Pre-MS, Hotmail was run eclusively on FreeBSD servers. Even after MS bought them out, they didn't immediately cut the whole service over to Windows servers...they have been phasing FreeBSD out over time. Obviously this is in the best interest of a company that sells a "competing product" to the servers' installed OS.
From the article: "...Microsoft's main objection has been to Linux, which has a more restrictive licensing arrangement than FreeBSD."
Ironic, isn't it...? Perspective never fails to amaze me.
Take a celeron or p3 of reasonable speed, put it in a low-profile horizontal case with a bigass HD, a NIC, a great sound card, and a video-out card, attach a wireless mouse and/or keyboard, and stick it in your home entertainment center.
Now create something cute/aesthetic in Flash with big buttons that lets you pick your music and make playlists (use Perl or something with a libswf API to generate dynamic Flash files), run an appropriate web server and browser, and set this script up to load in your browser full-screen mode at boot (the use of Flash may require something like The Best of Redmond or JobsOS X rather than Linux).
Then you're golden. Hell, add a DVD drive to further improve the bang/buck ratio.
Of course...I've already patented the "method for decoding and playback of digitally-encoded audio from a rectangular-shaped computer through circular magnetic transducers", so you'll just have to piss off and find another way lest I Rambust your IP-violatin' ass...
As for Coldfusion taking your server down... Bullshit.
Ooh..them's fightin' words. Obviously you've never attempted to perform any kind of complex regular expression matching in ColdFusion. It crashes every time. I have absolutely nothing to gain by wasting my time typing this out on a web forum, and therefore have absolutely no motivation to embellish the facts...and the fact is, specific ColdFusion code has proven to crash the ColdFusion server process without fail.
It also has no way of handling complex recursion...if you throw it into a recursion loop, even one that would be nothing short of *trivial* in any other language, it dies. Dies as above with regexp and has to be restarted.
Coldfusion has it's strengths and weaknesses... But bad stability is not one of them.
Have you ever written a web-based app in Perl or PHP on a Linux/UNIX box running Apache web server? Somehow I seriously doubt it...you just simply wouldn't've said such a thing if you had. The bar is raised far, far above the one you're used to friend. Give it a spin sometime. You'll love it.
(Not great stability, but what the hell, I'll take that with the ability to put together a site or application rwice as fast as the next guy.)
Twice as fast as the next guy coding in what language? COBOL? It's nothing short of fact that ColdFusion requires more typing to do less work than, I use the example once again, PHP or Perl. You never see any Obfuscated ColdFusion Contests, now do you? No, that's because you're still working inside this tag analogy...building tag structures in addition to your logic structures is an unnecessary pain in the ass. If you want this kind of ease of use, you might as well use Zope or ArsDigita so you'll be delightfully abstracted from the big mean world of "real" programming as a "real" programmer might tend to feel when working in ColdFusion.
From what the article mentions, this isn't a matter of improved stability over linux, rather that Coldfusion for windows was more stable than the less mature Linux port.
<rant>
I love comparative terms like "more stable"...they do a great job of avoiding the messy details, like how ColdFusion (my experience is on NT) will take your server DOWN if you try to perform just about any kind of simple regular expression matching. To say nothing of the fact that you're not going to get it to return the matches...no, you get an offset of the starting point of the first match. How bloody useful!
Functions you say? What are those???
</rant>
Can you tell I currently have to "code" in CF for my day job? Thankfully our next project there will be done in PHP or Perl. The (new) lead programmer finally got the suits to realize that ColdFusion, and originally hiring a guy who didn't know the first thing about programming to put it together, is why their site sucks.
Did anyone else [who actually clicked on the link] notice towards the bottom of the first page the following line (emphasis added for/.ers who wouldn't click on the article link anyway):
Action by the Commission: March 14, 2001 (FCC 01-90). Chairman Powell and
Commissioners Ness and Furchtgott-Roth with Commissioner Tristani dissenting;
Commissioners Ness, Furchtgott-Rothand Tristani issuing separate statements.
Holy schlamoley...big politics happening in the offices of the FCC. Here's the last paragraph of Tristani's statement (emphasis added):
Moreover, I am aware of
no rush of inquiries by broadcast licensees seeking to learn whether their programs comply with our indecency caselaw. In the absence of such requests, this Policy Statement will likely become instead a "how-to" manual for those licensees who wish to tread the line drawn by our cases. It likely may lead to responses to future enforcement actions that cite the Statement as establishing false safe harbors. In the absence of proof that the Statement addresses concerns supported by the FCC's history of enforcement, or the record of the Evergreen case, the Statement is nothing more than a remedy in search of a problem. It would better serve the public if the FCC got serious about enforcing the broadcast indecency standards. For these reasons, I dissent.
Good to know there are still a few people kicking about D.C. that actually give a rat's ass about what's going on around them, rather than simply following the party line.
Here's the message I just posted to Pillsbury's bulletin board (submissions are apparently reviewed before they're posted...all the better -- we know somebody there has to read it!):
Leave the geeks alone, damnt! Programmers have been getting together in what they have referred to since at least 1979 as "bake-offs" to test communication software (such that today comprises the Internet you're using to read this message) against each other in a non-profit effort to improve digital communication protocols. Nobody ever shows up with a casserole. If they show up with cookies, it's completely coincidental. Pillsbury lost their opportunity to defend their 51-year-old copyright on the phrase "bake-off" a long time ago.
If this were a porno club or something referring to large groups of masturbators as a "bake-off", I could see how that could be damaging to Pillsbury's business, but by the GODS PLEASE leave the geeks alone. Find me one customer this has confused. One. "Oh, TCP/IP...I thought you meant angel food cake..."
Get real, Pillsbury. Looks like my next purchase in the realm of baking needs is going to come from Duncan Hines, and I doubt much of the geek community will disagree with me.
All are encouraged to post something similar. We'll squash this before it ever gets to the court.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:...but will it keep up with the upgrades?
on
Laser-equipped 747
·
· Score: 1
Big deal, if the tank isn't hit and the missile isn't completely destroyed, it may end up striking a foreign town rather than the aircraft it had targeted.
Well that fact would certainly be an effective deterrent for any country to launch an ICBM, now wouldn't it? I'd say that beats the hell out of mutually-assured destruction. It's statistically-probably self-destruction-with-a-30%-chance-of-pissing-off- your-neighbors, depending upon size and distance of the launch platform from national borders.
...and that's a concept even North Koreans can understand!
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Re:What IT Is And Isn't
on
What is 'IT'?
·
· Score: 1
Dude, I don't get why you went to all the time and effort to type all that out without tying it up into a point in the end. You just retyped a few paragraphs of the article, replacing some names with presumably fake names and embellishing the already grandiose statements.
Why?
I mean, it sounds like there could have been a really significate joke there. Am I missing something? Are Seth Brundle, Veronica Quaif and Anton Bartok characters from an obscure SF novel you probably have to be a SF enthusiast to have even heard about, let alone read?
...'til I make millionz of bux0rz so I can buy one of these things. Maybe then Natalie Portman will come over. Then I'll sell her 3-D nude image to all of you other geeks for mucho $$$. I'll be richer than Gates in no time....
Okay, let's get this right out of the way, shall we?
Let's have a show of hands. Is your religion Government Approved?
Yes, it seems that it's going to have to be up to the pagans to invoke a global asteroid defense system, apparently all the while smoking a big, fat illegal doobie.
I was hoping to see a home movie of a bunch of kids rolling dice, playing the game, not a CG extravaganza. Oh well, I guess Time Warner knows whats best.
Actually, I figured it'd be about a bunch of high school kids sitting around in their basement rolling dice, playing the game, and trying like hell to still get laid.
Would you renew funding of programs to research and develop global defense systems against asteroids or other such threats from space?
Answer (Browne): [emphasis added]
In 1983 Ronald Reagan made the most sensible military suggestion of the past 50 years -- that America should have
protection against a missile attack. Unfortunately, he assigned the job to the Department of Defense, and now -- 17 years later -- we are no closer to being protected than we were then. The only thing the government should do is post a reward -- $25, or even $50 billion -- to be given to the first private company that can demonstrate a working, functioning, fool-proof missile defense system. Not a prototype, not a plan -- but the actual system.
Perhaps a properly functioning system could deal with "global threats from space" though that wouldn't be our first or primary objectives.
Uuh...I guess Browne doesn't watch PBS or the Discovery Channel very much. It seems to me that the general concensus among astronomers/astrophysicists/space types is that another asteroid hit like the one in Tunguska back in (when?) is imminent, and we currently have little means of early detection (to say nothing of actual defense). I believe this was the focus of the poster's question.
At least it seems like McReynolds "gets it".
Question:
(For instance, if our national mission is the pursuit of science, then would you increase funding for scientific pursuits in the budget?)
Answer (Browne): [emphasis added]
Not only would I not increase scientific funding in the budget, I'd end it altogether because the truth is government doesn't work. It doesn't keep our streets safe, educate our children or provide a secure retirement. It doesn't aid progress, it hinders it. Government is politics, not progress. Government is bureaucracy, inefficiency, and brute force. It is the least desirable, least effective and least likely to succeed means of getting anything accomplished.
Wh...what? Am I reading this wrong? Was this a typo on Harry Browne's part? Did he actually just say that he's going to eliminate government funding for scientific research because "government, um, sucks and stuff"? Am I taking this to mean that scientific research is going to be an innocent victim in the Libertarian fight against governance as a whole, or was he actually trying to make a point about something?
Almost as annoying as not being able to watch the Z1 truss go up is that most feeds appear to be Windows mediaplayer. You have to dig for Real, and of course there's NOTHING non-proprietary at all.
Well, I've never been into a Fry's (I don't think we have these 'up heah in New England, chummie'), but we definitely do have Best Buy and Radio Shack.
As far as Best Buy goes, well, at least you know they aren't working on commission, so they have no incentive to screw you over for the more expensive option.
As for Radio Shack (Rat Shack, Ripoff Shack, etc.), I like to respond to any sufficiently ignorant answer to my question with the slogan:
Radio Shack: You've got quesitons, we've got blank stares.
In any case, the trick is to go in knowing what you're looking for, and treat the McDonald's graduates that work there like the simple wet interfaces to the inventory system they are (e.g., "Do you have any $PRODUCT?" or "Where are the $PRODUCT_CATEGORY?" questions).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if "hacking" SDMI is defined as "being able to copy the music", then wouldn't it be most easily "hacked" by patching a tape recorder or "set-top" CD-R appliance to your sound card's headphone jack?
Slashdot Mirror
Pre-MS, Hotmail was run eclusively on FreeBSD servers. Even after MS bought them out, they didn't immediately cut the whole service over to Windows servers...they have been phasing FreeBSD out over time. Obviously this is in the best interest of a company that sells a "competing product" to the servers' installed OS.
From the article:
"...Microsoft's main objection has been to Linux, which has a more restrictive licensing arrangement than FreeBSD."
Ironic, isn't it...? Perspective never fails to amaze me.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
http://www.crq.com/master_templ.cfm?view=Home&CFID =507647&CFTOKEN=33609537
Now it all makes sense. It wasn't the free barcode scanners that took this half-wit company down, it was ColdFusion!
ColdFusion haiku:
It has no functions
Complex regexps crash it hard
Truly a sick joke
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Death does not mean you can stop selling crap... at least not in our culture.
I'm sure we can all agree that sales is probably the most profitable post-mortem profession you can get into these days.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Well. It would have been nice had Slashdot SPELT HIS NAME RIGHT
::snicker::
I'm sure you can all see the irony in this...no need to point it out. It's practicly spelt out four you in blak and wite...
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
How hard would it be, really...
Take a celeron or p3 of reasonable speed, put it in a low-profile horizontal case with a bigass HD, a NIC, a great sound card, and a video-out card, attach a wireless mouse and/or keyboard, and stick it in your home entertainment center.
Now create something cute/aesthetic in Flash with big buttons that lets you pick your music and make playlists (use Perl or something with a libswf API to generate dynamic Flash files), run an appropriate web server and browser, and set this script up to load in your browser full-screen mode at boot (the use of Flash may require something like The Best of Redmond or JobsOS X rather than Linux).
Then you're golden. Hell, add a DVD drive to further improve the bang/buck ratio.
Of course...I've already patented the "method for decoding and playback of digitally-encoded audio from a rectangular-shaped computer through circular magnetic transducers", so you'll just have to piss off and find another way lest I Rambust your IP-violatin' ass...
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Amen, brother.
<CFQUERY NAME="whyOhWhy" DATASOURCE="twentyTwentyHindsight">
- SELECT reason FROM brain WHERE coldfusion='good idea' ORDER BY expense,stability,speedOfDevel DESC
</CFQUERY>"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
As for Coldfusion taking your server down... Bullshit.
Ooh..them's fightin' words. Obviously you've never attempted to perform any kind of complex regular expression matching in ColdFusion. It crashes every time. I have absolutely nothing to gain by wasting my time typing this out on a web forum, and therefore have absolutely no motivation to embellish the facts...and the fact is, specific ColdFusion code has proven to crash the ColdFusion server process without fail.
It also has no way of handling complex recursion...if you throw it into a recursion loop, even one that would be nothing short of *trivial* in any other language, it dies. Dies as above with regexp and has to be restarted.
Coldfusion has it's strengths and weaknesses... But bad stability is not one of them.
Have you ever written a web-based app in Perl or PHP on a Linux/UNIX box running Apache web server? Somehow I seriously doubt it...you just simply wouldn't've said such a thing if you had. The bar is raised far, far above the one you're used to friend. Give it a spin sometime. You'll love it.
(Not great stability, but what the hell, I'll take that with the ability to put together a site or application rwice as fast as the next guy.)
Twice as fast as the next guy coding in what language? COBOL? It's nothing short of fact that ColdFusion requires more typing to do less work than, I use the example once again, PHP or Perl. You never see any Obfuscated ColdFusion Contests, now do you? No, that's because you're still working inside this tag analogy...building tag structures in addition to your logic structures is an unnecessary pain in the ass. If you want this kind of ease of use, you might as well use Zope or ArsDigita so you'll be delightfully abstracted from the big mean world of "real" programming as a "real" programmer might tend to feel when working in ColdFusion.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
From what the article mentions, this isn't a matter of improved stability over linux, rather that Coldfusion for windows was more stable than the less mature Linux port.
<rant>
I love comparative terms like "more stable"...they do a great job of avoiding the messy details, like how ColdFusion (my experience is on NT) will take your server DOWN if you try to perform just about any kind of simple regular expression matching. To say nothing of the fact that you're not going to get it to return the matches...no, you get an offset of the starting point of the first match. How bloody useful!
Functions you say? What are those???
</rant>
Can you tell I currently have to "code" in CF for my day job? Thankfully our next project there will be done in PHP or Perl. The (new) lead programmer finally got the suits to realize that ColdFusion, and originally hiring a guy who didn't know the first thing about programming to put it together, is why their site sucks.
I'll see you in hell, ColdFusion...
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Man I love RISC chips....
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Holy schlamoley...big politics happening in the offices of the FCC. Here's the last paragraph of Tristani's statement (emphasis added):
Good to know there are still a few people kicking about D.C. that actually give a rat's ass about what's going on around them, rather than simply following the party line.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Here's something else that didn't make it into the quickies:
Bush vs. Yoda: Famous Quotes
Too funny!
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
All are encouraged to post something similar. We'll squash this before it ever gets to the court.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Dude, I don't get why you went to all the time and effort to type all that out without tying it up into a point in the end. You just retyped a few paragraphs of the article, replacing some names with presumably fake names and embellishing the already grandiose statements.
Why?
I mean, it sounds like there could have been a really significate joke there. Am I missing something? Are Seth Brundle, Veronica Quaif and Anton Bartok characters from an obscure SF novel you probably have to be a SF enthusiast to have even heard about, let alone read?
Someone please enlighten me.
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
Everyone's cell phone working OK?
Oh, Timothy, dear Timothy -- it probably won't be...that's kind of the point.
As an interesting side benefit, I might actually find a use for all that ramen and cans of baked beans I bought for y2k...
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
[scratchy old broad's voice] "RAAAAAGWEEEEED POLLEN!"
(The first thing I think of whenever I think of the film version of Andromeda Strain).
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
...'til I make millionz of bux0rz so I can buy one of these things. Maybe then Natalie Portman will come over. Then I'll sell her 3-D nude image to all of you other geeks for mucho $$$. I'll be richer than Gates in no time....
Okay, let's get this right out of the way, shall we?
Click here for a nude picture of Natalie Portman.
Trolls...
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
[Comic Store Owner]: Worst ballot ever !
Let's have a show of hands. Is your religion Government Approved?
Yes, it seems that it's going to have to be up to the pagans to invoke a global asteroid defense system, apparently all the while smoking a big, fat illegal doobie.
Uuh...I guess Browne doesn't watch PBS or the Discovery Channel very much. It seems to me that the general concensus among astronomers/astrophysicists/space types is that another asteroid hit like the one in Tunguska back in (when?) is imminent, and we currently have little means of early detection (to say nothing of actual defense). I believe this was the focus of the poster's question.
At least it seems like McReynolds "gets it".
Question: Answer (Browne): [emphasis added]
Wh...what? Am I reading this wrong? Was this a typo on Harry Browne's part? Did he actually just say that he's going to eliminate government funding for scientific research because "government, um, sucks and stuff"? Am I taking this to mean that scientific research is going to be an innocent victim in the Libertarian fight against governance as a whole, or was he actually trying to make a point about something?
It looks like the answers to the questions were never posted. What happened? Did I miss the followup?
IIRC, the NSA interview was with the person in charge of their museum (not exactly the Cigarette-Smoking Man). I doubt we missed much.
Okay
As far as Best Buy goes, well, at least you know they aren't working on commission, so they have no incentive to screw you over for the more expensive option.
As for Radio Shack (Rat Shack, Ripoff Shack, etc.), I like to respond to any sufficiently ignorant answer to my question with the slogan:
In any case, the trick is to go in knowing what you're looking for, and treat the McDonald's graduates that work there like the simple wet interfaces to the inventory system they are (e.g., "Do you have any $PRODUCT?" or "Where are the $PRODUCT_CATEGORY?" questions).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if "hacking" SDMI is defined as "being able to copy the music", then wouldn't it be most easily "hacked" by patching a tape recorder or "set-top" CD-R appliance to your sound card's headphone jack?
I don't get it...