We use older systems dated 1995/1996 (running Linux and FreeBSD), which weren't checked/fixed against possible y2k problems. They run webservers, databases, home-made programs (C, shell-scripts, PHP/FI) and everything still works fine.
So was all this Y2K-panic-making really necessary? Everything works - no extra checks were necessary.
We didn't switch off our servers. It was a good decision, as we sold quite some goods last night.
You know, timezones are not the same all over the world, so while it may be midnight here in Europe, in New York it is still around 18:00 in the afternoon. Why would americans stop buying at midday 31st? If we wanted to switch off our servers for midnight, we would have lost a whole day of sales. But we didn't, and we were right. Who where those panic-makers? Where are they now? Let's lough!
Linux...it doesn't show in any of the server statistics
Pure bullshit! According to the counter at leb.net (please refer to a posting on slashdot around april 1999) Linux accounts for 31% of all servers "running the Internet" (WWW, FTP and News). Linux is the number one operating system right now. Linux plus FreeBSD account for more than half of all servers... what should I tell more?
I remember when in 1994 70% of all Webservers were run on Sun-boxes, the rest was HP-UX, SGI, AIX and e few others. MS-Windows wasn't even on the horizon back then.
Please ask again: who wrote the Internet history? Unix = Internet: Sun some years ago, Linux today.
Amazon.com Books, the world's largest on-line bookstore, relies on DIGITAL UNIX AlphaServer 2000 systems to keep its Internet business open around the clock. DIGITAL VLM64 technology keeps data highly available to customers. "The extensive Web server capabilities of the DIGITAL AlphaServer series, coupled with its smooth upgrade path, provided the perfect solution for our rapid growth curve."
BTW: www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.de also have switched to Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 on DIGITAL UNIX:-) ms
I'm webmaster since the early days when XMosaic 0.9 was the only graphical browser and observed the same alarming evolution...
Getting involved with the Mozilla Project is good, but unfortunately not all of us are programmers.
Complaining to those WebMasters who are responsible for non-portable webpages is much easier: write them an e-mail asking them politely to make it's webpages "usable" to all. Tell them that otherwise we can't read them and we wont link to them. If we don't link to them, they'll loose also readers which may use MSIE on Windows... Shop will not sell, information will not be read an banners wont be seen and clicked. I call this the leverage effect.
Be assured: after they get hundrets of complaints, they'll switch!
Better still: write to the customers who own the webpage (often it's not the webmaster who wanted this Java-thingie, but it was the customer who saw somewhere this neat moving pop-up and instructed the webmaster to insert something similar in his homepage too.
To my experience, a website which is readable by all browsers and doesn't contain ActiveX, Java, Shockwave or the like has a 200% bigger audience due to various leverage-effects.
You know David Siegel? He was(!) responsible for dazzling websites, and now has turned back to the "minimalismus". Others will soon follow.
E-Commerce and it's need to reach all people we do our interests here and drive away from proprietary solutions towards robust and standardized solutions.
No, we haven't lost yet, but we will have to work hard.
I'm are currently administering an e-commerce site and want to know how much licenses I should buy:
we have about 4000 visitors a day.
a day has 1440 minutes
each visitor looks at our server for about 10 minutes
this gives about 28 concurrent users (=4000*10/1440)
at peak times the number of hits at our server is two times the average
so there may occur 56 concurrent visitors
we have to buy 56 licenses!
Notice: we don't sell much, so we surely WILL NOT pay this many licenses. How would Microsoft control this anyway?!? Will Microsoft require to have access to our logfiles?
I'm a happy Microsoft Mouse user since 1988, when the "soap bar" came out.
Microsoft always made good mice and hardware in general (friends tell me, their joystick is also wonderful). Microsoft never did made good hardware. I think Bill Gates should switch from selling SW to selling HW - at least they would sell good products.
As an Italian ISP we used Altavista as the default search engine in our homepage, and we advised our clients to use Altavista too, as it has the biggest index and is blazingly fast...
...since I discovered Google half a year ago: Google finds the right terms more often than all other search engines I know of combined (!). Google really gets the right results first. Google simply is the best. So I switched to Google on my ISP's homepage.
It didn't last long, and my chief (he's a convinced M$ supporter) discovered the change and asked me why I did it, and what this Gogolele is about. After I showed him the difference searching for some common terms, but also some locally related stuff, on Altavista as well as Google, he was convinced and stopped complaining: "Bravo, you did the right thing - we're always trying to give our clients the best service - and Google fits our needs"
Some of our clients still send me e-mails asking, why I choose this silly beta search engine, which doesn't even find his look-how-cool-I-am personal homepage. But when I ask them to try to search for some terms on both search engines, I silence them easily.
:-) ms
PS: I'm still missing the "Try your query on other engines", when Google doesn't find, what I search for. I don't need to try other search engines, if Google finds the right URL. So this really should be the other way round (I already asked for this in another post on slashdot some months ago).
In Italy we have such laws since 1994 if I remeber well. According to the law it is forbidden to write or distribute any program, which changes or deletes data on your system or does some action without you knowing it. It is even forbidden to write or distribute programs with bugs. This leads to consider nearly every program as outlawed, since many commercial software (and not) tend to write configuration files, logfiles, change some settings, registry, overwrite data, crash, hang, and other things you didn't expect it to do.
But in Italy we don't bother much about such laws, as we have learned to not interpret the laws so strictly.
There's a big difference between an airplane having an engine failure...
... and an airplane driven by some foolish pilots seeking the challenge of underflying the lifts cable. Yes: they didn't do it for the first time, and yes, they knew very well the cable was there. US Prowlers were often seen flying low and trying to underpass cable cars!
The pilots unfortunately flew too high and touched the cable with the wing. They flew so fast, they didn't realize they touched. While 20 people where crushing to dead, the pilots loughed in their video. The video they wanted to show later to their friends to demonstrte how much courage they had, and how fun it was...
...when they landed and heared 20 people were killed, they destroyed the tape.
I tried to telnet to www.microsoft2000test.com on port 80, and this is what I got:
/home/markus> telnet www.windows2000test.com 80 Trying 207.46.171.196... Connected to www.windows2000test.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.1
Terminated /home/markus> telnet www.windows2000test.com 80 Trying 207.46.171.196... Connected to www.windows2000test.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD / HTTP/1.0
Terminated /home/markus> telnet www.windows2000test.com 80 Trying 207.46.171.196... Connected to www.windows2000test.com. Escape character is '^]'. HEAD/
Terminated
I had to terminate all connections by killing the telnet session to Microsoft's server. Shouldn't the server have returned me some info? Was HEAD disabled? I think this is a crippled down implementation of IIS.
HTML is a Markup Language, not a Formatting Language. HTML was never meant, nor is it designed to do formatting.
Pages should be designed flexible and adapt to whatever screen/resolution (this includes also number of colors/color depth, not only size in pixels) and software/fonts the user has (this includes browser model/version, type and number of fonts - there are lynx users on a text-only monitor as well!)...
All html-designers requiring 800*600, at least 256 colors, MSIE 4.0 or higher,... did miss the point. They aren't real html-designers. They are simply designers and haven't really understood what html is for, and how it should be used.
Only those who use HTML for and how it isn't meant for, have trouble. I don't. I feel well with HTML.
MPEG is for multimedia, and supports audio as well as video, but may also be used for only one or the other: there are MPEGs without audio, and (you guess it) MPEGs without video. From version to version the encoding got better. MPEG version 3 (shortly MP3) has an excellent audio compression, so it is used mainly for compression of audio files.
Well, MP4, MP5 and MPn are basically the evolution of MP3. Obviously there will be further research, development and better quality in versions to come.. But it will always be an open standard, and we will continue to use it.
Once upon a time... ...we copied from vinyl to tape. Sacrifying quality, yes. Sometimes we even copied from tape to tape, sacrifuying even more quality. But we owned more hits on tape than on vinyl. Then came the CDs. And we copied them to tape. The quality was better than from vinyl or tape as source. We copied a lot. Then there came MP3 and we copied from CDs to harddisk. Quality was excellent. Then we copied from harddisk to harddisk. It was cheap and fast. It's quite a few months now, I don't buy CDs!
make digital distribution disapppear? How?
As long as I can hear music, I may also be able to digitise it, and hence save it in MP3 Format on my harddisk. There's no technical possibility to avoid that someone will distribute this new song in MP3 format.
No, guys, there's no way back. All other formats will die, as no one will want to use them (besides the distributors, but we are the ones, who actually listen to the music). Long live MP3.
Slashdot Mirror
So was all this Y2K-panic-making really necessary? Everything works - no extra checks were necessary.
ms
You know, timezones are not the same all over the world, so while it may be midnight here in Europe, in New York it is still around 18:00 in the afternoon. Why would americans stop buying at midday 31st?
If we wanted to switch off our servers for midnight, we would have lost a whole day of sales. But we didn't, and we were right.
Who where those panic-makers? Where are they now? Let's lough!
ms
Pure bullshit!
According to the counter at leb.net (please refer to a posting on slashdot around april 1999) Linux accounts for 31% of all servers "running the Internet" (WWW, FTP and News). Linux is the number one operating system right now. Linux plus FreeBSD account for more than half of all servers... what should I tell more?
I remember when in 1994 70% of all Webservers were run on Sun-boxes, the rest was HP-UX, SGI, AIX and e few others. MS-Windows wasn't even on the horizon back then.
Please ask again: who wrote the Internet history?
Unix = Internet: Sun some years ago, Linux today.
ms
ETOY.COM was registered in 1995:
while ETOYS:COM was registered more than 2 years later:
ms
http://www.btb-online.de/software/dkp 40wi.htm
Diskeeper is already sold in Germany, so why would it be a problem for Microsoft to sell it as well?
ms
The lesson is: don't trust in ads - check yourself or ask a real expert!
ms
- BASE, META and TITLE tags outside of the HEAD section
- HEAD tag closed twice
- FORM not closed in TR (tags may be nested but not crossed)
- NOBR not closed in STRONG (same as above)
- COLOR attribute for IMG tag does not exist
- BORDERD attribute for IMG tag also does not exist
- ...
Do they code HTML using vi? If so, don't they check what they've typed? Is Redhat's webmaster unaware of HTML-validators?Learn RedHat, learn!
ms
BTW: www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.de also have switched to Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 on DIGITAL UNIX
ms
I'm webmaster since the early days when XMosaic 0.9 was the only graphical browser and observed the same alarming evolution...
Getting involved with the Mozilla Project is good, but unfortunately not all of us are programmers.
Complaining to those WebMasters who are responsible for non-portable webpages is much easier: write them an e-mail asking them politely to make it's webpages "usable" to all. Tell them that otherwise we can't read them and we wont link to them. If we don't link to them, they'll loose also readers which may use MSIE on Windows... Shop will not sell, information will not be read an banners wont be seen and clicked. I call this the leverage effect.
Be assured: after they get hundrets of complaints, they'll switch!
Better still: write to the customers who own the webpage (often it's not the webmaster who wanted this Java-thingie, but it was the customer who saw somewhere this neat moving pop-up and instructed the webmaster to insert something similar in his homepage too.
To my experience, a website which is readable by all browsers and doesn't contain ActiveX, Java, Shockwave or the like has a 200% bigger audience due to various leverage-effects.
You know David Siegel? He was(!) responsible for dazzling websites, and now has turned back to the "minimalismus". Others will soon follow.
E-Commerce and it's need to reach all people we do our interests here and drive away from proprietary solutions towards robust and standardized solutions.
No, we haven't lost yet, but we will have to work hard.
ms
- we have about 4000 visitors a day.
- a day has 1440 minutes
- each visitor looks at our server for about 10 minutes
- this gives about 28 concurrent users (=4000*10/1440)
- at peak times the number of hits at our server is two times the average
- so there may occur 56 concurrent visitors
- we have to buy 56 licenses!
Notice: we don't sell much, so we surely WILL NOT pay this many licenses. How would Microsoft control this anyway?!? Will Microsoft require to have access to our logfiles?ms
Should obviously be:
Microsoft never did made good software...
Yes, I proofred it, but didn't notice the mismatch - sorry!
ms
Microsoft always made good mice and hardware in general (friends tell me, their joystick is also wonderful). Microsoft never did made good hardware. I think Bill Gates should switch from selling SW to selling HW - at least they would sell good products.
ms
ms
Google finds the right terms more often than all other search engines I know of combined (!). Google really gets the right results first. Google simply is the best. So I switched to Google on my ISP's homepage.
It didn't last long, and my chief (he's a convinced M$ supporter) discovered the change and asked me why I did it, and what this Gogolele is about. After I showed him the difference searching for some common terms, but also some locally related stuff, on Altavista as well as Google, he was convinced and stopped complaining: "Bravo, you did the right thing - we're always trying to give our clients the best service - and Google fits our needs"
Some of our clients still send me e-mails asking, why I choose this silly beta search engine, which doesn't even find his look-how-cool-I-am personal homepage. But when I ask them to try to search for some terms on both search engines, I silence them easily.
ms
PS: I'm still missing the "Try your query on other engines", when Google doesn't find, what I search for. I don't need to try other search engines, if Google finds the right URL. So this really should be the other way round (I already asked for this in another post on slashdot some months ago).
- Uranus would become lighter an be attracted by the sun resulting in a tighter orbit, and finally eventually crash on the sun.
- Our planet on the other hand would become more and more heavy and flying out of orbit into deep space
Do we want that?I'm sure we won't
(There's a fundamental error in my above assumptions - who finds it?)
ms
- Uranus would become lighter an be attracted by the sun resulting in a tighter orbit, and finally eventually crash on the sun.
- Our planet on the other hand would become more and more heavy and flying out of orbit into deep space
Do we want that?I'm sure we won't
(There's a fundamental error in my abopve assumptions - who finds it?)
ms
IBM seems to have won the 1 TB TPC-D benchmark using DB2 on NT with a cluster of 32 Netfinity servers with 128 PII Xeon Processors...
:-)
IBM claims to to have the fastest and most used database. Well, look for yourself.
ms
But in Italy we don't bother much about such laws, as we have learned to not interpret the laws so strictly.
Our motto is: take it easy!
Markus Senoner
--
There's a big difference between an airplane having an engine failure ...
... and an airplane driven by some foolish pilots seeking the challenge of underflying the lifts cable. Yes: they didn't do it for the first time, and yes, they knew very well the cable was there. US Prowlers were often seen flying low and trying to underpass cable cars!
...when they landed and heared 20 people were killed, they destroyed the tape.
:-(
The pilots unfortunately flew too high and touched the cable with the wing. They flew so fast, they didn't realize they touched. While 20 people where crushing to dead, the pilots loughed in their video. The video they wanted to show later to their friends to demonstrte how much courage they had, and how fun it was...
See the difference?
Markus Senoner
--
ms
All html-designers requiring 800*600, at least 256 colors, MSIE 4.0 or higher, ... did miss the point. They aren't real html-designers. They are simply designers and haven't really understood what html is for, and how it should be used.
Only those who use HTML for and how it isn't meant for, have trouble. I don't. I feel well with HTML.
There are other formats for real page formatting.
ms
MPEG is for multimedia, and supports audio as well as video, but may also be used for only one or the other: there are MPEGs without audio, and (you guess it) MPEGs without video. From version to version the encoding got better. MPEG version 3 (shortly MP3) has an excellent audio compression, so it is used mainly for compression of audio files.
Markus
But it will always be an open standard, and we will continue to use it.
Markus
Also some years ago someone said, Unix will die. No, Usenet too, will not die soon. At least not for it being used as a conduit for illegal content.
Markus
make digital distribution disapppear?
How?
As long as I can hear music, I may also be able to digitise it, and hence save it in MP3 Format on my harddisk. There's no technical possibility to avoid that someone will distribute this new song in MP3 format.
No, guys, there's no way back.
All other formats will die, as no one will want to use them (besides the distributors, but we are the ones, who actually listen to the music). Long live MP3.
Markus