So, as your homeland succumbs to the ravages of commercialism, you prefer to live in the country that invented and has the major franchise on it?
BTW, it's America that has private beaches... If a Yank or Japanese company tried to to annex Dee Why beach in Sydney, the local surfers would KILL them once they entered the water. In Australia, I can walk along the beaches in Port Douglas, Broome, or Whitehaven... I can't do that at the Hollister ranch in California.
So we have inept and corrupt politicians, and Telstra is a monopoly run by morons... I think by moving to the States you went from the frying pan into the fire, boyo.
Perhaps this is just, but not practical. How are you going to charge a non-cable-using sender in another country the cost of what they send to your cable customer?
Why should I pay your carrier extra to send info to you because you hook up with cable rather than ISDN or dialup? You want the slick access, you should pay for it (though I suggest you find a different model than Telstra's).
I think not. You can't have/. one day banning AC's (some of whom may actually post good solid info, and may be seeking anonymity for legit reasons), and on another posting stories bemoaning attempts to control privacy, encryption, and content.
Sorry sport, you will still have to use your brain to sort the diamonds from the shit.
Is anyone else getting sick of Katz dragging either:
a) an anti-MS reference b) Linux ass-kissing
into absolutely every article he posts on/.?
You could argue the anti-trust thing had some relevance to his argument, but the way he rams it straight in after talking about internet porn has all the subtlety of a severed head in your driveway.
Katz, write out 1000 times (alright weenies, 1024):
Slashdot readers will not love me just because I bash Microsoft and praise Linux.
Er, so if someone wants a day or two out of the real world seeking controlled entertainment there's something morally corrupt about them?
Do you play computer games? Do you read science fiction, or any other sort of fiction? Do you go to cinemas? Plenty of controlled sanitised experiences and escapism there.
Or do you spend your days coding and fighting for human rights with only the occasional visit to a library (textbooks and non-fiction only) or museum for inspiration to continue the struggle?
I doubt it.
Lighten up. If you don't like Disney's stuff, like the violence in Tarantino's movies, don't go.
The problem with this article and comments like yours is searching for some deep meaning in a corporate theme park. There isn't any. Live with it.
I don't think John Katz is a bad writer. However, he does ask for criticism and gets it, for which he deserves some respect for 1) doing it and 2) taking it, along with all the inane flaming etc., on the chin.
He starts to annoy me when he starts sermonising - he's much better just relating the progress and content of the interview. He needs to learn to guide the reader to a conclusion unintrusively rather than breaking away from the action to bludgeon us to death with the point he's trying to make.
One thing I DO find annoying is the way he gratuitously works Linux into too many pieces, presumably under the supposition it will somehow make it more palatable to the slashdot audience.
I do have to say however that his earlier rant on The Phantom Menace and Star Wars ommercialisation was utter rubbish.
This piece was OK as a work in progress, but more action and less lecturing, please.
Java's purpose was to allow Scott McNealy to turn Sun into Microsoft. He failed (opinions vary as to whether this is a good or bad thing).
Personally, every time I've started a project where Java looked like a contender, I've run into some hole in the object model, like the lack of a select() or equivalent for non-blocking I/O in sockets, or the COM/CORBA DMZ. I've usually ended up using either Delphi on Win9x or Perl in one of the Unices. I'd use Perl on windows more if it supported threads or fork(), but that hasn't happened yet (though fork() is meant to be on the way).
If Java's the only thing that can save my ass (what exactly do I need saving from again? I might dislike MS, but I hate zealots of any kind) then IMHO I might as well eat a bullet now and get the whole thing over with, because Java don't cut it.
Perl - now THERE's a platform independent language. Closer than Java, anyway.
I too hate the platform incompatibility of plugins, but really I hate the IDEA of plugins and applets even more. The web just wasn't designed for all this whizzbang crap.
By your standards, lots and lots and lots of morons. There are LOADS of such implementations out there, and for a while every computer magazine I picked up had an article on how to get your Access DB onto a web. It's not difficult, and it actually works well enough if throughput is low and the app is not mission critical.
No one's going to take you seriously. Anyone who has abuse but no better solutions to offer can and will safely be ignored. Anyway, the choice of Access may not have been his, he may just have had to pick it up. Don't go away mad... just go away, OK?
As plentry of people have said, exporting data from an Access database is trivial. If you don't want to get a copy of Access, use ActivePerl (www.activestate.com) with DBI and DBD:ODBC and roll your own. You could perhaps use another DBD for the database you plan to use and do the entire data migration in a single script.
We should say no, we NEED others to follow, we need to seek the guidence of other countries to help form sensible policies. Decisions like this proove we cannot stand on our own two feet.
Er, our own prime minister is anti-republic. There is anything but a consensus on this. Which is good.
And which country would you choose to guide us? The Poms, who put us up as cannon fodder in WW1? The Yanks, who show their political panache by electing Reagan and Clinton?
You might need to be led around by a ring in your nose and be afraid of thinking for yourself, but don't be so patronising as to assume that all your fellow Aussies (me included) do.
Putting your future in the hands of others is a poor recipe for survival.
I would also agree that not all the best and brightest gravitate to internet-related work. Rhetorical question: if the best/brightest are working in internet technology, why are we still grappling with crap browser technology, rudimentary development tools and methodologies, etc. etc. etc.? Frankly, there have been and will continue to be far more interesting and complex challenges in computing than building collaborative web sites which manipulate databases. If you want a real computing challenge, try designing mutithreaded transaction queuing systems, secure crypto, etc., not building web sites.
Some readers of your post may not live in America (I don't) and may not have the luxury of a government they feel they can trust, nor the luxury of free elections. A significant number of your countrymen do not share your confidence that the government works in their best interests.
For such people, particularly those battling an oppressive regime from within (Iran? East Timor until recently, etc. etc.), privacy may be literally a matter of life and death.
You are privileged to live in America. Just try to avoid assuming everyone else on the Internet does too.
Actually, I have, and having done Winsock API coding, I can say that Winsock is Berkley sockets compliant and so you can use select instead of the event driven model.
Agreed. I've done fairly extensive socket development on Win32, and it is indeed BSD socket compatible. The message/event model is optional and only useful for nonblocking IO - though IMHO, that model is in some ways superior to the convoluted select loop that some apps require.
I agree there are cleaner models (Java JDK 1.1+ for instance),
No. Java SUCKS as a development environment for socket applications. Try writing an app which writes to a server which provides a non-blocking socket as an interface. There is no facility like select(). It must have been too hard for Sun or something, though the ActivePerl people had no problem with it.
Try ActivePerl for Win32 if you want to use something more unix-compatible. This is a good product, and it's free. And really good for sockets.
I'm tempted to reply to this comment with a random anecdote about a stupid athiest. It would be just as relevant.
The topic is to do with the mandatory teaching, i.e. legislatively demanded, of a Christian doctrine. The pi == 3 story is closely related IMHO, and the moderated rating given is also an indication that my opinion is shared.
The fact that there are stupid Christians does not make all Christians stupid.
He never said that. The point is that being Christian doesn't make you more or less smart or more or less entitled to have a say than anyone else.
By the way, I strongly suggest you don't post anecdotes of stupid decisions made by politicians of a secular (or religious) persuasion, there ain't enough disk space in the entire universe, no matter how it got created, to list them all.
I'm not overly comfortable with the idea that I have personality quirks which must be pandered to before I become fully productive in any company, and that I have the right to be treated this way because I have certain skills and knowledge. Elitism sucks.
Maturity requires some flexibility. Not that you have to become an ass-kisser, but it's not impossible to consider other people's styles of working and meet them halfway.
Taking a professional attitude to your work, keeping your skills and knowledge up (I've worked on mainframes, Unix, and Web programming, and I've never noticed these cliques the author talked about) and not acting like an arrogant prima donna should keep you in secure employment.
4. IT professionals, tired of stodgy traditional government, unite to form the first nation unbound by geographic or genetic ties. The native language of this new country is not English or Spanish, but Java 6.1.
JAVA?????!!!!!
In that case we're all going to die, and deservedly so. Never has a language promised so much and delivered so little, unless you count Oracle Designer/2000 as a language.
All too often politicians work directly against the interests of all but a tiny share of their constituients, for the benefit of those that pay their re-election bills, or otherwise supply them with money or power.
Which makes their motivation pretty much the same as the rest of us. Most admire altruism, but generally when other people do it if the issue affects us directly.
Can't let the hoi-polloi loose on the code, any damn thing could happen. For example, Linux. It is true that moderation (like Linus) is required, but the argument that it would necessarily result in chaos is bogus I think.
This is a Linux oriented forum, but why does it have to get dragged into absolutely everything? The Linux model is different in any case. The work is done by the hoi polloi, who have latitude to do specific tasks their way, but government/moderation is done by Linus and has delegates/appointees, not by consensus. Pretty much like the way government now works in both countries. Not a bad thing, but hardly consensual democracy. Yes, anyone can go out and make their own distro, but surely you don't want to extend that out to evryone who's pissed off with the Central Government starting their own little country.
In this consensual democracy, who decides what questions are put to the masses? Government involves an enormous amount of compromise - decisions must be based on previous decisions and the average Joe/Josephine would need to keep track of the hugely complex web of historical legislation, as well as budgets, economic forecasts, global security issues, the concerns of other countries, etc. I can see one vote approving a social program and another indirectly knocking back the funding which would allow it to happen.
Do I service my own car or do my own plumbing? Nah. I hire someone to do it. You go this way, you'll get lots of entrepreneurs offering to vote with your interests at heart and lots of punters willing to hire them. May be morally questionable perhaps, but it'll still happen. You'd pay people to make decisions for you rather than elect them.
We have a fairly widespread consensus in this country that politics is broken,
Do we? Which country? Are you assuming the US is the whole world again?
You obviously haven't hung out with too many philosophers.
My Dad is a retired professor of philosophy. He's a great guy, and I've met a lot of his colleagues.
There is no way I'd want to let these guys anywhere near government. And I think that goes for most academics. There's no substitute for real world experience.
Well, my government passed stupid legislation and we have an idiot whose head is in the '50s as a minister. The main opposition party, with a few exceptions, chose not to stand up on the issue (no one once to be seen advocating kiddie porn) and the minor parties made loud noises but were basically irrelevant to the debate because of numbers.
Situation normal, and hardly confined to Australia.
You US people had Reagan (cluelessness made America proud again!) and now you have Bill "keep it in your pants" Clinton. We have our Howard and Alston.
There are few SW companies these days that do not provide patches for download.
Part of the thrust of the article IMHO was that the Web has made things worse rather than better as regards software quality. In many ways, the web has just meant we don't need to wait six months to replace our current set of bugs with a different and possibly larger and costlier set of bugs, we can do it right away.
Anyone who has tried to upgrade IIS and MS proxy server and keep their PCAnywhere and ARCServe in sync with the various service packs will know this is NOT something that can be done in realtime. You endup in this downward spiral of patch/upgrade escalation which seems destined to hit Mutually Assured Destruction at any moment.
Linux is better at this sort of thing, but you still spend lots of time keeping your web of mutual version compatibility in sync.
The greatest problem is the history of computing is the result of COBOL.
Y2k is not COBOL's fault, nor Grace Hopper's. It's a question of program design, not the language used. Using C++, Perl, or Eiffel doesn't stop (and has not stopped) people writing programs with Y2K problems.
Engage your brain before you touch the keyboard next time.
Er, it sounds like the original poster is a programmer and someone is paying THEM to do the work.
In the real world, most business people (bosses)want and are paid to solve business problems, not to finance open source initiatives which may provide something more or less like what they originally wanted at some indeterminate time.
Running a business dependent on the output of one or more open source projects yet to reach fruition sounds like an extraodinarily effective way to go broke in the fastest possible time.
I think the cosource way works if people "invest" in software, much as they invest in shares or property, with the opportunity to reap the benefits (which may be more or less than they would hope for) at an indeterminate later time. The "other interested people" who may invest may not come on board in the timeframe you would wish for, and if you can't wait that long or justify paying for the whole thing yourself then you lose.
Trying to meet a corporate deadline using the methods you advocate would be far too risky IMHO.
PHP is a server side scripting language often used for database-linked web pages.
The logical leap from here to an OLAP engine is far too great for any sane person to make. OLAP and the Web have no direct or necessary relationship.
New definition:
"frind (n): a type of software, very useful for the type of work for which it was developed, but which is pushed relentlessly by the indiscriminate as being the solution to all problems past and future."
Your not obligated to post on this forum, and if you don't know what you're talking about it's probably best not to.
Slashdot Mirror
So, as your homeland succumbs to the ravages of commercialism, you prefer to live in the country that invented and has the major franchise on it?
... If a Yank or Japanese company tried to to annex Dee Why beach in Sydney, the local surfers would KILL them once they entered the water. In Australia, I can walk along the beaches in Port Douglas, Broome, or Whitehaven ... I can't do that at the Hollister ranch in California.
... I think by moving to the States you went from the frying pan into the fire, boyo.
BTW, it's America that has private beaches
So we have inept and corrupt politicians, and Telstra is a monopoly run by morons
Stay there. You complain too much.
Perhaps this is just, but not practical. How are you going to charge a non-cable-using sender in another country the cost of what they send to your cable customer?
Why should I pay your carrier extra to send info to you because you hook up with cable rather than ISDN or dialup? You want the slick access, you should pay for it (though I suggest you find a different model than Telstra's).
No one replaced Hendrix, but Stevie Ray Vaughan did best at picking up where he left off. Malmsteen is a different genre entirely IMHO.
I did as suggested. There's some really weird and funny stuff here. A useless diversion, but entertaining.
...
It makes you wonder where Jizmak lives ( a padded room maybe? ), and what his OTHER "interests" are
I think not. You can't have /. one day banning AC's (some of whom may actually post good solid info, and may be seeking anonymity for legit reasons), and on another posting stories bemoaning attempts to control privacy, encryption, and content.
Sorry sport, you will still have to use your brain to sort the diamonds from the shit.
Is anyone else getting sick of Katz dragging either:
/.?
a) an anti-MS reference
b) Linux ass-kissing
into absolutely every article he posts on
You could argue the anti-trust thing had some relevance to his argument, but the way he rams it straight in after talking about internet porn has all the subtlety of a severed head in your driveway.
Katz, write out 1000 times (alright weenies, 1024):
Slashdot readers will not love me just because I bash Microsoft and praise Linux.
Er, so if someone wants a day or two out of the real world seeking controlled entertainment there's something morally corrupt about them?
Do you play computer games? Do you read science fiction, or any other sort of fiction? Do you go to cinemas? Plenty of controlled sanitised experiences and escapism there.
Or do you spend your days coding and fighting for human rights with only the occasional visit to a library (textbooks and non-fiction only) or museum for inspiration to continue the struggle?
I doubt it.
Lighten up. If you don't like Disney's stuff, like the violence in Tarantino's movies, don't go.
The problem with this article and comments like yours is searching for some deep meaning in a corporate theme park. There isn't any. Live with it.
I don't think John Katz is a bad writer. However, he does ask for criticism and gets it, for which he deserves some respect for 1) doing it and 2) taking it, along with all the inane flaming etc., on the chin.
He starts to annoy me when he starts sermonising - he's much better just relating the progress and content of the interview. He needs to learn to guide the reader to a conclusion unintrusively rather than breaking away from the action to bludgeon us to death with the point he's trying to make.
One thing I DO find annoying is the way he gratuitously works Linux into too many pieces, presumably under the supposition it will somehow make it more palatable to the slashdot audience.
I do have to say however that his earlier rant on The Phantom Menace and Star Wars ommercialisation was utter rubbish.
This piece was OK as a work in progress, but more action and less lecturing, please.
Wrong.
Java's purpose was to allow Scott McNealy to turn Sun into Microsoft. He failed (opinions vary as to whether this is a good or bad thing).
Personally, every time I've started a project where Java looked like a contender, I've run into some hole in the object model, like the lack of a select() or equivalent for non-blocking I/O in sockets, or the COM/CORBA DMZ. I've usually ended up using either Delphi on Win9x or Perl in one of the Unices. I'd use Perl on windows more if it supported threads or fork(), but that hasn't happened yet (though fork() is meant to be on the way).
If Java's the only thing that can save my ass (what exactly do I need saving from again? I might dislike MS, but I hate zealots of any kind) then IMHO I might as well eat a bullet now and get the whole thing over with, because Java don't cut it.
Perl - now THERE's a platform independent language. Closer than Java, anyway.
I too hate the platform incompatibility of plugins, but really I hate the IDEA of plugins and applets even more. The web just wasn't designed for all this whizzbang crap.
My 0.02
By your standards, lots and lots and lots of morons. There are LOADS of such implementations out there, and for a while every computer magazine I picked up had an article on how to get your Access DB onto a web. It's not difficult, and it actually works well enough if throughput is low and the app is not mission critical.
... just go away, OK?
No one's going to take you seriously. Anyone who has abuse but no better solutions to offer can and will safely be ignored. Anyway, the choice of Access may not have been his, he may just have had to pick it up. Don't go away mad
As plentry of people have said, exporting data from an Access database is trivial. If you don't want to get a copy of Access, use ActivePerl (www.activestate.com) with DBI and DBD:ODBC and roll your own. You could perhaps use another DBD for the database you plan to use and do the entire data migration in a single script.
We should say no, we NEED others to follow, we need to seek the guidence of other countries to help form sensible policies. Decisions like this proove we cannot stand on our own two feet.
Er, our own prime minister is anti-republic. There is anything but a consensus on this. Which is good.
And which country would you choose to guide us? The Poms, who put us up as cannon fodder in WW1? The Yanks, who show their political panache by electing Reagan and Clinton?
You might need to be led around by a ring in your nose and be afraid of thinking for yourself, but don't be so patronising as to assume that all your fellow Aussies (me included) do.
Putting your future in the hands of others is a poor recipe for survival.
I would also agree that not all the best and brightest gravitate to internet-related work. Rhetorical question: if the best/brightest are working in internet technology, why are we still grappling with crap browser technology, rudimentary development tools and methodologies, etc. etc. etc.? Frankly, there have been and will continue to be far more interesting and complex challenges in computing than building collaborative web sites which manipulate databases. If you want a real computing challenge, try designing mutithreaded transaction queuing systems, secure crypto, etc., not building web sites.
Some readers of your post may not live in America (I don't) and may not have the luxury of a government they feel they can trust, nor the luxury of free elections. A significant number of your countrymen do not share your confidence that the government works in their best interests.
For such people, particularly those battling an oppressive regime from within (Iran? East Timor until recently, etc. etc.), privacy may be literally a matter of life and death.
You are privileged to live in America. Just try to avoid assuming everyone else on the Internet does too.
Actually, I have, and having done Winsock API coding, I can say that Winsock is Berkley sockets compliant and so you can use select instead of the event driven model.
Agreed. I've done fairly extensive socket development on Win32, and it is indeed BSD socket compatible. The message/event model is optional and only useful for nonblocking IO - though IMHO, that model is in some ways superior to the convoluted select loop that some apps require.
I agree there are cleaner models (Java JDK 1.1+ for instance),
No. Java SUCKS as a development environment for socket applications. Try writing an app which writes to a server which provides a non-blocking socket as an interface. There is no facility like select(). It must have been too hard for Sun or something, though the ActivePerl people had no problem with it.
Try ActivePerl for Win32 if you want to use something more unix-compatible. This is a good product, and it's free. And really good for sockets.
I'm tempted to reply to this comment with a random anecdote about a stupid athiest. It would be just as relevant.
The topic is to do with the mandatory teaching, i.e. legislatively demanded, of a Christian doctrine. The pi == 3 story is closely related IMHO, and the moderated rating given is also an indication that my opinion is shared.
The fact that there are stupid Christians does not make all Christians stupid.
He never said that. The point is that being Christian doesn't make you more or less smart or more or less entitled to have a say than anyone else.
By the way, I strongly suggest you don't post anecdotes of stupid decisions made by politicians of a secular (or religious) persuasion, there ain't enough disk space in the entire universe, no matter how it got created, to list them all.
Well said.
I'm not overly comfortable with the idea that I have personality quirks which must be pandered to before I become fully productive in any company, and that I have the right to be treated this way because I have certain skills and knowledge. Elitism sucks.
Maturity requires some flexibility. Not that you have to become an ass-kisser, but it's not impossible to consider other people's styles of working and meet them halfway.
Taking a professional attitude to your work, keeping your skills and knowledge up (I've worked on mainframes, Unix, and Web programming, and I've never noticed these cliques the author talked about) and not acting like an arrogant prima donna should keep you in secure employment.
Do this in the US if you want.
Just keep it away from where I live, Australia.
4. IT professionals, tired of stodgy traditional government, unite to form the first nation unbound by geographic or genetic ties. The native language of this new country is not English or Spanish, but Java 6.1.
JAVA?????!!!!!
In that case we're all going to die, and deservedly so. Never has a language promised so much and delivered so little, unless you count Oracle Designer/2000 as a language.
That orta piss a few people off...
All too often politicians work directly against the interests of all but a tiny share of their constituients, for the benefit of those that pay their re-election bills, or otherwise supply them with money or power.
Which makes their motivation pretty much the same as the rest of us. Most admire altruism, but generally when other people do it if the issue affects us directly.
Can't let the hoi-polloi loose on the code, any damn thing could happen. For example, Linux. It is true that moderation (like Linus) is required, but the argument that it would necessarily result in chaos is bogus I think.
This is a Linux oriented forum, but why does it have to get dragged into absolutely everything? The Linux model is different in any case. The work is done by the hoi polloi, who have latitude to do specific tasks their way, but government/moderation is done by Linus and has delegates/appointees, not by consensus. Pretty much like the way government now works in both countries. Not a bad thing, but hardly consensual democracy. Yes, anyone can go out and make their own distro, but surely you don't want to extend that out to evryone who's pissed off with the Central Government starting their own little country.
In this consensual democracy, who decides what questions are put to the masses? Government involves an enormous amount of compromise - decisions must be based on previous decisions and the average Joe/Josephine would need to keep track of the hugely complex web of historical legislation, as well as budgets, economic forecasts, global security issues, the concerns of other countries, etc. I can see one vote approving a social program and another indirectly knocking back the funding which would allow it to happen.
Do I service my own car or do my own plumbing? Nah. I hire someone to do it. You go this way, you'll get lots of entrepreneurs offering to vote with your interests at heart and lots of punters willing to hire them. May be morally questionable perhaps, but it'll still happen. You'd pay people to make decisions for you rather than elect them.
We have a fairly widespread consensus in this country that politics is broken,
Do we? Which country? Are you assuming the US is the whole world again?
Oh, and BTW, philosophers should rule the world.
You obviously haven't hung out with too many philosophers.
My Dad is a retired professor of philosophy. He's a great guy, and I've met a lot of his colleagues.
There is no way I'd want to let these guys anywhere near government. And I think that goes for most academics. There's no substitute for real world experience.
Well, my government passed stupid legislation and we have an idiot whose head is in the '50s as a minister. The main opposition party, with a few exceptions, chose not to stand up on the issue (no one once to be seen advocating kiddie porn) and the minor parties made loud noises but were basically irrelevant to the debate because of numbers.
Situation normal, and hardly confined to Australia.
You US people had Reagan (cluelessness made America proud again!) and now you have Bill "keep it in your pants" Clinton. We have our Howard and Alston.
Politicians. Don't expect much.
There are few SW companies these days that do not provide patches for download.
Part of the thrust of the article IMHO was that the Web has made things worse rather than better as regards software quality. In many ways, the web has just meant we don't need to wait six months to replace our current set of bugs with a different and possibly larger and costlier set of bugs, we can do it right away.
Anyone who has tried to upgrade IIS and MS proxy server and keep their PCAnywhere and ARCServe in sync with the various service packs will know this is NOT something that can be done in realtime. You endup in this downward spiral of patch/upgrade escalation which seems destined to hit Mutually Assured Destruction at any moment.
Linux is better at this sort of thing, but you still spend lots of time keeping your web of mutual version compatibility in sync.
The greatest problem is the history of computing is the result of COBOL.
Y2k is not COBOL's fault, nor Grace Hopper's. It's a question of program design, not the language used. Using C++, Perl, or Eiffel doesn't stop (and has not stopped) people writing programs with Y2K problems.
Engage your brain before you touch the keyboard next time.
Er, it sounds like the original poster is a programmer and someone is paying THEM to do the work.
In the real world, most business people (bosses)want and are paid to solve business problems, not to finance open source initiatives which may provide something more or less like what they originally wanted at some indeterminate time.
Running a business dependent on the output of one or more open source projects yet to reach fruition sounds like an extraodinarily effective way to go broke in the fastest possible time.
I think the cosource way works if people "invest" in software, much as they invest in shares or property, with the opportunity to reap the benefits (which may be more or less than they would hope for) at an indeterminate later time. The "other interested people" who may invest may not come on board in the timeframe you would wish for, and if you can't wait that long or justify paying for the whole thing yourself then you lose.
Trying to meet a corporate deadline using the methods you advocate would be far too risky IMHO.
PHP is a server side scripting language often used for database-linked web pages.
The logical leap from here to an OLAP engine is far too great for any sane person to make. OLAP and the Web have no direct or necessary relationship.
New definition:
"frind (n): a type of software, very useful for the type of work for which it was developed, but which is pushed relentlessly by the indiscriminate as being the solution to all problems past and future."
Your not obligated to post on this forum, and if you don't know what you're talking about it's probably best not to.