I've done the exact same thing myself. Make a contract over the functionality and the service delivered that excludes code and implementation specs and agree verbally to GPL all parts exepct any CI and branding stuff the company uses. Think about a generic name for the GPL side of the project. Then anything that goes GPL is entirely in your hands and there's no need for a contract handling the GPL. It's a wonderfull foundation for working with larger partners. They don't have to pay further than needed, no need for both to fight wether they bought a result or some code and you don't need to feel ripped off as there's a funded GPL project out there with your name on it. It's a win-win situation.
Gaming, special predifined requirements for software? -> Windows, some new preconfigured box - Dell, Shuttle, whatever(stay away from hardware building!)
Cheap, Laptop, Internet, Email, Wordprocessing, stadard productivity apps small 10-minute games? -> Linux (Ubuntu), have your local geek check for a printer that fits, join the mailinglist and get a n00b book on ubuntu. (Same applies here: Stay away from hardware building)
Desk, hassle free, Email, Internet, Wordprocessing, small games, neat games, design + nice OSS goodies? -> Mac OS X (Mac Mini / iMac)
Not that the above is the current state and can chance slightly every half year or so. (for instance if iBooks get cheaper than equivalent PC laptops again) or hushtech PCs become affordable.
The bottom line is unless the people have to really look out for costs right now a Mac is the best they can do. Only with super cheap laptops will they do better with Linux, as the iBook advantage has worn of lately. Windows nowadays is only usefull for a newcomer if they're into gaming or special apps that require Windows. Example: a friend of mine is engineer and needs stuff that only runs on Windows. And in any of these cases you'll have to shed out some money to get a real advantage. The legend that hardware is easyer to set up with Windows is exactly that: a legend. True to some extent two years ago, but not anymore. Of course the hardware in question should be able to run under Linux. But if so, it's not any more difficult to set it up with Ubuntu than it is with Windows. On the contrary.
Note that the above is the current state of things. The omnipresence of Windows distorts that quite some bit. People who have no business runnig a Windows computer buy one because 'their friend at work' uses one. And with PC hardware closing in on something like 15 concurrent different CPU sockets and the accompaning bunch of RAM types and the likes PCs aren't getting easyer to handle. Windows or not.
The barrier that prevents standard, non-gaming users from using Linux is nothing but a psychological one nowadays. At some time soon Linux/OSS will reach critical mass (probably when MS has pissed off enough customers) and then this will be a non-issue aswell. To me it's a tad ironic that now that I'm a full-time Mac OS X user (fedd up with hardware fiddling and kernelmod linking) that has real work that needs finishing, desktop Linux is finally close to going mainstream.
Me and my friends have been waiting for this and joking about it since IBM Via Voice and Dragon Speak. A whole new era of IT pranks and cyberterrorisim awaits us. Imagine bursting into a room full of PCs and yelling
"FORMAT DRIVE C! CONFIRM!".
Instant fun. Makes me feel all soft and gooshy inside just thinking of it.:-)
Marten Mickos, this is the second time within a few days I've seen you posting usefull stuff on/. Thanks for you time and staying true to geekiness in general, allthough, I presume, you have quite a schedule to keep up to.
I'm an avid MySQL user. I too don't consider MySQL or any other classic RDBMS the cream of databases concepts, allthough the SAP DB/MaxDB thing and the attempt to make it compatible with MySQL SQL dialect did get my attention. The prime reason why I'm using MySQL on a daily basis is that available object databases are to slow and/or exotic and for classic RDBMS - which in my book all suffer from SQL - I consider MySQL 5 at least nearly as good as any other. A big bonus is the available documentation and the amount of free tools that support MySQL, which is unmatched by any other product.
And here's my first wart that is bugging me:
When will we see MySQL Workbench finished?
Imho getting the DB-Designer Team on board was one of the smartest moves of recent in an impressive line of smart moves, and having a sophisticated free ERD Tool that fits MySQL 5's featureset is yet another killer criteria in favour of MySQL. Using Workbench would slash developement times yet again and give the entire MySQL faction yet another lead.... When will we finally see it finished?
Aside from that: Keep up the good work.
A satisfied professional MySQL user
P.S.: What will the IPO per share be? I'm pondering the thought of hopping on board.
You forget that Games and Gamers are what keep the Windows Monopoly going for the larger part. So, no, 'Baristas react to Vista Launch' is not a headline, whereas 'Gamers react to Vista' is.
Vivisimo not among the top 100? This is silly. Vivisimo is the first I turn to when Google fails to deliver. And they cover Googles shortcomings very well. In my book (and that of many others) Vivisimo is SE #2. And for good reasons too.
I was a Webmaster. Amongst other things in the field. Now Joomla and the secretaries are doing the job nearly just as good as I ever could. And way cheaper and a milllion times faster. Journalists are moving in fast aswell. And nobody even needs DW anymore to do it. The last time I started DW was more than a year ago. I toyed around a bit for 5 minutes and thought of back in the days of 2000 when we were handlinking entire e-learn lectures with the DW crosshairs and DWs offline template engine. It took us hours to do what any OSS LMS I can download in 3 minutes does in an instant.
Now I make my money setting up the CMS, customizing it, building webapps and designing databases.
The Webmaster went the way of the weaver when the mechanical loom came. And that's a good thing. No need for humans anymore. Automate it and move on. It's a big wave and it's called cyberpunk. Learn to ride it.
I'd say the real number is closer to 50%. Lot's of Bots out there that make an effort not to be noticed and just bog down the system. I hear from countless Windows users how slow their boxes are. I'd say it's a sure guess that at least 60% of those are compromised.
I was looking for a top-notch calculator myself just a few weeks ago. I looked at all the ususal suspects (Casio, HP, TI, etc.) and must say that I was somewhat disappointed. The situation for calculators hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. I think my Sharp PC-1402 would still keep up with most of them. However I bought a non-grafical Casio fx-991ES, the most powerfull without grafics functionality. The neatest feature it has is Casio's 'Natural Display' Option which let's you type your formulas just the way you see them in your textbooks. For 20$ you get a very performant and powerfull calculator. Albeit one that isn't programmable. The TI Nspire (http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US/ nonProductMulti/nspire_cas.html) seems to be the next big thing coming up but I'd acutally suggest you get a Palm or a Pocket Computer/Handheld if you need anything powerfull and programm the stuff you need yourself. Takes time but you learn something along the way.
... is what was desperately missing within the Linux/OSS community. Just looking at that splash page of the Ubuntu Studio project made me utter a sigh of relief. Visual and outer skin consistency are things that Linux has seruiously lacked up to now. Ubuntu - basically a not-like-shit-looking version of debian - is what OSS needs to finally succeed in the real world. They use Gnome (which I don't like) but if they continue to improve it style as they did I couldn't care less. Seeing this, one knows that OSS will prevail and Ubuntu will be at the helm. Nice prospects indeed.
The GEMA is not the German RIAA.... And besides, as far as artist organisations go, the GEMA is actually a relatively fair organisation. It's the the one or other federal law that makes them worse than they actually are. For instance, by law I pay a GEMA procentage on every blank CD I buy as a flatrate for any music I could possibly copy on to it. (Scanners and Photocopiers have a simular fee) Yet 'copyprotected' CDs aren't prohibited in germany and circumventing copyprotection is sort of illegal (the law they issued on this is a complete mess so nobody really can tell for shure). So now what can I do? To who'm do I turn to get my GEMA percentage back because I legally can't copy any of them DRM CDs? Somebody with time and money on his hands can have the german supreme court blast all of this shit to chunky kibbles. In the end nobody - politicians, lawmen and probably even the people don't even give a shit. After all, analog copies are still legal, so to speak.
Now that we've just calmed down the Rails bunch they'll be all over us again with foam aroung their mouths. "RAILS! RUBY! RAAAAH!"....
Here's a list of very good/better alternatives: Zope - What Rails want's to be when it grows up. Ancient but still ahead of anything else with classic persistance. (www.zope.org) django - Drinking buddies of the rails people. And they have unicode support. (www.djangoproject.com) cakephp - YaWebframework. In PHP. Largest community out there. Impressive piece of code (www.cakephp.org). Some De-Normalisation and Relational Trails built in. Very neat. symfony - PHP 5 Framework. Very good. (www.symfony-project.com)
The biggest suprise for me was reading right here that Rails, as of version 1.2, doesn't have unicode support - and apparently never had. Now that's showstopper imo.
Flash 7 Linux was nearly in sync with the other plattforms. They took quite some time for FLash 9 (more than a year). According to Macromedia Labs it was because they redid the entire codebase and now can move on faster in xplattform developement. That's why they skipped Flash 8. I'm inclined to believe them. And, being a professional Flash developer who deploys all his webstuff on Linux aswell I am now going to update from Flash MX 2k4 Pro IDE to the newest. Support Flash on Linux and I'll continue using it, drop it and I'll be off to Java/Xul/Whatever before you can say "people want cross-plattform RIA". It's that simple.
Bottom line: Nice job. Took you long enough. Be faster next time or you'll have one flasher less.
(Now all we need is a fresh batch of O'Reillys to go with ActionScript 3 and I'm set.:-) )
I've read a few snide remarks in the last 20 seconds allready, so I guess I'm not the only one notably unimpressed. Yet I have to ask: What is Websphere all about? What's the big, fat, hairy deal? It appears to me as some giant bloated hunk of web related software that appears to have just as much use as others of it's kind (BEA, Sun [Whatever Server] and so forth) with huge incomprehensible backend that have no practical use and application in getting the job done.
Tell me, is it just some piece of 'ware to give business users a reason to buy more servers or does it have a real use? What can Webspere or any other large commercial "Appplication Server" do that any halfway mature OSS web system like Zope, Tomcat, Drupal, Joomla Framework or Rails can't? (And, yes, I know they are classified as different types of software, but all in all they do the more or less the same thing)
Someone with knowledge about Websphere (or some simular product) please enlighten me.
Computers aren't dangerous. If they were small, under-the-desk Nuclear Power plants or something that required a licence to operate and could likely kill somebody if not operated and maintained properly (like a car), IT would be treated with much more respect and be taken for granted and there'd be less hurt feelings. But computers aren't dangerous. They're mostly not even really neccesary. Thus a friend of mine has me, for over three years, warning him time and time again to tell me before he buys a laptop (it would've been a Mac or a PC laptop with Linux set up by me). So my friend goes out this summer and buys a laptop from a super-market special offer with Windows XP preinstalled. It refuses to work with the WiFi I set up for his wife at home (and works flawlessly with the mac mini I had her buy). How in earth should I restrain myself from gritty comments and side-remarks whenever he goes into a lament over how complicated computers are? If computers were litte Nuclear Plants this simly wouldn't happen. I personally am slowly moving my business to IT consulting and going around, wearing more management like clothes and talking to people. I get less grunt work, people listen and pay better, are more thankfull and I get to pull some padawan geeks into some neat projects and can keep the heat of their backs. People listen to things that are dangerous and/or expensive. It's simple actually: If the heat you're getting and the responsablity you're carrying doesn't match the pay, don't do the job.
Let's not loose our focus. If you want to talk about guilt and who's responsible it's first of all the hackers and crackers. No matter what site they attack and what language it's writtten in. Website hackers are criminals and are the guilty. If my PHP website get's hacked (happend just a few weeks ago) it's the hackers fault. Not mine, not PHPs. As far as I'm concerned he should go to jail or pay for my expenses plus a hefty fee.
Apart from that it is, of course, my responsibility to keep my website safe, no matter what technology I use. PHP is a great piece of work and the best SSI solution available. It has it's pipeline covered with a set of OSS tools other solutions can only dream of and it has the largest amount of super-mature OSS webprojects available. All of which are, measured by their installbase, safer than anything else out there. Which proves that security in PHP is nothing special. You just have to compensate for PHPs upside (extreme easy of use) by doulbe checking it's downsides (enough leash to hang youself with). You have to apply basic brain functions when building critical PHP apps. Just like with any other technology. It's just that PHP ease of use lures novices into building larger apps that ignore security at first. Don't anyone tell me that his first C, Java, Whatever app was built with security and buffer overflow prevention in mind.
Blaming something on the language is just plain silly. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. It's not that there's a lack of them.
... what a crappy website. You'd expect a company that makes most of it's sales over the web to built a site with a design and style from this millenium. Makes my eyes hurt just looking at it. And those bottles with the tacky lable and the glasses? A hint at wine, I know. But what are people suposed to think? We are a company of drunkards or what?... Gosh, my mom can do better marketing than that.
1. Free speech as in 'profanity prohibition' in the US? 2. Politians (konservative mostly) are discussing the banning of extremly violent games that primarly simulate the killing of humanoids. Fair enough I'd say. What bugs me the most that Gunrage Clubs (Schüzenvereine) are not closed down to minors, allthough the last german massmurder school killing was conducted by a 16 year old hormone bundle who *legally* possesed a shotgun made for killing people and a 3 digit sum of ammo shells for it and legally kept it in his room! And politians in germany don't even give a shit. Robert Steinhäuser learned his killing skills in 'Action Shooting' lessons at his german gunclub and the politicians what to forbid 'Killer Games' and don't even mention 'Killer Clubs'. THAT is the biggest scandal.
Acer is one of the 'big name' Laptop producers that actually sell Laptops with Linux preinstalled that are generally available and visible and don't require placement of a special order at headquarters overseas. And they let you notice the price difference to the same models with Windows on them. Solution to this 'bug': If you buy an Acer, by one that comes with Linux.
I don't like the Oxygen Icons. To many look tacky - probalby on purpose. How that is supposed to be a 'new user experience' I can't tell. I think we've got enough rull-color range Iconsets by now. They should put the work into refining and variation of what's there.
Really? I don't think I've ever seen a web page that scaled down its fonts when you resized the window. I just get scroll bars.
I consider myself a web professional. And, curiously enough, what you're saying there is one of the prime reasons to use... Flash. Flash is the only thing I know that is multi-plattform, has +90% reach, stays true to anything a designer would want *and* is completely independant of screen size or resolution when done right. Sadly enough, even the elite of flash designers, usually being grafics people and unable to think beyond the concept of pixels and fixed pixel sizes. Most if not all screw up totally and push out fixed resoltion squint versions of their flash apps. When leading larger Flash projects, beating the concept of resoltion independence into their stupid sculls is a harder part of the job I usually have to get started with right away. The really sad thing is that it takes only 10 seconds of thinking and planning and 5 second of export settings to make your flashapp completely resolution independent. But even most of the most famous flashers are to f*cking stupid and incapable of doing it. Proof positive: Check out (flash required)this alpha of a flash siteframe for dynamic CMS content and scale the browserwindow to see what I mean. (no bickering about design please, it's in alpha stage)
Bottom line: A web designer/programmer that uses flash and builds an app that isn't fit to scale down on a pocket pc is not worth his money. The exact oposite is a prime reason for using it. It's these countless half-assed flashers that give flash the bad reputation it has amoung many geeks.
Slashdot Mirror
I've done the exact same thing myself. Make a contract over the functionality and the service delivered that excludes code and implementation specs and agree verbally to GPL all parts exepct any CI and branding stuff the company uses. Think about a generic name for the GPL side of the project. Then anything that goes GPL is entirely in your hands and there's no need for a contract handling the GPL. It's a wonderfull foundation for working with larger partners. They don't have to pay further than needed, no need for both to fight wether they bought a result or some code and you don't need to feel ripped off as there's a funded GPL project out there with your name on it. It's a win-win situation.
Eiher the guys over at FSF are smoking crack or slahsdot is posting rubbish again. ... Hummm, gee, I wonder which is more likely ....
Gaming, special predifined requirements for software? -> Windows, some new preconfigured box - Dell, Shuttle, whatever(stay away from hardware building!)
Cheap, Laptop, Internet, Email, Wordprocessing, stadard productivity apps small 10-minute games? -> Linux (Ubuntu), have your local geek check for a printer that fits, join the mailinglist and get a n00b book on ubuntu. (Same applies here: Stay away from hardware building)
Desk, hassle free, Email, Internet, Wordprocessing, small games, neat games, design + nice OSS goodies? -> Mac OS X (Mac Mini / iMac)
Not that the above is the current state and can chance slightly every half year or so. (for instance if iBooks get cheaper than equivalent PC laptops again) or hushtech PCs become affordable.
The bottom line is unless the people have to really look out for costs right now a Mac is the best they can do. Only with super cheap laptops will they do better with Linux, as the iBook advantage has worn of lately.
Windows nowadays is only usefull for a newcomer if they're into gaming or special apps that require Windows. Example: a friend of mine is engineer and needs stuff that only runs on Windows. And in any of these cases you'll have to shed out some money to get a real advantage.
The legend that hardware is easyer to set up with Windows is exactly that: a legend. True to some extent two years ago, but not anymore. Of course the hardware in question should be able to run under Linux. But if so, it's not any more difficult to set it up with Ubuntu than it is with Windows. On the contrary.
Note that the above is the current state of things. The omnipresence of Windows distorts that quite some bit. People who have no business runnig a Windows computer buy one because 'their friend at work' uses one. And with PC hardware closing in on something like 15 concurrent different CPU sockets and the accompaning bunch of RAM types and the likes PCs aren't getting easyer to handle. Windows or not.
The barrier that prevents standard, non-gaming users from using Linux is nothing but a psychological one nowadays. At some time soon Linux/OSS will reach critical mass (probably when MS has pissed off enough customers) and then this will be a non-issue aswell. To me it's a tad ironic that now that I'm a full-time Mac OS X user (fedd up with hardware fiddling and kernelmod linking) that has real work that needs finishing, desktop Linux is finally close to going mainstream.
Me and my friends have been waiting for this and joking about it since IBM Via Voice and Dragon Speak. A whole new era of IT pranks and cyberterrorisim awaits us. Imagine bursting into a room full of PCs and yelling
:-)
"FORMAT DRIVE C! CONFIRM!".
Instant fun.
Makes me feel all soft and gooshy inside just thinking of it.
Marten Mickos, this is the second time within a few days I've seen you posting usefull stuff on /. Thanks for you time and staying true to geekiness in general, allthough, I presume, you have quite a schedule to keep up to.
... When will we finally see it finished?
I'm an avid MySQL user. I too don't consider MySQL or any other classic RDBMS the cream of databases concepts, allthough the SAP DB/MaxDB thing and the attempt to make it compatible with MySQL SQL dialect did get my attention.
The prime reason why I'm using MySQL on a daily basis is that available object databases are to slow and/or exotic and for classic RDBMS - which in my book all suffer from SQL - I consider MySQL 5 at least nearly as good as any other. A big bonus is the available documentation and the amount of free tools that support MySQL, which is unmatched by any other product.
And here's my first wart that is bugging me:
When will we see MySQL Workbench finished?
Imho getting the DB-Designer Team on board was one of the smartest moves of recent in an impressive line of smart moves, and having a sophisticated free ERD Tool that fits MySQL 5's featureset is yet another killer criteria in favour of MySQL. Using Workbench would slash developement times yet again and give the entire MySQL faction yet another lead.
Aside from that: Keep up the good work.
A satisfied professional MySQL user
P.S.: What will the IPO per share be? I'm pondering the thought of hopping on board.
You forget that Games and Gamers are what keep the Windows Monopoly going for the larger part. So, no, 'Baristas react to Vista Launch' is not a headline, whereas 'Gamers react to Vista' is.
Vivisimo not among the top 100? This is silly. Vivisimo is the first I turn to when Google fails to deliver. And they cover Googles shortcomings very well.
In my book (and that of many others) Vivisimo is SE #2. And for good reasons too.
www.vivisimo.com
I was a Webmaster. Amongst other things in the field. Now Joomla and the secretaries are doing the job nearly just as good as I ever could. And way cheaper and a milllion times faster. Journalists are moving in fast aswell. And nobody even needs DW anymore to do it. The last time I started DW was more than a year ago. I toyed around a bit for 5 minutes and thought of back in the days of 2000 when we were handlinking entire e-learn lectures with the DW crosshairs and DWs offline template engine. It took us hours to do what any OSS LMS I can download in 3 minutes does in an instant.
Now I make my money setting up the CMS, customizing it, building webapps and designing databases.
The Webmaster went the way of the weaver when the mechanical loom came. And that's a good thing. No need for humans anymore. Automate it and move on. It's a big wave and it's called cyberpunk. Learn to ride it.
I'd say the real number is closer to 50%. Lot's of Bots out there that make an effort not to be noticed and just bog down the system. I hear from countless Windows users how slow their boxes are. I'd say it's a sure guess that at least 60% of those are compromised.
I was looking for a top-notch calculator myself just a few weeks ago. I looked at all the ususal suspects (Casio, HP, TI, etc.) and must say that I was somewhat disappointed. The situation for calculators hasn't changed much in the last 20 years. I think my Sharp PC-1402 would still keep up with most of them./ nonProductMulti/nspire_cas.html) seems to be the next big thing coming up but I'd acutally suggest you get a Palm or a Pocket Computer/Handheld if you need anything powerfull and programm the stuff you need yourself. Takes time but you learn something along the way.
However I bought a non-grafical Casio fx-991ES, the most powerfull without grafics functionality. The neatest feature it has is Casio's 'Natural Display' Option which let's you type your formulas just the way you see them in your textbooks. For 20$ you get a very performant and powerfull calculator. Albeit one that isn't programmable.
The TI Nspire (http://education.ti.com/educationportal/sites/US
So, what *is* the integral of a sin allready?
... Gosh, no wonder I got a D in analysis ... )
(An integral is that stuff between the abszisse and the function graph isn't it?
... is what was desperately missing within the Linux/OSS community. Just looking at that splash page of the Ubuntu Studio project made me utter a sigh of relief. Visual and outer skin consistency are things that Linux has seruiously lacked up to now. Ubuntu - basically a not-like-shit-looking version of debian - is what OSS needs to finally succeed in the real world. They use Gnome (which I don't like) but if they continue to improve it style as they did I couldn't care less.
Seeing this, one knows that OSS will prevail and Ubuntu will be at the helm. Nice prospects indeed.
OMFG, w3ZA 411 0\/\/nZoR3d!!!! +3h ch1n3zE h4v3 haXXor3D 411 0uR 3ncryp+10n 411g0r1+himZ!
Now it will only take them 130 Quadrillion years to crack a 1024bit SHA1 hash rather than the usual 460 Quadrillion - just imagine the consequences!
w3Za d000m3d!
The GEMA is not the German RIAA. ... And besides, as far as artist organisations go, the GEMA is actually a relatively fair organisation. It's the the one or other federal law that makes them worse than they actually are. For instance, by law I pay a GEMA procentage on every blank CD I buy as a flatrate for any music I could possibly copy on to it. (Scanners and Photocopiers have a simular fee) Yet 'copyprotected' CDs aren't prohibited in germany and circumventing copyprotection is sort of illegal (the law they issued on this is a complete mess so nobody really can tell for shure). So now what can I do? To who'm do I turn to get my GEMA percentage back because I legally can't copy any of them DRM CDs? Somebody with time and money on his hands can have the german supreme court blast all of this shit to chunky kibbles. In the end nobody - politicians, lawmen and probably even the people don't even give a shit. After all, analog copies are still legal, so to speak.
I'd trade the RIAA for the GEMA at any time.
Now that we've just calmed down the Rails bunch they'll be all over us again with foam aroung their mouths. "RAILS! RUBY! RAAAAH!". ...
Here's a list of very good/better alternatives:
Zope - What Rails want's to be when it grows up. Ancient but still ahead of anything else with classic persistance. (www.zope.org)
django - Drinking buddies of the rails people. And they have unicode support. (www.djangoproject.com)
cakephp - YaWebframework. In PHP. Largest community out there. Impressive piece of code (www.cakephp.org). Some De-Normalisation and Relational Trails built in. Very neat.
symfony - PHP 5 Framework. Very good. (www.symfony-project.com)
The biggest suprise for me was reading right here that Rails, as of version 1.2, doesn't have unicode support - and apparently never had. Now that's showstopper imo.
Flash 7 Linux was nearly in sync with the other plattforms. They took quite some time for FLash 9 (more than a year). According to Macromedia Labs it was because they redid the entire codebase and now can move on faster in xplattform developement. That's why they skipped Flash 8.
:-) )
I'm inclined to believe them.
And, being a professional Flash developer who deploys all his webstuff on Linux aswell I am now going to update from Flash MX 2k4 Pro IDE to the newest. Support Flash on Linux and I'll continue using it, drop it and I'll be off to Java/Xul/Whatever before you can say "people want cross-plattform RIA". It's that simple.
Bottom line:
Nice job. Took you long enough. Be faster next time or you'll have one flasher less.
(Now all we need is a fresh batch of O'Reillys to go with ActionScript 3 and I'm set.
I've read a few snide remarks in the last 20 seconds allready, so I guess I'm not the only one notably unimpressed. Yet I have to ask: What is Websphere all about? What's the big, fat, hairy deal? It appears to me as some giant bloated hunk of web related software that appears to have just as much use as others of it's kind (BEA, Sun [Whatever Server] and so forth) with huge incomprehensible backend that have no practical use and application in getting the job done.
Tell me, is it just some piece of 'ware to give business users a reason to buy more servers or does it have a real use? What can Webspere or any other large commercial "Appplication Server" do that any halfway mature OSS web system like Zope, Tomcat, Drupal, Joomla Framework or Rails can't? (And, yes, I know they are classified as different types of software, but all in all they do the more or less the same thing)
Someone with knowledge about Websphere (or some simular product) please enlighten me.
Computers aren't dangerous. If they were small, under-the-desk Nuclear Power plants or something that required a licence to operate and could likely kill somebody if not operated and maintained properly (like a car), IT would be treated with much more respect and be taken for granted and there'd be less hurt feelings.
But computers aren't dangerous. They're mostly not even really neccesary. Thus a friend of mine has me, for over three years, warning him time and time again to tell me before he buys a laptop (it would've been a Mac or a PC laptop with Linux set up by me). So my friend goes out this summer and buys a laptop from a super-market special offer with Windows XP preinstalled. It refuses to work with the WiFi I set up for his wife at home (and works flawlessly with the mac mini I had her buy).
How in earth should I restrain myself from gritty comments and side-remarks whenever he goes into a lament over how complicated computers are?
If computers were litte Nuclear Plants this simly wouldn't happen. I personally am slowly moving my business to IT consulting and going around, wearing more management like clothes and talking to people. I get less grunt work, people listen and pay better, are more thankfull and I get to pull some padawan geeks into some neat projects and can keep the heat of their backs. People listen to things that are dangerous and/or expensive. It's simple actually: If the heat you're getting and the responsablity you're carrying doesn't match the pay, don't do the job.
Let's not loose our focus. If you want to talk about guilt and who's responsible it's first of all the hackers and crackers. No matter what site they attack and what language it's writtten in. Website hackers are criminals and are the guilty. If my PHP website get's hacked (happend just a few weeks ago) it's the hackers fault. Not mine, not PHPs. As far as I'm concerned he should go to jail or pay for my expenses plus a hefty fee.
Apart from that it is, of course, my responsibility to keep my website safe, no matter what technology I use. PHP is a great piece of work and the best SSI solution available. It has it's pipeline covered with a set of OSS tools other solutions can only dream of and it has the largest amount of super-mature OSS webprojects available. All of which are, measured by their installbase, safer than anything else out there. Which proves that security in PHP is nothing special. You just have to compensate for PHPs upside (extreme easy of use) by doulbe checking it's downsides (enough leash to hang youself with). You have to apply basic brain functions when building critical PHP apps. Just like with any other technology. It's just that PHP ease of use lures novices into building larger apps that ignore security at first. Don't anyone tell me that his first C, Java, Whatever app was built with security and buffer overflow prevention in mind.
Blaming something on the language is just plain silly. If you don't like it, don't use it, period. It's not that there's a lack of them.
... what a crappy website. You'd expect a company that makes most of it's sales over the web to built a site with a design and style from this millenium. Makes my eyes hurt just looking at it. And those bottles with the tacky lable and the glasses? A hint at wine, I know. But what are people suposed to think? We are a company of drunkards or what? ... Gosh, my mom can do better marketing than that.
1. Free speech as in 'profanity prohibition' in the US?
2. Politians (konservative mostly) are discussing the banning of extremly violent games that primarly simulate the killing of humanoids. Fair enough I'd say. What bugs me the most that Gunrage Clubs (Schüzenvereine) are not closed down to minors, allthough the last german massmurder school killing was conducted by a 16 year old hormone bundle who *legally* possesed a shotgun made for killing people and a 3 digit sum of ammo shells for it and legally kept it in his room! And politians in germany don't even give a shit. Robert Steinhäuser learned his killing skills in 'Action Shooting' lessons at his german gunclub and the politicians what to forbid 'Killer Games' and don't even mention 'Killer Clubs'. THAT is the biggest scandal.
Browsercam.
It's a plug, yes. But they deserve it.
Acer is one of the 'big name' Laptop producers that actually sell Laptops with Linux preinstalled that are generally available and visible and don't require placement of a special order at headquarters overseas. And they let you notice the price difference to the same models with Windows on them.
Solution to this 'bug': If you buy an Acer, by one that comes with Linux.
I don't like the Oxygen Icons. To many look tacky - probalby on purpose. How that is supposed to be a 'new user experience' I can't tell. I think we've got enough rull-color range Iconsets by now. They should put the work into refining and variation of what's there.
Really? I don't think I've ever seen a web page that scaled down its fonts when you resized the window. I just get scroll bars.
... Flash. Flash is the only thing I know that is multi-plattform, has +90% reach, stays true to anything a designer would want *and* is completely independant of screen size or resolution when done right.
I consider myself a web professional. And, curiously enough, what you're saying there is one of the prime reasons to use
Sadly enough, even the elite of flash designers, usually being grafics people and unable to think beyond the concept of pixels and fixed pixel sizes. Most if not all screw up totally and push out fixed resoltion squint versions of their flash apps. When leading larger Flash projects, beating the concept of resoltion independence into their stupid sculls is a harder part of the job I usually have to get started with right away. The really sad thing is that it takes only 10 seconds of thinking and planning and 5 second of export settings to make your flashapp completely resolution independent. But even most of the most famous flashers are to f*cking stupid and incapable of doing it.
Proof positive: Check out (flash required)this alpha of a flash siteframe for dynamic CMS content and scale the browserwindow to see what I mean. (no bickering about design please, it's in alpha stage)
Bottom line: A web designer/programmer that uses flash and builds an app that isn't fit to scale down on a pocket pc is not worth his money. The exact oposite is a prime reason for using it. It's these countless half-assed flashers that give flash the bad reputation it has amoung many geeks.