Asm: it's like moving a mountain with a teaspoon. It takes a longer, but you have control over every bit of dirt.
The right tool for the job. <rolls eyes>
You use asm where you need to. Yes some people go overboard (some would consider writing a complete industrial motor starter and variable speed drive in assembly overboard but it was necessary for code space and speed reasons). Sometimes C compilers aren't available or the overhead of C is just too much.
I can't tell if that comment was supposed to be a troll or not but I've bitten. If it wasn't a troll, you need a few whacks with the clue stick.
That is the biggest problem with the fast pace of Linux upgrades, vendors don't have the luxury of 20 billion bug breakers for their code, they have to spend lots of time verifying that their code works against any upgrades.
And this is why they used Win2000 instead of WinNT4?
If you're gonna pit the top of one and the middle of the next, I ain't even gonna look at your benchmark. They used Win2k, so (in my mind) should have used Linux kernel 2.4.1-prewhateveritistoday.
According to Ann Landers, 3-5 people a year get killed by lightning over telephone wires a year in the US. Something to think about the next time you are smoking rocks.
I fail to see what you're getting at.
If you are on a computer with a modem (external or internal) and a lightning strike capable of killing you (i.e. it's directly on the telephone line outside your house or *very* close to it, not down at the CO or induced from the nearby power lines) you are at just as great a danger if the modem is internal or external. That 5' of 26AWG cable is not going to save you or your computer.
Any sufficient length of phone line out on the pole will have some kind of lightning arrestor helping to protect it. Most lightning strkes that take out the modem without blowing it apart are just overvoltages which the metal oxide varistors (MOVs) weren't quick enough or powerful enough to protect against. Let me repeat it again. Your computer is not safe from a direct lightning strike, no matter what kind of modem you're using. You can only hope to save your equipment if you're using a combination of protection, and you don't have a hope in hell unless you're using station-class lightning arrestors. Those puppies don't fit into your typical external modem.
Now there is a small band of lightning strike intensities which would fry a computer with an internal modem but not one with an external modem but that band is so narrow it's not worth the extra bother with the box and cabling and everything. That is what my reference to insurance and backups were all about, Mr. Coward.
Now you are probably safer using a computer during a lightning strike than you are a phone but that is beside the point in this discussion.
Next time you try to blow off a valid point with some inane bit of trivia and accuse me of drug abuse, think for a half second and ask yourself if what you're saying really really matters. I bet you'll close the window instead of hitting the submit button and polluting/. with just another bit of anemic squitter.
Frankly I am forced to live outside of the city where they don't understand someone might like DSL...
Actually it has nothing to do with them not understanding your want for DSL. DSL has a very limited distance requirement between its endpoints and the further out you are from the other end (usually the central office) the slower your connection goes. Pairgain has the best distance "records" for their DSL equipment (we use the Megabit Modem 300S for our DSL customers) but even they only get 128kbps at 35kft or so. That number is right out of my ass, BTW... Please refer to the spec guide/manual before quoting that number elsewhere. It's midnight and I'm just about off to bed.
Connections to most other stores would run from the mid-20s to the low 30s, but we'd always connect to the Milpitas store at the whopping fast speed of 9600 bps!
That's the speed I usually get when I hook my OsitechJack of Diamonds PCMCIA modem+ethernet. If I'm way out in the boonies I'm lucky to get 2400. And if I'm in Northern Quebec, I don't connect at all!
If you're not trying to grab some huge binary file 2400 is more than enough. It brings back the old days of BBSes and 232 characters per second.:-)
Why would anybody want a PCI OR an ISA modem in the first place? Don't you realize that with any internal modem, you're plugging your computer into a big antenna for lightening strikes and other unpleasantries?
Any lightning strike great enough to blow your modem to ratshit is great enough to travel along a 5' length of 26AWG to your computer and take it out, too. If the lightning strike only fries the modem and/or it's protection circuitry that same circuitry is in the internal modem as well, as part of the Part-15 interface.
I used to think the same way as you but in the last three years I've come to the conclusion that the extra wall wart and cabling and plastic box with lights doesn't give me a whole lot of advantage to the card in the computer. I can tell what's going on with pppd -debug or -kdebug and ifconfig.
Besides, that's what backups and insurance are for.
crap modems at the ISP's (Internet service, only $9.95/month!!!)
Whoa there. Back up.
We are offerring unlimited interactive dialup internet for 9.95/month (prepaid 1yr, $14.95/mo otherwise). Our equipment yields over 46k connections more than 75% of the time and we're expanding into a Nortel CVX POP box within two months.
I certainly don't consider our service crappy, although I do agree with all your other points. Especially the WinModems. People seem to love buying a $25 WinModem and throwing it in a P100 and wondering why their connect rates are so shitty and there are so many line disconnections.
They are ticked that ISPs are using *their* telephone networks for essentially free while charging their $20 a month for internet access.
Essentially free?! What are you smoking?!
The ISP I work at pays approximately $2400 per month for the use of 96 DEAs (phone lines). I guess you could claim that we are using their switching equipment (what routes our customer's exchanges to ours) for free but I don't buy it. If they would clue in and drop the prices on allowing us to either lease ports off their DSLAMs or put in our own I could see your arguement. The telcos don't want to put in the infrastructure to take the burden off. They're making more money off dialup.
Hell one of the towns we have a POP in doesn't even have the infrastructure to support ISDN let alone DSL!
In the heyday, USR and Cardinals were pretty high-quality stuff. Now it seems to be the land of Diamond.
I agree. USR used to be really really good. Now I opt for GVC over all. If you want some WinModem that sucks down your P3-700, go ahead. If you've got the system to drive it right, you'll have no problems. However if you want your processor for yourself and don't want to be cluttering up your PCI bandwidth with a trillion requests about how to convert a certain screech into data and vice versa and actually want to have decent ping times for online gaming, get a true blue hardware modem. WinModems just aren't worth it IMO.
In a slightly different mode of thought... I've found that USR Total Control Centers tend to favour (duh) USR modems and have difficulty with a variety of others, although they seem to speak fairly well to WinModems. Portmasters have the worst time with WinModems in my experience.
Ninety percent of the dial-ups I've used in the last three years have connected at 31200bps or lower, with 56k modems (modems on both ends utilizing either Flex or x2).
As the technical admin for a smallish ISP (96 lines, moving soon to well over 1300 though) I am kind of surprised to hear this. We use Cisco AS5200s and have competitors with total control centres and portmasters. Nobody has a problem offerring 56k and most of our connections are in the 45kbps range, with a few as high as 53k.
We will be moving to Nortel CVX boxen very soon (within 2 months) and that'll replace the old 12-port cards and the AS5200s with a single "cube" which interfaces directly with an SS7 and a DS3 and provides 1344 ports per unit. Throw on CNID (Called Number ID, we can tell what number you dialled) and you have a box which can support any number of ISPs, turning yet another technical business into nothing more than a VAR with a RADIUS server.
Seriously though, even at 7:1 user:line ratios (about as high as you can get before busy signals become the norm) we have not had a single complaint, neither with our connection speeds nor our busys. Hit a 7.2:1 and the busy signal complaints start pouring in.:-)
You only wish you had successfully trolled. What do you do, post this kind of anemic squitter and then wait for someone to reply so you can say you trolled? Hang out in the better Usenet groups for a while and learn what a real troll is.
It is a very rare occassion when I see a real decent troll on/.. Most times it's just some pizza-faced 14 year old who thinks that they can achieve trolldom by trying to egg people on in the most obvious way.
And data integrity, vis a vis transactions, just isn't important. Is somebody changing the moderation score on a topic while somebody else is accessing that topic? Who cares? So the moderation score of the thread won't match up. This isn't your checking account, the top line doesn't need to be consistent with the bottom line.
I guess that's an area I won't be able to agree with you in. I know that all things aren't as important as a chequing account or a medical database but in my mind regardless of the application data coming into the database, the database should ensure that whatever comes in follows a set of rules designed to ensure that what goes in is right, and the store itself keeps its integrity based on the rules set out.
I suppose you could argue that the rules for MySQL-based apps (slashdot, etc.) are lax just because it's not that critical, but that just rubs me the wrong way.:-)
Please repeat after me: You do not have to mix code and layout when using PHP.
I know this. That doesn't answer my question about what advantages does PHP have over Perl though.:-)
Many beginners find it easier to do so
Indeed. That's why I first started using it. That, and because I figured Perl was just too damn ugly and unwieldy to use. I'm trying to see if I'm missing anything now that my viewpoint seems to have changed.
Perhaps you have a point... Perl has lots of ways to do things and some of them don't seem intuitive right off. Regexps aside, PHP is still probably easier to learn than Perl.
Of course, if you're trying to make perl compact and slick you're gonna end up with write-only code.:-)
Well, now is a good time to start the debate, which do you like better and why? I like them both equally, but then again, I've only run MySQL in enterprise, how does postgress hold up to real strain?
MySQL in enterprise? How'd you do that without transaction support or are you doing the checks and balances in your code?
I've settled on Postgres because of the transaction issue and because I write my code so that most of the grunt work is done in the database. Why use your cgi to do the sort or the ordering when the database (supposedly) should be able to do it faster? Why use PHP to pick and choose the columns from a generalized select when your database is designed to pick and choose?
I like Postgres (7) because now I don't have to have shared libs to fake foreign keys. Data integrity is a big thing for me and MySQL doesn't seem to have a whole lot of support for it. Yeah it's fast as hell but how much faster than Postgres 6.5 or 7?
I've seen the benchmarks pitting Postgres and MySQL. What I'd like to see are these benchmarks performed with somewhat more "realistic" criteria. I don't do select a,b,c,d from mytable where a=whatever; -- my SQL statements are set up so that the bulk of the work is done by the database itself and the resultant data given back to my program is already ordered, sorted and formatted how I need so that all I have to do in the program is wrap it in HTML and spit it out.
I thought that was the whole idea behind using a database over a flat file or other "roll yer own" database setup?
While I'm on this mini rant, where are some real benchmarks between Perl (with and without mod_perl) and PHP (with and without Zend)? I really don't care if PHP can compute a FFT in 1/3 the time that Perl can; 99% of my cgi scripting is feeding and recieving data from a database connection or parsing some kind of human-readable input into something the machine can use, not doing heavy computations. What are the speed comparisions in a realistic situation?
Don't get me wrong -- I started out with PHP and gradually found myself using more and more Perl just because I could reuse my modules in my other (non-cgi) code. I found myself questioning my use of PHP every time I typed the <?php tag. It's not a good thing to mix code and content, which is pretty much the biggest advantage PHP has over Perl IMO. It makes it very easy to do exactly that.
If I wanted speed over all, I'd write in assembly or C and do the CGI that way. What real advantage does PHP have over Perl?
Makes it perfect tool for DDOS attack. Just tell 20 of your Guntella neighbours "that guy overseas really wanted that 10G movie clip, so please help me delivering it" and your victim is roasted and served with fries.
Humorous, but I think you missed the idea.
The scatter network code is part of every client. You can't initiate the transfer for someone, it's the other way around.
Client: Wants to grab that Metallica box set MP3
Client: Analyze network and send request to server along with network picks
Server: Takes the MP3, splits it into x chunks and distributes to 1st-tier scatter network
1st-tier: Each scatter server breaks up their "block" into x blocks and sends them to 2nd-tier network
2nd-tier: Same idea as first tier
nth-tier:...
In discussing the idea with my brother earlier today, you would have to devise a way to split the initial transfer up into x "tamper proof" packets. Packets which could be split up but not be altered otherwise. That would prevent subverted clients from mucking with the data.
How would the fragmented mess eventually get to the original requestor? I would imagine it would be done with some kind of session ID. A "virtual circuits" (to steal a Frame/ATM term) kind of thing, but where you would start advertising you are connection x and the server would start broadcasting that it is the producer of information for that session. Hmmm... I wonder if a DeviceNet style of data producer/data consumer would work in this case. A routed system which learns which sessions are where... sounds bandwidth intensive.
I didn't say I had a working solution, merely an idea.:-)
No, I mean requests flowing across the network (and encryption to make it secure). If what I described were implemented:
Servers would have no clue which requests came from which IP's, because the request was forwarded across a network.
The forwarding computers (who know your IP) would have no idea which requests you put out because the request is encrypted.
Actually you can take it a step further... with all the gnutella clients out there, each one can serve bits and pieces of the file to the requestor once it is determined that they want file 'x' from server 'y'. You could do a bit of network analysis to find, say, your closest 10 neighbours and your most reliable (and distant) 10, and then spread the transfer through those 20 clients. (use more for less bandwidth impact on the scatterers but at the cost of more complexity). At the receiver's end, just reassemble the packets from all the scatterers.
Make it better by having several layers of this scattering. server --> scatter network --> scatter network 2 (now scatter impact is squared for the same size network) --> scatter network 3 (cubed impact now). Let's say you've got a scatter network of only 10 computers. That's now 1000 computers sending bits and pieces of what you want, at no (significant) bandwidth cost to themselves. Of course you'll have to set up levels of how many scatter networks you want to take part in.
Think of it as spread-spectrum TCP/IP networking.:-)
... or are all of these "integrated" (and I use that term very loosely) office suites getting way out of hand? There is definitely such a thing as trying to do too much, and MS Office, StarOffice et al. are heading this way at a full gallop rather than concentrating on refining what's already there.
Absolutely.
What I hate about StarOffice is its requirement to take over your desktop. I can't tear off a window and get rid of the rest of StarOffice. Why do I need Another mini windowmanager or desktop? Blows me away, it does.
What program are you tring to use to import DOC files?
My own creation, just to convert.doc to.html, creating tables and standard formatting (lists, bold, underline, etc., and doing some "intelligent" font manipulation and such.
Formatting might get you into trouble as different programs have different ideas. (Compare Word, StarOffice, Abiword and Word Perfect and notice the differences). I suppose you could say Word is the right one;)
Indeed. I was just looking more for the standard BIU and font size/"class" stuff. Nothing too tricky.
I really hope I get a response, Slashdot blows for how it handles the user info screen... you need to remember how many replies you had to a given comment instead of having it know that you clicked on it when it was at 3 replies and give you some kind of visual cue that there are now 5 or 7 or 23:-)
The thing is DOC is a compound file format. Meaning it is made up of various serialized data streams from embedded components. Word itself won't even know what many parts of a DOC file means, it'll just pass it on to Visio, Excel, Photoshop etc to read and understand.
If the spec is right then, I should be able to import my.doc files, creating tables, lists, text, all formatting and most graphics (.gif,.jpg,.png, etc.) without any trouble, as Word doesn't need any part of any other program to do this. Why can't I?
I agree fully with you that Word doesn't handle most of the complex streams (excel data, powerpoint data, visio data, etc.) but in my documents I don't have any of these, it's all text and a lot of formatting, which Word would have to handle on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
Then they popped up exclaiming "Oh, look what I've just found in my back pocket!"
I thought this wasn't allowed in Patent Law.
IIRC, you must vigorously defent every patent infringement or lose your ability to sue altogether. This was sone to prevent this exact problem.
I hope RAMBUS gets slapped with a countersuit (how I don't know) over this. Companies should be responsible for their actions.
The real test, of course, will be to emulate a Zebra vagina.
huh?
Asm: it's like moving a mountain with a teaspoon. It takes a longer, but you have control over every bit of dirt.
The right tool for the job. <rolls eyes>
You use asm where you need to. Yes some people go overboard (some would consider writing a complete industrial motor starter and variable speed drive in assembly overboard but it was necessary for code space and speed reasons). Sometimes C compilers aren't available or the overhead of C is just too much.
I can't tell if that comment was supposed to be a troll or not but I've bitten. If it wasn't a troll, you need a few whacks with the clue stick.
That is the biggest problem with the fast pace of Linux upgrades, vendors don't have the luxury of 20 billion bug breakers for their code, they have to spend lots of time verifying that their code works against any upgrades.
And this is why they used Win2000 instead of WinNT4?
If you're gonna pit the top of one and the middle of the next, I ain't even gonna look at your benchmark. They used Win2k, so (in my mind) should have used Linux kernel 2.4.1-prewhateveritistoday.
According to Ann Landers, 3-5 people a year get killed by lightning over telephone wires a year in the US. Something to think about the next time you are smoking rocks.
I fail to see what you're getting at.
If you are on a computer with a modem (external or internal) and a lightning strike capable of killing you (i.e. it's directly on the telephone line outside your house or *very* close to it, not down at the CO or induced from the nearby power lines) you are at just as great a danger if the modem is internal or external. That 5' of 26AWG cable is not going to save you or your computer.
Any sufficient length of phone line out on the pole will have some kind of lightning arrestor helping to protect it. Most lightning strkes that take out the modem without blowing it apart are just overvoltages which the metal oxide varistors (MOVs) weren't quick enough or powerful enough to protect against. Let me repeat it again. Your computer is not safe from a direct lightning strike, no matter what kind of modem you're using. You can only hope to save your equipment if you're using a combination of protection, and you don't have a hope in hell unless you're using station-class lightning arrestors. Those puppies don't fit into your typical external modem.
Now there is a small band of lightning strike intensities which would fry a computer with an internal modem but not one with an external modem but that band is so narrow it's not worth the extra bother with the box and cabling and everything. That is what my reference to insurance and backups were all about, Mr. Coward.
Now you are probably safer using a computer during a lightning strike than you are a phone but that is beside the point in this discussion.
Next time you try to blow off a valid point with some inane bit of trivia and accuse me of drug abuse, think for a half second and ask yourself if what you're saying really really matters. I bet you'll close the window instead of hitting the submit button and polluting /. with just another bit of anemic squitter.
Frankly I am forced to live outside of the city where they don't understand someone might like DSL...
Actually it has nothing to do with them not understanding your want for DSL. DSL has a very limited distance requirement between its endpoints and the further out you are from the other end (usually the central office) the slower your connection goes. Pairgain has the best distance "records" for their DSL equipment (we use the Megabit Modem 300S for our DSL customers) but even they only get 128kbps at 35kft or so. That number is right out of my ass, BTW... Please refer to the spec guide/manual before quoting that number elsewhere. It's midnight and I'm just about off to bed.
Connections to most other stores would run from the mid-20s to the low 30s, but we'd always connect to the Milpitas store at the whopping fast speed of 9600 bps!
That's the speed I usually get when I hook my Ositech Jack of Diamonds PCMCIA modem+ethernet. If I'm way out in the boonies I'm lucky to get 2400. And if I'm in Northern Quebec, I don't connect at all!
If you're not trying to grab some huge binary file 2400 is more than enough. It brings back the old days of BBSes and 232 characters per second. :-)
Why would anybody want a PCI OR an ISA modem in the first place? Don't you realize that with any internal modem, you're plugging your computer into a big antenna for lightening strikes and other unpleasantries?
Any lightning strike great enough to blow your modem to ratshit is great enough to travel along a 5' length of 26AWG to your computer and take it out, too. If the lightning strike only fries the modem and/or it's protection circuitry that same circuitry is in the internal modem as well, as part of the Part-15 interface.
I used to think the same way as you but in the last three years I've come to the conclusion that the extra wall wart and cabling and plastic box with lights doesn't give me a whole lot of advantage to the card in the computer. I can tell what's going on with pppd -debug or -kdebug and ifconfig.
Besides, that's what backups and insurance are for.
crap modems at the ISP's (Internet service, only $9.95/month!!!)
Whoa there. Back up.
We are offerring unlimited interactive dialup internet for 9.95/month (prepaid 1yr, $14.95/mo otherwise). Our equipment yields over 46k connections more than 75% of the time and we're expanding into a Nortel CVX POP box within two months.
I certainly don't consider our service crappy, although I do agree with all your other points. Especially the WinModems. People seem to love buying a $25 WinModem and throwing it in a P100 and wondering why their connect rates are so shitty and there are so many line disconnections.
They are ticked that ISPs are using *their* telephone networks for essentially free while charging their $20 a month for internet access.
Essentially free?! What are you smoking?!
The ISP I work at pays approximately $2400 per month for the use of 96 DEAs (phone lines). I guess you could claim that we are using their switching equipment (what routes our customer's exchanges to ours) for free but I don't buy it. If they would clue in and drop the prices on allowing us to either lease ports off their DSLAMs or put in our own I could see your arguement. The telcos don't want to put in the infrastructure to take the burden off. They're making more money off dialup.
Hell one of the towns we have a POP in doesn't even have the infrastructure to support ISDN let alone DSL!
In the heyday, USR and Cardinals were pretty high-quality stuff. Now it seems to be the land of Diamond.
I agree. USR used to be really really good. Now I opt for GVC over all. If you want some WinModem that sucks down your P3-700, go ahead. If you've got the system to drive it right, you'll have no problems. However if you want your processor for yourself and don't want to be cluttering up your PCI bandwidth with a trillion requests about how to convert a certain screech into data and vice versa and actually want to have decent ping times for online gaming, get a true blue hardware modem. WinModems just aren't worth it IMO.
In a slightly different mode of thought... I've found that USR Total Control Centers tend to favour (duh) USR modems and have difficulty with a variety of others, although they seem to speak fairly well to WinModems. Portmasters have the worst time with WinModems in my experience.
Ninety percent of the dial-ups I've used in the last three years have connected at 31200bps or lower, with 56k modems (modems on both ends utilizing either Flex or x2).
As the technical admin for a smallish ISP (96 lines, moving soon to well over 1300 though) I am kind of surprised to hear this. We use Cisco AS5200s and have competitors with total control centres and portmasters. Nobody has a problem offerring 56k and most of our connections are in the 45kbps range, with a few as high as 53k.
We will be moving to Nortel CVX boxen very soon (within 2 months) and that'll replace the old 12-port cards and the AS5200s with a single "cube" which interfaces directly with an SS7 and a DS3 and provides 1344 ports per unit. Throw on CNID (Called Number ID, we can tell what number you dialled) and you have a box which can support any number of ISPs, turning yet another technical business into nothing more than a VAR with a RADIUS server.
Seriously though, even at 7:1 user:line ratios (about as high as you can get before busy signals become the norm) we have not had a single complaint, neither with our connection speeds nor our busys. Hit a 7.2:1 and the busy signal complaints start pouring in. :-)
Yeah, this is pretty ridiculous. Colleges aren't silly enough to do it, but it's still ridiculous.
Unfortunately the universities are getting pretty loony these days...
... I only wish I were joking.
BTW, YHBT, YHL, HAND.
You only wish you had successfully trolled. What do you do, post this kind of anemic squitter and then wait for someone to reply so you can say you trolled? Hang out in the better Usenet groups for a while and learn what a real troll is.
It is a very rare occassion when I see a real decent troll on /.. Most times it's just some pizza-faced 14 year old who thinks that they can achieve trolldom by trying to egg people on in the most obvious way.
And data integrity, vis a vis transactions, just isn't important. Is somebody changing the moderation score on a topic while somebody else is accessing that topic? Who cares? So the moderation score of the thread won't match up. This isn't your checking account, the top line doesn't need to be consistent with the bottom line.
I guess that's an area I won't be able to agree with you in. I know that all things aren't as important as a chequing account or a medical database but in my mind regardless of the application data coming into the database, the database should ensure that whatever comes in follows a set of rules designed to ensure that what goes in is right, and the store itself keeps its integrity based on the rules set out.
I suppose you could argue that the rules for MySQL-based apps (slashdot, etc.) are lax just because it's not that critical, but that just rubs me the wrong way. :-)
Please repeat after me: You do not have to mix code and layout when using PHP.
I know this. That doesn't answer my question about what advantages does PHP have over Perl though. :-)
Many beginners find it easier to do so
Indeed. That's why I first started using it. That, and because I figured Perl was just too damn ugly and unwieldy to use. I'm trying to see if I'm missing anything now that my viewpoint seems to have changed.
- What real advantage does PHP have over Perl?
It's easier to learn...Perhaps you have a point... Perl has lots of ways to do things and some of them don't seem intuitive right off. Regexps aside, PHP is still probably easier to learn than Perl.
Of course, if you're trying to make perl compact and slick you're gonna end up with write-only code. :-)
Well, now is a good time to start the debate, which do you like better and why? I like them both equally, but then again, I've only run MySQL in enterprise, how does postgress hold up to real strain?
MySQL in enterprise?
How'd you do that without transaction support or are you doing the checks and balances in your code?
I've settled on Postgres because of the transaction issue and because I write my code so that most of the grunt work is done in the database. Why use your cgi to do the sort or the ordering when the database (supposedly) should be able to do it faster? Why use PHP to pick and choose the columns from a generalized select when your database is designed to pick and choose?
I like Postgres (7) because now I don't have to have shared libs to fake foreign keys. Data integrity is a big thing for me and MySQL doesn't seem to have a whole lot of support for it. Yeah it's fast as hell but how much faster than Postgres 6.5 or 7?
I've seen the benchmarks pitting Postgres and MySQL. What I'd like to see are these benchmarks performed with somewhat more "realistic" criteria. I don't do select a,b,c,d from mytable where a=whatever; -- my SQL statements are set up so that the bulk of the work is done by the database itself and the resultant data given back to my program is already ordered, sorted and formatted how I need so that all I have to do in the program is wrap it in HTML and spit it out.
I thought that was the whole idea behind using a database over a flat file or other "roll yer own" database setup?
While I'm on this mini rant, where are some real benchmarks between Perl (with and without mod_perl) and PHP (with and without Zend)? I really don't care if PHP can compute a FFT in 1/3 the time that Perl can; 99% of my cgi scripting is feeding and recieving data from a database connection or parsing some kind of human-readable input into something the machine can use, not doing heavy computations. What are the speed comparisions in a realistic situation?
Don't get me wrong -- I started out with PHP and gradually found myself using more and more Perl just because I could reuse my modules in my other (non-cgi) code. I found myself questioning my use of PHP every time I typed the <?php tag. It's not a good thing to mix code and content, which is pretty much the biggest advantage PHP has over Perl IMO. It makes it very easy to do exactly that.
If I wanted speed over all, I'd write in assembly or C and do the CGI that way. What real advantage does PHP have over Perl?
Every, and I do mean every Perl script I write start out like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -wTuse strict;
Saves a lot of frustration and trouble. Same reason why almost every C program I write is compiled with warnings turned up to the max.
I'm supposed to be R&D'ing software for PalmPilots right about now, but am still waiting for mine (And have been for quite a while).
I wanted to email you regarding Palm software but unfortunately you don't have an email address listed in your /. profile. Perhaps you could email me?
Makes it perfect tool for DDOS attack. Just tell 20 of your Guntella neighbours "that guy overseas really wanted that 10G movie clip, so please help me delivering it" and your victim is roasted and served with fries.
Humorous, but I think you missed the idea.
The scatter network code is part of every client. You can't initiate the transfer for someone, it's the other way around.
In discussing the idea with my brother earlier today, you would have to devise a way to split the initial transfer up into x "tamper proof" packets. Packets which could be split up but not be altered otherwise. That would prevent subverted clients from mucking with the data.
How would the fragmented mess eventually get to the original requestor? I would imagine it would be done with some kind of session ID. A "virtual circuits" (to steal a Frame/ATM term) kind of thing, but where you would start advertising you are connection x and the server would start broadcasting that it is the producer of information for that session. Hmmm... I wonder if a DeviceNet style of data producer/data consumer would work in this case. A routed system which learns which sessions are where... sounds bandwidth intensive.
I didn't say I had a working solution, merely an idea. :-)
No, I mean requests flowing across the network (and encryption to make it secure). If what I described were implemented:
Actually you can take it a step further... with all the gnutella clients out there, each one can serve bits and pieces of the file to the requestor once it is determined that they want file 'x' from server 'y'. You could do a bit of network analysis to find, say, your closest 10 neighbours and your most reliable (and distant) 10, and then spread the transfer through those 20 clients. (use more for less bandwidth impact on the scatterers but at the cost of more complexity). At the receiver's end, just reassemble the packets from all the scatterers.
Make it better by having several layers of this scattering. server --> scatter network --> scatter network 2 (now scatter impact is squared for the same size network) --> scatter network 3 (cubed impact now). Let's say you've got a scatter network of only 10 computers. That's now 1000 computers sending bits and pieces of what you want, at no (significant) bandwidth cost to themselves. Of course you'll have to set up levels of how many scatter networks you want to take part in.
Think of it as spread-spectrum TCP/IP networking. :-)
Absolutely.
What I hate about StarOffice is its requirement to take over your desktop. I can't tear off a window and get rid of the rest of StarOffice. Why do I need Another mini windowmanager or desktop? Blows me away, it does.
What program are you tring to use to import DOC files?
My own creation, just to convert .doc to .html, creating tables and standard formatting (lists, bold, underline, etc., and doing some "intelligent" font manipulation and such.
Formatting might get you into trouble as different programs have different ideas. (Compare Word, StarOffice, Abiword and Word Perfect and notice the differences). I suppose you could say Word is the right one ;)
Indeed. I was just looking more for the standard BIU and font size/"class" stuff. Nothing too tricky.
I really hope I get a response, Slashdot blows for how it handles the user info screen... you need to remember how many replies you had to a given comment instead of having it know that you clicked on it when it was at 3 replies and give you some kind of visual cue that there are now 5 or 7 or 23 :-)
The thing is DOC is a compound file format. Meaning it is made up of various serialized data streams from embedded components. Word itself won't even know what many parts of a DOC file means, it'll just pass it on to Visio, Excel, Photoshop etc to read and understand.
If the spec is right then, I should be able to import my .doc files, creating tables, lists, text, all formatting and most graphics (.gif, .jpg, .png, etc.) without any trouble, as Word doesn't need any part of any other program to do this. Why can't I?
I agree fully with you that Word doesn't handle most of the complex streams (excel data, powerpoint data, visio data, etc.) but in my documents I don't have any of these, it's all text and a lot of formatting, which Word would have to handle on its own.