> Slashdotters should think programming languages. Imagine a world where there were no programming languages except visual basic
That's a poor analogy. How about a world in which there is only one CPU architecture (real like x86 or virtual like the JVM), meaning that any program can run on any system. Sure, you lost some of the specific benefits of particular architectures, but gain in increased compatability.
You've got that right - I work on a commercial product (Virtualmin) that runs on a variety of Linux distros, and the amount of work required to properly support them all is massive. I haven't done much Windows development, but I imagine that in that market you can tell customers "you must have XP SP2 or later", and still manage to cover 80% or more of the market.
Whereas when doing Linux development, targeting just Ubuntu users would miss the other 80% who use CentOS, Fedora, Redhat Enterprise, SuSE, etc. If there were some standards that distro developers actually followed to ensure application compatability then this wouldn't be an issue..
Sure, they are binary compatible.. which means that your compiled 'hello world' program is pretty much guaranteed to work across distros.
But what about programs that actually do anything significant, like interact with the user through a KDE or Gnome or Motif or Java GUI? They will have a bunch of library dependencies that may or may not be available on a given distro. How many Linux apps are distributed in non-staticly-linked binary format for a range of distros? Very few, and those that are probably had to be compiled on Redhat 7 to ensure maximum library compatabity.
Another pain point for developers introduced by the variety of distros is packaging - you have RPM, Dpkg, Emerge, whatever it is that Slackware uses, and probably a few more. Worse still, a single RPM may not even be suitable for all RPM-based distros, as all have different locations for documentation, icon files, application shortcuts and system config files.
All these spurious differences really piss me off, as I work on the Webmin web-based sys admin tool which runs on pretty much every major Linux distro, plus a bunch of other operating systems like Solaris and *BSD. And every distro has a different location for the httpd.conf file, firewall config, network config, squid.conf.. which means a huge amount of effort on my part to find and keep track of those files.
Oh, and Solaris has actually been pretty stable across versions in this regard, at least since they made the jump from SunOS (BSD-based) to Solaris (SysV) years ago. From talking to people at Sun, they actually make it a priority to preserve the locations of config files and programs, and the format of output and input to admin commands. Redhat and other distro maintainers could do well to learn from this.
From a technical point of view, this isn't usually possible. On most servers, web applications don't have the permissions to update themselves - the PHP scripts are run via mod_php as the 'httpd' or 'apache' user, while the scripts themselves are owned by whatever Unix account was setup to own and manage the domain. Sure, some hosting services run PHP scripts as the Unix user who owns the domain, but they seem to be in the minority.
The updates are better done by the hosting control panel, assuming that it is one that supports automatic script installation like Virtualmin or Fantastico.
Yeah, as the developer I'd be the first to admit that Webmin's UI is still too complex - however, there is a tradeoff between functionality and simplicity, and I've generally gone towards functionality. Webmin isn't too useful if you are not familiar with concepts like zones and DNS records.. if you want something simpler, one of the hosted DNS services (network solutions, godaddy, etc..) would be better.
If you are looking for a tool to configure Apache, Webmin would be the way to go. One of its modules provides a relatively easy to use UI for editing httpd.conf and other Apache config files.
Plus there are other modules for servers like Sendmail, Postfix, SSHd, BIND, Squid and more..
Re:of course it was stolen
on
Who won?
·
· Score: 1
If you read that wikipedia article, it clearly says that this problem was detected before the -16000 votes were included in the final count.
Thirdly, I'll gladly take an interface that isn't slow, obnoxiously ugly and difficult to use. Webmin, CPanel, Ensim, they are all deep, complex, and ugly. Webmin is the worst.
Webmin isn't really in the same class as cPanel and Plesk, as it is more of a general system administration tool than a web-hosting control panel. A better comparison is Webmin with the Virtualmin plugin, which is available in free and commercial versions.
Why would the US government want to repress electric cars when the country imports oil? Why would auto makers want to promote oil dependence when they make no money from selling oil?
>If you want to kill off an industry, the best way to do so is to regulate it the way the medical > industry and the aviation industry are regulated.
What makes you think that this isn't exactly what the environmental groups pushing for regulation want? Sadly, many in the movement are little more than a bunch of anti-technology luddites..
I used to carry a laptop with a copy of all my development tools and code base around so that I could work wherever I was, but these days pretty much every hotel or relative's house that I stay at when away from home has high-speed internet access of some kind. So I can do all my development by SSHing into my home server, editing my files with vi, and testing my code via the web. That is exactly what I'd do if I was at home anyway..
> If we are to ban everything that is "possibly" dangerous, then we need to ban everything. Literally.
Its called the "precautionary priciple" - anything that cannot be proven safe is a candidate for banning. The scary part is that this philosophy is not just isolated to one crazy university administration - it is becoming official goverment policy is most western countries.
I'd hardly call Australia's immigration laws 'draconian'.. last year, the net intake was around 130,000, which is quite a few for a country of 20 million. And those with IT qualifications are pretty much guaranteed to get it, thanks to IT being on the list of in-demand qualifications.
How many seconds would it take to write a program that removes such an ID? Assuming it isn't hidden by some kind of digital watermarking process of course.. which is hardly foolproof anyway.
Entire books have been written on the growing importance of design in an era where the actual functionality of products has been pretty much commoditized..
Now, if you simply take the hose and, instead of dunking it in the garbage can, just attach it to a faucet. Turn on the cold water and you have an infinite supply of cool water for your cooling.
You've just described the standard commercially-available evaporative cooling system I have on my house:-) Its not as powerful as air-conditioning, but cheaper to install and run.
Interestingly, I went to university with the guy who developed that Postmodernism generator back in 1995! So this random scientific paper generator is 10 years out of date.
Even if the US wasn't involved in the middle east at all, oil would continue to flow. After all, what else are the Iraqis, Saudis and others going to do with their oil except sell it?
In fact, the invasion of Iraq and sanctions have actually *increased* the price by reducing supply. War is really bad way of securing access to resources - it is far cheaper to simply purchase them in the free market.
Perhaps that 'efficiency' comes from potentially low-paid workers in France and Germany not being able to get jobs at all, due to insane minimum wage laws? I'm sure the average US wage and thus productivity per worker could be increased if the lowest 10% of workers by salary were fired.. but would this be a good thing?
Interactive services like Compuserve are not comparable.. Teletext is read-only, there is no support for email, chat, newsgroups, downloading data or any of the other services a BBS can offer.
Doesn't count, because as every conspiracy theorist worth his tin-foil hat knows, the Port of Chicago blast was a nuclear explosion set off by the navy to test the effect of radiation of people:-)
Isn't this a bit of a self-fulfulling conspiracy theory? "Of course there's no evidence the martians shot JFK - they've covered it up. That only proves how powerful the conspiracy is!"
Slashdot Mirror
> Slashdotters should think programming languages. Imagine a world where there were no programming languages except visual basic
That's a poor analogy. How about a world in which there is only one CPU architecture (real like x86 or virtual like the JVM), meaning that any program can run on any system. Sure, you lost some of the specific benefits of particular architectures, but gain in increased compatability.
You've got that right - I work on a commercial product (Virtualmin) that runs on a variety of Linux distros, and the amount of work required to properly support them all is massive. I haven't done much Windows development, but I imagine that in that market you can tell customers "you must have XP SP2 or later", and still manage to cover 80% or more of the market.
Whereas when doing Linux development, targeting just Ubuntu users would miss the other 80% who use CentOS, Fedora, Redhat Enterprise, SuSE, etc. If there were some standards that distro developers actually followed to ensure application compatability then this wouldn't be an issue ..
Sure, they are binary compatible .. which means that your compiled 'hello world' program is pretty much guaranteed to work across distros.
.. which means a huge amount of effort on my part to find and keep track of those files.
But what about programs that actually do anything significant, like interact with the user through a KDE or Gnome or Motif or Java GUI? They will have a bunch of library dependencies that may or may not be available on a given distro. How many Linux apps are distributed in non-staticly-linked binary format for a range of distros? Very few, and those that are probably had to be compiled on Redhat 7 to ensure maximum library compatabity.
Another pain point for developers introduced by the variety of distros is packaging - you have RPM, Dpkg, Emerge, whatever it is that Slackware uses, and probably a few more. Worse still, a single RPM may not even be suitable for all RPM-based distros, as all have different locations for documentation, icon files, application shortcuts and system config files.
All these spurious differences really piss me off, as I work on the Webmin web-based sys admin tool which runs on pretty much every major Linux distro, plus a bunch of other operating systems like Solaris and *BSD. And every distro has a different location for the httpd.conf file, firewall config, network config, squid.conf
Oh, and Solaris has actually been pretty stable across versions in this regard, at least since they made the jump from SunOS (BSD-based) to Solaris (SysV) years ago. From talking to people at Sun, they actually make it a priority to preserve the locations of config files and programs, and the format of output and input to admin commands. Redhat and other distro maintainers could do well to learn from this.
The updates are better done by the hosting control panel, assuming that it is one that supports automatic script installation like Virtualmin or Fantastico.
Yeah, as the developer I'd be the first to admit that Webmin's UI is still too complex - however, there is a tradeoff between functionality and simplicity, and I've generally gone towards functionality. Webmin isn't too useful if you are not familiar with concepts like zones and DNS records.. if you want something simpler, one of the hosted DNS services (network solutions, godaddy, etc..) would be better.
If you are looking for a tool to configure Apache, Webmin would be the way to go. One of its modules provides a relatively easy to use UI for editing httpd.conf and other Apache config files.
Plus there are other modules for servers like Sendmail, Postfix, SSHd, BIND, Squid and more..
If you read that wikipedia article, it clearly says that this problem was detected before the -16000 votes were included in the final count.
So what's going to happen to gun control laws in a future where everyone can print themselves an AK-47 at home? :-)
Webmin isn't really in the same class as cPanel and Plesk, as it is more of a general system administration tool than a web-hosting control panel. A better comparison is Webmin with the Virtualmin plugin, which is available in free and commercial versions.
Why would the US government want to repress electric cars when the country imports oil?
Why would auto makers want to promote oil dependence when they make no money from selling oil?
>If you want to kill off an industry, the best way to do so is to regulate it the way the medical
> industry and the aviation industry are regulated.
What makes you think that this isn't exactly what the environmental groups pushing for regulation
want? Sadly, many in the movement are little more than a bunch of anti-technology luddites..
I used to carry a laptop with a copy of all my development tools and code base around so that I could work wherever I was, but these days pretty much every hotel or relative's house that I stay at when away from home has high-speed internet access of some kind. So I can do all my development by SSHing into my home server, editing my files with vi, and testing my code via the web. That is exactly what I'd do if I was at home anyway ..
> If we are to ban everything that is "possibly" dangerous, then we need to ban everything. Literally.
Its called the "precautionary priciple" - anything that cannot be proven safe is a candidate for banning. The scary part is that this philosophy is not just isolated to one crazy university administration - it is becoming official goverment policy is most western countries.
I'd hardly call Australia's immigration laws 'draconian' .. last year, the net intake was around 130,000, which is quite a few for a country of 20 million. And those with IT qualifications are pretty much guaranteed to get it, thanks to IT being on the list of in-demand qualifications.
How many seconds would it take to write a program that removes such an ID? Assuming it isn't hidden by some kind of digital watermarking process of course .. which is hardly foolproof anyway.
Entire books have been written on the growing importance of design in an era where the actual functionality of products has been pretty much commoditized ..
Didn't you notice that penguin in Toy Story 2?
Now, if you simply take the hose and, instead of dunking it in the garbage can, just attach it to a faucet. Turn on the cold water and you have an infinite supply of cool water for your cooling.
:-) Its not as powerful as air-conditioning, but cheaper to install and run.
You've just described the standard commercially-available evaporative cooling system I have on my house
Interestingly, I went to university with the guy who developed that Postmodernism generator back in 1995! So this random scientific paper generator is 10 years out of date.
Even if the US wasn't involved in the middle east at all, oil would continue to flow. After all, what else are the Iraqis, Saudis and others going to do with their oil except sell it?
In fact, the invasion of Iraq and sanctions have actually *increased* the price by reducing supply. War is really bad way of securing access to resources - it is far cheaper to simply purchase them in the free market.
Perhaps that 'efficiency' comes from potentially low-paid workers in France and Germany not being able to get jobs at all, due to insane minimum wage laws? I'm sure the average US wage and thus productivity per worker could be increased if the lowest 10% of workers by salary were fired .. but would this be a good thing?
Sounds to me like the severity of civil liberty violations have actually been reducing over time!
Interactive services like Compuserve are not comparable .. Teletext is read-only, there is no support for email, chat, newsgroups, downloading data or any of the other services a BBS can offer.
Doesn't count, because as every conspiracy theorist worth his tin-foil hat knows, the Port of Chicago blast was a nuclear explosion set off by the navy to test the effect of radiation of people :-)
Isn't this a bit of a self-fulfulling conspiracy theory?
"Of course there's no evidence the martians shot JFK - they've covered it up. That only proves how powerful the conspiracy is!"