PHP started as a templating engine built on Perl. It took on some of the stranger and some of the nicer habits of Perl and eventually developed into the main server-side-included language for web applications with it's own distinct charater. I find myself using PHP for more and more projects and tasks (cli scripting included) and keep wondering if PHP is a dead end or if PHP is basically a natural progesssion into the web-aera and has become so popular for mostly the right reasons.
Since you are a member of the MySQL Core team (the database pratically married to PHP) and a Perl Guru (PHPs anchestor) I'd like to know what you think of PHP and it's breathtaking success as the 'web-generations basic' and the road it's come along since PHP 3. Do you think that the nonchalance with which PHP treats programming newcomers, the one or other strange web programming habit it allows/fosters and the large set of default web-centric functions is a fair trade for the downsides PHP is said to have? Or do you think PHP should go the way of the dodo in favour of Perl or other languages?
>> Maybe somewhere in the Swiss Alps? >As being German: Definitely yes. Island may be an other option to consider >If the current politics remain, Germany is going to be a police and >surveillance state in near future...
Living in Germany you should know better than that.
Don't worry. In two months from now someone will the surveilance will cost money and jobs and eventually eliminate 15% of the positions for human investigators at the federal german BKA, thus costing more jobs. An uproar will shake the nation. Some guy at some obscure bureau of the Interior Ministry will also notice that this law makes their recent pet project, the German Federal Trojan (TM) officialy 65% superfluos. Another big no-no. Some other intellectual will publically notice that all info about all Germans is either available at StudiVZ (Germanys Facebook/MySpace), Amazon.de Marketplace or Ebay Germany anyway - which is allready completely scanned and archived (backups included) by the German IRS - and we know everything worth knowing about everybody allready. 10-15 different factions and public bodies of interest groups will have allready filed 20 complaints to the Federal Constitutional Court and the country will be plaqued by a lengthy debate that will have Secretary of the Interior Schäuble eventually drive his wheelchair off a cliff in frustration. Just before the current coalition of two big parties ends it's legislature there will be a watered down full-compromise version of the law with 8500 exception rules and modifications delivered on 2000+ pages in three big-ass Leitz file-covers, German style. Two months after the federal vote and three months into the new law someone in the EU Gouverment Headquarters will notice that this law breaks somewhere between 23 and 65 terms of union contracts, the British will wine that the Germans are now also attempting to take over the EU lead in surveilance, directly competing the UKs last big resort of excellence. Eventually the then new German gouverment will be bitch-slapped into revising its 10kg online surveilance law into a new draft as not to be fined by Brussels for a kazillion Euros.
Bottom line: No need to worry yet. Even by the most optimistic projections I wouldn't expect this law to gain any tracktion before 2015.
It's only since about 25 years that German boardgames have come to be the reference of quality they are. Before that it was just Checkers, Halma and Mikado plus some flashy stuff from Milton Bradley and Parker that came across the pond.
The German game publisher Ravensburger was iirc the first to regularly put a little more time and quality into their boardgames. Their first steps were sort of academic, one of the first German Boardgames of the year ("Spiel des Jahres") being 'Sagaland' ('Enchanted Forest'), a quite simple, non-innovative variant of Memory+Ludo but with a distinct quality of the artwork and game-parts. A year later came 'Scotland Yard', also from Ravensburger. It more or less went uphill from there.
The Game Fair in Essen is a very good place to go if you are a gamer. I live 20km away and while I haven't been there in the last few years a friend of mine always goes there all four days and stays at my place. He always comes back with a stack of prime-quality boardgames one better than the next. It's also nice to see how, after all these years, the Pen&Paper RPG scene is still fairly alive and kicking in Germany. DSA is one of the best RPGs available, quality-wise. It the only RPG I know of in which the quality of official maps rivals that of Harnworld.
I've *never* used whois for probing novel domain-names for this exact reason. I just use the URL and see if it hits. If it and it's adjacent ones on other tlds of interest don't hit and I want it, I order it.
I'm sitting here in my mid-30s, webdeving against abysmal insignificance since 2000 and along comes some highschool punk and cashes 250 MILLLION DOLLARS for a website totalling a nominal 15 billion in worth. Un-f*cking-believable.
Karma can be tough.
Goes to show a main business rule: Not what *you* think is a cool interweb app is a cool interweb app. If you can think the concept 'cool interweb app' you are most likely more intelligent than 99% of the poplulation and what you think matters zilch against any possible demografic. What your *customers* think, on the other hand, is *all* that matters in business. Be they 250 Quadzillion Facebook users or a board of half-a-dozen... *GASP!*... *SOB*.... MS Execs with truckloads of cash to burn.
I'm sorry, I'm probably sounding completely lame to those more firm in cryptography, but I have to ask:
What would it take to attack the 40 byte key? Imagine a coordinated effort by the biggest 500 gouverment computing setups around the world. All the blue genes and whatnot pitching in. The Japanese sure have the one or other state-of-the-art mainframe supercomputer, and CERN, ESA, Nasa and few German weather services have a few aswell. There is tons of horsepower laying around idle at agencies, bureaus and the occasional school or corporation. If they all pitch in in a coordinated brute force attack *and* have Seti@Home do a few hours too it should be possible, no? Especially if one takes into account that at least the NSA has mathmatical functions that do some of the dirty work and speed up the process a little. They wouldn't even have to publish them.
Wait, let's just check:
255 to the power of 40 is rougly 1.8 times 10 to the power of 96 (Gulp!). Thats nearly Gogol. (10^100, what Google initially was supposed to be called, the guy registering the domain mixed up the letters...) Whatever. On it goes: For the sake of ease I'll roughly estimate that after the overhead has been dealt with, half of the top 500 (or a simular setup) will be doing optimized attacks on an average of 50 billion tries per second. An average state-of-the-art mid-range server has aprox. 20 GigaFLOPS, so I think that's fairly realistic for a large mainframe doing a multi-step operation. 250 * 50 000 000 000 = 1.25*10^13 tries per second.
*60*60*24 makes 1.08*10^18 per day. [Sidenote: This may be way off wack allready and total bollocks but it's fun actually]
*7*52*5 makes 1.96*10^21. Oh, gee. This doesn't look to good. Where at it for 5 years and have only covered less than the fourth root of our total amount of keys. Even if we had 10 times the power it would make up only 1 percent of the keypace. Sheesh. We'll probably be cheaper off in handing out Linux PCs to everyone on the planet.
It's no use. I gotta start working on my next project: Finding an explicit function for prime numbers. Hehehe. I could use the Million from the Fields Medal too.:-)
Bottom line: My question/assumption was lame. But at least I found out myself.:-)
There are some very interesting replies here. Two I'd like to repeat because I find them particulary true:
1.) Don't be intimidated. 2.) Stay curious. Find ways to get curious about certain fields of math.
These are from different posts, but I think they go good together.
The truth is, math is a mess. It's a historically grown mumbo-jumbo of countless variations in notation. The problem is that with programming languages - no matter how crazy they may be - they allways come with a reference manual to explain their syntax. In fact, that is the main element by which we judge the viability of a PL. With math on the other hand academia kind of expects us to understand what the Professor is writing on the blackboard without even addressing the issue of a solid reference in which I can look up the meaning of the sum-symbol or what a limes means and how it looks like. It's like music-notation. Somewhere back in the day - often a few hundred years ago - someone came up with a certain notation and since then that's the rule of thumb by which everybody sticks to sorta-kinda 50% of the time. If he feels like it. These notations are mostly literally bolted on to terms and expressions in the most chaotic and hideous way one can imagine. It's like trying to understand a Perl obfuscation contest without the manual. This is IMHO the single biggest problem in grasping math. Especially for Computer Geeks who are used to strict syntax constraints.
I' currently studying the first semester of BS-CompSci and am glad for having finished my German GED just this summer, with all the accelerated math (barely made it with a D+ due to the time-constrained tests) still in my head. I can just about keep up with the lectures. We allready have quite a few students bickering about the lack of a symbol and notation reference.
Bottom line: Math is a mess. It is a non-trivial science and takes work to understand, but it's a mess none-the-less. If one keeps that in mind without using it as a cheap excuse not to fully work out and understand the details then learning math is much less frustrating. That's how I feel about it anyway.
Would you have sex with a robot if it were nearly lifelike? And wouldn't it just boil down to "rubberdoll + fantasy" or would there be interesting dialogs involved when lying beside each other afterwards in the dark.... Imagine a romantic walk in the park at night with a Sexaroid (the imho appropriate term for it from "Ghost in the Shell 2")? It boils down to the question: How lifelike would it have to be to engage an intimacy with a machine if that is an option?
Given it's stuck at 256MB RAM - which is sad. It's got a few other downsides like probably some bottleneck somewhere beween IO and the CPU. But it only draws 5 Watts and needs no active cooling which is really cool. Considering that this is a small company and they manage to offer their micropc for such a low price it is a really interesting device. 5 Watts... my Eco-Bulb in my desklamp uses 7. Quite awesome actually.
The equivalent of an Asus EEE running DR-DOS, a pimped GEOS, WordPro, Lotus 123, PINE and some ancient version of Corel Draw will do 90% of your standard desktop work at a speed one hasn't even dreamed of. It's because nowadays we run upwards of 5-7 extreme performance hogs at a time on regular PCs today without even thinking twice about it. Decoding MP3s, millions of desktop colors, workplace shells chewing so much RAM and CPU it's insane, running huge apps on top of Java, Mozilla/XUL,.Net or toolkits of simular performance impact, with the odd webserver, database and somewhere around three net-applets (Mail, PIM, Newsreader, Browser) idling in the background. The ease at which we switch around between 10-20 pratically redundant application stacks running at a time is payed for by throwing huge amounts of computing power at them. Optimze that even slightly and you'll have a huge impact on what a work enviroment needs.
It's just that today we expect a comp to idle an active mp3 player while running Firefox showing a Flash Video in 600x300 at 25fps. With Eclipse and OpenOffice open in the background. All powered by 32bit Aqua or an MS rippoff.... There really is no need to do that, but we like it that way. Thus anything slower than 800Mhz often is out of discussion.
I have to second the parent. I've programmed commercially funded GPL E-Learning Systems and built a few small business support systems entirely from OSS components. $5000 dollars is an absolute minimum to get an ERP or CRM system set up, configured and extended in a usable manner. It won't be any other with even the most frictionless of POS setups.
If you have somebody competent you can trust then you can kickstart the first components of someone who wants to build a small POS system to start his own POS software business (maybe a student or so). But that's an extra load on top of your job of building up your own business so I'd be triple carefull before attempting that.
I too strongly recommend you do some research on shrinkwrap POS systems and then ask a reputable local OSS savy freelance programmer / SMB IT consultant how he would automate your business and what it takes to implement some glue-scripts for automation and data-migration to bringe the gaps between bill-printing, the ledger and whatever other shareware you piecemeal your first IT enviroment together with. The programmer and the job(s) he needs to do shouldn't initially cost more than $2000 in total and deliver measurable speed up of your IT pipeline. A good programmer with experience and consulting skills will - in the first round - speed up a mom'n'pop shop business by up to ten to twenty weekhours and bridge the worst gaps in IT on a relativly small budget. If you go that way, you can also see if your IT specialist is for real or just a wannabe. And you won't risk to much either.
If your business grows he'll know enough of yours to extend IT accordingly and you'll both know what problems to look out for. On the second or third iteration of your business relationship you can start thinking about funding an OSS project with your favourite programmer as a funded project-lead. All else is too early.
Just a free advice from an E-Lancer and OSS Consultant.
While Randis debunkings, undermined by his 1000000$ Award, can be usefull for seperating phantasms from truths, I find him to be somewhat of a jerk after reading and watching his stuff. He quite frequently makes unfounded hearsay claims on subjects he obviously knows squat about and presents them in such a way as if they where scientifically proven fact. Even though he often has nothing more than anecdotal evidence he presents his position as more scientifically noteworthy than that of his opponents.
I do think that his work as a critic is invaluable as it forces honest people that have fallen for flim-flam to get their head straight. However his methods are by far much to unscientific to give true further insights into the subjects he talks about. Yet it appears that his intention is to cause more (false) negatives than his methods are capable of giving.
Even his video-debunkings of such obvious trickery as the Uri Geller performances (credit to Randi: obvious trickery *after* you've seen Randis debunkings) contains factually false hearsay intended to sway peoples opinions in favour of materialisim. While being sceptical of anything possibly metaphysical is a must, to claim Randis methods, findings and results are scientific is silly. I find myself having difficulties taking him for granted in the very same way I have with Audiophiles.
The emphasis with which he and his followers claim his methods are scientific add more to the negative impression.
Bottom line: In my opionion he gets to much uncritical attention from the geek crowd.
Blenders UI is fine. I've been using it since 1.8 and the fact that it appears like a 3D version of Emacs is because a professional grade 3D programm is loaded with features. 3DSMax, Houdini and whatnot have a simular learning curve when it comes to the UI. Softimages UI sux big time - allways has - but it has top grade NLA tools. That's why professionals bite the bullet and learn how to use it. In the end it enhances their workflow greatly. Same with Blender.
3D kits are *complicated* and so are their UIs. Get over it. The glitches Blender has in it's UI aren't nearly as bad as those of 3DSMax.... The only one I can think of right now is that scrolling in the button viewport pushed tabs out of view even if there's enough space for all to be shown.... Not really a bug to get your pants wet about.
On the other hand, Blenders Workspace management is top of the line, unmatched by any other tool I know. And it's the only 3D package out there with a fully OpenGL accelerated UI. Watch Houdini or LW slowpocke into ready-to-use-mode to see what I mean.
That Blenders learning curve is steep has to do with its speed of developement and a lack of consistent documentation. A circumstance that is rapidly changing for the better right now.
Bottom line: If you want to learn a 3D tool - ANY 3D tool - expect to burn 6 months of time and up to 200$ on generic and special documentation while doing it. Blender is no exeption to that. If you think Softimage or Maya is easyer to use just because it costs north of 3000$, you're smoking crack.
CakePHP and Symfony are the two 400 pound Gorillas in the PHP FW Arena. Zend Framework is being pushed big time by Zend and a huge wave of hype they managed to build within the last 10 weeks or so but I advise everyone not to fall for the hype until it's riped a bit. It's not nearly as mature or as well tested as Symfony or Cake and could use another year or two on the market before it has proven itself.
Mashups target dynamic web-readiness and are often used to exploit visionary ROI in order to syndicate front-end systems. In order to exploit ubiquitous bandwidth Mashups can also be utilzed to unleash efficient e-business and envisioneer intuitive applications.
Hope that helps.
... (What really scares me that most of the above actually makes a strange sort of sense)...
[Disclaimer: Large portions of this post where generated using the official Web Economy Bullshit Generator in order to aggregate web-enabled networks.... God, I just *love* this tool... ]
Yahoo Pipes does this much better AFAICT. And it's been around for almost a year now. AND it's a good place to look if you can't quite pin the meaning of this new buzzword called "Mashup". (I'll explain it in a different post)
Rails did not invent MVC, nor did they invent scaffolding or any of the other stuff. They didn't even make it popular. Very many people get these facts wrong. The only thing Ruby On Rails did as a first was to apply professional marketing strategies when trying to make an open source web application framework popular. They were the first to build a project website that was appealing to the eye more than anything else and they heavyly pushed the concept of the screencast, right when broadband was becoming commonplace. I'm shure almost everybody has watched that famous 'a blog in 15 minutes' screencast. This screencast alone made Rails (and the editor presented in it, Textmate) extremely popular. Technology wise there are many frameworks and webkits that are far more mature and far more sophisticated than Rails and have been around for 6 years and more.
The big problem with a very fair creative licence such as the CC is that it can give those who apply it to their works a false sense of security. Just because the CCL is fair and is meant to be applied and used by fair people it doesn't mean it can't be exploited by *ssholes or people who don't care about common decency. If I give away my Photoportrait under the CCL and it appears in tomorrows newspaper in an advertisement for a Nazi-Party, Nuclear Energy or the new P2000X Puppymulcher then there's nothing I can do about it. Even if the advert is CCLd itself. I'd say the girl is out of luck and learned her lesson. If the picture was used in a decent add, then she'd be best off if she'd support it. Then no one can use it in a different context. People need to be aware of this sort of thing in the internet age.
Here's a simular problem: My Name appears all around Google and Google groups, because some dickhead thought it would be a smart idea to put out all Fidoechos of the last decade (the Fidonet required real id and real names) bearing the name of each posts author. They didn't get my permission, not that of most other Fidonetters, I presume, but it's still there in the archives. Thus when someone searches my realatively rare name, he get's quite a few hits for ancient posts, including some call's for help on Linux from 8 years ago. Not a good thing if you're a Linux expert now and what to sell yourself as one.
Being paranoid about what you put where on the web, about yourself and under what terms, is a good thing. Nobody's gonna die if he politely has to ask for your permission to use your creative works.
Lot's of Blahblah, the only thing downloadable is a zip of various versions of the companys icons, no technocal details and registration for the alpha version gives no details but requires one to fill out aprox. 50 fields with personal details.... etc.
The impression of this website fits to what many people here are saying: That this guy is know for large-type gameproject screwups and shady marketing ploys. To me it looks like a marketing scheme to push some half-assed idea and grab a little cash on the way.
As a contrast - and I'm not saying I'm a fan or even a user - Second Life in the beginning had little more than two guys. One business man and one programmer. The business man did his job and the programmer built a powerfull, usable protocoll and a plattform independant client for it. It probably takes no more than minutes to get up and running with SL and start building and scripting your primitives-based 3D objects. In a nutshell: It works and is flexible enough to get the attention of IT opinion leaders.
Many companies have tried to build rich 3D clients and plugins since around 1999/2000. Quite a few very good ones failed down the road or went into hybernation mode. The only one I know of that really took of is SL. This Metaplace on the other hand has nothing to offer that I can't build myself in a few days - a mediocre website filled with marketing-babble.
Autodesk sucks. That's a fact. For instance, the Autodesk Videoconverter is widely know as the buggiest software ever. Ever since they bought Alias I've been expecting Maya to go downhill. It isn't that they've really gained that much in tracktion since the takeover, which is a bad sign.
If you need a good 3D programm and Blender doesn't offer enough industry compliance I recommend Lightwave. Affordable, an insane amount of features, an impressive feature production track record and a high profile industry standard throughout the world. AFAICT it has the most widespread use in the industry. LW does come with a dongle, but at least Newtek (LWs producer) doesn't act like a bunch of dickheads. I bought a used LW licence from a guy on Ebay and they transferred it without a hassle and even did a cheap upgrade for me allthough I wasn't entitled.
Bottom line: Blender and then Lightwave for all things Blender doesn't handle well (or not at all). And stay away from Autodesk.
I've heard a Camorra Hit Team is quite effective. Have the software phone home the IP, track down it's position with Google Maps and some IP-to-map service and fork off some of your revenue to pay the mob to take the licence offender out. Your local Camorra Joint might even offer a subsciption which could come you cheaper if there's a lot of rippers distributing you software. Maybe you want to try it yourself. The Steyr AUG Sniper Rifles are good for this sort of job, but you can resort to a bomb under the carhood if target is active only outside workhours (which hackers and crackers often are). Good Luck....
Jokes aside: Honesty, Fair Pricing, Good Service, Licence Key Generated from licencee name, no phoning home, Website to refetch the key if the customer looses it/can't find it/is to lazy to look for it. As a rule of thumb you can say it should be easier to refetch the key from the web/email than to open the drawer and rumage out the booklet where the licence key is written down. If you follow these simple rules it's likely you'll have the lowest possible piracy ratio.
Where's the Article on Vendetta Online? Their employees don't cheat, and they've had a Linux (even a seperate one for AMD 64 bit) and Mac client from the very beginning. And they are a small independant gaming company that actually deserve some attention for their very neat Space MMORPG.
PHP. People do build large apps in PHP. Having used it quite a bit it remains a mystery to me a)how and b)why. Its ugly and handles state poorly - a disaster for a web language in my view.
It's difficult to understand, since PHP combines the quirkyness of Perl with the syntactic bloat of Java and does have some other shortcommings. However, it handles all web stuff very gracefully. Tons of functions in PHP are built to handle the everyday shortcommings the WWW Inet-service brings along. And they are all come in the box without any classpath or you-need-this-seperate-servlet-running-to-handle-m e crap. Oneliners convert objects to HTML characters, walk arrays or connect to a database. The God-Datatype in PHP is the PHP Array - compareable to Pythons dictionary - and offers tons of functions to handle them and do neat stuff to arrays fast. Despite (or because?) some 300+ core functions it's extremely newbie friendly - no need to add any libs or stuff just to halfway deal with webstuff. There-is-more-than-one-way-to-do-it applies to PHP as much as it applies to Perl, without PHP bugging people with a to terse but arcane syntax.
PHP is the king of all SSI solutions because it's built for exactly that sort of task and nothing else. That's why the most successfull, non-trivial web applications are built with it. It's the best tool for the job, plain and simple.
As many have pointed out allready, PHP (incl. PHP 5) is a subset of CakePHP, as it is - Tadaa! - a PHP Framework. So if you run Cake on PHP 5 (it runs on both PHP 4 and PHP 5) then you've got both. There are a lot of Frameworks recommended here, such as Django, Turbogears and others. They are all very neat. I'd like to add Zope (or it's superset Plone) to that list as it is the oldest and most mature of all these neat OSS Webkits.
Rails is the first project that emphatically applied marketing tactics to make itself popular, thus the extreme hype surrounding it and the potential critical mass it has gained. It's simular to the hype Zend is putting behind it's Zend Framework right now. Which is also way overhyped with bold claims despite being less than a year old. However Rails is *not* the Framework that invented or first implemented MVC, Scaffolding or all the other concepts associated with it.
A Webdevelopers 2 cents.
Feature, concept and technology wise Zope (built with Python) is still unmatched by any other Framework or Appserver available, be it in Python, Ruby, Java or whatever.
CakePHP is a good Framework - I'm using on PHP 5 it just now to build a larger custom CRM System - and the community is fun (no Forum - we all hang out on IRC) but I recommend Symfony, as it is built entirely on PHP 5 no extra work added for PHP 4 compliance, covers aspects of it job by integrating existing Projects such as Creole and Propel for the DB stuff and it has very good documentation. Including a very well written Book (free PDF version available). Symfony is mature and has been successfully used in very large scale Projects (Yahoo Bookmarks is built on it).
Bottom Line: I'd be carefull not to blindly follow the rabid hypers of Rails or their fresh PHP equivalent, the Zend Framework bandwagon crew. Check out the Frameworks people have mentioned here and if you want to stick to PHP 5 Cake or Symfony are both fine choices.
Slashdot Mirror
PHP started as a templating engine built on Perl. It took on some of the stranger and some of the nicer habits of Perl and eventually developed into the main server-side-included language for web applications with it's own distinct charater. I find myself using PHP for more and more projects and tasks (cli scripting included) and keep wondering if PHP is a dead end or if PHP is basically a natural progesssion into the web-aera and has become so popular for mostly the right reasons.
Since you are a member of the MySQL Core team (the database pratically married to PHP) and a Perl Guru (PHPs anchestor) I'd like to know what you think of PHP and it's breathtaking success as the 'web-generations basic' and the road it's come along since PHP 3. Do you think that the nonchalance with which PHP treats programming newcomers, the one or other strange web programming habit it allows/fosters and the large set of default web-centric functions is a fair trade for the downsides PHP is said to have? Or do you think PHP should go the way of the dodo in favour of Perl or other languages?
>> Maybe somewhere in the Swiss Alps?
>As being German: Definitely yes. Island may be an other option to consider
>If the current politics remain, Germany is going to be a police and
>surveillance state in near future...
Living in Germany you should know better than that.
Don't worry. In two months from now someone will the surveilance will cost money and jobs and eventually eliminate 15% of the positions for human investigators at the federal german BKA, thus costing more jobs. An uproar will shake the nation. Some guy at some obscure bureau of the Interior Ministry will also notice that this law makes their recent pet project, the German Federal Trojan (TM) officialy 65% superfluos. Another big no-no. Some other intellectual will publically notice that all info about all Germans is either available at StudiVZ (Germanys Facebook/MySpace), Amazon.de Marketplace or Ebay Germany anyway - which is allready completely scanned and archived (backups included) by the German IRS - and we know everything worth knowing about everybody allready. 10-15 different factions and public bodies of interest groups will have allready filed 20 complaints to the Federal Constitutional Court and the country will be plaqued by a lengthy debate that will have Secretary of the Interior Schäuble eventually drive his wheelchair off a cliff in frustration. Just before the current coalition of two big parties ends it's legislature there will be a watered down full-compromise version of the law with 8500 exception rules and modifications delivered on 2000+ pages in three big-ass Leitz file-covers, German style. Two months after the federal vote and three months into the new law someone in the EU Gouverment Headquarters will notice that this law breaks somewhere between 23 and 65 terms of union contracts, the British will wine that the Germans are now also attempting to take over the EU lead in surveilance, directly competing the UKs last big resort of excellence. Eventually the then new German gouverment will be bitch-slapped into revising its 10kg online surveilance law into a new draft as not to be fined by Brussels for a kazillion Euros.
Bottom line: No need to worry yet. Even by the most optimistic projections I wouldn't expect this law to gain any tracktion before 2015.
It's only since about 25 years that German boardgames have come to be the reference of quality they are. Before that it was just Checkers, Halma and Mikado plus some flashy stuff from Milton Bradley and Parker that came across the pond.
The German game publisher Ravensburger was iirc the first to regularly put a little more time and quality into their boardgames. Their first steps were sort of academic, one of the first German Boardgames of the year ("Spiel des Jahres") being 'Sagaland' ('Enchanted Forest'), a quite simple, non-innovative variant of Memory+Ludo but with a distinct quality of the artwork and game-parts. A year later came 'Scotland Yard', also from Ravensburger. It more or less went uphill from there.
The Game Fair in Essen is a very good place to go if you are a gamer. I live 20km away and while I haven't been there in the last few years a friend of mine always goes there all four days and stays at my place. He always comes back with a stack of prime-quality boardgames one better than the next. It's also nice to see how, after all these years, the Pen&Paper RPG scene is still fairly alive and kicking in Germany. DSA is one of the best RPGs available, quality-wise. It the only RPG I know of in which the quality of official maps rivals that of Harnworld.
I've *never* used whois for probing novel domain-names for this exact reason. I just use the URL and see if it hits. If it and it's adjacent ones on other tlds of interest don't hit and I want it, I order it.
Being a little paranoid allways helps.
I'm sitting here in my mid-30s, webdeving against abysmal insignificance since 2000 and along comes some highschool punk and cashes 250 MILLLION DOLLARS for a website totalling a nominal 15 billion in worth. Un-f*cking-believable.
... *GASP!* ... *SOB* .... MS Execs with truckloads of cash to burn.
Karma can be tough.
Goes to show a main business rule:
Not what *you* think is a cool interweb app is a cool interweb app. If you can think the concept 'cool interweb app' you are most likely more intelligent than 99% of the poplulation and what you think matters zilch against any possible demografic. What your *customers* think, on the other hand, is *all* that matters in business. Be they 250 Quadzillion Facebook users or a board of half-a-dozen
I'm sorry, I'm probably sounding completely lame to those more firm in cryptography, but I have to ask:
:-)
:-)
What would it take to attack the 40 byte key? Imagine a coordinated effort by the biggest 500 gouverment computing setups around the world. All the blue genes and whatnot pitching in. The Japanese sure have the one or other state-of-the-art mainframe supercomputer, and CERN, ESA, Nasa and few German weather services have a few aswell. There is tons of horsepower laying around idle at agencies, bureaus and the occasional school or corporation. If they all pitch in in a coordinated brute force attack *and* have Seti@Home do a few hours too it should be possible, no? Especially if one takes into account that at least the NSA has mathmatical functions that do some of the dirty work and speed up the process a little. They wouldn't even have to publish them.
Wait, let's just check:
255 to the power of 40 is rougly 1.8 times 10 to the power of 96 (Gulp!). Thats nearly Gogol. (10^100, what Google initially was supposed to be called, the guy registering the domain mixed up the letters...)
Whatever.
On it goes: For the sake of ease I'll roughly estimate that after the overhead has been dealt with, half of the top 500 (or a simular setup) will be doing optimized attacks on an average of 50 billion tries per second. An average state-of-the-art mid-range server has aprox. 20 GigaFLOPS, so I think that's fairly realistic for a large mainframe doing a multi-step operation.
250 * 50 000 000 000 = 1.25*10^13 tries per second.
*60*60*24 makes 1.08*10^18 per day. [Sidenote: This may be way off wack allready and total bollocks but it's fun actually]
*7*52*5 makes 1.96*10^21. Oh, gee. This doesn't look to good. Where at it for 5 years and have only covered less than the fourth root of our total amount of keys. Even if we had 10 times the power it would make up only 1 percent of the keypace. Sheesh. We'll probably be cheaper off in handing out Linux PCs to everyone on the planet.
It's no use. I gotta start working on my next project: Finding an explicit function for prime numbers. Hehehe. I could use the Million from the Fields Medal too.
Bottom line: My question/assumption was lame. But at least I found out myself.
Quick! Lets all think "Format C:"! See how long they want to read our minds with that. :-)
There are some very interesting replies here. Two I'd like to repeat because I find them particulary true:
1.) Don't be intimidated.
2.) Stay curious. Find ways to get curious about certain fields of math.
These are from different posts, but I think they go good together.
The truth is, math is a mess. It's a historically grown mumbo-jumbo of countless variations in notation. The problem is that with programming languages - no matter how crazy they may be - they allways come with a reference manual to explain their syntax. In fact, that is the main element by which we judge the viability of a PL. With math on the other hand academia kind of expects us to understand what the Professor is writing on the blackboard without even addressing the issue of a solid reference in which I can look up the meaning of the sum-symbol or what a limes means and how it looks like. It's like music-notation. Somewhere back in the day - often a few hundred years ago - someone came up with a certain notation and since then that's the rule of thumb by which everybody sticks to sorta-kinda 50% of the time. If he feels like it. These notations are mostly literally bolted on to terms and expressions in the most chaotic and hideous way one can imagine. It's like trying to understand a Perl obfuscation contest without the manual.
This is IMHO the single biggest problem in grasping math. Especially for Computer Geeks who are used to strict syntax constraints.
I' currently studying the first semester of BS-CompSci and am glad for having finished my German GED just this summer, with all the accelerated math (barely made it with a D+ due to the time-constrained tests) still in my head. I can just about keep up with the lectures. We allready have quite a few students bickering about the lack of a symbol and notation reference.
Bottom line:
Math is a mess. It is a non-trivial science and takes work to understand, but it's a mess none-the-less. If one keeps that in mind without using it as a cheap excuse not to fully work out and understand the details then learning math is much less frustrating. That's how I feel about it anyway.
Would you have sex with a robot if it were nearly lifelike? And wouldn't it just boil down to "rubberdoll + fantasy" or would there be interesting dialogs involved when lying beside each other afterwards in the dark. ... Imagine a romantic walk in the park at night with a Sexaroid (the imho appropriate term for it from "Ghost in the Shell 2")?
It boils down to the question: How lifelike would it have to be to engage an intimacy with a machine if that is an option?
Given it's stuck at 256MB RAM - which is sad. It's got a few other downsides like probably some bottleneck somewhere beween IO and the CPU. But it only draws 5 Watts and needs no active cooling which is really cool. Considering that this is a small company and they manage to offer their micropc for such a low price it is a really interesting device. 5 Watts ... my Eco-Bulb in my desklamp uses 7. Quite awesome actually.
The equivalent of an Asus EEE running DR-DOS, a pimped GEOS, WordPro, Lotus 123, PINE and some ancient version of Corel Draw will do 90% of your standard desktop work at a speed one hasn't even dreamed of. It's because nowadays we run upwards of 5-7 extreme performance hogs at a time on regular PCs today without even thinking twice about it. Decoding MP3s, millions of desktop colors, workplace shells chewing so much RAM and CPU it's insane, running huge apps on top of Java, Mozilla/XUL, .Net or toolkits of simular performance impact, with the odd webserver, database and somewhere around three net-applets (Mail, PIM, Newsreader, Browser) idling in the background. The ease at which we switch around between 10-20 pratically redundant application stacks running at a time is payed for by throwing huge amounts of computing power at them. Optimze that even slightly and you'll have a huge impact on what a work enviroment needs.
... There really is no need to do that, but we like it that way. Thus anything slower than 800Mhz often is out of discussion.
It's just that today we expect a comp to idle an active mp3 player while running Firefox showing a Flash Video in 600x300 at 25fps. With Eclipse and OpenOffice open in the background. All powered by 32bit Aqua or an MS rippoff.
I have to second the parent. I've programmed commercially funded GPL E-Learning Systems and built a few small business support systems entirely from OSS components. $5000 dollars is an absolute minimum to get an ERP or CRM system set up, configured and extended in a usable manner. It won't be any other with even the most frictionless of POS setups.
If you have somebody competent you can trust then you can kickstart the first components of someone who wants to build a small POS system to start his own POS software business (maybe a student or so). But that's an extra load on top of your job of building up your own business so I'd be triple carefull before attempting that.
I too strongly recommend you do some research on shrinkwrap POS systems and then ask a reputable local OSS savy freelance programmer / SMB IT consultant how he would automate your business and what it takes to implement some glue-scripts for automation and data-migration to bringe the gaps between bill-printing, the ledger and whatever other shareware you piecemeal your first IT enviroment together with. The programmer and the job(s) he needs to do shouldn't initially cost more than $2000 in total and deliver measurable speed up of your IT pipeline. A good programmer with experience and consulting skills will - in the first round - speed up a mom'n'pop shop business by up to ten to twenty weekhours and bridge the worst gaps in IT on a relativly small budget. If you go that way, you can also see if your IT specialist is for real or just a wannabe. And you won't risk to much either.
If your business grows he'll know enough of yours to extend IT accordingly and you'll both know what problems to look out for. On the second or third iteration of your business relationship you can start thinking about funding an OSS project with your favourite programmer as a funded project-lead. All else is too early.
Just a free advice from an E-Lancer and OSS Consultant.
While Randis debunkings, undermined by his 1000000$ Award, can be usefull for seperating phantasms from truths, I find him to be somewhat of a jerk after reading and watching his stuff. He quite frequently makes unfounded hearsay claims on subjects he obviously knows squat about and presents them in such a way as if they where scientifically proven fact. Even though he often has nothing more than anecdotal evidence he presents his position as more scientifically noteworthy than that of his opponents.
I do think that his work as a critic is invaluable as it forces honest people that have fallen for flim-flam to get their head straight. However his methods are by far much to unscientific to give true further insights into the subjects he talks about. Yet it appears that his intention is to cause more (false) negatives than his methods are capable of giving.
Even his video-debunkings of such obvious trickery as the Uri Geller performances (credit to Randi: obvious trickery *after* you've seen Randis debunkings) contains factually false hearsay intended to sway peoples opinions in favour of materialisim. While being sceptical of anything possibly metaphysical is a must, to claim Randis methods, findings and results are scientific is silly. I find myself having difficulties taking him for granted in the very same way I have with Audiophiles.
The emphasis with which he and his followers claim his methods are scientific add more to the negative impression.
Bottom line: In my opionion he gets to much uncritical attention from the geek crowd.
Blenders UI is fine. I've been using it since 1.8 and the fact that it appears like a 3D version of Emacs is because a professional grade 3D programm is loaded with features. 3DSMax, Houdini and whatnot have a simular learning curve when it comes to the UI. Softimages UI sux big time - allways has - but it has top grade NLA tools. That's why professionals bite the bullet and learn how to use it. In the end it enhances their workflow greatly. Same with Blender.
... The only one I can think of right now is that scrolling in the button viewport pushed tabs out of view even if there's enough space for all to be shown. ... Not really a bug to get your pants wet about.
3D kits are *complicated* and so are their UIs. Get over it. The glitches Blender has in it's UI aren't nearly as bad as those of 3DSMax.
On the other hand, Blenders Workspace management is top of the line, unmatched by any other tool I know. And it's the only 3D package out there with a fully OpenGL accelerated UI. Watch Houdini or LW slowpocke into ready-to-use-mode to see what I mean.
That Blenders learning curve is steep has to do with its speed of developement and a lack of consistent documentation. A circumstance that is rapidly changing for the better right now.
Bottom line: If you want to learn a 3D tool - ANY 3D tool - expect to burn 6 months of time and up to 200$ on generic and special documentation while doing it. Blender is no exeption to that. If you think Softimage or Maya is easyer to use just because it costs north of 3000$, you're smoking crack.
CakePHP and Symfony are the two 400 pound Gorillas in the PHP FW Arena. Zend Framework is being pushed big time by Zend and a huge wave of hype they managed to build within the last 10 weeks or so but I advise everyone not to fall for the hype until it's riped a bit. It's not nearly as mature or as well tested as Symfony or Cake and could use another year or two on the market before it has proven itself.
Mashups target dynamic web-readiness and are often used to exploit visionary ROI in order to syndicate front-end systems. In order to exploit ubiquitous bandwidth Mashups can also be utilzed to unleash efficient e-business and envisioneer intuitive applications.
... (What really scares me that most of the above actually makes a strange sort of sense) ...
... God, I just *love* this tool ... ]
Hope that helps.
[Disclaimer: Large portions of this post where generated using the official Web Economy Bullshit Generator in order to aggregate web-enabled networks.
Yahoo Pipes does this much better AFAICT. And it's been around for almost a year now. AND it's a good place to look if you can't quite pin the meaning of this new buzzword called "Mashup". (I'll explain it in a different post)
Rails did not invent MVC, nor did they invent scaffolding or any of the other stuff. They didn't even make it popular. Very many people get these facts wrong. The only thing Ruby On Rails did as a first was to apply professional marketing strategies when trying to make an open source web application framework popular. They were the first to build a project website that was appealing to the eye more than anything else and they heavyly pushed the concept of the screencast, right when broadband was becoming commonplace. I'm shure almost everybody has watched that famous 'a blog in 15 minutes' screencast. This screencast alone made Rails (and the editor presented in it, Textmate) extremely popular.
Technology wise there are many frameworks and webkits that are far more mature and far more sophisticated than Rails and have been around for 6 years and more.
The big problem with a very fair creative licence such as the CC is that it can give those who apply it to their works a false sense of security. Just because the CCL is fair and is meant to be applied and used by fair people it doesn't mean it can't be exploited by *ssholes or people who don't care about common decency.
If I give away my Photoportrait under the CCL and it appears in tomorrows newspaper in an advertisement for a Nazi-Party, Nuclear Energy or the new P2000X Puppymulcher then there's nothing I can do about it. Even if the advert is CCLd itself. I'd say the girl is out of luck and learned her lesson. If the picture was used in a decent add, then she'd be best off if she'd support it. Then no one can use it in a different context.
People need to be aware of this sort of thing in the internet age.
Here's a simular problem: My Name appears all around Google and Google groups, because some dickhead thought it would be a smart idea to put out all Fidoechos of the last decade (the Fidonet required real id and real names) bearing the name of each posts author. They didn't get my permission, not that of most other Fidonetters, I presume, but it's still there in the archives. Thus when someone searches my realatively rare name, he get's quite a few hits for ancient posts, including some call's for help on Linux from 8 years ago. Not a good thing if you're a Linux expert now and what to sell yourself as one.
Being paranoid about what you put where on the web, about yourself and under what terms, is a good thing. Nobody's gonna die if he politely has to ask for your permission to use your creative works.
Lot's of Blahblah, the only thing downloadable is a zip of various versions of the companys icons, no technocal details and registration for the alpha version gives no details but requires one to fill out aprox. 50 fields with personal details. ... etc.
The impression of this website fits to what many people here are saying: That this guy is know for large-type gameproject screwups and shady marketing ploys. To me it looks like a marketing scheme to push some half-assed idea and grab a little cash on the way.
As a contrast - and I'm not saying I'm a fan or even a user - Second Life in the beginning had little more than two guys. One business man and one programmer. The business man did his job and the programmer built a powerfull, usable protocoll and a plattform independant client for it. It probably takes no more than minutes to get up and running with SL and start building and scripting your primitives-based 3D objects. In a nutshell: It works and is flexible enough to get the attention of IT opinion leaders.
Many companies have tried to build rich 3D clients and plugins since around 1999/2000. Quite a few very good ones failed down the road or went into hybernation mode. The only one I know of that really took of is SL. This Metaplace on the other hand has nothing to offer that I can't build myself in a few days - a mediocre website filled with marketing-babble.
Autodesk sucks. That's a fact. For instance, the Autodesk Videoconverter is widely know as the buggiest software ever. Ever since they bought Alias I've been expecting Maya to go downhill. It isn't that they've really gained that much in tracktion since the takeover, which is a bad sign.
If you need a good 3D programm and Blender doesn't offer enough industry compliance I recommend Lightwave. Affordable, an insane amount of features, an impressive feature production track record and a high profile industry standard throughout the world. AFAICT it has the most widespread use in the industry. LW does come with a dongle, but at least Newtek (LWs producer) doesn't act like a bunch of dickheads. I bought a used LW licence from a guy on Ebay and they transferred it without a hassle and even did a cheap upgrade for me allthough I wasn't entitled.
Bottom line:
Blender and then Lightwave for all things Blender doesn't handle well (or not at all). And stay away from Autodesk.
I've heard a Camorra Hit Team is quite effective. Have the software phone home the IP, track down it's position with Google Maps and some IP-to-map service and fork off some of your revenue to pay the mob to take the licence offender out. Your local Camorra Joint might even offer a subsciption which could come you cheaper if there's a lot of rippers distributing you software. ...
Maybe you want to try it yourself. The Steyr AUG Sniper Rifles are good for this sort of job, but you can resort to a bomb under the carhood if target is active only outside workhours (which hackers and crackers often are). Good Luck.
Jokes aside: Honesty, Fair Pricing, Good Service, Licence Key Generated from licencee name, no phoning home, Website to refetch the key if the customer looses it/can't find it/is to lazy to look for it. As a rule of thumb you can say it should be easier to refetch the key from the web/email than to open the drawer and rumage out the booklet where the licence key is written down. If you follow these simple rules it's likely you'll have the lowest possible piracy ratio.
My 2 cents.
Where's the Article on Vendetta Online? Their employees don't cheat, and they've had a Linux (even a seperate one for AMD 64 bit) and Mac client from the very beginning. And they are a small independant gaming company that actually deserve some attention for their very neat Space MMORPG.
PHP. People do build large apps in PHP. Having used it quite a bit it remains a mystery to me a)how and b)why. Its ugly and handles state poorly - a disaster for a web language in my view.
m e crap. Oneliners convert objects to HTML characters, walk arrays or connect to a database. The God-Datatype in PHP is the PHP Array - compareable to Pythons dictionary - and offers tons of functions to handle them and do neat stuff to arrays fast. Despite (or because?) some 300+ core functions it's extremely newbie friendly - no need to add any libs or stuff just to halfway deal with webstuff. There-is-more-than-one-way-to-do-it applies to PHP as much as it applies to Perl, without PHP bugging people with a to terse but arcane syntax.
It's difficult to understand, since PHP combines the quirkyness of Perl with the syntactic bloat of Java and does have some other shortcommings. However, it handles all web stuff very gracefully. Tons of functions in PHP are built to handle the everyday shortcommings the WWW Inet-service brings along. And they are all come in the box without any classpath or you-need-this-seperate-servlet-running-to-handle-
PHP is the king of all SSI solutions because it's built for exactly that sort of task and nothing else. That's why the most successfull, non-trivial web applications are built with it. It's the best tool for the job, plain and simple.
As many have pointed out allready, PHP (incl. PHP 5) is a subset of CakePHP, as it is - Tadaa! - a PHP Framework. So if you run Cake on PHP 5 (it runs on both PHP 4 and PHP 5) then you've got both.
There are a lot of Frameworks recommended here, such as Django, Turbogears and others. They are all very neat. I'd like to add Zope (or it's superset Plone) to that list as it is the oldest and most mature of all these neat OSS Webkits.
Rails is the first project that emphatically applied marketing tactics to make itself popular, thus the extreme hype surrounding it and the potential critical mass it has gained. It's simular to the hype Zend is putting behind it's Zend Framework right now. Which is also way overhyped with bold claims despite being less than a year old. However Rails is *not* the Framework that invented or first implemented MVC, Scaffolding or all the other concepts associated with it.
A Webdevelopers 2 cents.
Feature, concept and technology wise Zope (built with Python) is still unmatched by any other Framework or Appserver available, be it in Python, Ruby, Java or whatever.
CakePHP is a good Framework - I'm using on PHP 5 it just now to build a larger custom CRM System - and the community is fun (no Forum - we all hang out on IRC) but I recommend Symfony, as it is built entirely on PHP 5 no extra work added for PHP 4 compliance, covers aspects of it job by integrating existing Projects such as Creole and Propel for the DB stuff and it has very good documentation. Including a very well written Book (free PDF version available). Symfony is mature and has been successfully used in very large scale Projects (Yahoo Bookmarks is built on it).
Bottom Line: I'd be carefull not to blindly follow the rabid hypers of Rails or their fresh PHP equivalent, the Zend Framework bandwagon crew. Check out the Frameworks people have mentioned here and if you want to stick to PHP 5 Cake or Symfony are both fine choices.