Why should a working computer be retired and replace with a new machine and new OS, just to serve its old purpose?
Maybe it sucked to use, and sucked to setup, but once it was running it was fairly good. And if the web site, or file shares, it serves are still in use, what benefit is there from Win2k?
(Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that 2k kicks NT4 (and maybe XP) but I don't think you should need to run out and upgrade a machine that's happily plugging along.)
It's this kind of attitude that dooms the console market to having shallow derivative games forever.
The only game with a worse camera than Zelda 64 was the original Tomb Raider, and how much actual content was there in that game? You talk to someone, they tell you to run across the map the other side, along the way you fight the same monsters you fought before because the stupid console can't actually save anything. Then you go to another era and run across the stupid level again fighting the same monsters, but with a different low-res skin, talk to someone and he tells you, guess what, to run to the absolute farthest away place...
Then there's the mental defect in console developers that forces them to stupidly mix genres. Is Zelda an RPG, or a mindless arcade game where you have to dodge stupidly flailing boss monsters, or replay the whole damn level again from the save point. The side games were all twitch crap too. Want to have a reasonable chance of success in the RPG game? Get good at shooting arrows from horseback.
Console games are pretty much all about making you fight the game. Shooting arrows at a slowly moving target is easy, with a real controller, but these stupid pucks you get with consoles are the result of a nazi experiment in torture. But, if they didn't have all this crap in there, and if you didn't have to replay everything from the last save-point all the time, you'd notice how little there was to actually do in the game.
"100+ hours of gameplay" translates to "98 hours of tedious shit between tiny bits of hidden gameplay and story."
Next time you think a game is shit when you sit down with it, listen to yourself. Don't support companies in making more crap like that.
But, if you do, you might want to drop a bit of the money you made on your recent job as a donation to the Samba group, or whoever else would be working on something like this. It'll pay off in the end when you can offer the same services at the same price but not have to pay software costs out of it.
And if you don't need it enough to pay for it, I question how much you need it.
If Apple put a disclaimer screen in the program, at start, that made you type "Yes" to "I understand that not only is this BETA software likely to have unknown bugs, it also was distributed with known bugs (as detailed at http:...) that have yet to be fixed at this stage in testing..." I doubt people would be so hot to use it, or to bitch about it if they did.
A legitimate tester, or illegitimate tester who understood what beta meant, would jump through that hurdle immediately. A bored person, or someone who thought they were getting something for free, probably wouldn't.
Next time you see someone get told to RTFM, look at where they're asking, and what they're asking.
If you go into #LinuxKernel and ask "How do I install Linux", you're going to get brushed off, either with "RTFM" or "ask somewhere else" because it's not the right place. It's like stopping at a drag-racing forum and asking about the best undercoating to get for driving on salted roads. Technically both forums deal with cars but that's as close as they get.
If someone goes into #Mandrake or #LinuxNewbies and asks the question in anything but a rude tone they'll be pointed to a faq or something. Told to RTFM, but gently, and with a pointer to the right M.
But, if that person comes back and says "I can't make an install floppy from windows" they'll get a ton of help, even if it's a simple task. They've obviously read a bit about the process and have taken the time to explain what the problem is so they the potential helper doesn't have to play twenty questions.
I've *never* had trouble going into a channel and asking the most basic of questions. I say something like "I looked at the PHP docs online and I couldn't find how to X, the best I can find is Y. Can someone help?" Even if it's fairly basic, I've at least shown willingness to help myself.
You say that as if you tricked me into admitted a deep dark secret of open source. If you want support people catering to you, buy a support contract. Nobody ever suggested otherwise.
I don't see why you have so much trouble with the concept. If I wrote you a petulant and whiny letter about being unable to configure IIS you wouldn't help. It's not your job to do so. If I was nice about it though, you might be friendly and give me a few tips.
The big difference between open source and closed source is that open source companies make all their money from support. They really do try to help because they want you to renew that support contract. They go much farther than simply reading the FAQ (Knowledge base) entries for you like MS support does.
Furthermore, saying "You get what you pay for" is about the most ignorant thing you could say. How much do you pay for Linux? Yet it's a top-end server OS. How much do you pay for Mozilla? How much does ReiserFS cost? You get exactly what the developer uses, which is worth far more than what you (didn't) pay.
Honestly, if open source takes over, the gripe will go from MS to RTFM. Its something that should be addressed now instead of later.
Okay. RTFM.
If you buy Microsoft's software, they're obligated to listen to you bitch about its problems. If you download something I offer for free, I'm not obligated to you in the slightest.
If you can say something both coherent and polite, I'll listen. I do want my software to be better, but I'm not going to be abused by you in the process.
Why do you think people are entitled to anything else? I've very rarely seen people told to RTFM for asking a polite question. They almost always get pointed to docs. If they fail to read those, they get told off, but what else do you expect when you rudely demand someone walk you step by step through something you aren't willing to read a help file for?
It's no different in any other circumstance. Ask for directions in a mall and you'll get pointed to the map. If you ignore the map and ask something it would answer, expect to be ignored. Nobody has respect for whiners who demand that other people solve their problems for them.
We got up to 32Mb/s before Apache couldn't keep up on these machines (too many processes, not enough memory). We then went exploring other web server softwares, and found thttpd.. These same machines could now serve 80Mb/s...
Big difference. Shows the importance of a *lot* of ram for servers.
We had to put an additional blower fan in to keep the CPU at a reasonable temperature.. Actually, they're from Radio Shack.:)
My biggest problem when building 1u cases for my old job was finding blowers. I should have tried Radio Shack. (None of the computer stores had heard of them, and the electronics stores didn't seem to carry them.)
We used to use one staging server, but when you have 20+ machines rsyncing a lot of data all at once, it was enough to saturate the line it was on rather quickly.
Why not keep a directory containing the old content on the staging server. Generate diffs locally and send that out, it should be easier on your bandwidth.
On this subject, I wonder if anyone has written a broadcast file server to run on ethernet... That way your server only has to send one copy of the file, as long as there aren't any routers in between which might drop broadcast packets. Security might be an issue but should be solvable fairly easily, or just worked around by using isolated ethernet segments.
We switched over to MySQL, and now have 1.9 million messages in the system.
I haven't used MySQL, but I work with Postgres a bit. I don't know enough SQL to appreciate the features it has over MySQL so I suppose either would work.
1.9 million messages is a lot. My news system (kinda like a message board, but without threads) has nine right now.:) I anticipate it'll get up into the thousands when fully deployed, but still nowhere near.
I have a whole bunch of project ideas, but can barely begin to explain how to do them.. Some of it could revolutionize the way people access the Internet.. I really need to get a site set up and put stuff like that on it..
Yeah, that'd be neat. I'd check them out at least and discuss them.
I saw your post in the robot car thread. I hope you get a few people involved. Even if you don't get an entry that can compete you'll have fun doing it.
It's a local root hole. Do you give out accounts (at any privellege) to anyone else? If not, you should be safe waiting a day or two to see how other, more daring people fare. But, you are that person... Post back in a day or two and let us know how it works.
It could be the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
I think the only part that's needed is the seamless transition. Ship with Mozilla (perhaps spoofing as IE/Windows) and OpenOffice. Both of these apps do essentially everything IE/Office does, and have extra features too... Anyone willing to tolerate any change (going from Win2k/Office2k -> KDE3.0/OpenOffice is about as different as going to WinXP/OfficeXP) can adjust easily.
The reason people will switch is that businesses will save up to $1k per employee in site licenses. The employees won't get a say.
Video card drivers, ugh... I swapped a Matrox for an ATI at work and ended up reinstalling because after two hours of fiddling. Of course, that's ATI, and the standard windows answer to anything, but it can certainly be hard to understand.
But as someone pointed out, if anything in Windows fails it's seen to be the fault of the program or hardware. If anything in Linux fails, it's the fault of Linux. People blame hardware for not coming with drivers for every version of windows, but blame MacOS and Linux for not automatically knowing how to use everything under the sun.
And I'd give Mozilla another try if I were you. I've never had problems with it, I often get 30+ day uptimes and I've always got 20+ tabs open. The version that comes with the distro has a few issues. I always uninstall it, then delete/usr/local/mozilla/* and/usr/bin/mozilla, then I install it using the full installer in the default (/usr/local/mozilla) location and make a pointer from/usr/bin/mozilla to/usr/local/mozilla/mozilla... The default install in Mandrake 9.0 is kinda screwy and gave me problems with upgrading until I deleted it entirely and installed fresh. Keeping your.mozilla/ directory works just fine though. Even if you like Konq more, if you figured out why it was crashing (is it the default setup?) and filed a bug it'd help the mozilla project a lot. Hell, even drop in on irc.mozilla.org #mozillazine and ask for help reporting the bug.
This is why Oracle ported to Linux. They get the benefits of having their own OS (customization) and their customers don't have a pay a second set of license fees.
Many developers of destination-applications (something a customer demands, and buys a system to run) like Oracle, 3d rendering, etc, are looking at Linux. It lets them install onto an empty system without worrying about changing OSes, security holes opened by other processes, etc. It also lets them provide things like the ability to remote configure the computers with proven technology like ssh and X instead of writing their own tools.
Next to a copy of many applications, the hardware is a trivial cost. $15k for a 3d package, $2.5k for a smoking x86 computer to run it on.
And, these companies analyze the market and figure that a customer will be willing to pay $40k for a system with Oracle handling n transactions per second. If they can remove the OS cost, more of that $40k goes to them.
I didn't get the idea that the parent posted wanted to shove MySQL or Postgres code into the kernel. I thought they wanted to make a common interface available so that having an RDBMS available was as common and expected as having a/tmp directory.
Today, you can assume perl is on a system and there's 95% chance of python being available. But for an app developer that's not where it ends. If you want a database available you have to get your install scripts to install Postgres, or get the user to do it, and then cope with all these different directory structures, a real nightmare of configuration options.
What if there was a simple library call 'sql-query-to-systemDB' and the distro maintainers made sure that there was an rdmbs available and they took care of the back-end, like is it mysql or postgres, etc. Your application would just create tables and query away without any more worry than creating a temp file or allocating memory.
Now we'd scoff at an OS that didn't have tcp/ip networking available. Virtual memory is a requirement. When will we start seeing RDMBS availability this way?
ReiserFS v4 is looking to have a transaction interface. This initially will just be accessible by the kernel to allow out-of-order write caching to best utilize the disk.
(User writes block 1 and 2, block 2 is nearby, but block 1 isn't. It's faster to write 2, then 1, but if you crash between them your data is in an inconsistent state... With transactions you can safely write 2 first, then 1, because you know that they'll both happen, or not, as a group.)
But, to be a database replacement you need to allow independent transactions without blocking. For instance, someone runs a really complex select on a huge DB at midnight. It runs for three hours before returning an answer, but it sees the DB as it was at midnight, without any of the data written since then. But, you can't block writes while this happens...
If ReiserFS does manage to allow this, it'll be incredible. I doubt the default filesystem will support it. It's the kind of thing that you rarely need in filesystem, but costs a lot to provide.
I think the proposed solution should involve a requirement that the work remain available.
I dislike the idea that someone could pay the nominal fee for the next 100 years and stop publishing the work, wanting it to rot away rather than be available for free.
And, I'd have a requirement that the payments need to be made on a year by year basis, not up front. Otherwise Disney (and such) would simply pay for a thousand years of $1 extensions every time they publish anything.
Actually, that seems like a valid interpretation. It talks about killing infidels, infidels are non-believers or those who try to destroy islam. He sees the Americans as fitting this, so they're infidels, and thus need to be killed.
Python has its uses. Just because I don't use it (yet perhaps, dunno) isn't reason to bash it.
It's all about the programmer anyways. People can write unmaintainable code in any language, or write beautiful ASM.
Also, python doesn't suffer from accidental use of '=' instead of '==' in a conditional
That's one of the things I missed going from pascal to C. Using:= for assignment was such a nice touch. No mistakes and only one more character.
I think this is a non-argument. If you dont want to put the block on the same line, then just don't.
What I mean is that if I want to pull a small block up in C or perl I just change the indenting. An extra syntax to allow that seems a little silly. I'd think that a (normally phrased) conditional followed by a statement, followed by unindented code, should be interpreted properly without having a new syntax.
Anyways, I'm very late for a meeting. I'll return to this later though.
A couple hundred Mb/s extra all day probably, but nothing we couldn't handle.
Yeah, an interview with a company that didn't mind being slashdotted might not be a bad idea. So many sites die from CPU load even if they've got plenty of bandwidth.
It'd be interesting hearing partially about what servers and what configurations you use, but also what design issues you found, especially as it looks like there's a fair bit of dynamic content.
Ditto with slashdot, constructing all these huge pages on the fly. But, I guess 90% of their users don't go past the first page which is cached for most users.
I'd *LOVE* to have a script go through the database, take every dictionary word and change it to a better password, and Email the user.. But, people would be ready to kill me when 200k users start complaining.
So many good security ideas get ditched because users don't want security, until after there's a problem.
Well, and there's no popups or ads,
Not that I see them these days... But yeah, popups are the mark of a cheesy desperate site. Sites with real content want you to stay with them, not go somewhere else for a banner click.
That's one of the mandates from the bosses is that all the sites *HAVE* to be fast.
Smart. That's one thing that sends people away quickly. I didn't browse too deeply but all the pages I opened off the front page popped right open, even when I opened all the links at once. Sounds nice to have bosses with a clue!
You appear to be based in Tampa. I was there just recently on my honeymoon. (St. Pete beach actually, but we went into Tampa for Busch Gardens.)
If I wasn't thousands of miles away I'd ask if you were looking for a perl/postgres/php guy. (I usually say 'back-end developer' but for a porn site it sounded... wrong.)
Btw, most C compilers will catch your code snippet and complain that the it doesn't do anything. (Unless x is declared volatile, in which case "useless" expressions often have a purpose, like to toggle a soft-switch, and don't get optimised out.)
Anyways, the example is also a demonstration of why that brace style isn't the _One True Way_, which is the put the opening brace on the line of code that opens it. "if (foo) {\n" Which makes it easier to catch hanging semicolons. But, by far, the largest mistake I've seen where one character changes the meaning is "" instead of "=" or vice versa. Fencepost errors I think they're called. But, for a typo, any comparison in there is just as bad, it won't do what you expect.
Interpretted languages have one huge benefit. They're easy to test. (And good programmers write easily tested code.) So you probably run a test every ~50 lines of code and will catch blocks that don't execute and so on. I'd hate to write a C project that took hours to compile.
I was writing hello-world type code in python and I remember it as having two syntaxes for an if, one that required an indented block and one that was meant for one line. I found this awkward and I prefer being able to use explicit controls (braces) to put a block where I want it. Was I mistaken?
Admittedly, perl does have a lot of cruft. Like "foo unless bar"... What the hell is that for?! Why not "if (!bar) {foo}". If the conditional is in front you can see when something is going to happen, which is almost always more useful right off the bat, than seeing what is happening. I write perl code that like my C code, is very readable. The only part that tends not to be is regexps and even those I break out onto multiple lines (and document) when they're more than a little complex.
Languages like perl and python and much more readable in terms of logic flow. You don't need to have an array size counter and count from zero to size - 1, you simple do "foreach $value (@array) { foo }" and even a non-programmer knows what's going on. With usable variable names it's very plain. Self documenting code through clear naming and structure.
Oh I had misread your earlier message as saying that 10% of all passwords were 1234.
And yeah, I can imagine you get a lot of scans. If I was to do this I'd either use proxies from major ISPs (where you likely have subscribers you wouldn't want to ban) or bounce at random intervals through many proxies, preferably private ones on friends' computers.
I like the script that changes passwords. But why not just scan the database now, mail out secure passwords to everyone who fails the check, and in the future, mark all guesses from an IP tagged as a scanner as failure, regardless of what they guess?
But, I can get more porn than I can, um... use, from The Hun's, other free services, Gnaughty (check this out) and p2p programs. It was for the intellectual exercise.
And yeah, I've got a domain I use for mail (and private pages, and hidden links that are meant for friends but aren't supposed to be secure, like pictures from parties, etc) and it doesn't have a front page (or easily guessable page) and people tell us it's down even though we don't actually send anyone there.
How much do you get paid to astroturf for Microsoft? You're running around saying they haven't broken the law multiple times when there's clear evidence to the contrary.
Stacker/Doublespace and the DR DOS issue are two example.
I wouldn't cut any other company any slack, I'd treat NVidia just like any other company I haven't see a track record of fraud from. Microsoft has simply established a pattern and only an idiot or an employee would ignore it. Not everyone abuses the patent system, but when Amazon files patents I'm naturally untrusting after their 1-click stupidity.
And what lie are you talking about with trustworthy computing? Microsoft is courting Hollywood with it, that means they're selling it as being able to stop "piracy". They don't sell it that way to consumers, they lie about it stopping viruses and other things, but that's obviously not true. And the BSA. They send out threatening letters and blackmail companies. (They don't accept receipts as proof of purchase, they want packaging, even though companies buying 100+ copies of some software usually throw out the packaging.) The BSA is largely a Microsoft front.
As for my claim that trustworthy computing is a lie. Microsoft claims it will stop viruses, as they viruses won't be properly signed. This would be good, except that most recent viruses aren't actual executable files, they trick outlook, or IIS, into doing things they shouldn't. How is code signing supposed to prevent that?
It's fairly obvious that "trustworthy computing" is the first step towards removing full control of the hardware from the user. Given that the US political system allows bribes (oh, sorry, "donations") you're going to see trustworthy computing becoming mandatory, if Microsoft manages to pull it off. All to stop terrorism, I'm sure.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should a working computer be retired and replace with a new machine and new OS, just to serve its old purpose?
Maybe it sucked to use, and sucked to setup, but once it was running it was fairly good. And if the web site, or file shares, it serves are still in use, what benefit is there from Win2k?
(Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that 2k kicks NT4 (and maybe XP) but I don't think you should need to run out and upgrade a machine that's happily plugging along.)
It's this kind of attitude that dooms the console market to having shallow derivative games forever.
The only game with a worse camera than Zelda 64 was the original Tomb Raider, and how much actual content was there in that game? You talk to someone, they tell you to run across the map the other side, along the way you fight the same monsters you fought before because the stupid console can't actually save anything. Then you go to another era and run across the stupid level again fighting the same monsters, but with a different low-res skin, talk to someone and he tells you, guess what, to run to the absolute farthest away place...
Then there's the mental defect in console developers that forces them to stupidly mix genres. Is Zelda an RPG, or a mindless arcade game where you have to dodge stupidly flailing boss monsters, or replay the whole damn level again from the save point. The side games were all twitch crap too. Want to have a reasonable chance of success in the RPG game? Get good at shooting arrows from horseback.
Console games are pretty much all about making you fight the game. Shooting arrows at a slowly moving target is easy, with a real controller, but these stupid pucks you get with consoles are the result of a nazi experiment in torture. But, if they didn't have all this crap in there, and if you didn't have to replay everything from the last save-point all the time, you'd notice how little there was to actually do in the game.
"100+ hours of gameplay" translates to "98 hours of tedious shit between tiny bits of hidden gameplay and story."
Next time you think a game is shit when you sit down with it, listen to yourself. Don't support companies in making more crap like that.
Who needs that? I certainly don't.
But, if you do, you might want to drop a bit of the money you made on your recent job as a donation to the Samba group, or whoever else would be working on something like this. It'll pay off in the end when you can offer the same services at the same price but not have to pay software costs out of it.
And if you don't need it enough to pay for it, I question how much you need it.
What planet are you from? In what way does Mozilla have a terrible interface, or Opera or IE have a "good" one?
You probably don't like the default theme or something stupid like that.
If Apple put a disclaimer screen in the program, at start, that made you type "Yes" to "I understand that not only is this BETA software likely to have unknown bugs, it also was distributed with known bugs (as detailed at http: ...) that have yet to be fixed at this stage in testing ..." I doubt people would be so hot to use it, or to bitch about it if they did.
A legitimate tester, or illegitimate tester who understood what beta meant, would jump through that hurdle immediately. A bored person, or someone who thought they were getting something for free, probably wouldn't.
Next time you see someone get told to RTFM, look at where they're asking, and what they're asking.
If you go into #LinuxKernel and ask "How do I install Linux", you're going to get brushed off, either with "RTFM" or "ask somewhere else" because it's not the right place. It's like stopping at a drag-racing forum and asking about the best undercoating to get for driving on salted roads. Technically both forums deal with cars but that's as close as they get.
If someone goes into #Mandrake or #LinuxNewbies and asks the question in anything but a rude tone they'll be pointed to a faq or something. Told to RTFM, but gently, and with a pointer to the right M.
But, if that person comes back and says "I can't make an install floppy from windows" they'll get a ton of help, even if it's a simple task. They've obviously read a bit about the process and have taken the time to explain what the problem is so they the potential helper doesn't have to play twenty questions.
I've *never* had trouble going into a channel and asking the most basic of questions. I say something like "I looked at the PHP docs online and I couldn't find how to X, the best I can find is Y. Can someone help?" Even if it's fairly basic, I've at least shown willingness to help myself.
You say that as if you tricked me into admitted a deep dark secret of open source. If you want support people catering to you, buy a support contract. Nobody ever suggested otherwise.
I don't see why you have so much trouble with the concept. If I wrote you a petulant and whiny letter about being unable to configure IIS you wouldn't help. It's not your job to do so. If I was nice about it though, you might be friendly and give me a few tips.
The big difference between open source and closed source is that open source companies make all their money from support. They really do try to help because they want you to renew that support contract. They go much farther than simply reading the FAQ (Knowledge base) entries for you like MS support does.
Furthermore, saying "You get what you pay for" is about the most ignorant thing you could say. How much do you pay for Linux? Yet it's a top-end server OS. How much do you pay for Mozilla? How much does ReiserFS cost? You get exactly what the developer uses, which is worth far more than what you (didn't) pay.
Honestly, if open source takes over, the gripe will go from MS to RTFM. Its something that should be addressed now instead of later.
Okay. RTFM.
If you buy Microsoft's software, they're obligated to listen to you bitch about its problems. If you download something I offer for free, I'm not obligated to you in the slightest.
If you can say something both coherent and polite, I'll listen. I do want my software to be better, but I'm not going to be abused by you in the process.
Why do you think people are entitled to anything else? I've very rarely seen people told to RTFM for asking a polite question. They almost always get pointed to docs. If they fail to read those, they get told off, but what else do you expect when you rudely demand someone walk you step by step through something you aren't willing to read a help file for?
It's no different in any other circumstance. Ask for directions in a mall and you'll get pointed to the map. If you ignore the map and ask something it would answer, expect to be ignored. Nobody has respect for whiners who demand that other people solve their problems for them.
We got up to 32Mb/s before Apache couldn't keep up on these machines (too many processes, not enough memory). We then went exploring other web server softwares, and found thttpd.. These same machines could now serve 80Mb/s...
:)
:) I anticipate it'll get up into the thousands when fully deployed, but still nowhere near.
Big difference. Shows the importance of a *lot* of ram for servers.
We had to put an additional blower fan in to keep the CPU at a reasonable temperature.. Actually, they're from Radio Shack.
My biggest problem when building 1u cases for my old job was finding blowers. I should have tried Radio Shack. (None of the computer stores had heard of them, and the electronics stores didn't seem to carry them.)
We used to use one staging server, but when you have 20+ machines rsyncing a lot of data all at once, it was enough to saturate the line it was on rather quickly.
Why not keep a directory containing the old content on the staging server. Generate diffs locally and send that out, it should be easier on your bandwidth.
On this subject, I wonder if anyone has written a broadcast file server to run on ethernet... That way your server only has to send one copy of the file, as long as there aren't any routers in between which might drop broadcast packets. Security might be an issue but should be solvable fairly easily, or just worked around by using isolated ethernet segments.
We switched over to MySQL, and now have 1.9 million messages in the system.
I haven't used MySQL, but I work with Postgres a bit. I don't know enough SQL to appreciate the features it has over MySQL so I suppose either would work.
1.9 million messages is a lot. My news system (kinda like a message board, but without threads) has nine right now.
I have a whole bunch of project ideas, but can barely begin to explain how to do them.. Some of it could revolutionize the way people access the Internet.. I really need to get a site set up and put stuff like that on it..
Yeah, that'd be neat. I'd check them out at least and discuss them.
I saw your post in the robot car thread. I hope you get a few people involved. Even if you don't get an entry that can compete you'll have fun doing it.
It's a local root hole. Do you give out accounts (at any privellege) to anyone else? If not, you should be safe waiting a day or two to see how other, more daring people fare. But, you are that person... Post back in a day or two and let us know how it works.
It could be the purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
I think the only part that's needed is the seamless transition. Ship with Mozilla (perhaps spoofing as IE/Windows) and OpenOffice. Both of these apps do essentially everything IE/Office does, and have extra features too... Anyone willing to tolerate any change (going from Win2k/Office2k -> KDE3.0/OpenOffice is about as different as going to WinXP/OfficeXP) can adjust easily.
The reason people will switch is that businesses will save up to $1k per employee in site licenses. The employees won't get a say.
Video card drivers, ugh... I swapped a Matrox for an ATI at work and ended up reinstalling because after two hours of fiddling. Of course, that's ATI, and the standard windows answer to anything, but it can certainly be hard to understand.
/usr/local/mozilla/* and /usr/bin/mozilla, then I install it using the full installer in the default (/usr/local/mozilla) location and make a pointer from /usr/bin/mozilla to /usr/local/mozilla/mozilla... The default install in Mandrake 9.0 is kinda screwy and gave me problems with upgrading until I deleted it entirely and installed fresh. Keeping your .mozilla/ directory works just fine though. Even if you like Konq more, if you figured out why it was crashing (is it the default setup?) and filed a bug it'd help the mozilla project a lot. Hell, even drop in on irc.mozilla.org #mozillazine and ask for help reporting the bug.
But as someone pointed out, if anything in Windows fails it's seen to be the fault of the program or hardware. If anything in Linux fails, it's the fault of Linux. People blame hardware for not coming with drivers for every version of windows, but blame MacOS and Linux for not automatically knowing how to use everything under the sun.
And I'd give Mozilla another try if I were you. I've never had problems with it, I often get 30+ day uptimes and I've always got 20+ tabs open. The version that comes with the distro has a few issues. I always uninstall it, then delete
This is why Oracle ported to Linux. They get the benefits of having their own OS (customization) and their customers don't have a pay a second set of license fees.
Many developers of destination-applications (something a customer demands, and buys a system to run) like Oracle, 3d rendering, etc, are looking at Linux. It lets them install onto an empty system without worrying about changing OSes, security holes opened by other processes, etc. It also lets them provide things like the ability to remote configure the computers with proven technology like ssh and X instead of writing their own tools.
Next to a copy of many applications, the hardware is a trivial cost. $15k for a 3d package, $2.5k for a smoking x86 computer to run it on.
And, these companies analyze the market and figure that a customer will be willing to pay $40k for a system with Oracle handling n transactions per second. If they can remove the OS cost, more of that $40k goes to them.
I didn't get the idea that the parent posted wanted to shove MySQL or Postgres code into the kernel. I thought they wanted to make a common interface available so that having an RDBMS available was as common and expected as having a /tmp directory.
Today, you can assume perl is on a system and there's 95% chance of python being available. But for an app developer that's not where it ends. If you want a database available you have to get your install scripts to install Postgres, or get the user to do it, and then cope with all these different directory structures, a real nightmare of configuration options.
What if there was a simple library call 'sql-query-to-systemDB' and the distro maintainers made sure that there was an rdmbs available and they took care of the back-end, like is it mysql or postgres, etc. Your application would just create tables and query away without any more worry than creating a temp file or allocating memory.
Now we'd scoff at an OS that didn't have tcp/ip networking available. Virtual memory is a requirement. When will we start seeing RDMBS availability this way?
ReiserFS v4 is looking to have a transaction interface. This initially will just be accessible by the kernel to allow out-of-order write caching to best utilize the disk.
(User writes block 1 and 2, block 2 is nearby, but block 1 isn't. It's faster to write 2, then 1, but if you crash between them your data is in an inconsistent state... With transactions you can safely write 2 first, then 1, because you know that they'll both happen, or not, as a group.)
But, to be a database replacement you need to allow independent transactions without blocking. For instance, someone runs a really complex select on a huge DB at midnight. It runs for three hours before returning an answer, but it sees the DB as it was at midnight, without any of the data written since then. But, you can't block writes while this happens...
If ReiserFS does manage to allow this, it'll be incredible. I doubt the default filesystem will support it. It's the kind of thing that you rarely need in filesystem, but costs a lot to provide.
I think the proposed solution should involve a requirement that the work remain available.
I dislike the idea that someone could pay the nominal fee for the next 100 years and stop publishing the work, wanting it to rot away rather than be available for free.
And, I'd have a requirement that the payments need to be made on a year by year basis, not up front. Otherwise Disney (and such) would simply pay for a thousand years of $1 extensions every time they publish anything.
Ie, no extra syntax to 'pull up' a block, if that was what you meant.
Hmmm. That certainly is what I want, though it isn't what I remember.
I will have to give Python a try. If for no other reason that adding a few more lines to the resume.
Actually, that seems like a valid interpretation. It talks about killing infidels, infidels are non-believers or those who try to destroy islam. He sees the Americans as fitting this, so they're infidels, and thus need to be killed.
Communism has nothing more to do with religion than capitalism does.
I think you mean, Stalin tried to get rid of religion. And why not, he was already getting rid of everyone else...
You don't exactly sound anti-Python, there
:= for assignment was such a nice touch. No mistakes and only one more character.
Python has its uses. Just because I don't use it (yet perhaps, dunno) isn't reason to bash it.
It's all about the programmer anyways. People can write unmaintainable code in any language, or write beautiful ASM.
Also, python doesn't suffer from accidental use of '=' instead of '==' in a conditional
That's one of the things I missed going from pascal to C. Using
I think this is a non-argument. If you dont want to put the block on the same line, then just don't.
What I mean is that if I want to pull a small block up in C or perl I just change the indenting. An extra syntax to allow that seems a little silly. I'd think that a (normally phrased) conditional followed by a statement, followed by unindented code, should be interpreted properly without having a new syntax.
Anyways, I'm very late for a meeting. I'll return to this later though.
Thanks for the response.
A couple hundred Mb/s extra all day probably, but nothing we couldn't handle.
... wrong.)
Yeah, an interview with a company that didn't mind being slashdotted might not be a bad idea. So many sites die from CPU load even if they've got plenty of bandwidth.
It'd be interesting hearing partially about what servers and what configurations you use, but also what design issues you found, especially as it looks like there's a fair bit of dynamic content.
Ditto with slashdot, constructing all these huge pages on the fly. But, I guess 90% of their users don't go past the first page which is cached for most users.
I'd *LOVE* to have a script go through the database, take every dictionary word and change it to a better password, and Email the user.. But, people would be ready to kill me when 200k users start complaining.
So many good security ideas get ditched because users don't want security, until after there's a problem.
Well, and there's no popups or ads,
Not that I see them these days... But yeah, popups are the mark of a cheesy desperate site. Sites with real content want you to stay with them, not go somewhere else for a banner click.
That's one of the mandates from the bosses is that all the sites *HAVE* to be fast.
Smart. That's one thing that sends people away quickly. I didn't browse too deeply but all the pages I opened off the front page popped right open, even when I opened all the links at once. Sounds nice to have bosses with a clue!
You appear to be based in Tampa. I was there just recently on my honeymoon. (St. Pete beach actually, but we went into Tampa for Busch Gardens.)
If I wasn't thousands of miles away I'd ask if you were looking for a perl/postgres/php guy. (I usually say 'back-end developer' but for a porn site it sounded
Pre-WWW you mean. Usenet was sent over the internet.
Easy mistake to make though, these days when talking to people we usually use internet to mean web because it's all the common user sees.
Btw, most C compilers will catch your code snippet and complain that the it doesn't do anything. (Unless x is declared volatile, in which case "useless" expressions often have a purpose, like to toggle a soft-switch, and don't get optimised out.)
Anyways, the example is also a demonstration of why that brace style isn't the _One True Way_, which is the put the opening brace on the line of code that opens it. "if (foo) {\n" Which makes it easier to catch hanging semicolons. But, by far, the largest mistake I've seen where one character changes the meaning is "" instead of "=" or vice versa. Fencepost errors I think they're called. But, for a typo, any comparison in there is just as bad, it won't do what you expect.
Interpretted languages have one huge benefit. They're easy to test. (And good programmers write easily tested code.) So you probably run a test every ~50 lines of code and will catch blocks that don't execute and so on. I'd hate to write a C project that took hours to compile.
I was writing hello-world type code in python and I remember it as having two syntaxes for an if, one that required an indented block and one that was meant for one line. I found this awkward and I prefer being able to use explicit controls (braces) to put a block where I want it. Was I mistaken?
Admittedly, perl does have a lot of cruft. Like "foo unless bar"... What the hell is that for?! Why not "if (!bar) {foo}". If the conditional is in front you can see when something is going to happen, which is almost always more useful right off the bat, than seeing what is happening. I write perl code that like my C code, is very readable. The only part that tends not to be is regexps and even those I break out onto multiple lines (and document) when they're more than a little complex.
Languages like perl and python and much more readable in terms of logic flow. You don't need to have an array size counter and count from zero to size - 1, you simple do "foreach $value (@array) { foo }" and even a non-programmer knows what's going on. With usable variable names it's very plain. Self documenting code through clear naming and structure.
Oh I had misread your earlier message as saying that 10% of all passwords were 1234.
And yeah, I can imagine you get a lot of scans. If I was to do this I'd either use proxies from major ISPs (where you likely have subscribers you wouldn't want to ban) or bounce at random intervals through many proxies, preferably private ones on friends' computers.
I like the script that changes passwords. But why not just scan the database now, mail out secure passwords to everyone who fails the check, and in the future, mark all guesses from an IP tagged as a scanner as failure, regardless of what they guess?
But, I can get more porn than I can, um... use, from The Hun's, other free services, Gnaughty (check this out) and p2p programs. It was for the intellectual exercise.
And yeah, I've got a domain I use for mail (and private pages, and hidden links that are meant for friends but aren't supposed to be secure, like pictures from parties, etc) and it doesn't have a front page (or easily guessable page) and people tell us it's down even though we don't actually send anyone there.
How much do you get paid to astroturf for Microsoft? You're running around saying they haven't broken the law multiple times when there's clear evidence to the contrary.
Stacker/Doublespace and the DR DOS issue are two example.
I wouldn't cut any other company any slack, I'd treat NVidia just like any other company I haven't see a track record of fraud from. Microsoft has simply established a pattern and only an idiot or an employee would ignore it. Not everyone abuses the patent system, but when Amazon files patents I'm naturally untrusting after their 1-click stupidity.
And what lie are you talking about with trustworthy computing? Microsoft is courting Hollywood with it, that means they're selling it as being able to stop "piracy". They don't sell it that way to consumers, they lie about it stopping viruses and other things, but that's obviously not true. And the BSA. They send out threatening letters and blackmail companies. (They don't accept receipts as proof of purchase, they want packaging, even though companies buying 100+ copies of some software usually throw out the packaging.) The BSA is largely a Microsoft front.
As for my claim that trustworthy computing is a lie. Microsoft claims it will stop viruses, as they viruses won't be properly signed. This would be good, except that most recent viruses aren't actual executable files, they trick outlook, or IIS, into doing things they shouldn't. How is code signing supposed to prevent that?
It's fairly obvious that "trustworthy computing" is the first step towards removing full control of the hardware from the user. Given that the US political system allows bribes (oh, sorry, "donations") you're going to see trustworthy computing becoming mandatory, if Microsoft manages to pull it off. All to stop terrorism, I'm sure.