Go Tools->Internet Options->Advanced, and then under the "Browsing" section there is a entry "Show Friendly HTTP error messages"
IE 5 shows them ("Friendly error messages") if there is a HTTP error code and the page size returned from the server is less than x bytes (where x is some number I can't remember now).
IMHO, it's quite a nice way to handle it - it tells newbies what has gone wrong and tells them ways in which they may be able to fix it, and yet it still enables website designers to display a custom web page (or redirect) on 404 errors, and advanced users can turn it off.
Okay, it's not Open Source, but at least you access to the source code and can fix bugs when neccessary.
The number of time I've wished i could do that I can't count!
Infact, Borland has always done something like this with their VCL for Delphi. You can't redistibute the source, but they ship it, and it's great for seeing how they do thing, or fixing (fairly infrequent in Delphi) bugs.
Why on earth would anyone try and teach a newcommer to programming something like C++? It's my view that any langage based on the C syntax is not suitable for beginners.
Pascal, Python, maybe Java are all great languages for a beginning programmer.
I'm sure that it is possible to teach some people C++ as their first language. I'd argue that they could have learnt something like Pascal in less time, and have a better understanding of it. C/C++ syntax is too weird for a beginner, and you need to understand too much about memory & pointer to do anything useful. I mean... no native string type in C? How stupid is that when you think about it?
Firstly, I hope this (merger between BONOBO & KParts) takes place. Even if this annoucement was somewhat premature, I hope it becomes a self fufilling prophecy.
That's not really what I wanted to discuss, though. Please excuse me if this is a little off-topic.
What component archictectures are sutible for use in server side (ie, website) development on Linux/Unix? Is the only option Enterprise Java Beans?
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with EJBs, but I think there is room for a proper language independant component architecture suitable for server development on Unix. As far as I know, there is nothign directly comparable to COM+ (or COM/MTS) on Windows, apart from EJB. I don't think either BONOBO or KParts fills this gap, either.
I suppose CORBA support is a good start, but there is more to a component architecture than a remote object calling standard. COM+ supplies database connection pooling, object pooling and some failover features, all of which need to be added by developers or non-standard vendor tools to any CORBA based solution.
I'm not too optimistic about this changing, though. Or am I wrong, and there are projects already underway?
What are you talking about? Every single review of IE5.5 on the Mac I've read raved about it - especially about it's standards compliance. In some areas it is even more standard compliant than Mozilla (I believe some CSS2 issues)
It's easy to talk tough about MS, but that is just FUD.
A company can download your app, modify it, and then never contribute the source back to you if they choose, because the source only has to be distibuted with the binaries, and the binaries are never distributed.
While most people understand this now, I feel it is time for a new licence to be created. It should say something like:
If this code is ever used in a publically accessible service, then the source for it and all your modifications must be easily available.
Of course, we would need to define "source-code" as including database schemes, but not data, and including HTML templates, but not orginal artwork etc.
"Publically accessible" also needs to be defined. If someone has to register for the site, does that make it publically accessible, for instance? I think it should in most cases.
I think a licence like that would be more in the spirit of the GPL.
On the other hand, maybe there is little need for it, because there is little competitve advantage in keeping your modifications private - it is cheaper to let everyone debug them, and compete on branding.
I believe the SourceForge people have been considering these issues in some depth.
You were ridiculing the consistancy of arguement on Slashdot, and he pointed out the way in which both these arguements are consistant.
Now, I'm not sure I agree with the way in which some things are argued, but decending to saying Gotta love that special brand of "progressivism" that would do Karl Marx himself proud. He sure hated hearing his critics, too -- you two aren't related, are ya? is not adding to the discussion.
Could I also point out that you aren't taking critisim terribly well, either?
It is the single most useful feature I've used in an IDE - it speeds up typing and stops you having to look for documentation on the exact method names.
I use the Borland eqivalent feature in Delphi, and I can't live without it. Now, even when I'm typing in a work processor I find myself typing for any word longer than about four letters.
Breakpoints and intergrated debugging are wonderful things, too, but like you said, EMACS does them fine.
If the Open Group had done this back in '97 or earlier, it would probably have continued as the dominate toolkit on Unix.
When was it that the Gimp guys stopped using Motif, and started work on GTK? '96 or something?
There is little doubt that had Motif been freely available on Linux at that time they wouldn't have done that and the Gimp would have continued to be a Motif app.
QT might have come out, but I suspect that the KDE would have used Motif anyway (remember, the original KDE idea wasn't that concerned about the licence (this licecne seems somewhat similar to the original QT licence), and there was no "Open Source Licence Definition" back then anyway.), and there would have been no need for the GNOME vs KDE wars.
Of course, there might have been a KDE vs CDE war, but I suspect that CDE would have been surparassed sometime in 1998, and would have been abandoned, even by the major vendors.
As it is, we have three main toolkit - GTK and QT have broard support in the free software world, but Motif is still used by lots of commerical Unix software.
Another thing.. no, the licence isn't Open Source (TM), but I don't think that is a huge problem. On most non-Free Unicies, Motif comes as standard anyway.
I don't see a lot of new free-software being written specifically for Motif, but it will help commercial Unix software get ported to Linux quicker. I guess that's a good thing.
Anyway, look at this announcement like this: Motif is now freely (in the beer sense) available on all Unixes, either supplied by the vendor, or for download. That is good.
I'm a GPLite myself, but I can't agree with what you claimed there.
There are some companies doing open sourced development and using the BSD licence, and not just in the *BDS OS world, either. Lots of them do seem to be driver software, though, which is something of a special case.
On the otherhand, I can only think of Hewlett Packard (for their eSpeak thing) of the non-Linux (Redhat, VA etc) companies that is using the actual GPL[1]. Novell is using something very similar, but they have renamed it the Novell Public Licence. Most seem to use the Mozilla Public Licecne, or variations of it.
I do agree with you point, though - most companies do tend to use Open Source licences that force the code to be recontributed, unlike the BSD.
[1]Ignoring companies that make contributions to exisiting GPLed projects.
I can't understand why MS is doing this. Lets assume the the most likely scenerio happens, and Slashdot is forced to remove the actual copyrighted material but is allowed to keep the "How to get the specs without seeing the licence agreement" posts.
What has MS achieved? Copyright isn't like a trademark - it can't be dilluted by not defending it (At least, I don't think so).
Unless this really is an anti-SAMBA thing, I can't see why MS would do this. The SAMBA consipiracy theory (for those who haven't heard it) goes, briefly: MS make the specs freely available, but forbid implementation from them. Then, even if the SAMBA team implements the MS Kerboes protocol, they can't prove that it was clean room reverse-engineered because the specs were so freely available.
If this theory is correct (which I'm not sure I believe), then we must consider the possibility that agents of MS posted at least some of those posts. They would have known the the SAMBA team would have read it. Of course, it would have been much simpler to post the specs anonymously on the SAMBA mailing list saying somethign like "I'm a k00l hacker who got these specs from MS". The they could have claimed that all the SAMBA team had seen the (illegaly obtained) specs and therefor could not clean-room reverse engineer them.
No, I don't really believe this, but I honestly can't see any other even sligtly rational explaination for why MS would do this. All it is going to achieve for them is a lot of attention being focused on their "Embrace & Extend" policies, which I would not have thought they would want right now.
If anyone else has any other rational explainations, please post them. (And no, I don't believe the "Their lawyers thought it was a good idea" story either.)
Maybe it really is an "Anti Open-Source" tactic. Perhaps soon we will see those supposed "Hidden-API's" that IIS uses to perform so well posted with a similar licence, so the MS can guarantee that Apache will never be able to use them.
I guess it could be called the old Poison Api-le trick. (Okay, it's not funny, but it would be a great headline, wouldn't it?)
although I didn't send an entry in. I was mainly interested in the "Config" section.
It's been interesting. As soon as the entries were posted, some people who hadn't seemed to have read the spec immeaditly began posting stuff justifying the way they did things. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but the fact that there was a lot of money hanging over the judges decisions made it worse than most lists - the list has driffed further and further off-topic in the last few days.
As soon as the results were announced, it went pretty quite again, apart from some interesting (but mostly offtopic) discussion of languages which are written entirly in XML.
I'm hoping that all those who didn't win don't abandon the project, but find a way to continue to contribute.
As for those who are saying that they don't see a need for these tools: Neither did I, until I heard some horror stories about people who couldn't build their softwear because of bugs in the build tools on some platforms, and the makefile/autoconfig scripts were so full of work arounds for other (Operating Sytem) problems that no one could figure out how to fix them. These are nuclear physicists we're talking about, too.
Yeah, don't shoot me for watching it, I was eating.
There were two site, this CrimeNet one, and another, even worse one that was called "World Wide Records" or something.
This second one allowed you to submit people you claimed had not payed debts to you, and then rewards would be payed for finding them. The details could include pictures.
Fortunatly, it seemed that the Privacy Commisioner (toothless though he might be) though that it would break existing laws, mainly because it had to do with peoples credit history, which strict laws exist about.
The owner of the business didn't seem worried, though. He's in my city, too - maybe I should go and see what the real story is.
(Note: I might have got this story a bit wrong in places.. I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention, and "Today Tonight" isn't known for accurate reporting, anyway)
You can stick a PIII motherboard in your old 286AT case! (Around the same vintage as the colour classics)
You can replace the 5 1/4 inch with a CDROM and you can replace the old CGA monitor with a 21 inch Sony, and it will all run fine!!
Oh, wait.. I had a computer like that.. so does everyone else I know.
I (actually my parents) had a Mac+ for a while (before that they had one of the original 128K Mac, too). Did you know that upgrading the RAM invalidated to warrenty?
This is somewhat similar to the softwear engineering methodology known as "Extreme Programming"
One of the main tenents of Extreme Programming is constant refactoring (ie, you see something that could be done better another way, you fix it straight away)
The other main point of extreme programming are: Always do the simplest thing that will work, and have proper, automatic test suites to constantly test your work.
I've read your book (online), and I found it very enlightening and useful.
I was wondering to what extent you keep it up to date? Some of the information in it seems to be somewhat dated, and because of that it maybe somewhat misleading.
For instance, while here on Slashdot we may mostly agree with you that Windows NT is a bad platform to host websites on, it does seem that some companies are doing it fairly successfully now, and your book does not seem to reflect that.
Your book seems to say "To build a good website, use Solaris or HP/UX, Oracle, AOLServer, get good people and you'll be okay". While not many people will argue with that statement, do you think you are neglecting other technologies?
Should we read you book more as a "This is how we build websites and it works for us" rather than a "This is how you should build websites" kind of thing?
I also just noticed (just before I submitted this question) that you now have mod_aolserver for Apache. What prompted this being written? Was it requests by clients, or was it contributed by non-ArsDigita employees?
Slashdot Mirror
Go Tools->Internet Options->Advanced, and then under the "Browsing" section there is a entry "Show Friendly HTTP error messages"
IE 5 shows them ("Friendly error messages") if there is a HTTP error code and the page size returned from the server is less than x bytes (where x is some number I can't remember now).
IMHO, it's quite a nice way to handle it - it tells newbies what has gone wrong and tells them ways in which they may be able to fix it, and yet it still enables website designers to display a custom web page (or redirect) on 404 errors, and advanced users can turn it off.
Okay, it's not Open Source, but at least you access to the source code and can fix bugs when neccessary.
The number of time I've wished i could do that I can't count!
Infact, Borland has always done something like this with their VCL for Delphi. You can't redistibute the source, but they ship it, and it's great for seeing how they do thing, or fixing (fairly infrequent in Delphi) bugs.
Still, I don't think a language like that (C) is good to learn on, which is what my point was.
Why on earth would anyone try and teach a newcommer to programming something like C++? It's my view that any langage based on the C syntax is not suitable for beginners.
Pascal, Python, maybe Java are all great languages for a beginning programmer.
I'm sure that it is possible to teach some people C++ as their first language. I'd argue that they could have learnt something like Pascal in less time, and have a better understanding of it. C/C++ syntax is too weird for a beginner, and you need to understand too much about memory & pointer to do anything useful. I mean... no native string type in C? How stupid is that when you think about it?
Firstly, I hope this (merger between BONOBO & KParts) takes place. Even if this annoucement was somewhat premature, I hope it becomes a self fufilling prophecy.
That's not really what I wanted to discuss, though. Please excuse me if this is a little off-topic.
What component archictectures are sutible for use in server side (ie, website) development on Linux/Unix? Is the only option Enterprise Java Beans?
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with EJBs, but I think there is room for a proper language independant component architecture suitable for server development on Unix. As far as I know, there is nothign directly comparable to COM+ (or COM/MTS) on Windows, apart from EJB. I don't think either BONOBO or KParts fills this gap, either.
I suppose CORBA support is a good start, but there is more to a component architecture than a remote object calling standard. COM+ supplies database connection pooling, object pooling and some failover features, all of which need to be added by developers or non-standard vendor tools to any CORBA based solution.
I'm not too optimistic about this changing, though. Or am I wrong, and there are projects already underway?
I bet there isn't much demand for it, so you can't really blame MS too much for not putting too much effort into bug fixing it.
IE5.5 on Mac is pretty good by all accounts, though, which was my original point.
What are you talking about? Every single review of IE5.5 on the Mac I've read raved about it - especially about it's standards compliance. In some areas it is even more standard compliant than Mozilla (I believe some CSS2 issues)
It's easy to talk tough about MS, but that is just FUD.
The GPL is meaningless for online apps.
A company can download your app, modify it, and then never contribute the source back to you if they choose, because the source only has to be distibuted with the binaries, and the binaries are never distributed.
While most people understand this now, I feel it is time for a new licence to be created. It should say something like:
If this code is ever used in a publically accessible service, then the source for it and all your modifications must be easily available.
Of course, we would need to define "source-code" as including database schemes, but not data, and including HTML templates, but not orginal artwork etc.
"Publically accessible" also needs to be defined. If someone has to register for the site, does that make it publically accessible, for instance? I think it should in most cases.
I think a licence like that would be more in the spirit of the GPL.
On the other hand, maybe there is little need for it, because there is little competitve advantage in keeping your modifications private - it is cheaper to let everyone debug them, and compete on branding.
I believe the SourceForge people have been considering these issues in some depth.
You were ridiculing the consistancy of arguement on Slashdot, and he pointed out the way in which both these arguements are consistant.
Now, I'm not sure I agree with the way in which some things are argued, but decending to saying Gotta love that special brand of "progressivism" that would do Karl Marx himself proud. He sure hated hearing his critics, too -- you two aren't related, are ya? is not adding to the discussion.
Could I also point out that you aren't taking critisim terribly well, either?
At least, I've never seen it.
It is the single most useful feature I've used in an IDE - it speeds up typing and stops you having to look for documentation on the exact method names.
I use the Borland eqivalent feature in Delphi, and I can't live without it. Now, even when I'm typing in a work processor I find myself typing for any word longer than about four letters.
Breakpoints and intergrated debugging are wonderful things, too, but like you said, EMACS does them fine.
Since it relates to Borland, it might be of interest to those reading this story.
I've written a little piece on kuro5hin on Borland's Kylix, which is their upcoming RAD tool for Linux.
Rather than reporducing it here, go and have a look.
If the Open Group had done this back in '97 or earlier, it would probably have continued as the dominate toolkit on Unix.
When was it that the Gimp guys stopped using Motif, and started work on GTK? '96 or something?
There is little doubt that had Motif been freely available on Linux at that time they wouldn't have done that and the Gimp would have continued to be a Motif app.
QT might have come out, but I suspect that the KDE would have used Motif anyway (remember, the original KDE idea wasn't that concerned about the licence (this licecne seems somewhat similar to the original QT licence), and there was no "Open Source Licence Definition" back then anyway.), and there would have been no need for the GNOME vs KDE wars.
Of course, there might have been a KDE vs CDE war, but I suspect that CDE would have been surparassed sometime in 1998, and would have been abandoned, even by the major vendors.
As it is, we have three main toolkit - GTK and QT have broard support in the free software world, but Motif is still used by lots of commerical Unix software.
Another thing.. no, the licence isn't Open Source (TM), but I don't think that is a huge problem. On most non-Free Unicies, Motif comes as standard anyway.
I don't see a lot of new free-software being written specifically for Motif, but it will help commercial Unix software get ported to Linux quicker. I guess that's a good thing.
Anyway, look at this announcement like this: Motif is now freely (in the beer sense) available on all Unixes, either supplied by the vendor, or for download. That is good.
I'm a GPLite myself, but I can't agree with what you claimed there.
There are some companies doing open sourced development and using the BSD licence, and not just in the *BDS OS world, either. Lots of them do seem to be driver software, though, which is something of a special case.
On the otherhand, I can only think of Hewlett Packard (for their eSpeak thing) of the non-Linux (Redhat, VA etc) companies that is using the actual GPL[1]. Novell is using something very similar, but they have renamed it the Novell Public Licence. Most seem to use the Mozilla Public Licecne, or variations of it.
I do agree with you point, though - most companies do tend to use Open Source licences that force the code to be recontributed, unlike the BSD.
[1]Ignoring companies that make contributions to exisiting GPLed projects.
I can't understand why MS is doing this. Lets assume the the most likely scenerio happens, and Slashdot is forced to remove the actual copyrighted material but is allowed to keep the "How to get the specs without seeing the licence agreement" posts.
What has MS achieved? Copyright isn't like a trademark - it can't be dilluted by not defending it (At least, I don't think so).
Unless this really is an anti-SAMBA thing, I can't see why MS would do this. The SAMBA consipiracy theory (for those who haven't heard it) goes, briefly: MS make the specs freely available, but forbid implementation from them. Then, even if the SAMBA team implements the MS Kerboes protocol, they can't prove that it was clean room reverse-engineered because the specs were so freely available.
If this theory is correct (which I'm not sure I believe), then we must consider the possibility that agents of MS posted at least some of those posts. They would have known the the SAMBA team would have read it. Of course, it would have been much simpler to post the specs anonymously on the SAMBA mailing list saying somethign like "I'm a k00l hacker who got these specs from MS". The they could have claimed that all the SAMBA team had seen the (illegaly obtained) specs and therefor could not clean-room reverse engineer them.
No, I don't really believe this, but I honestly can't see any other even sligtly rational explaination for why MS would do this. All it is going to achieve for them is a lot of attention being focused on their "Embrace & Extend" policies, which I would not have thought they would want right now.
If anyone else has any other rational explainations, please post them. (And no, I don't believe the "Their lawyers thought it was a good idea" story either.)
Maybe it really is an "Anti Open-Source" tactic. Perhaps soon we will see those supposed "Hidden-API's" that IIS uses to perform so well posted with a similar licence, so the MS can guarantee that Apache will never be able to use them.
I guess it could be called the old Poison Api-le trick. (Okay, it's not funny, but it would be a great headline, wouldn't it?)
although I didn't send an entry in. I was mainly interested in the "Config" section.
It's been interesting. As soon as the entries were posted, some people who hadn't seemed to have read the spec immeaditly began posting stuff justifying the way they did things. There's nothing wrong with that in itself, but the fact that there was a lot of money hanging over the judges decisions made it worse than most lists - the list has driffed further and further off-topic in the last few days.
As soon as the results were announced, it went pretty quite again, apart from some interesting (but mostly offtopic) discussion of languages which are written entirly in XML.
I'm hoping that all those who didn't win don't abandon the project, but find a way to continue to contribute.
As for those who are saying that they don't see a need for these tools: Neither did I, until I heard some horror stories about people who couldn't build their softwear because of bugs in the build tools on some platforms, and the makefile/autoconfig scripts were so full of work arounds for other (Operating Sytem) problems that no one could figure out how to fix them. These are nuclear physicists we're talking about, too.
What were you trying to do? There wasn't one last night when I posted that.
I tried checking it, but it seems to be Slashdotted at the moment.
The Crimenet site can be found here, at www.crimenet.com.au, for those who want to see it.
Yeah, don't shoot me for watching it, I was eating.
There were two site, this CrimeNet one, and another, even worse one that was called "World Wide Records" or something.
This second one allowed you to submit people you claimed had not payed debts to you, and then rewards would be payed for finding them. The details could include pictures.
Fortunatly, it seemed that the Privacy Commisioner (toothless though he might be) though that it would break existing laws, mainly because it had to do with peoples credit history, which strict laws exist about.
The owner of the business didn't seem worried, though. He's in my city, too - maybe I should go and see what the real story is.
(Note: I might have got this story a bit wrong in places.. I wasn't paying a huge amount of attention, and "Today Tonight" isn't known for accurate reporting, anyway)
I think they were talking about the source to in-house applications - the business support apps the most large businesses have.
This is a very interesting question, because lots of these apps incorporate business rules that the companies would consider highly confidential.
You can stick a PIII motherboard in your old 286AT case! (Around the same vintage as the colour classics)
You can replace the 5 1/4 inch with a CDROM and you can replace the old CGA monitor with a 21 inch Sony, and it will all run fine!!
Oh, wait.. I had a computer like that.. so does everyone else I know.
I (actually my parents) had a Mac+ for a while (before that they had one of the original 128K Mac, too). Did you know that upgrading the RAM invalidated to warrenty?
They were nice machines, in 1984.
Did anyone else see it? It was an Ask Slashdot, on the front page, just before this article.
Last Seen with about 30 comments.. where'd it go?
This is somewhat similar to the softwear engineering methodology known as "Extreme Programming"
One of the main tenents of Extreme Programming is constant refactoring (ie, you see something that could be done better another way, you fix it straight away)
The other main point of extreme programming are: Always do the simplest thing that will work, and have proper, automatic test suites to constantly test your work.
Have a look at The Extreme Programming Web Site to learn more.
I've read your book (online), and I found it very enlightening and useful.
I was wondering to what extent you keep it up to date? Some of the information in it seems to be somewhat dated, and because of that it maybe somewhat misleading.
For instance, while here on Slashdot we may mostly agree with you that Windows NT is a bad platform to host websites on, it does seem that some companies are doing it fairly successfully now, and your book does not seem to reflect that.
Your book seems to say "To build a good website, use Solaris or HP/UX, Oracle, AOLServer, get good people and you'll be okay". While not many people will argue with that statement, do you think you are neglecting other technologies?
Should we read you book more as a "This is how we build websites and it works for us" rather than a "This is how you should build websites" kind of thing?
I also just noticed (just before I submitted this question) that you now have mod_aolserver for Apache. What prompted this being written? Was it requests by clients, or was it contributed by non-ArsDigita employees?
Something weird's going on.. this story seems to be only in "Ask Slashdot", but not on the main page..
Of course, by the time I've posted this it might be fixed.
There was an "Ask Slashdot" on this a couple of days ago.
There are a huge number of FAQs on it. It's pretty simple.
If you are linking in the traditional sense (using a C Library or something), then the answer is yes, the program code must be GPLed
If you are using somthing like CORBA, no one is quite sure... the GPL needs to be cleared up because the definition of linking isn't clear enough.