My office here in Montreal was also at a complete standstill all day, everybody kept reading the news and listening to the radio, hoping it would finally stop. I'm still in awe and shock that such a thing could even happen.
My heart goes out to everyone who has lost loved ones in this horrible tragedy.
I find this question rather disturbing question, especially since it's on slashdot. Most information should be free just like most software should be free. Source code is essentially just information, after all.
The reality is very few sources actually produce real "content" - newspapers for instance - and usually even these mediums make their money from advertising, not subscribership. This is NOT a new phenomenon, it's the standard. Typically most printed publication's cover price only cover production and distribution - which incidentally is much lower with online publishing! Their cash cow is advertising.
Not that it's fair that online content providers don't have that income, but let's be clear - it's not the principal source of income for other publishers. Why should it be for them?
Many sites - slashdot, for instance - simply link other people's stories (Imagine having to pay separately for each story you read!). This means the principal added value is convenience by having interesting stories bundled together. Many people (myself included) don't see this worth my hard earned dollars. I pay for access to digital TV, I don't pay for each individual show.
Like someone said previously, a reasonable approache is to put plutonium in our reactors and change it into "less radioactive" substances, or at least something with a shorter half-life. Storing something away for 30k years is one thing, but most radioactive elements don't have such a long lifespan.
Then again, a more expensive (but definately cooler) idea would be to store it all in a big tunnel in redmond, washington. Maybe it'll mutate the clarity gene and M$ might stop being so crappy:)
Let's face it. This "new technology" is another Microsoft standard meant to extend it's monopoly into yet another platform. Usually, when people "innovate" new standards, they appear on RFC's and people contribute ideas and eventually the bad ones get debunked. Not only is.NET an internal M$ thing - everybody knows all the world's smartest people work at M$, so they can never be wrong - but you can be DAMN sure that M$ will make absolutely certain only IE ever fully supports it. It's not that M$ doesn't ever have good ideas, it's that they make sure noone else can participate.
It's about time we started spending money on things not so local. Canadians in general (and maybe people in Quebec more so - Living here gives me a right to that comment IHMO) seem to have an intense focus on internal issues. It's a nice change to focus on something with a little more importance to the planet as a whole, instead of who lives next to who, and what language they happen to speak. Finally - something I'm happy to have my tax dollars pay. I think it's been a long time coming, and I only hope this is just the beginning!
While some of the design ideas presented by compaq's "visioneering" (ugh.) are definately visually interesting (if not exactly pleasing), I see ONE serious flaw behind the entire concept.
Notebook computers traditionally trade a certain amount of performance and expandability for portability. Which is fine, when you get a notebook, you expect upgrades to be expensive but you know you're gaining mobility.
Desktops usually are easily upgraded, and fairly modular. You can just take the box out and pop in a new one, leaving the monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers intact.
I think making a hybrid is an inherently flaky concept. It's a bit like Microsoft wanting to merge the server and the client into a single OS - the two modules are simply SPECIALIZED and are best at their particular environments. Trying to "homogenize" is a bad idea. When the system doesn't need to move, desktops are cheaper and easier to upgrade. This won't change.
It's not all bad though. There's a great idea hidden in there too - having a notebook where could could keep your monitor and keyboard during upgrades (just buy the "back" of the book for a new system) is TERRIFIC! It could be the answer to cheaper notebook upgrades, provided it doesn't fall apart too easily!
Preventing non-free systems using our code would probably help us more than deter us. I'm sure there are disadvantages (for instance, what about MacOS X?) but I for one believe that it will come to a point where companies like M$ will try to assimilate free software, "embrace and extend" style. Every peice that's protected prepares us more.
I think the next natural evolution for such a concept would include creating true, open licenses for standards. How many times has Micro$oft performed an "embrace and extend" lobotomy on various kinds of standards? (Remember the old days, when IE was actually more of a substandard of the web - a little like AOL's nyetscape?)
Protecting our software is one thing, but I think we should make sure that if corporations hop on the bandwagon, they don't steal our horses. If this was done for the web, for instance, we would be stuck with all this IE specific crap in web pages since it would be a derivative of a protected work. Let's face it - the reason it's there is to make the web incompatible with every other browser, even if it is only a temporary annoyance. This could get fairly complicated from a legal standpoint, but I think it needs to happen.
Ok, I'll be the first to admit that I use Netscape vs. Mozilla in Linux. Now, I hate the old Netscape as much as the next person (probably more) but maybe this will have a positive side effect.
Let's not forget most of the contributors to Mozilla are Netscape employees. You can call it Open Source all you like, but that's not the way it's supposed to work. I think having all those installations on the next release of RedHat will force everyone to have a second (or first) look, and hopefully, the bright (and lazy or bandwith throttled) among us might not bother downloading Netscape. And they'll get angry. And you know what? They just might fix it.
Laziness has been working against us - there's no incentive... perhaps this time laziness might actually help us. Hopefully, more users will mean a bigger contributor base.
Given a reasonable workload without too much overtime, salary's great. But for jobs requiring a lot of overtime, you're much better off with hourly rates since the employees won't feel like they're being treated like slave labour.
I know this company who gets their programmers (who are salaried) to do sick amounts of overtime because of stupid scheduling on the mgmt's part, doesn't pay them for extra overtime and promises stock (but nothing in writing), and pays them VERY MUCH under the industry average. Result: Just about every single programmer in the place is about to quit. Morale is the lowest I've seen at any company.
Don't let that be your mistake... Don't be afraid to compensate people for their work, salaried or by hourly rate. Most people will be happy as long as they feel appreciated and are reasonably well paid for their effort. (Remember that if overtime isn't compensated (and starts becoming expected instead of appreciated), the employee is essentially getting PUNISHED for the more effort they put into their job. If they're salaried and end up doing large chunks of overtime every other week, be reasonable (give them a few extra vacation days, tell them to not come in tomorrow... a little bonus now and then, just so they know their effort is noticed and appreciated. Worst off, TELL THEM;) and you won't have any problems.)
But if you're looking for neat jobs in 3D art, consider looking a few of the major Canadian cities. Pixar in Vancouver made Toy Story (and spinoffs thereof... and Vancouver is quite a nice place to live if you can deal with the rain:) Vancouver has the added advantage that it's a filmmaking hotspot because of it's natural beauty which is good for shooting scenes and tax reimbursements from the provincial govt. There's certainly things in Toronto since it's our largest city, plus Alias Wavefront was built there if I'm not mistaken so you might get spinoffs from that. Montreal is also a filmmaking hotspot because of the varying scenery (old and new buildings) and big american movies film here relatively often. (More recently Snake Eyes with Nicolas Cage was filmed here) Plus SoftImage originated from here too, which incidentally is why the "image" is pronounced "imawge"... the french way:)
Montreal is also a stone's throw from the NY state border so you wouldn't be living far from home. Don't worry, you don't *need* to know French to get by in Montreal... but it's useful.
Of course, if this is *really* what you want to do, you'll probably want to go to California. NYC gets a lot of film work, but most of these companies get the 3D art done in California (since it's next to home) or outside of the US (Canada or Europe... maybe a few other places too) because it's cheaper.
I think the best distinction between "OS" and "Application" is whether or not the peice of software provides a service or not.
Most daemons, for example, could be considered part of the Linux (or *nix, *bsd...) operating systems. In the case in winnt, all its services would fall into the same class. Anything that sets up a protocol (netbios, http, etc) or allows low-level access to hardware is also part of the OS, or at least could conceivably be made to part of it in the future (since you might have to install a web server on an OS that doesn't have one)
Most things that can't be installed off the OS cd I'd consider an application until it gets included with the rest of the OS on a future version.
Anything that makes USE of said protocols or services are applications. For me, I'd consider window managers applications since they use the XServer, which I'd consider part of the OS. IE is most definately NOT part of the OS:)
This works as a general rule, but I'm sure there are some greyer areas...
I just got back from a night full of drinking, socializing, and other non-geekish things with some friends. Granted, I'm a full blown geek, having a life as a programmer and all, (and having a humongous LAN at home... well, by 10 port hub standards;) It's important for everyone to remember: while you MAY find someone online, don't COUNT on it. Relationships HAPPEN. The more you look, the less you find. Personnally, I've NEVER had a geek gf... all my gf's have always been non-geeks. But it's all good! I have a need for a complement. I don't think I could ever go out with a girl that's exactly like me beacue I don't think I could stand her. FIND A GIRL that's for you. Odds are, you won't find her online however. GO OUT, have fun with friends. You just might meet the girl you're looking for.
While the engineer boom did die off in the past, it's important to note that this was a type of "construction" boom. People were building things, and by the very nature of the beast, this can only go on for so long before busting out.
There is only a limited amount of space.
In the case of highways and other govt. project, there is only a limited amount of money they're willing to spend before it's adios.
This infrastructure has been building itself since the birth of every single country in the world. Since most post-industrial societies are already quite "built-up" economically, there is already an existing infrastructure to build upon that invevitably limits the growth potential for the boom.
I don't beleive this will happen for IT workers for quite a long time. Case in point:
The shortage of IT workers has been there for years, yet the amount of new students in CS is going *down*.
Not everybody can become a programmer/sysadmin/whatnot (unlike the industrial revolution where anybody could work in a factory). It does require a fair amount of discipline, and a passion for your work that some people simply do not possess. (well, to be any good;)
There's simply TOO MUCH work to go around. Most companies can't fill the programming positions that they need. (This is a testimonial, I have yet to see a single company not "looking to hire" IT workers of some type.)
Most companies can benefit from competing on the Internet because of next to nonexistant taxation. Add dollar values to a killer concept and you've got a winner.
To be honest, I do believe the "hotspots" of IT today will slow down, I don't think it will all come to a grinding halt. There's still too much to be done since there is not very much existing infrastructure to build upon, and it's all still very primitive. (Some US president once said that "everything that could be invented, has been invented". Of course, he was far off, but I think that assuming that what we have now won't change quite a bit is equally short-sighted.) We essentially have to build the entire infrastructure from the ground up. The Internet is in it's infancy, and we're nearing the limit of our existing techniques for processor production, but the micro-processor is ANYTHING but the bottleneck in most of today's machine. There are many applications of technology waiting to happen, and only time will bring them to a reality.
I believe that the IT worker shortage is more due to the existance of an IT revolution, where competing industries that don't jump in on the race will be left in the dust.
The industrial revolution did eventually die off, but it DID take SEVERAL years. And look at the repercussions... no one saw all of the factories close down. It just became a WAY of LIFE, and I think that's what will eventually happen in the future, given time.
This is a government run project. Whether it fails or succeeds isn't really relevant, since it's tax money paying for it anyway. Funny we can afford this but we can't increase funding to our health programs or pay our nurses salaries. Go figure.
Maybe they could try something other people aren't already doing better, though, I do agree with you.
For example, sending snail-mail online. You write the letter, the post office on the other end receives it (or maybe the main post office in wherever, ontario (i'm guessing, since just about anything big and federal is in ontario, unless it's the mint)), prints it, then sends it to the appropriate party. They could charge a small amount for the service, it would be faster than the standard 7 day waiting period, and it would offer a link between the "online" world and the "not online" world. Well, at least in Canada:)
Either way, it's good that they're admitting defeat to the internet age.
I've noticed my big boss generally dislikes linux and just about everything non-micro$oft, which for me really sucks since *I'M* usually the one that ends up having to deal with all the problems that come around because of it. (ie: when it crashes, it's not the boss that's fixing it...) My particular beef is with NT and SQL Server 7.0. I could write several pages on the problems I encounter.
He even installed MS Proxy server/client instead of a good old run-of-the-mill gateway. In fact, he REMOVED our gateway to do this. Of course, it offers NO MORE FUNCTIONALITY than an IP masquerading gateway. Of course, Micro$oft didn't bother writing a client for anything non-windows, so all the linux boxes have no net access. Yup.
Although, recently he's been softening up... I think it's partially due to my badgering and partically due to positive press. So my suggestion to you for losing clueless OSS policies based on M$ FUD is:
-print up positive article, post them where people will read them. -exthol the virtues of linux, with figures to back it up. -calculate your overtime fixing stuff that breaks because it's a crummy product, add it to your real-world cost. That's a biggie.
The result of this is we're keeping the damn MS proxy server, but we're also installing a gateway. Linux is also installed on one of our main server boxes. It's getting better:)
I think slashdot builds each page via a series of perl scripts, some of which executing via a daemon (cron job, whatever) such as the comments (which would also explain the delay on posting/viewing comments), others executed at request time such as the "this page was...". So slashdot would neither be static or dynamic per se... more of a quasi-dynamic site. I don't think anything could withhold processing all those comments for all of slashdot's traffic every request... it'd be just brutal (and inhumane:)
I based my recommendations on how much traffic I thought a peice of art might attract, which is probably quite a bit at first since it's a new idea, but not a lot of repeat visits, I'd guess. I mean, you don't read your horoscope in da vinci's armpit.
You can run a decent web server with *very* little hardware. Assuming you'll be staying away from dynamically built pages and database access, you could probably get away with a pentium 120, 64Mg RAM and (of course), Linux or your fave flavour of BSD. Don't even bother buying a monitor since that'll drive up costs... administer remotely via telnet (if you're not too paranoid) or ssh (if you are)
If you decide to mingle databases and dynamic pages (either in perl or php), I'd pump up the ram to 128 and give it a little more processing juice for good measure. A well tuned apache can be made to not throw up when there's LOTS of requests (ie slashdot), but I'm guessing it'll probably end up puking if it has to produce a page each request.
There's a workaround though. You can write a set of perl scripts that make a static web site every 15 minutes (or whatever time) running as a daemon. That way, you escape building pages for every single request. (correct me if i'm wrong, I think that's how slashdot's built... rob???)
In *all* likelihood, though, I wouldn't worry about it. Let's face it, if you *do* get slashdotted (which is likely), it won't be everyday (which is certain). It *will* force you to configure your server well, though. In your place I'd just go static HTML, or dynamic pages with perl or php3.
Of course, then there's the web cam to take into consideration, but to be honest, I haven't set one up so I'll let that up to someone who has.
Read the article again, you'll read that the machines are heading to Britain after a successful public trial in Canada. That means that have already been in use for awhile.
If you'll refer yourself back to the article, you'll read that the machines are heading to Britain *after* a public trial in Canada. It looks to me like Houston is testing it now (or was 3 months ago), so old or not, odds are Texas was not the first place to have it implemented.
Just think of all the crummy web pages they've just inherited, not to mention all the sites that just serve as *illegal* buffers for files such as ROMS, MP3's or whatever. I'm sure that more than a few people have those on a geocities site...
If yahoo wants the responsibility (and perhaps lawsuits, since after all, it's THEIR intellectual property) that will come of it, let them do it. It'll be a problem they create for themselves!
Yahoo will become the largest set of links to warez ftps in the world!
Yet another indication of people's commitment to read stuff that they can only criticize since they are so *obviously* the experts. Yes, that comment was immensely useful to all of us, I'm still awed by your insight. Thank You.
Okay genius. Let me guess. You have a degree in Psychology, Computer Science, and Quantum physics? I'd bet those "few lines" of Katz article are the only lines you *did* read, thus making you a hippocrite by not having done your research!
Just by the tone your post it's quite obvious that the only reason you didn't like this article was either because it's not written in C, or because it's evidently written by someone with a little more maturity than you.
I'm getting sick of the "you're responsible for what I read because I don't have the capacity to stop myself" posts. SOMEONE please moderate them out!
Slashdot Mirror
My office here in Montreal was also at a complete standstill all day, everybody kept reading the news and listening to the radio, hoping it would finally stop. I'm still in awe and shock that such a thing could even happen.
My heart goes out to everyone who has lost loved ones in this horrible tragedy.
I find this question rather disturbing question, especially since it's on slashdot. Most information should be free just like most software should be free. Source code is essentially just information, after all.
The reality is very few sources actually produce real "content" - newspapers for instance - and usually even these mediums make their money from advertising, not subscribership. This is NOT a new phenomenon, it's the standard. Typically most printed publication's cover price only cover production and distribution - which incidentally is much lower with online publishing! Their cash cow is advertising.
Not that it's fair that online content providers don't have that income, but let's be clear - it's not the principal source of income for other publishers. Why should it be for them?
Many sites - slashdot, for instance - simply link other people's stories (Imagine having to pay separately for each story you read!). This means the principal added value is convenience by having interesting stories bundled together. Many people (myself included) don't see this worth my hard earned dollars. I pay for access to digital TV, I don't pay for each individual show.
Then again, a more expensive (but definately cooler) idea would be to store it all in a big tunnel in redmond, washington. Maybe it'll mutate the clarity gene and M$ might stop being so crappy
Let's face it. This "new technology" is another Microsoft standard meant to extend it's monopoly into yet another platform. Usually, when people "innovate" new standards, they appear on RFC's and people contribute ideas and eventually the bad ones get debunked. Not only is .NET an internal M$ thing - everybody knows all the world's smartest people work at M$, so they can never be wrong - but you can be DAMN sure that M$ will make absolutely certain only IE ever fully supports it. It's not that M$ doesn't ever have good ideas, it's that they make sure noone else can participate.
Open the source, baby!
There's also one in Montreal and Quebec, both (presumably) named after the one in France.
It's about time we started spending money on things not so local. Canadians in general (and maybe people in Quebec more so - Living here gives me a right to that comment IHMO) seem to have an intense focus on internal issues. It's a nice change to focus on something with a little more importance to the planet as a whole, instead of who lives next to who, and what language they happen to speak. Finally - something I'm happy to have my tax dollars pay. I think it's been a long time coming, and I only hope this is just the beginning!
Notebook computers traditionally trade a certain amount of performance and expandability for portability. Which is fine, when you get a notebook, you expect upgrades to be expensive but you know you're gaining mobility.
Desktops usually are easily upgraded, and fairly modular. You can just take the box out and pop in a new one, leaving the monitor/keyboard/mouse/speakers intact.
I think making a hybrid is an inherently flaky concept. It's a bit like Microsoft wanting to merge the server and the client into a single OS - the two modules are simply SPECIALIZED and are best at their particular environments. Trying to "homogenize" is a bad idea. When the system doesn't need to move, desktops are cheaper and easier to upgrade. This won't change.
It's not all bad though. There's a great idea hidden in there too - having a notebook where could could keep your monitor and keyboard during upgrades (just buy the "back" of the book for a new system) is TERRIFIC! It could be the answer to cheaper notebook upgrades, provided it doesn't fall apart too easily!
I think the next natural evolution for such a concept would include creating true, open licenses for standards. How many times has Micro$oft performed an "embrace and extend" lobotomy on various kinds of standards? (Remember the old days, when IE was actually more of a substandard of the web - a little like AOL's nyetscape?)
Protecting our software is one thing, but I think we should make sure that if corporations hop on the bandwagon, they don't steal our horses. If this was done for the web, for instance, we would be stuck with all this IE specific crap in web pages since it would be a derivative of a protected work. Let's face it - the reason it's there is to make the web incompatible with every other browser, even if it is only a temporary annoyance. This could get fairly complicated from a legal standpoint, but I think it needs to happen.
Let's not forget most of the contributors to Mozilla are Netscape employees. You can call it Open Source all you like, but that's not the way it's supposed to work. I think having all those installations on the next release of RedHat will force everyone to have a second (or first) look, and hopefully, the bright (and lazy or bandwith throttled) among us might not bother downloading Netscape. And they'll get angry. And you know what? They just might fix it.
Laziness has been working against us - there's no incentive... perhaps this time laziness might actually help us. Hopefully, more users will mean a bigger contributor base.
I know this company who gets their programmers (who are salaried) to do sick amounts of overtime because of stupid scheduling on the mgmt's part, doesn't pay them for extra overtime and promises stock (but nothing in writing), and pays them VERY MUCH under the industry average. Result: Just about every single programmer in the place is about to quit. Morale is the lowest I've seen at any company.
Don't let that be your mistake... Don't be afraid to compensate people for their work, salaried or by hourly rate. Most people will be happy as long as they feel appreciated and are reasonably well paid for their effort. (Remember that if overtime isn't compensated (and starts becoming expected instead of appreciated), the employee is essentially getting PUNISHED for the more effort they put into their job. If they're salaried and end up doing large chunks of overtime every other week, be reasonable (give them a few extra vacation days, tell them to not come in tomorrow... a little bonus now and then, just so they know their effort is noticed and appreciated. Worst off, TELL THEM
Montreal is also a stone's throw from the NY state border so you wouldn't be living far from home. Don't worry, you don't *need* to know French to get by in Montreal... but it's useful.
Of course, if this is *really* what you want to do, you'll probably want to go to California. NYC gets a lot of film work, but most of these companies get the 3D art done in California (since it's next to home) or outside of the US (Canada or Europe... maybe a few other places too) because it's cheaper.
Most daemons, for example, could be considered part of the Linux (or *nix, *bsd...) operating systems. In the case in winnt, all its services would fall into the same class. Anything that sets up a protocol (netbios, http, etc) or allows low-level access to hardware is also part of the OS, or at least could conceivably be made to part of it in the future (since you might have to install a web server on an OS that doesn't have one)
Most things that can't be installed off the OS cd I'd consider an application until it gets included with the rest of the OS on a future version.
Anything that makes USE of said protocols or services are applications. For me, I'd consider window managers applications since they use the XServer, which I'd consider part of the OS. IE is most definately NOT part of the OS :)
This works as a general rule, but I'm sure there are some greyer areas...
I just got back from a night full of drinking, socializing, and other non-geekish things with some friends. Granted, I'm a full blown geek, having a life as a programmer and all, (and having a humongous LAN at home... well, by 10 port hub standards ;) It's important for everyone to remember: while you MAY find someone online, don't COUNT on it. Relationships HAPPEN. The more you look, the less you find. Personnally, I've NEVER had a geek gf... all my gf's have always been non-geeks. But it's all good! I have a need for a complement. I don't think I could ever go out with a girl that's exactly like me beacue I don't think I could stand her. FIND A GIRL that's for you. Odds are, you won't find her online however. GO OUT, have fun with friends. You just might meet the girl you're looking for.
Had more than a few chuckles, and what's funniest is that it's pretty much all true :)
just post and let us know. We can donate hardware and corn chips :)
I don't beleive this will happen for IT workers for quite a long time. Case in point:
To be honest, I do believe the "hotspots" of IT today will slow down, I don't think it will all come to a grinding halt. There's still too much to be done since there is not very much existing infrastructure to build upon, and it's all still very primitive. (Some US president once said that "everything that could be invented, has been invented". Of course, he was far off, but I think that assuming that what we have now won't change quite a bit is equally short-sighted.) We essentially have to build the entire infrastructure from the ground up. The Internet is in it's infancy, and we're nearing the limit of our existing techniques for processor production, but the micro-processor is ANYTHING but the bottleneck in most of today's machine. There are many applications of technology waiting to happen, and only time will bring them to a reality.
I believe that the IT worker shortage is more due to the existance of an IT revolution, where competing industries that don't jump in on the race will be left in the dust.
The industrial revolution did eventually die off, but it DID take SEVERAL years. And look at the repercussions... no one saw all of the factories close down. It just became a WAY of LIFE, and I think that's what will eventually happen in the future, given time.
This is a government run project. Whether it fails or succeeds isn't really relevant, since it's tax money paying for it anyway. Funny we can afford this but we can't increase funding to our health programs or pay our nurses salaries. Go figure.
:)
Maybe they could try something other people aren't already doing better, though, I do agree with you.
For example, sending snail-mail online. You write the letter, the post office on the other end receives it (or maybe the main post office in wherever, ontario (i'm guessing, since just about anything big and federal is in ontario, unless it's the mint)), prints it, then sends it to the appropriate party. They could charge a small amount for the service, it would be faster than the standard 7 day waiting period, and it would offer a link between the "online" world and the "not online" world. Well, at least in Canada
Either way, it's good that they're admitting defeat to the internet age.
I've noticed my big boss generally dislikes linux and just about everything non-micro$oft, which for me really sucks since *I'M* usually the one that ends up having to deal with all the problems that come around because of it. (ie: when it crashes, it's not the boss that's fixing it...) My particular beef is with NT and SQL Server 7.0. I could write several pages on the problems I encounter.
:)
He even installed MS Proxy server/client instead of a good old run-of-the-mill gateway. In fact, he REMOVED our gateway to do this. Of course, it offers NO MORE FUNCTIONALITY than an IP masquerading gateway. Of course, Micro$oft didn't bother writing a client for anything non-windows, so all the linux boxes have no net access. Yup.
Although, recently he's been softening up... I think it's partially due to my badgering and partically due to positive press. So my suggestion to you for losing clueless OSS policies based on M$ FUD is:
-print up positive article, post them where people will read them.
-exthol the virtues of linux, with figures to back it up.
-calculate your overtime fixing stuff that breaks because it's a crummy product, add it to your real-world cost. That's a biggie.
The result of this is we're keeping the damn MS proxy server, but we're also installing a gateway. Linux is also installed on one of our main server boxes. It's getting better
I think slashdot builds each page via a series of perl scripts, some of which executing via a daemon (cron job, whatever) such as the comments (which would also explain the delay on posting/viewing comments), others executed at request time such as the "this page was...". So slashdot would neither be static or dynamic per se... more of a quasi-dynamic site. I don't think anything could withhold processing all those comments for all of slashdot's traffic every request... it'd be just brutal (and inhumane :)
I based my recommendations on how much traffic I thought a peice of art might attract, which is probably quite a bit at first since it's a new idea, but not a lot of repeat visits, I'd guess. I mean, you don't read your horoscope in da vinci's armpit.
Either way, I'd like the piece in my living room.
You can run a decent web server with *very* little hardware. Assuming you'll be staying away from dynamically built pages and database access, you could probably get away with a pentium 120, 64Mg RAM and (of course), Linux or your fave flavour of BSD. Don't even bother buying a monitor since that'll drive up costs... administer remotely via telnet (if you're not too paranoid) or ssh (if you are)
:)
If you decide to mingle databases and dynamic pages (either in perl or php), I'd pump up the ram to 128 and give it a little more processing juice for good measure. A well tuned apache can be made to not throw up when there's LOTS of requests (ie slashdot), but I'm guessing it'll probably end up puking if it has to produce a page each request.
There's a workaround though. You can write a set of perl scripts that make a static web site every 15 minutes (or whatever time) running as a daemon. That way, you escape building pages for every single request. (correct me if i'm wrong, I think that's how slashdot's built... rob???)
In *all* likelihood, though, I wouldn't worry about it. Let's face it, if you *do* get slashdotted (which is likely), it won't be everyday (which is certain). It *will* force you to configure your server well, though. In your place I'd just go static HTML, or dynamic pages with perl or php3.
Of course, then there's the web cam to take into consideration, but to be honest, I haven't set one up so I'll let that up to someone who has.
And that's my 2 cents
I enjoy it. If people can't handle it, let them, umm... NOT click on the link?
Read the article again, you'll read that the machines are heading to Britain after a successful public trial in Canada. That means that have already been in use for awhile.
If you'll refer yourself back to the article, you'll read that the machines are heading to Britain *after* a public trial in Canada. It looks to me like Houston is testing it now (or was 3 months ago), so old or not, odds are Texas was not the first place to have it implemented.
No problem.
:)
Just think of all the crummy web pages they've just inherited, not to mention all the sites that just serve as *illegal* buffers for files such as ROMS, MP3's or whatever. I'm sure that more than a few people have those on a geocities site...
If yahoo wants the responsibility (and perhaps lawsuits, since after all, it's THEIR intellectual property) that will come of it, let them do it. It'll be a problem they create for themselves!
Yahoo will become the largest set of links to warez ftps in the world!
yahoo, yipee, and hoorah
Yet another indication of people's commitment to read stuff that they can only criticize since they are so *obviously* the experts. Yes, that comment was immensely useful to all of us, I'm still awed by your insight. Thank You.
Okay genius. Let me guess. You have a degree in Psychology, Computer Science, and Quantum physics? I'd bet those "few lines" of Katz article are the only lines you *did* read, thus making you a hippocrite by not having done your research!
Just by the tone your post it's quite obvious that the only reason you didn't like this article was either because it's not written in C, or because it's evidently written by someone with a little more maturity than you.
I'm getting sick of the "you're responsible for what I read because I don't have the capacity to stop myself" posts. SOMEONE please moderate them out!