"I have already gotten 3 telemarketing calls to the phone number I put on the national list since the list went into effect."
well, you can't sue them, since the list wasn't supposed to be enacted until early October anyway
Did you notice that he claimed he'd had those calls since it went into effect? So if the list went into effect today, he's claiming that today he has already had 3 calls that violate the list. Or are you suggesting that the list still shouldn't be in effect yet, even though it already is "early October"?
El, I have taken your concept and RUN with it. Below is a first-draft parody of the entire editorial. I think some parts are inspired, but other parts could use some help. It doesn't make Verisign's claims look as crazy as they are, yet. Anybody want to take a shot at rewriting my rewrite? I figure we can throw it up on a Web site with a similar look to it, and let the parody stand as a good rebuttal. Here it is.
Hobocorp's decision to launch a new Bum Gun service that gives panhandlers tools
and options when they harass people for money has spurred a debate about the
future of a safe society. It is a debate worth having, because at the heart of
it is whether innovation in a safe society will be encouraged or whether the
status quo is good enough. More than 20 million times a day, innocent citizens
receive a barrage of requests for cash when they walk or drive by street beggars
(such as stopping at a light and having the windshield washed whether requested
or not). Those requests for cash can lead to a dead end, with no money given to
the beggar in compensation for his efforts.
That's what Bum Gun is about. Instead of begging for cash, its users get an option to intimidate the citizenry, try a holdup or simply assualt the victim. Thus far, people have used these guns more than 40 million times to get the money they want to have.
While similar services have been tested and offered before, Hobocorp's Bum Gun has triggered debate because it hasn't been tried for non-mafia and non-gang related groups. Seemingly ignoring that fact, the police cast a vote last week for the status quo by forcing Hobocorp to shut down the service. We reluctantly agreed and are exploring our options.
The police appear to have bought into claims that our society's safety has broken or will break. Anyone who has lived through it in the last three weeks knows that claim to be false. More likely, the police caved under the pressure from some in the community for whom this is a 2nd-amendment-religion issue about whether guns should be used for these purposes.
For this vocal minority, resentment lingers at the very fact that guns are used for extortion, which ignores the fact that it's a critical part of our economy.
We respectfully disagree with those who, in the name of anti-gun rhetoric, strive to hold society back. Society as we know it today was built by expanding beyond its origins. When clans -- the first known humans to group together -- became prevalent thousands of years ago, its purpose was to provide strength in numbers.
Over the next few millenia, every stage of what we now know as human society caused fierce debate and controversy. By not being afraid to test and try new things, a set of laws and rights was created that now serves as the foundation for commerce and communications.
While the current debate is not the first over the future of society, it is critically important because it could well determine its future development. Our society has been used for many innovative purposes over the last century -- look at what the USA and the European Union have been able to accomplish -- but the reality is society itself, the infrastructure that serves as the foundation, has not significantly benefited from innovation.
This is a significant test for the entire planet because if the world can't find a way to introduce new services while reaching a resolution on legal matters that might arise, then society's infrastructure will never improve. It's tantamount to saying that the world is flat and therefore there is no need for further exploration.
If that is the case, it doesn't bode well for Earth. If beggars and con men are discouraged from exploring the bounds of the law, it will mean less research and development and less investment into firearms and assault weapons. In short, a weaker society.
That should concern the panhandling community, NRA members, thieves and white-collar criminals alike. Less investment means a less-stable gun-lobby long-term, with de
If you do this, then you MUST double your estimated hours. You'll feel bad, because you'll think you can do something in a week, even though you'll charge them for 2 weeks of work as a flat-fee. But don't feel bad -- you will actually take 3 weeks to do it right and end up making less for your time. And in the odd case where it actually does take less time, you can be sure that the company is fine with this because they'd rather pay a little extra for a flat-fee than get an ambiguous hourly "when it's done" contract. Besides, everyone is happy when someone delivers a product ahead of schedule.
I put out some free Perl & PHP code, and planned to release some more next week. But I partly rely on the BSD license to protect me from liability. What does this case mean for someone like me? While I think I'm such a good programmer that eventually my code will be super-tight, I know I'm a poor enough programmer that it will take many iterations and bug reports to get there. Should I only release code when I'm certain no security issues exist (which probably means I'd never release stuff)?
From SCO's "open letter": "The GPL has never faced a full legal test, and SCO believes that it will not stand up in court."
In other words, SCO is saying, "We believe we have no legal right to distribute a huge amount of the software that we are in fact distributing."
No, you're not giving SCO enough credit. Don't dismiss a cornered badger as harmless. It may still have a plan to bite you. In SCO's case, they're saying that they have every legal right to treat every GPL'd product as if it were public domain. I understand the geeks here are saying that even if they win against the GPL, SCO will still have to contend with copyrights. But you can tell from SCO's comments that they view this as a non-issue -- they fully intend to argue that use of the GPL is the equivalent of giving up rights to your work. Similiar to the notion that if you don't protect your trademark it is diminished, SCO will argue that use of the GPL effectively makes any copyright claim null & void. And therefore, they fully believe that they have every legal right to do anything they wish with any GPL'd work.
Remember, according to SCO, GPL == Public Domain. We may not think they will win in court, but their intention is to yank our IP right out from under us. It's something to think about.
I'm interested in other mods for Baldurs or the other Infinity Engine RPGs. Can anyone point out a site with more info on these?
You mean you haven't been using them? Oh man, I envy you. It would be great to play through all the mods for the "first time" again. There are banter packs that add NPC dialogues, flirt packs that give some NPCs much more romantic text to say to your character, bug patches, completely new NPCs that can join your group (such as Solaufein and Kelsey), and more. Go here now.
Be careful. Some mods, like Dark Side of the Sword Coast, are buggy. It's best to find a mod that looks interesting, and then go to groups.google.com and type it in to see people's comments about it. If it sounds stable, try it.
Here is a summary of what I've experienced after about 10 hours of gameplay (using beta 3). First, it's far more crash-prone. In the non-modded BG1, I could play for about 8 hours straight before it started to slow or get crash-prone. In BG1tutu, it crashed about 6 times in 5 hours. That's not so bad, as I make saved-games about every 5 minutes (the Q key works for quick saves). But it is buggy. Also, some areas spawn a whole lot MORE monsters than before, and my characters ended up fleeing to the Friendly Arm after getting mobbed. Also, the quest log is mostly toast. You'll get notes in the journal, but nothing is showing up under the completed quests area or pending quests area. So I'm having a tough time keeping track of what to do. But I'll print out a quest list from a Web site and it'll be fine. Finally, some characters have weapons that don't match their proficiencies. For example, Minsc is specialized in two-handed swords, AND wielding two weapons at once. Huh? He has 4 arms? But no biggie, the game works fine.
The good stuff is that it really works to play at 1024x768 (and even bigger). My fights have been a whole lot more strategic because of this, already. The "kits" for NPCs are useful. I really like some of the changes I've seen to a few of the characters. Khalid is now a better NPC to have. Garrick is still lame -- I should have selected a kit for him (I left him un-kitted). Another nice thing that doesn't have to do with BG1tutu (much) is that I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the low-level character stuggles. I've visited temples a lot for resurrections, scrimped for enough cash just to get a potion, and really thought hard about what 2 wimpy spells would possibly keep my character alive longer. Although, here's a cool trick: since you can hit "tab" to highlight items in BG1tutu, it's easy to find the ring of wizardry near the Friendly Arm. And since you can play a sorcerer now, try it with the ring. You get 6 spells on level 1. Nice. You might actually survive.
IBM is being so hypocritical. If the issue is a non-issue, why don't they indemnify their customers?
So, has Sun been ghostwriting for SCO all along? Or is their strangely similar wording just weird coincidence?
I guess it doesn't matter. I feel like they don't support the Linux community -- and by extension, the Open Source community. So I question why I support them.
...are in Planescape Torment. I found it to be slightly interesting at first, but it got far more interesting when I returned to the morgue and spoke to every dead thing there. I was impressed to find that they had bothered to script dialogues for something that very few people would use. Arcanum also has this, but they did skimp on the dialogues. The spell is almost worthless in Arcanum -- even when a major NPC was murdered and I was tasked with solving the mystery, communing with his spirit did nothing. I thought to myself, "wow, even in obvious places they neglected the spell, why even have it?" But Planescape used it well. It was enjoyable.
Though there are clunkly J2EE apps out there, I'd wager on a hunch, that the average J2EE app would out-perform a same sized PHP app.
Not in my experience. I held 2 jobs -- one at Arzoo, and one at SST -- where Java just couldn't deliver good response times. That's not to say that Java is crap, just that speed & scalability are not the reasons to use it. I would use Java for banking or ecommerce -- wherever I needed to do guaranteed work with money. And I'd probably want Oracle on the backend for that kind of work, too. At SST, that's exactly the scenario that Java is used for. And that ecommerce team takes the hit, but keeps on chugging, because it's the best choice for what they do. However, at the same time, there are lots of Web apps that need to scale up to Internet-level traffic, but don't need to work with money or make guaranteed transactions. The SST Web site just has a few part finders, for example. Mostly plain SELECT statements, sometimes with a join or two. All we want it to do is display non-critical data to customers as fast as possible. PHP & MySQL do that, and in my experience, do it faster. It can scale to very high levels with very reasonable hardware.
When I joined the IT department at SST (a fabless chip manufacturer), they were 100% MS. I said I would be using PHP or they would be hiring someone else. They hired me, so I went hog-wild. I hired on the guy who built edrugtrader.com, the guy who built beerotopia, and one of the developers of Yube (which is/was a primarily Java shop). We've built up a massive intranet product in PHP. It's modular, with 196 files all interoperating nicely. Thanks to our Yube guy, it's object-oriented in the most-reused parts. It has areas for file management, posting news, creating new Web pages with a built-in GUI editor (thanks HTMLArea!), org charts, a task management system, a budgeting tool, employee evaluation systems, a signoff system with escalations & delegates, a form builder, and a lot more. On a day when we post earnings, the intranet can see just as much traffic as the public site. We've sustained over 100 requests/second in a few spots, and done just fine. I know that's not Yahoo-size numbers, but it's not "small" either, I don't think. If it is small, I know that edrugtrader sees many times more traffic and performs well. So no qualms there.
The problems we've had with PHP were small in number and quickly resolved. First, 4.3.2 had a bug that resulted in blank pages displaying intermittently to our users. That sucked, but 4.3.3 fixed it. And way back about 3 years ago as we started the site, we had to increase the memory allotment for just about everything -- we had some big processes with hundreds of queries getting read into PHP arrays, and we hit the default memory limits pretty quick. Other than that, no problems. Development is quick, often easy, usually fun. If we need to go OOP, that's fine. If we need to do simple templating, that's fine too. And increasingly, we're using it outside of the Web. We have a dozen cron jobs now that are all PHP scripts. Some things, especially screen scraping and working with mailboxes, still need to be done in Perl. But lots of server management stuff -- filesystem work, data dumps, monitoring -- seems to be going along fine with PHP nowadays. I'm pretty happy to have bet my career on PHP so far.
coming back in the next life as something really cool like a dolhpin
Yes. Swimming in your own toilet is "really cool." If only I could come back as a dolphin, I'd be just as happy as the 5 year-old next door. He singlehandedly turned the community pool green.
By the way, yes, this has happened to me several times. Most recently was my battle with the DMCA over flipping embedding bits.
Tom, thanks for posting this. I went through and read all the letters, and I think I've learned a lot. It appears that the end result was the same -- you stopped responding, and they gave up on intimidating you. Is that correct? It is good to see someone stand up to legal threats.
Well, I don't think anyone here is going to be able to help you much with this, since it really depends on the details.
Well, I'll be sad if I don't get any good feedback here, but I actually wasn't asking for advice on my situation in particular. I was hoping to provoke developers to comment on their own projects and the issues they have already faced. I find it is always more useful to hear about events that have actually happened, and how it played out, than to guess about what the best plan of action might be.
Anyway, it has actually been about 10 days since I submitted this Ask Slashdot story. So I'll give you my own story, full of incompetence, as it was my first experience with outsiders barging in. Basically, I graduated from my high school in 1989. I've fallen out of touch with many classmates, so I built an "approximation" of classmates.com. Mostly, I didn't want to pay $25 for a classmates.com membership. The site is not very good yet, and doesn't have all the features. But what is there works well, and I'd hold it against the PHP alumni projects on Freshmeat with fair confidence. About 50 people signed up initially (mostly friends I had emailed). Then came a call at 10 PM a couple weekends ago, from a graduate of 1956. He told me my project needed to be HIS project, and as head of the alumni association, if I did NOT come on board, "well, the site may not be legal, so there will be a problem."
I was non-commital on the phone, trying to say goodbye until about 11:15 PM, when I finally just said I was going to bed and hung up. The next day, other staff from the alumni association began sending nasty emails. One person got a rough list of who I had contacted, and sent an email out to my classmates warning that my site is (rough quote, off the top of my head) "unauthorized, unsanctioned, and running without the express permission of the alumni association." That same person sent a letter to the school board charging me with deception in the email I sent out (I said in the email that I didn't want to pay for classmates.com, but they looked on classmates.com, found my name, and incorrectly assumed I must have paid for access).
I soon learned that these people actually draw a salary from the alumni association, and had plans to strengthen their reserves by putting up a similar site with a $1000 "donation" fee. Since I wasn't willing to pay the $25 fee for classmates.com, I really wasn't willing to give over my code so they could charge me $1000 to use it. So, after a few days of going back and forth, I just stopped responding. They sent follow-up emails that still sit in my inbox, unanswered.
I have not retained a lawyer yet, as I feel that they are bluffing and have no case. However, if I have to interact with them at all in the future, my lawyer will do it. I just found them to be so hostile, that the bridge was burning even as they asked me to hand over my code and offered me a seat on the board. It's too bad. If they had been civil, I might have considered anything.
If I were hiring and had an SCO resume that looked nice, I'd ask the person how he felt about the SCO debacle. Now that's a FAIR way to treat another human.
Or the naive way. If that's how you interview, you'll get people telling you exactly what you want to hear. You need to consider history, and if you don't, well, that affects the quality of your hires.
I recently hired someone who appeared to be quite good at PHP. Once in the job, the person turned out to be an amateur. Thankfully, he learned so fast I got whiplash just watching him go. But the point was hammered home to me: I didn't look at his job history hard enough, I wasn't dilligent at considering what his previous jobs meant about his current situation.
If I had a job opening, and someone applied who had stuck with SCO all these months, I wouldn't reject them flat-out, but it would sure set off a warning signal to me. I want loyal employees, sure, but I also want ethical employees. Someone who sticks with an employer of the SCO/Enron caliber is someone who will allow my company to go to Hell in a handbasket. I hire people not only for what they can do, but for what they will say "no" to.
Imagine you're living in a 10,000 sq. ft. mansion with 2 butlers, a cook, and a 26 year old supermodel wife.
Leave me out of this, OK? I value my privacy and don't like being used in examples.
Re:They're going right to the source after that...
on
SCO's Next Target: SGI?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When they're done with SGI they'll probably track down Ken Thompson and try to claim that he somehow infringed their IP by writing UNIX in the first place.
Actually, that brings up a question about one of SCO's strategies: they have suggested that owning the copyright to some old Unix code automatically confers ownership of improved new code, as a "derivative work." I think that's BS, but let's pretend they win it: is there something out there that would make SCOs crufty old code a "derivative" work? In other words, if they establish as case-law that new code is owned by some old copyright holder, then can we lay claim to their old code with something even older? It'd be fun to use their own ruling against them.
Of course, they'll never get that ruling, this is just a "what if?"
"We're the owners of the Unix (AT&T) System V code, and so we would know what it would look like," he said.
Hmm. Nucleon's post made me think of an interesting question: now that SCO has gone on record as saying that they "know what it would like," does that damage their earlier claim that they didn't know they were distributing their own code under the GPL? I mean, if they're being quoted as condescendingly saying that they can recognize their own code, can they go to court and say they couldn't recognize their own code?
In Bruce's commentary, there was a link to an Infoworld article/interview with Bruce. It's pretty good. Bruce disputes SCO's claims, and the reporter didn't minimize/trivialize it. Coupled with the eWeek interview, I think we might stand a fighting chance in the court of public opinion.
And if you have questions about what NetScan does, give it a whirl and form your own conclusions.
OK. I tried it. I'm actually impressed, Microsoft has done something useful (IMHO). But it is only as good as the data that gets plugged into it, and really, their data source is limited. The system can't find any of my old addresses, and it thinks my "first appearance" on Usenet was 1999, regardless of which email address I give it. Going back to 1999 is useful, and I think fairly shows a person's posting habits. But people who stopped posting (or stopped using an email address) by then just don't exist to the system, which I find makes this less valuable for trending and analysis over time.
Also, considering that this tool is used for "social research," they've certainly omitted or ignored some fairly big social issues in the design of it. For example, you can't assign multiple email addresss to one "person" -- so there is no real way to get a representation of someone's real posting habits, unless they magically managed to keep the same email address for their entire history online.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you notice that he claimed he'd had those calls since it went into effect? So if the list went into effect today, he's claiming that today he has already had 3 calls that violate the list. Or are you suggesting that the list still shouldn't be in effect yet, even though it already is "early October"?
El, I have taken your concept and RUN with it. Below is a first-draft parody of the entire editorial. I think some parts are inspired, but other parts could use some help. It doesn't make Verisign's claims look as crazy as they are, yet. Anybody want to take a shot at rewriting my rewrite? I figure we can throw it up on a Web site with a similar look to it, and let the parody stand as a good rebuttal. Here it is.
Hobocorp's decision to launch a new Bum Gun service that gives panhandlers tools and options when they harass people for money has spurred a debate about the future of a safe society. It is a debate worth having, because at the heart of it is whether innovation in a safe society will be encouraged or whether the status quo is good enough. More than 20 million times a day, innocent citizens receive a barrage of requests for cash when they walk or drive by street beggars (such as stopping at a light and having the windshield washed whether requested or not). Those requests for cash can lead to a dead end, with no money given to the beggar in compensation for his efforts.
That's what Bum Gun is about. Instead of begging for cash, its users get an option to intimidate the citizenry, try a holdup or simply assualt the victim. Thus far, people have used these guns more than 40 million times to get the money they want to have.
While similar services have been tested and offered before, Hobocorp's Bum Gun has triggered debate because it hasn't been tried for non-mafia and non-gang related groups. Seemingly ignoring that fact, the police cast a vote last week for the status quo by forcing Hobocorp to shut down the service. We reluctantly agreed and are exploring our options.
The police appear to have bought into claims that our society's safety has broken or will break. Anyone who has lived through it in the last three weeks knows that claim to be false. More likely, the police caved under the pressure from some in the community for whom this is a 2nd-amendment-religion issue about whether guns should be used for these purposes.
For this vocal minority, resentment lingers at the very fact that guns are used for extortion, which ignores the fact that it's a critical part of our economy.
We respectfully disagree with those who, in the name of anti-gun rhetoric, strive to hold society back. Society as we know it today was built by expanding beyond its origins. When clans -- the first known humans to group together -- became prevalent thousands of years ago, its purpose was to provide strength in numbers.
Over the next few millenia, every stage of what we now know as human society caused fierce debate and controversy. By not being afraid to test and try new things, a set of laws and rights was created that now serves as the foundation for commerce and communications.
While the current debate is not the first over the future of society, it is critically important because it could well determine its future development. Our society has been used for many innovative purposes over the last century -- look at what the USA and the European Union have been able to accomplish -- but the reality is society itself, the infrastructure that serves as the foundation, has not significantly benefited from innovation.
This is a significant test for the entire planet because if the world can't find a way to introduce new services while reaching a resolution on legal matters that might arise, then society's infrastructure will never improve. It's tantamount to saying that the world is flat and therefore there is no need for further exploration.
If that is the case, it doesn't bode well for Earth. If beggars and con men are discouraged from exploring the bounds of the law, it will mean less research and development and less investment into firearms and assault weapons. In short, a weaker society.
That should concern the panhandling community, NRA members, thieves and white-collar criminals alike. Less investment means a less-stable gun-lobby long-term, with de
If you do this, then you MUST double your estimated hours. You'll feel bad, because you'll think you can do something in a week, even though you'll charge them for 2 weeks of work as a flat-fee. But don't feel bad -- you will actually take 3 weeks to do it right and end up making less for your time. And in the odd case where it actually does take less time, you can be sure that the company is fine with this because they'd rather pay a little extra for a flat-fee than get an ambiguous hourly "when it's done" contract. Besides, everyone is happy when someone delivers a product ahead of schedule.
I put out some free Perl & PHP code, and planned to release some more next week. But I partly rely on the BSD license to protect me from liability. What does this case mean for someone like me? While I think I'm such a good programmer that eventually my code will be super-tight, I know I'm a poor enough programmer that it will take many iterations and bug reports to get there. Should I only release code when I'm certain no security issues exist (which probably means I'd never release stuff)?
<sarcasm>
You think Microsoft actually lost?
</sarcasm>
No, you're not giving SCO enough credit. Don't dismiss a cornered badger as harmless. It may still have a plan to bite you. In SCO's case, they're saying that they have every legal right to treat every GPL'd product as if it were public domain. I understand the geeks here are saying that even if they win against the GPL, SCO will still have to contend with copyrights. But you can tell from SCO's comments that they view this as a non-issue -- they fully intend to argue that use of the GPL is the equivalent of giving up rights to your work. Similiar to the notion that if you don't protect your trademark it is diminished, SCO will argue that use of the GPL effectively makes any copyright claim null & void. And therefore, they fully believe that they have every legal right to do anything they wish with any GPL'd work.
Remember, according to SCO, GPL == Public Domain. We may not think they will win in court, but their intention is to yank our IP right out from under us. It's something to think about.
You mean you haven't been using them? Oh man, I envy you. It would be great to play through all the mods for the "first time" again. There are banter packs that add NPC dialogues, flirt packs that give some NPCs much more romantic text to say to your character, bug patches, completely new NPCs that can join your group (such as Solaufein and Kelsey), and more. Go here now.
Be careful. Some mods, like Dark Side of the Sword Coast, are buggy. It's best to find a mod that looks interesting, and then go to groups.google.com and type it in to see people's comments about it. If it sounds stable, try it.
Here is a summary of what I've experienced after about 10 hours of gameplay (using beta 3). First, it's far more crash-prone. In the non-modded BG1, I could play for about 8 hours straight before it started to slow or get crash-prone. In BG1tutu, it crashed about 6 times in 5 hours. That's not so bad, as I make saved-games about every 5 minutes (the Q key works for quick saves). But it is buggy. Also, some areas spawn a whole lot MORE monsters than before, and my characters ended up fleeing to the Friendly Arm after getting mobbed. Also, the quest log is mostly toast. You'll get notes in the journal, but nothing is showing up under the completed quests area or pending quests area. So I'm having a tough time keeping track of what to do. But I'll print out a quest list from a Web site and it'll be fine. Finally, some characters have weapons that don't match their proficiencies. For example, Minsc is specialized in two-handed swords, AND wielding two weapons at once. Huh? He has 4 arms? But no biggie, the game works fine.
The good stuff is that it really works to play at 1024x768 (and even bigger). My fights have been a whole lot more strategic because of this, already. The "kits" for NPCs are useful. I really like some of the changes I've seen to a few of the characters. Khalid is now a better NPC to have. Garrick is still lame -- I should have selected a kit for him (I left him un-kitted). Another nice thing that doesn't have to do with BG1tutu (much) is that I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the low-level character stuggles. I've visited temples a lot for resurrections, scrimped for enough cash just to get a potion, and really thought hard about what 2 wimpy spells would possibly keep my character alive longer. Although, here's a cool trick: since you can hit "tab" to highlight items in BG1tutu, it's easy to find the ring of wizardry near the Friendly Arm. And since you can play a sorcerer now, try it with the ring. You get 6 spells on level 1. Nice. You might actually survive.
So, has Sun been ghostwriting for SCO all along? Or is their strangely similar wording just weird coincidence?
I guess it doesn't matter. I feel like they don't support the Linux community -- and by extension, the Open Source community. So I question why I support them.
...are in Planescape Torment. I found it to be slightly interesting at first, but it got far more interesting when I returned to the morgue and spoke to every dead thing there. I was impressed to find that they had bothered to script dialogues for something that very few people would use. Arcanum also has this, but they did skimp on the dialogues. The spell is almost worthless in Arcanum -- even when a major NPC was murdered and I was tasked with solving the mystery, communing with his spirit did nothing. I thought to myself, "wow, even in obvious places they neglected the spell, why even have it?" But Planescape used it well. It was enjoyable.
Not in my experience. I held 2 jobs -- one at Arzoo, and one at SST -- where Java just couldn't deliver good response times. That's not to say that Java is crap, just that speed & scalability are not the reasons to use it. I would use Java for banking or ecommerce -- wherever I needed to do guaranteed work with money. And I'd probably want Oracle on the backend for that kind of work, too. At SST, that's exactly the scenario that Java is used for. And that ecommerce team takes the hit, but keeps on chugging, because it's the best choice for what they do. However, at the same time, there are lots of Web apps that need to scale up to Internet-level traffic, but don't need to work with money or make guaranteed transactions. The SST Web site just has a few part finders, for example. Mostly plain SELECT statements, sometimes with a join or two. All we want it to do is display non-critical data to customers as fast as possible. PHP & MySQL do that, and in my experience, do it faster. It can scale to very high levels with very reasonable hardware.
When I joined the IT department at SST (a fabless chip manufacturer), they were 100% MS. I said I would be using PHP or they would be hiring someone else. They hired me, so I went hog-wild. I hired on the guy who built edrugtrader.com, the guy who built beerotopia, and one of the developers of Yube (which is/was a primarily Java shop). We've built up a massive intranet product in PHP. It's modular, with 196 files all interoperating nicely. Thanks to our Yube guy, it's object-oriented in the most-reused parts. It has areas for file management, posting news, creating new Web pages with a built-in GUI editor (thanks HTMLArea!), org charts, a task management system, a budgeting tool, employee evaluation systems, a signoff system with escalations & delegates, a form builder, and a lot more. On a day when we post earnings, the intranet can see just as much traffic as the public site. We've sustained over 100 requests/second in a few spots, and done just fine. I know that's not Yahoo-size numbers, but it's not "small" either, I don't think. If it is small, I know that edrugtrader sees many times more traffic and performs well. So no qualms there.
The problems we've had with PHP were small in number and quickly resolved. First, 4.3.2 had a bug that resulted in blank pages displaying intermittently to our users. That sucked, but 4.3.3 fixed it. And way back about 3 years ago as we started the site, we had to increase the memory allotment for just about everything -- we had some big processes with hundreds of queries getting read into PHP arrays, and we hit the default memory limits pretty quick. Other than that, no problems. Development is quick, often easy, usually fun. If we need to go OOP, that's fine. If we need to do simple templating, that's fine too. And increasingly, we're using it outside of the Web. We have a dozen cron jobs now that are all PHP scripts. Some things, especially screen scraping and working with mailboxes, still need to be done in Perl. But lots of server management stuff -- filesystem work, data dumps, monitoring -- seems to be going along fine with PHP nowadays. I'm pretty happy to have bet my career on PHP so far.
Yes. Swimming in your own toilet is "really cool." If only I could come back as a dolphin, I'd be just as happy as the 5 year-old next door. He singlehandedly turned the community pool green.
You lucky bastard. I had some hope that it would get better. So I naively went to see episode 2, and had my heart mercilessly crushed.
Must. Resist. Dark side. Must. Fight. Urge. To see. Episode 3.
I think they're inherently evil, so it sounds like they're exactly as bad as I think they are. :)
Tom, thanks for posting this. I went through and read all the letters, and I think I've learned a lot. It appears that the end result was the same -- you stopped responding, and they gave up on intimidating you. Is that correct? It is good to see someone stand up to legal threats.
Well, I'll be sad if I don't get any good feedback here, but I actually wasn't asking for advice on my situation in particular. I was hoping to provoke developers to comment on their own projects and the issues they have already faced. I find it is always more useful to hear about events that have actually happened, and how it played out, than to guess about what the best plan of action might be.
Anyway, it has actually been about 10 days since I submitted this Ask Slashdot story. So I'll give you my own story, full of incompetence, as it was my first experience with outsiders barging in. Basically, I graduated from my high school in 1989. I've fallen out of touch with many classmates, so I built an "approximation" of classmates.com. Mostly, I didn't want to pay $25 for a classmates.com membership. The site is not very good yet, and doesn't have all the features. But what is there works well, and I'd hold it against the PHP alumni projects on Freshmeat with fair confidence. About 50 people signed up initially (mostly friends I had emailed). Then came a call at 10 PM a couple weekends ago, from a graduate of 1956. He told me my project needed to be HIS project, and as head of the alumni association, if I did NOT come on board, "well, the site may not be legal, so there will be a problem."
I was non-commital on the phone, trying to say goodbye until about 11:15 PM, when I finally just said I was going to bed and hung up. The next day, other staff from the alumni association began sending nasty emails. One person got a rough list of who I had contacted, and sent an email out to my classmates warning that my site is (rough quote, off the top of my head) "unauthorized, unsanctioned, and running without the express permission of the alumni association." That same person sent a letter to the school board charging me with deception in the email I sent out (I said in the email that I didn't want to pay for classmates.com, but they looked on classmates.com, found my name, and incorrectly assumed I must have paid for access).
I soon learned that these people actually draw a salary from the alumni association, and had plans to strengthen their reserves by putting up a similar site with a $1000 "donation" fee. Since I wasn't willing to pay the $25 fee for classmates.com, I really wasn't willing to give over my code so they could charge me $1000 to use it. So, after a few days of going back and forth, I just stopped responding. They sent follow-up emails that still sit in my inbox, unanswered.
I have not retained a lawyer yet, as I feel that they are bluffing and have no case. However, if I have to interact with them at all in the future, my lawyer will do it. I just found them to be so hostile, that the bridge was burning even as they asked me to hand over my code and offered me a seat on the board. It's too bad. If they had been civil, I might have considered anything.
Or the naive way. If that's how you interview, you'll get people telling you exactly what you want to hear. You need to consider history, and if you don't, well, that affects the quality of your hires.
I recently hired someone who appeared to be quite good at PHP. Once in the job, the person turned out to be an amateur. Thankfully, he learned so fast I got whiplash just watching him go. But the point was hammered home to me: I didn't look at his job history hard enough, I wasn't dilligent at considering what his previous jobs meant about his current situation.
If I had a job opening, and someone applied who had stuck with SCO all these months, I wouldn't reject them flat-out, but it would sure set off a warning signal to me. I want loyal employees, sure, but I also want ethical employees. Someone who sticks with an employer of the SCO/Enron caliber is someone who will allow my company to go to Hell in a handbasket. I hire people not only for what they can do, but for what they will say "no" to.
Leave me out of this, OK? I value my privacy and don't like being used in examples.
Actually, that brings up a question about one of SCO's strategies: they have suggested that owning the copyright to some old Unix code automatically confers ownership of improved new code, as a "derivative work." I think that's BS, but let's pretend they win it: is there something out there that would make SCOs crufty old code a "derivative" work? In other words, if they establish as case-law that new code is owned by some old copyright holder, then can we lay claim to their old code with something even older? It'd be fun to use their own ruling against them.
Of course, they'll never get that ruling, this is just a "what if?"
Would Bill Gates be the king?
Party pooper!
Hmm. Nucleon's post made me think of an interesting question: now that SCO has gone on record as saying that they "know what it would like," does that damage their earlier claim that they didn't know they were distributing their own code under the GPL? I mean, if they're being quoted as condescendingly saying that they can recognize their own code, can they go to court and say they couldn't recognize their own code?
In Bruce's commentary, there was a link to an Infoworld article/interview with Bruce. It's pretty good. Bruce disputes SCO's claims, and the reporter didn't minimize/trivialize it. Coupled with the eWeek interview, I think we might stand a fighting chance in the court of public opinion.
OK. I tried it. I'm actually impressed, Microsoft has done something useful (IMHO). But it is only as good as the data that gets plugged into it, and really, their data source is limited. The system can't find any of my old addresses, and it thinks my "first appearance" on Usenet was 1999, regardless of which email address I give it. Going back to 1999 is useful, and I think fairly shows a person's posting habits. But people who stopped posting (or stopped using an email address) by then just don't exist to the system, which I find makes this less valuable for trending and analysis over time.
Also, considering that this tool is used for "social research," they've certainly omitted or ignored some fairly big social issues in the design of it. For example, you can't assign multiple email addresss to one "person" -- so there is no real way to get a representation of someone's real posting habits, unless they magically managed to keep the same email address for their entire history online.