The free ones where you pay for the phone call are not flaky (in my experience). The free one where you don't pay for the call is flaky, but you get what you pay for.
I still keep my for-pay ISP for downloads and a decent connection, but try and use my free-free ISP as much as I can.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I now have a 100% free internet connection at home in the UK (well, OK, it's free after 6pm and on the weekend, but that's the only time I'm online). So there are companies out there willing to offer this service.
The connection is crap - awful in fact. Very slow on the US uplink, but fast enough for long irc sessions. And their modem ratio is 30:1 (increasing to 20:1 this weekend), but I haven't had too many problems connecting (never connects first time at 6pm, but always connects eventually).
However I don't really want to shout out how to get this service. People who know should probably keep it to themselves too - I'd hate for the service to get *worse*!!!:)
Drop me a line with a good grovelling line, and a great joke, and I'll tell you all the details. (PS: I'm connecting from Linux).
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Office 2000's "save as HTML" will save extended XML tags, using a unique namespace, for anything that HTML 4 is unable to represent. However, I think Abi need to release a _lot_ more information about their file format, and should also work a bit more closely with other teams to define a single standard base (which you can extend trivially via namespaces). They need to chat to the kword people.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
For those interested in IIS and benchmarking, please take some time to read this rather long article. It's from a friend of mine who was the manager of the O'Reilly WebSite Pro development team. Some of the key issues were that MS made changes to the Winsock API specifically for IIS (AcceptEx, TransmitFile, Fibers and IOCompletionPort). Should Linux do this to make Apache/Zeus faster just for benchmarks, when really it does fine in the real world? No. Of course not.
The other interesting point is the fact that ZD came up with the IIS benchmarks specifically to show how good IIS is. Such things as fitting the test harness in the cache, and only doing ISAPI dll's for dynamic content (vs CGI on other servers).
There are lies, damn lies, and ZD benchmarks. I'll use what works, and live happy in the fact that I won't have to reboot my server this year.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
The exploits in all the other web based email systems (particularly hotmail, although I suspect they are just targeted because they are big) have been based on browser bugs, and Javascript deficiencies. What's to say that something running as Java won't suffer from similar problems? I know there's the sandbox there, but will that be enough (i.e. there might be bugs in their server configuration or any other possible point of entry)? And do enough people care?
For me, I don't care about the security of my email, just that I can get it 24/7 and quickly (which is why I dumped hotmail for joymail). I honestly don't think that many people will care enough to use Java for their email. Especially not considering how slow it is. Still, I might just create an account, just for a laugh...
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
How about some proper stats, like say run analog on the site every night. I'd love to see more up to the minute stats, detailing things like hourly access and stuff like that. Analog is an amazing log analysis tool - check it out Rob.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Wow - that was harsh... I guess the Microsoft battle is now firmly ON - big time. That's probably good news - it means they're a little bit scared.
So let's try and address these points.
Spec Web
The Spec Web figures are generally put out by hardware and software manufacturers in cahoots to produce high figures (often using slightly modified server binaries). Linux has no hardware vendors who are yet big enough to produce these figures. VA are getting there but I don't know if they have plans to produce SpecWeb figures.
The same goes for SAP and TPC figures.
Netbench
The kernel developers are aware of some issues here, since Solaris and Irix don't exhibit this behaviour. Also the clients have so far tended to be '95/98 clients. Where I work all the desktops are NT Wks (thousands of them).
WebBench
These figures use Apache, instead of Zeus. Let's see some real figures with Zeus before making judgement here. Apache is meant for complex systems developers who need flexibility, not raw speed.
Also, WebBench's dynamic benchmarks cover ISAPI on IIS and CGI on Apache. Gee, that seems like a fair test eh? It's not, and until WebBench provides an apxs module it will continue to be unfair to Apache. Why not compile that ISAPI module on Zeus and see how it fairs? I think we know the answer.
Reliability
Microsoft are most scared of Linux's reliability (hence it's at the top of their non-performance list). OK, so no OEM guarantees Linux uptimes. Big deal. NT's 99.9% uptime guarantees are based on clustering solutions - not single servers. And these guarantees are expensive. NTFS is not a true journaling filesystem either, although they may be talking about a commercial filesystem that I'm not aware of.
Scalability
I think they're probably pretty close on this - although they still make some glaring mistakes - like Synchronous I/O - only on the driver mindcraft used. And if pthreads aren't kernel level threading I'll eat my shoes. Yummy. Oooo and NT has an integrated file cache... Linux has one of those too. Wow.
Security
I don't even have to touch this section. Wow... stunning marketing going on in there.
TCO
Comparing to UNIX, not Linux.
Ease of Use/Admin
I just loved the bit about "Scriptable administration tools for automated local and remote administration". OK, so wsh is now available. How much is it used? What about non-automated remote administration? For most administrators of NT boxes, wsh and SMS just don't cut it - they have to walk to the box usually.
Actually, I'm bored with breaking this down. What can I achieve - leave me to just use Linux and be successful with it, and not have to suffer reboots.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I remain unconvinced. Tell me how this compares to my 2 current perl references - the Palm pilot Perl Quick Reference (great for quick searches, and keeping a current position), and perldoc. Definitely perldoc is your friend, and I don't know why more people don't use it. Does this book offer that much more than the standard perl docs?
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
It's a very well written article, with few deficiencies. It is a bit over the top in it's glowing recommendation of Linux - i.e. it's biased. What more should we expect. However I was supposed to be writing something like this myself this week in an ongoing persuasion process. Looks like I can have an easy week for once... Nah - they'll find something else for me to do;-)
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Sorry, but well-formedness != valid. Yes, of course expat does well formedness checks - if it didn't it wouldn't be an XML parser. And yes, it does internal entity expansion. That's not the same as external entity expansion, which is really a requirement for more complex DTD's.
PEntities are parameter entities, another requirement for complex DTD's. I know that expat found well formedness errors in your XUL files, because I was the one logging the bugs about it...:)
Note though that expat _does_ return enough information to be expandable to support all the above (with the possible exception of validation) - that's how you do it using Perl's XML::Parser.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I'm the least IE advocate you'll find. But some of your nonesense has to be refuted.
Mozilla's XML support uses Expat. That means no validation, no support for PEntities, no external DTD support. IE's XML parser supports all of this (although validation isn't generally performed in the browser, it's still available to developers as a DLL or OLE control). Now, let me also say that I use expat every single day and it's a great parser. Fast too.
Mozilla has zero plans for XSL support. That's bad news. They hope someone might contribute it, but that's still looking unlikely, even given the prize money available. Microsoft also did something bad - providing XSL support before the standard is ratified. What the hell are they thinking of? Now everyone must make sure their XSL is backwards compatible to MS's. Duh! But I think you're unfair about the process through which XSL is going through at the W3C.
Having said that - I'm now getting excited about mozilla. If they ship XSL I'll be dancing on the ceiling. If they don't, then I guess I'll get more work doing server side XML transformations;-)
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Hmm... maybe. But only if you go for a lower end box. Once you're up to a quad processor system, or even more, the price of the OS dwindles in comparison to the h/w.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Moderators up the above post further. It's an excellent point.
The point is, they've obviously done exactly that - retested with all the patches and improvements we suggested, and still came out with abysmal performance. Otherwise they wouldn't (and neither would MS) be willing to get high profile people in there to do the tests again. This is a setup and it stinks.
However, it may, afterall, prove beneficial. If it finally gets linux-kernel started on some serious SMP improvements to the kernel then we'll all be better off in the long run (provided uni-processor doesn't suffer in the process...).
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
On our box we switched in thttpd to see how much of a difference it would make, and it maxed out at 1200 hps (compared to apache's 1800+). Not sure why. I expected it to be faster too. Perhaps because of Linux's weak threads implementation.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
I really hope kpilotDaemon is a bit more stable - using it with my Palm V it keeps crashing out - which is really frustrating! Other than that, it looks good, though I'm feeling a bit impatient for themable KDE, it's still butt ugly:)
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
You can secure any registry node - it simply follows the NT security rules. Whether it comes secure as default I don't know, but I didn't want you to continue believing that any user always has full access to the registry - it's not true.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
It's been my experience that you can have someone who is a really great programmer (the "programmer mindset": Laziness, Impatience and Hubris), who doesn't know the theory behind some of the stuff. That's great for 90% of projects (even for most of the stuff I'm working on). Maybe even 99% of projects. The difficulty comes when you have a really hard problem to solve, one that these people haven't come across before, like the "dining philosophers" problem. That's when the people who have both the CS background and the programmer's mindset really come into their own. Note that I say "both" though...
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Indeed it does... However the same concept of portion also applies to many other (commercial and non-commercial) licences, and there hasn't (to my knowledge) been any real fights over those.
I certainly wouldn't want it to be too closely defined - what if it said "any method or function or subroutine copied as a whole", and there were code like:
sub isActive { 0; }
(ok, so it's perl, but you get the idea)
That sort of thing can be quite common in OO base classes.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
THAT is why programmers will eventually be regarded in the same way as architects, IT people will be seen as Construction Foremen and the 'grunt' laborers.
Sheesh, I wish it were like that now. Sometimes I really hate being lumped in with all the other morons who stumbled through their CS degree, or who don't even have a degree, but call themselves "Software Engineers". What we really need is some nice discriminatory jargon, like I'd be an Architect and they'd be Construction Workers... That would make me happy... Unfortunately we seem to have gotten stuck with "Everyone's a Software Engineer..." - Yuck!
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:,hacker Perl another Just)'
Slashdot Mirror
The free ones where you pay for the phone call are not flaky (in my experience). The free one where you don't pay for the call is flaky, but you get what you pay for.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
I still keep my for-pay ISP for downloads and a decent connection, but try and use my free-free ISP as much as I can.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I now have a 100% free internet connection at home in the UK (well, OK, it's free after 6pm and on the weekend, but that's the only time I'm online). So there are companies out there willing to offer this service.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
The connection is crap - awful in fact. Very slow on the US uplink, but fast enough for long irc sessions. And their modem ratio is 30:1 (increasing to 20:1 this weekend), but I haven't had too many problems connecting (never connects first time at 6pm, but always connects eventually).
However I don't really want to shout out how to get this service. People who know should probably keep it to themselves too - I'd hate for the service to get *worse*!!!
Drop me a line with a good grovelling line, and a great joke, and I'll tell you all the details. (PS: I'm connecting from Linux).
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Office 2000's "save as HTML" will save extended XML tags, using a unique namespace, for anything that HTML 4 is unable to represent. However, I think Abi need to release a _lot_ more information about their file format, and should also work a bit more closely with other teams to define a single standard base (which you can extend trivially via namespaces). They need to chat to the kword people.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
It's true. A stealth aircraft reflects radar about as much as a duck. All you have to do is track the ducks that fly at mach 1...
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
From the slashdot stats page:
/.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
uptime: 52mins
Last time I looked it was 3 days. Maybe Rob should explain what's going on with
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
For those interested in IIS and benchmarking, please take some time to read this rather long article. It's from a friend of mine who was the manager of the O'Reilly WebSite Pro development team. Some of the key issues were that MS made changes to the Winsock API specifically for IIS (AcceptEx, TransmitFile, Fibers and IOCompletionPort). Should Linux do this to make Apache/Zeus faster just for benchmarks, when really it does fine in the real world? No. Of course not.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
The other interesting point is the fact that ZD came up with the IIS benchmarks specifically to show how good IIS is. Such things as fitting the test harness in the cache, and only doing ISAPI dll's for dynamic content (vs CGI on other servers).
There are lies, damn lies, and ZD benchmarks. I'll use what works, and live happy in the fact that I won't have to reboot my server this year.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
The exploits in all the other web based email systems (particularly hotmail, although I suspect they are just targeted because they are big) have been based on browser bugs, and Javascript deficiencies. What's to say that something running as Java won't suffer from similar problems? I know there's the sandbox there, but will that be enough (i.e. there might be bugs in their server configuration or any other possible point of entry)? And do enough people care?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
For me, I don't care about the security of my email, just that I can get it 24/7 and quickly (which is why I dumped hotmail for joymail). I honestly don't think that many people will care enough to use Java for their email. Especially not considering how slow it is. Still, I might just create an account, just for a laugh...
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
How about some proper stats, like say run analog on the site every night. I'd love to see more up to the minute stats, detailing things like hourly access and stuff like that. Analog is an amazing log analysis tool - check it out Rob.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
How about some proper stats, like say run on the site every night. I'd love to see more up to the minute stats, detailing things like hourly access and stuff like that. Analog is an amazing log analysis tool - check it out Rob.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Wow - that was harsh... I guess the Microsoft battle is now firmly ON - big time. That's probably good news - it means they're a little bit scared.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
So let's try and address these points.
Spec Web
The Spec Web figures are generally put out by hardware and software manufacturers in cahoots to produce high figures (often using slightly modified server binaries). Linux has no hardware vendors who are yet big enough to produce these figures. VA are getting there but I don't know if they have plans to produce SpecWeb figures.
The same goes for SAP and TPC figures.
Netbench
The kernel developers are aware of some issues here, since Solaris and Irix don't exhibit this behaviour. Also the clients have so far tended to be '95/98 clients. Where I work all the desktops are NT Wks (thousands of them).
WebBench
These figures use Apache, instead of Zeus. Let's see some real figures with Zeus before making judgement here. Apache is meant for complex systems developers who need flexibility, not raw speed.
Also, WebBench's dynamic benchmarks cover ISAPI on IIS and CGI on Apache. Gee, that seems like a fair test eh? It's not, and until WebBench provides an apxs module it will continue to be unfair to Apache. Why not compile that ISAPI module on Zeus and see how it fairs? I think we know the answer.
Reliability
Microsoft are most scared of Linux's reliability (hence it's at the top of their non-performance list). OK, so no OEM guarantees Linux uptimes. Big deal. NT's 99.9% uptime guarantees are based on clustering solutions - not single servers. And these guarantees are expensive. NTFS is not a true journaling filesystem either, although they may be talking about a commercial filesystem that I'm not aware of.
Scalability
I think they're probably pretty close on this - although they still make some glaring mistakes - like Synchronous I/O - only on the driver mindcraft used. And if pthreads aren't kernel level threading I'll eat my shoes. Yummy. Oooo and NT has an integrated file cache... Linux has one of those too. Wow.
Security
I don't even have to touch this section. Wow... stunning marketing going on in there.
TCO
Comparing to UNIX, not Linux.
Ease of Use/Admin
I just loved the bit about "Scriptable administration tools for automated local and remote administration". OK, so wsh is now available. How much is it used? What about non-automated remote administration? For most administrators of NT boxes, wsh and SMS just don't cut it - they have to walk to the box usually.
Actually, I'm bored with breaking this down. What can I achieve - leave me to just use Linux and be successful with it, and not have to suffer reboots.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Yes, they do:
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perldoc -f functionname
perldoc -riX any_word
perldoc -q faq_word
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
What the perldocs dont have is that fancy camel cover and they are not something you can comfortably read while at the bathroom and such.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
No, that's what the Palm version is for
That and the backlight for reading under the covers...
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I remain unconvinced. Tell me how this compares to my 2 current perl references - the Palm pilot Perl Quick Reference (great for quick searches, and keeping a current position), and perldoc. Definitely perldoc is your friend, and I don't know why more people don't use it. Does this book offer that much more than the standard perl docs?
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I'm trying to get my managers to read this...
;-)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
It's a very well written article, with few deficiencies. It is a bit over the top in it's glowing recommendation of Linux - i.e. it's biased. What more should we expect. However I was supposed to be writing something like this myself this week in an ongoing persuasion process. Looks like I can have an easy week for once... Nah - they'll find something else for me to do
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Sorry, but well-formedness != valid. Yes, of course expat does well formedness checks - if it didn't it wouldn't be an XML parser. And yes, it does internal entity expansion. That's not the same as external entity expansion, which is really a requirement for more complex DTD's.
:)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
PEntities are parameter entities, another requirement for complex DTD's. I know that expat found well formedness errors in your XUL files, because I was the one logging the bugs about it...
Note though that expat _does_ return enough information to be expandable to support all the above (with the possible exception of validation) - that's how you do it using Perl's XML::Parser.
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I'm the least IE advocate you'll find. But some of your nonesense has to be refuted.
;-)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Mozilla's XML support uses Expat. That means no validation, no support for PEntities, no external DTD support. IE's XML parser supports all of this (although validation isn't generally performed in the browser, it's still available to developers as a DLL or OLE control). Now, let me also say that I use expat every single day and it's a great parser. Fast too.
Mozilla has zero plans for XSL support. That's bad news. They hope someone might contribute it, but that's still looking unlikely, even given the prize money available. Microsoft also did something bad - providing XSL support before the standard is ratified. What the hell are they thinking of? Now everyone must make sure their XSL is backwards compatible to MS's. Duh! But I think you're unfair about the process through which XSL is going through at the W3C.
Having said that - I'm now getting excited about mozilla. If they ship XSL I'll be dancing on the ceiling. If they don't, then I guess I'll get more work doing server side XML transformations
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Hmm... maybe. But only if you go for a lower end box. Once you're up to a quad processor system, or even more, the price of the OS dwindles in comparison to the h/w.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Moderators up the above post further. It's an excellent point.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
The point is, they've obviously done exactly that - retested with all the patches and improvements we suggested, and still came out with abysmal performance. Otherwise they wouldn't (and neither would MS) be willing to get high profile people in there to do the tests again. This is a setup and it stinks.
However, it may, afterall, prove beneficial. If it finally gets linux-kernel started on some serious SMP improvements to the kernel then we'll all be better off in the long run (provided uni-processor doesn't suffer in the process...).
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
On our box we switched in thttpd to see how much of a difference it would make, and it maxed out at 1200 hps (compared to apache's 1800+). Not sure why. I expected it to be faster too. Perhaps because of Linux's weak threads implementation.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Matt.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I really hope kpilotDaemon is a bit more stable - using it with my Palm V it keeps crashing out - which is really frustrating! Other than that, it looks good, though I'm feeling a bit impatient for themable KDE, it's still butt ugly :)
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Yes it is totally incorrect. Totally crap.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
But then so is NT....
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
You can secure any registry node - it simply follows the NT security rules. Whether it comes secure as default I don't know, but I didn't want you to continue believing that any user always has full access to the registry - it's not true.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
I would say that you're 90% right...
,hacker Perl another Just)'
It's been my experience that you can have someone who is a really great programmer (the "programmer mindset": Laziness, Impatience and Hubris), who doesn't know the theory behind some of the stuff. That's great for 90% of projects (even for most of the stuff I'm working on). Maybe even 99% of projects. The difficulty comes when you have a really hard problem to solve, one that these people haven't come across before, like the "dining philosophers" problem. That's when the people who have both the CS background and the programmer's mindset really come into their own. Note that I say "both" though...
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
Indeed it does... However the same concept of portion also applies to many other (commercial and non-commercial) licences, and there hasn't (to my knowledge) been any real fights over those.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
I certainly wouldn't want it to be too closely defined - what if it said "any method or function or subroutine copied as a whole", and there were code like:
sub isActive {
0;
}
(ok, so it's perl, but you get the idea)
That sort of thing can be quite common in OO base classes.
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
THAT is why programmers will eventually be regarded in the same way as architects, IT people will be seen as Construction Foremen and the 'grunt' laborers.
,hacker Perl another Just)'
Sheesh, I wish it were like that now. Sometimes I really hate being lumped in with all the other morons who stumbled through their CS degree, or who don't even have a degree, but call themselves "Software Engineers". What we really need is some nice discriminatory jargon, like I'd be an Architect and they'd be Construction Workers... That would make me happy... Unfortunately we seem to have gotten stuck with "Everyone's a Software Engineer..." - Yuck!
perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-: