly enough to write it. However, a number of incompetent programmers have sat down and scratched their own itch, and come up with PHP.
I'm certain that PHP would make a perfectly useful starting point to write a decent web framework. It really isn't missing that much before it would be useful. But, I've seen no evidence that anyone working on PHP has any interest in writing a decent web framework. And, I've seen no evidence that anyone interested in decent web frameworks is interested in PHP.
No paramatarized queries in the standard MySQL database module
No equivilant to Server.MapPath (read the documentation -- $_SERVER["PATH_TRANSLATED"] doesn't do the same thing)
The NAME="var[]" thing is a fucking hilarious hack. Every time I read that part of the PHP manual I simply can't stop giggling
No URL handling functions at all.
since PHP includes no functions to translate relative URL's to absolute URL's, manually setting headers like your example is an incredible pain in the ass. How would you write the equivilant to <% Response.Redirect("foo.asp"); Response.End() %> in PHP? Remember, you have to send a fully-qualified URL in your response.
PHP is a perfectly fine language if you have a smart, dedicated team writing the custom, application specific extensions in a real language, and simply use PHP as a glue between your HTML and the "real" code. But trying to actually write your "real" code in PHP is a recipe for a hideous, convoluted mess.
PHP is simply not a good language for writing web-based applications. It's that simple.
Based on the headline, the answer is The X Window System. Sweet Jebus, have you only been using Linux for a week or something?
However, based on the actual article body -- I have no answer. What the hell are you blathering about? What is the server OS you're using? What is the client OS you're using? If you can't use VNC, whey the hell would you be able to use any other solution? Could you re-state the question please, but in a comprehensible manner this time?
I that PHP might possibly be the only web scripting toolbox on earth worse than ASP, and it gets marked as flamebait. I suppose it deserves it -- ASP is amazingly ugly. Comparing anything to ASP is pretty damned hostile.
But, lets be frank here. PHP really amazingly shitty.
PHP is crap. It's essentially just like ASP, except unlike ASP you're:
locked into a language worse than VBScript,
locked into an extension model worse than ActiveX,
have a database interface a billion times worse than ADO (for example, the standard PHP MySQL interface has no paramatarized queries!!! Who's the supergenius who thought that up?), and
lack almost all the functions, procedures, methods, or objects that would make web programming useful.
For a few glaring examples where PHP doesn't give you even the most basic requirements for first-generation web language, there's no equivilant to ASP's Response.Redirect(). There's no equivilant to ASP's Server.MapPath(). The handling of forms with multiple fields of the same name (like checkboxes) is so hideously broken I don't know if I should laugh or cry.
I want to avoid saying that most PHP sites are amazingly insecure. Certainly, this must be a function of the pathetic losers who use PHP, instead of some function of the language. But after spending even a week on BugTraq, one begins to wonder exactly what most PHP developers are smoking when they write sites.
In short, I think PHP sucks. It's little suprise to me that the editors on this site find it so endearing.
I haven't been following this closely, but my understanding was that:
no-one's certain the autopilot was had been turned off, because the data from those last few seconds wasn't clean enough to be certain, and
even if it was turned off, no-one has any idea how it was turned off. It was either turned off manually once the conditions went beyond what the autopilot could handle, or turned off automatically once conditions went beyond what the autopilot could handle.Of course, what I reqd in the papers, and what the investigators say, and what the investigators know, and what the engineers know, are four totally different stories. So, don't listen to me.
What is this SIM thing you guys keep talking about in Europe?
To the best of my knowledge, the only removable things on my phone are they battery and the faceplate. If I want to change carriers, don't you have to buy a new phone at the same time?
And, I'm being semi-serious here. Explain to me how it works over there. Then, someone explain to me why we're so f*ck'd up here?
It should be simple to build a system where the identity of everyone who sends you mail is verified by some authority. However, the price is that everyone who uses it will have to be willing to accept a system where you will have to verify your identity to some authority before you send mail.
So, I guess my question (to stay on subject) is
is there an identity verificication system that would be suitable for email, and
barring that, is there some system that would allow us to charge the sender of any email a small micropayment?
At that point, the site is either hosting copyrighted content, or they're not.
As far as I know, 100% of all content on all websites is copyright. Hell, this post that you're reading right now is copyright.
I really wish that people wouldn't say "hosting copyright content" when they mean unauthorized reproduction of copyright material that exceeds fair use. It really seems that most of the vocabulary we're using for this discussion has been created by people with a vested interest in promoting the idea that only large companies create any content worth the protection of copyright, and that any unauthorized reproduction is illegal. Neither claim is true...
I'm assuming that "Napster Insite" is going to be the name of the new product risen out of the ashes of Napster, and not some hideous bastard spelling of "insight".
I believe that CmdrTaco got the scoop before anyone else in the whole world., and this is one of those "from the future" stories that he was bragging about a few days ago. Maybe I should rethink that subscription after all?
One of my female friends who worked there came back with some real horror stories: the older men there are so desperate they'll throw a tonne of money at any employee with breasts just for a chance at having a date.
To a poor college student, any multi-millionaire is going to look pretty damned frivilous with his money.
But those "older guys" are probably 35 years old, and just realized:
because of the options they picked up at microsoft, they could easily spend $1,000 a day, every day, for the rest of their lives, and still have a big pile left over when they die,
geek girls are cute,
they never did get married, and
there are much worse ways of spending a $1,000.00 of your daily "play money" than trying to impress a geek girl
I'm just saying that if I was in that position (single, with several million dollars cash in the bank) I'd probably be hitting on geek girls all the time too.
This risk can be removed by turning any of your equipment off
If they're being charged for incoming bandwidth (especially incoming UDP bandwidth like the slammer worm) then shutting off their server will not help.
As long as the router continues to send those packets to that IP, they'll keep getting those packets. It doesn't matter if the packets just fall off the end of an unplugged cable -- incoming bandwidth is incoming bandwidth is incoming bandwidth.
If I sent a huge SYN attack to your home DSL connection, and your machine crashes, are you responsible for the bandwidth before your machine goes down? Are you responsible for the bandwidth after your machine has crashed, but before the ISP's realized you're not on the other end anymore?
Yes, but, do you realize that things you do at home show how you want to write code, how important different aspects are.
Again, no. I write code at work to fill the clients needs, which is often to get a maintainable business solution at a reasonable price.
I write code at home to try some new technique, scratch an itch, or just goof around. It's almost never the same (except, of course, that the inconsequential stuff like variable names, indentation, and brace style are the same).
That's the problem with Ask Slashdot -- you get answers from Slashdot readers.
I have no idea why anyone would post a link to freeware PHP projects to display pretty graphs of SNMP data when the question was about Linux Kernel Modules to monitor Firmware.
Probably because there are hundreds of shitty free linux web tools to display pretty graphs of your network performance, and nearly zero linux tools for hardware monitoring. That should tell you something about the type of projects linux is currently being used for, and the type of projects you should use linux for.
I'm not saying that linux doesn't have a niche, and that it fills that niche very well. But outside that, it starts to fall down. True high-availability, single-point-of-failure servers like the original poster is using is one of those places where linux falls, unfortunately.
No doubt you encountered the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Assesment
Like you, I assumed that the test given was a Myers-Briggs or a derivative. I read the smarmy stuff on the "Organisation Analysis and Design" link and only imagined they were doing Myers-Briggs a grave disservice by representing it so poorly, with so much new-age business-speak.
Then, my wife (with an advanced degree in Psychology) made me click the link to the test: http://www.oad.ltd.uk/survey.htm. We were floored. It's not a real personality profile at all. It's just a filter for buzz-word spouting business psychophants.
I would be more than willing to take a real personality profile or aptitude test to get an interview. But if I was asked to take this joke of a "survey" I would make a point to call the hiring manager to make certain he knew the crap the HR department was putting the applicants through. If he agreed with it, I would simply scratch him or her off the list of potential employers.
But, the stuff I do at home is either small throwaway stuff written while I learn a new technology, or it's real stuff written for work.
The small throwaway stuff is nothing like the real stuff I do at work. Toys, utilities, and practice are written with adifferent goals and for a different audience.
If you don't even know who the right people are, then you're not in a position in the company where this is your problem. Tell your manager your concerns, and document the conversation. Then drop it.
If you know who the right people are, but they're not listening, then you're not in a position in the company where this is your problem. Tell the people your concerns, and document the conversation. Then drop it.
In a company of 2,600 people, there is going to be a lot of crap that's busted, poorly done, or just plain b0rked. Find something else to fix.
If you can't find anything worth fixing -- nothing that is interesting to you, within your technical and political capabilities, has some monetary benefit to the company, and is within your sphere of influence -- and you enjoy fixing things, then find a different job.
Can you offer any advice that doesn't seem to be inherently career-limiting (such as playing whistle-blower and talking to the regulating agencies, labor department, legal department, union leaders, and so forth)?
Yes. Fire off a short and polite e-mail to the person in IT who is in charge of the People Soft application deployment. Say that you have security concerns and ask for 15 minutes of his or her time. Print and keep a copy of that e-mail.
If you are rebuffed, then drop it. It is not your problem. Do not allow your sphere of concern be larger than your sphere of influence.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the linked article (which neither the editor nor the submitter took the time to read, apparently) Paypal has not been charged under the PATRIOT act. Instead, "the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri claims the company's PayPal operation violated part of the USA Patriot Act", which is an entirely different thing.
Wake me up when the bat-shit insane puritan who runs the Justice Department decides to file real charges, instead of just sending out thinly veiled extortion letters.
Many others of us have a very capable and dynamic cross-platform language which is well-suited to writing web-based apps, and we're not tied to a language which was shoehorned into a webserver against its will.
No, you a poorly written, poorly thought out toy language, shoehorned into a third-rate web framework.
I'm not a huge fan of ASP, but it's a marginally better framework than PHP. Of course, you can write ASP programs in Perl, Javascript, VBScript, and any other language that uses Window's active scripting framework.
I'll gladly admit that nothing else freely available is as simple to get started with as PHP. That's not praise. In my mind, PHP serves as a perfect example of the reasons open-source software simply can not fill every need. A lot of people want a well-thought out, well documented, stable, relatively secure, and very simple to use web framework, similar to ASP. Unfortunately, no competent programmer wants such a thing badly enough to write it. However, a number of incompetent programmers have sat down and scratched their own itch, and come up with PHP.
I'm certain that PHP would make a perfectly useful starting point to write a decent web framework. It really isn't missing that much before it would be useful. But, I've seen no evidence that anyone working on PHP has any interest in writing a decent web framework. And, I've seen no evidence that anyone interested in decent web frameworks is interested in PHP.
- No paramatarized queries in the standard MySQL database module
- No equivilant to Server.MapPath (read the documentation -- $_SERVER["PATH_TRANSLATED"] doesn't do the same thing)
- The NAME="var[]" thing is a fucking hilarious hack. Every time I read that part of the PHP manual I simply can't stop giggling
- No URL handling functions at all.
- since PHP includes no functions to translate relative URL's to absolute URL's, manually setting headers like your example is an incredible pain in the ass. How would you write the equivilant to <% Response.Redirect("foo.asp"); Response.End() %> in PHP? Remember, you have to send a fully-qualified URL in your response.
PHP is a perfectly fine language if you have a smart, dedicated team writing the custom, application specific extensions in a real language, and simply use PHP as a glue between your HTML and the "real" code. But trying to actually write your "real" code in PHP is a recipe for a hideous, convoluted mess.PHP is simply not a good language for writing web-based applications. It's that simple.
Based on the headline, the answer is The X Window System. Sweet Jebus, have you only been using Linux for a week or something?
However, based on the actual article body -- I have no answer. What the hell are you blathering about? What is the server OS you're using? What is the client OS you're using? If you can't use VNC, whey the hell would you be able to use any other solution? Could you re-state the question please, but in a comprehensible manner this time?
I that PHP might possibly be the only web scripting toolbox on earth worse than ASP, and it gets marked as flamebait. I suppose it deserves it -- ASP is amazingly ugly. Comparing anything to ASP is pretty damned hostile.
But, lets be frank here. PHP really amazingly shitty.
- locked into a language worse than VBScript,
- locked into an extension model worse than ActiveX,
- have a database interface a billion times worse than ADO (for example, the standard PHP MySQL interface has no paramatarized queries!!! Who's the supergenius who thought that up?), and
- lack almost all the functions, procedures, methods, or objects that would make web programming useful.
For a few glaring examples where PHP doesn't give you even the most basic requirements for first-generation web language, there's no equivilant to ASP's Response.Redirect(). There's no equivilant to ASP's Server.MapPath(). The handling of forms with multiple fields of the same name (like checkboxes) is so hideously broken I don't know if I should laugh or cry.I want to avoid saying that most PHP sites are amazingly insecure. Certainly, this must be a function of the pathetic losers who use PHP, instead of some function of the language. But after spending even a week on BugTraq, one begins to wonder exactly what most PHP developers are smoking when they write sites.
In short, I think PHP sucks. It's little suprise to me that the editors on this site find it so endearing.
What is this SIM thing you guys keep talking about in Europe?
To the best of my knowledge, the only removable things on my phone are they battery and the faceplate. If I want to change carriers, don't you have to buy a new phone at the same time?
And, I'm being semi-serious here. Explain to me how it works over there. Then, someone explain to me why we're so f*ck'd up here?
Start a CD library, with physical CDs. Let employees sign out the CDs and play them at their desk.
Easy, low-tech, and legal.
please mod the parent up.
So, I guess my question (to stay on subject) is
How about homer -- it seems that he wrote a lot of stuff about the highest technology of his time, like bronze spears and fast black ships, and so on.
Or, do you mean the hideously limited view of "technology" that only applies to something with a keyboard?
At that point, the site is either hosting copyrighted content, or they're not.
As far as I know, 100% of all content on all websites is copyright. Hell, this post that you're reading right now is copyright.
I really wish that people wouldn't say "hosting copyright content" when they mean unauthorized reproduction of copyright material that exceeds fair use. It really seems that most of the vocabulary we're using for this discussion has been created by people with a vested interest in promoting the idea that only large companies create any content worth the protection of copyright, and that any unauthorized reproduction is illegal. Neither claim is true...
I thought that Pakistan "found" him by looking at the address on the paycheck they sent him every month?
The only question I have about the whole thing is why Pakistan betrayed this fellow now.
I'm assuming that "Napster Insite" is going to be the name of the new product risen out of the ashes of Napster, and not some hideous bastard spelling of "insight".
I believe that CmdrTaco got the scoop before anyone else in the whole world., and this is one of those "from the future" stories that he was bragging about a few days ago. Maybe I should rethink that subscription after all?
To a poor college student, any multi-millionaire is going to look pretty damned frivilous with his money.
But those "older guys" are probably 35 years old, and just realized:
- because of the options they picked up at microsoft, they could easily spend $1,000 a day, every day, for the rest of their lives, and still have a big pile left over when they die,
- geek girls are cute,
- they never did get married, and
- there are much worse ways of spending a $1,000.00 of your daily "play money" than trying to impress a geek girl
I'm just saying that if I was in that position (single, with several million dollars cash in the bank) I'd probably be hitting on geek girls all the time too.This risk can be removed by turning any of your equipment off
If they're being charged for incoming bandwidth (especially incoming UDP bandwidth like the slammer worm) then shutting off their server will not help.
As long as the router continues to send those packets to that IP, they'll keep getting those packets. It doesn't matter if the packets just fall off the end of an unplugged cable -- incoming bandwidth is incoming bandwidth is incoming bandwidth.
If I sent a huge SYN attack to your home DSL connection, and your machine crashes, are you responsible for the bandwidth before your machine goes down? Are you responsible for the bandwidth after your machine has crashed, but before the ISP's realized you're not on the other end anymore?
doesnt /. want to be free??
No. Only information wants to be free. Slashdot has managed to avoid that for a looong time.
Yes, but, do you realize that things you do at home show how you want to write code, how important different aspects are.
Again, no. I write code at work to fill the clients needs, which is often to get a maintainable business solution at a reasonable price.
I write code at home to try some new technique, scratch an itch, or just goof around. It's almost never the same (except, of course, that the inconsequential stuff like variable names, indentation, and brace style are the same).
That's the problem with Ask Slashdot -- you get answers from Slashdot readers.
I have no idea why anyone would post a link to freeware PHP projects to display pretty graphs of SNMP data when the question was about Linux Kernel Modules to monitor Firmware.
Probably because there are hundreds of shitty free linux web tools to display pretty graphs of your network performance, and nearly zero linux tools for hardware monitoring. That should tell you something about the type of projects linux is currently being used for, and the type of projects you should use linux for.
I'm not saying that linux doesn't have a niche, and that it fills that niche very well. But outside that, it starts to fall down. True high-availability, single-point-of-failure servers like the original poster is using is one of those places where linux falls, unfortunately.
No doubt you encountered the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Assesment
Like you, I assumed that the test given was a Myers-Briggs or a derivative. I read the smarmy stuff on the "Organisation Analysis and Design" link and only imagined they were doing Myers-Briggs a grave disservice by representing it so poorly, with so much new-age business-speak.
Then, my wife (with an advanced degree in Psychology) made me click the link to the test: http://www.oad.ltd.uk/survey.htm. We were floored. It's not a real personality profile at all. It's just a filter for buzz-word spouting business psychophants.
I would be more than willing to take a real personality profile or aptitude test to get an interview. But if I was asked to take this joke of a "survey" I would make a point to call the hiring manager to make certain he knew the crap the HR department was putting the applicants through. If he agreed with it, I would simply scratch him or her off the list of potential employers.
don't most programmers do programming at home?
I code at home all the time.
But, the stuff I do at home is either small throwaway stuff written while I learn a new technology, or it's real stuff written for work.
The small throwaway stuff is nothing like the real stuff I do at work. Toys, utilities, and practice are written with adifferent goals and for a different audience.
I think this should be the only thread.
No branching, please.
How do I get the right people to hear me?
If you don't even know who the right people are, then you're not in a position in the company where this is your problem. Tell your manager your concerns, and document the conversation. Then drop it.
If you know who the right people are, but they're not listening, then you're not in a position in the company where this is your problem. Tell the people your concerns, and document the conversation. Then drop it.
In a company of 2,600 people, there is going to be a lot of crap that's busted, poorly done, or just plain b0rked. Find something else to fix.
If you can't find anything worth fixing -- nothing that is interesting to you, within your technical and political capabilities, has some monetary benefit to the company, and is within your sphere of influence -- and you enjoy fixing things, then find a different job.
Can you offer any advice that doesn't seem to be inherently career-limiting (such as playing whistle-blower and talking to the regulating agencies, labor department, legal department, union leaders, and so forth)?
Yes. Fire off a short and polite e-mail to the person in IT who is in charge of the People Soft application deployment. Say that you have security concerns and ask for 15 minutes of his or her time. Print and keep a copy of that e-mail.
If you are rebuffed, then drop it. It is not your problem. Do not allow your sphere of concern be larger than your sphere of influence.