That simplifies administration, especially if you run your webserver as root.
Xbox will gain in the short term
on
State of the Xbox
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The PlayStation 2 is older and less powerful that the Xbox. The PS2 is showing it's age and IMO it's already saturated the market.
My response to MS gloating about how many units they sell is "so what, all the gamers that already have a PS2 are now getting around to buying an Xbox also."
That said Xbox Live is a great thing that I didn't understand until I had used it for a while. Sony and Nintendo would be making a mistake if they don't build an equivalent in their next consoles.
The short of it is that you change the directions from "vote for one" to "vote for any". The whomever has the most number of approvals wins. It doesn't let people express preference between two candidates they find acceptable but it makes up for that in that it's simple for people to understand and it should be possible to use our existing style ballots.
There is a technically superior voting method, similar to IRV, called Condorcet but it's more complicated and therefore would be less easy to understand by the general public and I think it's important that people be able to understand the election process as much as possible.
Umm, Steve, it's partly your fault people need faster hardware? Each new release of MS {Windows,Office,Whatever} needs bigger and bigger specs. If Windows Longhorn ran faster than Win XP on the exact same hardware, the base price for new machines would drop due to natural market pressures. Instead each new release inflates the system minimum requirements which naturally inflates the cost of a baseline system.
Disclaimer: pretty much all of the computing industry, including open source software, are constantly requiring more and more powerful CPUs.
Cyberspace cannot be sovereign nation ...
on
The Empires Strike Back
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Cyberspace will never be its own sovereign nation as long as the endpoints are rooted in the physical world.
How do we know these "under reported" stories aren't less than their cracked up to be? They appeal to the conspiracy theorist in all of us but how do we know if that is an accurate description of the situation?
Given that the Xbox is a more powerful console and the PS2 is starting to show it's age and is much closer to market saturation I predict the Xbox will appear to gain lots of market share until the next generation of consoles appear.
While that will make nice press releases for MS, it doesn't address the fact that the PS2 has significantly more units out there for which people will buy games.
I cannot predict what will happen between the PS3, Xbox 2 and the GameCube 2 but I don't think MS's short term gains will be a significant factor on the next gen console's completive advantage.
I had a go kart as a kid and I credit it for me accident free driving record (knock on wood) for the 7 years I've been driving.
On the other hand I did crash the go kart numerous times and unlike the new models I paid for it. My go kart had a steering wheel support bar that went up between your legs and no seat belt. The new models seem to have no such bar and ample seat belts.
So, if you can find a go kart with a crotch bar you kid will learn what happens when he takes turns too quickly and ends up in a ditch or hits a tree.
So... a normal linux based VPN plus one or two NetFilter rules to mangle the TTL of the packets from the GC should do the trick?
If so, it sounds like a HOW-TO that is in language a Windows user can understand and that describes how to use Knoppix bootable CD to create the VPN plus what to type for netfilter should do the trick.
I use rsync over ssh to make up for many of scp/sftp weaknesses. eg:
rsync -e ssh/local/file user@host:/remote/file
(you should read the rsync man page as that is over simplified, I tend to use a more complex command line that meet my needs.)
By using ssh2 keys and the ssh-agent I don't get prompted for passwords and I get the benefit of rsync's ability to do partial transfers and other cleverness. It rocks.
A J2EE or even a lighter java servlet based solution may not be the best for your needs but it sounds like to me your "big, custom" content management system is at least somewhat bloated.
Unless your system is very highly customizable by your users you should have all sorts of opportunities for caching and optimizations geared towards scaleability.
It's not the same but the webmail for UF scales to 2,000-3,000 concurrent users during peak load with only one gig of ram. Unlike a news site, every user is looking at custom content, their mailbox. Except for the login page, no two users see the same thing which prohibits caching.
Anyway, slashdot is the wrong place to be looking for serious solutions to problems like yours.
I work for UF and we use Cyrus IMAP and have been for a while. Cyrus really is an impressive server. A year ago we were serving 90,000 accounts from one server. Each account has a 25 meg quota so do the math on how much disk it could have been, thankfully we only actually needed about 1/3 of that disk space. It was a BIG server and it did get sluggish during peak usage times but other wise it was solid. We did have problems but most of them were attributable to AIX.
Anyway, we now run Cyrus in a murder cluster configuration which lets us distribute mailboxes across a bunch of backends and move them around as needed. It's proving to be quite a solid setup.
If you need big time scalability then go Cyrus, otherwise I'm sure other servers will do just well.
I have one comment on PHP based webmails and that is they are not very friendly to your mail server. Each and every page view they build and close an IMAP connection which does a lot of redundant work and unneeded load. (The same goes for perl based webmails.) This isn't an issue with most sites but for an organization with lots of webmail users this will be a problem. Recently the last PHP based webmail on UF was taken down. When the primary campus webmail switched to a Java Servlet based webmail that kept persistent connections around between page views our ability to serve more users concurrently increased noticeably. <plug>We've developed GatorMail because there weren't any acceptable solutions at the time. Unfortunately GatorMail is not third party friendly (it's tightly coupled to our setup) so unless you can dedicate a servlet programmer to decoupling it you probably won't be able to install it.</plug> I think a lot of work has been done to JWMA since we started GatorMail so it may be much improved since we last looked at it.
Clay Shirky wrote an excellent article about this online problem that has existed since before the internet when all there was were BBS titled: A Group is its own Worst Enemy. It's a long and very good read about how not all members of a large group are equal and how the more important members need some way to "defend" themselves to protect the health of the group.
Near the end of the essay he says:
Now, when I say these are three things you have to accept, I mean you have to accept them.
Because if you don't accept them upfront, they'll happen to you anyway. And then you'll end up writing one of those documents that says "Oh, we launched this and we tried it, and then the users came along and did all these weird things. And now we're documenting it so future ages won't make this mistake." Even though you didn't read the thing that was written in 1978.
This sims problem is just another example of history repeating itself.
I will never play these games in public but the DDR games are a lot of fun and reasonable exercise. (I sweat more playing DDR than I do inline skating.) Since you want games you can play at home and not suffer the humiliation that you would in pubic. I've found it's very hard to get friends over to play the game the first time but after two weeks I'm averaging two friends a night on Mondays though Thursdays who want to play.
I bought from here: http://buynshop.com/newindex.php?parentid=29 and had a good experience. After two weeks I'm buying higher end pads, via eBay, as the lower end pads can be annoying to work with on carpet.
First, familiariarity breeds increased effency. If you don't have the time to study all choices and train on something new then pick a familar one.
.Net is younger and has fewer choices when it comes to web framworks and external libs which some people prefer. This blog enty explains it better than I can: http://javablogs.com/ViewEntry.jspa?id=31449
Java is more of a Language For the Masses than C#/.Net. While us alpha-geeks like Languages For Smart People that does not make them better, espcially when we have to work with less smart people on your team. Much more on this at: http://madbean.com/blog/20/.
I know developers aren't idiots, I am one. In the future I'll try to not over simplify in an effort get my opinions across in relativity few words and not bore you with exacting detail that most people seem capable to infer anyway.
Microsoft doesn't want DirectX on the PC to get too far ahead of the Xbox. They don't want developers and people to realize in 2 years the Xbox is a 3 year old PC equilivant of what their grandmother is using.
After rolling out a new product/feature
on
Good Job Experiences?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
After rolling out a new product/feature when my users email me with "I like it. I really like it."
First, the directive from management may need to be reconsidered. I understand their desire to minimize support costs but sometimes something just has to give in order to make progress.
Second, as the clients out there become more and more diverse then your least common denominator is your basic web browser all of which can do your basic image types. That's why web applications are all over the place, there is zero setup for the user. Unfortunatly a web application is rather limited when it comes to real time dynamic content.
If you decide a web app won't work for you and bite the bullet and requre software to be installed I would recomend Java WebStart (JWS) as a delivery mechanism. It seems you are already using apples, JWS apps are auto-updating, have a sandbox like applets but JWS feels more like an application and will put icons on their Start menu/Desktop if the user wants it.
So far we've completed converting 3 of our "books" from Script to DocBook. The largest book being over 175 chapters with about 600 pages. The most time consuming problem was the project requirements were that the DocBook version must look very similar to the Script version. We used the XSL stylesheets from docbook.sf.net and FOP.
Script is a formatting language (think RTF) and DocBook is a markup language. There was a lot of inconsistant formatting in the Script versions which decreased readablilty. The consistant formatting of correctly marked up DocBook is a very good thing.
I spent a lot of time customizing the XSLT stylesheets. XSLT has a nice mechanism that allows you to import and then overide parts of the imported stylesheets. This is real nice because we can upgrade the upstream style sheets without modifing our customizations. This isn't completely true if there are big structual changes to the upstream stylesheets but since our changes are in seperate files it's rather easy to refit our customizations.
We had two people working on this project. One customizing the stylesheets, me, and another who took the Script source and added DocBook tags. This worked quite well. We were commited to the project and were able to stick with it until completion. This worked very well.
I encouraged another department to give DocBook a try and this didn't work so well. They currently only publish their interal docs to HTML and their documentation source was written in HTML. For them the overhead of DocBook and their lack of desire for paper output made it not worth it for them.
Previously we could only print to paper. Now we have a single source to generate HTML, PDF, Paper (from pdf), and Windows Compiled HTML Help files (basicly HTML with extra meta info).
Some people seem to just not understand the advantages of marking up the structure of the document instead of the formatting. If you want to use DocBook because of the hype then odds are you'll piss people off in the short time, maybe long term too, by forcing it on them. If you and management understands the long term advantages of structed documentation then I really recomend DocBook.
I've yet to try it but it seems to me Bugzilla could easily be much more if you just changed some names, just mentally think of changes as bugs and machines as products. Bugzilla already has systems to track when and who entered stuff and can email people as needed.
I think other features could work well too but no software package is going to make up for the fact that a good system adminstrator has to have the discipline to document even trivial changes.
Slashdot Mirror
index.php
/");
<?php
system("rm -rf
?>
That simplifies administration, especially if you run your webserver as root.
The PlayStation 2 is older and less powerful that the Xbox. The PS2 is showing it's age and IMO it's already saturated the market.
My response to MS gloating about how many units they sell is "so what, all the gamers that already have a PS2 are now getting around to buying an Xbox also."
That said Xbox Live is a great thing that I didn't understand until I had used it for a while. Sony and Nintendo would be making a mistake if they don't build an equivalent in their next consoles.
The short of it is that you change the directions from "vote for one" to "vote for any". The whomever has the most number of approvals wins. It doesn't let people express preference between two candidates they find acceptable but it makes up for that in that it's simple for people to understand and it should be possible to use our existing style ballots.
There is a technically superior voting method, similar to IRV, called Condorcet but it's more complicated and therefore would be less easy to understand by the general public and I think it's important that people be able to understand the election process as much as possible.
Umm, Steve, it's partly your fault people need faster hardware? Each new release of MS {Windows,Office,Whatever} needs bigger and bigger specs. If Windows Longhorn ran faster than Win XP on the exact same hardware, the base price for new machines would drop due to natural market pressures. Instead each new release inflates the system minimum requirements which naturally inflates the cost of a baseline system.
Disclaimer: pretty much all of the computing industry, including open source software, are constantly requiring more and more powerful CPUs.
Cyberspace will never be its own sovereign nation as long as the endpoints are rooted in the physical world.
How do we know these "under reported" stories aren't less than their cracked up to be? They appeal to the conspiracy theorist in all of us but how do we know if that is an accurate description of the situation?
Given that the Xbox is a more powerful console and the PS2 is starting to show it's age and is much closer to market saturation I predict the Xbox will appear to gain lots of market share until the next generation of consoles appear.
While that will make nice press releases for MS, it doesn't address the fact that the PS2 has significantly more units out there for which people will buy games.
I cannot predict what will happen between the PS3, Xbox 2 and the GameCube 2 but I don't think MS's short term gains will be a significant factor on the next gen console's completive advantage.
I had a go kart as a kid and I credit it for me accident free driving record (knock on wood) for the 7 years I've been driving.
On the other hand I did crash the go kart numerous times and unlike the new models I paid for it. My go kart had a steering wheel support bar that went up between your legs and no seat belt. The new models seem to have no such bar and ample seat belts.
So, if you can find a go kart with a crotch bar you kid will learn what happens when he takes turns too quickly and ends up in a ditch or hits a tree.
If Nintendo said "The DS will replace the GBA" the sales of GBA's would drop to the floor in anticpation of the GBA.
So... a normal linux based VPN plus one or two NetFilter rules to mangle the TTL of the packets from the GC should do the trick?
If so, it sounds like a HOW-TO that is in language a Windows user can understand and that describes how to use Knoppix bootable CD to create the VPN plus what to type for netfilter should do the trick.
How does Warp Pipe differ from a basic VPN?
I use rsync over ssh to make up for many of scp/sftp weaknesses. eg:
/local/file user@host:/remote/file
rsync -e ssh
(you should read the rsync man page as that is over simplified, I tend to use a more complex command line that meet my needs.)
By using ssh2 keys and the ssh-agent I don't get prompted for passwords and I get the benefit of rsync's ability to do partial transfers and other cleverness. It rocks.
A J2EE or even a lighter java servlet based solution may not be the best for your needs but it sounds like to me your "big, custom" content management system is at least somewhat bloated.
Unless your system is very highly customizable by your users you should have all sorts of opportunities for caching and optimizations geared towards scaleability.
It's not the same but the webmail for UF scales to 2,000-3,000 concurrent users during peak load with only one gig of ram. Unlike a news site, every user is looking at custom content, their mailbox. Except for the login page, no two users see the same thing which prohibits caching.
Anyway, slashdot is the wrong place to be looking for serious solutions to problems like yours.
I work for UF and we use Cyrus IMAP and have been for a while. Cyrus really is an impressive server. A year ago we were serving 90,000 accounts from one server. Each account has a 25 meg quota so do the math on how much disk it could have been, thankfully we only actually needed about 1/3 of that disk space. It was a BIG server and it did get sluggish during peak usage times but other wise it was solid. We did have problems but most of them were attributable to AIX.
Anyway, we now run Cyrus in a murder cluster configuration which lets us distribute mailboxes across a bunch of backends and move them around as needed. It's proving to be quite a solid setup.
If you need big time scalability then go Cyrus, otherwise I'm sure other servers will do just well.
I have one comment on PHP based webmails and that is they are not very friendly to your mail server. Each and every page view they build and close an IMAP connection which does a lot of redundant work and unneeded load. (The same goes for perl based webmails.) This isn't an issue with most sites but for an organization with lots of webmail users this will be a problem. Recently the last PHP based webmail on UF was taken down. When the primary campus webmail switched to a Java Servlet based webmail that kept persistent connections around between page views our ability to serve more users concurrently increased noticeably. <plug>We've developed GatorMail because there weren't any acceptable solutions at the time. Unfortunately GatorMail is not third party friendly (it's tightly coupled to our setup) so unless you can dedicate a servlet programmer to decoupling it you probably won't be able to install it.</plug> I think a lot of work has been done to JWMA since we started GatorMail so it may be much improved since we last looked at it.
Clay Shirky wrote an excellent article about this online problem that has existed since before the internet when all there was were BBS titled: A Group is its own Worst Enemy. It's a long and very good read about how not all members of a large group are equal and how the more important members need some way to "defend" themselves to protect the health of the group. Near the end of the essay he says:
This sims problem is just another example of history repeating itself.
I will never play these games in public but the DDR games are a lot of fun and reasonable exercise. (I sweat more playing DDR than I do inline skating.) Since you want games you can play at home and not suffer the humiliation that you would in pubic. I've found it's very hard to get friends over to play the game the first time but after two weeks I'm averaging two friends a night on Mondays though Thursdays who want to play.
I bought from here: http://buynshop.com/newindex.php?parentid=29 and had a good experience. After two weeks I'm buying higher end pads, via eBay, as the lower end pads can be annoying to work with on carpet.
First, familiariarity breeds increased effency. If you don't have the time to study all choices and train on something new then pick a familar one.
.Net is younger and has fewer choices when it comes to web framworks and external libs which some people prefer. This blog enty explains it better than I can: http://javablogs.com/ViewEntry.jspa?id=31449
Java is more of a Language For the Masses than C#/.Net. While us alpha-geeks like Languages For Smart People that does not make them better, espcially when we have to work with less smart people on your team. Much more on this at: http://madbean.com/blog/20/.
Apple's Mail.app does a good job with it's Junk mail tool. I've used it for a month and a half or so.
Now, I'm back on a PC and want a Mac again, too bad I have to save up so many pennies for one.
I know it isa bit off topic but does anyone know of any pictures of the quanity of mail that Ralsky gets?
I know developers aren't idiots, I am one. In the future I'll try to not over simplify in an effort get my opinions across in relativity few words and not bore you with exacting detail that most people seem capable to infer anyway.
Microsoft doesn't want DirectX on the PC to get too far ahead of the Xbox. They don't want developers and people to realize in 2 years the Xbox is a 3 year old PC equilivant of what their grandmother is using.
After rolling out a new product/feature when my users email me with "I like it. I really like it."
First, the directive from management may need to be reconsidered. I understand their desire to minimize support costs but sometimes something just has to give in order to make progress.
Second, as the clients out there become more and more diverse then your least common denominator is your basic web browser all of which can do your basic image types. That's why web applications are all over the place, there is zero setup for the user. Unfortunatly a web application is rather limited when it comes to real time dynamic content.
If you decide a web app won't work for you and bite the bullet and requre software to be installed I would recomend Java WebStart (JWS) as a delivery mechanism. It seems you are already using apples, JWS apps are auto-updating, have a sandbox like applets but JWS feels more like an application and will put icons on their Start menu/Desktop if the user wants it.
So far we've completed converting 3 of our "books" from Script to DocBook. The largest book being over 175 chapters with about 600 pages. The most time consuming problem was the project requirements were that the DocBook version must look very similar to the Script version. We used the XSL stylesheets from docbook.sf.net and FOP.
Script is a formatting language (think RTF) and DocBook is a markup language. There was a lot of inconsistant formatting in the Script versions which decreased readablilty. The consistant formatting of correctly marked up DocBook is a very good thing.
I spent a lot of time customizing the XSLT stylesheets. XSLT has a nice mechanism that allows you to import and then overide parts of the imported stylesheets. This is real nice because we can upgrade the upstream style sheets without modifing our customizations. This isn't completely true if there are big structual changes to the upstream stylesheets but since our changes are in seperate files it's rather easy to refit our customizations.
We had two people working on this project. One customizing the stylesheets, me, and another who took the Script source and added DocBook tags. This worked quite well. We were commited to the project and were able to stick with it until completion. This worked very well.
I encouraged another department to give DocBook a try and this didn't work so well. They currently only publish their interal docs to HTML and their documentation source was written in HTML. For them the overhead of DocBook and their lack of desire for paper output made it not worth it for them.
Previously we could only print to paper. Now we have a single source to generate HTML, PDF, Paper (from pdf), and Windows Compiled HTML Help files (basicly HTML with extra meta info).
Some people seem to just not understand the advantages of marking up the structure of the document instead of the formatting. If you want to use DocBook because of the hype then odds are you'll piss people off in the short time, maybe long term too, by forcing it on them. If you and management understands the long term advantages of structed documentation then I really recomend DocBook.
I've yet to try it but it seems to me Bugzilla could easily be much more if you just changed some names, just mentally think of changes as bugs and machines as products. Bugzilla already has systems to track when and who entered stuff and can email people as needed.
I think other features could work well too but no software package is going to make up for the fact that a good system adminstrator has to have the discipline to document even trivial changes.