Would it be that hard to develop a standard (perhaps much like meta-tagging), giving one set of data easily digestible by the bots (and not displayed to the human reader), while retaining an entertaining writing style for human consumption?
That won't ever happen (or more precisely, if it ever happens, it will fail). The problem is that we've done that before with the meta tags you mentioned. See what the SEO world has to say about them (summary: they're nearly useless now). Here's the deal. Any time you create a system for someone to deliver one thing to search engines and another thing to humans, what happens is a small group of opportunists will create massively spammy porn pages for human viewing, while making the search-engine content about every popular topic under the sun. You'll see a headline-made-for-Google which reads, "Britney Spears on Will and Grace" but when you click it, the headline-for-humans reads, "3 lesbian midgets have a pee party!"
I'd steer clear of him, just because I wouldn't want to be the next person sued for whatever else sets him off. How is he going to make friends?
My guess is that if your not a total ass who tries to humiliate him on the internet, he won't sue you. Do you have any evidence he's ever sued anyone else before and that he get's 'set off' easily?
We're not talking about a court of law. We're talking about friendship. He's probably heading off to college soon enough, and he's going to get hazed, or embarassed, or who knows what else. Anyone who has been to college knows you don't get a guaranteed stress-free environment. And those kids are going to know that he's the kid who sued people for hurting his feelings. They won't need "evidence he's ever sued anyone else." They won't need to be sure "he gets 'set off' easily." In fact, that's kind of the point -- they won't know. And their gut will tell them "better safe than sorry."
I'm not saying the kid is doomed. But I am saying that people are going to react to his lawsuit. And his lawsuit wasn't against a corporation or something impersonal. It's going to make people wary. That's a consequence of his lawsuit, and something he'll have to live with. If he's lucky, he'll be surrounded by people like you, who feel that they must gather evidence that he's more litigious before writing him off. But I'm not putting you on a pedastal for being willing to be his friend. I think it's dangerous to interact with him.
A victory for the victims of cyber-bullying, or missed chance by thin-skinned Ghyslain to cash-in as the next William 'She Bangs' Hung?
I vote for missed opportunity by Raza. I don't expect a high school student to have a well developed ability to laugh at himself, but surely his 15 minutes of fame could have been put to better use than merely to sue a few classmates.
Agreed. I remember at the start of the fiasco, sympathy for him was running very high -- at one point, someone solicited donations to buy the kid an iPod, and got waaaayyy more donations than needed. But then this stuff started happening, and the sympathy dried up. Of course, you can say that iPod != $300K settlement. In that regard, he did the smart thing. But the real equation is more like iPod + other potential loot + lots of open doors from sympathetic fans != $300K settlement + huge loss of goodwill. If were around him now, I'd steer clear of him, just because I wouldn't want to be the next person sued for whatever else sets him off. How is he going to make friends?
I think that automated unit testing is the future of killing bugs. In layman's terms, this involves a program trawling your code and automatically trying to break it. If done well, the system can replace some of your QA team, and QA goes a lot faster. I hadn't even heard of such a thing until I did some contract work for Agitar, one of the companies doing this stuff. Here's a link with an overview & screenshots:
Their list is great -- I'll be reading some of those articles for weeks before I get through them all. I'm especially interested in the 7 security blunders article. Nice!
But they did leave off a lot of sites that are useful. Here are a few:
PHP Resource Index - a few thousand scripts for downloading, most free, all PHP.
PHP Builder Forums -- the PHP Builder site is pretty useful all by itself, but in the forums there are thousands of people willing to answer your PHP questions.
PHP Freaks -- one of the guys behind this site wrote a great PHP book. The site is excellent.
ADOdb Database Abstraction Layer -- okay, okay, this isn't really a site, so much as a product. But still, it's a very efficient DBAL, and it should be used for every database query.
Anyone want to pitch in with some more? I'm sure there are some very useful sites that I've completely missed (and which the IBM site missed, too).
It's funny to read the responses. You can almost see the IT guys circling the wagons, taking a defensive stance, even though none of us understands the situation. I mean, yes, Mr. IT-Slashdot-reader, it's possible that the IT group is underfunded and misunderstood. But it's also possible that, exactly as described, the IT group is incompetent.
I worked at a company that was both -- the head of the team was incompetent, but completely trusted by management. So we had a fine budget, but internally, the team was failing to execute over and over again. The biggest issue was that the leader measured his employment with the company in decades -- it was a battering ram for him: "I've been here for sooo long, I have serious experience! Trust me!" Of course, the day I suggested that the years of being insulated had left him with no concept of how competiting companies were run, I knew my days were numbered. It was frustrating to work in an IT department that had never heard of Linux, Apache, Open Source, and a lot of other stuff that has come onto the scene. At a certain point, I delivered to them a working intranet, running LAMP. After deployment they took it down for a month while they swapped it out for Solaris, Oracle, etc. Cost in the hundreds of thousands... to replace a working system that I assembled for just a few thousand. Ugh. But at least they used Solaris, so I got something Unixy to use. We ended up regularly mired recoding things to the language-of-the-week, paying out near-millions for commodity systems, and taking direction on algorithms and programming from managers who couldn't write pseudocode, much less the real thing.
There are bad IT teams out there. I've fled some of them. If you are in a good IT department, hold onto it. I think it's rare.
The interesting thing about all of this that it was developed in only three months by a 17 year old and to top it all off, the site is currently localized in 16 languages.
Localization systems are really easy once you know how to do them. I used to be intimidated by such things, but then I started making phpBB mods. I saw that the phpBB localization system was basically a set of arrays of text strings that gets loaded depending upon the user settings. Then the array is used as variables to drop in the appropriate text. I've since seen some better systems, and mostly I'm impressed with how simple good developers can make it.
I put some of that into practice for Agitar, a company whose site is available in English & Japanese. I don't speak Japanese, I just added some tweaks to a Movable Type system, and voila, two fields per entry. I do the English, and any employee who speaks Japanese will enter a translation. I suspect that I can create a basic i18n framework for PHP in an afternoon.
What would be really cool would be if he did the translations himself. Does he speak 16 languages? Or did he sit with Babelfish or Google, and nurse some automated translations into something sensible? That's the step that takes talent or hard effort. I would be impressed if he did that completely without outside help. For that matter, if he has a system in place for people to upload translations, have them verified, and be automatically put into effect, that would be impressive too. I tried such a thing, but I just couldn't find good ways to deal with the character sets and launder data that is so open-ended, without human inspection.
I worked at Borland during the time in question, and what you describe is not what I saw first hand. But maybe you know Anders personally, and have better info. It just clashes with what I saw.
For example, Anders did not quit and call Microsoft. Microsoft recruited him while he was still employed at Borland. In fact, they sent a limo to pick him up right at the Borland entrance. And how badly did he want to leave Borland? So not badly that when Microsoft offered him a cool million, he asked Borland to match (not beat) the offer, so he could stay.
It was only when Borland execs rejected the idea of any developer being worth a million that he bailed.
Also, while I can't say what Anders thought of Delphi, I can say that the "Delphi for Java" text you put in quotes sounds an awful lot like how he described what he was going to do at his new job, not what he asked of Borland.
As an aside, one bit of data that was clear almost immediately was that everyone -- except for 2 or 3 execs -- thought that losing Anders was awful. It wasn't one of those decisions where, looking back months or years later, you realized it was wrong. It was instantaneous. The decision was made, and every VP and Director I knew said, "Terrible move! Over a lousy million!"
At one point in my career, I worked for a company that had some surprising racism. I found it out by looking at statistical trends, which was pretty depressing.
I managed the intranet that the company used to upload/download documents, share electronic "whiteboards," post announcements, etc. One system we built for the intranet was an employee review system. Normally, we wouldn't even see the data. However, we had a bug with the reports, and needed to do at least a spot-check. While in there, we noticed that white males had low scores; everyone else, high. Not just in 1 or 2 cases, but predominantly in at least 2 divisions, and more mildly thoughout the whole company.
Eventually, one of my employees was bothered enough by what he saw that he mentioned it to HR. Within 6 months, the HR manager was replaced, my team was gone (including me), and every other white manager in my division was replaced.
None of us ever sued or retaliated in any way. The company was in a downward spiral, so we mostly just laughed and got better jobs.
Havoc Pennington's response points out that "reducing complexity" was not, in fact, the reason the particular dialog in question doesn't have all the options Linux wanted:
You are correct that Havoc is distancing himself from that. However, Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer did cite that as the reason. And that's what Linus was responding to. So at best, Havoc and Frederic have a disconnect in what they tell end-users. In any case, it reveals that some of the Gnome leadership are in a rut, using the stupidity of their users as an excuse for the stupidity of their interface.
When have tags previously been mentioned on Slashdot?
Here and here at least. I found those pretty quickly just by searching for "flickr." If I expanded the search to the terms "tagging" & "folksonomies" I suspect I'd find more. Outside of Slashdot, there are a good number of magazine articles on it, too.
Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.
Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).
Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.
I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.
So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.
First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."
It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.
I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.
Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.
What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.
Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa
The reason (as stated in the articles) why OSWD.org is down is because the person that started the OSWD.org site, Frank, is trying to keep control over the site, although he isn't doing the majority of the work behind mantaining the site.
I run a few sites that get "maintained" by other people. It is bizarre to me that some/. readers apparently think it is reasonable that someone else would eventually have rights to my site simply because they maintained the data for a while. Is that some kind of unspoken agreement that site owners have unknowingly entered into? Is every forum in the world eventually going to be owned by the moderators? Is every code repository going to be owned by patch submitters? Should we have rights to/. because we've posted comments?
I haven't been able to read the article -- the links I've clicked on have been Slashdotted. However, I've not clicked them all, and I'm hopeful that there is more to it than just "OMG! The guy who created it won't cede it to the guy who works on it!"
I'm not saying I don't believe in sweat equity. That's a very real, legitimate thing. But both sides have to agree to what that is worth. If Frank felt the sweat equity was worth nothing, and Aaron didn't bother to find that out until now, then I'd say shame on Aaron, not shame on Frank.
We didn't make the decision lightly; we knew SCO was a sensitive subject with the free software and open source communities.
That sounds a lot like saying, "we knew it'd piss them off, but we did it anyway!"
Look, I know I'm on the wrong side of this -- Slashdot groupthink is clearly forgiving of this, and I'm just not. But if ev1 had its feet held to the flame, I don't see why MySQL should walk away unscathed. Bottom line: it was a bad decision, and while most of the MySQL users won't care, some do, and they're entitled to vote their conscience.
Re:What I would like to see...
on
Review: Dragonshard
·
· Score: 5, Informative
If I could just get an AI engine for NPCs and monsters, graphics, and whatever building blocks I need to create my own world. THAT would be cool.
If Apple can match the PSP's screen quality and beat its ease of use (by making movies downloadable, perhaps) they might have something.
TV shows. I don't have cable now, and when I did have it, I only had the minimum. But there were always 1 or 2 shows that made me want to pay the $50/month for the "extra" package. If someone will provide me with a more reasonably priced solution, I'll take it. I'll even take it over "free/p2p/copyright infringement" but it should be easy to use and reliable, like iTunes.
Basically, this would be a way to get a-la-carte shows, no bundles from the cable companies. If my choice was to pay $50/month for a TV cable bundle, or pay $60 to download the 20 episodes I wanted, I'd pay the $60, just for the control and convenience. I'd load up on sci-fi for me, and Spongebob for my kids. I'd be willing to endure various light amounts of DRM for various price breaks. A $1 per view option might be OK, so long as I don't have to redownload the video each time. A $3 charge to get unlimited viewing for 30 days, I'd do that a lot. The thing they have to keep in mind is that I can go to Blockbuster and rent a DVD (with 3 episodes) for $4. If they can compete with that, I'm all for it.
Slashdot Mirror
That won't ever happen (or more precisely, if it ever happens, it will fail). The problem is that we've done that before with the meta tags you mentioned. See what the SEO world has to say about them (summary: they're nearly useless now). Here's the deal. Any time you create a system for someone to deliver one thing to search engines and another thing to humans, what happens is a small group of opportunists will create massively spammy porn pages for human viewing, while making the search-engine content about every popular topic under the sun. You'll see a headline-made-for-Google which reads, "Britney Spears on Will and Grace" but when you click it, the headline-for-humans reads, "3 lesbian midgets have a pee party!"
And you sir, are an idiot. Go play with your sue-happy friends. See how long you remain unscathed.
We're not talking about a court of law. We're talking about friendship. He's probably heading off to college soon enough, and he's going to get hazed, or embarassed, or who knows what else. Anyone who has been to college knows you don't get a guaranteed stress-free environment. And those kids are going to know that he's the kid who sued people for hurting his feelings. They won't need "evidence he's ever sued anyone else." They won't need to be sure "he gets 'set off' easily." In fact, that's kind of the point -- they won't know. And their gut will tell them "better safe than sorry."
I'm not saying the kid is doomed. But I am saying that people are going to react to his lawsuit. And his lawsuit wasn't against a corporation or something impersonal. It's going to make people wary. That's a consequence of his lawsuit, and something he'll have to live with. If he's lucky, he'll be surrounded by people like you, who feel that they must gather evidence that he's more litigious before writing him off. But I'm not putting you on a pedastal for being willing to be his friend. I think it's dangerous to interact with him.
Agreed. I remember at the start of the fiasco, sympathy for him was running very high -- at one point, someone solicited donations to buy the kid an iPod, and got waaaayyy more donations than needed. But then this stuff started happening, and the sympathy dried up. Of course, you can say that iPod != $300K settlement. In that regard, he did the smart thing. But the real equation is more like iPod + other potential loot + lots of open doors from sympathetic fans != $300K settlement + huge loss of goodwill. If were around him now, I'd steer clear of him, just because I wouldn't want to be the next person sued for whatever else sets him off. How is he going to make friends?
4) You're on Lost, and Walt is dreaming up what he reads in comic books, again.
I would give anything to have a "delayed but prolonged spurt."
I suspect this guy probably hasn't.
It's called the FireGL because it puts out heat at levels equivalent to a large fire. -T
I think that automated unit testing is the future of killing bugs. In layman's terms, this involves a program trawling your code and automatically trying to break it. If done well, the system can replace some of your QA team, and QA goes a lot faster. I hadn't even heard of such a thing until I did some contract work for Agitar, one of the companies doing this stuff. Here's a link with an overview & screenshots:
h tml
:(
http://www.agitar.com/products/20051101-agitator.
They only work with Java. Here is a link to a page where they ran some Open Source products through their tool & published the results:
http://www.agitar.com/openquality/
But Agitar's product isn't Open Source itself.
-Tony
Dang! 5 minutes after I post the link, the server goes down! It's an NT server... figures!
w ww.suite101.com/article.cfm/oracle/115560+&hl=en&g l=us&ct=clnk&cd=1&client=firefox-a
Here's Google's cache:
http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:3Z3Pzf07oboJ:
-Tony
I found a fairly good review of Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL. All sorta recent versions, too. You can read it here:
http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/oracle/115560
However, it doesn't really get into nitty gritty. Nice primer, though.
-Tony
Their list is great -- I'll be reading some of those articles for weeks before I get through them all. I'm especially interested in the 7 security blunders article. Nice!
But they did leave off a lot of sites that are useful. Here are a few:
Anyone want to pitch in with some more? I'm sure there are some very useful sites that I've completely missed (and which the IBM site missed, too).
It's funny to read the responses. You can almost see the IT guys circling the wagons, taking a defensive stance, even though none of us understands the situation. I mean, yes, Mr. IT-Slashdot-reader, it's possible that the IT group is underfunded and misunderstood. But it's also possible that, exactly as described, the IT group is incompetent.
I worked at a company that was both -- the head of the team was incompetent, but completely trusted by management. So we had a fine budget, but internally, the team was failing to execute over and over again. The biggest issue was that the leader measured his employment with the company in decades -- it was a battering ram for him: "I've been here for sooo long, I have serious experience! Trust me!" Of course, the day I suggested that the years of being insulated had left him with no concept of how competiting companies were run, I knew my days were numbered. It was frustrating to work in an IT department that had never heard of Linux, Apache, Open Source, and a lot of other stuff that has come onto the scene. At a certain point, I delivered to them a working intranet, running LAMP. After deployment they took it down for a month while they swapped it out for Solaris, Oracle, etc. Cost in the hundreds of thousands... to replace a working system that I assembled for just a few thousand. Ugh. But at least they used Solaris, so I got something Unixy to use. We ended up regularly mired recoding things to the language-of-the-week, paying out near-millions for commodity systems, and taking direction on algorithms and programming from managers who couldn't write pseudocode, much less the real thing.
There are bad IT teams out there. I've fled some of them. If you are in a good IT department, hold onto it. I think it's rare.
Localization systems are really easy once you know how to do them. I used to be intimidated by such things, but then I started making phpBB mods. I saw that the phpBB localization system was basically a set of arrays of text strings that gets loaded depending upon the user settings. Then the array is used as variables to drop in the appropriate text. I've since seen some better systems, and mostly I'm impressed with how simple good developers can make it.
I put some of that into practice for Agitar, a company whose site is available in English & Japanese. I don't speak Japanese, I just added some tweaks to a Movable Type system, and voila, two fields per entry. I do the English, and any employee who speaks Japanese will enter a translation. I suspect that I can create a basic i18n framework for PHP in an afternoon.
What would be really cool would be if he did the translations himself. Does he speak 16 languages? Or did he sit with Babelfish or Google, and nurse some automated translations into something sensible? That's the step that takes talent or hard effort. I would be impressed if he did that completely without outside help. For that matter, if he has a system in place for people to upload translations, have them verified, and be automatically put into effect, that would be impressive too. I tried such a thing, but I just couldn't find good ways to deal with the character sets and launder data that is so open-ended, without human inspection.
Most 5 year-olds can't read. It isn't abnormal, nor should the OP be berated for the situation. -T
I worked at Borland during the time in question, and what you describe is not what I saw first hand. But maybe you know Anders personally, and have better info. It just clashes with what I saw.
For example, Anders did not quit and call Microsoft. Microsoft recruited him while he was still employed at Borland. In fact, they sent a limo to pick him up right at the Borland entrance. And how badly did he want to leave Borland? So not badly that when Microsoft offered him a cool million, he asked Borland to match (not beat) the offer, so he could stay.
It was only when Borland execs rejected the idea of any developer being worth a million that he bailed.
Also, while I can't say what Anders thought of Delphi, I can say that the "Delphi for Java" text you put in quotes sounds an awful lot like how he described what he was going to do at his new job, not what he asked of Borland.
As an aside, one bit of data that was clear almost immediately was that everyone -- except for 2 or 3 execs -- thought that losing Anders was awful. It wasn't one of those decisions where, looking back months or years later, you realized it was wrong. It was instantaneous. The decision was made, and every VP and Director I knew said, "Terrible move! Over a lousy million!"
At one point in my career, I worked for a company that had some surprising racism. I found it out by looking at statistical trends, which was pretty depressing.
I managed the intranet that the company used to upload/download documents, share electronic "whiteboards," post announcements, etc. One system we built for the intranet was an employee review system. Normally, we wouldn't even see the data. However, we had a bug with the reports, and needed to do at least a spot-check. While in there, we noticed that white males had low scores; everyone else, high. Not just in 1 or 2 cases, but predominantly in at least 2 divisions, and more mildly thoughout the whole company.
Eventually, one of my employees was bothered enough by what he saw that he mentioned it to HR. Within 6 months, the HR manager was replaced, my team was gone (including me), and every other white manager in my division was replaced.
None of us ever sued or retaliated in any way. The company was in a downward spiral, so we mostly just laughed and got better jobs.
Translation: "Someone with influence is saying something I don't like. Shut up shut up shut up!"
You are correct that Havoc is distancing himself from that. However, Frederic Crozat, GNOME packager/maintainer did cite that as the reason. And that's what Linus was responding to. So at best, Havoc and Frederic have a disconnect in what they tell end-users. In any case, it reveals that some of the Gnome leadership are in a rut, using the stupidity of their users as an excuse for the stupidity of their interface.
That's just IMHO, of course. ;)
Here and here at least. I found those pretty quickly just by searching for "flickr." If I expanded the search to the terms "tagging" & "folksonomies" I suspect I'd find more. Outside of Slashdot, there are a good number of magazine articles on it, too.
Ever since a year ago, when I was laid off, I've been contracting for companies who need CMS software. I've tried a LOT of them at this point.
Agitar Software uses Movable Type to power their site. It's a corporate site, not really a blog. I added a boatload of PHP statements to the MT templates, so that it would provide i18n (the pages get generated with PHP code in them, then they become dynamic PHP files on the server). Unfortunately, we don't do much with the i18n yet. No matter what you pick, it's in English. But we've got a translation firm on the hook, so that will change. I also work on Developer Testing, which is far, far more bloggy (also uses MT).
Mill Valley Film Festival uses Drupal. It isn't really bloggy, but on the backend, that's how it works. There are a few "blogs" available (such as "Film Listings"), and the staff add in entries. I also have just started a very basic drupal blog for my daughter's class.
I have a boatload of other blog-like sites I maintain (mostly using Mambo & Joomla), and I've even open-sourced some software to turn phpBB into a blogging system.
So, with some credentials out of the way, here's my impressions.
First, Movable Type is archaic, even with the new 3.2 update. It's great for old-school Web publishing, where the main players know a few HTML tags and dynamic publishing isn't terribly urgent. Yes, MT can do dynamic publishing, but there are other systems that do that waaaaayyy better. So its strength is more along the lines of "update & release, update & release."
It has hard-coded fields, but you can muck around with them (moreso in 3.2). We use those fields for features that don't really tie into the fields anymore. For example, when a user wants to control the URL of an entry, he/she fills out our keywords field. It's just how the solutions have evolved.
I think MT is weakest at looping through entries. The entire scoping system is arbitrary. Some plugins sometimes return global loops, other times narrowly-scoped loops, which can be really not-fun to learn about. Overall, Movable Type seems to me to be a workhorse, reliable, but old and no longer well-devised.
Drupal is very frustrating. The template system is rigid. The PHPTemplate plugin helps. I used it exclusively on mvff.com. But it still requires a huge investment into figuring out how it works. In some cases, I ended up posting support questions and then later answering them myself on drupal.org -- partly because the forums are quiet, and partly because I was pushing the system waaaayy more than the bulk of users do. But what's surprising is that I wasn't doing much. You can see that from mvff.com -- it's just a film Web site. It's not highly sophisticated. If you're going to be building a typical site and the system requires so much tweaking that you become a bleeding-edge pioneer for it, that's a bit much. Drupal is too technical for the average blogger.
What Drupal does well is the plugin system. A default install of Drupal comes with a boatload of plugins. Want forums? Just click a button. Want blogs? Click a button. Want an image gallery? Click a button. For example, with the school blog that I built using Drupal, I went with almost all of the defaults, and it was a lot easier to setup. It took maybe 3 hours from start to finish. It also looks really plain and doesn't do much, however. And I'm still having trouble getting the TinyMCE HTML GUI to work properly on that system. I don't know why yet.
Joomla seems to be the best of both worlds -- a fair balance of tradeoffs on the technical side, but also a backend control pa
I run a few sites that get "maintained" by other people. It is bizarre to me that some /. readers apparently think it is reasonable that someone else would eventually have rights to my site simply because they maintained the data for a while. Is that some kind of unspoken agreement that site owners have unknowingly entered into? Is every forum in the world eventually going to be owned by the moderators? Is every code repository going to be owned by patch submitters? Should we have rights to /. because we've posted comments?
I haven't been able to read the article -- the links I've clicked on have been Slashdotted. However, I've not clicked them all, and I'm hopeful that there is more to it than just "OMG! The guy who created it won't cede it to the guy who works on it!"
I'm not saying I don't believe in sweat equity. That's a very real, legitimate thing. But both sides have to agree to what that is worth. If Frank felt the sweat equity was worth nothing, and Aaron didn't bother to find that out until now, then I'd say shame on Aaron, not shame on Frank.
That sounds a lot like saying, "we knew it'd piss them off, but we did it anyway!"
Look, I know I'm on the wrong side of this -- Slashdot groupthink is clearly forgiving of this, and I'm just not. But if ev1 had its feet held to the flame, I don't see why MySQL should walk away unscathed. Bottom line: it was a bad decision, and while most of the MySQL users won't care, some do, and they're entitled to vote their conscience.
NWN and free server software
TV shows. I don't have cable now, and when I did have it, I only had the minimum. But there were always 1 or 2 shows that made me want to pay the $50/month for the "extra" package. If someone will provide me with a more reasonably priced solution, I'll take it. I'll even take it over "free/p2p/copyright infringement" but it should be easy to use and reliable, like iTunes.
Basically, this would be a way to get a-la-carte shows, no bundles from the cable companies. If my choice was to pay $50/month for a TV cable bundle, or pay $60 to download the 20 episodes I wanted, I'd pay the $60, just for the control and convenience. I'd load up on sci-fi for me, and Spongebob for my kids. I'd be willing to endure various light amounts of DRM for various price breaks. A $1 per view option might be OK, so long as I don't have to redownload the video each time. A $3 charge to get unlimited viewing for 30 days, I'd do that a lot. The thing they have to keep in mind is that I can go to Blockbuster and rent a DVD (with 3 episodes) for $4. If they can compete with that, I'm all for it.