BTW, I 'dug up' prices (90 seconds of my life, if that) because I like to keep on top of the facts. Believe it or not, I get into conversations with real people about these topics, and sometimes just saying 'X is true', without knowing a source, or having verified it, just isn't persuasive. Honest. Even when bashing the price of a mac, sometimes people want sources for the numbers that seem to be pulled out of thin air. I know have those sources.
The answer would be to not make 'close' hideable. Perhaps also after 4-5 times clicking on a menu with 'hidden' items with no item selected, all items become 'unhidden' for a time. Strange, perhaps, but there's gotta be some better way than multi-level nesting in the menus to show ALL options at all times.
Not saying it shouldn't behave that way, but it would help 'average' users such as myself who aren't low-level admins to spell out some of that during the install. The installer specifically *knows* it's an upgrade, so why not give me some 'tips' specific to an upgraded system? I'd rather read that than the continuous ads rotated during the hour long installation procedure. Maybe it says something in the boxed version, but I don't think so.
I was also posting it as a note for people like me who might have expected something a bit more or different.
I had a stock RH7.3 install, which I'd then changed a bit visually (new KDE themes, etc). I upgraded to RH8 yesterday. The 'bluecurve' didn't come up, although it was an available theme in the KDE theme area. Overall, after the 'upgrade', everything seemed exactly as it was before. Couple things seemed faster, but nothing significant had changed (didn't check Apache, and apparently it's gone to 2.0, so that probably wouldn't have worked).
Anyway, I had to completely remove my.kde directory, then restarting brought up everything 'new', and it looks nice. Not earth shattering, but nice. We've played around with it here, going between KDE and Gnome, and they do look very similar. Menus are the same, colors, etc. Fonts seemed a bit different between the two (Gnome fonts appeared a bit smaller) but otherwise it was fine. Not impossible to tell which you're using, but it's not a jarring experience going between the two.
The menu now has just one option for many things - 'project manager', 'web browser', 'email', etc. and I do think some things are grouped more logically than others. It also seems that you still get WAY too much *in the menus* which isn't useful for most people - it just overwhelms you when you're trying to find stuff. I'd suggest making a 'default' menu with fewer things, with the option of clicking a 'sysadmin menu' checkbox somewhere to add sysadmin stuff if/when it's needed.
Finally, many things seem faster - I'm assuming this is because of the new GCC and some kernel scheduling stuff. Whatever it is, it's made a big difference on this box. I'm testing at home tonight as well and expect similar performance increases.
Not been able to ever get the apt-rpm stuff to work. Just keeps complaining about not being able to find package info or something stupid. Yes, I followed all the (mostly not there) documnentation to no avail.
More to the point, though, is that the GCC and underlying libraries may be radically different enough so as to make upgrading like that not work - what were the jumps in gcc from 7.0 -> 7.3? I can't remember.
People don't 'admit' that Pepsi's 'actions' are 'more or less legal'. Pepsi is a company, just like Coca-Cola. The music labels are trying to fight something which they essentially can't win against, because it's not another company they can shut down. Napster, yes. The entire personal computer movement, with all the attendant technological freedoms it brings, no. Maybe the DRM/Palladium thing will help, but I don't think enough people will get behind that to make it a mainstream reality.
If MS was really serious about stopping piracy, they would have required the 'activation' home users of XP have to go through for 'enterprise' licensed copies as well. The 'enterprise' licensed copies have no activation requirements, which means that people will still continue to sneak home copies from work to install, bypassing the activation scheme completely.
They've never been serious about stopping piracy. Collecting money - yes. Stopping piracy - no.
I hadn't been a GAIM fan before, but there is a Win32 port out (not perfect), but it does have the tabbed conversation window thing going on, which may impress those used to standard AIM interface. If you've got a couple spare meg, toss it on.:)
The Tomcat effort had to be somewhat "under the radar" whereas the WebLogic could be banner headlines.
Cause you don't want to piss off the vendor of the pricey product. If you piss them off by publicizing how much a free version does, you'll not get the same level of support/helpfulness from them. They'll do the bare minimum to keep you, as opposed to going the extra mile to help out when you need it.
I think the idea is that the slapper worm will try to grab something from server X (which it believes to be infected) and it tries to run that. If I replaced what it was expecting with something else, that can't be my fault - an external entity was grabbing code off my servers and executing it, not me.
'Do you know how much you're hurting the open-source movement? Please stop.'
I don't think I've *ever* heard anyone say that - certainly not at the local LUG meetings or amongst other fellow users in the area. Maybe it's a Michigan thing, but I can not ever recall hearing or reading comments like that.
They're doing it all on $5k Xserve boxes, instead of $500 x86 whiteboxes. Considering that, you're getting a bargain. The $5k servers are justified because it's so much easier for them to administrate.
I've been seeing people say 'this is the last step' or similar things, about some type of 'outlook killer' app for Linux. It won't be the last step. By the time there is something that is workable/usable for the majority of companies, there will be some other roadblock/obstacle which people start saying 'we have to have or we can't switch'. I'm not saying I necessarily even know what that is at this point, but it'll happen.
First it was web browsers. Then an office suite. Now an 'outlook' killer. What next? `
Personal security/prefs setting ala 'passport'? Though that hasn't seemed to have taken off as pervasively (or publicly) as might have been. Honestly I can't think of what it might be, but there'll no doubt be some other area of corporate culture MS gets embedded into quickly, which will take years to wean people away from (if in fact they want to get weaned away - if it works for them, just let it be).
ISDN might be worthwhile, depending on setup costs. 3 years ago I got a free modem, installation was about $100, and monthly it's about $30 ($14 for line, $17 for service).
I had Suse and Mandrake and Redhat all installed on the same machine at various times. Suse was, by far, the slowest/worst of them all. So, I guess everyone should listen to me now instead because I've just given unrefutable evidence, just like the poster, I'm replying to, right?:)
Seriously, Suse used to really suck bad on the hardware here - yeah, maybe it was bad hardware, but Mandrake/Redhat (hell even Caldera) all worked better than the Suse we had. Perhaps newer ones are better, but I couldn't even get Suse fans to admit (when they saw it) that it was bad, even though it was demonstrably bad.
I'd mod this up if I had points today. Excellent point, which I've made on a local LUG list, and got hugely flamed for. Somehow the notion that people who develop open source projects are human and have egos is a taboo subject, but it's about the only rational explanation for the problem you described. It's certainly not 'money', because developers who release stuff as open source aren't usually in it for the money in the first place (else they'd charge for their projects).
A company has to sell several times as many Linux copies, proportionally, the recoup its investment in the port;
You're assuming the development costs are equal for both platforms. They might not be. Much of the logic/flowcharting/data structure thinking/planning will be done once, regardless of code implmentation. The coding *shouldn't* be so time consuming relative to the planning that the planning is totally insignificant.
My first reaction what that they're reinventing the wheel. Then I saw that they're going to be using and extending many current KDE components. *IF* the KDE teams takes these changes/modifications and uses them to build a new base, great. If, however, this becomes essentially a fork of current Kmail, Korganizer, etc., I don't see this as a good thing.
And yeah, why not take Aethera and build on that - it's already more integrated with itself and other things, and I'm sure the Kompany could have used a nice gov't contract just as much as the team that got it (maybe moreso).
Google's great, but there's no mention of the CORBA support on the PHP.net site, and there used to be (satellite extension I think it was referred to as). It's not there anymore from what I can see, which is what I was referring to.
Not sure if you're replying directly to me or not - I didn't say 'books suck'. Many of the PHP books out there do suck somewhat, because they are mostly reprints of the manual, and reprinting of mostly less-than-useful functions (mSQL, Interbase, etc.). The huge majority are using PHP and MySQL, and even more to the point, often times these books only have examples relating to MySQL anyway, so including 3 pages of info on interbase (manual reprinting) is just filler, making it look like there's more useful info in there than there is.
I like books - I buy them myself. I just think most of the PHP books out there now are repeating the same stuff. You can get by buying one of them, and essentially have covered 6-7 of them. It's pretty much the same as ASP books or Java books or other languages - there are so many publishers looking to get something out that there a lot of filler and a lot of repetition nowadays - a stark contrast from 1998.:)
Book vs. online manual
on
Programming PHP
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
There is no denying that the php.net/manual site is a good comprehensive resource. I do get tired of people suggesting to avoid books and just use the online manual. Obviously, they both have their places.
The first strike against the online manual is that it's not portable. Downloading in most of the portable formats loses the user contributed comments, which are really what make the online version as helpful as it is in most cases. Seeing how other people have worked around issues, or just posted small extra example snippets is often a lifesaver.
However, where books can come in useful is the depth. The biggest drawback of MOST PHP books is that they are thin on detail - sometimes a 500 page PHP book has less than 200 pages of 'useful' content, and often times its still elaborated examples of basic 'form submission' code. 200+ pages of reprinting the manual is often not useful for too many people. Yes, it's portable, but I don't need pages of mSQL commands, for example, printed in any book.
The few good books I've seen regarding PHP that are more in depth and less 'manuals' include the new Professional PHP4 XML (not perfect, but certainly useful if you need to do XML, although that's a moving target in PHP), PHP 4 Web Applications (from New Riders, kinda thin, but many good techniques over and above the usual PHP stuff) and a couple others which escape me. Probably only 20% of the books published actually contain useful stuff you won't find by combing the manual or various discussion boards.
Also, in defense of books, some people just learn better by being able to read and see examples (which is why the books should have more good examples and fewer filler pages of manual reprinting). Similarly some people do better with hands-on training than with forums or books, which (small plug) my company provides (http://www.tapinternet.com/php/).:)
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent post dude - 'moron'. Great.
BTW, I 'dug up' prices (90 seconds of my life, if that) because I like to keep on top of the facts. Believe it or not, I get into conversations with real people about these topics, and sometimes just saying 'X is true', without knowing a source, or having verified it, just isn't persuasive. Honest. Even when bashing the price of a mac, sometimes people want sources for the numbers that seem to be pulled out of thin air. I know have those sources.
Whoops - another 75 seconds gone...
Under OSX, the print-to-PDF feature is built in. You don't have to pay extra for it.
j ects/A ppleStore.woa/231/wo/1JCIT0eLnEF7XH1PZK/0.3.0.3.27 .39.3.3.1.1.0?222,40
c at=395 1&lr=A&dept=3944&path=0%3A3944%3A3951
Cheapest prices I can find:
Apple OSX - $799
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebOb
Windows PC - $399
http://www.walmart.com/catalog/catalog.gsp?
I'd say you're paying extra for it.
The answer would be to not make 'close' hideable. Perhaps also after 4-5 times clicking on a menu with 'hidden' items with no item selected, all items become 'unhidden' for a time. Strange, perhaps, but there's gotta be some better way than multi-level nesting in the menus to show ALL options at all times.
Not saying it shouldn't behave that way, but it would help 'average' users such as myself who aren't low-level admins to spell out some of that during the install. The installer specifically *knows* it's an upgrade, so why not give me some 'tips' specific to an upgraded system? I'd rather read that than the continuous ads rotated during the hour long installation procedure. Maybe it says something in the boxed version, but I don't think so.
I was also posting it as a note for people like me who might have expected something a bit more or different.
I had a stock RH7.3 install, which I'd then changed a bit visually (new KDE themes, etc). I upgraded to RH8 yesterday. The 'bluecurve' didn't come up, although it was an available theme in the KDE theme area. Overall, after the 'upgrade', everything seemed exactly as it was before. Couple things seemed faster, but nothing significant had changed (didn't check Apache, and apparently it's gone to 2.0, so that probably wouldn't have worked).
.kde directory, then restarting brought up everything 'new', and it looks nice. Not earth shattering, but nice. We've played around with it here, going between KDE and Gnome, and they do look very similar. Menus are the same, colors, etc. Fonts seemed a bit different between the two (Gnome fonts appeared a bit smaller) but otherwise it was fine. Not impossible to tell which you're using, but it's not a jarring experience going between the two.
Anyway, I had to completely remove my
The menu now has just one option for many things - 'project manager', 'web browser', 'email', etc. and I do think some things are grouped more logically than others. It also seems that you still get WAY too much *in the menus* which isn't useful for most people - it just overwhelms you when you're trying to find stuff. I'd suggest making a 'default' menu with fewer things, with the option of clicking a 'sysadmin menu' checkbox somewhere to add sysadmin stuff if/when it's needed.
Finally, many things seem faster - I'm assuming this is because of the new GCC and some kernel scheduling stuff. Whatever it is, it's made a big difference on this box. I'm testing at home tonight as well and expect similar performance increases.
All in all, a good upgrade.
Not been able to ever get the apt-rpm stuff to work. Just keeps complaining about not being able to find package info or something stupid. Yes, I followed all the (mostly not there) documnentation to no avail.
More to the point, though, is that the GCC and underlying libraries may be radically different enough so as to make upgrading like that not work - what were the jumps in gcc from 7.0 -> 7.3? I can't remember.
Will it be a smooth upgrade from 7.3? Or will I (once again) simply be reinstalling everything from scratch?
People don't 'admit' that Pepsi's 'actions' are 'more or less legal'. Pepsi is a company, just like Coca-Cola. The music labels are trying to fight something which they essentially can't win against, because it's not another company they can shut down. Napster, yes. The entire personal computer movement, with all the attendant technological freedoms it brings, no. Maybe the DRM/Palladium thing will help, but I don't think enough people will get behind that to make it a mainstream reality.
If MS was really serious about stopping piracy, they would have required the 'activation' home users of XP have to go through for 'enterprise' licensed copies as well. The 'enterprise' licensed copies have no activation requirements, which means that people will still continue to sneak home copies from work to install, bypassing the activation scheme completely.
They've never been serious about stopping piracy. Collecting money - yes. Stopping piracy - no.
I hadn't been a GAIM fan before, but there is a Win32 port out (not perfect), but it does have the tabbed conversation window thing going on, which may impress those used to standard AIM interface. If you've got a couple spare meg, toss it on. :)
The Tomcat effort had to be somewhat "under the radar" whereas the WebLogic could be banner headlines.
Cause you don't want to piss off the vendor of the pricey product. If you piss them off by publicizing how much a free version does, you'll not get the same level of support/helpfulness from them. They'll do the bare minimum to keep you, as opposed to going the extra mile to help out when you need it.
I think the idea is that the slapper worm will try to grab something from server X (which it believes to be infected) and it tries to run that. If I replaced what it was expecting with something else, that can't be my fault - an external entity was grabbing code off my servers and executing it, not me.
Perhaps I misread this idea tho?
'Do you know how much you're hurting the open-source movement? Please stop.'
I don't think I've *ever* heard anyone say that - certainly not at the local LUG meetings or amongst other fellow users in the area. Maybe it's a Michigan thing, but I can not ever recall hearing or reading comments like that.
They're doing it all on $5k Xserve boxes, instead of $500 x86 whiteboxes. Considering that, you're getting a bargain. The $5k servers are justified because it's so much easier for them to administrate.
I've been seeing people say 'this is the last step' or similar things, about some type of 'outlook killer' app for Linux. It won't be the last step. By the time there is something that is workable/usable for the majority of companies, there will be some other roadblock/obstacle which people start saying 'we have to have or we can't switch'. I'm not saying I necessarily even know what that is at this point, but it'll happen.
First it was web browsers.
Then an office suite.
Now an 'outlook' killer.
What next? `
Personal security/prefs setting ala 'passport'? Though that hasn't seemed to have taken off as pervasively (or publicly) as might have been. Honestly I can't think of what it might be, but there'll no doubt be some other area of corporate culture MS gets embedded into quickly, which will take years to wean people away from (if in fact they want to get weaned away - if it works for them, just let it be).
ISDN might be worthwhile, depending on setup costs. 3 years ago I got a free modem, installation was about $100, and monthly it's about $30 ($14 for line, $17 for service).
I had Suse and Mandrake and Redhat all installed on the same machine at various times. Suse was, by far, the slowest/worst of them all. So, I guess everyone should listen to me now instead because I've just given unrefutable evidence, just like the poster, I'm replying to, right? :)
Seriously, Suse used to really suck bad on the hardware here - yeah, maybe it was bad hardware, but Mandrake/Redhat (hell even Caldera) all worked better than the Suse we had. Perhaps newer ones are better, but I couldn't even get Suse fans to admit (when they saw it) that it was bad, even though it was demonstrably bad.
The 'detroit free press' logo at the top of the page was rather a giveaway too.
He wasn't there for very long (less than 2 years, IIRC) and didn't do all the much even when he was there (lots of gigging, etc)
I'd mod this up if I had points today. Excellent point, which I've made on a local LUG list, and got hugely flamed for. Somehow the notion that people who develop open source projects are human and have egos is a taboo subject, but it's about the only rational explanation for the problem you described. It's certainly not 'money', because developers who release stuff as open source aren't usually in it for the money in the first place (else they'd charge for their projects).
A company has to sell several times as many Linux copies, proportionally, the recoup its investment in the port;
You're assuming the development costs are equal for both platforms. They might not be. Much of the logic/flowcharting/data structure thinking/planning will be done once, regardless of code implmentation. The coding *shouldn't* be so time consuming relative to the planning that the planning is totally insignificant.
My first reaction what that they're reinventing the wheel. Then I saw that they're going to be using and extending many current KDE components. *IF* the KDE teams takes these changes/modifications and uses them to build a new base, great. If, however, this becomes essentially a fork of current Kmail, Korganizer, etc., I don't see this as a good thing.
And yeah, why not take Aethera and build on that - it's already more integrated with itself and other things, and I'm sure the Kompany could have used a nice gov't contract just as much as the team that got it (maybe moreso).
Google's great, but there's no mention of the CORBA support on the PHP.net site, and there used to be (satellite extension I think it was referred to as). It's not there anymore from what I can see, which is what I was referring to.
Not sure if you're replying directly to me or not - I didn't say 'books suck'. Many of the PHP books out there do suck somewhat, because they are mostly reprints of the manual, and reprinting of mostly less-than-useful functions (mSQL, Interbase, etc.). The huge majority are using PHP and MySQL, and even more to the point, often times these books only have examples relating to MySQL anyway, so including 3 pages of info on interbase (manual reprinting) is just filler, making it look like there's more useful info in there than there is.
:)
I like books - I buy them myself. I just think most of the PHP books out there now are repeating the same stuff. You can get by buying one of them, and essentially have covered 6-7 of them. It's pretty much the same as ASP books or Java books or other languages - there are so many publishers looking to get something out that there a lot of filler and a lot of repetition nowadays - a stark contrast from 1998.
There is no denying that the php.net/manual site is a good comprehensive resource. I do get tired of people suggesting to avoid books and just use the online manual. Obviously, they both have their places.
:)
The first strike against the online manual is that it's not portable. Downloading in most of the portable formats loses the user contributed comments, which are really what make the online version as helpful as it is in most cases. Seeing how other people have worked around issues, or just posted small extra example snippets is often a lifesaver.
However, where books can come in useful is the depth. The biggest drawback of MOST PHP books is that they are thin on detail - sometimes a 500 page PHP book has less than 200 pages of 'useful' content, and often times its still elaborated examples of basic 'form submission' code. 200+ pages of reprinting the manual is often not useful for too many people. Yes, it's portable, but I don't need pages of mSQL commands, for example, printed in any book.
The few good books I've seen regarding PHP that are more in depth and less 'manuals' include the new Professional PHP4 XML (not perfect, but certainly useful if you need to do XML, although that's a moving target in PHP), PHP 4 Web Applications (from New Riders, kinda thin, but many good techniques over and above the usual PHP stuff) and a couple others which escape me. Probably only 20% of the books published actually contain useful stuff you won't find by combing the manual or various discussion boards.
Also, in defense of books, some people just learn better by being able to read and see examples (which is why the books should have more good examples and fewer filler pages of manual reprinting). Similarly some people do better with hands-on training than with forums or books, which (small plug) my company provides (http://www.tapinternet.com/php/).