Not quite as bad, but a couple HS CS stories of mine (bad) spring to mind...
BASIC I (1985 this must have been) we were learning BASIC on a TRS80. We were partway thru the course and were doing some INPUT $A stuff with ZIP codes (doing a quick 'mailing address' list thing with printf). The instructor, bless her heart, had an issue with the fact that I was treating my input as a string, not a numeric. 'A zip code is all numbers' she stated. 'There are ZIP codes that start with 0, and your display logic won't work right otherwise'. I got marked down for 'mouthing off' or something like that.
The other story is too involved, but good memories anyway...:)
Not sure if geeks actually do. *SOME* might, but someone like my mom is more likely to go to graphics heavy pages with spinning flash intros, etc. taking up tons of bandwidth - alot more than a lynx user, or someone with a junkbuster filter to not pull down 50k of graphic banners with every 5k page request.
I actually did this some time ago when shopping for a local insurance agent.
The site was crap, took forever to load, then stopped because NS crashed on weird HTML/formatting/whatever. Looking at it in IE it was still crap, but done in FP (i believe). Anyhow, I shot a note to the agent, and thought nothing more of it. He called me later that day and verbally abused me, and emailed me saying i should get a 'real' browser to 'experience the internet as it was meant to be'. (almost exact words).
I emailed the note to a friend, who put it on his weblog. The agency got a lot of messages from people chastising him for his arrogance, and he then contacted me the threat of a lawsuit unless we took down the message.
I explained 5 times that since *I* didn't run the weblog, *I* couldn't do anything about it - but he didn't believe me ans said I was 'avoiding the issue' or some such nonsense.
It finally dropped, but he claimed 'lost income' because they 'had to answer all those emails'. Nice one...
PHP *is* just a language, but takes advantage of whatever context you're in. We've used it in both Apache/Linux situations, and Windows. The windows environment handles the pooling for you there, so it's not an issue. But, yes, connection pooling can be an issue on high-concurrency sites.
Theoreticall, tying PHP to AOLServer would get you connection pooling too.
Still not sure how you architected your 'universal login' - I can't figure out what you'd be doing that PHP/Postgres wouldn't be fast enough, except that I know postgres hasn't always been a speed demon.
PHP wasn't meant to do anything you were trying to do, but application variable-style variables really all that hard in PHP - we 'eumlate' them all the time.
Not sure how you even *attempted* or *thought* of threading issues with PHP. We've used it for some rather large volume sites for years with no problems at all - threading issues never even came up on my radar as an issue. For standard web apps they're really not necessary.
Putting things in a 'set' variable - sounds like you're meaning application vars - again, emulating is no big deal.
Not getting into a flame war, but there's pretty much nothing you can do in your JSP model that I can't do with a PHP model, and probably just as quickly.
JSP doesn't support true threading - the underlying servlet engine does, but JSP itself doesn't.
Email me offlist if you want to continue this - I'd like to know what your 'universal login' system is doing that's so complex.
Doot doot doo...
I suck with php
Doot doot doo...
so I'm gonna use jsp
A-doobie doobie doo...
don't know wtf i'm doin
Banana-wow
but the book i bought says enterprise and java on it so I must be on the right track
Yeah, not quite an ontopic reply re: the JSP book, but what about PHP was not up to creating a universal login system? *mysql* might not be depending on your traffic, but that's not really anything to do with PHP.
I had a quick knee-jerk 'wtf?' reaction to your statement, but I am genuinely curious as to what you found the shortcoming to be that necessitated a switch to JSP.
Are you saying Apple HAS or HAS NOT survived 'in this way'? I couldn't quite tell.
Apple doesn't seem to have more than about 5% of the desktop market - probably a lot of 'fanatics' as you'd say. But Apple is one of the most centralized companies out there, imo. So, which is it? Linux needs centralization, or decentralization?
Many people seem to think so, but it really wasn't... It started off as an excuse to test a new app framework we put together, just to see how quickly some type of basic interactive thing could be put together (regsitration, etc.). Didn't turn out too bad for a few hours work.:)
Good one! Alright! I've got quite a nice life, actually.
Not sure what qualifies that comment for 'wankerhood' - goodness! Anyone else who posts 'grab the code and make it do what you want yourself' is normally applauded as some sort of hero for having the 'guts' to think that everyone who uses a computer should be a kernel hacker.
Don't know what changed in this case...
The "let's make this x" attitude could quite happily coincide with non-free software or non GNU-compliant packages by having the company or person that wrote the software accept user feedback as part of their development process.
Review and feedback is a tenet of the bazaar development model, but it's not exclusive to GNU-compliant packages. There has been many a closed-source developer that still listened to their users and made improvements that were requested.
Indeed, one could make the argument that someone developing commercial closed-source software has more of an impetus to do so, because if it doesn't do what people want, it won't sell, and if it doesn't sell, the developers don't eat.
In the poster's point about email clients, whether it was open or closed source, end users providing feedback may be all that's necessary to make it the best email client. To be certain, perhaps most of the users can't even read source code to begin with, and so could only possibly give feedback anyway.
I understand the theory, but I'm not sure if your suggestion is on the mark or not.
"If one proves to be better, it will surpass the other. "
How can that be, if there is no agreement on standards? The fact that KDE can do something the GNOME can not is not evidence to a majority that KDE is 'better', so how can it 'surpass' GNOME?
MS Word is dominant now not so much because it 'surpassed' Word Perfect in terms of features. We had competition in that market - but that didn't spur them both to be better products. One got consumed by the other due to other forces.
It seems that the Linux community will adamantly opposed ANY efforts to get rid of Gnome or KDE or merge them precisely because many people WANT this perceived competition. How many improvements in KDE or Gnome have come about because one team looked at features in the other and said 'Hey cool, we'll add that?' - this isn't rhetorical - I've not followed the development of either that closely, so I don't know. Has it happened?
I thought simply having the source code itself, and taking input from other developers, was enough for a project to flourish. Now we need competing versions of the same thing to divide development time up?
Excellent reply. Too often 'free software'/'GNU' type users/coders/people get caught up in 'this is the best GNU code ever', etc.
You're right - coming from Outlook, it would probably look or feel or operate like crap. I think too many hardcore developers use MS stuff - the hardcore ones I know don't. They avoid it religiously, but end up not knowing what 'regular' users expectations are.
Slightly off topic, BUT... I installed Star Office on my Caldera 2.4 desktop earlier this year. It sucked. I don't know about functionality, but the whole interface sucked - this is probably more to do with KDE, but the fonts were HORRIBLY jagged. I couldn't use it for more than about 10 minutes. I use MS Office now and then, and the difference was night and day. Sure, to an average Linux hax0r, Star Office might be useable, but it was definitely not something I would foist on unsuspecting users. (Actually, most linux hax0rs would probably just use vim or write their own text editor, send it to postscript, etc.).
Probably not much difference, except that Ebay would be claiming they're the first.
Now, having said that and looking at what I wrote yesterday, there's a new light to look at it in, because someone posted the abstract of their patent. Compare their text with what you're doing - it's still in the vein of online auctions. Although your car dealership doesn't have a fixed price necessarily, cars aren't normally dealt with in an auction setting (unless it's a car auction!) I'm straying offtopic, and don't mean to - have a look at the patent text...
Unique is probably not the precise term, but something's uniqueness (or originality - if something is original it was by definition unique at some point because it was the first) is a factor in patentability.
The issue of stock photos vs. actual photos - well, again, this comes down to opinion, but it seems fairly original to me. If buying a used camera from someone, I'd rather see the actual camera I'm buying, box and all, not just a picture of a particular model from Kodak. I might see some damage, or perhaps unique markings or colorings (camera is not best example here).
I've not seen other sites do this, that deal in this kind of stuff. One is supposedly an indication of the specific physical item I'll get - another is a generic substitute.
I'm not saying it's RIGHT, but that it may in fact be possible. If someone can TRY to patent hyperlinks, 'one click' anything, etc. an 'original' way of quickly seeing multiple auction items is certainly a candidate for a patent. Whether or not it'd stand up later in court is another story.
There *could* be an element of 'uniqueness' to their approach. I don't know of too many commerce sites that let you see a thumbnail gallery of the actual items you're able to buy - usually only professionally done photographs of stock items.
And how many auction sites do this? Again, it's not a case of 'I've seen thumbnail galleries before, so ebay can't do it cause it's prior art' - they're not saying they invented thumbnail galleries. What they'd be claiming is that they've invented a unique business process of some sort. If the scope is narrowed some, they might be the first auction site to do this, making it unique and perhaps patentable.
It APPEARS that this Perl one is completely scripted - I mean it's all Perl code. The PHP ones I've seen all rely on a library (libswf or ming) being compiled, then (generally) compiled into the copy of PHP you're running. Probably could dl() them in, but they still apparently rely on external libraries. From what I can tell after a quick perusal, this project is all Perl code.
Not too dissimilar to the charges that MS and Oracle licensing (and probably others) prohibit publication of benchmarks without prior written approval.
I've not gotten all the way thru my MS SQL7 license to know if it's completely true or not, but it wouldn't suprise me at all. This type of 'agreement' doesn't seem too far out of the norm, or at least where the norm may be soon.
"You can only do business with us as long as you don't ever tell anyone at all anything about us, our products, our service or what we do." Seems to cover most of the bases...:)
I submitted a story about this last week after the Wired article, but it was rejected.:(
What I found extremely interesting was that I couldn't find the terms of service anywhere. I actually signed up for an account (old CC number, so it wouldn't go thru) but at no time was I actually even offered the option of seeing what I was agreeing to.
The Wired article pointed out that for 'unlimited' bandwidth, you were actually charged $1/k for traffic over a sustained transfer rate of.3k/s or greater. Again, couldn't see any TOS to verify this or not, but that's not a whole lot of bandwidth.
I guess their point was yes, it's unlimited bandwidth, but that doesn't mean you'll only pay $24.95/month (or whatever the rate was).
I was very surprised the guy lasted as long as he did, charging people THOUSANDS of dollars, then defending himself by saying they didn't 'understand the technical nature of hosting', etc. Wouldn't the banks get suspicious? You have 200 charges of $24.95/month for 18 months, then 3 charges of $10,000, then hundreds more $24.95s. I think that SHOULD raise some eyebrows, just like my CC usage causes calls from the CC company occasionally - "you've never charged anything over $200 in the past 10 years we've known you, and you just charged $10,000 in 5 different states in 10 minutes. Is everything OK?"
HTML - I think webstandards.org would have something to say about MS' support of HTML 'standards'. There are published specifications about how HTML should work. They don't adhere to those standards. Should they or shouldn't they is another debate, but they don't.
MARQUEE - 'standard' tag in HTML? Yes, NS had 'blink' and got yelled at for it to, from a 'standards' POV
SSL - ack - I can't find the URL. We were just tracking down SSL problems in the latest IE last week. OK, OK, maybe not a full 'standards' issue, but someone was monkeying around with something to make something as basic as encryption which USED to work in a product NOT work in an upgrade. (cheap shot, yes, but the sites we were reasearching this on were coming to the same conclusion).
HTTP - Our HTTP headers indentifying pages we were creating as 'gzipped' quit working in later versions of IE (something like IE 5.00.2610 and below worked - above didn't). Either they DIDN'T support the HTTP protocal re: GZIP before then, and fixed it, breaking our scheme, or they DID work, and broke it. Our code didn't change - just versions of IE. Which was it? They were broke and fixed it, or worked before and purposefully 'enhanced' it to not work with the same headers which used to work?
Kerberos - I need say no more than go read some old slashdot articles on this topic.
These are just a few examples of 'standards' where MS wasn't quite up to par. Whether or not they SHOULD be is a different point.
The author referenced WarGames in the paragraph describing the atmosphere of the 1980's regading media portrayal of 'online communications', not the 1990's.
Slashdot Mirror
You were using netscape in 1992?
Not quite as bad, but a couple HS CS stories of mine (bad) spring to mind...
:)
BASIC I (1985 this must have been) we were learning BASIC on a TRS80. We were partway thru the course and were doing some INPUT $A stuff with ZIP codes (doing a quick 'mailing address' list thing with printf). The instructor, bless her heart, had an issue with the fact that I was treating my input as a string, not a numeric. 'A zip code is all numbers' she stated. 'There are ZIP codes that start with 0, and your display logic won't work right otherwise'. I got marked down for 'mouthing off' or something like that.
The other story is too involved, but good memories anyway...
Not sure if geeks actually do. *SOME* might, but someone like my mom is more likely to go to graphics heavy pages with spinning flash intros, etc. taking up tons of bandwidth - alot more than a lynx user, or someone with a junkbuster filter to not pull down 50k of graphic banners with every 5k page request.
I actually did this some time ago when shopping for a local insurance agent.
The site was crap, took forever to load, then stopped because NS crashed on weird HTML/formatting/whatever. Looking at it in IE it was still crap, but done in FP (i believe). Anyhow, I shot a note to the agent, and thought nothing more of it. He called me later that day and verbally abused me, and emailed me saying i should get a 'real' browser to 'experience the internet as it was meant to be'. (almost exact words).
I emailed the note to a friend, who put it on his weblog. The agency got a lot of messages from people chastising him for his arrogance, and he then contacted me the threat of a lawsuit unless we took down the message.
I explained 5 times that since *I* didn't run the weblog, *I* couldn't do anything about it - but he didn't believe me ans said I was 'avoiding the issue' or some such nonsense.
It finally dropped, but he claimed 'lost income' because they 'had to answer all those emails'. Nice one...
PHP *is* just a language, but takes advantage of whatever context you're in. We've used it in both Apache/Linux situations, and Windows. The windows environment handles the pooling for you there, so it's not an issue. But, yes, connection pooling can be an issue on high-concurrency sites.
Theoreticall, tying PHP to AOLServer would get you connection pooling too.
Still not sure how you architected your 'universal login' - I can't figure out what you'd be doing that PHP/Postgres wouldn't be fast enough, except that I know postgres hasn't always been a speed demon.
PHP wasn't meant to do anything you were trying to do, but application variable-style variables really all that hard in PHP - we 'eumlate' them all the time.
Not sure how you even *attempted* or *thought* of threading issues with PHP. We've used it for some rather large volume sites for years with no problems at all - threading issues never even came up on my radar as an issue. For standard web apps they're really not necessary.
Putting things in a 'set' variable - sounds like you're meaning application vars - again, emulating is no big deal.
Not getting into a flame war, but there's pretty much nothing you can do in your JSP model that I can't do with a PHP model, and probably just as quickly.
JSP doesn't support true threading - the underlying servlet engine does, but JSP itself doesn't.
Email me offlist if you want to continue this - I'd like to know what your 'universal login' system is doing that's so complex.
I wrote a song about this guy, here goes...
Doot doot doo...
I suck with php
Doot doot doo...
so I'm gonna use jsp
A-doobie doobie doo...
don't know wtf i'm doin
Banana-wow
but the book i bought says enterprise and java on it so I must be on the right track
Excellent post - I'd have modded it up, but I've already posted. :(
Yeah, not quite an ontopic reply re: the JSP book, but what about PHP was not up to creating a universal login system? *mysql* might not be depending on your traffic, but that's not really anything to do with PHP.
I had a quick knee-jerk 'wtf?' reaction to your statement, but I am genuinely curious as to what you found the shortcoming to be that necessitated a switch to JSP.
Are you saying Apple HAS or HAS NOT survived 'in this way'? I couldn't quite tell.
Apple doesn't seem to have more than about 5% of the desktop market - probably a lot of 'fanatics' as you'd say. But Apple is one of the most centralized companies out there, imo. So, which is it? Linux needs centralization, or decentralization?
Many people seem to think so, but it really wasn't... It started off as an excuse to test a new app framework we put together, just to see how quickly some type of basic interactive thing could be put together (regsitration, etc.). Didn't turn out too bad for a few hours work. :)
Good one! Alright! I've got quite a nice life, actually.
Not sure what qualifies that comment for 'wankerhood' - goodness! Anyone else who posts 'grab the code and make it do what you want yourself' is normally applauded as some sort of hero for having the 'guts' to think that everyone who uses a computer should be a kernel hacker. Don't know what changed in this case...
The "let's make this x" attitude could quite happily coincide with non-free software or non GNU-compliant packages by having the company or person that wrote the software accept user feedback as part of their development process.
Review and feedback is a tenet of the bazaar development model, but it's not exclusive to GNU-compliant packages. There has been many a closed-source developer that still listened to their users and made improvements that were requested.
Indeed, one could make the argument that someone developing commercial closed-source software has more of an impetus to do so, because if it doesn't do what people want, it won't sell, and if it doesn't sell, the developers don't eat.
In the poster's point about email clients, whether it was open or closed source, end users providing feedback may be all that's necessary to make it the best email client. To be certain, perhaps most of the users can't even read source code to begin with, and so could only possibly give feedback anyway.
I understand the theory, but I'm not sure if your suggestion is on the mark or not.
"If one proves to be better, it will surpass the other. "
How can that be, if there is no agreement on standards? The fact that KDE can do something the GNOME can not is not evidence to a majority that KDE is 'better', so how can it 'surpass' GNOME?
MS Word is dominant now not so much because it 'surpassed' Word Perfect in terms of features. We had competition in that market - but that didn't spur them both to be better products. One got consumed by the other due to other forces.
It seems that the Linux community will adamantly opposed ANY efforts to get rid of Gnome or KDE or merge them precisely because many people WANT this perceived competition. How many improvements in KDE or Gnome have come about because one team looked at features in the other and said 'Hey cool, we'll add that?' - this isn't rhetorical - I've not followed the development of either that closely, so I don't know. Has it happened?
I thought simply having the source code itself, and taking input from other developers, was enough for a project to flourish. Now we need competing versions of the same thing to divide development time up?
Of course you know the reply to this is to 'get the code and do it yourself'. :)
Excellent reply. Too often 'free software'/'GNU' type users/coders/people get caught up in 'this is the best GNU code ever', etc.
:)
You're right - coming from Outlook, it would probably look or feel or operate like crap. I think too many hardcore developers use MS stuff - the hardcore ones I know don't. They avoid it religiously, but end up not knowing what 'regular' users expectations are.
Slightly off topic, BUT... I installed Star Office on my Caldera 2.4 desktop earlier this year. It sucked. I don't know about functionality, but the whole interface sucked - this is probably more to do with KDE, but the fonts were HORRIBLY jagged. I couldn't use it for more than about 10 minutes. I use MS Office now and then, and the difference was night and day. Sure, to an average Linux hax0r, Star Office might be useable, but it was definitely not something I would foist on unsuspecting users. (Actually, most linux hax0rs would probably just use vim or write their own text editor, send it to postscript, etc.).
I'm getting off topic - back to to work...
Probably not much difference, except that Ebay would be claiming they're the first.
Now, having said that and looking at what I wrote yesterday, there's a new light to look at it in, because someone posted the abstract of their patent. Compare their text with what you're doing - it's still in the vein of online auctions. Although your car dealership doesn't have a fixed price necessarily, cars aren't normally dealt with in an auction setting (unless it's a car auction!) I'm straying offtopic, and don't mean to - have a look at the patent text...
Doesn't matter if others are doing it - if Ebay can prove they were the first, they'v got a shot.
Unique is probably not the precise term, but something's uniqueness (or originality - if something is original it was by definition unique at some point because it was the first) is a factor in patentability.
The issue of stock photos vs. actual photos - well, again, this comes down to opinion, but it seems fairly original to me. If buying a used camera from someone, I'd rather see the actual camera I'm buying, box and all, not just a picture of a particular model from Kodak. I might see some damage, or perhaps unique markings or colorings (camera is not best example here). I've not seen other sites do this, that deal in this kind of stuff. One is supposedly an indication of the specific physical item I'll get - another is a generic substitute.
I'm not saying it's RIGHT, but that it may in fact be possible. If someone can TRY to patent hyperlinks, 'one click' anything, etc. an 'original' way of quickly seeing multiple auction items is certainly a candidate for a patent. Whether or not it'd stand up later in court is another story.
There *could* be an element of 'uniqueness' to their approach. I don't know of too many commerce sites that let you see a thumbnail gallery of the actual items you're able to buy - usually only professionally done photographs of stock items.
And how many auction sites do this? Again, it's not a case of 'I've seen thumbnail galleries before, so ebay can't do it cause it's prior art' - they're not saying they invented thumbnail galleries. What they'd be claiming is that they've invented a unique business process of some sort. If the scope is narrowed some, they might be the first auction site to do this, making it unique and perhaps patentable.
Whoops!
Looks like this one uses LibSWF after all - sorry! My mistake!
It APPEARS that this Perl one is completely scripted - I mean it's all Perl code. The PHP ones I've seen all rely on a library (libswf or ming) being compiled, then (generally) compiled into the copy of PHP you're running. Probably could dl() them in, but they still apparently rely on external libraries. From what I can tell after a quick perusal, this project is all Perl code.
Not too dissimilar to the charges that MS and Oracle licensing (and probably others) prohibit publication of benchmarks without prior written approval.
:)
I've not gotten all the way thru my MS SQL7 license to know if it's completely true or not, but it wouldn't suprise me at all. This type of 'agreement' doesn't seem too far out of the norm, or at least where the norm may be soon.
"You can only do business with us as long as you don't ever tell anyone at all anything about us, our products, our service or what we do." Seems to cover most of the bases...
I submitted a story about this last week after the Wired article, but it was rejected. :(
.3k/s or greater. Again, couldn't see any TOS to verify this or not, but that's not a whole lot of bandwidth.
What I found extremely interesting was that I couldn't find the terms of service anywhere. I actually signed up for an account (old CC number, so it wouldn't go thru) but at no time was I actually even offered the option of seeing what I was agreeing to.
The Wired article pointed out that for 'unlimited' bandwidth, you were actually charged $1/k for traffic over a sustained transfer rate of
I guess their point was yes, it's unlimited bandwidth, but that doesn't mean you'll only pay $24.95/month (or whatever the rate was).
I was very surprised the guy lasted as long as he did, charging people THOUSANDS of dollars, then defending himself by saying they didn't 'understand the technical nature of hosting', etc. Wouldn't the banks get suspicious? You have 200 charges of $24.95/month for 18 months, then 3 charges of $10,000, then hundreds more $24.95s. I think that SHOULD raise some eyebrows, just like my CC usage causes calls from the CC company occasionally - "you've never charged anything over $200 in the past 10 years we've known you, and you just charged $10,000 in 5 different states in 10 minutes. Is everything OK?"
Hmmm....
HTML - I think webstandards.org would have something to say about MS' support of HTML 'standards'. There are published specifications about how HTML should work. They don't adhere to those standards. Should they or shouldn't they is another debate, but they don't.
MARQUEE - 'standard' tag in HTML? Yes, NS had 'blink' and got yelled at for it to, from a 'standards' POV
SSL - ack - I can't find the URL. We were just tracking down SSL problems in the latest IE last week. OK, OK, maybe not a full 'standards' issue, but someone was monkeying around with something to make something as basic as encryption which USED to work in a product NOT work in an upgrade. (cheap shot, yes, but the sites we were reasearching this on were coming to the same conclusion).
HTTP - Our HTTP headers indentifying pages we were creating as 'gzipped' quit working in later versions of IE (something like IE 5.00.2610 and below worked - above didn't). Either they DIDN'T support the HTTP protocal re: GZIP before then, and fixed it, breaking our scheme, or they DID work, and broke it. Our code didn't change - just versions of IE. Which was it? They were broke and fixed it, or worked before and purposefully 'enhanced' it to not work with the same headers which used to work?
Kerberos - I need say no more than go read some old slashdot articles on this topic.
These are just a few examples of 'standards' where MS wasn't quite up to par. Whether or not they SHOULD be is a different point.
The author referenced WarGames in the paragraph describing the atmosphere of the 1980's regading media portrayal of 'online communications', not the 1990's.