I was working on electroluminescent organic polymers back in 1995 at livenomore. We mostly used MEH-PPV. Back then the goal was flatscreens, but the polymers degraded too quickly in an oxygen environment to be useful. Which i personally confirmed by twisting knobs in a dark room for what seemed to be eons on end.
I soon after left physics and left to roam developing parts of the world. Oh had I had known. (sic).
Yeah, I been to Singapore. It sucks overall unless you like shopping malls. But, it's is a little glimpse of the first world, which we get so rarely over here. But, Singapore is safe and the people are honest. One time I got into a cab on Orchard Rd. and asked to go to a hotel not knowing where it was. The cabbie scowled and drove me around the corner to the hotel. Had I done that here in Jakarta it would have been an hour long cab ride.
Singapore's laws are the key to it's success. In the rest of Southeast Asia you'll be lucky enough if people know what the colors on the stoplights mean. I'm serious.
With regards to the arcades, let's remember that Malaysia is a developing country. Compare it to the states in 1900-1950 when you want to compare personal freedoms. I think you'll remember that the pre-60's states wasn't so different.
Finally, remember that Law is Negotiable in this region of the world (except Singapore). Outlawing all video arcades this week doesn't mean they'll be closed next week. It just means the local policeman is going to make a bit more take-home-pay.
I am in the exact same position as this guy. 3 months ago I moved into a management position. I am resposible for hiring, budget, business development, and day to day operations. There is one other manager at my level with no technical knowledge whatsoever. We report directly to the senior management.
This is in direct contrast to what I did previously, working part-time and coding from home.
From my _brief_ experience, here are some observations:
a. Forget about coding. You'll be surprised how busy you will be with phone calls, meetings, and interviews. You won't be able to keep any set schedule. Issues pop up all the time, and you have to resolve them. It's surprising how people avoid making decisions.
2. Forget about a sense of accomplishment. Coding gives a tangible sense of accomplishment every day, and huge loads of accomplishment when you finish projects. You won't have that feeling any more, because it doesn't seem like you are doing any work.
d. Get used to complaining. People love to complain and it puts you in a seemingly impossible position.
And, to counter those observations, some advice:
$. Draw the line early. One thing I have noticed is that you are ready and willing, people will continue to dump work into your lap until you can't effectively do anything. Do what you can to remain effective, know your limits, delegate as much responsibility as your team can take. Whatever you do, lay down the grounds rules, and if there is something you don't want to do, don't do it. The chief engineer in my first tech job was great - he went home at 4:30 pm every day, NO exceptions. I wish I could do the same.
X. Insist on coding. Choose projects or parts of projects and code them yourself. You may have to get out of the office to do this. Either way, you're a manager, so you're empowered to make decisions. Make it clear that you are working on a project and are not to be disturbed.
This is key to keeping yourself on both tracks. (Aside: the great thing about the GPL is that it takes power out of the hands of the corporation and puts it into the hands of the programmer. You have to know the code to benefit from it.) The best way to keep up with the technology, and keep yourself in high demand, is to know how to use it.
[]. Get good people. (and the contrapositive, get rid of bad people). I cannot stress how important this is - take the extra time to get good employees, and make them happy enough to stay. Making them happy is not just $, it's also giving them a challenging working environment, keeping them learning, and being a good listener.
Want a simple test of whether your staff is working well? Spend three days at home coding (or vacation or whatever). Make sure everyone is aware you are doing this. When you get back to the office, what state is it in? If it is a clusterf$ck, you'll know pretty quickly who is not pulling their weight. If it's running smoothly, you'll know pretty quickly who was pulling the strings when you were gone. The ideas is to reduce the amount of the former and increase the amount of the latter.
Or, you can think of it like a software developer: when coding, if you code something twice, you put it into a function, and don't have to do it again. Management is no different, except that the transfer function between input and output is a little more complicated than the box in front of you. Recognize similar problems and build functions to handle them - then delegate the functions to staff. Soon, the management will be evenly distributed, and everyone will have time to focus on what they do best.
Whatever you do, remember that the manager is on the list of endangered species, so keep getting your hands dirty as much as you can.
It seems the situation you have in Heliopolis is the same we have in Jakarta. Here, there is a store you can go to and buy any type of software sold. The price: $2.50 a CD, $4.00 for two - you name it, you can buy it. In fact, I only know of one dealer where you can buy licensed software, but you you have to wait months to get most of it, and forget about getting obscure stuff.
I saw a talk from the country manager for M$ about two months ago. He was talking about piracy. The piracy levels for India and most of South East Asia are from 60% to 90%. A guy I work with is from India and he said his company there had only bought licensed software once.
So, at this time, money is not a factor. But it will be. Here, software, books and movies are vigourously pirated (no legal repercussions whatsoever), but music is not. I have yet to notice any store selling pirated music. From that I can assume that the local authorities have the ability to rid the country of software piracy, but have chosen not to.
At some time in the future the piracy will stop, and a tremendous opportunity for 'free-as-in-beer' software will open. No one will think of paying the $ for a windows install when the Linux install is free. There will be millions of computer users who need quality desktop applications. (On the server, Linux use is already widespread here).
I think the real opportunity Linux desktop development will be in countries like this one.
RedHat Installer: Menu based, simple options, mostly autodetect. Just click next until you log in as root. It's a very simple process, and easy for people new to Linux, as long as they have reasonably common hardware.
Once you get it installed, you have to play with rpms or install new packages from source, which can at times be frustrating.
Debian Installer: Wow. I had to reinstall Debian on my box about 100 times until I got the configuration to catch. If I didn't have a problem with the network card, I had a problem with X. If I didn't have a problem with X, I had a problem with smtp. Basically, the only way I got it done was to reboot the RedHat partition, start linuxconf, and copy all of the appropriate value down so i could enter them later when I tried to install debian. Maybe I'm spoiled and refuse to pull out the manuals for my hardware. Maybe I don't even have the manuals for my hardware. Either way, it tried about 30 network card drivers until I figured out what the right one was. (again from linuxconf in RedHat)
But, I must say, apt-get has made it all worthwhile. I spend 90% of my time on the debian partition now.
In any case, installing Debian is a real b$tch.
Win32 Installer: no idea, as I've never installed it. It comes pre-installed.
Linux on the server: happy happy. Wouldn't choose otherwise.
Linux on the desktop: does indeed SUCK.
I've been using Unix in a server environment since 1992. Never had any major problems. On the desktop, I started with Mac, fiddled with NeXT, tried Sun and DEC workstations, and eventual moved to M$ Windows (for gaming, nothing else compares).
All of those OS's have their strengths and weaknesses. And, in hope af creating a better world, last week I bought an extra hard drive and installed Linux (RedHat 6.2, am told Debian is better but no CD available) on it to play around.
In general, a less than fulfilling experience. Here are my observations:
1. I have to choose a desktop environemnt? GNOME or KDE? I'm supposed to know which has better Apps? Great idea - split a limited developers pool among two environments - so instead of getting one set of applications that work well, we get two sets of applications that are in perpetual beta.
2. Web Browser. At no time while using a PC do I have less than 4 or 5 browser windows open. Trying to work without a functional browser is difficult, if not impossible. I just don't enjoy opening NN and seeing my available memory disappear. (Last week, Mozilla was declared dead - how could this happen when it hasn't even been born yet?)
3. Mail Client. I spent days looking for a mail client for GNOME which supported multiple POP mailboxes. I found a few, but they ended up in wild-goose chases for libraries to replace those which where outdated, too new, etc. Never actually got anything to compile. Heard there's a good mail client for KDE, which means I made the wrong choice back at #1.
4. Editor. Uhh, I use vi and emacs when there is absolutely, positively, nothing else available. Don't get me wrong, I first learned emacs over 8 years ago. But there are some basic functions which I rely upon that don't exist in emacs. Give me something like HomeSite on a linux box and you've got a convert.
5. Word and Excel. Regardless of how much other Microsoft software sucks, these two products are hard to beat. Also, they are practically industry standards. If you work in any office environment, you'll be sure to get these sent to you all the time. Of course, you can read them from your linux box - but if you want to edit them, it's lilo:dos yet again.
I use my computer to work. It is a tool which I need to function efficiently. I played with my new Linux Desktop for a few days, then when I had real work to do, I rebooted back to DOS. A real disappointment.
I know, it's open source, help and code it instead of complaining. I do code open source software, but for web applications. I don't code for the desktop. To grow, linux needs the desktop. To win on the desktop, Linux needs the killer apps - at least a browser, a good mail client, and an editor.
To get there, I'll argue that Linux needs less developers rather than more. I'm tired of seeing 2000 new apps which are v.0.0.0.1beta0.0.5-unstable. The paradigm of "release early and often" needs to be rethought. Release when you have a functioning application. If you have an idea for a new app, look around to see if anything else is out there first. If someone is already working on the same application, join them rather than creating a new tarball which will never get out of beta.
Open Source can and will take over. But it won't do so without the Desktop. And the desktop is all about applications.
It's a thorny problem and the solutions available now are very expensive and I hear not that great. This coupled with Apache and the free XML tools that are out there now should combine to make a killer, free, web suite a reality.
If you have Apache and XML (and any other programming language) making a content management suite is not a complicated problem. The only problem is how to integrate it with a client's exisitng publishing process - which may be different for every client. But the code running it is not complicated - so it is easy to cutomize for multiple clients.
Taking a look at Tea, I see a few things happening:
They have named it after a househould beverage and used childish analogies to describe it's functionality. Surefire winner.
The documents supporting it emphasize it's complexity rather than it's simplicity. This tells me they are trying to market it to people who will not be maintaining their own sites. To quote from another post:
The text below is from the TeaTemplateLanguage.pdf file (240k). This information does not seem to be on any of the site's pages (requires a bit more digging), so I think it makes sense to bring up to the surface a bit here...
Why use Tea?
In general, neither developers nor page designers author Tea templates. The goal is that they be written and maintained by technical producers who are liaisons between developers and designers.
If I'm developing a content management system for my site, I don't want a matrix of developer::designer::technical-producers who control the site. I want the people who develop the content to control the site and will build the system accordingly.
Coffee and Tea. Usually I think one thing when people start talking Java and Web development. Something about being born yesterday. The corporate types like Java because it has a name they can remember, so they say it back to the system analysts whenever a new design team is in the office. The web sites that would benefit from the use of Java development environment are few and far between. With Java you'll get a long development cycle, expensive developers, expensive hardware, expensive support contracts, and preformance increases that aren't even seen as necessary by the Media Metrix Top 50.
Really, is seeing the technical specs and source code going to help determine if the Carnivore system invades privacy? The FBI stated that all email traffic in an ISP goes through Carnivore. If that isn't invading privacy, what is?
I'll try and guess how Carnivore works (the software that is, IDNJS about networks). I assume it requires too much disk to log the entire text of every message (and be too cumbersome to search, and be a tremendous waste of cpu). I bet they just index every message and check it against a list of "flags" - names, phrases, addresses or other terms related to ongoing investigations. If a message turns up a flag, the Carnivore notifies HQ and the message is logged. I bet the From:, To:, Cc: and Bcc: addresses immediately become flags as well. Perhaps all email traffic immediately following the flagged message would be logged for a certain period of time. Encrypted messages are ignored, but the From:, To:, Cc: and Bcc: addresses can still be checked.
At least that's how I would build the system. Now, as a hypothetical exercise, how would you defeat it? Encryption helps, for sure. You'd need to change email addresses frequently, though. Or you could do what I do and live in a developing country. My ISP couldn't figure out if someone hacked into their system if their life depended on it, let alone figure out how to track anything.
All I can tell you is the FBI will become the world's top experts on spam, as 60% of the carnivore's food will be spam. I can imagine a team of 30-year-old college drop outs working in a basement outside DC, reading page after page of spam on some trusty 1983 VAX machines.
Who determines the impartiality of the news we read ?
Well, the publisher determines the impartiality of the news they publish. And you determine the impartiality of the publishers you read. If you feel it's not impartial, find another news source.
Who determines what is news and what is advertising ?
See #1. There is no ombudsman for the media. If fact, if there was, we wouldn't appreciate it that much.
But LinuxLinks is independent - it isn't owned by internet.com and it isn't owned by VA Linux. Is it, and sites like it, being penalised because they don't have a monopoly in the Linux media ?
I wasn't aware that inernet.com and VA Linux had monopolies in the Linux media. In fact, I wasn't aware that they were the same company. Did I miss the news about how internet.com merged with VA Linux and bought every other Linux media site? Better call the Justice Department:o
And is this really in the spirit of the Linux movement ?
Yes. No. Maybe. Recently, there seem to be cracks forming in the armor of Linux solidarity. Is this a bad thing? Not at all. The goal of "world domination" seems to be universally agreed upon, but at what cost? Let's face it, there is no world domination without big business - it can't be a grass roots movement forever. Bringing linux to the world also means bringing the world to linux, and all of the corporate feasability and profitability issues that come with it. Only know do you understand...
Well, if you're colocating, meaning you are administering your own server, I would focus on one thing: Connectivity.
Granted, 100% uptime is an impossible goal. But, assuming that you can keep your server up and running, you are dependent on your colocation service for keeping your server connected to the net. The main factor here is connectivity. Make sure they are connected to multiple backbones on different carriers. Look at the network maps of their carriers and make sure the physical location of their colocation service is located near those backbones. Don't get into a situation where you depend on a single trunk line. Try testing their connectivity with a service like netmechanic.com as well. The numbers you get from the test may not be that accurate, but they'll let you know if there's a problem.
Other issues: bulding security, rack security, multiple power feeds and backup generators, dry fire suppression system. Ask them what their disaster plan is. And, of course, talk to some of their existing clients to get some feedback. Also, if you get the feeling they offer "sales support" rather than real support, forget about it. (a good sign of this is that a call to the sales number always gets through but a call to the support number more often gets a machine.)
------ Besides, it's my understanding that most ISP's have a terms and conditions agreement that limits the liability of the ISP, and provides for the termination of the abusive users account. ------
The problem is that the terms and conditions agreements simply do not work towards limiting abuse, and the termination of the user's account just doesn't happen.
I see that it would set dangerous legal precedents. Point taken. IANAL either, but the ISPs are the only ones with the ability to intervene in this situation, and many times they just don't. If there were repercussions to the ISP giving the abuser sustained and repeated access to the internet, you can be sure they would implement some from of controls in order to prevent it. But there isn't, so they do very little to stop it.
If the cabbie knew he was a bank robber, and gave him a ride out of town anyway, is the cabbie innocent? Or, if the bank robber got into the cab unbeknownst to the cabbie, and the security officer from the bank ran out and said "Don't give him a ride, he's a bank robber," but the cabbie still gave him a ride, is the cabbie innocent?
OK, let's say that the ISP is not fined, but rather obliged to reveal the identity of the abuser when a clear cut case of abuse is present. This information could be made readily available to those adversely affected by the abuse, as well as sent to other ISP's to prevent the abuser from reestablishing connectivity. The terms and conditions agreement could be modified to force the users to agree to this possibility.
I have one web site that provides free webmail (no SMTP) in addition to other stuff. Every three months for the past year, there is a scumbag spammer who uses us as a return address (forges everything, including the message-id, but can't forge the originating Received: header). He runs a credit card grabbing scam that can only appeal to people who can count their IQ on their toes. But he keeps coming back. He operates out of Los Angeles, started with connectivity through Verio, moved to UUNET, and now works out of rasserver.net.
Now, the average user cannot read email headers. However, the average user has the ability to send an abuse report (hundreds and thousands), although usually with a threat of a lawsuit, foul language, or incomplete headers. But we can't blame the users. We just tell them where it really came from and give them a few good links about spam. At the same time, we fend of cease-and-desist or die messages from our various outsourcers, who routinely forget that the exact same thing happened only a few months ago. It gets to you after a while.
So, what can we do? Contact the ISP that is putting this guy on the net? Nice try. Waste your time on their abuse address, waste more time on faxing, finally call them to tell them about the problem and they will immediately refer you to their lawyers. Any chance of getting a network tech on the phone to talk about the problem? Forget it.
The only viable solution is to subpoena (sp?) the server logs from the ISP and the telephone records from the telco and go from there. For me, that doesn't work, as I'm in Jakarta and have no desire to spend mucho money on an intercontinental lawsuit with little or no hope of reward at the end of it.
What would put a stop to SPAM? Making the ISP responsible for monitoring, and responding to abuse complaints about, spam that was sent from their systems. Do you think the ISPs could stop it if they were "motivated" to do so? Damn right they could. It can't be too hard to notice that someone is sending 50,000 emails through your system within a 20 minute period.
Making the ISPs partially responsible would go a long way toward eliminating spam. Perhaps a sliding scale fine system would work.
[aside: in the one event where a shitforbrains spammer rigged a perl script to sign up for accounts, login to our webmail, and send spam (all through HTTP connections), we only got 4 complaints. we also shut down the spammer within hours of the original complaint]
Slashdot and Zeldman are having a real laugh over this one. This is an obvious setup. I think what they're really doing is categorizing the intelligence of/. user into 4 groups:
1. Clueless people who look at the site, think it's neat, and ask Zeldman a serious question.
2. Smart but angry people who love to flame at the slightest opportunity.
3. Paranoid people determined to expose the hidden motives behind everything.
4. Ultrageeks who have seen this trick before and, recognizing the brilliance, go on to ask an interesting question about web design.
So my question: Are there any examples of your actual web design? Can we see them?
Why do you render my status bar useless with javascript mouseovers? Are you trying to disguise the state-of-the-art directory structure behind your site?
Of the recent 5k contest, which design did you like the best?
I can't help but think - what if someone grabs my cookie file and mails it to my mother? This is the worst thing to happen since the "History" list in the browsers...
ahhhhhhhhck.
The real security blunder here is sites storing sensitive information in cookies. Idiot moves by microsoft should be anticipated, and _no_ sensitive information should be stored in cookies.
makes you wonder how long microsoft has been collecting cookies from other web sites;)
well, from over here it looks like Postgres is doing fine. Several flame squads have managed to kick the knees out from under the MySQL team (I've seen it on seven different BBS's in the past two weeks). This has piqued my interest, nonetheless.
Let me give you a quick suggestion - change the name. Why? let's take a look at your competitors:
1. Oracle. They have the best name, thus they have the best software. Everybody knows that if you ask an Oracle a question, it gives you the answer. VERY hard to compete with.
2. DB2. Right away, we know what we're talking about here. And IBM has always been a leader in acronymized systems. I can't wait until DB3 comes out!
3. Informix. Looking at the entymology of this sucker tells me it's going to be really easy to get my boss to use it.
4. Sybase. Sounds cool. More importantly, I know how to pronounce it.
5. MySQL. That's right, it's mine. For me. How much more fun can you get. I've got mySQL, you go get yourSQL!
Now, lets take a look at your product: PostgreSQL. Wow. I can't wait to tell my boss about that, as soon as I figure out how to pronounce it. Is it named after some french mathemetician or something? I mean, I get the SQL part, but what is the Postgre? Am I only allowed to use it after I take my Graduate Requisite Exams? I mean, I pass that requirement, but if I hire someone who hasn't taken their GRE's yet will they be confused?
Finally, I see in the threads here that there have been several competing versions about how to spell it: PostgreSQL, Postgres, PostGres, PostgresSQL, and so on. This is a major bug in the postgres source and must be fixed.
The NASDAQ has gone off the charts for three reasons:
1. Hype. The internet is the ultimate hype machine. People really become consumed by things they read, and that makes the internet so much more powerful than television. Added to this is the fact that people can actually contribute and see their own words published on the web. It build a big "you pat my back, I'll pat yours" system where no website is going to give negative press to the Internet. It was interesting to see the damage control in the Tech rags after the NASDAQ tumbled. (btw, Katz is a great example of this - a real ally for the tech world, like it or not)
2. Joe Bob Investor. It used to be the case that the stock market was a game restricted to the very wealthy. You think of the atmosphere portayed in movies like "Trading Places". But now, everyone's rich and everyone who's not rich has figured out that the 2% savings account is a crock. So, anybody with $0.02 lying around is playing the game. This is a mass influx of wealth into both the NYSE and NASDAQ. And as the tech stocks are the apple in everyone's eye, they get the lion's share.
3. Potential Future Value. OK, this term gets way overused. But wrt some companies, it has merit. The companies that build the infrastucture for the net are building solid, perisitent revenue streams that will bring in cash for years to come. Certain b2b opportunities work much more successfully on the net than anywhere else.
That said...
The NASDAQ has taken a bath for three reasons:
1. Potential Future Value. Right back at you. One of the great mysteries is the advertising-backed web site. There are two kinds of such sites that make a profit - Yahoo!, and small sites that are made on shoestring budgets on shared servers with skeleton crew staffs. Everything in between is just some silly VC's nightmare. I don't know how many times I've seen ad-backed sites launch with a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Obviously, these people didn't do to well in high school math. "Let's see, or launch campaign will cost $2,000,000... err, at $0.002 a pageview, we'll make that back in about a billion page views - great! let's do it." There is a major misundestanding of the economic fundamentals of the situation. They don't care about that, of course, because they're just trying to seduce...
3. Joe Bob Investor. What's that saying about a fool and their money? Here's a proposal - I'm building an online grocery delivery service. Will you give me a hundred million dollars to get it going? Oh sure, except that... HAVEN'T YOU EVER REALIZED THAT PEOPLE WILL DRIVE TO THE NEXT TOWN TO SHOP BECAUSE THEY KNOW THE SHAMPOO IS $0.02 CHEAPER. WTF?!? Anyway, VC's ares tumbling all over eachother so fast that they don't have time to think about what outrageous deal they are going to flush their money into next. But, they do have very good source of information, but in the tech world it's hard to tell the difference between information and...
3. Hype. The ultimate form of expression on the web is the personal home page. Ridiculous, I know, but just look around. Philip Greenspun was here last week - you ever see his homepage? It's 20 gigs of material singing the praises of Philip. There's nothing wrong with that - I learned more from his homepage than I've learned anywhere else on the web. Take a look at other influential web figures - does the term megalomaniac come to mind? Humility and personal homepages just don't mix. This has carried over into how companies market themselves and from there into how everybody talks about the Net. Everything is always the newest, fastest, coolest, most advanced, most reliable, most whatever. And we all have trouble living up to those claims sooner or later...
Where will the NASDAQ go from here? Nowhere but up baby, and don't let me hear you tell otherwise;)
g
The tools for the job ...
on
Why Not MySQL?
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· Score: 1
I origninally posted this over at Zend ( http://zend.com/phorum/read.php?num=3&id=1117&loc= 0&thread=1117 ) But I'll repost here. [I have edited some mistakes from my original post at Zend.]
It's a good article. The ArsDigita Community System (ACS) is very powerful software for the enterprise - see http://photo.net/wtr/ for more. All the points he makes about MySQL are true. But, it all boils down to what you need your website to do.
MySQL is good for: 1. low connection overhead - it doesn't take long to open a connection to the db server. This is good for those of us on shared servers who cannot run mod_php [or the likes of it] and don't have access to persistent database connections. 2. Fast reads. MySQL can read faster than any database on the web. It beats Oracle 3:1. It beats PostgresSQL by [6:1 ?]. This is good for websites like which are many reads and few updates. 3. Simplicity. Sure, MySQL doesn't have many advances features like cross table referencing, triggers, etc. But most of us don't use those features. Most of those features are db specific, meaning you can't move the code around. For smaller sites, they are not necessary.
MySQL is bad at: 1. Transactions - they don't exist in mySQL, so it fails the ACID test completely. Read: Never use MySQL to store _critical_ information. That means no ecommerce, stock information, factory inventory, payroll, etc.
But if you're using a dbms for a bbs, greeting cards, or news, it wouldn't make sense to shovel out the $50K required to set up the 18 disks required to run Oracle. So you lose a few posts in your BBS - who cares? If you're planning on $123.9 million in revenues for your enterprise ecommerce site, you want Oracle. Otherwise, keep it simple.
Regarding ACS ( http://arsdigita.com ) - their ecommerce module is very good - perhaps the best available. [snip] But, if you're just looking for a bbs or news server, don't bother with it - I haven't been too impressed with the BBS's I've seen built with ACS. I recommend sitting down and building a BBS by yourself. Check out the articles at webmonkey and get coding - it's worth the effort.
I remember watching "Cliff 'em All" for the first time around 12 years ago. Back then, I listened to Metallica and little else. We even had a room in our barn that we called the "Metallidome" where my young brother would play guitars with his friends. I had introduced him to Metallica, introduced my whole high school to their music. Watching them play in a parking lot in the closest city was the ultimate. I couldn't hear for three days and my neck hurt for a week.
Remember the beginning of "Cliff 'em All"? The band walks into a convenience store, takes a bunch of sh*t off the shelves, and walks out without paying. Their lack of respect for everything was excellent. They wanted to call their first album "Metal up your Ass" but the record company wouldn't let 'em - so they called it "Kill 'em all" instead. Man, that was when Metallica were men - Ride The Lightning, Master of Puppets, and finally And Justice for All... After that I lost track of the band.
So, my question: what would Cliff think of all this Napster crap?
Slashdot Mirror
I was working on electroluminescent organic polymers back in 1995 at livenomore. We mostly used MEH-PPV. Back then the goal was flatscreens, but the polymers degraded too quickly in an oxygen environment to be useful. Which i personally confirmed by twisting knobs in a dark room for what seemed to be eons on end.
I soon after left physics and left to roam developing parts of the world. Oh had I had known. (sic).
Yeah, I been to Singapore. It sucks overall unless you like shopping malls. But, it's is a little glimpse of the first world, which we get so rarely over here. But, Singapore is safe and the people are honest. One time I got into a cab on Orchard Rd. and asked to go to a hotel not knowing where it was. The cabbie scowled and drove me around the corner to the hotel. Had I done that here in Jakarta it would have been an hour long cab ride.
Singapore's laws are the key to it's success. In the rest of Southeast Asia you'll be lucky enough if people know what the colors on the stoplights mean. I'm serious.
With regards to the arcades, let's remember that Malaysia is a developing country. Compare it to the states in 1900-1950 when you want to compare personal freedoms. I think you'll remember that the pre-60's states wasn't so different.
Finally, remember that Law is Negotiable in this region of the world (except Singapore). Outlawing all video arcades this week doesn't mean they'll be closed next week. It just means the local policeman is going to make a bit more take-home-pay.
Telephone calls, meetings, interviews ...
I am in the exact same position as this guy. 3 months ago I moved into a management position. I am resposible for hiring, budget, business development, and day to day operations. There is one other manager at my level with no technical knowledge whatsoever. We report directly to the senior management.
This is in direct contrast to what I did previously, working part-time and coding from home.
From my _brief_ experience, here are some observations:
a. Forget about coding. You'll be surprised how busy you will be with phone calls, meetings, and interviews. You won't be able to keep any set schedule. Issues pop up all the time, and you have to resolve them. It's surprising how people avoid making decisions.
2. Forget about a sense of accomplishment. Coding gives a tangible sense of accomplishment every day, and huge loads of accomplishment when you finish projects. You won't have that feeling any more, because it doesn't seem like you are doing any work.
d. Get used to complaining. People love to complain and it puts you in a seemingly impossible position.
And, to counter those observations, some advice:
$. Draw the line early. One thing I have noticed is that you are ready and willing, people will continue to dump work into your lap until you can't effectively do anything. Do what you can to remain effective, know your limits, delegate as much responsibility as your team can take. Whatever you do, lay down the grounds rules, and if there is something you don't want to do, don't do it. The chief engineer in my first tech job was great - he went home at 4:30 pm every day, NO exceptions. I wish I could do the same.
X. Insist on coding. Choose projects or parts of projects and code them yourself. You may have to get out of the office to do this. Either way, you're a manager, so you're empowered to make decisions. Make it clear that you are working on a project and are not to be disturbed.
This is key to keeping yourself on both tracks. (Aside: the great thing about the GPL is that it takes power out of the hands of the corporation and puts it into the hands of the programmer. You have to know the code to benefit from it.) The best way to keep up with the technology, and keep yourself in high demand, is to know how to use it.
[]. Get good people. (and the contrapositive, get rid of bad people). I cannot stress how important this is - take the extra time to get good employees, and make them happy enough to stay. Making them happy is not just $, it's also giving them a challenging working environment, keeping them learning, and being a good listener.
Want a simple test of whether your staff is working well? Spend three days at home coding (or vacation or whatever). Make sure everyone is aware you are doing this. When you get back to the office, what state is it in? If it is a clusterf$ck, you'll know pretty quickly who is not pulling their weight. If it's running smoothly, you'll know pretty quickly who was pulling the strings when you were gone. The ideas is to reduce the amount of the former and increase the amount of the latter.
Or, you can think of it like a software developer: when coding, if you code something twice, you put it into a function, and don't have to do it again. Management is no different, except that the transfer function between input and output is a little more complicated than the box in front of you. Recognize similar problems and build functions to handle them - then delegate the functions to staff. Soon, the management will be evenly distributed, and everyone will have time to focus on what they do best.
Whatever you do, remember that the manager is on the list of endangered species, so keep getting your hands dirty as much as you can.
g
It seems the situation you have in Heliopolis is the same we have in Jakarta. Here, there is a store you can go to and buy any type of software sold. The price: $2.50 a CD, $4.00 for two - you name it, you can buy it. In fact, I only know of one dealer where you can buy licensed software, but you you have to wait months to get most of it, and forget about getting obscure stuff.
I saw a talk from the country manager for M$ about two months ago. He was talking about piracy. The piracy levels for India and most of South East Asia are from 60% to 90%. A guy I work with is from India and he said his company there had only bought licensed software once.
So, at this time, money is not a factor. But it will be. Here, software, books and movies are vigourously pirated (no legal repercussions whatsoever), but music is not. I have yet to notice any store selling pirated music. From that I can assume that the local authorities have the ability to rid the country of software piracy, but have chosen not to.
At some time in the future the piracy will stop, and a tremendous opportunity for 'free-as-in-beer' software will open. No one will think of paying the $ for a windows install when the Linux install is free. There will be millions of computer users who need quality desktop applications. (On the server, Linux use is already widespread here).
I think the real opportunity Linux desktop development will be in countries like this one.
RedHat Installer: Menu based, simple options, mostly autodetect. Just click next until you log in as root. It's a very simple process, and easy for people new to Linux, as long as they have reasonably common hardware.
Once you get it installed, you have to play with rpms or install new packages from source, which can at times be frustrating.
Debian Installer: Wow. I had to reinstall Debian on my box about 100 times until I got the configuration to catch. If I didn't have a problem with the network card, I had a problem with X. If I didn't have a problem with X, I had a problem with smtp. Basically, the only way I got it done was to reboot the RedHat partition, start linuxconf, and copy all of the appropriate value down so i could enter them later when I tried to install debian. Maybe I'm spoiled and refuse to pull out the manuals for my hardware. Maybe I don't even have the manuals for my hardware. Either way, it tried about 30 network card drivers until I figured out what the right one was. (again from linuxconf in RedHat)
But, I must say, apt-get has made it all worthwhile. I spend 90% of my time on the debian partition now.
In any case, installing Debian is a real b$tch.
Win32 Installer: no idea, as I've never installed it. It comes pre-installed.
Linux on the server: happy happy. Wouldn't choose otherwise.
Linux on the desktop: does indeed SUCK.
I've been using Unix in a server environment since 1992. Never had any major problems. On the desktop, I started with Mac, fiddled with NeXT, tried Sun and DEC workstations, and eventual moved to M$ Windows (for gaming, nothing else compares).
All of those OS's have their strengths and weaknesses. And, in hope af creating a better world, last week I bought an extra hard drive and installed Linux (RedHat 6.2, am told Debian is better but no CD available) on it to play around.
In general, a less than fulfilling experience. Here are my observations:
1. I have to choose a desktop environemnt? GNOME or KDE? I'm supposed to know which has better Apps? Great idea - split a limited developers pool among two environments - so instead of getting one set of applications that work well, we get two sets of applications that are in perpetual beta.
2. Web Browser. At no time while using a PC do I have less than 4 or 5 browser windows open. Trying to work without a functional browser is difficult, if not impossible. I just don't enjoy opening NN and seeing my available memory disappear. (Last week, Mozilla was declared dead - how could this happen when it hasn't even been born yet?)
3. Mail Client. I spent days looking for a mail client for GNOME which supported multiple POP mailboxes. I found a few, but they ended up in wild-goose chases for libraries to replace those which where outdated, too new, etc. Never actually got anything to compile. Heard there's a good mail client for KDE, which means I made the wrong choice back at #1.
4. Editor. Uhh, I use vi and emacs when there is absolutely, positively, nothing else available. Don't get me wrong, I first learned emacs over 8 years ago. But there are some basic functions which I rely upon that don't exist in emacs. Give me something like HomeSite on a linux box and you've got a convert.
5. Word and Excel. Regardless of how much other Microsoft software sucks, these two products are hard to beat. Also, they are practically industry standards. If you work in any office environment, you'll be sure to get these sent to you all the time. Of course, you can read them from your linux box - but if you want to edit them, it's lilo:dos yet again.
I use my computer to work. It is a tool which I need to function efficiently. I played with my new Linux Desktop for a few days, then when I had real work to do, I rebooted back to DOS. A real disappointment.
I know, it's open source, help and code it instead of complaining. I do code open source software, but for web applications. I don't code for the desktop. To grow, linux needs the desktop. To win on the desktop, Linux needs the killer apps - at least a browser, a good mail client, and an editor.
To get there, I'll argue that Linux needs less developers rather than more. I'm tired of seeing 2000 new apps which are v.0.0.0.1beta0.0.5-unstable. The paradigm of "release early and often" needs to be rethought. Release when you have a functioning application. If you have an idea for a new app, look around to see if anything else is out there first. If someone is already working on the same application, join them rather than creating a new tarball which will never get out of beta.
Open Source can and will take over. But it won't do so without the Desktop. And the desktop is all about applications.
If you have Apache and XML (and any other programming language) making a content management suite is not a complicated problem. The only problem is how to integrate it with a client's exisitng publishing process - which may be different for every client. But the code running it is not complicated - so it is easy to cutomize for multiple clients.
Taking a look at Tea, I see a few things happening:
The text below is from the TeaTemplateLanguage.pdf file (240k). This information does not seem to be on any of the site's pages (requires a bit more digging), so I think it makes sense to bring up to the surface a bit here...
Why use Tea?
In general, neither developers nor page designers author Tea templates. The goal is that they be written and maintained by technical producers who are liaisons between developers and designers.
If I'm developing a content management system for my site, I don't want a matrix of developer::designer::technical-producers who control the site. I want the people who develop the content to control the site and will build the system accordingly.
Usually I think one thing when people start talking Java and Web development. Something about being born yesterday. The corporate types like Java because it has a name they can remember, so they say it back to the system analysts whenever a new design team is in the office. The web sites that would benefit from the use of Java development environment are few and far between. With Java you'll get a long development cycle, expensive developers, expensive hardware, expensive support contracts, and preformance increases that aren't even seen as necessary by the Media Metrix Top 50.
Really, is seeing the technical specs and source code going to help determine if the Carnivore system invades privacy? The FBI stated that all email traffic in an ISP goes through Carnivore. If that isn't invading privacy, what is?
I'll try and guess how Carnivore works (the software that is, IDNJS about networks). I assume it requires too much disk to log the entire text of every message (and be too cumbersome to search, and be a tremendous waste of cpu). I bet they just index every message and check it against a list of "flags" - names, phrases, addresses or other terms related to ongoing investigations. If a message turns up a flag, the Carnivore notifies HQ and the message is logged. I bet the From:, To:, Cc: and Bcc: addresses immediately become flags as well. Perhaps all email traffic immediately following the flagged message would be logged for a certain period of time. Encrypted messages are ignored, but the From:, To:, Cc: and Bcc: addresses can still be checked.
At least that's how I would build the system. Now, as a hypothetical exercise, how would you defeat it? Encryption helps, for sure. You'd need to change email addresses frequently, though. Or you could do what I do and live in a developing country. My ISP couldn't figure out if someone hacked into their system if their life depended on it, let alone figure out how to track anything.
All I can tell you is the FBI will become the world's top experts on spam, as 60% of the carnivore's food will be spam. I can imagine a team of 30-year-old college drop outs working in a basement outside DC, reading page after page of spam on some trusty 1983 VAX machines.
Well, the publisher determines the impartiality of the news they publish. And you determine the impartiality of the publishers you read. If you feel it's not impartial, find another news source.
See #1. There is no ombudsman for the media. If fact, if there was, we wouldn't appreciate it that much.
I wasn't aware that inernet.com and VA Linux had monopolies in the Linux media. In fact, I wasn't aware that they were the same company. Did I miss the news about how internet.com merged with VA Linux and bought every other Linux media site? Better call the Justice Department
Yes. No. Maybe. Recently, there seem to be cracks forming in the armor of Linux solidarity. Is this a bad thing? Not at all. The goal of "world domination" seems to be universally agreed upon, but at what cost? Let's face it, there is no world domination without big business - it can't be a grass roots movement forever. Bringing linux to the world also means bringing the world to linux, and all of the corporate feasability and profitability issues that come with it. Only know do you understand
Well, if you're colocating, meaning you are administering your own server, I would focus on one thing: Connectivity.
Granted, 100% uptime is an impossible goal. But, assuming that you can keep your server up and running, you are dependent on your colocation service for keeping your server connected to the net. The main factor here is connectivity. Make sure they are connected to multiple backbones on different carriers. Look at the network maps of their carriers and make sure the physical location of their colocation service is located near those backbones. Don't get into a situation where you depend on a single trunk line. Try testing their connectivity with a service like netmechanic.com as well. The numbers you get from the test may not be that accurate, but they'll let you know if there's a problem.
Other issues: bulding security, rack security, multiple power feeds and backup generators, dry fire suppression system. Ask them what their disaster plan is. And, of course, talk to some of their existing clients to get some feedback. Also, if you get the feeling they offer "sales support" rather than real support, forget about it. (a good sign of this is that a call to the sales number always gets through but a call to the support number more often gets a machine.)
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:)
Besides, it's my understanding that most ISP's have a terms and conditions agreement that limits the liability of the ISP, and provides for the termination of the abusive users account.
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The problem is that the terms and conditions agreements simply do not work towards limiting abuse, and the termination of the user's account just doesn't happen.
I see that it would set dangerous legal precedents. Point taken. IANAL either, but the ISPs are the only ones with the ability to intervene in this situation, and many times they just don't. If there were repercussions to the ISP giving the abuser sustained and repeated access to the internet, you can be sure they would implement some from of controls in order to prevent it. But there isn't, so they do very little to stop it.
If the cabbie knew he was a bank robber, and gave him a ride out of town anyway, is the cabbie innocent? Or, if the bank robber got into the cab unbeknownst to the cabbie, and the security officer from the bank ran out and said "Don't give him a ride, he's a bank robber," but the cabbie still gave him a ride, is the cabbie innocent?
OK, let's say that the ISP is not fined, but rather obliged to reveal the identity of the abuser when a clear cut case of abuse is present. This information could be made readily available to those adversely affected by the abuse, as well as sent to other ISP's to prevent the abuser from reestablishing connectivity. The terms and conditions agreement could be modified to force the users to agree to this possibility.
(if you are a lawyer, feel free to speak up
I have one web site that provides free webmail (no SMTP) in addition to other stuff. Every three months for the past year, there is a scumbag spammer who uses us as a return address (forges everything, including the message-id, but can't forge the originating Received: header). He runs a credit card grabbing scam that can only appeal to people who can count their IQ on their toes. But he keeps coming back. He operates out of Los Angeles, started with connectivity through Verio, moved to UUNET, and now works out of rasserver.net.
Now, the average user cannot read email headers. However, the average user has the ability to send an abuse report (hundreds and thousands), although usually with a threat of a lawsuit, foul language, or incomplete headers. But we can't blame the users. We just tell them where it really came from and give them a few good links about spam. At the same time, we fend of cease-and-desist or die messages from our various outsourcers, who routinely forget that the exact same thing happened only a few months ago. It gets to you after a while.
So, what can we do? Contact the ISP that is putting this guy on the net? Nice try. Waste your time on their abuse address, waste more time on faxing, finally call them to tell them about the problem and they will immediately refer you to their lawyers. Any chance of getting a network tech on the phone to talk about the problem? Forget it.
The only viable solution is to subpoena (sp?) the server logs from the ISP and the telephone records from the telco and go from there. For me, that doesn't work, as I'm in Jakarta and have no desire to spend mucho money on an intercontinental lawsuit with little or no hope of reward at the end of it.
What would put a stop to SPAM? Making the ISP responsible for monitoring, and responding to abuse complaints about, spam that was sent from their systems. Do you think the ISPs could stop it if they were "motivated" to do so? Damn right they could. It can't be too hard to notice that someone is sending 50,000 emails through your system within a 20 minute period.
Making the ISPs partially responsible would go a long way toward eliminating spam. Perhaps a sliding scale fine system would work.
[aside: in the one event where a shitforbrains spammer rigged a perl script to sign up for accounts, login to our webmail, and send spam (all through HTTP connections), we only got 4 complaints. we also shut down the spammer within hours of the original complaint]
Slashdot and Zeldman are having a real laugh over this one. This is an obvious setup. I think what they're really doing is categorizing the intelligence of /. user into 4 groups:
1. Clueless people who look at the site, think it's neat, and ask Zeldman a serious question.
2. Smart but angry people who love to flame at the slightest opportunity.
3. Paranoid people determined to expose the hidden motives behind everything.
4. Ultrageeks who have seen this trick before and, recognizing the brilliance, go on to ask an interesting question about web design.
So my question: Are there any examples of your actual web design? Can we see them?
Dear Mr. best ever,
Why do you render my status bar useless with javascript mouseovers? Are you trying to disguise the state-of-the-art directory structure behind your site?
Of the recent 5k contest, which design did you like the best?
I can't help but think - what if someone grabs my cookie file and mails it to my mother? This is the worst thing to happen since the "History" list in the browsers ...
;)
ahhhhhhhhck.
The real security blunder here is sites storing sensitive information in cookies. Idiot moves by microsoft should be anticipated, and _no_ sensitive information should be stored in cookies.
makes you wonder how long microsoft has been collecting cookies from other web sites
g
well, from over here it looks like Postgres is doing fine. Several flame squads have managed to kick the knees out from under the MySQL team (I've seen it on seven different BBS's in the past two weeks). This has piqued my interest, nonetheless.
Let me give you a quick suggestion - change the name. Why? let's take a look at your competitors:
1. Oracle. They have the best name, thus they have the best software. Everybody knows that if you ask an Oracle a question, it gives you the answer. VERY hard to compete with.
2. DB2. Right away, we know what we're talking about here. And IBM has always been a leader in acronymized systems. I can't wait until DB3 comes out!
3. Informix. Looking at the entymology of this sucker tells me it's going to be really easy to get my boss to use it.
4. Sybase. Sounds cool. More importantly, I know how to pronounce it.
5. MySQL. That's right, it's mine. For me. How much more fun can you get. I've got mySQL, you go get yourSQL!
Now, lets take a look at your product: PostgreSQL. Wow. I can't wait to tell my boss about that, as soon as I figure out how to pronounce it. Is it named after some french mathemetician or something? I mean, I get the SQL part, but what is the Postgre? Am I only allowed to use it after I take my Graduate Requisite Exams? I mean, I pass that requirement, but if I hire someone who hasn't taken their GRE's yet will they be confused?
Finally, I see in the threads here that there have been several competing versions about how to spell it: PostgreSQL, Postgres, PostGres, PostgresSQL, and so on. This is a major bug in the postgres source and must be fixed.
The NASDAQ has gone off the charts for three reasons:
...
... err, at $0.002 a pageview, we'll make that back in about a billion page views - great! let's do it." There is a major misundestanding of the economic fundamentals of the situation. They don't care about that, of course, because they're just trying to seduce ...
... HAVEN'T YOU EVER REALIZED THAT PEOPLE WILL DRIVE TO THE NEXT TOWN TO SHOP BECAUSE THEY KNOW THE SHAMPOO IS $0.02 CHEAPER. WTF?!? Anyway, VC's ares tumbling all over eachother so fast that they don't have time to think about what outrageous deal they are going to flush their money into next. But, they do have very good source of information, but in the tech world it's hard to tell the difference between information and ...
...
;)
1. Hype. The internet is the ultimate hype machine. People really become consumed by things they read, and that makes the internet so much more powerful than television. Added to this is the fact that people can actually contribute and see their own words published on the web. It build a big "you pat my back, I'll pat yours" system where no website is going to give negative press to the Internet. It was interesting to see the damage control in the Tech rags after the NASDAQ tumbled. (btw, Katz is a great example of this - a real ally for the tech world, like it or not)
2. Joe Bob Investor. It used to be the case that the stock market was a game restricted to the very wealthy. You think of the atmosphere portayed in movies like "Trading Places". But now, everyone's rich and everyone who's not rich has figured out that the 2% savings account is a crock. So, anybody with $0.02 lying around is playing the game. This is a mass influx of wealth into both the NYSE and NASDAQ. And as the tech stocks are the apple in everyone's eye, they get the lion's share.
3. Potential Future Value. OK, this term gets way overused. But wrt some companies, it has merit. The companies that build the infrastucture for the net are building solid, perisitent revenue streams that will bring in cash for years to come. Certain b2b opportunities work much more successfully on the net than anywhere else.
That said
The NASDAQ has taken a bath for three reasons:
1. Potential Future Value. Right back at you. One of the great mysteries is the advertising-backed web site. There are two kinds of such sites that make a profit - Yahoo!, and small sites that are made on shoestring budgets on shared servers with skeleton crew staffs. Everything in between is just some silly VC's nightmare. I don't know how many times I've seen ad-backed sites launch with a multi-million dollar advertising campaign. Obviously, these people didn't do to well in high school math. "Let's see, or launch campaign will cost $2,000,000
3. Joe Bob Investor. What's that saying about a fool and their money? Here's a proposal - I'm building an online grocery delivery service. Will you give me a hundred million dollars to get it going? Oh sure, except that
3. Hype. The ultimate form of expression on the web is the personal home page. Ridiculous, I know, but just look around. Philip Greenspun was here last week - you ever see his homepage? It's 20 gigs of material singing the praises of Philip. There's nothing wrong with that - I learned more from his homepage than I've learned anywhere else on the web. Take a look at other influential web figures - does the term megalomaniac come to mind? Humility and personal homepages just don't mix. This has carried over into how companies market themselves and from there into how everybody talks about the Net. Everything is always the newest, fastest, coolest, most advanced, most reliable, most whatever. And we all have trouble living up to those claims sooner or later
Where will the NASDAQ go from here? Nowhere but up baby, and don't let me hear you tell otherwise
g
I origninally posted this over at Zend ( http://zend.com/phorum/read.php?num=3&id=1117&loc= 0&thread=1117 ) But I'll repost here. [I have edited some mistakes from my original post at Zend.]
It's a good article. The ArsDigita Community System (ACS) is very powerful software for the enterprise - see http://photo.net/wtr/ for more. All the points he makes about MySQL are true. But, it all boils down to what you need your website to do.
MySQL is good for:
1. low connection overhead - it doesn't take long to open a connection to the db server. This is good for those of us on shared servers who cannot run mod_php [or the likes of it] and don't have access to persistent database connections.
2. Fast reads. MySQL can read faster than any database on the web. It beats Oracle 3:1. It beats PostgresSQL by [6:1 ?]. This is good for websites like which are many reads and few updates.
3. Simplicity. Sure, MySQL doesn't have many advances features like cross table referencing, triggers, etc. But most of us don't use those features. Most of those features are db specific, meaning you can't move the code around. For smaller sites, they are not necessary.
MySQL is bad at:
1. Transactions - they don't exist in mySQL, so it fails the ACID test completely. Read: Never use MySQL to store _critical_ information. That means no ecommerce, stock information, factory inventory, payroll, etc.
But if you're using a dbms for a bbs, greeting cards, or news, it wouldn't make sense to shovel out the $50K required to set up the 18 disks required to run Oracle. So you lose a few posts in your BBS - who cares? If you're planning on $123.9 million in revenues for your enterprise ecommerce site, you want Oracle. Otherwise, keep it simple.
Regarding ACS ( http://arsdigita.com ) - their ecommerce module is very good - perhaps the best available. [snip] But, if you're just looking for a bbs or news server, don't bother with it - I haven't been too impressed with the BBS's I've seen built with ACS. I recommend sitting down and building a BBS by yourself. Check out the articles at webmonkey and get coding - it's worth the effort.
I remember watching "Cliff 'em All" for the first time around 12 years ago. Back then, I listened to Metallica and little else. We even had a room in our barn that we called the "Metallidome" where my young brother would play guitars with his friends. I had introduced him to Metallica, introduced my whole high school to their music. Watching them play in a parking lot in the closest city was the ultimate. I couldn't hear for three days and my neck hurt for a week.
... After that I lost track of the band.
Remember the beginning of "Cliff 'em All"? The band walks into a convenience store, takes a bunch of sh*t off the shelves, and walks out without paying. Their lack of respect for everything was excellent. They wanted to call their first album "Metal up your Ass" but the record company wouldn't let 'em - so they called it "Kill 'em all" instead. Man, that was when Metallica were men - Ride The Lightning, Master of Puppets, and finally And Justice for All
So, my question: what would Cliff think of all this Napster crap?