Well, if you're talking about sessions, you're still talking about dynamically generated pages, so really the performance hit, which is negligible, is gonna be similar. But where the headache comes in is grabbing every query string on every page, adding to it if need be, rebuilding it with existing information that's irrelevant for the page you're on, etc. Whereas with sessions (using cookies), you just grab the info you need in each particular page, and it persists without any additional code.
Like, if you're writing, say, a basic shopping cart, then the items ordered need to be in the querystring every single page, even if the customer is say, reading the privacy policy. Also, it's all gone if the user, say, types in a different web page on your site manually.
The other way of using it is for holding a GUID from a DB, but then, you're looking at a lot more DB hits.
With sessions, as long as your webserver cleans 'em up, and you have enough memory in the webserver, it's a pretty good performance option, plus, you don't have to deal with the headache of rebuilding the querystring every page.... Or shit, I just thought of that... if you're doing a form submit, then you have to dynamically make a hidden field for everything in the querystring and submit the form normally. Ugh. Nasty.
I remember having to pick servers, and connect to multiple servers, and having to get a list of 'em from somewhere and blah blah blah. It was a royal PITA compared to Kazaa where you click "Search", type in what you want, and click on what you want.
The hard drive is some ancient technology that is the *easily* #1 cause of all computer failures. Other than the cooling fans, they're the last moving parts, and the most critical ones too... A fan dying may cook your computer, but a hard drive kills your *data*. It's high time that something came along to replace those damn things. I'm typing this on my PC with a 2 drive RAID because I can't afford downtime or data loss. That really shouldn't be necessary any more. Bring on the alternatives!
Well, first off the querystring is a very, very messy way of doing things, and introduce the potential for many, many more bugs in a web app.
And actually, the reason that I decided to go with cookies instead of the querystring/form method is because Netscape 4.7 had a very tough time with querystrings. There was a length limit, and it munged up lots of special characters, so extra formatting was required on every single page, and if your querystring got to be a certain length, it simply didn't work.
I tried WinMX once. It was so impossibly difficult and convoluted, I just nuked it. If companies like Kazza can make their programs very, very simple, why can't WinMX? There's really no excuse for such poor design. Kazaalite does everything I need it to do, and it does it pretty damn well. It's even better now that they have the participation levels in place.
I don't see it making a huge impact on bandwidth either, since people will still be leeching away. Most *my* bandwidth goes to downloading, not uploading.
For people using FastTrack (Kazaa, Kazaalite, etc.), there's a new thing in place that gives you a "participation" rating based on how often and how much people download from you. People get paired up with people with similar ratings. While not perfect, it's a great step in the right direction to get rid of leeches. Leeches can still leech, but soon they'll only be able to leach from people with 28.8K modems, or they'll have to wait a good bit for the files they want.
Yeah, that's a great idea. You should write an article: How to Be a Complete Web Leech and Screw Over Every Site You Visit For Free!
I mean really, isn't it *terrible* that web sites might know how often you come back to the site? You know what that leads to, right...? First it's that, and from that, they can figure out your height, weight, favorite food, and even dick size! You'd better protect that privacy at all costs!
Well heck, with most cookies, they dont' even directly benefit a site more than, say, helping them figure out what users go where... their site's flowthrough... Or where they come from or go to afterwards. Most cookies don't actually *do* anything other than help the websites with their marketing.
I use cookies on my sites to help the users' experience. There's no other way to do it. If they don't want to accept cookies, that's fine. But they're losing out. It doesn't effect me as a web site owner either way.
As far as I can tell, even Slashdot, the bastion of privacy (paranoi) isn't using it either. Tough to advocate something that you don't do yourself, huh?
We all create hoopla over tiny privacy issues, user profiling and doubleclick.net . Then why isn't there much enthusiasm for P3P support in browsers?"
Why? It's simple. Users don't care. Geeks do, but geeks don't make up a large percentage of the general population. The general population of Web users aren't nearly as paranoid.
See, when you throw out garbage, it doesn't just vanish. The garbage man takes the garbage to a big hole in the ground where it's sealed in a concrete tomb for thousands of years. If you don't throw it out, then it rots naturally (actually, faster), and you get the benefit of really, really good free dirt.
Don't kids in school these days have to study anything other than how to install fucking software? Compost = soil. Stuff rots, it becomes dirt. Isn't this like a third grade concept...?
What is this I see?? An article on Slashdot that's *NOT* about Evil Microsoft or the Evil government? Be still my beatign heart! Is this an acknowledgement that there are geeks that don't just sit around and write angry letters to senator's junk mail boxes about the evils or Microsoft and the lack of privacy while waiting for the last hour's version of Mozilla to compile on a Gentoo box used to play Quake 3? Dear God! I am *so* impressed. As a part time biology geek, I was fucking thrilled to see this post. Keep it up. There's more to true geekiness than OSS and boring anti-privacy law garbage.
In the article, the author mentions that "Four upside down pot plants." help with circulation. I don't know about him, but four pot plants, upside down or otherwise, don't help me with circulation... they knock me on my ass.
You'll always lose in Vegas, period. Any game. Every game is in the house's favor. Just go to Vegas, have a blast, and expect to lose money.
My wife & I go every 6 months and have a ball. The trick to Vegas is to *knw* you're going to lose. Then say, "I'm gonna lose $1K/day" and expect it. That's how to have fun. People who go to Vegas expecting to win end up having a miserable time.
Who the hell is "Monty"? If you're gonna name drop, at least drop a name of somebody famous. And, what exactly is in this miraculous email that's not in the article?
On a related note, I got an email from Candy about this really hot web site...
The people you're describing are by *far* in the minority. You're talking about what, a quarter of a percent of all computer users, if that many? Who knows. But I tend to agree with this guy. For most people, it's time to move beyond the current computer paradigm of OS + Applications + Internet + File System.
Stereotyping is very useful for making broad generalizations. Without stereotypes (along with some real research), no company would ever develop anything at all, because *everybody* doesn't like it. It's a fact of life, you can't please all the people all the time. But personally, I think this guy's onto something.
The OS wars are largely over. For most people W2K (or XP) work just fine, do much more than they need to do, are stable, and are cheap. It's time to ignore the OS and start concentrating on more usability aspects.
Actually, now that I think about it, that's what Outlook was trying to accomplish. From Outlook, you can get to all of your office files, your contacts, you schedule, etc. It's all integrated in Outlook so theoretically, you could just about live in Outlook (for work). However, most people don't use Outlook that way. What he's advocating is something similar, with with a better, more organic GUI.
The OS isn't dead per se, but, like he said, irrelevant. Ask the average Joe what OS they run. First off, they won't know what OS means. Then, if you ask 'em what kind of Windows they have, most of 'em still won't know. People have long since using computers for the sake of the OS (well, except for OSS zealots). His point is to slap some real useable software on top of any OS and live there, not at the OS level with files, folders, permissions, etc.
I agree that DBA politics can be a bottleneck for developers at times
In good teams of developers (in which I've only gotten to work a few times), the developers and the DBA's work very closely together. The DBA creates the sandbox for the developer to work in, handles backups, helps with occasional optimizations, etc. In most shops, developers think that they understand databases if they can write simple SELECT statement. They just have no clue, whatsoever, as to what databases can do and what they can be used for.
I was lucky enough to learn the hard way... I was pushed straight into development with a very, very brutal Oracle DBA. He knew more than I've forgotten in my lifetime, so I learned the right way to write apps. Most programmers never get that opportunity, so you're right, they treat databases as nothing mroe than a data dump. Hell, most people have no idea as to the scope and size of just Oracle's product offerings that all work with their databases.
there's a middle ground between all or no logic in the "storage layer"
You can still have a business logic layer. It's just that in many projects, that logic is faster and more efficient running as PL/SQL or TSQL than it is in some compiled DLL.
and one of the reasons that they'll "keep it around" is because they paid so damn much for it. why lock in an implementation decision for so long? it doesn't promote agility, nor does it promote flexibility. quite the opposite, it encourages poor SQL coding (i.e., vendor-specific features). it's called the "Golden Hammer" Anit-Pattern. look into it.
If you're talking about a serious piece of software (as opposed, to say, a web app for a shopping cart or something similarly as silly), flexibility isn't an issue. You simply don't go around switching databases for say, a bank or a credit card company or a health care provider. Any IT guy that says "let's switch databases" mid-stream for no good reason is incompetent. Projects that use things like Oracle generally use it because the company is stable, the projects are stable, and the project is going to live largely intact for many years.
um, no. gigabytes, maybe, but most companies have databases in the terabyte range? i don't think so.
It sounds like you're used to working on smaller, perhaps not misson-critial projects for smaller companies. Terrabyte+ databases are very common in most Fortune 500 companies, gov't institutions, etc. Who do you think keeps Sun in business? You don't buy Sun hardware for a 100 gig database. You get a PC.
Your assumption that flexibility is always so very important is wrong. No reasonable company is gonna be switching databases like they change their pencil suppliers. It just doesn't happen. Hell, I know of many instances where companies stay with the same *version* of database for 5+ years.
Oracle has a problem with Joins, they just don't work, and that's a big bit of SQL.
ROTFL. Oh jesus... hang on, I gota wipe the tears from my eyes. Oh christ, that needs to be modded up to +5 ignorant/pathetic/funny.
Joins in Oracle don't work? You're saying, Oracle, the oldest database on the market, the most widely used, made by he second largest software company in the world, doesn't work. You have got to be off of your fucking rocker. I can't even begin to argue with a statement like that, because you can't argue with people who are so delusional, that they can't possibly see the truth. That's like when some crackpot on the street walks up to you and says, "The sky is red and filled with demons!". How do you argue with that other than "no it isn't"?
In the immortal words from Billy Madison:
"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if you're talking about sessions, you're still talking about dynamically generated pages, so really the performance hit, which is negligible, is gonna be similar. But where the headache comes in is grabbing every query string on every page, adding to it if need be, rebuilding it with existing information that's irrelevant for the page you're on, etc. Whereas with sessions (using cookies), you just grab the info you need in each particular page, and it persists without any additional code.
Like, if you're writing, say, a basic shopping cart, then the items ordered need to be in the querystring every single page, even if the customer is say, reading the privacy policy. Also, it's all gone if the user, say, types in a different web page on your site manually.
The other way of using it is for holding a GUID from a DB, but then, you're looking at a lot more DB hits.
With sessions, as long as your webserver cleans 'em up, and you have enough memory in the webserver, it's a pretty good performance option, plus, you don't have to deal with the headache of rebuilding the querystring every page.... Or shit, I just thought of that... if you're doing a form submit, then you have to dynamically make a hidden field for everything in the querystring and submit the form normally. Ugh. Nasty.
...Poindexter. Oh wait.
I remember having to pick servers, and connect to multiple servers, and having to get a list of 'em from somewhere and blah blah blah. It was a royal PITA compared to Kazaa where you click "Search", type in what you want, and click on what you want.
The hard drive is some ancient technology that is the *easily* #1 cause of all computer failures. Other than the cooling fans, they're the last moving parts, and the most critical ones too... A fan dying may cook your computer, but a hard drive kills your *data*. It's high time that something came along to replace those damn things. I'm typing this on my PC with a 2 drive RAID because I can't afford downtime or data loss. That really shouldn't be necessary any more. Bring on the alternatives!
Well, first off the querystring is a very, very messy way of doing things, and introduce the potential for many, many more bugs in a web app.
And actually, the reason that I decided to go with cookies instead of the querystring/form method is because Netscape 4.7 had a very tough time with querystrings. There was a length limit, and it munged up lots of special characters, so extra formatting was required on every single page, and if your querystring got to be a certain length, it simply didn't work.
I tried WinMX once. It was so impossibly difficult and convoluted, I just nuked it. If companies like Kazza can make their programs very, very simple, why can't WinMX? There's really no excuse for such poor design. Kazaalite does everything I need it to do, and it does it pretty damn well. It's even better now that they have the participation levels in place.
I don't see it making a huge impact on bandwidth either, since people will still be leeching away. Most *my* bandwidth goes to downloading, not uploading.
For people using FastTrack (Kazaa, Kazaalite, etc.), there's a new thing in place that gives you a "participation" rating based on how often and how much people download from you. People get paired up with people with similar ratings. While not perfect, it's a great step in the right direction to get rid of leeches. Leeches can still leech, but soon they'll only be able to leach from people with 28.8K modems, or they'll have to wait a good bit for the files they want.
Yeah, that's a great idea. You should write an article: How to Be a Complete Web Leech and Screw Over Every Site You Visit For Free!
I mean really, isn't it *terrible* that web sites might know how often you come back to the site? You know what that leads to, right...? First it's that, and from that, they can figure out your height, weight, favorite food, and even dick size! You'd better protect that privacy at all costs!
Well heck, with most cookies, they dont' even directly benefit a site more than, say, helping them figure out what users go where... their site's flowthrough... Or where they come from or go to afterwards. Most cookies don't actually *do* anything other than help the websites with their marketing.
I use cookies on my sites to help the users' experience. There's no other way to do it. If they don't want to accept cookies, that's fine. But they're losing out. It doesn't effect me as a web site owner either way.
As far as I can tell, even Slashdot, the bastion of privacy (paranoi) isn't using it either. Tough to advocate something that you don't do yourself, huh?
We all create hoopla over tiny privacy issues, user profiling and doubleclick.net . Then why isn't there much enthusiasm for P3P support in browsers?"
Why? It's simple. Users don't care. Geeks do, but geeks don't make up a large percentage of the general population. The general population of Web users aren't nearly as paranoid.
Why do we compost? OK, that's just as good.
See, when you throw out garbage, it doesn't just vanish. The garbage man takes the garbage to a big hole in the ground where it's sealed in a concrete tomb for thousands of years. If you don't throw it out, then it rots naturally (actually, faster), and you get the benefit of really, really good free dirt.
Don't kids in school these days have to study anything other than how to install fucking software? Compost = soil. Stuff rots, it becomes dirt. Isn't this like a third grade concept...?
What is this I see?? An article on Slashdot that's *NOT* about Evil Microsoft or the Evil government? Be still my beatign heart! Is this an acknowledgement that there are geeks that don't just sit around and write angry letters to senator's junk mail boxes about the evils or Microsoft and the lack of privacy while waiting for the last hour's version of Mozilla to compile on a Gentoo box used to play Quake 3? Dear God! I am *so* impressed. As a part time biology geek, I was fucking thrilled to see this post. Keep it up. There's more to true geekiness than OSS and boring anti-privacy law garbage.
In the article, the author mentions that "Four upside down pot plants." help with circulation. I don't know about him, but four pot plants, upside down or otherwise, don't help me with circulation... they knock me on my ass.
Well, although it's technically not legal, don't you consider FastTrack real competition?
You'll always lose in Vegas, period. Any game. Every game is in the house's favor. Just go to Vegas, have a blast, and expect to lose money.
My wife & I go every 6 months and have a ball. The trick to Vegas is to *knw* you're going to lose. Then say, "I'm gonna lose $1K/day" and expect it. That's how to have fun. People who go to Vegas expecting to win end up having a miserable time.
Who the hell is "Monty"? If you're gonna name drop, at least drop a name of somebody famous. And, what exactly is in this miraculous email that's not in the article?
On a related note, I got an email from Candy about this really hot web site...
The people you're describing are by *far* in the minority. You're talking about what, a quarter of a percent of all computer users, if that many? Who knows. But I tend to agree with this guy. For most people, it's time to move beyond the current computer paradigm of OS + Applications + Internet + File System.
Stereotyping is very useful for making broad generalizations. Without stereotypes (along with some real research), no company would ever develop anything at all, because *everybody* doesn't like it. It's a fact of life, you can't please all the people all the time. But personally, I think this guy's onto something.
The OS wars are largely over. For most people W2K (or XP) work just fine, do much more than they need to do, are stable, and are cheap. It's time to ignore the OS and start concentrating on more usability aspects.
Actually, now that I think about it, that's what Outlook was trying to accomplish. From Outlook, you can get to all of your office files, your contacts, you schedule, etc. It's all integrated in Outlook so theoretically, you could just about live in Outlook (for work). However, most people don't use Outlook that way. What he's advocating is something similar, with with a better, more organic GUI.
Read the article. Nowhere did he say that an OS wasn't necessary.
The OS isn't dead per se, but, like he said, irrelevant. Ask the average Joe what OS they run. First off, they won't know what OS means. Then, if you ask 'em what kind of Windows they have, most of 'em still won't know. People have long since using computers for the sake of the OS (well, except for OSS zealots). His point is to slap some real useable software on top of any OS and live there, not at the OS level with files, folders, permissions, etc.
I agree that DBA politics can be a bottleneck for developers at times
In good teams of developers (in which I've only gotten to work a few times), the developers and the DBA's work very closely together. The DBA creates the sandbox for the developer to work in, handles backups, helps with occasional optimizations, etc. In most shops, developers think that they understand databases if they can write simple SELECT statement. They just have no clue, whatsoever, as to what databases can do and what they can be used for.
I was lucky enough to learn the hard way... I was pushed straight into development with a very, very brutal Oracle DBA. He knew more than I've forgotten in my lifetime, so I learned the right way to write apps. Most programmers never get that opportunity, so you're right, they treat databases as nothing mroe than a data dump. Hell, most people have no idea as to the scope and size of just Oracle's product offerings that all work with their databases.
there's a middle ground between all or no logic in the "storage layer"
You can still have a business logic layer. It's just that in many projects, that logic is faster and more efficient running as PL/SQL or TSQL than it is in some compiled DLL.
and one of the reasons that they'll "keep it around" is because they paid so damn much for it. why lock in an implementation decision for so long? it doesn't promote agility, nor does it promote flexibility. quite the opposite, it encourages poor SQL coding (i.e., vendor-specific features). it's called the "Golden Hammer" Anit-Pattern. look into it.
If you're talking about a serious piece of software (as opposed, to say, a web app for a shopping cart or something similarly as silly), flexibility isn't an issue. You simply don't go around switching databases for say, a bank or a credit card company or a health care provider. Any IT guy that says "let's switch databases" mid-stream for no good reason is incompetent. Projects that use things like Oracle generally use it because the company is stable, the projects are stable, and the project is going to live largely intact for many years.
um, no. gigabytes, maybe, but most companies have databases in the terabyte range? i don't think so.
It sounds like you're used to working on smaller, perhaps not misson-critial projects for smaller companies. Terrabyte+ databases are very common in most Fortune 500 companies, gov't institutions, etc. Who do you think keeps Sun in business? You don't buy Sun hardware for a 100 gig database. You get a PC.
Your assumption that flexibility is always so very important is wrong. No reasonable company is gonna be switching databases like they change their pencil suppliers. It just doesn't happen. Hell, I know of many instances where companies stay with the same *version* of database for 5+ years.
Oracle has a problem with Joins, they just don't work, and that's a big bit of SQL.
ROTFL. Oh jesus... hang on, I gota wipe the tears from my eyes. Oh christ, that needs to be modded up to +5 ignorant/pathetic/funny.
Joins in Oracle don't work? You're saying, Oracle, the oldest database on the market, the most widely used, made by he second largest software company in the world, doesn't work. You have got to be off of your fucking rocker. I can't even begin to argue with a statement like that, because you can't argue with people who are so delusional, that they can't possibly see the truth. That's like when some crackpot on the street walks up to you and says, "The sky is red and filled with demons!". How do you argue with that other than "no it isn't"?
In the immortal words from Billy Madison:
"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."