I know you can pick which port you want to use with the viewer. But no, I haven't used it in a scenario where I didn't control the firewall I was behind. UltraVNC does offer a repeater that is supposed to solve this problem, though YMMV.
For online presentations, I use Ultra VNC's Java viewer. I setup a webpage that automatically detects the remote desktop size and pops up the VNC viewer window properly scaled to fit, works like a charm. All they need is Java installed and the ability to click a single link.
For just plain presentations where the remote people see your desktop and you use the telephone for audio this setup works about as well as GoToMeeting does. If you don't have the ability to host your own conference calls, there are several free conference call companies out there, just search google for "free conference call".
Yes, the contact-less RFID or similar cards are very handy.
Especially in areas where people are often carrying stuff, like datacenters and storage areas. In these areas place the readers at hip/waste height as close to the door frame as possible and turn the sensitivity up. This way when you're carrying a server in to the locked server room you don't have to pull the card out, just leave it in your pocket and walk on by, using your back or foot to open the door once it is unlocked.
This is excellent. Hopefully Evolution on Win32 works just as well as it does on Linux and starts to catch on.
In my opinion Evolution for Win32 will play a critical role in companies switching their desktops to Linux. I think its pretty clear that the most successfully way to migrate people to Linux is to first migrate their windows applications to open source or cross-platform ones, then once they are comfortable migrate their operating system to Linux.
Having applications like Evolution that are cross-platform will only help this process along.
So far the best "backup" software I've used is rsync.
I used to work at one of the worlds most well known web hosting companies where among other things I ran their backup system. It started out with Arkeia and a 120tape library with 6 AIT3 drives. Arkeia was crap though (this was 3yrs ago), it was such a pain to setup and the trying to restore ANY amount of data would literally take days just to scan its local database. Trying to restore just one file would take 6hrs just for it to scan its local database... On a dual processor box with SCSI drives and 1gb of ram.
We moved to Veritas NetBackup, which was a dream to work with compared to Arkeia, but it too had issues (besides its cost). You could tell the software had been around for ages, it was far from being easy to use, or even efficient, but compared to Arkeia, it was a dream. It would start like 10+ processes, and every now and then one would die, causing everything to silently stop working and you would have restart them all. This usually caused at least one days worth of backups to fail. When you had 1TB of data to get in a 8hr window from a few hundred machines, it didn't take much to miss your window.
Tape backups are just a pain to use. They are slow to backup, and even slower to restore from. They need constant cleaning, and from my experience the drives fail more often then harddisks do. It seemed we were replacing about two tape drives a year. They aren't cheap either. Ouch!
The best backup system I've used so far is rsync with its nifty snapshot ability.
I setup the backup system for a company with locations in 10 different cities (connected with broadband), where each location has its own Linux server, and a central backup server at the main branch. Each employee has a H: which maps to a Samba share on the cities local Linux server, they save all their data to this location, and twice a day the main backup server rsync's the data back to the head office. Since this process happens twice a day, the amount of data that changes is quite minimal, a few hundred megs or less across the entire company, so it only takes a couple hours at most. The main backup server keeps these twice daily snapshots for about two months, and each week the main backup server itself is backed up to tapes. Luckily we have never had the need to restore from the tapes...
So basically all data is stored locally on a RAID'd server, then remotely on a RAID'd server at head office (twice daily), then offsite on tapes (weekly). The main benefit though is that executives, or the technical staff can pull data off the main backup server from any date in the last two months immediately, just by using Windows Explorer. No need to restore from tapes, and all the data is redundant in 3 locations. To do a restore, we basically just reverse the rsync script, and push the selected data from the main backup server back out to the local server.
Don't eliminate, or even reduce taxes on gasoline. Its going away as we know it, its just a matter of time. If they reduce the taxes on it just prolongs the problem. Better to find an alternative now then when gas is $8/gallon and the problem is 10x worse.
Instead, significantly reduce or eliminate the taxes on any alternative fuel, alternative fuel vehicles, alternative fuel research & development and everything else in the chain of getting alternative fuel to the people. Heck, include income tax in this too... If the company you work for qualifies as an "alternative fuel" company, its employees are exempt from income tax.
Once a solution is found, its easy to start taxing these areas again.
I prefer the current development model over the old one, upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 was much more difficult then it should have been, mostly due to the learning curve though I think.
However the current development model does "seem" to have introduced more instability into the kernel then I remember. (My box at home seems to crash every 17days like clockwork.) Even with the 2.6.x.y releases, they are only maintained for a couple.x releases, so even those don't get a chance to stabilize much. I haven't NOTICED a new kernel feature in quite some time, so I would rather get the additional stability until I realize there are features available that I could make use of.
Why not something like every kernel that is evenly divisible by 5, (or 10?) is considered a "stable" kernel. 2.6.20, 2.6.25, 2.6.30, and commit to supporting 2.6.x.y releases on those versions for a minimum set of time, perhaps 6months. 6 months seems to be about the average cycle of distro releases, so that may work pretty well.
This should give the best of both worlds, longer "stable" kernel releases then we have now, and still the fast developement/test cycle that the current development model offers.
Reiser3 is FAR from abandoned by Namesys. Anyone can post patches to it and get them in the kernel, Hans has no control over that, and it has been proven because SuSE developers have gotten patches in to the kernel against Hans wishes.
ReiserFS3 is "version 3" of the Reiser filesystem. Hans wants it to be deemed "stable" and free from new FEATURES, and only bug fixes be applied. Any new features he wants to put in the next version of ReiserFS, v4. Rarely do you see MAJOR features from Kernel v2.6 being backported to v2.4, there is reason for that, because with features comes bugs.
For some reason people consider this to be abandoning Reiser3. When it is quite the opposite.
"In mid-October, Apple unveiled its long-rumored video iPod and started making some TV downloads and Pixar shorts available through its popular iTunes service. Navin says that the Google and Apple moves are both competition, but that BitTorrent's market will offer much more than just movies and TV shows. Plus, he speculates that Apple is paying "an astronomical price for bandwidth."
For anyone big, bandwidth becomes more and more of a non-issue. Only the little guys actually pay a significant amount for it.
Having worked for a web hosting company that went from small, averaging only 50mbits/sec in total, to over 800mbits/sec their overall bandwidth costs actually went DOWN. Why? Because once they started pushing over 100-200mbits/sec they could sign free, or next to free peering agreements with major Tier 1 providers. As long as you don't piss them off, and the agreement continues to be mutually benficial you get "free" bandwidth.
I'm sure Apple and any other big players pay fractions of a cent on the dollar for bandwidth.
I still believe Cohen's company can help out the little guys sell their wares, at least until they push enough bandwidth that it becomes cheaper to host the content themselves. I doubt you'll ever see Apple or the MPAA paying him money to host content though.
This is something I've been thinking about myself. I have a pretty large web based application that I currently sell access to, and I've been thinking about open sourcing it, free for anyone to use and contribute to.
The problem though is I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars/year developing it, so I don't want John Doe Computer Geek to take it and with little to no investment undercut my prices and sell access to it on his own server.
Is there a license out there similar to the GPL that forbids someone from competing for commercial gain, or charity (free service) against the original copyright holder? This seems like a way to encourage companies to release their code, without putting their business model in jeopardy from doing so.
I would hold off on the PVR-150,500 just yet. I purchased one almost a month ago now and have yet to get it to work. Many other people are reporting issues with it as well.
How does this classify as being treated like a criminal? I always get a kick out of employees who constantly complain about no loyality left in the work place, and how bad they are always treated.
Were you in handcuffs and a orange jump suit? Put in to a police car with lights and sirens running? C'mon.
Put yourself in the companies shoes for once.
1. Companies are required BY LAW to give severance pay and/or notice when laying off employees. Employees can just up and leave any minute they choose for the most part. Not only that, a lot of employees that at least have the decency to give notice are usually an order of magnitude less productive in those last couple weeks. In the companies eyes it would have been less expensive to just leave and not give any notice.
2. If a company is getting rid of an employee, don't you think its in their best interest to not take ANY chances? It doesn't matter if you've worked there 50 years or not, they owe it to their customers and other employees to remove your access and get you out of the building ASAP, "just in case". It only takes one bad apple to cause major havoc.
3. Companies have a lot of people to keep in mind when they do business. Share holders, employees, customers. If a company is experiencing hard financial times, in a lot of cases (not all of course) it makes sense to get rid of the highest paid people. If you've been there for 10 years, not only are you normally get paid more then other people, you also get more time off, and require more severance pay. Since getting rid of one high paid employee can in a lot of cases fund two lower paid ones, it also doesn't look as bad to the public. Also because of the severance pay requirements, sometimes companies have to think years in advance, especially in your case. If you have to pay out 12months worth of wages to get rid of someone, you better make sure you do it at the right time and not wait until its too late.
Yes, some companies are evil, but put yourself in their shoes sometimes.
I used to work in the large hosting business, and the gay porn sites were usually premium customers to have. The running joke around the office was if we ever wanted to make quick cash, it would be to get in the gay porn business.
You wouldn't believe how much traffic they push, and the money they are willing to spend on servers.
Of course, the problem was always if they called support and complained that their images weren't showing up...
I would like to see something similar, and even started building it myself. However as always time is a factor.
It is "usable" as far as getting recommendations from hundreds of other MythTV users. However its only "console based" at this point, but its ready for anyone to build a native MythTV gui for it at anytime.
I would be happy to work with you on such a project if you like. I have many other ideas of things to implement, just haven't gotten around to it yet.
You do have 10 fingers, so if your thumb print gets stolen, you could change to your middle finger print instead.
You could also use different fingers for different purposes, so if one print gets stolen, it only lets them in to certain places.
The only difference between finger prints and a password is you only have 10 fingers to choose from.
Quite a few places REQUIRE a PIN along with your finger print anyways. So it doesn't matter if your prints are stolen really, they still need to guess your PIN.
Take Apache for example, just because it has a "critical mass installbase" doesn't make it any less secure then it was previous to that point.
Regardless, in my opinion anyone who thinks open source software is more secure than closed source is fooling themselves. In both cases human beings are writing the code. The big advantage open source has is that a fix can be released the instant it is completed. No formal QA teams to go through, no legal department to consult, no inefficient policies to follow, no press releases required to put a positive spin on a negative event need to be written, and no investors to consider, it is just done.
For me, thats where the "cozy feeling" comes from.
I believed MS Office has faster startup times than OpenOffice because of all the pre-caching, until I installed CrossOver Office and MS Office 2000 on my Linux box.
Word and Excel both start in literally 2-3 seconds using WINE even, where OpenOffice still takes almost 20seconds.
Hardly a double standard at all. Employers can show you the door anytime they want, as long as they give you a minimum of TWO WEEKS PAY! (In Canada anyways) Assuming you didn't do anything that justified them (according to the labor standards act) to fire you on the spot.
It's only fair that an employee gives two weeks notice before he/she leaves. The employee could always give back two weeks of pay I suppose to make it "truly" fair, but like anyone would do that.
If anything, the employer gets screwed 99.9% of the time.
Benchmark comparing virtually every major file system against each other. They are fairly old, but I doubt things have changed significantly since they were run.
I used to work for a large web hosting company that wrote there billing software frontend in Delphi, and kept all the business logic in stored procedures on MS-SQL. It got so bad, they even ended up having a stored procedure that generated HTML/Text invoices for customers! Ever tried doing text layout in a stored procedure? It was absolutely nuts, but once they had started putting all the business logic (and much more) in stored procedures, its hard to stop without "splitting the code-base".
They were also scared to upgrade from MS-SQL 6.0 to anything newer for fear of it breaking their stored procedures. They tried at least once and failed miserably. As far as I know, to this day, they are still running MS-SQL 6.0.
This whole issue basically put a strangle hold on the company, it took forever to "innovate" and they eventually got bought out. The new parent company has spent over a year trying to migrate away from this "stored procedure" mess.
I think stored procedures are good, but only in very specific circumstances. If you design and code your application properly, there is usually very little need to start down the slippery slope of stored procedures.
Not that any other open source project has changed their license in the past. XFree86 dot org
If Zend decides to do something stupid with PHP, it will simply be forked.
Zend has been around for quite a while. At least since PHP4 was released years ago, if I recall correctly. My guess is they are doing relatively well, and having a company that actually makes some money backing an open source project is a _good thing_ (tm).
It means for the most part that the project will be pushed ahead with customers in mind, and won't die off from lack of time by the developers, or head in a completely wrong direction due to the developers growing out of touch with reality.
There is no reason to treat every company as if they are the next Microsoft. Not every single company is evil by nature. We should be encouraging companies that actually find a way to make money off open source projects.
Re:Scalability and Maintainability go hand in hand
on
On PHP and Scaling
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"a module architechture that doesn't require you to recompile"
Your kidding right?
urpmi php-mysql php-pgsql php-curl php-xml php-sockets service httpd restart
See any "make; make install" commands in there?
How is that not modular?
Nearly everything in PHP is a module (or PHP's term, an extension) that can be installed or removed without recompiling.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you can pick which port you want to use with the viewer. But no, I haven't used it in a scenario where I didn't control the firewall I was behind. UltraVNC does offer a repeater that is supposed to solve this problem, though YMMV.
For online presentations, I use Ultra VNC's Java viewer. I setup a webpage that automatically detects the remote desktop size and pops up the VNC viewer window properly scaled to fit, works like a charm. All they need is Java installed and the ability to click a single link.
For just plain presentations where the remote people see your desktop and you use the telephone for audio this setup works about as well as GoToMeeting does. If you don't have the ability to host your own conference calls, there are several free conference call companies out there, just search google for "free conference call".
Yes, the contact-less RFID or similar cards are very handy.
Especially in areas where people are often carrying stuff, like datacenters and storage areas. In these areas place the readers at hip/waste height as close to the door frame as possible and turn the sensitivity up. This way when you're carrying a server in to the locked server room you don't have to pull the card out, just leave it in your pocket and walk on by, using your back or foot to open the door once it is unlocked.
This is excellent. Hopefully Evolution on Win32 works just as well as it does on Linux and starts to catch on.
In my opinion Evolution for Win32 will play a critical role in companies switching their desktops to Linux. I think its pretty clear that the most successfully way to migrate people to Linux is to first migrate their windows applications to open source or cross-platform ones, then once they are comfortable migrate their operating system to Linux.
Having applications like Evolution that are cross-platform will only help this process along.
So far the best "backup" software I've used is rsync.
I used to work at one of the worlds most well known web hosting companies where among other things I ran their backup system. It started out with Arkeia and a 120tape library with 6 AIT3 drives. Arkeia was crap though (this was 3yrs ago), it was such a pain to setup and the trying to restore ANY amount of data would literally take days just to scan its local database. Trying to restore just one file would take 6hrs just for it to scan its local database... On a dual processor box with SCSI drives and 1gb of ram.
We moved to Veritas NetBackup, which was a dream to work with compared to Arkeia, but it too had issues (besides its cost). You could tell the software had been around for ages, it was far from being easy to use, or even efficient, but compared to Arkeia, it was a dream. It would start like 10+ processes, and every now and then one would die, causing everything to silently stop working and you would have restart them all. This usually caused at least one days worth of backups to fail. When you had 1TB of data to get in a 8hr window from a few hundred machines, it didn't take much to miss your window.
Tape backups are just a pain to use. They are slow to backup, and even slower to restore from. They need constant cleaning, and from my experience the drives fail more often then harddisks do. It seemed we were replacing about two tape drives a year. They aren't cheap either. Ouch!
The best backup system I've used so far is rsync with its nifty snapshot ability.
I setup the backup system for a company with locations in 10 different cities (connected with broadband), where each location has its own Linux server, and a central backup server at the main branch. Each employee has a H: which maps to a Samba share on the cities local Linux server, they save all their data to this location, and twice a day the main backup server rsync's the data back to the head office. Since this process happens twice a day, the amount of data that changes is quite minimal, a few hundred megs or less across the entire company, so it only takes a couple hours at most. The main backup server keeps these twice daily snapshots for about two months, and each week the main backup server itself is backed up to tapes. Luckily we have never had the need to restore from the tapes...
So basically all data is stored locally on a RAID'd server, then remotely on a RAID'd server at head office (twice daily), then offsite on tapes (weekly). The main benefit though is that executives, or the technical staff can pull data off the main backup server from any date in the last two months immediately, just by using Windows Explorer. No need to restore from tapes, and all the data is redundant in 3 locations. To do a restore, we basically just reverse the rsync script, and push the selected data from the main backup server back out to the local server.
Works like a charm, and its free!
Is it just me, or does the person at the front of the elevator holding the bag look "odd" ?
It looks like a guys head/hair cut, some moderately muscular arms... wearing a SKIRT, white panty hose, and womens shoes!
Oh, wait... Its an Apple store. Nevermind, nothing to see here.
Don't eliminate, or even reduce taxes on gasoline. Its going away as we know it, its just a matter of time. If they reduce the taxes on it just prolongs the problem. Better to find an alternative now then when gas is $8/gallon and the problem is 10x worse.
Instead, significantly reduce or eliminate the taxes on any alternative fuel, alternative fuel vehicles, alternative fuel research & development and everything else in the chain of getting alternative fuel to the people. Heck, include income tax in this too... If the company you work for qualifies as an "alternative fuel" company, its employees are exempt from income tax.
Once a solution is found, its easy to start taxing these areas again.
I prefer the current development model over the old one, upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6 was much more difficult then it should have been, mostly due to the learning curve though I think.
.x releases, so even those don't get a chance to stabilize much. I haven't NOTICED a new kernel feature in quite some time, so I would rather get the additional stability until I realize there are features available that I could make use of.
However the current development model does "seem" to have introduced more instability into the kernel then I remember. (My box at home seems to crash every 17days like clockwork.) Even with the 2.6.x.y releases, they are only maintained for a couple
Why not something like every kernel that is evenly divisible by 5, (or 10?) is considered a "stable" kernel. 2.6.20, 2.6.25, 2.6.30, and commit to supporting 2.6.x.y releases on those versions for a minimum set of time, perhaps 6months. 6 months seems to be about the average cycle of distro releases, so that may work pretty well.
This should give the best of both worlds, longer "stable" kernel releases then we have now, and still the fast developement/test cycle that the current development model offers.
Reiser3 is FAR from abandoned by Namesys. Anyone can post patches to it and get them in the kernel, Hans has no control over that, and it has been proven because SuSE developers have gotten patches in to the kernel against Hans wishes.
ReiserFS3 is "version 3" of the Reiser filesystem. Hans wants it to be deemed "stable" and free from new FEATURES, and only bug fixes be applied. Any new features he wants to put in the next version of ReiserFS, v4. Rarely do you see MAJOR features from Kernel v2.6 being backported to v2.4, there is reason for that, because with features comes bugs.
For some reason people consider this to be abandoning Reiser3. When it is quite the opposite.
"In mid-October, Apple unveiled its long-rumored video iPod and started making some TV downloads and Pixar shorts available through its popular iTunes service. Navin says that the Google and Apple moves are both competition, but that BitTorrent's market will offer much more than just movies and TV shows. Plus, he speculates that Apple is paying "an astronomical price for bandwidth."
For anyone big, bandwidth becomes more and more of a non-issue. Only the little guys actually pay a significant amount for it.
Having worked for a web hosting company that went from small, averaging only 50mbits/sec in total, to over 800mbits/sec their overall bandwidth costs actually went DOWN. Why? Because once they started pushing over 100-200mbits/sec they could sign free, or next to free peering agreements with major Tier 1 providers. As long as you don't piss them off, and the agreement continues to be mutually benficial you get "free" bandwidth.
I'm sure Apple and any other big players pay fractions of a cent on the dollar for bandwidth.
I still believe Cohen's company can help out the little guys sell their wares, at least until they push enough bandwidth that it becomes cheaper to host the content themselves. I doubt you'll ever see Apple or the MPAA paying him money to host content though.
This is something I've been thinking about myself. I have a pretty large web based application that I currently sell access to, and I've been thinking about open sourcing it, free for anyone to use and contribute to.
The problem though is I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars/year developing it, so I don't want John Doe Computer Geek to take it and with little to no investment undercut my prices and sell access to it on his own server.
Is there a license out there similar to the GPL that forbids someone from competing for commercial gain, or charity (free service) against the original copyright holder? This seems like a way to encourage companies to release their code, without putting their business model in jeopardy from doing so.
Propel is the best I've seen. I'm not a java programmer but apparently its based on a similar java framework.
http://propel.phpdb.org/docs/user_guide/
I would hold off on the PVR-150,500 just yet. I purchased one almost a month ago now and have yet to get it to work. Many other people are reporting issues with it as well.
The 250/350's should work really well though.
How does this classify as being treated like a criminal? I always get a kick out of employees who constantly complain about no loyality left in the work place, and how bad they are always treated.
Were you in handcuffs and a orange jump suit? Put in to a police car with lights and sirens running? C'mon.
Put yourself in the companies shoes for once.
1. Companies are required BY LAW to give severance pay and/or notice when laying off employees. Employees can just up and leave any minute they choose for the most part. Not only that, a lot of employees that at least have the decency to give notice are usually an order of magnitude less productive in those last couple weeks. In the companies eyes it would have been less expensive to just leave and not give any notice.
2. If a company is getting rid of an employee, don't you think its in their best interest to not take ANY chances? It doesn't matter if you've worked there 50 years or not, they owe it to their customers and other employees to remove your access and get you out of the building ASAP, "just in case". It only takes one bad apple to cause major havoc.
3. Companies have a lot of people to keep in mind when they do business. Share holders, employees, customers. If a company is experiencing hard financial times, in a lot of cases (not all of course) it makes sense to get rid of the highest paid people. If you've been there for 10 years, not only are you normally get paid more then other people, you also get more time off, and require more severance pay. Since getting rid of one high paid employee can in a lot of cases fund two lower paid ones, it also doesn't look as bad to the public. Also because of the severance pay requirements, sometimes companies have to think years in advance, especially in your case. If you have to pay out 12months worth of wages to get rid of someone, you better make sure you do it at the right time and not wait until its too late.
Yes, some companies are evil, but put yourself in their shoes sometimes.
I used to work in the large hosting business, and the gay porn sites were usually premium customers to have. The running joke around the office was if we ever wanted to make quick cash, it would be to get in the gay porn business.
;)
You wouldn't believe how much traffic they push, and the money they are willing to spend on servers.
Of course, the problem was always if they called support and complained that their images weren't showing up...
God bless Lynx.
err... Sorry, that link would be:
http://ipso.snappymail.ca:8080/mythrecommend/
I would like to see something similar, and even started building it myself. However as always time is a factor.
It is "usable" as far as getting recommendations from hundreds of other MythTV users. However its only "console based" at this point, but its ready for anyone to
build a native MythTV gui for it at anytime.
I would be happy to work with you on such a project if you like. I have many other ideas of things to implement, just haven't gotten around to it yet.
http://ipso.snappymail.ca/mythrecommend/
You do have 10 fingers, so if your thumb print gets stolen, you could change to your middle finger print instead.
You could also use different fingers for different purposes, so if one print gets stolen, it only lets them in to certain places.
The only difference between finger prints and a password is you only have 10 fingers to choose from.
Quite a few places REQUIRE a PIN along with your finger print anyways. So it doesn't matter if your prints are stolen really, they still need to guess your PIN.
I don't see how your argument holds any water.
Take Apache for example, just because it has a "critical mass installbase" doesn't make it any less secure then it was previous to that point.
Regardless, in my opinion anyone who thinks open source software is more secure than closed source is fooling themselves. In both cases human beings are writing the code. The big advantage open source has is that a fix can be released the instant it is completed. No formal QA teams to go through, no legal department to consult, no inefficient policies to follow, no press releases required to put a positive spin on a negative event need to be written, and no investors to consider, it is just done.
For me, thats where the "cozy feeling" comes from.
I believed MS Office has faster startup times than OpenOffice because of all the pre-caching, until I installed CrossOver Office and MS Office 2000 on my Linux box.
Word and Excel both start in literally 2-3 seconds using WINE even, where OpenOffice still takes almost 20seconds.
Hardly a double standard at all. Employers can show you the door anytime they want, as long as they give you a minimum of TWO WEEKS PAY! (In Canada anyways) Assuming you didn't do anything that justified them (according to the labor standards act) to fire you on the spot.
It's only fair that an employee gives two weeks notice before he/she leaves. The employee could always give back two weeks of pay I suppose to make it "truly" fair, but like anyone would do that.
If anything, the employer gets screwed 99.9% of the time.
Benchmark comparing virtually every major file system against each other. They are fairly old, but I doubt things have changed significantly since they were run.
fsbench.netnation.com
It's a slippery slope...
I used to work for a large web hosting company that wrote there billing software frontend in Delphi, and kept all the business logic in stored procedures on MS-SQL. It got so bad, they even ended up having a stored procedure that generated HTML/Text invoices for customers! Ever tried doing text layout in a stored procedure? It was absolutely nuts, but once they had started putting all the business logic (and much more) in stored procedures, its hard to stop without "splitting the code-base".
They were also scared to upgrade from MS-SQL 6.0 to anything newer for fear of it breaking their stored procedures. They tried at least once and failed miserably. As far as I know, to this day, they are still running MS-SQL 6.0.
This whole issue basically put a strangle hold on the company, it took forever to "innovate" and they eventually got bought out. The new parent company has spent over a year trying to migrate away from this "stored procedure" mess.
I think stored procedures are good, but only in very specific circumstances. If you design and code your application properly, there is usually very little need to start down the slippery slope of stored procedures.
Not that any other open source project has changed their license in the past. XFree86 dot org
If Zend decides to do something stupid with PHP, it will simply be forked.
Zend has been around for quite a while. At least since PHP4 was released years ago, if I recall correctly. My guess is they are doing relatively well, and having a company that actually makes some money backing an open source project is a _good thing_ (tm).
It means for the most part that the project will be pushed ahead with customers in mind, and won't die off from lack of time by the developers, or head in a completely wrong direction due to the developers growing out of touch with reality.
There is no reason to treat every company as if they are the next Microsoft. Not every single company is evil by nature. We should be encouraging companies that actually find a way to make money off open source projects.
"a module architechture that doesn't require you to recompile"
Your kidding right?
urpmi php-mysql php-pgsql php-curl php-xml php-sockets
service httpd restart
See any "make; make install" commands in there?
How is that not modular?
Nearly everything in PHP is a module (or PHP's term, an extension) that can be installed or removed without recompiling.