Netscape gives you sample code illustrating (poorly) the linkage between their server and your module, and they offer some doc (scanty) on how to sprinkle their cross-platform NSAPI threading macros into your code. I'm sure it would work for perl, but that would be a project of it's own.
Perl 5.6 threads, BTW, are clearly documented down in the source for perl as not ready for production code yet, and due to change significantly.
the importance of efficient code: Web sites...[your code] executed in thousands of instances concurrently
then go back and read what I saidI code in perl
... but I did think that people might be interested in hearing someone who was paid by a huge company to actually test the performance: not to prove that C was faster, but to quantify how much faster.
And, while perl is great for getting something out quickly, if you are working on an application consisting of dozens of interlinked components/pages/packages, perl is not easier to manage than C. 10x faster is a lot.
What percentage of websites are coded in perl? What percentage are coded in C? And you call C the obvious idea?:)
The nice thing about that old ad is that it does not look like this ad suggestive of a phallus popping off. That's for a product targetted at the *nix market?
Do those bozos really think that this makes anybody want their product? Anybody except a certain... ah, leave that for the trollers.
This is out of about 5000 readers who responded. I wonder how the numbers would look in the US (SuSE - RedHat position reversed?)
I heard a few months ago that Mandrake, recently forked from RedHat, was being installed a higher rate than RedHat now, mostly due to the fact that it's packaged in the US by a very large book publisher (Macmillan? I can't remember) so it is in a lot of stores. Interestingly, it comes from France.
Perl isn't really slow; when you run it, most of the time... easily fixed by mod_perl.
In my own experience a year and a half ago, this was exactly not true. Yes, perl does run surprisingly fast, and yes, for many applications it's perfect, and yes, when we installed mod_perl it got faster, probably from eliminating the forking and recompilation...
But, with a Netscape Enterprise server (Solaris) running multi-threaded, we were able to make shared read access to gdbm files fast and threadsafe in a very natural way in C. Is perl threading good enough now, and does mod_perl handle multithreaded applications?
And you have to watch what modules you use, as some can be slow (like DateManip)
does it pull in Posix.pm? cuz you can hear the machine *sigh* when that sucker loads, and all so i can call pwd without forking a shell:)
You like CGI.pm? I really couldn't get used it it. I like a paradigm where the form is spit out by and the action processed by the same CGI (so the form variables appear in one place in the source). CGI.pm is downright buggy when used like that.
If I'm doing something that's going to run intensively and I don't want CGI to spit out the form, I follow the same source paradigm anyway, but throw together a "makefile" that will generate.html form "object" files and automatically patch up all the links.
write in C or C++, and compile server loadable modules and you will be measurably 10x faster. Don't take my word for it, do the testing yourself. Modperl? 5x slower, without even trying hard.
Don't moderate this as a Troll or a Flame, I write in Perl most of the time myself. But I've recoded some stuff and tested it, and blew the doors off.
Your PIII will last longer because you will not be able to afford to replace or augment it. With my leftover money, I'll buy more memory, or just replace it with the next generation when it's available. Too bad... for you.
I would imagine that the band makes more off my $10 then they do off 2 CDs.
don't slur Metallica! They sold certain rights to the record company, and if you sent them $10, they'd be sure to send $9.50 of it on to the company. After all, they believe in everybody being scrupulously honest.
Yeah, right. I wonder if they've ever taped any cassettes, like when they were in high school...
I'm not familiar with that particulcar protocol. Are you talking about setting up a particular invitation-only tunnel for you and your friends, or are you talking about creating software/platform/api which allows anyone to create such a little cluster?
I was thinking that a cool way to do this stuff would be based on barter. The more bandwidth you give to other people for anonymous use, the more bandwidth you can consume. This way, it wouldn't have to be invitation only.
unless you are encrypting your traffic to the proxy, your ISP can just as easily track it.
till such use of proxies is widespread, it might be fairly easy to figure out: "oh, this is that guy Bill who used the proxy to buy the airline ticket."
Being intellectually gifted on some dimensions but being unable to spell would be better termed imperfect intelligence, as would imprecise use of words.
It's a ridiculously atrocious perversion of the english language,
And what's the failure to capitalize "English" called?:) In any case, I quoted your statement because it is deeply wrong. If you were to study linguistics, here's what they would teach you: humans have a particular ability to learn to use language -- and I'm referring to "natural" languages -- starting very young. This ability declines dramatically after about age 5 or 6. So, any meaningful definition of "language" must encompass this particular facet. Something is a language if a population learns it as children. The reason this is significant is that it implies that language is a spoken thing. Writing systems represent languages, but they are not part of the language. So, by what orthography should the word "you" be represented? It is certainly not a "perversion" to choose (and not even through ignorance) to use "u".
It is through language that we communicate. By the use of "u", HeUnique was trying to communicate something, a subtle amalgam of informality and "hip", i.e. expressing that he's wise to the use of "u" by marketing types ("U-Haul"), and that's how you should interpret it. You, through your umbrage, are also trying to communicate something, that you like standardization and obeisance to the heritage handed down to us, what HeUnique would call rulez. Both of you communicated quite effectively, so I don't see where the discord comes from.:)
This seems to be becoming a common theme on Slashdot in last few months - companies jumping on the Linux bandwagon in the hopes of securing some free publicity.
it's not clear that this just for publicity. it's an opportunity for hardware vendors to free themselves from having to develop expensive software. the "jumping on the bandwagon" aspect is equally real: become part of the broader network of the linux world delivers positive network externalities to smaller players. notice that the market share winners are not adopting linux... yet.
It seems that companies are beginning to perceive that Linux may eventually come to gain some portion of the OS market and are coming up with new marketing strategies to take this into account. This is quite a cunning move on their part
it's not cunning, it's realio trulio deep down smart. the effect linux will have on the market for hardware and software is far-reaching. Most people do not realize the extent of the Microsoft stranglehold. I'd peg it as something like 50% destructive of the software GDP. The hardware vendors have been under Microsoft's thumb more obviously than consumers have so they are catching on fast: "you mean, we can do what we WANT?"
...will earn them "kudos" from the hacker demographic, who have significant purchasing power.
The hacker demographic has no purchasing power. look at the articles posted here about how you can spend 12 hours hacking a machine to save a few hundred bucks. What the hacker demographic has is incredible influence over future technology. Management can make all the lame decisions they want, but developers will keep rowing the ship in the direction they want to. Like what you work on? work hard. Don't like what you work on? surf.
However I am not sure about the long-term implications of this for the whole freeware ethos. How can you be sure that these companies will not turn around and violate the GNU Public License so as to make more money from the Linux platform.
It's General Public License.
The potential problem you're talking about is a long way off, and is tiny compared to the other "problems" such theives will face. Look at the ethos question this way: nobody predicted that open sourced free software would/could be a succss (no, not even Stallman... he was simply delusional, and even a clock that's stopped is right twice a day). So, given that you couldn't predict where we are today, why attempt to predict where we're going tomorrow? If you didn't believe that opensource could work as well as it does, why should we believe you can predict how well it will work?
There is a massive amount of development going on, pushing fronts all over the place, platform, paradigm, blah blah. Want to keep your little sliver of code private? Nobody is going to care. If a big player "steals" GPLed code? They'll receive more scrutiny, and it's hard for large organizations to keep that kind of a secret anyway.
I've had a quick look at the GPL and the legal department at my clients are going through it now, and it seems like it has some flaws in it which leave it vulnerable to certain areas of legal attack.
uh... you've not spent the time that the community has collectively. IBM has embraced it, and they've got lawyers... copyright holders do not lose their copyrights because of a license, and the aforementioned tidal wave of new code will swamp today's versions anyway. It'll be like worrying that now that MSDOS has faded, DRDOS has a chance.
What I want to know is, do you, as a demographic which typifies the Linux "crowd", think that the short-term gains in market recognition are worth the possible long-term complications from money-hungry corporations?
The money hungry corporations are the ones who need to worry as it's going to get significantly harder to make money. That's a good thing as free market econ tells us in the long run, economic profit goes to zero, i.e. lower prices for consumers, the true benefit of free markets.
does anybody know if we could use DeCSS to put it onto a DVD?
MPAA couldn't possibly stop us: how would it look in court? "Yes, your honor, we're suing these guys for taking it off a DVD, and we're suing these guys for putting it onto a DVD. We hate everybody."
Slashdot Mirror
Perl 5.6 threads, BTW, are clearly documented down in the source for perl as not ready for production code yet, and due to change significantly.
And, while perl is great for getting something out quickly, if you are working on an application consisting of dozens of interlinked components/pages/packages, perl is not easier to manage than C. 10x faster is a lot.
What percentage of websites are coded in perl? What percentage are coded in C? And you call C the obvious idea? :)
Do those bozos really think that this makes anybody want their product? Anybody except a certain... ah, leave that for the trollers.
I heard a few months ago that Mandrake, recently forked from RedHat, was being installed a higher rate than RedHat now, mostly due to the fact that it's packaged in the US by a very large book publisher (Macmillan? I can't remember) so it is in a lot of stores. Interestingly, it comes from France.
like I said, nobody says fnord anymore.
Well, if not me, who? If not now, when?
fnord!
In my own experience a year and a half ago, this was exactly not true. Yes, perl does run surprisingly fast, and yes, for many applications it's perfect, and yes, when we installed mod_perl it got faster, probably from eliminating the forking and recompilation...
But, with a Netscape Enterprise server (Solaris) running multi-threaded, we were able to make shared read access to gdbm files fast and threadsafe in a very natural way in C. Is perl threading good enough now, and does mod_perl handle multithreaded applications?
does it pull in Posix.pm? cuz you can hear the machine *sigh* when that sucker loads, and all so i can call pwd without forking a shell :)
You like CGI.pm? I really couldn't get used it it. I like a paradigm where the form is spit out by and the action processed by the same CGI (so the form variables appear in one place in the source). CGI.pm is downright buggy when used like that.
If I'm doing something that's going to run intensively and I don't want CGI to spit out the form, I follow the same source paradigm anyway, but throw together a "makefile" that will generate .html form "object" files and automatically patch up all the links.
Don't moderate this as a Troll or a Flame, I write in Perl most of the time myself. But I've recoded some stuff and tested it, and blew the doors off.
Your PIII will last longer because you will not be able to afford to replace or augment it. With my leftover money, I'll buy more memory, or just replace it with the next generation when it's available. Too bad... for you.
don't slur Metallica! They sold certain rights to the record company, and if you sent them $10, they'd be sure to send $9.50 of it on to the company. After all, they believe in everybody being scrupulously honest.
Yeah, right. I wonder if they've ever taped any cassettes, like when they were in high school...
I was thinking that a cool way to do this stuff would be based on barter. The more bandwidth you give to other people for anonymous use, the more bandwidth you can consume. This way, it wouldn't have to be invitation only.
Being intellectually gifted on some dimensions but being unable to spell would be better termed imperfect intelligence, as would imprecise use of words.
It's a ridiculously atrocious perversion of the english language,
And what's the failure to capitalize "English" called? :) In any case, I quoted your statement because it is deeply wrong. If you were to study linguistics, here's what they would teach you: humans have a particular ability to learn to use language -- and I'm referring to "natural" languages -- starting very young. This ability declines dramatically after about age 5 or 6. So, any meaningful definition of "language" must encompass this particular facet. Something is a language if a population learns it as children. The reason this is significant is that it implies that language is a spoken thing. Writing systems represent languages, but they are not part of the language. So, by what orthography should the word "you" be represented? It is certainly not a "perversion" to choose (and not even through ignorance) to use "u".
It is through language that we communicate. By the use of "u", HeUnique was trying to communicate something, a subtle amalgam of informality and "hip", i.e. expressing that he's wise to the use of "u" by marketing types ("U-Haul"), and that's how you should interpret it. You, through your umbrage, are also trying to communicate something, that you like standardization and obeisance to the heritage handed down to us, what HeUnique would call rulez. Both of you communicated quite effectively, so I don't see where the discord comes from. :)
uh... not quite: mean, median and mode, are three meaningful "average" values in a population sample.
it's not clear that this just for publicity. it's an opportunity for hardware vendors to free themselves from having to develop expensive software. the "jumping on the bandwagon" aspect is equally real: become part of the broader network of the linux world delivers positive network externalities to smaller players. notice that the market share winners are not adopting linux... yet.
It seems that companies are beginning to perceive that Linux may eventually come to gain some portion of the OS market and are coming up with new marketing strategies to take this into account. This is quite a cunning move on their part
it's not cunning, it's realio trulio deep down smart. the effect linux will have on the market for hardware and software is far-reaching. Most people do not realize the extent of the Microsoft stranglehold. I'd peg it as something like 50% destructive of the software GDP. The hardware vendors have been under Microsoft's thumb more obviously than consumers have so they are catching on fast: "you mean, we can do what we WANT?"
The hacker demographic has no purchasing power. look at the articles posted here about how you can spend 12 hours hacking a machine to save a few hundred bucks. What the hacker demographic has is incredible influence over future technology. Management can make all the lame decisions they want, but developers will keep rowing the ship in the direction they want to. Like what you work on? work hard. Don't like what you work on? surf.
However I am not sure about the long-term implications of this for the whole freeware ethos. How can you be sure that these companies will not turn around and violate the GNU Public License so as to make more money from the Linux platform.
It's General Public License.
The potential problem you're talking about is a long way off, and is tiny compared to the other "problems" such theives will face. Look at the ethos question this way: nobody predicted that open sourced free software would/could be a succss (no, not even Stallman... he was simply delusional, and even a clock that's stopped is right twice a day). So, given that you couldn't predict where we are today, why attempt to predict where we're going tomorrow? If you didn't believe that opensource could work as well as it does, why should we believe you can predict how well it will work?
There is a massive amount of development going on, pushing fronts all over the place, platform, paradigm, blah blah. Want to keep your little sliver of code private? Nobody is going to care. If a big player "steals" GPLed code? They'll receive more scrutiny, and it's hard for large organizations to keep that kind of a secret anyway.
I've had a quick look at the GPL and the legal department at my clients are going through it now, and it seems like it has some flaws in it which leave it vulnerable to certain areas of legal attack.
uh... you've not spent the time that the community has collectively. IBM has embraced it, and they've got lawyers... copyright holders do not lose their copyrights because of a license, and the aforementioned tidal wave of new code will swamp today's versions anyway. It'll be like worrying that now that MSDOS has faded, DRDOS has a chance.
What I want to know is, do you, as a demographic which typifies the Linux "crowd", think that the short-term gains in market recognition are worth the possible long-term complications from money-hungry corporations?
The money hungry corporations are the ones who need to worry as it's going to get significantly harder to make money. That's a good thing as free market econ tells us in the long run, economic profit goes to zero, i.e. lower prices for consumers, the true benefit of free markets.
MPAA couldn't possibly stop us: how would it look in court? "Yes, your honor, we're suing these guys for taking it off a DVD, and we're suing these guys for putting it onto a DVD. We hate everybody."