In addition to your own response, let me just add this: Inkscape is the answer for "why Inkscape?" In other words, it is really proving to be both easy to use and powerful. I can get things done with Inkscape. It has readily justified itself.
I could get things done with Sodipodi, too. I was using it back when it was the only FOSS option I could find. At the time, Sodipodi's interface was "meh" at best, and what I heard was that you needed that kind of interface to do such complicated stuff. When Inkscape forked, I nearly whooped with glee -- they did more, did it better, and made it easier.
I couldn't believe it, but I was pretty damn happy. So, why Inkscape? Well, Inkscape is friendlier, Inkscape is growing faster, Inkscape is proving its worth.
Now all it needs is stability. I've never had it crash on me (or at least, I don't recall it), but I have had it just suddenly eat up hundreds of megs of RAM and start paging to disk. I'm (sadly) patient enough to wait an hour for it to settle down, then keep going. But ugh. Needs more work on that front.
Under the best of circumstances, making a role like this compelling is difficult, and circumstances here are not the best.
You cannot seriously be talking about Darth Vader. The child prodigy? The "chosen one" who became the apprentice of the legendary Jedi? The character who then, in greed, loneliness, and rage for power, embraced evil -- slaughtering innocents, assualting his own child, and somehow, in the last seconds of his life, redeeming himself by turning against the very evil he had succumbed to -- that is difficult to make compelling? Jesus Christ, that is like the biggest fanboy apology I have ever heard in my fucking life. This is one of the greatest villians of our time. Not only that, he is a fucking complicated mess of psychology, if someone would just portray it right! This character should be disturbed, confused, hurt, lonely, seeking validation and acceptance. Instead, we got a mechanical arm and petulant whining. I think people complain and mock both Lucas and Christensen precisely because it should have been brain-dead easy to make this compelling. How the hell could he screw up something that left such an indelible impression for so many years? How could we get such dreck?
Personally, I think that Lucas's obsession with technology provides a disappointing counterpoint to Peter Jackson's focus on the human aspects of a story. But I'm going to see SW3 on Friday afternoon in an all-digital showing, because I'm just that much of a lost cause.
If you've got the modified files you most certainly can tell how they've changed. You do a diff.
But I thought Apple was writing in Objective C. Wouldn't the language differences cause nearly every line to appear in the diff?
(Note: that's not a rebuttal to his point -- it's a real question. Did Apple really convert the whole codebase to Objective C? If so, it does make the use of a diff pointless. But if Apple didn't, then maybe the original post has a point. I know that I have gone into smaller but still overwhelming codebases, and I've managed to get things working with tools such as WinMerge.)
Hmmm. I wonder... so does the study then indicate that primarily men use Firefox, or does the study actually indicate that primarily men install antivirus protection? Or both, for a double whammy of a skewed number?
I think my biggest frustration reading this memoir is that the author appears to be saying, "Hey, Jimmy doesn't deserve all the credit, I worked on it too!" -- but then he goes on to say, "Of course, I only worked on it for 3 years, Jimmy actually came up with the idea and funded most of it through Boomis, and after Nupedia failed and I was laid off, Jimmy grew Wikipedia like a motherfucker."
That frustrates me because I actually prefer the Nupedia style of vetting articles for publication, but the author just bungled it. Or I partially like the Nupedia style -- I mean, I like the Wiki notion that anyone can write anything, but I don't like that it isn't moderated or peer reviewed before being published. So a little code to get a signoff before publication would have been a nice addition.
In any case, I think a memoir about a 3 year stint at a dot-com startup isn't very exciting anymore -- even if the startup is Wikipedia. Especially since it appears that Wikipedia is doing better now that he's gone. In fact, I kind of wonder if his layoff wasn't a "thank you" for squandering the first 18 months of investment money on a old-fashioned system that netted 24 articles. Now that would make for a good article: talk to the people controlling the purse-strings, let's hear what their back-room conversations were like.
Wow, for once the Slashdot groupthink isn't pro-Linus. But I am. I'll explain why. First, you need to read the original thread to get a feel for what Linus is saying. At least read the first 15 posts there.
After you've read it, you'll come away with a few realizations:
The Register is courting controversy. There really is a dispute, don't get me wrong. But they've boiled down a lengthy, nuanced discussion into a few hotheaded soundbytes.
Torvalds really is saying some stupid stuff, granted.
But Torvalds also makes some good points. From reading that thread I linked to, I can see that Linus has a very real, legitimate problem that only BitKeeper could solve. Read it. He saved hours or in some cases days of down time -- time that other SCM tools would have sucked up and wasted. For a man in his position, that's really serious.
Just think: if you were a bottleneck, if data and people were coming at you at a very fast pace all the time, and if there was tremendous pressure on you to build a platform that would rival Microsoft, one coping mechanism is to find tools that increase productivity. A lot. (Other good coping mechanisms include heavy drinking and vanishing without a trace.)
Now Linus, who has no ready alternative is staring down a barrel of loaded source code, knowing it's going to fire off in his face real soon now. And someone else has yanked his defense right out from under him. He has a real problem now. He's pissed. I can put myself in his shoes, I can understand his frustration. Basically, it's this: "Well great. WTF do I do now? Oh shit, stuff is backing up already. Thanks! That's fucking great!"
Is Torvalds wrong to blame Trigdell for reverse engineering? Yes. Is Torvalds wrong to feel horribly, disastrously inconvenienced by this? No, he has every right. Forget the technical arguments for a day or a week. This is a human issue right now. People were inconsiderate of each other, and now they're walking around with bloddy noses. Give them time to assess the situation. If Torvalds doesn't soften his position in a short while, fork, screw him, whatever. But give him some time for the fight or flight instinct to be peter out before you all write him off.
Just yesterday I was commenting about this in someone's blog, although the blog was about greasemonkey (another Moz plugin that can block ads). It was interesting to note that one of the Greasemonkey developers posted a comment in that blog, distancing himself from the whole adblocking issue.
My personal feeling is twofold. First, some ads (especially popups) are so disrespectful of a site's visitors that they deserve killing. And, if that means the site dies from lack of revenue, so be it. However, my second thought is that there are many good sites (maybe Slashdot qualifies, lack of editorial responsibility notwithstanding) that do not blare ads at me, and deserve my support. These sites have no popups, and no shimmering, shaking, animated Flash monstrosities. I have never blocked a Slashdot ad. In fact, I have deliberately clicked a few Thinkgeek banners.
If a large enough group started to block out every kind of ad possible, sites would go under. And not just a single, inconsequential site. You can't say "there will always be free alternatives" if you starve even the alternatives of a way to cover costs.
Personally, I don't want the Web to go the way of the Wall Street Journal. I don't want to pay for access or be forced to sit and watch an ad so I can get my access code. I like free roaming, and if that means I need to tolerate a quiet ad banner or two, I'm OK with that. It's only the loud annoying crap that grates on my nerves.
So where are the other shining stars in this sky? I've been to Bruce Perens' news site, and it just ain't fun. I've been to OSNews and it's OK but the owner treats it like a fiefdom. What other options are there for pro-OSS news with commentary from the readers? From what I can tell, there is nowhere else to go.
Pagerank involves getting other sites to link to you and stuff. It's very broad and mostly irrelevant to what I was suggesting. When I said to do some SEO work on your pages, I was only talking about putting text on the pages that makes it clear what the focus of each page is -- text that is searchable, text that will hint to Google who your audience is. The Google bot will notice new text and choose better ads to show. If you do a good job, this will get you a better clickthrough rate for your ads, even if your pagerank is zero.
Nono, you're thinking ads on google. The 100k impressions were on google syndication. You know those ads that appear on the side of webpages?
Thanks for the clarification -- I wasn't sure if the OP was referring to Google Adsense or Google Adwords. However, now that I know, I can say that I am a member of Google adsense (where Google places ads on my sites). With adsense, for the ads that run on my site, I currently average.7% clickthrough, not quite 1% but decent. With Google automatically monitoring ads for poor performance, I just don't see how it is possible to get really bad clickthroughs. If that happened to me, I would go to Overture or some other Google-competitor. Any of them can do better than.06% clickthrough.
I haven't checked to see if you are the person that posted the original comment that I first responded to back at the beginning of this thread, but if you are, I'm telling you: your ads are broken. Either you've integrated them into your site in such a way that they are ignored or obnoxious or something else bad, or they are terribly unfocused and uninteresting to your audience. In the latter case, use some SEO on your pages to automatically optimize the ads (as Google picks ads based upon what it spiders from your pages), or else drop Google for someone better. Really,.06% is bad.
I've been living without a TV for almost 2 years now, and honestly I missed it badly only during the first few months. After that, I discovered that I'm actually getting much more rest while at home, feel generally less-stressed, and most importantly - can concentrate on strenous coding tasks for longer stretches at a time.
I used to have huge battles over the television with my wife. My wife is the kind of person who would get killed by Slashdot members -- she loves mindless soap operas, she loves spam and is happy to buy things from spammers, she thinks auto-installing toolbars that include spyware are "cute" and "probably worth the tradeoff." OK? As for me, I hate TV on paper, but if it is turned on in front of me, I turn into a vegetable. I sit for hours. It is so bad that I will watch infomercials to the point of insomnia, clicking away at 3 AM, knowing full well that I have to go to work in a few hours.
In short, TV was killing me.
I explained this to my wife. Her response? Just use willpower. TV is full of great programs. My response? Yes, and let's stock my alcoholic cousin's refrigerator with beer and tell her the solution to her problem is to surround yourself with it, but just not drink any of it. Eventually, my wife agreed to curtail the TV saturated-ness of our family. We still have 5 (!!!) TVs, but 3 are unplugged, and two have no cable, getting only NBC and KQED with static. I recently suggested to my wife that I might be willing to have some cable just so she and the kids could watch stuff, and she said that she now thinks most TV is crap and she can't believe she ever watched so much of it.
The point of all this? Ten years ago, when I bought outshine.com, I put up poetry, articles, ran a Web-magazine called WEBsurf, went biking daily, was healthy, etc. Four years ago, outshine.com was a wasteland, dead. I was 40 pounds overweight and basically just read Slashdot, ate twinkies, and watched TV until 4 AM each night. With the TV severely limited over the past 3 years, these are the changes: my 7 year-old daughter reads at least 2 grade levels above her class and loves to tell me about the great stories she's encountered; outshine.com is functioning again, with free software, poetry, rants, and services; my wife and I are slowly getting healthy again -- no more fast-food, no twinkies, workouts every night (but we're imperfect on this count); and I'm building some of the Web sites I always wanted to build. Things aren't perfect, I'd say I'm still a big screwup. But getting back a few "mindless" hours each night has really improved my life.
I had one day on google syndication that had 100,000 impressions. Only 60 or so people clicked through.
There is something wrong with this. First of all, if someone isn't getting about 1% clickthrough on their ads, then the ads are poorly targeted or badly, badly written. So this example seems to me to be more of an example of failed advertising than it is a reflection of the state of Web advertising.
However, the second point is really what puzzles me: any ad with less than one-half of one percent clickthrough is usually cancelled by Google, automatically. Of course, Google withholds judgement until 1000-2000 views have been registered, but once you get into thousands of views, if the ad doesn't perform, it's dropped. So how in the world is it possible to get 100,000 impressions with only a.06% clickthrough? The ads should never have seen 100,000 views. They should have been dropped by Google. Very very odd.
If there is an area where slow data performance is acceptible, its web development, for exactly the reasons you gave. The bottleneck is often the wire... not the database, not the browser or CPU behind the browser. Having a faster database, just means that your users get to wait faster!
No. These delays are not parallel, they are serial. In other words, the delays are cumulative, building on top of one another and extending the delays further. If the network, CPU, database, and code each add 500ms lag, that's a 2 second wait for the Web page. By getting the code to a point where it executes in only 100ms, and by switching to a database that can return the query in 100ms, the end-user now waits only 1.2 seconds for the Web page. You may think that the difference between 1 and 2 seconds is insignificant, but that would be the kind of thinking that got Intrabuilder into trouble. I recently had outshine.com move to a new server, and instantly saw visitors to the site decline sharply. Why? Well, the new server was doing DNS lookups on each request, and it wasn't caching the results for more than a second! So nearly every request had a 3 second delay in response. That alone killed off about 25% of my traffic. In an e-commerce site, such a loss would be a disaster.
I'm hoping that the new MySQL won't sacrifice speed for all these features.
Agreed. I don't think other database vendors understand the importance of speed to a Web Developer. We have to go over a network layer, with the requisite delays factored in. We use a client-server model, and cannot rely on the client CPU, like a traditional software product. And even a crappy Web site can find itself loaded down with a large audience. So we have to squeeze out milliseconds anywhere we can get them. A fast database and optimized code, that's pretty much what we can control.
I mentioned this story once before on Slashdot, but it's relevant, so here it is. Borland had a product called Intrabuilder. It had a poor-man's version of Live Script on the backend, with a built-in database -- so back in 1997 you could do some very PHP-like stuff with the system. It was promising. But as a Web guy there, I was tasked with using it on the borland.com site. And it was giving me huge lag -- 1 or 2 seconds per simultaneous user. So with 5 people testing my app, each page took 10 seconds to display. I told this to the Intrabuilder team. Response? "That is an acceptable delay. It's how databases work." For all I knew, they were right. Maybe databases did work slowly like that back then. I was young & new to that stuff. But I knew that I didn't work that way and I didn't want my site to work that way either. Borland eventually abandoned the product, because the developers didn't see the shift in the market: Web Developers need speed. It's not like an ATM transaction, where I'll wait 15 seconds to get my money. MySQL needs to keep its speed, especially under load. And other database teams would be wise to take note.
with postgresql and firebird there have long been available real open-source databases that are just as easy to get up and running as MySQL, but won't hamstring you when you start to learn more.
No. If that were true, then they would have seen far greater adoption rates. PostgreSQL has a history of difficult installations -- I tried it years ago and was stymied, then tried it again in 2003 I think and was stuck doing VACUUM (sp?) over and over. It also had some byte-size limits, but I don't think I even understood that complaint or experienced it. In the meantime, for MySQL I just hit "install" and it did, with excellent defaults, so that I did not need to babysit it at all.
And as for Firebird, no. I worked at Borland, I saw the limitations of that monster. I'm not suggesting that Firebird is problematic now -- I suspect it is devoid of problems to the point that I'd prefer it over PostgreSQL. I am merely disputing your assertion that it has been "just as easy" as MySQL. It hasn't. It may be now. But now may be too late.
Also note that I am not suggesting that MySQL is perfect. But let's focus on legitimate complaints, such as the way it quietly recasts data and stores it, rather than error out. For example, storing dates as 0000-00-00 when your table setup did nothing of the kind. Once that little (in)convenience introduces itself to you for the first time, you really wish you had been using PostgreSQL. Of course, again, it looks like a "compliance" mode is being integrated into MySQL, so by the time I'm ready to ditch MySQL over this, they will have fixed it, and I'll stay.:)
People NEVER verify the card holders name to the ID these days so having the actual card stolen from someone is just about as safe.
I seem to have stumbled upon a way to make every clerk ask me for ID, every time. I wrote on the back of my card in permanent marker, "ASK TO SEE ID." The first few times cashiers asked to see my ID, I was actually rather snotty about it, like they were wasting my time. Then I remembered what I had written and that it was working. I was stunned.
There is a small fallout though -- although 99% of my transactions over the past year have been really nice, I got one last week at Barnes & Noble that was just completely uncomfortable. The lady at the register saw the back of my card, took a hardass stance and assumed I was a criminal. She said (loud enough for the other customers to look up and stare), "Excuse me sir, could I have your name?" I told her my name. Then even louder she said, "UH HUH. RIGHT. WELL 'MR. BOYD' YOU'RE GOING TO NEED TO SHOW ME SOME ID." Then, apparently disappointed that I actually had confirming ID, she muttered quietly, "well sir everything appears to be in order. Just doing as instructed." Oh well. At least she asked. If it had been a card thief, she probably would have leapt across the counter to make a citizen's arrest while she shouted "COVER ME!" to her coworker.
Birds too, I believe, cannot see things that do not move, and birds are believed to be whats left of dinosours as they evolved to today.
Then how do birds land on rocks, branches, or statues? If they can't see it, how do they avoid crashing into it instead of landing gracefully?
I think the truth is that every creature can see inanimate objects. Otherwise they would stumble with every footfall. Perhaps more accurate is to say that when scanning for something that moves, most creatures watch for changes in a scene. Even humans do this to a lesser degree. We only stop to look when a quick scan doesn't reveal what we were looking for.
"Sosumi" was the name of the sound, and it came from the equally amusing battle between Apple Computer and Carl "Billions and Billions" Sagan.
That's a great story, pity it's not true. The original poster was correct. Quoting from Macworld's "Mac & PowerMac Secrets, 3rd Edition":
The Beatle's lawyers claimed that Apple, in making a computer with sound capabilities, was trying to get into the recording industry, causing confusion in the consumers' minds.
And later, from the same page:
Some wily Apple engineer, recognizing the potential litigation, gave the alert sound a name that serves as a subtle tribute to Apple Records:
Sosumi!
Someone from a public domain advocacy website wanted to use quotes from one of my slashdot posts on his site. But he had released all text on his site into the public domain. I had to decline unless he could change his license, not because I care where my words were used, but because I care that they be attributed to me.
Yes, that was one of my Web sites. However, since my interaction with you is getting lumped into a discussion of plagarism, I would mention that I do not plagarize -- everything I put up there is extensively cited and credited. The reason I didn't change my license for you was simply that other people were more easy-going, so there was no need to pursue your writing.
I'm basing my comment on one thing: the lawsuit. And I'm hoping I'm wrong. Here's my thinking: when you do something for the love of it, and you take an inordinate amount of time to do it -- money be damned -- you might just create something amazing (although the movie Dungeons & Dragons was a labor of love, and it was unwatchable); but when you get caught up in the movie receipts and the merchandising revenue (which seems to be what is going on with Jackson), you've effectively become George Lucas.
I know that's overly harsh, and Jackson hasn't let me down yet. So I'm taking even my own comment with a grain of salt. But it's worrying, you know? It makes me want to pre-emptively lower my expectations, just so I won't get my ass kicked for a third time (the other two being Star Wars and the Matrix).
As a PHP/Perl/JavaScript/HTML developer, here are some of the things I think I do well:
I use liberal comments in most of my projects. I always try to use/* and */ to make multiline comments that are easy to quickly add to without worrying about a lot of pretty formatting.
I have recently started to play with PHPDoc to create self-documenting code.
When creating any character(s) implying "open" I immediately create the "closed" character(s) too. For example, I type "if () { }" and then fill it in. As I write this, my LI tags are all already typed, I am just filling in text now.
I use text editors with syntax highlighting, such as HTML-Kit -- no drag & drop GUIs.
I use tools like WinMerge, Subversion (only a little, not so good at it) and ReplaceEm to maintain large codebases.
Where I fail at coding:
I know OOP, but it isn't natural for me, so I'm still a procedural boy, even when Object-Oriented Programming might help.
I have no idea what vectors and matrixes are.
I'm self-taught, my schooling is as an English major. So I have absolutely no Computer Science education behind what I do. While I try to do well, my solution to a deep and complicated problem is going to be basic compared to a guy who spent years of his life learning algorithms.
Um, okay, I'll try to explain it. Note that I am just repeating what I picked up on an NPR broadcast, so right or wrong, I probably don't deserve credit. Anyway, apparently a large number of States in the USA have indeed put laws on the books granting journalists protection similar to client/attorney privelege. Now, this is all at the State level. At the Federal level, it is as you describe -- no protection for journalists beyond what any normal person has. However, and this is why it was on NPR, there is a national case underway (not involving Apple, it's the one involving 2 journalists who learned the name of a secret agent) that might set a precedent that journalists DO have protections. I believe NPR said there have already been rulings & appeals, and the judges decisions are ping-ponging back and forth.
But even if journalists are ruled to have some kind of protection at the Federal level, I'm almost certain it will come too late for any appeals in the Apple case.
I mean, you show such ignorance about how open markets work that either you have been in cave for 50 years or are a Communist, comrade. Which one is it?
Before I respond to the meat of your comment, I just wanted to say how impressed I am with your name calling. Very high minded of you.
Now, about that ignorance of open markets: please explain the whole "made in the USA" movement? By that I mean, some country was always undercutting the price of US products and services. Either clothes, cars, whatever. And yet apparently "ignorant" people made a conscious choice to buy from within their own community to support the local economy. So since when is that so wrong? Were you whining when Japan got bit by Americans deliberately buying Fords? Do you whine each time a country slaps a tariff on an import?
Of course it's an open market. That doesn't mean we slavishly, mindlessly uproot our economy when there are perfectly reasonable, time-tested ways of responding to it.
As for the English capabilities of the Indians,, frankly, stop beating that horse. It has been fucking dead for ages.
Really? Because I just got off the phone with an Indian providing tech support for my DSL. And it didn't sound like that horse was "fucking dead" as you so crudely put it. Instead, I had to repeat myself a dozen times, even spelling out simple words letter by letter. So how about this: I'll stop beating the dead horse when these call center employees can actually be competent on the phone. Mmmkay?
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to your own response, let me just add this: Inkscape is the answer for "why Inkscape?" In other words, it is really proving to be both easy to use and powerful. I can get things done with Inkscape. It has readily justified itself.
I could get things done with Sodipodi, too. I was using it back when it was the only FOSS option I could find. At the time, Sodipodi's interface was "meh" at best, and what I heard was that you needed that kind of interface to do such complicated stuff. When Inkscape forked, I nearly whooped with glee -- they did more, did it better, and made it easier.
I couldn't believe it, but I was pretty damn happy. So, why Inkscape? Well, Inkscape is friendlier, Inkscape is growing faster, Inkscape is proving its worth.
Now all it needs is stability. I've never had it crash on me (or at least, I don't recall it), but I have had it just suddenly eat up hundreds of megs of RAM and start paging to disk. I'm (sadly) patient enough to wait an hour for it to settle down, then keep going. But ugh. Needs more work on that front.
-Tony
That must have been very loud and caused a lot of earthquakes.
You cannot seriously be talking about Darth Vader. The child prodigy? The "chosen one" who became the apprentice of the legendary Jedi? The character who then, in greed, loneliness, and rage for power, embraced evil -- slaughtering innocents, assualting his own child, and somehow, in the last seconds of his life, redeeming himself by turning against the very evil he had succumbed to -- that is difficult to make compelling? Jesus Christ, that is like the biggest fanboy apology I have ever heard in my fucking life. This is one of the greatest villians of our time. Not only that, he is a fucking complicated mess of psychology, if someone would just portray it right! This character should be disturbed, confused, hurt, lonely, seeking validation and acceptance. Instead, we got a mechanical arm and petulant whining. I think people complain and mock both Lucas and Christensen precisely because it should have been brain-dead easy to make this compelling. How the hell could he screw up something that left such an indelible impression for so many years? How could we get such dreck?
Personally, I think that Lucas's obsession with technology provides a disappointing counterpoint to Peter Jackson's focus on the human aspects of a story. But I'm going to see SW3 on Friday afternoon in an all-digital showing, because I'm just that much of a lost cause.
He was probably thinking more along the lines of a Holodeck, given the word used.
But I thought Apple was writing in Objective C. Wouldn't the language differences cause nearly every line to appear in the diff?
(Note: that's not a rebuttal to his point -- it's a real question. Did Apple really convert the whole codebase to Objective C? If so, it does make the use of a diff pointless. But if Apple didn't, then maybe the original post has a point. I know that I have gone into smaller but still overwhelming codebases, and I've managed to get things working with tools such as WinMerge.)
Hmmm. I wonder... so does the study then indicate that primarily men use Firefox, or does the study actually indicate that primarily men install antivirus protection? Or both, for a double whammy of a skewed number?
I think my biggest frustration reading this memoir is that the author appears to be saying, "Hey, Jimmy doesn't deserve all the credit, I worked on it too!" -- but then he goes on to say, "Of course, I only worked on it for 3 years, Jimmy actually came up with the idea and funded most of it through Boomis, and after Nupedia failed and I was laid off, Jimmy grew Wikipedia like a motherfucker."
That frustrates me because I actually prefer the Nupedia style of vetting articles for publication, but the author just bungled it. Or I partially like the Nupedia style -- I mean, I like the Wiki notion that anyone can write anything, but I don't like that it isn't moderated or peer reviewed before being published. So a little code to get a signoff before publication would have been a nice addition.
In any case, I think a memoir about a 3 year stint at a dot-com startup isn't very exciting anymore -- even if the startup is Wikipedia. Especially since it appears that Wikipedia is doing better now that he's gone. In fact, I kind of wonder if his layoff wasn't a "thank you" for squandering the first 18 months of investment money on a old-fashioned system that netted 24 articles. Now that would make for a good article: talk to the people controlling the purse-strings, let's hear what their back-room conversations were like.
Wow, for once the Slashdot groupthink isn't pro-Linus. But I am. I'll explain why. First, you need to read the original thread to get a feel for what Linus is saying. At least read the first 15 posts there.
After you've read it, you'll come away with a few realizations:
Just think: if you were a bottleneck, if data and people were coming at you at a very fast pace all the time, and if there was tremendous pressure on you to build a platform that would rival Microsoft, one coping mechanism is to find tools that increase productivity. A lot. (Other good coping mechanisms include heavy drinking and vanishing without a trace.)
Now Linus, who has no ready alternative is staring down a barrel of loaded source code, knowing it's going to fire off in his face real soon now. And someone else has yanked his defense right out from under him. He has a real problem now. He's pissed. I can put myself in his shoes, I can understand his frustration. Basically, it's this: "Well great. WTF do I do now? Oh shit, stuff is backing up already. Thanks! That's fucking great!"
Is Torvalds wrong to blame Trigdell for reverse engineering? Yes. Is Torvalds wrong to feel horribly, disastrously inconvenienced by this? No, he has every right. Forget the technical arguments for a day or a week. This is a human issue right now. People were inconsiderate of each other, and now they're walking around with bloddy noses. Give them time to assess the situation. If Torvalds doesn't soften his position in a short while, fork, screw him, whatever. But give him some time for the fight or flight instinct to be peter out before you all write him off.
Just yesterday I was commenting about this in someone's blog, although the blog was about greasemonkey (another Moz plugin that can block ads). It was interesting to note that one of the Greasemonkey developers posted a comment in that blog, distancing himself from the whole adblocking issue.
My personal feeling is twofold. First, some ads (especially popups) are so disrespectful of a site's visitors that they deserve killing. And, if that means the site dies from lack of revenue, so be it. However, my second thought is that there are many good sites (maybe Slashdot qualifies, lack of editorial responsibility notwithstanding) that do not blare ads at me, and deserve my support. These sites have no popups, and no shimmering, shaking, animated Flash monstrosities. I have never blocked a Slashdot ad. In fact, I have deliberately clicked a few Thinkgeek banners.
If a large enough group started to block out every kind of ad possible, sites would go under. And not just a single, inconsequential site. You can't say "there will always be free alternatives" if you starve even the alternatives of a way to cover costs.
Personally, I don't want the Web to go the way of the Wall Street Journal. I don't want to pay for access or be forced to sit and watch an ad so I can get my access code. I like free roaming, and if that means I need to tolerate a quiet ad banner or two, I'm OK with that. It's only the loud annoying crap that grates on my nerves.
So where are the other shining stars in this sky? I've been to Bruce Perens' news site, and it just ain't fun. I've been to OSNews and it's OK but the owner treats it like a fiefdom. What other options are there for pro-OSS news with commentary from the readers? From what I can tell, there is nowhere else to go.
Pagerank involves getting other sites to link to you and stuff. It's very broad and mostly irrelevant to what I was suggesting. When I said to do some SEO work on your pages, I was only talking about putting text on the pages that makes it clear what the focus of each page is -- text that is searchable, text that will hint to Google who your audience is. The Google bot will notice new text and choose better ads to show. If you do a good job, this will get you a better clickthrough rate for your ads, even if your pagerank is zero.
Thanks for the clarification -- I wasn't sure if the OP was referring to Google Adsense or Google Adwords. However, now that I know, I can say that I am a member of Google adsense (where Google places ads on my sites). With adsense, for the ads that run on my site, I currently average .7% clickthrough, not quite 1% but decent. With Google automatically monitoring ads for poor performance, I just don't see how it is possible to get really bad clickthroughs. If that happened to me, I would go to Overture or some other Google-competitor. Any of them can do better than .06% clickthrough.
I haven't checked to see if you are the person that posted the original comment that I first responded to back at the beginning of this thread, but if you are, I'm telling you: your ads are broken. Either you've integrated them into your site in such a way that they are ignored or obnoxious or something else bad, or they are terribly unfocused and uninteresting to your audience. In the latter case, use some SEO on your pages to automatically optimize the ads (as Google picks ads based upon what it spiders from your pages), or else drop Google for someone better. Really, .06% is bad.
I used to have huge battles over the television with my wife. My wife is the kind of person who would get killed by Slashdot members -- she loves mindless soap operas, she loves spam and is happy to buy things from spammers, she thinks auto-installing toolbars that include spyware are "cute" and "probably worth the tradeoff." OK? As for me, I hate TV on paper, but if it is turned on in front of me, I turn into a vegetable. I sit for hours. It is so bad that I will watch infomercials to the point of insomnia, clicking away at 3 AM, knowing full well that I have to go to work in a few hours.
In short, TV was killing me.
I explained this to my wife. Her response? Just use willpower. TV is full of great programs. My response? Yes, and let's stock my alcoholic cousin's refrigerator with beer and tell her the solution to her problem is to surround yourself with it, but just not drink any of it. Eventually, my wife agreed to curtail the TV saturated-ness of our family. We still have 5 (!!!) TVs, but 3 are unplugged, and two have no cable, getting only NBC and KQED with static. I recently suggested to my wife that I might be willing to have some cable just so she and the kids could watch stuff, and she said that she now thinks most TV is crap and she can't believe she ever watched so much of it.
The point of all this? Ten years ago, when I bought outshine.com, I put up poetry, articles, ran a Web-magazine called WEBsurf, went biking daily, was healthy, etc. Four years ago, outshine.com was a wasteland, dead. I was 40 pounds overweight and basically just read Slashdot, ate twinkies, and watched TV until 4 AM each night. With the TV severely limited over the past 3 years, these are the changes: my 7 year-old daughter reads at least 2 grade levels above her class and loves to tell me about the great stories she's encountered; outshine.com is functioning again, with free software, poetry, rants, and services; my wife and I are slowly getting healthy again -- no more fast-food, no twinkies, workouts every night (but we're imperfect on this count); and I'm building some of the Web sites I always wanted to build. Things aren't perfect, I'd say I'm still a big screwup. But getting back a few "mindless" hours each night has really improved my life.
There is something wrong with this. First of all, if someone isn't getting about 1% clickthrough on their ads, then the ads are poorly targeted or badly, badly written. So this example seems to me to be more of an example of failed advertising than it is a reflection of the state of Web advertising.
However, the second point is really what puzzles me: any ad with less than one-half of one percent clickthrough is usually cancelled by Google, automatically. Of course, Google withholds judgement until 1000-2000 views have been registered, but once you get into thousands of views, if the ad doesn't perform, it's dropped. So how in the world is it possible to get 100,000 impressions with only a .06% clickthrough? The ads should never have seen 100,000 views. They should have been dropped by Google. Very very odd.
No. These delays are not parallel, they are serial. In other words, the delays are cumulative, building on top of one another and extending the delays further. If the network, CPU, database, and code each add 500ms lag, that's a 2 second wait for the Web page. By getting the code to a point where it executes in only 100ms, and by switching to a database that can return the query in 100ms, the end-user now waits only 1.2 seconds for the Web page. You may think that the difference between 1 and 2 seconds is insignificant, but that would be the kind of thinking that got Intrabuilder into trouble. I recently had outshine.com move to a new server, and instantly saw visitors to the site decline sharply. Why? Well, the new server was doing DNS lookups on each request, and it wasn't caching the results for more than a second! So nearly every request had a 3 second delay in response. That alone killed off about 25% of my traffic. In an e-commerce site, such a loss would be a disaster.
Agreed. I don't think other database vendors understand the importance of speed to a Web Developer. We have to go over a network layer, with the requisite delays factored in. We use a client-server model, and cannot rely on the client CPU, like a traditional software product. And even a crappy Web site can find itself loaded down with a large audience. So we have to squeeze out milliseconds anywhere we can get them. A fast database and optimized code, that's pretty much what we can control.
I mentioned this story once before on Slashdot, but it's relevant, so here it is. Borland had a product called Intrabuilder. It had a poor-man's version of Live Script on the backend, with a built-in database -- so back in 1997 you could do some very PHP-like stuff with the system. It was promising. But as a Web guy there, I was tasked with using it on the borland.com site. And it was giving me huge lag -- 1 or 2 seconds per simultaneous user. So with 5 people testing my app, each page took 10 seconds to display. I told this to the Intrabuilder team. Response? "That is an acceptable delay. It's how databases work." For all I knew, they were right. Maybe databases did work slowly like that back then. I was young & new to that stuff. But I knew that I didn't work that way and I didn't want my site to work that way either. Borland eventually abandoned the product, because the developers didn't see the shift in the market: Web Developers need speed. It's not like an ATM transaction, where I'll wait 15 seconds to get my money. MySQL needs to keep its speed, especially under load. And other database teams would be wise to take note.
No. If that were true, then they would have seen far greater adoption rates. PostgreSQL has a history of difficult installations -- I tried it years ago and was stymied, then tried it again in 2003 I think and was stuck doing VACUUM (sp?) over and over. It also had some byte-size limits, but I don't think I even understood that complaint or experienced it. In the meantime, for MySQL I just hit "install" and it did, with excellent defaults, so that I did not need to babysit it at all.
And as for Firebird, no. I worked at Borland, I saw the limitations of that monster. I'm not suggesting that Firebird is problematic now -- I suspect it is devoid of problems to the point that I'd prefer it over PostgreSQL. I am merely disputing your assertion that it has been "just as easy" as MySQL. It hasn't. It may be now. But now may be too late.
Also note that I am not suggesting that MySQL is perfect. But let's focus on legitimate complaints, such as the way it quietly recasts data and stores it, rather than error out. For example, storing dates as 0000-00-00 when your table setup did nothing of the kind. Once that little (in)convenience introduces itself to you for the first time, you really wish you had been using PostgreSQL. Of course, again, it looks like a "compliance" mode is being integrated into MySQL, so by the time I'm ready to ditch MySQL over this, they will have fixed it, and I'll stay. :)
I seem to have stumbled upon a way to make every clerk ask me for ID, every time. I wrote on the back of my card in permanent marker, "ASK TO SEE ID." The first few times cashiers asked to see my ID, I was actually rather snotty about it, like they were wasting my time. Then I remembered what I had written and that it was working. I was stunned.
There is a small fallout though -- although 99% of my transactions over the past year have been really nice, I got one last week at Barnes & Noble that was just completely uncomfortable. The lady at the register saw the back of my card, took a hardass stance and assumed I was a criminal. She said (loud enough for the other customers to look up and stare), "Excuse me sir, could I have your name?" I told her my name. Then even louder she said, "UH HUH. RIGHT. WELL 'MR. BOYD' YOU'RE GOING TO NEED TO SHOW ME SOME ID." Then, apparently disappointed that I actually had confirming ID, she muttered quietly, "well sir everything appears to be in order. Just doing as instructed." Oh well. At least she asked. If it had been a card thief, she probably would have leapt across the counter to make a citizen's arrest while she shouted "COVER ME!" to her coworker.
Then how do birds land on rocks, branches, or statues? If they can't see it, how do they avoid crashing into it instead of landing gracefully?
I think the truth is that every creature can see inanimate objects. Otherwise they would stumble with every footfall. Perhaps more accurate is to say that when scanning for something that moves, most creatures watch for changes in a scene. Even humans do this to a lesser degree. We only stop to look when a quick scan doesn't reveal what we were looking for.
That's a great story, pity it's not true. The original poster was correct. Quoting from Macworld's "Mac & PowerMac Secrets, 3rd Edition":
And later, from the same page:
Yes, that was one of my Web sites. However, since my interaction with you is getting lumped into a discussion of plagarism, I would mention that I do not plagarize -- everything I put up there is extensively cited and credited. The reason I didn't change my license for you was simply that other people were more easy-going, so there was no need to pursue your writing.
I'm basing my comment on one thing: the lawsuit. And I'm hoping I'm wrong. Here's my thinking: when you do something for the love of it, and you take an inordinate amount of time to do it -- money be damned -- you might just create something amazing (although the movie Dungeons & Dragons was a labor of love, and it was unwatchable); but when you get caught up in the movie receipts and the merchandising revenue (which seems to be what is going on with Jackson), you've effectively become George Lucas.
I know that's overly harsh, and Jackson hasn't let me down yet. So I'm taking even my own comment with a grain of salt. But it's worrying, you know? It makes me want to pre-emptively lower my expectations, just so I won't get my ass kicked for a third time (the other two being Star Wars and the Matrix).
As a PHP/Perl/JavaScript/HTML developer, here are some of the things I think I do well:
Where I fail at coding:
Um, okay, I'll try to explain it. Note that I am just repeating what I picked up on an NPR broadcast, so right or wrong, I probably don't deserve credit. Anyway, apparently a large number of States in the USA have indeed put laws on the books granting journalists protection similar to client/attorney privelege. Now, this is all at the State level. At the Federal level, it is as you describe -- no protection for journalists beyond what any normal person has. However, and this is why it was on NPR, there is a national case underway (not involving Apple, it's the one involving 2 journalists who learned the name of a secret agent) that might set a precedent that journalists DO have protections. I believe NPR said there have already been rulings & appeals, and the judges decisions are ping-ponging back and forth.
But even if journalists are ruled to have some kind of protection at the Federal level, I'm almost certain it will come too late for any appeals in the Apple case.
Before I respond to the meat of your comment, I just wanted to say how impressed I am with your name calling. Very high minded of you.
Now, about that ignorance of open markets: please explain the whole "made in the USA" movement? By that I mean, some country was always undercutting the price of US products and services. Either clothes, cars, whatever. And yet apparently "ignorant" people made a conscious choice to buy from within their own community to support the local economy. So since when is that so wrong? Were you whining when Japan got bit by Americans deliberately buying Fords? Do you whine each time a country slaps a tariff on an import?
Of course it's an open market. That doesn't mean we slavishly, mindlessly uproot our economy when there are perfectly reasonable, time-tested ways of responding to it.
Really? Because I just got off the phone with an Indian providing tech support for my DSL. And it didn't sound like that horse was "fucking dead" as you so crudely put it. Instead, I had to repeat myself a dozen times, even spelling out simple words letter by letter. So how about this: I'll stop beating the dead horse when these call center employees can actually be competent on the phone. Mmmkay?