Sure: a govm't agency or sufficiently large medical facility could sequence your DNA and thus steal your private key, but then they would have to get a look-alike for you, implant a false-broadcast chip in them and send them out to do their bidding.
That would be a monumental, though not impossible feat.
I wouldn't doubt that they could build a chip which grabbed a sample strand of dna and used it as the private key. I don't even think it would actually have to sequence all the chromosomes, just one should be long enough.
There will never be a truely secure method until someone creates one.
I hold that there will always be a way around, but then the cost of getting around it may get too high.
Many of us Christians believe that one day the government will track every single in-duh-vidual with an implanted chip, or some other type of imprinting device (Mark of the beast and all that).
Hard to copy music when the government is watching everything you do.
Even if you say it won't happen, you'll be wrong one day just like your great-great-great-grandpappy was wrong when he said they wouldn't be tracking you via your SSN.
In the white-transparancy LCD. I would just love to have a very-large one of these.
Can you immagine having a huge seemingly tranparent pane of glass with the ability to show any range of LCD images except white? It's like the ultimate HUD. I could install one in my car. The possibilities are endless.
Most people don't upgrade because they don't have the time. That's the whole point of the firewall: have one secure box between the big bad internet and all your insecure boxes. Sysadmins have the time to keep the one box (firewall) up to date, but not the 3,000 behind it.
"First, if you shout fire in a crowded theatre and people get crushed in the panic, then you're responsible, not the movie theatre for not being able to handle the rush."
True, but the movie theater isn't responsible for keeping you from yelling fire either. That's my point. Immagine a bar has a sign in the window that says "Free beer on Friday". The bar expects maybee 100 people to see the sign in their window because they aren't on a crowded street. Immagine that a frequent patron at the bar works in a theatre. He puts the sign up on the big screen "Free beer at Moes on Friday". Has he done anything wrong? No. Should he have asked Moe? That would have been nice, but that isn't an obligation and can't be enforced on the theater owner. Moe should have considered the possibility.
"Secondly, most sites (except the largest commercial ones) certainly can't handle 1/2 million slashdotties all hitting them at once, so to put the blame on the site just doesn't cut it. If slashdot wants to be a good netizen then they should warn web masters before linking them - especially if they're going to be hit with a gazillion attempts to download a huge tarball."
And they never will be able to with or without warning. I like the suggestion that/. mirror sites which can't handle a good/.ing. You still are assuming that/. shouldn't have reported the news, and by this you are implying that they shouldn't report news based on the effects caused by the news. That's a lot to put on the editors shoulders. Does this mean that they will be liable for the effects of the news next?
Re:Our double standards...
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 2
Goodness. Nobody likes a person to rock the boat eh?
Look at it like this: who is responsible for violations of copyright protection? The people who violate the copyright is what I believe. You copy a book, movie, software and give it away for free then you are the violater, not the copying machine manufacturor, the CD Burner company or your hardware vendor, and certainly not the people who write the software that uses the internet to copy any files reguardless of their content.
I say the same thing is true of a news service: If you start along the line that the news service is responsible for what people do with the information then you are saying that CNN should be unable to report that the terriorsts which flew into the world trade center were arabs just because it might cause racism.
Where do we start drawing the lines? Just because you might draw them at a safe place (don't post it until the official release), doesn't mean that the person behind you won't come along and redraw the lines at something more rediculous (don't post it until a full week after the official announcement and a nice hand-signed letter from the development team telling you you can). It's not where you draw them that scares me so much, is that they are being drawn at all.
Perhaps/. should have used better judgement, perhaps they just wanted to get the story out before ArsDigita, either way they broke no laws, written, spoken, or otherwise.
This is political in nature more than we see on the surface...
A terrorist or disgruntal postal worker could capture a local station with a lot more ease than a national broadcast station. There are thousands of these facilities, some of them very very small. A person would get the attention of the nation and nobody could stop them...
I don't really see a problem with this since conversely it keeps the government from fsking one small town and nobody else hears a peep.
I would love to know what Californians really think instead of what the government, their polititians, and their newspapers tell me they think.
Give us more broadband for internet broadcasts and this will be a moot point however.
RMS and others have not yet brought up the underlying reason that Open Source is so important in the OS and in common large "container" type applications.
If you view a computers running environment as a software universe, with rules which govern its operation just like the laws of physics govern our physical universe, then it becomes a lot more obvious why closed source is really, really bad.
Unlike the physical universe, the rules in a computer environment can change. If you can't trust the person who is controlling the properties of the universe (the OS provider), and you can't change the environment yourself, then you are at the mercy of that person, group, or company. Imagine if there were no God, and Bill was controlling the universe. He could and would simply make everyone who didn't agree with him have to breath water instead of air and we would all quickly asphyxiate. The same thing is true of the OS. It is simply too much power to place in the hands of any one company, person, or organization. Thus the solution is to have it be completely open with everyone working together to ensure that no one person abuses the rest of us.
This philosophy should be extended to all container-model software applications. Apache is better than IIS because it is a container for web services (SOAP, CGI, mod_*, HTTP, etc...) and those services are not directly provided by the container. Just like in the case of IIS, any product that becomes popular is quickly either purchased and absorbed (often by less-than-honest means) by the owner of the container, or choked off and killed because it is a threat.
This is my problem with Weblogic, IIS, Microsoft's OS and any other system where I am writing code dependant on someone else's proprietary idea of how I should get things done. I simply don't trust anyone unless they trust me first.
This philosophy can even be extended to entertainment with very little modification. Our real problem with the RIAA and MPAA is that we can't trust anyone with the power to dictate what we are allowed to see and hear because they abuse it. They abused it when they started brainwashing us to listen to their idea of what was good music and by restricting and controlling the artists that produced that music. They are like the OS of the music industry.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any container model is absolute power over the contained objects. OS, J2EE, Web Services, Entertainment, News and the list goes on.
Free the source in all cases, not just the OS.
Of course, when you start applying this to government you get the whole Democratic system and we all know how terrible that turned out...:)
Imagine if anyone who wanted to could just plug into the kernel CVS tree and change the current distribution source to fit their proprietary purposes. That's why there is a governing body of people with the ability to decide what does and does not belong in the kernel. Thus: a republic.
So we have come full circle peeps: Let's create a on-line open-source republic with independent governing bodies for every single container system out there, from open source to government.
Hell, I just solved the worlds problems... time for a coffee break.
"voice recognition software is where i see major strides coming from"
Not likely for me either. Try speaking out the following:
public class Something extends SomethingElse implements Some, More, Somethings, { public static final String DOODLE = "DOODLE THIS"; private int _pick_me; private int _no_pick_me;
public void speakThis(String input) {
Voiceout vo = new com.dragon.output.VoiceOutputDevice().getInstance( );
vo.speak(input); }
And that's a simple example. Now try to talk out the kernel source and you really start having some fun with trying to get voice to keep up with the keyboard.
Our double standards...
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Slashdot does not/. a site, the users do. Put the blame where blame belongs./. Posted a story which was NEWS, if the users of/. beat the tarshit out of the KDE ftp server before the mirror is up then the fault belongs to the users and the sys admins that are incapable of handling the load.
This is like saying that Napster shouldn't have let the cat out of the bag on mp3 sharing until the music industry had time to react. Tit-for-tat, be consistent.
sucks... It sucked when I was a little twerpy geek in HS and it sucks now.
I long for a mac os X that works, just like everyone else. I am forced to investigate crap like this. It takes up useful time.
You rarely see a real geek running a screen saver because it wastes cycles. Slashdot is like a brain-saver on 100% processor usage on April 1st. Just another useless line dump from ps that needs to be purged.
There is some information on what channel bonding is here. I have not yet set up my system to handle this, but I intend to.
Everyone knows about caching on a web server, so I won't bore you with that. Since I am using a java application server (Weblogic) to serve my site, I can configure the container to load and serve a connection pool to my applications. This means that the connections are never closed, and so I only have to spend the overhead of opening the connection one time. I am serving from the same machine(s) so my reuse of connections is very high.
It's really quite fast. I'll probably write a howto on this for others to follow as well.
To let you guys get a better idea of what the nightmare we are dealing with is:
We have (currently) 8 companies being hosted with independant custom portals linked to our conent/functionality with about 500 more wanting on-board but being told to wait until we get done with our beta customers. Every company has their own marketing department and every one of those wants to have their fingers all over their portal.
So, if you have ever worked with a marketing department, especially one that doen't really know you are in fact human, you can appreciate the situation we are in. We want everything to be as brain-dead simple as possible with the site, and be free from doing anything other than writing really cool server-side tools.
I was tasked with evaluating and recommending a CMS on top of Weblogic Commerce Server/Personalization server/Campain server or whatever it's being called at the moment.
After going through all the presentations, whacking at installs and demos, pouring over frameworks and reading through source code I have finally come down to the following recommendations, opinions, and other such stuff.
Let's start with the definition. Is a CMS just supposed to store text, images and possibly other binary files, or does it store HTML and a framework as well? Every single one I have seen (ArsDigita, Zope/CMF Dogbowl, Fatwire, Stellant, Interwoven, etc...) have different ideas of what that means.
I believe that a CMS and a CMF should be separate yet work together nicely. This concept only shows nicely on the Zope project, and not at all in the others I mentioned. Write your own framework or use the CMF Dogbowl, it's all yours to choose. All the others I mentioned force you to use their framework if you want to use their CMS. A CMF is an architectural framework implemented in a language on top of a framework. A CMS is an application written in any language you choose for storing content.
Fatwire and Stellant are ok, but really bloated and untested. They do not perform well and are not even really out of beta yet. Interwoven does not perform much better and is priced somewhere past the moon. ArsDigita is ok from what I have seen, but nothing to write home about and lacks some of the functionality of Zope's CMF. That said I think it is a fine solution if you want to: go with it. Again you are forced to use their CMF if you use their CMS. Zope is my favorite because it's a CMS with other nifty tools like Python and DTML to boot. I can extend it and hack the source, both very nice features. They don't make me use their framework, but if I want to use it then I have a very nice one integrated and ready to bring online. The biggest benefits are discussed below, which was why I was so picky about our CMS.
I also see things that are a mutation of the concept of a CMF and a framework, like Portal Server. This horrific idea by BEA of how to mangle productivity and make the overworked lives of web developers much worse is only more problems on top existing ones without offering anything to ease the pain. BEA's marketing department is using mind-control devices, however, and used them on my bosses convincing them to force me to use the beast.
After learning (through great frustration) how to use Portal Server I have managed to implement a nice solution that minimizes the pain of administrating Portal Servers "portals". (I put that word in quotes because their "portals" are not Portals, but something else entirely which I have failed to properly quantify.)
My solution was to create a pipeline to Zope through a wrapper library and an HTTP connection, a tag library, and bang-whip-zing I have a working CMS and I can pretend to use the Portal Server "framework" (NOT), while really using Zope's stuff. It looks like this in JSP:
Now I pass of everything except actual java programming (like ERP access to corporate systems and in-house tools), to marketing to plug into Zope. I don't get called for "change this style sheet" questions anymore and yet I still have full control over everything.
IMO, if you are going to use a CMS and you don't want to make your life hell use Zope. Otherwise, my second choice is to go with ArsDigita. The rest are just too knew to the game and way too bloated and slow.
BTW: It took me only a couple of days to wrap zope in a library for use in JSPs and It can be done from any type of framework. Sure, it's odd to read content from an HTTP stream until you remember that when you channel bond your NICs, make your connections cached in a resource pool, and use Zope's caching the HTTP stream is faster than reading from disk:).
Has been doing "genetic" programming since we were created (IMO, if you think we evolved then just ignore that and continue).
It is observable in babies and that is where scientists got the ideas to write software that did the same thing. Of course this isn't really genetic programming, which suggests that genes evolve in a coherant state. Instead it is a selective process of trial and error. In other words, it's a statistical model.
When we learn to speak, in any language, we start by pattern recognition. "Goo-goo" and "ga-ga" are traditionally the first phonetic patters we recognise. In reallity it's phonetic sounds like "da" and "ma" and "th" which babies start to recognise and duplicate first (at least in English). This is simply because these phonetic sounds are the most frequent.
Gravity is the same way. It is 100% predictable to any child growing up. It's far more amazing that we can build a model of physics from the sound of the crack of a bat, combine it with the gravity equation and the physics of drag in air and then catch the ball than it is that we can predict gravity with our brains. That's one of the simplest equations of all to memorize.
It's also probably the reason it is so hard to unlearn. We grow up thinking it doesn't variate. Then when our eyes give our brains feedback that the equation was wrong when we are on the space shuttle or ISS then our brain doesn't believe it can be wrong at first.
The software works on statistics, when the equation is wrong 100% of the time then our brain re-writes it's nerual "code" to compensate.
Vision is the same way. When you change what you see by inverting it, your brain will eventually adapt and switch it back. It takes about two weeks.
This isn't amazing, it's the way the brain, any brain, works.
Now making a machine that works the same way would be newsworthy.
"'As long as we continue doing what we are doing today, we won't be subject to Federal banking laws,' said PayPal Chief Executive Peter Thiel."
These guys really need to back down and start telling people how they will fix the numerouscomplaints about their service instead of acting so arrogant, IMHO.
The reason I said probably in the first post about the defrag operation is because many (not all, and I have NO IDEA about the ext2/3 code) don't actually read the whole block from the disk if only the first 100 bytes are needed. Still others only write out the actual copied data (100 bytes) to the new block. Thus if you have following possibilities...
[A][B][Afrag-secretstuff][Bfrag-secretstuff] An d you defragment you could have [A][Afrag-gargage][Bbfrag-garbage] either because the defragmenter read only [Afrag] or [Bfrag] or wrote only [Afrag] or [Bfrag] to the disk.
Now obviously, a defragger which copies only blocks (like the old Win stuff) would not do this.
Wife: "Did you remember to pick up the milk? Didn't I tell you to pick up the milk? I swear you are so arrogant, you never listen to a thing I..."
Me: [Flips on soundbug running from laptop which is filtering out any sentence already stored in it's "redundant insults" database, so he hears nothing but the first question:] "No, I forgot."
Wife: "... Well you are going to go and pick it up right now."
Me: [hears "...go and pick it up..."] "Ok, honey".
HE'S GOT THIRTEEN CHANNELS OF WRESTLING COMIN' IN STRONG FROM A DSL SEND A TWO MILLION FUNCTION LINUX CONSOLE FLAT SCREEN TV WITH TWO TIVOS FOOTBALL BASEBALL NASCAR TOO WITH PICTURE IN A PICTURE IT'S ALL IN VIEW AND IF IT COMES ON JUST A LITTLE TOO LATE WITH HIS PVR'S HE'LL GET IT ON TAPE (or disk)
HE'S A HIGH-TECH REDNECK MAYBERRY MEETS STARTREK HE'S A BUMPKIN' BUT HE'S PLUGGED IN HE'S A HIGH-TECH REDNECK
HE'S GOT AN MP3 PLAYER IN THE BACK OF HIS TRUCK A THOUSAND WATTS OF POWER AND HE KEEPS IT CRANKED UP HE AIN'T INTO HIP HOP HE AIN'T INTO RAP HE LIKES TO RATTLE THEM SPEAKERS WITH RONNIE MILSAP
WITH A DVD, CD, AND MEMORY STICK HE'S A WAR DRIVING, PORT SCANNIN' REDNECK HICK AND IF HE NEEDS TO TALK TO HIS HONEY AT HOME HE JUST DIALS UP HER NUMBER ON HS PDA/PHONE
Slashdot Mirror
Sure: a govm't agency or sufficiently large medical facility could sequence your DNA and thus steal your private key, but then they would have to get a look-alike for you, implant a false-broadcast chip in them and send them out to do their bidding.
That would be a monumental, though not impossible feat.
I wouldn't doubt that they could build a chip which grabbed a sample strand of dna and used it as the private key. I don't even think it would actually have to sequence all the chromosomes, just one should be long enough.
said this...
There will never be a truely secure method until someone creates one.
I hold that there will always be a way around, but then the cost of getting around it may get too high.
Many of us Christians believe that one day the government will track every single in-duh-vidual with an implanted chip, or some other type of imprinting device (Mark of the beast and all that).
Hard to copy music when the government is watching everything you do.
Even if you say it won't happen, you'll be wrong one day just like your great-great-great-grandpappy was wrong when he said they wouldn't be tracking you via your SSN.
"The bubble boys were cured with their own stem cells."
:)
It looks like you are only half-right. They added complete genes for immune system production to the stem cells. Where did they get those genes?
I really want to know where they got the retro virus too.
In the white-transparancy LCD. I would just love to have a very-large one of these.
Can you immagine having a huge seemingly tranparent pane of glass with the ability to show any range of LCD images except white? It's like the ultimate HUD. I could install one in my car. The possibilities are endless.
Most people don't upgrade because they don't have the time. That's the whole point of the firewall: have one secure box between the big bad internet and all your insecure boxes. Sysadmins have the time to keep the one box (firewall) up to date, but not the 3,000 behind it.
"First, if you shout fire in a crowded theatre and people get crushed in the panic, then you're responsible, not the movie theatre for not being able to handle the rush."
/. mirror sites which can't handle a good /.ing. You still are assuming that /. shouldn't have reported the news, and by this you are implying that they shouldn't report news based on the effects caused by the news. That's a lot to put on the editors shoulders. Does this mean that they will be liable for the effects of the news next?
True, but the movie theater isn't responsible for keeping you from yelling fire either. That's my point. Immagine a bar has a sign in the window that says "Free beer on Friday". The bar expects maybee 100 people to see the sign in their window because they aren't on a crowded street. Immagine that a frequent patron at the bar works in a theatre. He puts the sign up on the big screen "Free beer at Moes on Friday". Has he done anything wrong? No. Should he have asked Moe? That would have been nice, but that isn't an obligation and can't be enforced on the theater owner. Moe should have considered the possibility.
"Secondly, most sites (except the largest commercial ones) certainly can't handle 1/2 million slashdotties all hitting them at once, so to put the blame on the site just doesn't cut it. If slashdot wants to be a good netizen then they should warn web masters before linking them - especially if they're going to be hit with a gazillion attempts to download a huge tarball."
And they never will be able to with or without warning. I like the suggestion that
Goodness. Nobody likes a person to rock the boat eh?
/. should have used better judgement, perhaps they just wanted to get the story out before ArsDigita, either way they broke no laws, written, spoken, or otherwise.
:-)
Look at it like this: who is responsible for violations of copyright protection? The people who violate the copyright is what I believe. You copy a book, movie, software and give it away for free then you are the violater, not the copying machine manufacturor, the CD Burner company or your hardware vendor, and certainly not the people who write the software that uses the internet to copy any files reguardless of their content.
I say the same thing is true of a news service: If you start along the line that the news service is responsible for what people do with the information then you are saying that CNN should be unable to report that the terriorsts which flew into the world trade center were arabs just because it might cause racism.
Where do we start drawing the lines? Just because you might draw them at a safe place (don't post it until the official release), doesn't mean that the person behind you won't come along and redraw the lines at something more rediculous (don't post it until a full week after the official announcement and a nice hand-signed letter from the development team telling you you can). It's not where you draw them that scares me so much, is that they are being drawn at all.
Perhaps
My opinion is that we are all too opinionated.
This is political in nature more than we see on the surface...
A terrorist or disgruntal postal worker could capture a local station with a lot more ease than a national broadcast station. There are thousands of these facilities, some of them very very small. A person would get the attention of the nation and nobody could stop them...
I don't really see a problem with this since conversely it keeps the government from fsking one small town and nobody else hears a peep.
I would love to know what Californians really think instead of what the government, their polititians, and their newspapers tell me they think.
Give us more broadband for internet broadcasts and this will be a moot point however.
RMS and others have not yet brought up the underlying reason that Open Source is so important in the OS and in common large "container" type applications.
:)
If you view a computers running environment as a software universe, with rules which govern its operation just like the laws of physics govern our physical universe, then it becomes a lot more obvious why closed source is really, really bad.
Unlike the physical universe, the rules in a computer environment can change. If you can't trust the person who is controlling the properties of the universe (the OS provider), and you can't change the environment yourself, then you are at the mercy of that person, group, or company. Imagine if there were no God, and Bill was controlling the universe. He could and would simply make everyone who didn't agree with him have to breath water instead of air and we would all quickly asphyxiate. The same thing is true of the OS. It is simply too much power to place in the hands of any one company, person, or organization. Thus the solution is to have it be completely open with everyone working together to ensure that no one person abuses the rest of us.
This philosophy should be extended to all container-model software applications. Apache is better than IIS because it is a container for web services (SOAP, CGI, mod_*, HTTP, etc...) and those services are not directly provided by the container. Just like in the case of IIS, any product that becomes popular is quickly either purchased and absorbed (often by less-than-honest means) by the owner of the container, or choked off and killed because it is a threat.
This is my problem with Weblogic, IIS, Microsoft's OS and any other system where I am writing code dependant on someone else's proprietary idea of how I should get things done. I simply don't trust anyone unless they trust me first.
This philosophy can even be extended to entertainment with very little modification. Our real problem with the RIAA and MPAA is that we can't trust anyone with the power to dictate what we are allowed to see and hear because they abuse it. They abused it when they started brainwashing us to listen to their idea of what was good music and by restricting and controlling the artists that produced that music. They are like the OS of the music industry.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Any container model is absolute power over the contained objects. OS, J2EE, Web Services, Entertainment, News and the list goes on.
Free the source in all cases, not just the OS.
Of course, when you start applying this to government you get the whole Democratic system and we all know how terrible that turned out...
Imagine if anyone who wanted to could just plug into the kernel CVS tree and change the current distribution source to fit their proprietary purposes. That's why there is a governing body of people with the ability to decide what does and does not belong in the kernel. Thus: a republic.
So we have come full circle peeps: Let's create a on-line open-source republic with independent governing bodies for every single container system out there, from open source to government.
Hell, I just solved the worlds problems... time for a coffee break.
"voice recognition software is where i see major strides coming from"
( );
Not likely for me either. Try speaking out the following:
public class Something extends SomethingElse implements Some, More, Somethings, {
public static final String DOODLE = "DOODLE THIS";
private int _pick_me;
private int _no_pick_me;
public void speakThis(String input) {
Voiceout vo = new com.dragon.output.VoiceOutputDevice().getInstance
vo.speak(input);
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Something _some = new Something();
_some.speakThis("Blah");
catch(Exception err) {
System.out.println(err.getMessage());
err.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
And that's a simple example. Now try to talk out the kernel source and you really start having some fun with trying to get voice to keep up with the keyboard.
Slashdot does not /. a site, the users do. Put the blame where blame belongs. /. Posted a story which was NEWS, if the users of /. beat the tarshit out of the KDE ftp server before the mirror is up then the fault belongs to the users and the sys admins that are incapable of handling the load.
This is like saying that Napster shouldn't have let the cat out of the bag on mp3 sharing until the music industry had time to react. Tit-for-tat, be consistent.
sucks... It sucked when I was a little twerpy geek in HS and it sucks now.
/service/slashdot
I long for a mac os X that works, just like everyone else. I am forced to investigate crap like this. It takes up useful time.
You rarely see a real geek running a screen saver because it wastes cycles. Slashdot is like a brain-saver on 100% processor usage on April 1st. Just another useless line dump from ps that needs to be purged.
the traditional solution:
ps -A | grep slashdot
27213 pts/2 1:20:05 slashdot
kill -9 27213
the daemontools solution:
svc -d
whatever. Time to get something useful done...
There is some information on what channel bonding is here. I have not yet set up my system to handle this, but I intend to.
Everyone knows about caching on a web server, so I won't bore you with that. Since I am using a java application server (Weblogic) to serve my site, I can configure the container to load and serve a connection pool to my applications. This means that the connections are never closed, and so I only have to spend the overhead of opening the connection one time. I am serving from the same machine(s) so my reuse of connections is very high.
It's really quite fast. I'll probably write a howto on this for others to follow as well.
"Money makes the world go round"
:)
"...money is the root of all evils..." 1 Timothy 6:10 - KJV.
:1,$/s/money/root of all evils/g
"root of all evils makes the world go round"
FYI: before you flame me I KNOW that is out of context: it's "For the love of money..." but it's still funny.
To let you guys get a better idea of what the nightmare we are dealing with is:
We have (currently) 8 companies being hosted with independant custom portals linked to our conent/functionality with about 500 more wanting on-board but being told to wait until we get done with our beta customers. Every company has their own marketing department and every one of those wants to have their fingers all over their portal.
So, if you have ever worked with a marketing department, especially one that doen't really know you are in fact human, you can appreciate the situation we are in. We want everything to be as brain-dead simple as possible with the site, and be free from doing anything other than writing really cool server-side tools.
Or at least I have been for the past month+.
:).
I was tasked with evaluating and recommending a CMS on top of Weblogic Commerce Server/Personalization server/Campain server or whatever it's being called at the moment.
After going through all the presentations, whacking at installs and demos, pouring over frameworks and reading through source code I have finally come down to the following recommendations, opinions, and other such stuff.
Let's start with the definition. Is a CMS just supposed to store text, images and possibly other binary files, or does it store HTML and a framework as well? Every single one I have seen (ArsDigita, Zope/CMF Dogbowl, Fatwire, Stellant, Interwoven, etc...) have different ideas of what that means.
I believe that a CMS and a CMF should be separate yet work together nicely. This concept only shows nicely on the Zope project, and not at all in the others I mentioned. Write your own framework or use the CMF Dogbowl, it's all yours to choose. All the others I mentioned force you to use their framework if you want to use their CMS. A CMF is an architectural framework implemented in a language on top of a framework. A CMS is an application written in any language you choose for storing content.
Fatwire and Stellant are ok, but really bloated and untested. They do not perform well and are not even really out of beta yet. Interwoven does not perform much better and is priced somewhere past the moon. ArsDigita is ok from what I have seen, but nothing to write home about and lacks some of the functionality of Zope's CMF. That said I think it is a fine solution if you want to: go with it. Again you are forced to use their CMF if you use their CMS. Zope is my favorite because it's a CMS with other nifty tools like Python and DTML to boot. I can extend it and hack the source, both very nice features. They don't make me use their framework, but if I want to use it then I have a very nice one integrated and ready to bring online. The biggest benefits are discussed below, which was why I was so picky about our CMS.
I also see things that are a mutation of the concept of a CMF and a framework, like Portal Server. This horrific idea by BEA of how to mangle productivity and make the overworked lives of web developers much worse is only more problems on top existing ones without offering anything to ease the pain. BEA's marketing department is using mind-control devices, however, and used them on my bosses convincing them to force me to use the beast.
After learning (through great frustration) how to use Portal Server I have managed to implement a nice solution that minimizes the pain of administrating Portal Servers "portals". (I put that word in quotes because their "portals" are not Portals, but something else entirely which I have failed to properly quantify.)
My solution was to create a pipeline to Zope through a wrapper library and an HTTP connection, a tag library, and bang-whip-zing I have a working CMS and I can pretend to use the Portal Server "framework" (NOT), while really using Zope's stuff. It looks like this in JSP:
Now I pass of everything except actual java programming (like ERP access to corporate systems and in-house tools), to marketing to plug into Zope. I don't get called for "change this style sheet" questions anymore and yet I still have full control over everything.
IMO, if you are going to use a CMS and you don't want to make your life hell use Zope. Otherwise, my second choice is to go with ArsDigita. The rest are just too knew to the game and way too bloated and slow.
BTW: It took me only a couple of days to wrap zope in a library for use in JSPs and It can be done from any type of framework. Sure, it's odd to read content from an HTTP stream until you remember that when you channel bond your NICs, make your connections cached in a resource pool, and use Zope's caching the HTTP stream is faster than reading from disk
BTW mods: thanks for bouncing me redundant dispite my post being there before any of the others along this line.
:P
Has been doing "genetic" programming since we were created (IMO, if you think we evolved then just ignore that and continue).
It is observable in babies and that is where scientists got the ideas to write software that did the same thing. Of course this isn't really genetic programming, which suggests that genes evolve in a coherant state. Instead it is a selective process of trial and error. In other words, it's a statistical model.
When we learn to speak, in any language, we start by pattern recognition. "Goo-goo" and "ga-ga" are traditionally the first phonetic patters we recognise. In reallity it's phonetic sounds like "da" and "ma" and "th" which babies start to recognise and duplicate first (at least in English). This is simply because these phonetic sounds are the most frequent.
Gravity is the same way. It is 100% predictable to any child growing up. It's far more amazing that we can build a model of physics from the sound of the crack of a bat, combine it with the gravity equation and the physics of drag in air and then catch the ball than it is that we can predict gravity with our brains. That's one of the simplest equations of all to memorize.
It's also probably the reason it is so hard to unlearn. We grow up thinking it doesn't variate. Then when our eyes give our brains feedback that the equation was wrong when we are on the space shuttle or ISS then our brain doesn't believe it can be wrong at first.
The software works on statistics, when the equation is wrong 100% of the time then our brain re-writes it's nerual "code" to compensate.
Vision is the same way. When you change what you see by inverting it, your brain will eventually adapt and switch it back. It takes about two weeks.
This isn't amazing, it's the way the brain, any brain, works.
Now making a machine that works the same way would be newsworthy.
Apple has publically admitted he is not bound by the agreement.
He could GPL all the code on his disk and screw Apple if he wanted.
The picture of the guy typing while driving?
Virtual or not that scares the crap outa me.
"'As long as we continue doing what we are doing today, we won't be subject to Federal banking laws,' said PayPal Chief Executive Peter Thiel."
These guys really need to back down and start telling people how they will fix the numerous complaints about their service instead of acting so arrogant, IMHO.
The reason I said probably in the first post about the defrag operation is because many (not all, and I have NO IDEA about the ext2/3 code) don't actually read the whole block from the disk if only the first 100 bytes are needed. Still others only write out the actual copied data (100 bytes) to the new block. Thus if you have following possibilities...
n d you defragment you could have
[A][B][Afrag-secretstuff][Bfrag-secretstuff]
A
[A][Afrag-gargage][Bbfrag-garbage]
either because the defragmenter read only
[Afrag] or [Bfrag] or wrote only [Afrag] or [Bfrag] to the disk.
Now obviously, a defragger which copies only blocks (like the old Win stuff) would not do this.
Wife: "Did you remember to pick up the milk? Didn't I tell you to pick up the milk? I swear you are so arrogant, you never listen to a thing I..."
Me: [Flips on soundbug running from laptop which is filtering out any sentence already stored in it's "redundant insults" database, so he hears nothing but the first question:] "No, I forgot."
Wife: "... Well you are going to go and pick it up right now."
Me: [hears "...go and pick it up..."] "Ok, honey".
Me: lives happily ever after.
HE'S GOT THIRTEEN CHANNELS OF WRESTLING
COMIN' IN STRONG FROM A DSL SEND
A TWO MILLION FUNCTION LINUX CONSOLE
FLAT SCREEN TV WITH TWO TIVOS
FOOTBALL BASEBALL NASCAR TOO
WITH PICTURE IN A PICTURE IT'S ALL IN VIEW
AND IF IT COMES ON JUST A LITTLE TOO LATE
WITH HIS PVR'S HE'LL GET IT ON TAPE (or disk)
HE'S A HIGH-TECH REDNECK
MAYBERRY MEETS STARTREK
HE'S A BUMPKIN'
BUT HE'S PLUGGED IN
HE'S A HIGH-TECH REDNECK
HE'S GOT AN MP3 PLAYER IN THE BACK OF HIS TRUCK
A THOUSAND WATTS OF POWER AND HE KEEPS IT CRANKED UP
HE AIN'T INTO HIP HOP HE AIN'T INTO RAP
HE LIKES TO RATTLE THEM SPEAKERS WITH RONNIE MILSAP
WITH A DVD, CD, AND MEMORY STICK
HE'S A WAR DRIVING, PORT SCANNIN' REDNECK HICK
AND IF HE NEEDS TO TALK TO HIS HONEY AT HOME
HE JUST DIALS UP HER NUMBER ON HS PDA/PHONE