I think that's terrible form. I realise it's an election year in America and attack ads are the vogue, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth and definitely wouldn't impress me.
Contacting the company who made the mistake would be a lot better.
1. It's an abuse of personal data, since the owner of that data (the individual) did not opt in. In many countries (particularly the UK) this is illegal and can land you in a lot of trouble.
2. If you're a small company, your reputation is going to be worth a lot more than one or two customers who may answer your email. Doing something that's at worst illegal and and at best irritating is hardly going to help your reputation.
3. Business ethos and ethics matter. As a consumer, I often know that dealing with a small company could cost slightly more than buying from a large one with economies of scale. However, I may feel it is worth it if the service is better or if I identify positively with the company. I have broken off relations in the past with companies that marketed too aggressively. This is entirely rational behaviour and not something limited to techies who "get" spam and are over-protective of their inboxes.
you just described the reason why Java was invented. Not because it is technically superior but because it makes team programming easier and less error prone.
I won't get into a language-or-framework argument - I am big believe in "right tools for the right job", and it sounds like Plone wasn't the right tool for you. If you didn't need a CMS, in particular, it was almost certainly the wrong tool.:-) Personally, I find Ruby syntax to be very convoluted, but that's mostly because I'm used to a different style of programming that fits my brain better. If Rails works for you, by all means use it!
However, I take some issue with the use of the word "obsolete". Maybe that isn't what you mean, but the evidence is pretty striking that neither Python nor Plone are obsolete They continue to grow and be used.
On another note, Zope and Plone do scale. The ZODB (Zope's object database) is both a blessing and a curse. It makes people a bit scared sometimes, but it's also been proven over the past ten years, and scales very well. I think an object model is more appropriate than a relational one for the kind semi-structured, hierarchical content structures that Plone generally deals with. For other use cases (more homogenous and table-like data) it's a bad choice. We're getting better at integration with RDBMS', mainly thanks to the awesome Python library that is SQLAlchemy. Chapter 12 deals with that.:)
On the issue of re-inventing wheels. There's certainly an element of that, both in the Zope and Plone communities. But I think that's true of any largeish open source community with its own cultures and values. Sometimes, we re-invent out of ignorance, sometimes out of convenience, sometimes because we have no choice. In the Python world, though, WSGI and eggs, two recent technologies (much younger than Zope or Plone) are making intra-framework co-operation easier. The Zope and Plone communities are embracing and experimenting with these tools, not at least through an embryonic project called Repoze (http://repoze.org).
Saying that Plone is a "pathologically" bad choice is only true if viewed in light of the kinds of projects you seem to work with: those that "consist of only a few specific modules of functionality and those modules can be written by hand or scraped together from other existing modules or source code on the net." I've not really worked on such projects in any serious degree. The projects I work on tend to be more complex, culturally and technically. Actually, that's not true. I've written small systems (those that don't need to deal with things like changing visual design, internationalisation, complex security models, ad-hoc workflows and so on), and I'd normally not use Plone for those. I would definitely use Python - for example through Pylons, which is probably on the other end of the scale. Interestingly, something like Repoze and WSGI actually make it possible to mix-and-match these types of applications.
Thanks for recommending my book. Although I am being paid royalties, the main motivation was precisely what you identified: we need more, and better documentation. I think this is a problem that affects quite a few open source projects, though.
I won't claim that Plone (or Zope) is small and lightweight (I do quite like Pylons, though). I do, however, find it to be one of the most productive tools I've ever used for delivering a certain type of solution - what I call "content-centric" systems. The book is very much about that. I think this type of problem fits many business use cases, perhaps better than enthusiast/single-person use cases. I run my blog in Plone, and it was a two-minute job to set up, but if all you want is a simple web site, then Plone may be overkill. Similarly, if you want to build an intranet or a complex multi-author publishing platform or a bespoke portal where semi-structured content will be key, Plone may be a good fit.
The single most important reason to love Plone, though, is the community. I have some incredibly good friends in the Plone community (and outside... I do occasionally leave IRC), individuals whom I respect and admire greatly. People are friendly, constructive and helpful, and we all actively welcome new contributors and interested parties. If you found Plone frustrating, and you're able to put that into the language of constructive criticism, we'd love to hear from you (http://plone.org/support) so that we can improve the system. We're not perfect, but we are also proud of what Plone does.
By the way, if you want to read a pretty in-depth and interesting case study of a Plone implementation, take a look at http://plone.net/case-studies/discover-magazine. Obviously it's favourable (and I'm biased), but it may give you a good flavour.
Like most musicians' websites, the In Rainbows site (http://www.inrainbows.com) sucks. It's confusing and ugly and doesn't feel like the web at all. It'd take me half the time to get the file from some BitTorrent site. I would actually pay for it, but their site scared me away. No way am I putting my credit card number into that.:)
If they made it a bit less quirky, they'd probably tilt the numbers a bit. Probably not enough to bring piracy down to zero, but a lot of people do not feel good about piracy and would prefer something that felt legit.
If you ask a question like this, you're unlikely to make it:
"Why Is US Grad School Mainly Non-US Students?"
But in all seriousness: why not? They come, they pay, they want to learn and they've picked the best schools they can get into and afford. In fact, they put up with ridiculous visa regulations and bureaurcracy just to get there, and when they do, they probably realise the value of the eduction they're getting, study hard and do well. Ideally, selection should be on merit only (I know in practice it isn't always, but I suspect in the US it's better than in many other countries), in which case no-one should have the right to complain. Having bright students around you is likely to further the quality of your own education as well.
You got it backwards. Apple are way too smart to release OS X for PCs.
I buy a Mac (happily, at a premium) because I know it works. Apple can guarantee it works because they control the full device, not just a half-assed OS or a lowest-bidder pile of components.
The moment they released OS X (legally) for any old PC, their brand image would plummet (OS X crashed with my home-built graphics card, those bastards!), their margins would fall (less margin on a disk of software than a shiny piece of metal) and they would forever lose almost all control over their perceived brand and full end-user experience.
The very fact that we are reading articles like this on the front page of Slashdot says a lot about Apple's marketing clout over the past two decades. They are not so stupid as to throw all that away (and try compete with Linux to boot).
The comment that CS may or may not be seen as a branch of mathematics (and thus more academic in nature) is a valid one. However, there's a limit to the number of jobs out there that pay for people with that deep a mathematical understanding, and I'm willing to bet many (most?) students in a typical CS degree have no interest in jobs where they will be doing fourier transforms all day.
Perhaps the UK is a little different, but here people tend to study what they want to learn, and what they are good at, and they can be hired into a lot of jobs. Consultancies, banks, IT firms, the civil service and many other professions looks for diversity and transferrable skills more than they look at specific modules on the curriculum.
But honestly, even if your aspiration is to be sat in a CS lab for the rest of your life, you *need* those skills. Every single interview I went to before I got a job focused very strongly on teamwork experience, evidence of leadership skills and evidence that the applicant could demonstrate an understanding of how their skills and knowledge translated into the real world. Even in the small number of cases where students want a career that doesn't involve interaction with marketing people or consumers or teamwork, they will be better off for having worked as part of realistic projects - and for the other (majority) of people, these skills will be a vital part of their education.
During my BSc and MSc studies, we did numerous projects, some better than others. The ones that worked best were the ones that ensured teams were balanced (having all the uber-geeks in one team produces ego clashes, bad code and pitiful deliverables; having no technical people in another team can be a significant barrier, though those teams tend to do better regardless), gave a significant degree of autonomy to the teams (the whole point is to learn to think independently), gave enough time and scope for people to do interesting things and become commited to the project, and were graded on fair and well-understood criteria that went beyond the technical (software must meet narrow spec) to the practical (software must meet "customer" need, team should demonstrate that they reacted well to changes in specifications introduced as part of the project process, end deliverables, i.e. reports and presentations, are tailored to the right audience and delivered with confidence).
Certainly, none of the organisations I wanted to work for would have accepted students with no demonstrable teamwork skills and no experience approaching the real world.
This resource looks good on the surface, but if you look at their requirements, they *only* feature PHP4/MySQL systems. For example, Plone (http://plone.org/ is one of the most mature and successful open source content management systems (and yes, I do work with it), and is not mentioned on the site. Who knows what other good systems are not featured there? In my mind, it makes this a pretty useless web site for all but the narrowest of searches.
At my university here in the UK, we have just had a campus-wide residential network installed. P2P and plain SMB sharing of, well, legally challenged material is high, but (luckily) the admins have opted to impose as few restrictions as possible. We are behind a firewall, but proxy use is optional, so no filtering and the like. I believe this is the way to go - at my old school, our ISP (Edex, the worst ISP in the history of mankind) had various filters installed, blocking out things like ESR's homepage (nope, not kidding... they *were* running Microsoft software) and Userfriendly. Those kinds of controls are more trouble than they're worth, and likely to alienate most users, including those who wish to use the network for legitimate purposes.
However, P2P did become a bandwidth problem here. The answer was to limit bandwith on the ports used for P2P to 1Mbit/sec (which is a tiny proportion of our total bandwith - we're on SuperJANET). This was introduced gradually and based on ananalysis of where bandwidth was going (i.e. ports other than 80, 21, etc.). The result was gradual abandonment of P2P software, as it become too slow and impractical to use. By choking use this way, the network admins avoided the inevitable uprising/cracking attempts/moaning from users that would've resulted had they simply blocked the ports. It was eventually confirmed that bandwidth limitation was indeed taking place, but there were very few complaints, as people had already moved to other services (which eventually also has gotten or will get choked) or abandoned P2P and other bandwidth hogs entirely.
I'd recomment you give all ports other than http, ftp, telnet, ssh, pop/smtp etc. a total bandwith of something like 1% of your total available. If people complain, you can rightly tell them that (a) too many people are using it, and bandwidth is a limited resource (you'll probably have to explain what bandwith is), (b) most use of such software is illegal and cannot be condoned by the school and (c) because certain things (i.e. P2P) were using a disproportionate amount of the bandwith, it became necessary to allocate available bandwidth proportionally based on educational potential.
Those are hopefully terms that teachers and more enlightened students should be able to come to terms with, and you should have a strong case if anyone above your rank starts asking around.
Your logic is flawed, as a vulcan would say.
You start off with the premise that you can shrink down and touch a neutrino which relative to you would look like a bowling ball. But that premise assumes implicitly that neutrinos have mass, so your argument is circular.
The same goes for the straight line. A straight line is a straight line (in euclidean geometry at least) - it's a definition. A line drawn with a pencil is not a geometric line, but rather something that looks like what we visually represent lines as.
As you say, you base it upon an assumption, but I don't think you have any reason to make that assumption.
Wow, would my physics teacher be proud:-)
Massless things, photons (wave-energy packets) and relativity don't make sense to us because we never sense them directly, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that's terrible form. I realise it's an election year in America and attack ads are the vogue, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth and definitely wouldn't impress me.
Contacting the company who made the mistake would be a lot better.
1. It's an abuse of personal data, since the owner of that data (the individual) did not opt in. In many countries (particularly the UK) this is illegal and can land you in a lot of trouble.
2. If you're a small company, your reputation is going to be worth a lot more than one or two customers who may answer your email. Doing something that's at worst illegal and and at best irritating is hardly going to help your reputation.
3. Business ethos and ethics matter. As a consumer, I often know that dealing with a small company could cost slightly more than buying from a large one with economies of scale. However, I may feel it is worth it if the service is better or if I identify positively with the company. I have broken off relations in the past with companies that marketed too aggressively. This is entirely rational behaviour and not something limited to techies who "get" spam and are over-protective of their inboxes.
Cheers,
Martin
The volume control goes up to 11. Brilliant. :)
you just described the reason why Java was invented. Not because it is technically superior but because it makes team programming easier and less error prone.
Hi,
:-) Personally, I find Ruby syntax to be very convoluted, but that's mostly because I'm used to a different style of programming that fits my brain better. If Rails works for you, by all means use it!
:)
I won't get into a language-or-framework argument - I am big believe in "right tools for the right job", and it sounds like Plone wasn't the right tool for you. If you didn't need a CMS, in particular, it was almost certainly the wrong tool.
However, I take some issue with the use of the word "obsolete". Maybe that isn't what you mean, but the evidence is pretty striking that neither Python nor Plone are obsolete They continue to grow and be used.
On another note, Zope and Plone do scale. The ZODB (Zope's object database) is both a blessing and a curse. It makes people a bit scared sometimes, but it's also been proven over the past ten years, and scales very well. I think an object model is more appropriate than a relational one for the kind semi-structured, hierarchical content structures that Plone generally deals with. For other use cases (more homogenous and table-like data) it's a bad choice. We're getting better at integration with RDBMS', mainly thanks to the awesome Python library that is SQLAlchemy. Chapter 12 deals with that.
On the issue of re-inventing wheels. There's certainly an element of that, both in the Zope and Plone communities. But I think that's true of any largeish open source community with its own cultures and values. Sometimes, we re-invent out of ignorance, sometimes out of convenience, sometimes because we have no choice. In the Python world, though, WSGI and eggs, two recent technologies (much younger than Zope or Plone) are making intra-framework co-operation easier. The Zope and Plone communities are embracing and experimenting with these tools, not at least through an embryonic project called Repoze (http://repoze.org).
Saying that Plone is a "pathologically" bad choice is only true if viewed in light of the kinds of projects you seem to work with: those that "consist of only a few specific modules of functionality and those modules can be written by hand or scraped together from other existing modules or source code on the net." I've not really worked on such projects in any serious degree. The projects I work on tend to be more complex, culturally and technically. Actually, that's not true. I've written small systems (those that don't need to deal with things like changing visual design, internationalisation, complex security models, ad-hoc workflows and so on), and I'd normally not use Plone for those. I would definitely use Python - for example through Pylons, which is probably on the other end of the scale. Interestingly, something like Repoze and WSGI actually make it possible to mix-and-match these types of applications.
Martin
Hi :)
Thanks for recommending my book. Although I am being paid royalties, the main motivation was precisely what you identified: we need more, and better documentation. I think this is a problem that affects quite a few open source projects, though.
I won't claim that Plone (or Zope) is small and lightweight (I do quite like Pylons, though). I do, however, find it to be one of the most productive tools I've ever used for delivering a certain type of solution - what I call "content-centric" systems. The book is very much about that. I think this type of problem fits many business use cases, perhaps better than enthusiast/single-person use cases. I run my blog in Plone, and it was a two-minute job to set up, but if all you want is a simple web site, then Plone may be overkill. Similarly, if you want to build an intranet or a complex multi-author publishing platform or a bespoke portal where semi-structured content will be key, Plone may be a good fit.
The single most important reason to love Plone, though, is the community. I have some incredibly good friends in the Plone community (and outside... I do occasionally leave IRC), individuals whom I respect and admire greatly. People are friendly, constructive and helpful, and we all actively welcome new contributors and interested parties. If you found Plone frustrating, and you're able to put that into the language of constructive criticism, we'd love to hear from you (http://plone.org/support) so that we can improve the system. We're not perfect, but we are also proud of what Plone does.
By the way, if you want to read a pretty in-depth and interesting case study of a Plone implementation, take a look at http://plone.net/case-studies/discover-magazine. Obviously it's favourable (and I'm biased), but it may give you a good flavour.
Cheers,
Thank you for a fair and balanced review. I hope you enjoyed the book!
Like most musicians' websites, the In Rainbows site (http://www.inrainbows.com) sucks. It's confusing and ugly and doesn't feel like the web at all. It'd take me half the time to get the file from some BitTorrent site. I would actually pay for it, but their site scared me away. No way am I putting my credit card number into that. :)
If they made it a bit less quirky, they'd probably tilt the numbers a bit. Probably not enough to bring piracy down to zero, but a lot of people do not feel good about piracy and would prefer something that felt legit.
If you ask a question like this, you're unlikely to make it:
"Why Is US Grad School Mainly Non-US Students?"
But in all seriousness: why not? They come, they pay, they want to learn and they've picked the best schools they can get into and afford. In fact, they put up with ridiculous visa regulations and bureaurcracy just to get there, and when they do, they probably realise the value of the eduction they're getting, study hard and do well. Ideally, selection should be on merit only (I know in practice it isn't always, but I suspect in the US it's better than in many other countries), in which case no-one should have the right to complain. Having bright students around you is likely to further the quality of your own education as well.
9.8/10 is also a fraction. And please stop the alarmist protectionist crap.
You got it backwards. Apple are way too smart to release OS X for PCs.
I buy a Mac (happily, at a premium) because I know it works. Apple can guarantee it works because they control the full device, not just a half-assed OS or a lowest-bidder pile of components.
The moment they released OS X (legally) for any old PC, their brand image would plummet (OS X crashed with my home-built graphics card, those bastards!), their margins would fall (less margin on a disk of software than a shiny piece of metal) and they would forever lose almost all control over their perceived brand and full end-user experience.
The very fact that we are reading articles like this on the front page of Slashdot says a lot about Apple's marketing clout over the past two decades. They are not so stupid as to throw all that away (and try compete with Linux to boot).
The comment that CS may or may not be seen as a branch of mathematics (and thus more academic in nature) is a valid one. However, there's a limit to the number of jobs out there that pay for people with that deep a mathematical understanding, and I'm willing to bet many (most?) students in a typical CS degree have no interest in jobs where they will be doing fourier transforms all day.
Perhaps the UK is a little different, but here people tend to study what they want to learn, and what they are good at, and they can be hired into a lot of jobs. Consultancies, banks, IT firms, the civil service and many other professions looks for diversity and transferrable skills more than they look at specific modules on the curriculum.
But honestly, even if your aspiration is to be sat in a CS lab for the rest of your life, you *need* those skills. Every single interview I went to before I got a job focused very strongly on teamwork experience, evidence of leadership skills and evidence that the applicant could demonstrate an understanding of how their skills and knowledge translated into the real world. Even in the small number of cases where students want a career that doesn't involve interaction with marketing people or consumers or teamwork, they will be better off for having worked as part of realistic projects - and for the other (majority) of people, these skills will be a vital part of their education.
During my BSc and MSc studies, we did numerous projects, some better than others. The ones that worked best were the ones that ensured teams were balanced (having all the uber-geeks in one team produces ego clashes, bad code and pitiful deliverables; having no technical people in another team can be a significant barrier, though those teams tend to do better regardless), gave a significant degree of autonomy to the teams (the whole point is to learn to think independently), gave enough time and scope for people to do interesting things and become commited to the project, and were graded on fair and well-understood criteria that went beyond the technical (software must meet narrow spec) to the practical (software must meet "customer" need, team should demonstrate that they reacted well to changes in specifications introduced as part of the project process, end deliverables, i.e. reports and presentations, are tailored to the right audience and delivered with confidence).
Certainly, none of the organisations I wanted to work for would have accepted students with no demonstrable teamwork skills and no experience approaching the real world.
A triplicate ...
(too early for jokes about 50 milliseconds, judging dupes, etc. etc.)
This resource looks good on the surface, but if you look at their requirements, they *only* feature PHP4/MySQL systems. For example, Plone (http://plone.org/ is one of the most mature and successful open source content management systems (and yes, I do work with it), and is not mentioned on the site. Who knows what other good systems are not featured there? In my mind, it makes this a pretty useless web site for all but the narrowest of searches.
At my university here in the UK, we have just had a campus-wide residential network installed. P2P and plain SMB sharing of, well, legally challenged material is high, but (luckily) the admins have opted to impose as few restrictions as possible. We are behind a firewall, but proxy use is optional, so no filtering and the like. I believe this is the way to go - at my old school, our ISP (Edex, the worst ISP in the history of mankind) had various filters installed, blocking out things like ESR's homepage (nope, not kidding... they *were* running Microsoft software) and Userfriendly. Those kinds of controls are more trouble than they're worth, and likely to alienate most users, including those who wish to use the network for legitimate purposes.
However, P2P did become a bandwidth problem here. The answer was to limit bandwith on the ports used for P2P to 1Mbit/sec (which is a tiny proportion of our total bandwith - we're on SuperJANET). This was introduced gradually and based on ananalysis of where bandwidth was going (i.e. ports other than 80, 21, etc.). The result was gradual abandonment of P2P software, as it become too slow and impractical to use. By choking use this way, the network admins avoided the inevitable uprising/cracking attempts/moaning from users that would've resulted had they simply blocked the ports. It was eventually confirmed that bandwidth limitation was indeed taking place, but there were very few complaints, as people had already moved to other services (which eventually also has gotten or will get choked) or abandoned P2P and other bandwidth hogs entirely.
I'd recomment you give all ports other than http, ftp, telnet, ssh, pop/smtp etc. a total bandwith of something like 1% of your total available. If people complain, you can rightly tell them that (a) too many people are using it, and bandwidth is a limited resource (you'll probably have to explain what bandwith is), (b) most use of such software is illegal and cannot be condoned by the school and (c) because certain things (i.e. P2P) were using a disproportionate amount of the bandwith, it became necessary to allocate available bandwidth proportionally based on educational potential.
Those are hopefully terms that teachers and more enlightened students should be able to come to terms with, and you should have a strong case if anyone above your rank starts asking around.
Best of luck!
Martin
Your logic is flawed, as a vulcan would say. You start off with the premise that you can shrink down and touch a neutrino which relative to you would look like a bowling ball. But that premise assumes implicitly that neutrinos have mass, so your argument is circular. The same goes for the straight line. A straight line is a straight line (in euclidean geometry at least) - it's a definition. A line drawn with a pencil is not a geometric line, but rather something that looks like what we visually represent lines as. As you say, you base it upon an assumption, but I don't think you have any reason to make that assumption. Wow, would my physics teacher be proud :-)
Massless things, photons (wave-energy packets) and relativity don't make sense to us because we never sense them directly, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.