I've always HATED the stupid "M$" text that people use when talking about Microsoft. They want to make money - good for them. HOW they go about it has proven problematic/wrong/illegal/whatever, but the motive is the same for all companies - make money.
No one is suggesting propping up a company at the expense of another - certainly not in this thread.
checking for Qt... configure: error: Qt (>= Qt 3.1 (20021021)) (library qt-mt) not found.
It needs a Qt from October(?) apparently. A stock RH8 (Qt3.0.5) isn't good enough, even though his (limited) docs indicate that you just need KDE3.x (except he then recommends 3.1pr5 !).
I'd take an Apple/Unix customer any day over a Dell user - Dell people are concerned with cost, Apple/Unix people are concerned with value.
I certainly would take an IE/MS user over a Linux user most days, simply because Linux users ARE NOT concerned with 'value', unless that value is measured in how much stuff is Free and free. Linux users (not saying Unix, but Linux) are far more concerned with money/cost/price than anyone else I've ever met.
P.S. Those Apple people who can't burn or even watch VCDs are concerned with value for money?
Second, "strong experienced based opinions" is crap.
It's better than just 'strong opinions'. Anyone logical enough to realize that you should normally have opinions based on experiences is normally logical enough to be reasoned with regarding how those experiences may differ from other experiences, and how 'new' approaches may in fact be better.
In your Air Force situation, it sounds like the people you were dealing with had had little or no experience with the type of topology you were recommending.
Is it just me or do others hear old Defender (arcade) and Pacman(VCS/2600) sounds in many TV shows and movies these days? I remember Superman III (or was it II?) there was a scene with a computer 'simulation' of Superman flying around and they were playing the damn Pacman (2600) sounds as sound effects! A multimillion $$$ movie! I notice these all the time, most recently on Coronation Street earlier this year - David Platt playing some NES-style console (I think that's what the controllers were) with arcade Defender sound effects. Maybe these sounds are 'public domain' now?
That's an excellent use of time - spend your own time redoing stuff someone else did for the sole purpose of giving it away to be able to laugh at people stupid enough to try to charge for support for a product they're already giving the source code away for.
You must place absolutely no value on your own time.
On UNIX, I would suggest it's a toss-up between C++/Qt and C/GTK, and IMHO I think Java's more productive than either (though pre-1.4 X-windows Swing performance was unacceptable).
1.4 isn't acceptable either. Better than pre 1.4? Yes. Functional? Yes. Acceptable? Haven't seen anything yet which leads me to believe it's 'acceptable'.
If people are professionally trained on a particular tool, the benefit in paying the extra few hundred is that they will be more productive. Could they LEARN to be as productive on something else? Maybe. That'd take time. If a company is willing to invest in workers like that - essentially acting as both employer and training center - and can live with lower productivity for a certain period of time, great. Force people to use unfamiliar tools. If not, then give them what they claim they need. They are professionals, and probably have a better idea of what they *need* than you do.
If the server is meant to be a development server, I'm not sure why it'd be under 'heavy load' - too many commits? You probably shouldn't be running a dev environment on a production machine anyway. And if you're in need of a multi-user environment for version control, you are probably able to afford a new 'low end' (300 mhz?) machine to run things on.
You're still GETTING it, just not in your standard 'INBOX' folder. The mail is still being sent, CPU and bandwidth are still being used, but it's being moved to a 'BULK MAIL' folder. Big deal - still eating up loads of disk space.
So the next time you get really shitty e-mail service from your bank, ISP, etc., think about how much crap they had to wade through in order to get your message, and how much you have to pay in order to cover that overhead. The spammer isn't paying, that's for sure...
It doesn't take THAT long to 'wade' through emails - most are obviously fake. Add decent 'obvious' spam filters and you've eliminated a decent percentage.
I spoke with customer service at a large national organization - they'd taken 'webmaster@' off their site. I'd tried to send a generic complaint to them about a subsidiary company they owned, and it bounced back. So I got on the phone to register my complaint and then ask about why they'd taken 'webmaster@' off the mail server.
"We got WAY too much junk mail," the woman told me. "Sometimes we'd have 70 or 80 emails that were just junk!" She sounded exasperated. This is a national multimillion dollar organization with hundreds of employees which can't/won't effectively LIVE with 80 spams per day to a standard web address which most people know to contact without having to have to visit a website. I told her that I, in a small business, have to deal with between 300 and 500 junk emails per day, in addition to 'regular' emails from clients/customers/other, and that if they couldn't use the money I was paying them effectively WRT to technology, I was cancelling my account, which I did. The company had 'service' in its name, by the way.:/
You can't just shove someone through a three-week training course and have them fix Linux boxes, you need people with some degree of skill.
You can if all machines are running the same version of something (MDK8.2, RH7.1, etc). You don't seriously think someone who supports 'Windows' can cover all nuances of 2000, XP, NT4, 98SE, ME and so on in 3 weeks, do you? A 3 week course would cover basic troubleshooting of one system. 'Reboot' is a common troubleshooting technique as well, which would be perfectly reasonable to most people (not to most techies, but more 'average' users who don't expect anything else)
mdk is simply asking for money without providing much extra value. the 'subscription' to RHN is a defined value-add - priority access to tested update packages.
If MDK was smart, they'd say the $60/year ($5/month) buys access to priority servers to URMPI update packages tested for your MDK version. That's easy to understand and define, and adds value to everyone. A 'club' just *sounds* childish, and is not at all a 'professional' image, regardless of what it may offer.
Whenever I've tried the 'mandrake update' in the past it NEVER works - slow as hell, and the 'mirrors' are generally in Europe. There are very few North American mirrors, and the interface locked up a lot. Iron out Mandrake update, provide commercial URPMI servers, and I'd pay $60/year for that, as would others I know. Until then, there's not enough value add anymore with MDK.
I can't speak for others, but I've tried to approach Mandrake about business partnerships in the past, and they never respond. They've got a phone number in the US which is never answered, and 'fill out this form' pages never get responded to. There may in fact be many other companies that would like to do business with Mandrake for mutual benefit, but they're probably way too focused on just desktop linux development to consider anything else (and, while their distro is OK, it's not really much better than anyone else).
RedHat specifically is branching out into training and vertical markets ('advanced server', 'rh database', etc). I don't see Mandrake really trying to address any specific need beyond not pissing off the general linux community. That's just not enough to make a profitable business, imo.
If anyone from Mandrake actually reads this message, please email me at michael@tapinternet.com. Thanks.:)
That's what open source is all about, right? There are complete ecommerce systems for free. Might not be any good, but they don't cost any cash, just configuration time.
And for your next trick, you'll compare a language to yet another framework, right? Hrmmm....NET server has 14,000 class libraries, but PHP doesn't have those. Websphere offers (foo) but PHP doesn't. PHP must suck.
Pretty much all of what you offered there is available in free or commercial frameworks, and the rest is opinion, not fact (python is 'better' - good argument).
Re:One person's experience with PHP ...
on
PHP5 Coming Soon
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Bzzttt - wrong.
There are not MILLIONS of people running PHP under IIS4 and 5, and it's your responsibility to prove that there are that many. It just doesn't work reliably under IIS in ISAPI mode period, which is what most people would want. Running as CGI is godawful slow, and millions of people are not going to pay $ for Windows specifically to use an extremely slow option for dynamic web stuff.
It seems it'll be 'free' to consumers and paid for by fees collected from telemarketers. That'll just translate into higher prices on more goods, as companies will use those fees as justification for higher prices, and there'll be more 'justification' than I care to think about.
No, I'd rather simply pay $5/year per number, or something similar, to have my numbers registered as 'do not call'. Or damn - have the phone companies collect it - they collect dozens of other taxes already. An extra 50 cents per number per month ($6/year) would go unnoticed and help fund this system.
They could even make extra money by charging the telemarketers for the lists of DNC numbers, but the decision is up to the telemarketing companies. Keep a current list, or risk paying fines.
Re:Please listen up to my noteworthy advice
on
Professional PHP4
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The 'id=foo&name=bar' translating to $id and $name defined is per the 'register globals' setting, which is now off by default in new installations. You'd need to identify where things are coming from:
$_GET['id'];
More typing, but generally safer, as it does force you to think about where things are coming from.
Book, benchmarks and other things...
on
Professional PHP4
·
· Score: 2
One - the book is OK, but out of date if only because of the 'register globals' stuff - they shouldn't have assumed it was on in a 'professional' book in the first place, imo.
Second - shameless plug - we offer PHP training classes. here
Third - PHP topics always devolve into 'java/perl/.net/asp/cf is better than PHP'. Anyone who is interested in putting together serious multi-platform tests between PHP and other languages, please contact me privately, as I'd like to arrange something with other developers. Not as 'one language beats all' but to present some tests which aren't sponsored by the companies (MS, Sun, whoever) which obviously have a BIG bias as to how they want the results to appear. Having a cross section of multiple developers from multiple platforms agreeing to common test terms would help eliminate that, I think.
Most likely ridiculously HUGE amounts of work, because PHP3 was not very good. It WAS good, at the time, but PHP4 is MUCH better in terms of memory handling, speed, extra functionality regarding objects, arrays, etc. There are a few projects out there now which try to maintain backwards compatibiltiy with PHP3, which should just be wrong at this point in time, 2.5 years after PHP4 was released.
If you think it's worth it, just write a GPL-compliant processor for PHP which can run all the PHP code out there already - no one is stopping you (or anyone) from doing that. But for heaven's sake PLEASE don't try to revive PHP3 as a development platform for anything.
I don't think he meant 'credit' as in a textfile attribution, but the idea of a writer's or artist's contributions aren't valued enough. Some projects may be the exception that proves the rule, but overall *most* open source projects focus far more on code to the exclusion of interface design, and clear/concise documentation.
There's nothing inherently BAD about it either, but it taints the 'movement' as extremely code-oriented rather than end-user-oriented. Again, nothing wrong necessarily, but don't also wonder why people are willing to pay hundreds or thousands for packages that don't accomplish anything more than an equivalent open source package.
It's not *just* the results, it's the process by which the results are achieved. If the choice is between a painful process or an easy process to get arguably equal results, people will choose the easy process, even if it costs money.
Not 100% related to your post exactly, but it spurred me.
I've run in to people who talk about 'open source' graphics, 'open source' art, etc. What these people mean by 'open source' is 'free', nothing more or less. Whatever 'betterment' can be achieve by opening the source to a project (review/feedback/improvements/etc) generally don't apply to graphics/documentation/design.
Many people are drawn to 'open source' because of the philosophy behind the movement, but there's not much benefit for an artist. You simply have to get people to agree to give away their work for free, with little or no direct or indirect compensation. Most artists/designers aren't brought up to think that way (probably for good reason).
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I've always HATED the stupid "M$" text that people use when talking about Microsoft. They want to make money - good for them. HOW they go about it has proven problematic/wrong/illegal/whatever, but the motive is the same for all companies - make money.
No one is suggesting propping up a company at the expense of another - certainly not in this thread.
Please lose the $, or use it evenly:
$un
Net$cape
$ear$
$BC
$pirit
$am$ Club
$heraton
etc
checking for Qt... configure: error: Qt (>= Qt 3.1 (20021021)) (library qt-mt) not found.
It needs a Qt from October(?) apparently. A stock RH8 (Qt3.0.5) isn't good enough, even though his (limited) docs indicate that you just need KDE3.x (except he then recommends 3.1pr5 !).
I'd take an Apple/Unix customer any day over a Dell user - Dell people are concerned with cost, Apple/Unix people are concerned with value.
I certainly would take an IE/MS user over a Linux user most days, simply because Linux users ARE NOT concerned with 'value', unless that value is measured in how much stuff is Free and free. Linux users (not saying Unix, but Linux) are far more concerned with money/cost/price than anyone else I've ever met.
P.S. Those Apple people who can't burn or even watch VCDs are concerned with value for money?
Second, "strong experienced based opinions" is crap.
It's better than just 'strong opinions'. Anyone logical enough to realize that you should normally have opinions based on experiences is normally logical enough to be reasoned with regarding how those experiences may differ from other experiences, and how 'new' approaches may in fact be better.
In your Air Force situation, it sounds like the people you were dealing with had had little or no experience with the type of topology you were recommending.
The police have a duty to get a search warrant before invading your privacy.
It can't be THAT private if you're THROWING IT IN THE TRASH.
Is it just me or do others hear old Defender (arcade) and Pacman(VCS/2600) sounds in many TV shows and movies these days? I remember Superman III (or was it II?) there was a scene with a computer 'simulation' of Superman flying around and they were playing the damn Pacman (2600) sounds as sound effects! A multimillion $$$ movie! I notice these all the time, most recently on Coronation Street earlier this year - David Platt playing some NES-style console (I think that's what the controllers were) with arcade Defender sound effects. Maybe these sounds are 'public domain' now?
That's an excellent use of time - spend your own time redoing stuff someone else did for the sole purpose of giving it away to be able to laugh at people stupid enough to try to charge for support for a product they're already giving the source code away for.
You must place absolutely no value on your own time.
The whole idea behind free software is to share information so everyone benefits.
Funny - I always thought the whole idea was to share source code.
On UNIX, I would suggest it's a toss-up between C++/Qt and C/GTK, and IMHO I think Java's more productive than either (though pre-1.4 X-windows Swing performance was unacceptable).
1.4 isn't acceptable either. Better than pre 1.4? Yes. Functional? Yes. Acceptable? Haven't seen anything yet which leads me to believe it's 'acceptable'.
If people are professionally trained on a particular tool, the benefit in paying the extra few hundred is that they will be more productive. Could they LEARN to be as productive on something else? Maybe. That'd take time. If a company is willing to invest in workers like that - essentially acting as both employer and training center - and can live with lower productivity for a certain period of time, great. Force people to use unfamiliar tools. If not, then give them what they claim they need. They are professionals, and probably have a better idea of what they *need* than you do.
If the server is meant to be a development server, I'm not sure why it'd be under 'heavy load' - too many commits? You probably shouldn't be running a dev environment on a production machine anyway. And if you're in need of a multi-user environment for version control, you are probably able to afford a new 'low end' (300 mhz?) machine to run things on.
You're still GETTING it, just not in your standard 'INBOX' folder. The mail is still being sent, CPU and bandwidth are still being used, but it's being moved to a 'BULK MAIL' folder. Big deal - still eating up loads of disk space.
So the next time you get really shitty e-mail service from your bank, ISP, etc., think about how much crap they had to wade through in order to get your message, and how much you have to pay in order to cover that overhead. The spammer isn't paying, that's for sure...
:/
It doesn't take THAT long to 'wade' through emails - most are obviously fake. Add decent 'obvious' spam filters and you've eliminated a decent percentage.
I spoke with customer service at a large national organization - they'd taken 'webmaster@' off their site. I'd tried to send a generic complaint to them about a subsidiary company they owned, and it bounced back. So I got on the phone to register my complaint and then ask about why they'd taken 'webmaster@' off the mail server.
"We got WAY too much junk mail," the woman told me. "Sometimes we'd have 70 or 80 emails that were just junk!" She sounded exasperated. This is a national multimillion dollar organization with hundreds of employees which can't/won't effectively LIVE with 80 spams per day to a standard web address which most people know to contact without having to have to visit a website. I told her that I, in a small business, have to deal with between 300 and 500 junk emails per day, in addition to 'regular' emails from clients/customers/other, and that if they couldn't use the money I was paying them effectively WRT to technology, I was cancelling my account, which I did. The company had 'service' in its name, by the way.
You can't just shove someone through a three-week training course and have them fix Linux boxes, you need people with some degree of skill.
You can if all machines are running the same version of something (MDK8.2, RH7.1, etc). You don't seriously think someone who supports 'Windows' can cover all nuances of 2000, XP, NT4, 98SE, ME and so on in 3 weeks, do you? A 3 week course would cover basic troubleshooting of one system. 'Reboot' is a common troubleshooting technique as well, which would be perfectly reasonable to most people (not to most techies, but more 'average' users who don't expect anything else)
mdk is simply asking for money without providing much extra value. the 'subscription' to RHN is a defined value-add - priority access to tested update packages.
If MDK was smart, they'd say the $60/year ($5/month) buys access to priority servers to URMPI update packages tested for your MDK version. That's easy to understand and define, and adds value to everyone. A 'club' just *sounds* childish, and is not at all a 'professional' image, regardless of what it may offer.
Whenever I've tried the 'mandrake update' in the past it NEVER works - slow as hell, and the 'mirrors' are generally in Europe. There are very few North American mirrors, and the interface locked up a lot. Iron out Mandrake update, provide commercial URPMI servers, and I'd pay $60/year for that, as would others I know. Until then, there's not enough value add anymore with MDK.
I can't speak for others, but I've tried to approach Mandrake about business partnerships in the past, and they never respond. They've got a phone number in the US which is never answered, and 'fill out this form' pages never get responded to. There may in fact be many other companies that would like to do business with Mandrake for mutual benefit, but they're probably way too focused on just desktop linux development to consider anything else (and, while their distro is OK, it's not really much better than anyone else).
:)
RedHat specifically is branching out into training and vertical markets ('advanced server', 'rh database', etc). I don't see Mandrake really trying to address any specific need beyond not pissing off the general linux community. That's just not enough to make a profitable business, imo.
If anyone from Mandrake actually reads this message, please email me at michael@tapinternet.com. Thanks.
That's what open source is all about, right? There are complete ecommerce systems for free. Might not be any good, but they don't cost any cash, just configuration time.
And for your next trick, you'll compare a language to yet another framework, right? Hrmmm... .NET server has 14,000 class libraries, but PHP doesn't have those. Websphere offers (foo) but PHP doesn't. PHP must suck.
Pretty much all of what you offered there is available in free or commercial frameworks, and the rest is opinion, not fact (python is 'better' - good argument).
Bzzttt - wrong.
There are not MILLIONS of people running PHP under IIS4 and 5, and it's your responsibility to prove that there are that many. It just doesn't work reliably under IIS in ISAPI mode period, which is what most people would want. Running as CGI is godawful slow, and millions of people are not going to pay $ for Windows specifically to use an extremely slow option for dynamic web stuff.
It seems it'll be 'free' to consumers and paid for by fees collected from telemarketers. That'll just translate into higher prices on more goods, as companies will use those fees as justification for higher prices, and there'll be more 'justification' than I care to think about.
No, I'd rather simply pay $5/year per number, or something similar, to have my numbers registered as 'do not call'. Or damn - have the phone companies collect it - they collect dozens of other taxes already. An extra 50 cents per number per month ($6/year) would go unnoticed and help fund this system.
They could even make extra money by charging the telemarketers for the lists of DNC numbers, but the decision is up to the telemarketing companies. Keep a current list, or risk paying fines.
The 'id=foo&name=bar' translating to $id and $name defined is per the 'register globals' setting, which is now off by default in new installations. You'd need to identify where things are coming from:
$_GET['id'];
More typing, but generally safer, as it does force you to think about where things are coming from.
One - the book is OK, but out of date if only because of the 'register globals' stuff - they shouldn't have assumed it was on in a 'professional' book in the first place, imo.
Second - shameless plug - we offer PHP training classes. here
Third - PHP topics always devolve into 'java/perl/.net/asp/cf is better than PHP'. Anyone who is interested in putting together serious multi-platform tests between PHP and other languages, please contact me privately, as I'd like to arrange something with other developers. Not as 'one language beats all' but to present some tests which aren't sponsored by the companies (MS, Sun, whoever) which obviously have a BIG bias as to how they want the results to appear. Having a cross section of multiple developers from multiple platforms agreeing to common test terms would help eliminate that, I think.
Most likely ridiculously HUGE amounts of work, because PHP3 was not very good. It WAS good, at the time, but PHP4 is MUCH better in terms of memory handling, speed, extra functionality regarding objects, arrays, etc. There are a few projects out there now which try to maintain backwards compatibiltiy with PHP3, which should just be wrong at this point in time, 2.5 years after PHP4 was released.
If you think it's worth it, just write a GPL-compliant processor for PHP which can run all the PHP code out there already - no one is stopping you (or anyone) from doing that. But for heaven's sake PLEASE don't try to revive PHP3 as a development platform for anything.
I don't think he meant 'credit' as in a textfile attribution, but the idea of a writer's or artist's contributions aren't valued enough. Some projects may be the exception that proves the rule, but overall *most* open source projects focus far more on code to the exclusion of interface design, and clear/concise documentation.
There's nothing inherently BAD about it either, but it taints the 'movement' as extremely code-oriented rather than end-user-oriented. Again, nothing wrong necessarily, but don't also wonder why people are willing to pay hundreds or thousands for packages that don't accomplish anything more than an equivalent open source package.
It's not *just* the results, it's the process by which the results are achieved. If the choice is between a painful process or an easy process to get arguably equal results, people will choose the easy process, even if it costs money.
Not 100% related to your post exactly, but it spurred me.
I've run in to people who talk about 'open source' graphics, 'open source' art, etc. What these people mean by 'open source' is 'free', nothing more or less. Whatever 'betterment' can be achieve by opening the source to a project (review/feedback/improvements/etc) generally don't apply to graphics/documentation/design.
Many people are drawn to 'open source' because of the philosophy behind the movement, but there's not much benefit for an artist. You simply have to get people to agree to give away their work for free, with little or no direct or indirect compensation. Most artists/designers aren't brought up to think that way (probably for good reason).