Right now I have to maintain an unmaintainable web app. Let's put it this way...
- This app was originally written in PHP/FI 2.0 in 1997. There were also some C cgi apps and a few Perl scripts.
- Due to performance problems the entire dynamic site was changed to a statically rendered site, so after changes were made to a page that page was rendered as an HTML file.
- In 2000 it was updated to PHP 4 and the app had a core feature bolted on, essentially confusing the difference between a city and a county. This resulted in a worst DB design I've ever seen. I'm talking about splitting up core pieces of data that need to be together, using ambiguous field names (rid means different things in different tables. Some tables relate to each other on field names that seemingly have nothing in common. Some field names have typos, etc).
- The code was written first by a team of six programmers, then by a smaller team of three other programmers and finally by some weird guy who I was supposed to work with when I got hired, but a few days before I started he decided he didn't like computers anymore and he went into the grow-op business instead. My boss claims that maintaining the horrible code base made him go crazy and I'm inclined to believe that.
- Two records in the same table of the database may look the same in all ways, but they are actually entirely different things. The only way the app knows which one to use where is because that data's unique id is hard-coded into the app.
- I am rewriting our site search engine from scratch because touching the old one is dangerous. Altering small harmless-looking bits of code can actually break unrelated pages, but that breakage isn't noticed until that other page is re-rendered into a new HTML page, so I was finding out about problems weeks after I caused them. Arrrg!
- I have been unable to get the app working on any server I have setup. If the live server goes down we're toast because there is no dev box. The app relies on a horrific web of interconnected scripts, cron jobs, strange directories, and it even uses an older version of itself to perform some mysterious actions. I've got an image of the server's hard drive I can use to recover it from.
I have finally convinced my boss that this thing needs to be rewritten *now*. It's a house of cards with our business resting on top.
It sounds to me like you've had a lot of crappy bosses. I installed Ubuntu with little fanfare. I just told them why it made sense for me: I program for Linux servers. I won't get any desktop support from IT, obviously, but I accepted that risk.
Most bosses don't care what programs you use as long as it doesn't directly affect them negatively. If I started sending spreadsheets to my boss as ODF files and told him he'd have to install OpenOffice, then it'd be a problem. But right now he sends me XLS and I send him XLS back. What does he care if I'm running Windows, Linux or a hacked up Atari 2600? If asked I could show my boss exactly why Linux makes me more productive and I could also show him exactly why our web designer would be less productive in Linux.
Any decent boss will understand that different people require different ways to work. Very few places make their Photoshoppers use Windows because they cater to their needs. They learned on Macs and they want to use Macs, so they do. The day will come where Linux is in the enterprise in the same way. Programmers and sysadmins will have Linux available to them if they want. It won't usually replace Windows for everybody, but it will be there nonetheless.
After installing it an IT guy noticed and my boss got a bit of shit for what I did and I was asked to justify using Linux. I'm a Linux programmer, so that got solved very quickly.
We use DeskNow (http://www.desknow.com/) for email and collaboration so Exchange connectivity was never a problem. Luckily we have a lot of sales reps who don't have a company computer, so at minimum we'd have to have OWA running for them even if we used Exchange. I still don't authenticate with the AD server, but that doesn't really present a problem for me and if it does, I'll figure out how to set that up. Because I'm on Linux I don't even have an AD user, so right now my only problem is accessing the shared drives, although I have never needed to do that. They won't let me dump several GB of server backups there anyway.
I can honestly say that using Linux hasn't caused me any trouble at all. I work with a lot of Excel spreadsheets, but while they're very large (one dataset often is split in several 65000 row files) they aren't very complicated. The one that is complicated works fine in OpenOffice 1.x and 2.0. From Linux it's much easier to manage my Linux servers and test my code. I use Wine to run IE so I can test application web front ends in multiple browsers for the apps that support a web front end.
All in all it's been a smashing success for me. Several people in the office have commented about how much they love my desktop -- how nice it looks and how easy it is to work with different types of files. Even the designers on Macs are impressed. I also got someone else from work to install Ubuntu at home. I just handed him an Ubuntu Live CD and he loved it. After installing the Windows apps like OpenOffice that came with the CD, he took the plunge and couldn't be happier.
MS is only forcing 64-bit CPUs on a few server apps. It'll be a decade before all 32-bit processors will be off the corporate desktops, so almost all software will be compatible for a long while. Additionally, going to 64-bits doesn't change the API, so most of that work will still be relevant.
Fair enough, although all games to date that I've seen do not have good motion blur. I very rarely see it on film and when I do it's not distracting like in games. Perhaps PGR3 has fixed this.
However, when I play a racing game I want to feel like I'm driving a car, not watching one on TV. I think aiming for realism is important, not aiming for TV "realism". Surely there are ways to better simulate high speeds at low framerates than bluring the image.
I can tell you what I don't like about it: it doesn't offer anything new.
Quick, name one thing that the 360 can do gameplay-wise that an Xbox, Gamecube or PS2 can't do. All Microsoft did for the 360 was package up more powerful hardware. I'm sure eventually some game developer will harness all that power into a game that couldn't easily be done on older hardware, but for the most part it'll be the same old games with better graphics.
Personally, I've had a Dreamcast for a few years and it's great. I just bought a used Gamecube and I can't wait to try some of the interesting games such as Super Monkey Ball. I may buy a Revolution if I see developers doing unique things with it, but I won't buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 unless they surprise me a whole lot.
From the Project Gotham Racing 3 review: "PGR3's use of motion blur is similarly effective. Every object in the environment blurs realistically as speeding vehicles tear through the tracks"
I've driven pretty fast. I once drove a Dodge Viper around a race track and got some pretty wicked speed, hitting about 150mph on the back straight. What didn't I see? Motion blur.
I understand that the designers want to give the player a better sense of speed, but real environments don't blur, they simply move by too quickly to see any detail. It's even worse when the reviewers start to declare unrealistic effects as very realistic. It's like in a movie when a car careens over an embankment and explodes. Sure, the explosion looked realistic *if cars actually exploded when they crashed* (even the Pinto didn't explode like that). Same thing here... I'm sure the bluring is very close to what it would actually look like *if environments actually did blur at high speeds*.
On an unrelated note, I loved the special effects in Star Wars Episode III. Those lightsabers looked very realistic.
You'll find nearly any product that requires a license agreement will grant the vendor the right to use your name. Ever installed MS Windows? Microsoft can mention that you're a customer.
Yes, the potential to do evil is there, but all the best web traffic analysis programs operate in a similar way. For one thing, if you're selling advertising on your web site very few advertisers will take your web logs seriously since they're not at all independent and can be faked easily. For another, web logs for a popular web site are difficult to manage. Before switching from Apache's logs to Red Sheriff (works with Javascript like Google Analytics) I had to deal with about 1GB/day of logs. So what happens when I want to build a year over year chart? Hmmm... 730 GB of logs is a bit hard to work with, especially in 2001 with no 500 GB hard drives, so I had to do monthly reports for each year then paste the results into a spreadsheet to build charts. That took me many times longer than if I could have just generated a report from all the logs.
Big brother and all, this is still the best way for a lot of people to manage their web traffic logging. Before selecting a company to work with, read their privacy policy.
"Fundamentally, there is a problem with the way the US is underpricing fuel."
I think the problem is that the EU is dramatically overpricing fuel. This has to hurt your economy. In North America the oil and fuel companies are making many billions of dollars, so there is no underpricing going on. We're still being ripped off, just to a lesser extent than you.
It's possible to build fuel efficient vehicles *and* have low gas prices. Pollution and emission laws are very effective in forcing the auto companies to build low emission vehicles.
The funny thing is that BF II *does* suck. I mean, it's not horrible, but it's kind of like BF 1.5. The original BF kind of sucked because the gameplay was unrefined and you couldn't play as a Jedi. Version II keeps the unrefined gameplay and adds space combat and player Jedis. So it's a fun game for a little while, but there is no lasting power here. The actual game kind of sucks.
DVDs are 480p, so do all DVDs look like crap on your TV, too? I sure wouldn't buy that TV.
I suspect you've enabled progressive scan on your DVD player and it looks great at 480p. Revolution should do the same thing.
The real problem is that most cheap and many expensive HDTVs have weird resolutions that can make HD signals look bad because of stretched pixels or they add black bars to accomodate their non-16:9 pixel resolution.
I think you got it. Even buying a real HDTV set is hard given the current state of labelling everything HDTV even if it doesn't support HD in native resolution and downsamples everything. Tons of EDTVs are labelled HDTV. Many don't have 16:9 screen resolutions so you get stretched pictures or black bars on both 4:3 and 16:9 video.
Screw 'em. I'll get an HDTV when they sort out this crap. I hope most everybody else feels the same way. I'll also buy a Revolution and it'll look great on my 32" Wega.
1. Improved the rendering engine (through Gecko) 2. Better tab behaviour (drag and drop placement, better default behaviour) 3. New faster updates that don't require a reinstall 4. SVG support
And more, but I can't remember every big change from the changelog at the moment. Don't forget that this is a minor release, not a major release. It's mostly refining and improving features from 1.0. You can expect bigger changes in 2.0. With any luck, 2.0 will be out in time to greet IE 7.
Re:That's Not What the Article Said
on
Space Lichens
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· Score: 1
And it's an important distinction because two weeks in space on a rock will get you nowhere.
That's only true if you believe they were protecting their trademark in good faith, then happened to use that name a little while later.
Truth is that MS was ok with Windows Defender for years. They wanted to use the name and so they threatened a trademark lawsuit in order to get it. They should have bought the name from him.
"Except that there are certain systems which are irreducibly complex."
I have yet to hear of a good example put forth by any IDer.
"(ID) allows for minor changes to occur"
ID only claims microevolution is occurs because they cannot possibly deny it. It's something that is easily explained and proven to everybody. Speciation is a lot more difficult to understand and most people don't have access to proper fossil records that show speciation.
I know somebody who believes that the Bible is the infallible word of God. His view is that the Vatican in far too Liberal and he can point out many examples of where the Vatican has turned its back on traditional thinking.
My friend is a hard right-winger and thinks of the Vatican as quite Liberal.
Yes, he believe everyone is either right wing or left wing and that the two don't agree on anything. No, pointing out that the Vatican once rejected Gallileo's proof and now accepts it won't convince him that it's the same with evolution.
You are in agreement with the Vatican and many, perhaps most, scientists, however you have absolutely no clue as to what Intelligent Design is.
ID doesn't describe the origins of life, or anything else for that matter. It simply states that certain biological features are irreducibly complex. (In each of those cases, evolution has proven that they are wrong.)
I think it's perfectly reasonable to believe that evolution is the process by which God decided to create current life. ID states that this is impossible, that life doesn't change dramatically and that some "intelligent being" must have created complex life to begin with. It leave no room at all for evolution.
It's a shame to see KDE become such an outcast because they have done many things better than Gnome.
1. KParts 2. Kate 3. Konqueror (file manager) 4. KHTML (browser) 5. KControl and its new System Settings replacement 6. Integrating Super Karamba into desktop
While Gnome has made some colossal errors in judgement.
1. Removing the menu editor (just back in newest version) 2. Forcing 'spacial' Nautilus as the default before anybody could even try it.
Luckily, Kubuntu is still great:)
I doubt KDE will die quickly, but it does seem the writing is on the wall. If major distros are really standardizing on Gnome I think KDE is too big a project to keep all the developers it needs. I hope KDE 4 + Plasma aren't affected by this move by Novell because it looks like KDE is much closer to an OS X-level desktop than Gnome is.
Anyway, you're right about an encrypted hard drive being secure, but in my entire working life I have not seen a workstation setup this way. I've worked for one of the largest telecom companies in the world, a major pro sports team and now one of the largest publishers in the country. No encrypted hard drives for any IT staff.
Maybe that's bad security practice, which wouldn't be a surprise from the same idiots who can't lock down IE, but it's still general practice around the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now I have to maintain an unmaintainable web app. Let's put it this way...
- This app was originally written in PHP/FI 2.0 in 1997. There were also some C cgi apps and a few Perl scripts.
- Due to performance problems the entire dynamic site was changed to a statically rendered site, so after changes were made to a page that page was rendered as an HTML file.
- In 2000 it was updated to PHP 4 and the app had a core feature bolted on, essentially confusing the difference between a city and a county. This resulted in a worst DB design I've ever seen. I'm talking about splitting up core pieces of data that need to be together, using ambiguous field names (rid means different things in different tables. Some tables relate to each other on field names that seemingly have nothing in common. Some field names have typos, etc).
- The code was written first by a team of six programmers, then by a smaller team of three other programmers and finally by some weird guy who I was supposed to work with when I got hired, but a few days before I started he decided he didn't like computers anymore and he went into the grow-op business instead. My boss claims that maintaining the horrible code base made him go crazy and I'm inclined to believe that.
- Two records in the same table of the database may look the same in all ways, but they are actually entirely different things. The only way the app knows which one to use where is because that data's unique id is hard-coded into the app.
- I am rewriting our site search engine from scratch because touching the old one is dangerous. Altering small harmless-looking bits of code can actually break unrelated pages, but that breakage isn't noticed until that other page is re-rendered into a new HTML page, so I was finding out about problems weeks after I caused them. Arrrg!
- I have been unable to get the app working on any server I have setup. If the live server goes down we're toast because there is no dev box. The app relies on a horrific web of interconnected scripts, cron jobs, strange directories, and it even uses an older version of itself to perform some mysterious actions. I've got an image of the server's hard drive I can use to recover it from.
I have finally convinced my boss that this thing needs to be rewritten *now*. It's a house of cards with our business resting on top.
It sounds to me like you've had a lot of crappy bosses. I installed Ubuntu with little fanfare. I just told them why it made sense for me: I program for Linux servers. I won't get any desktop support from IT, obviously, but I accepted that risk.
Most bosses don't care what programs you use as long as it doesn't directly affect them negatively. If I started sending spreadsheets to my boss as ODF files and told him he'd have to install OpenOffice, then it'd be a problem. But right now he sends me XLS and I send him XLS back. What does he care if I'm running Windows, Linux or a hacked up Atari 2600? If asked I could show my boss exactly why Linux makes me more productive and I could also show him exactly why our web designer would be less productive in Linux.
Any decent boss will understand that different people require different ways to work. Very few places make their Photoshoppers use Windows because they cater to their needs. They learned on Macs and they want to use Macs, so they do. The day will come where Linux is in the enterprise in the same way. Programmers and sysadmins will have Linux available to them if they want. It won't usually replace Windows for everybody, but it will be there nonetheless.
After installing it an IT guy noticed and my boss got a bit of shit for what I did and I was asked to justify using Linux. I'm a Linux programmer, so that got solved very quickly.
We use DeskNow (http://www.desknow.com/) for email and collaboration so Exchange connectivity was never a problem. Luckily we have a lot of sales reps who don't have a company computer, so at minimum we'd have to have OWA running for them even if we used Exchange. I still don't authenticate with the AD server, but that doesn't really present a problem for me and if it does, I'll figure out how to set that up. Because I'm on Linux I don't even have an AD user, so right now my only problem is accessing the shared drives, although I have never needed to do that. They won't let me dump several GB of server backups there anyway.
I can honestly say that using Linux hasn't caused me any trouble at all. I work with a lot of Excel spreadsheets, but while they're very large (one dataset often is split in several 65000 row files) they aren't very complicated. The one that is complicated works fine in OpenOffice 1.x and 2.0. From Linux it's much easier to manage my Linux servers and test my code. I use Wine to run IE so I can test application web front ends in multiple browsers for the apps that support a web front end.
All in all it's been a smashing success for me. Several people in the office have commented about how much they love my desktop -- how nice it looks and how easy it is to work with different types of files. Even the designers on Macs are impressed. I also got someone else from work to install Ubuntu at home. I just handed him an Ubuntu Live CD and he loved it. After installing the Windows apps like OpenOffice that came with the CD, he took the plunge and couldn't be happier.
MS is only forcing 64-bit CPUs on a few server apps. It'll be a decade before all 32-bit processors will be off the corporate desktops, so almost all software will be compatible for a long while. Additionally, going to 64-bits doesn't change the API, so most of that work will still be relevant.
Good call. Lens flare is just as annoying as motion blur. I wonder if lens flare gets motion blurred in PGR3?
And as I replied to someone else, I think game designers should aim for proper realism rather than TV "realism".
Fair enough, although all games to date that I've seen do not have good motion blur. I very rarely see it on film and when I do it's not distracting like in games. Perhaps PGR3 has fixed this.
However, when I play a racing game I want to feel like I'm driving a car, not watching one on TV. I think aiming for realism is important, not aiming for TV "realism". Surely there are ways to better simulate high speeds at low framerates than bluring the image.
I can tell you what I don't like about it: it doesn't offer anything new.
Quick, name one thing that the 360 can do gameplay-wise that an Xbox, Gamecube or PS2 can't do. All Microsoft did for the 360 was package up more powerful hardware. I'm sure eventually some game developer will harness all that power into a game that couldn't easily be done on older hardware, but for the most part it'll be the same old games with better graphics.
Personally, I've had a Dreamcast for a few years and it's great. I just bought a used Gamecube and I can't wait to try some of the interesting games such as Super Monkey Ball. I may buy a Revolution if I see developers doing unique things with it, but I won't buy a PS3 or Xbox 360 unless they surprise me a whole lot.
From the Project Gotham Racing 3 review: "PGR3's use of motion blur is similarly effective. Every object in the environment blurs realistically as speeding vehicles tear through the tracks"
I've driven pretty fast. I once drove a Dodge Viper around a race track and got some pretty wicked speed, hitting about 150mph on the back straight. What didn't I see? Motion blur.
I understand that the designers want to give the player a better sense of speed, but real environments don't blur, they simply move by too quickly to see any detail. It's even worse when the reviewers start to declare unrealistic effects as very realistic. It's like in a movie when a car careens over an embankment and explodes. Sure, the explosion looked realistic *if cars actually exploded when they crashed* (even the Pinto didn't explode like that). Same thing here... I'm sure the bluring is very close to what it would actually look like *if environments actually did blur at high speeds*.
On an unrelated note, I loved the special effects in Star Wars Episode III. Those lightsabers looked very realistic.
You'll find nearly any product that requires a license agreement will grant the vendor the right to use your name. Ever installed MS Windows? Microsoft can mention that you're a customer.
Yes, the potential to do evil is there, but all the best web traffic analysis programs operate in a similar way. For one thing, if you're selling advertising on your web site very few advertisers will take your web logs seriously since they're not at all independent and can be faked easily. For another, web logs for a popular web site are difficult to manage. Before switching from Apache's logs to Red Sheriff (works with Javascript like Google Analytics) I had to deal with about 1GB/day of logs. So what happens when I want to build a year over year chart? Hmmm... 730 GB of logs is a bit hard to work with, especially in 2001 with no 500 GB hard drives, so I had to do monthly reports for each year then paste the results into a spreadsheet to build charts. That took me many times longer than if I could have just generated a report from all the logs.
Big brother and all, this is still the best way for a lot of people to manage their web traffic logging. Before selecting a company to work with, read their privacy policy.
"Fundamentally, there is a problem with the way the US is underpricing fuel."
I think the problem is that the EU is dramatically overpricing fuel. This has to hurt your economy. In North America the oil and fuel companies are making many billions of dollars, so there is no underpricing going on. We're still being ripped off, just to a lesser extent than you.
It's possible to build fuel efficient vehicles *and* have low gas prices. Pollution and emission laws are very effective in forcing the auto companies to build low emission vehicles.
The funny thing is that BF II *does* suck. I mean, it's not horrible, but it's kind of like BF 1.5. The original BF kind of sucked because the gameplay was unrefined and you couldn't play as a Jedi. Version II keeps the unrefined gameplay and adds space combat and player Jedis. So it's a fun game for a little while, but there is no lasting power here. The actual game kind of sucks.
"unless mine get to doing some chores, theyll have an etch-a-sketch."
Can it do 720p? What framerate can your kids draw at?
DVDs are 480p, so do all DVDs look like crap on your TV, too? I sure wouldn't buy that TV.
I suspect you've enabled progressive scan on your DVD player and it looks great at 480p. Revolution should do the same thing.
The real problem is that most cheap and many expensive HDTVs have weird resolutions that can make HD signals look bad because of stretched pixels or they add black bars to accomodate their non-16:9 pixel resolution.
I think you got it. Even buying a real HDTV set is hard given the current state of labelling everything HDTV even if it doesn't support HD in native resolution and downsamples everything. Tons of EDTVs are labelled HDTV. Many don't have 16:9 screen resolutions so you get stretched pictures or black bars on both 4:3 and 16:9 video.
Screw 'em. I'll get an HDTV when they sort out this crap. I hope most everybody else feels the same way. I'll also buy a Revolution and it'll look great on my 32" Wega.
The United States' socialized road and highways seem to work ok. Socialism built a pretty good interstate highway infrastructure.
What are they doing? With 1.5...
1. Improved the rendering engine (through Gecko)
2. Better tab behaviour (drag and drop placement, better default behaviour)
3. New faster updates that don't require a reinstall
4. SVG support
And more, but I can't remember every big change from the changelog at the moment. Don't forget that this is a minor release, not a major release. It's mostly refining and improving features from 1.0. You can expect bigger changes in 2.0. With any luck, 2.0 will be out in time to greet IE 7.
And it's an important distinction because two weeks in space on a rock will get you nowhere.
You beat me to it, but I was also going to ask if the Sony Music rootkit would allow me to run game cheats.
"Microsoft didn't "deceive" anybody."
That's only true if you believe they were protecting their trademark in good faith, then happened to use that name a little while later.
Truth is that MS was ok with Windows Defender for years. They wanted to use the name and so they threatened a trademark lawsuit in order to get it. They should have bought the name from him.
"Except that there are certain systems which are irreducibly complex."
I have yet to hear of a good example put forth by any IDer.
"(ID) allows for minor changes to occur"
ID only claims microevolution is occurs because they cannot possibly deny it. It's something that is easily explained and proven to everybody. Speciation is a lot more difficult to understand and most people don't have access to proper fossil records that show speciation.
I know somebody who believes that the Bible is the infallible word of God. His view is that the Vatican in far too Liberal and he can point out many examples of where the Vatican has turned its back on traditional thinking.
My friend is a hard right-winger and thinks of the Vatican as quite Liberal.
Yes, he believe everyone is either right wing or left wing and that the two don't agree on anything. No, pointing out that the Vatican once rejected Gallileo's proof and now accepts it won't convince him that it's the same with evolution.
You are in agreement with the Vatican and many, perhaps most, scientists, however you have absolutely no clue as to what Intelligent Design is.
ID doesn't describe the origins of life, or anything else for that matter. It simply states that certain biological features are irreducibly complex. (In each of those cases, evolution has proven that they are wrong.)
I think it's perfectly reasonable to believe that evolution is the process by which God decided to create current life. ID states that this is impossible, that life doesn't change dramatically and that some "intelligent being" must have created complex life to begin with. It leave no room at all for evolution.
It's a shame to see KDE become such an outcast because they have done many things better than Gnome.
:)
1. KParts
2. Kate
3. Konqueror (file manager)
4. KHTML (browser)
5. KControl and its new System Settings replacement
6. Integrating Super Karamba into desktop
While Gnome has made some colossal errors in judgement.
1. Removing the menu editor (just back in newest version)
2. Forcing 'spacial' Nautilus as the default before anybody could even try it.
Luckily, Kubuntu is still great
I doubt KDE will die quickly, but it does seem the writing is on the wall. If major distros are really standardizing on Gnome I think KDE is too big a project to keep all the developers it needs. I hope KDE 4 + Plasma aren't affected by this move by Novell because it looks like KDE is much closer to an OS X-level desktop than Gnome is.
Case locks... LOL :)
Anyway, you're right about an encrypted hard drive being secure, but in my entire working life I have not seen a workstation setup this way. I've worked for one of the largest telecom companies in the world, a major pro sports team and now one of the largest publishers in the country. No encrypted hard drives for any IT staff.
Maybe that's bad security practice, which wouldn't be a surprise from the same idiots who can't lock down IE, but it's still general practice around the world.