The same goes for everything.... we all don't like windows because, hell, the only reasons we really use it are because we are forced to by software compatability... we don't see it as anyhing that adds real value.. only artificial value.
So, the only reason you use Windows is to accomplish tasks with software which runs on Windows. Hrm. That whole 'accomplishing tasks' and 'getting stuff done' thing doesn't have 'value'? Only 'artificial value'??
but no source code is supplied on CD and there is no way to recover it from the box (without some pretty dedicated reverse engineering).
So what? All the GPL says is that the recipient must be able to request the source code and the supplier must give it to them, and can charge a nominal distribution fee. Nothing was ever said about having to distribute the source with binaries.
Amusement parks
on
Rent a Segway
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
As someone else pointed out earlier, these would be great for amusement parks. I just wonder if they could keep enough around to rent so that it wouldn't piss people off who couldn't get time on one. $40/hour seems like a good way to keep the users down to a minimum to start with, but I could eventually see a park having a few hundred around to use for, let's say, $15/hour or so, or perhaps $80/day. Put a little credit card slider thingy on it so you can 'pay as you go' and you're all set. $40/hour is just too pricey at the moment for most people, but amusement parks *do* seem a somewhat logical place to do 'rentals'. It's an enclosed area where people already do a large amount of walking, and are looking for entertaining/fun experiences.
All 3 of those changed my life to the extent that it showed me what you could do with a computer, and what a computer could do to you. Spreadsheets and all that changed businesses, for sure, but those games (and many others from the similar era - Seven Cities of Gold, Zork series, etc) changed my view of things.
Sure, I was but a teenager, but those games made me realize that computers could engage people for extended periods of time in useful (or useless) endeavours. I saw that they could bring people together, or tear them apart.
So well before Doom, Duke Nukem, Half Life and whatever other 'leet'-FPS-with-500-frames-per-second- 3d-accelerated-surround-sound-need-512-meg-and-3gh z-processors-to-run-well games made the scene, computers and computer games changed my life.:)
So, we pay more in taxes to support education systems which produce stuff which companies can't patent. No patents means they probably can't monopolize something and charge higher prices, so we may see lowered prices in the marketplace for some products/services, but only by paying more taxes to support education? Doesn't sound all that hot to me...
Back in my day, we started at 7:30, and were done by 2. That's 6.5 hours, and that included at least 45 minutes for lunch. IIRC there were 6 50 minute periods - 5 hours of instructional time per day. Even including waking up, walking to the bus, and transport back home, it wasn't 8 hours.
And I've been in situations where someone said 'we have to use ASP/MS technologies'. Then the site got way behind schedule and yes, eventually, the company folded. So much for ASP.
???
OO code can be written as poorly as procedural if people don't understand how to model the particular data in a good way *for the project*. It's just another skill. I'd take well done procedural PHP over hacked/crap OO PHP of course, but ideally, well-written OOP is both maintainable and easy to work with.
It makes more sense to keep variables local to function scope.
If I'm calling a function, I should be explicit about what I'm passing in and what I'm returning. Using GLOBAL in functions should not be done. Can you give me examples of what you'd need to globalize in a function (or method)?
There are a couple times I've had to do that, which pretty much just drove home the fact that the app wasn't architected properly in the first place.
Writing a web-based app is usually not engineer-level work. I'm not putting this on what language you use, but in general anything written in perl/php/other-scripting-language is not engineer-level (a project we just finished at work was written entirely in perl/ksh, so this is not 100% true.)
It seems what you're saying is that php/perl/python/etc are not fit for 'engineer-level' work, unless *you're* working on it. In that case, it's fine to call it 'engineer-level'.
Someone dabbling in *anything* on the weekends isn't at the engineer-level of that 'thing'.
Same end, different reasons. My primary reason was based on an old experience, and no doubt people will say 'it's better!' but I don't have a major need to switch and learn another distro.
Back in 99 and 2000, I was trying out various distros - tried Caldera, RedHat, Mandrake, Suse on the same machine. Debian later on a different machine, but that was a different story.
Same hardware, but Suse took 100% longer to install, and at that point installed far fewer packages than the others, using a 'default' install. Perhaps there were switched I could have flipped at boot time to make it go faster, but all other distros were fine. What got me, though, was how slow Suse felt compared to the others (again - same hardware - same machine, actually). Yet everyone I spoke with who used Suse *raved* about how great it was and how much faster. When I showed a couple of them my machine - and they used it and didn't see anything wrong with it - I became suspect of Suse advocates.
We now have a guy here using Suse and it's OK, but I still can't shake those experiences off. Can't put my finger on it, but it's still a bit puzzling.
NS 6.0 is over 2 years old. 4.5 was done in late 98, and 4.7 is pretty much just incremental upgrades and patches, as have been all the point releases (.71,.72, etc). It's old, and it doesn't have decent CSS support. It's a waste of time trying to make things look the same in NS4.7 as in modern browsers.
There's a reason Netscape themselves doesn't support it. MS doesn't expect people to be using IE3, they expect people to be using more recent browsers. NS is the same way - they want you to use the latest stuff (NS6beta was release *3* years ago already).
What size are the servers? Single/dual proc? Any other info you can share would be appreciated. Thanks for the info you've shared so far. Anyone who says PHP can't scale can't really argue with those numbers.
There's a write up in linuxjournal about it from a couple years ago. Whether they've got the same traffic or not now I don't know.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=4488
"The company secured the services of Web Zone Inc. of Santa Clara, California and Broomfield, Colorado-based Level 3, a multinational Tier One provider with hosting facilities in Los Angeles. This provided enough bandwidth to deal comfortably with anticipated traffic volumes. NeoPets then added yet more staff and purchased about 50 Red Hat/Apache web and image servers, two more MySQL Servers and a Sun server to run an Oracle database. Once the Oracle conversion was completed, page views soared to over 40 million a day. "
The '50' servers could probably be reduced to half that now, considering hardware capacity and prices. that's 40M page views, not hits. It's graphic intensive, so I'd figure many times as many hits as page views per day.
The NAME="var[]" thing is a fucking hilarious hack. Every time I read that part of the PHP manual I simply can't stop giggling
And you do this in VBScript how? I worked at an MS shop for awhile and no one there knew how to do this. Not saying it can't be done, but it certainly wasn't intuitive to people working there.
If the syntax for dealing with arrays in a language uses [] as part of the syntax, using
makes perfect sense.
But trying to actually write your "real" code in PHP is a recipe for a hideous, convoluted mess.
Sorry if you think that. We manage to write fully functional apps all the time in PHP which aren't even close to hideous or convoluted.
Remember, you have to send a fully-qualified URL in your response.
IIRC ASP doesn't so this, or at least didn't do this a few years ago. If PHP was *only* written to work with one web server and didn't have to worry about being run in multiple environments, this wouldn't be a problem. As it is, you can feel all smug and safe knowing that you have a command to send a full URL in your response. Whoopee. Many others of us have a very capable and dynamic cross-platform language which is well-suited to writing web-based apps, and we're not tied to a language which was shoehorned into a webserver against its will.
Do you mean to translate it to Java byte code? Or 'byte code' in general so it would be 'like' java? There are already a few products which both obfuscate and compile your code so you can redistribute it to other PHP servers without the source code. zend.com and ioncube.com both do this.
But, by clicking the agreements, *someone* has given authorization for the data transfers to take place - usually the software won't load/install in the first place, so by the fact that it's running, someone has agreed to it.
BTW, this one has always bugged me. I know some companies will hire consultants to come in and install new systems or do upgrades. When a consultant comes in a 'click click click's his way through license agreements, and the company hiring him doesn't know what's going on, can the hiring company be held responsible? Or could they go after the consultant for failing to inform them of license consequences.
I'd guess people doing that sort of stuff probably have disclaimers in a signed contract before doing any work, but I've never had a clear answer to that situation, even though I've known people who've had these consultants come in and 'set up' new systems/software.
I've seen some posts on here saying that 'it won't save any money', 'training costs are higher','support blah blah', etc. Using open source in some cases may save money. In most cases, however, it'll *shift* money for projects. Money that may have gone to licensing fees may be shifted to larger training budgets or more custom development work. Who will provide those services? More than likely it'll be local companies, helping to create/sustain jobs in the respective areas.
OpenOffice is a good example. While it's not a perfect replacement for MSOffice, in some organizations, it can serve reasonably well. Let's say a dept of 40 people will be upgrading from Office 97 to Office XP @ $100/seat. That's $4000. Migrating to OpenOffice for those 40 people may require days of retraining, but in reality there'd be some retraining (formal or informal) for some of those people anyway even moving to Office XP.
So, migrating from Office 97 to anything else will require *some* training. You can have more formalized training, and pay someone local to come in, or shift the bulk of that money out of the region, yet still have to provide training for some of the staff (perhaps during lunch breaks, or overtime, or whatever).
That example isn't perfect, I know, but the local services factor *needs* to be played up. Money isn't a zero-sum - it floats around in transactions. The more of those transactions a state can keep to itself, the better.
Yes, already reported to bugzilla, but the behaviour seems to be confirmed as 'normal'.
While using Moz to kick off a mailing admin script, it was taking a LONG time to run (45 minutes or more - should have been 10-15). Then people complained of dupes. I finally tracked this down - every 5 minutes (within a couple seconds) Mozilla would silently rePOST the entire request (going to a different Apache process no doubt).
This is from the same browser which won't let you go BACK or FWD to a page that was the result of a POST because it would be 'cheating' the standards somehow. But silently rePOSTing is just fine. The developer at bugzilla suggested that Mozilla is supposed to do this because the connection may have dropped. If the connection drops, Mozilla will silently try to rePOST. However, that doesn't explain why I get 'connection with server timed out' errors - why doesn't is retry then?
I see Wrox is turning up the heat on the PHP book market, and while I understand there are many costs involved in publishing, these larger books are, in many cases, not cost effective.
Wrox has a PHP string handling book coming out, as well as a few others, in the 250-300 page target range. However, I have a feeling these will still be $40+. I'm not sure if Wrox is heading towards ebooks or not, but topics like these deserve to be $15 ebooks, not $45 hardcovers.
I see the publisher of phparch.com (good magazine!) has an early PHP->C converter which speeds up code dramatically. Umbrello is a UML modeller for KDE which generates PHP code. I saw refernces to a PHP/Tk/DHTML project, but forgotthe link. Any other cool PHP things people know about?
You can't duplicate a building in 10 seconds. You can let someone come in and walk around the building, test stuff, etc., before they pay. Generally, people aren't comfortable with custom software apps until it's running on their premises and/or with their own data. Ergo, you're usually giving someone access to the program before payment is finalized. That's just how it works.
I've *never* understood why individuals get the 'miles' associated with travel when they've not paid, but their company has. I had a relative who used to travel a lot - usually 3-4 days per week. He'd accumulate up those miles, then take extra personal trips. His company paid for those miles. If the company collected those miles and used them to offset the cost of future travel, A LOT of money could be saved. His reckoning was that probably every 5th or 6th flight of his could have been paid for by the frequent flyer miles accumulated by the previous trips, but those miles went to him personally, not the company. This was *supposedly* standard practice - I never knew if it was or not.
Slashdot Mirror
The same goes for everything.... we all don't like windows because, hell, the only reasons we really use it are because we are forced to by software compatability... we don't see it as anyhing that adds real value.. only artificial value.
So, the only reason you use Windows is to accomplish tasks with software which runs on Windows. Hrm. That whole 'accomplishing tasks' and 'getting stuff done' thing doesn't have 'value'? Only 'artificial value'??
but no source code is supplied on CD and there is no way to recover it from the box (without some pretty dedicated reverse engineering).
So what? All the GPL says is that the recipient must be able to request the source code and the supplier must give it to them, and can charge a nominal distribution fee. Nothing was ever said about having to distribute the source with binaries.
As someone else pointed out earlier, these would be great for amusement parks. I just wonder if they could keep enough around to rent so that it wouldn't piss people off who couldn't get time on one. $40/hour seems like a good way to keep the users down to a minimum to start with, but I could eventually see a park having a few hundred around to use for, let's say, $15/hour or so, or perhaps $80/day. Put a little credit card slider thingy on it so you can 'pay as you go' and you're all set. $40/hour is just too pricey at the moment for most people, but amusement parks *do* seem a somewhat logical place to do 'rentals'. It's an enclosed area where people already do a large amount of walking, and are looking for entertaining/fun experiences.
All 3 of those changed my life to the extent that it showed me what you could do with a computer, and what a computer could do to you. Spreadsheets and all that changed businesses, for sure, but those games (and many others from the similar era - Seven Cities of Gold, Zork series, etc) changed my view of things.
h z-processors-to-run-well games made the scene, computers and computer games changed my life. :)
Sure, I was but a teenager, but those games made me realize that computers could engage people for extended periods of time in useful (or useless) endeavours. I saw that they could bring people together, or tear them apart.
So well before Doom, Duke Nukem, Half Life and whatever other 'leet'-FPS-with-500-frames-per-second- 3d-accelerated-surround-sound-need-512-meg-and-3g
That is in a consumer OS (XP Home) that costs less than $100...
r icingretail.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/howtobuy/p
$299 as I read that page...
So, we pay more in taxes to support education systems which produce stuff which companies can't patent. No patents means they probably can't monopolize something and charge higher prices, so we may see lowered prices in the marketplace for some products/services, but only by paying more taxes to support education? Doesn't sound all that hot to me...
Back in my day, we started at 7:30, and were done by 2. That's 6.5 hours, and that included at least 45 minutes for lunch. IIRC there were 6 50 minute periods - 5 hours of instructional time per day. Even including waking up, walking to the bus, and transport back home, it wasn't 8 hours.
And I've been in situations where someone said 'we have to use ASP/MS technologies'. Then the site got way behind schedule and yes, eventually, the company folded. So much for ASP.
???
OO code can be written as poorly as procedural if people don't understand how to model the particular data in a good way *for the project*. It's just another skill. I'd take well done procedural PHP over hacked/crap OO PHP of course, but ideally, well-written OOP is both maintainable and easy to work with.
It makes more sense to keep variables local to function scope.
If I'm calling a function, I should be explicit about what I'm passing in and what I'm returning. Using GLOBAL in functions should not be done. Can you give me examples of what you'd need to globalize in a function (or method)?
There are a couple times I've had to do that, which pretty much just drove home the fact that the app wasn't architected properly in the first place.
Writing a web-based app is usually not engineer-level work. I'm not putting this on what language you use, but in general anything written in perl/php/other-scripting-language is not engineer-level (a project we just finished at work was written entirely in perl/ksh, so this is not 100% true.)
It seems what you're saying is that php/perl/python/etc are not fit for 'engineer-level' work, unless *you're* working on it. In that case, it's fine to call it 'engineer-level'.
Someone dabbling in *anything* on the weekends isn't at the engineer-level of that 'thing'.
Same end, different reasons. My primary reason was based on an old experience, and no doubt people will say 'it's better!' but I don't have a major need to switch and learn another distro.
Back in 99 and 2000, I was trying out various distros - tried Caldera, RedHat, Mandrake, Suse on the same machine. Debian later on a different machine, but that was a different story.
Same hardware, but Suse took 100% longer to install, and at that point installed far fewer packages than the others, using a 'default' install. Perhaps there were switched I could have flipped at boot time to make it go faster, but all other distros were fine. What got me, though, was how slow Suse felt compared to the others (again - same hardware - same machine, actually). Yet everyone I spoke with who used Suse *raved* about how great it was and how much faster. When I showed a couple of them my machine - and they used it and didn't see anything wrong with it - I became suspect of Suse advocates.
We now have a guy here using Suse and it's OK, but I still can't shake those experiences off. Can't put my finger on it, but it's still a bit puzzling.
If a page isn't viewable in Lynx, that's the coder's fault. All my pages are viewable with Lynx, *if I can help it*.
e rs .htm
.72, etc). It's old, and it doesn't have decent CSS support. It's a waste of time trying to make things look the same in NS4.7 as in modern browsers.
So, your pages aren't viewable in Lynx 100% of the time then, is what you're saying.
Netscape 4.7? It's only two years old, guys. It isn't like it's hard to code a page that will look correct in NS4.
Yes it is - at least, as someone else pointed out, to have it be visually normal in modern browsers. No, NS4.7 isn't two years old.
http://www.blooberry.com/indexdot/history/brows
NS 6.0 is over 2 years old. 4.5 was done in late 98, and 4.7 is pretty much just incremental upgrades and patches, as have been all the point releases (.71,
There's a reason Netscape themselves doesn't support it. MS doesn't expect people to be using IE3, they expect people to be using more recent browsers. NS is the same way - they want you to use the latest stuff (NS6beta was release *3* years ago already).
What size are the servers? Single/dual proc? Any other info you can share would be appreciated. Thanks for the info you've shared so far. Anyone who says PHP can't scale can't really argue with those numbers.
Neopets.com
8
There's a write up in linuxjournal about it from a couple years ago. Whether they've got the same traffic or not now I don't know.
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=448
"The company secured the services of Web Zone Inc. of Santa Clara, California and Broomfield, Colorado-based Level 3, a multinational Tier One provider with hosting facilities in Los Angeles. This provided enough bandwidth to deal comfortably with anticipated traffic volumes. NeoPets then added yet more staff and purchased about 50 Red Hat/Apache web and image servers, two more MySQL Servers and a Sun server to run an Oracle database. Once the Oracle conversion was completed, page views soared to over 40 million a day. "
The '50' servers could probably be reduced to half that now, considering hardware capacity and prices. that's 40M page views, not hits. It's graphic intensive, so I'd figure many times as many hits as page views per day.
The NAME="var[]" thing is a fucking hilarious hack. Every time I read that part of the PHP manual I simply can't stop giggling
And you do this in VBScript how? I worked at an MS shop for awhile and no one there knew how to do this. Not saying it can't be done, but it certainly wasn't intuitive to people working there.
If the syntax for dealing with arrays in a language uses [] as part of the syntax, using
makes perfect sense.
But trying to actually write your "real" code in PHP is a recipe for a hideous, convoluted mess.
Sorry if you think that. We manage to write fully functional apps all the time in PHP which aren't even close to hideous or convoluted.
Remember, you have to send a fully-qualified URL in your response.
IIRC ASP doesn't so this, or at least didn't do this a few years ago. If PHP was *only* written to work with one web server and didn't have to worry about being run in multiple environments, this wouldn't be a problem. As it is, you can feel all smug and safe knowing that you have a command to send a full URL in your response. Whoopee. Many others of us have a very capable and dynamic cross-platform language which is well-suited to writing web-based apps, and we're not tied to a language which was shoehorned into a webserver against its will.
Do you mean to translate it to Java byte code? Or 'byte code' in general so it would be 'like' java? There are already a few products which both obfuscate and compile your code so you can redistribute it to other PHP servers without the source code. zend.com and ioncube.com both do this.
How many machines and what kind of hardware did you run millions of pageviews per day with mod_perl on?
But, by clicking the agreements, *someone* has given authorization for the data transfers to take place - usually the software won't load/install in the first place, so by the fact that it's running, someone has agreed to it.
BTW, this one has always bugged me. I know some companies will hire consultants to come in and install new systems or do upgrades. When a consultant comes in a 'click click click's his way through license agreements, and the company hiring him doesn't know what's going on, can the hiring company be held responsible? Or could they go after the consultant for failing to inform them of license consequences.
I'd guess people doing that sort of stuff probably have disclaimers in a signed contract before doing any work, but I've never had a clear answer to that situation, even though I've known people who've had these consultants come in and 'set up' new systems/software.
I've seen some posts on here saying that 'it won't save any money', 'training costs are higher','support blah blah', etc. Using open source in some cases may save money. In most cases, however, it'll *shift* money for projects. Money that may have gone to licensing fees may be shifted to larger training budgets or more custom development work. Who will provide those services? More than likely it'll be local companies, helping to create/sustain jobs in the respective areas.
OpenOffice is a good example. While it's not a perfect replacement for MSOffice, in some organizations, it can serve reasonably well. Let's say a dept of 40 people will be upgrading from Office 97 to Office XP @ $100/seat. That's $4000. Migrating to OpenOffice for those 40 people may require days of retraining, but in reality there'd be some retraining (formal or informal) for some of those people anyway even moving to Office XP.
So, migrating from Office 97 to anything else will require *some* training. You can have more formalized training, and pay someone local to come in, or shift the bulk of that money out of the region, yet still have to provide training for some of the staff (perhaps during lunch breaks, or overtime, or whatever).
That example isn't perfect, I know, but the local services factor *needs* to be played up. Money isn't a zero-sum - it floats around in transactions. The more of those transactions a state can keep to itself, the better.
Already done so - thought I'd posted that in the original post. The bugzilla people got back and said it's expected behaviour.
Yes, already reported to bugzilla, but the behaviour seems to be confirmed as 'normal'.
While using Moz to kick off a mailing admin script, it was taking a LONG time to run (45 minutes or more - should have been 10-15). Then people complained of dupes. I finally tracked this down - every 5 minutes (within a couple seconds) Mozilla would silently rePOST the entire request (going to a different Apache process no doubt).
This is from the same browser which won't let you go BACK or FWD to a page that was the result of a POST because it would be 'cheating' the standards somehow. But silently rePOSTing is just fine. The developer at bugzilla suggested that Mozilla is supposed to do this because the connection may have dropped. If the connection drops, Mozilla will silently try to rePOST. However, that doesn't explain why I get 'connection with server timed out' errors - why doesn't is retry then?
I see Wrox is turning up the heat on the PHP book market, and while I understand there are many costs involved in publishing, these larger books are, in many cases, not cost effective.
Wrox has a PHP string handling book coming out, as well as a few others, in the 250-300 page target range. However, I have a feeling these will still be $40+. I'm not sure if Wrox is heading towards ebooks or not, but topics like these deserve to be $15 ebooks, not $45 hardcovers.
PHP has numerous books covering different topics, a professional support organization and training courses. (subtle plugs!) What's next on the horizon?
I see the publisher of phparch.com (good magazine!) has an early PHP->C converter which speeds up code dramatically. Umbrello is a UML modeller for KDE which generates PHP code. I saw refernces to a PHP/Tk/DHTML project, but forgotthe link. Any other cool PHP things people know about?
You can't duplicate a building in 10 seconds. You can let someone come in and walk around the building, test stuff, etc., before they pay. Generally, people aren't comfortable with custom software apps until it's running on their premises and/or with their own data. Ergo, you're usually giving someone access to the program before payment is finalized. That's just how it works.
might have been - I was referring to sitepoint, but I've run into the same stuff other places... :)
I've *never* understood why individuals get the 'miles' associated with travel when they've not paid, but their company has. I had a relative who used to travel a lot - usually 3-4 days per week. He'd accumulate up those miles, then take extra personal trips. His company paid for those miles. If the company collected those miles and used them to offset the cost of future travel, A LOT of money could be saved. His reckoning was that probably every 5th or 6th flight of his could have been paid for by the frequent flyer miles accumulated by the previous trips, but those miles went to him personally, not the company. This was *supposedly* standard practice - I never knew if it was or not.