On that note, my vision prevents me from reading most street signs far enough in advance to make traffic changes (change langes, slow down and turn, etc.) safely. So I cannot make out Elmendorf DR at 50 yards but the funny looking church, the large hill, the abandoned school are very easy to spot well off in the distance. Or maybe I just drive too fast, that's almost certainly true. I use maps whenever I can but mostly to find the landmarks I'll use to make the turn instead of the name of the street. Obviously, a good GPS would solve this problem too but I've gotten very good at this and google maps on my phone is good enough.
There are some places, like Utah, where most of the streets are named after their grid line. That changes things since I can guess that 1550 is shortly after (or before) 1500 which I just passed.
I purchased a Viao a few months back and was surprised to see Chrome appear on the desktop instead of IE. If Google wants to buy browser market share more power to them. I had not tried Chrome before and I'm glad I have, its a great browser.
Not exactly revolutionary but this is a great description of the game mechanics involved in playing to the casual audience. Like it or not any game that wants widespread adoption will not be targeting the hardcore players more willing to reroll when they fail. It's too bad really since those games were far more entertaining than end-game World of Warcraft is today.
Another good reason for games to reward players for their time is that it requires far less testing. if your Cow kills my level 99 Amazon because of a glitch then I may uninstall rather than rerolling. If I only lose the time it takes to run from the graveyard then I don't care as much about how well tuned the encounters are. Perhaps the article mentions this but I'm too lazy to read it.
Hopefully this line of research can be focused so that scientists can say "Get the hell out of SF before 5pm tonight!" and save some lives, you know?
Of course, with such little time between warning and the real event we'd likely have as many (or more) injuries and deaths as a result of the rush out the Oakland bridge or the panic that would ensue.
Having lived in an Earthquake prone state (Alaska) and somewhere near Tornado Alley (Kansas) I have been through both events many times and I would gladly take Earthquakes over tornados. Earthquakes come and go with very little warning so there isn't much you can do but run under a door or hide under a table. They're also very short lived and don't usually do too much damage. Tornados, OTOH, can be predicted to some extent leaving you huddled in fear for hours while a major storm cell passes overhead. And if you're unfortunate enough to have that cyclone of death drop on you-you are guarunteed to lose everything you own and maybe (although it seems unlikely these days) even your life.
Today was a gentle reminder of home for me today. I was on the phone with a guy in Cali when the quake hit. I can't remember the last time I had to tell someone "Hold on, earthquake.......... ok."
I count PL/PgSQL and postgres different tiers because they have different functions and in the case of one system I'm working on all database interactions are moderated by PL/PgSQL stored procedures.
That's interesting, what you have certainly provides the ideal MVC separation but I'm not sure that it would technically qualify as 3-tier. Only because you couldn't scale up or swap-out the PL/PgSQL without also affecting Postgres.
<crazy mode> That being said, it might be possible though. (And this is probably a really bad idea.... lol) but you could deploy middle-tier Postgres installations that held no data and used the dblink contrib package to do the real work. It would probably work. Albiet slower and maybe breaking atomicity.. But you would then be able to scale the stored procs without touching the database. The whole thing would be purely academic since most SP time is spent dealing with data anyway... Oh well. </crazy mode>
You need to get over your favorite language/technology/term you read in the trade-rag you read last week. And then you need to get over yourself.
Give it up slashdot crowd. mod_perl is not a valid technology for a large scale website! Perl was designed for a task, and that task was NOT enterprise application development.
Spoken like someone who has never had to build a very large site (doing "real" work) completely in Perl/mod_perl. I can tell you that it most certainly can scale to enterprise needs. Did this guy do it right? I don't think so either but he most certainly learned a valuable lesson. Hopefully other people will study what he has done and improve their own systems based on his work.
For the record, Java wasn't built for enterprise application development either. As with Perl, people discovered that Java had a future there and here we are today.
A properly designed website with n-tier sepperation will be able to handle a large load and scale infinitly. You'll note that large websites who actually do real things besides logging people's daily problems don't use mod_perl and a thousand servers. There's a reason for this.
You're assuming two dangerous things... (1) That you can't have n-tier and Perl. And (2) that large mod_perl sites require lots of servers. To believe any of these things is to demonstrate your horrific misunderstanding of computer science in general. I pity the company that lets you design their architecture. Wait, no I don't.... I'll gladly take their money for fixing your mistakes.
Oh yeah, and let us not forget some other languages that are showing promise... specifically Python+Zope. In fact, I know of several people implementing n-tier applications with PHP on the front, Python in the middle and PostgreSQL in the back with much success.
Because Intel is scurrying to try and play catch-up to AMD in the high-end market, time-to-market is critical for them.
I should point out that a VAST majority of AMD64/Opteron deployments are anything but "high-end." Where as most of the Itanium installations I've seen or heard of are of the >64 processor variety and most certainly qualify for the high-end badge.
You're statement would only be slightly more accurate if you had used "mid-range market" instead. But even there, Intel's saving grace has been a lack of a [stable / production ready] 64bit Windows platform.
What a world we live in. What happened to the nice Lycos dog?
Well, I don't have this first hand but they say he had a nasty run in with drugs... PHP maybe... He was known to burn his Lycos shares just to try the new designer drugs.. then came the booze... and the hookers.. One day, the cops found him face down in his own vomit on the sidewalk all coked up. They put him in the slammer for 20 to life where is is now known as Spot the Bead Freak. (Don't ask...)
but that could be avoided by loading software to memory as needed
...like a disk cache? </sarcasim>
That is the crux of the argument. You issue 'ls' a lot on a Unix server. But you don't use 'dd' all too often. So why allocate a ramdisk to store 'dd' when you don't really need it? The Linux kernel knows you hit/bin/ls a lot and sticks it in ram to make it faster. No ramdisk needed.
On the flip side, ramdisks ensure that whatever you want WILL be in RAM. So maybe temporary data files should go on a ramdisk./tmp anyone?
Not that slaping together server hardware is that dificult
It's not as easy as you might think. Maybe the dual proc you set up for the small biz you work for was simple, and it is, but that really doesn't qualify as a server anywhere near the league of an Itanium. Even high-end Dell machines go through a lot of QA to ensure the hardware and it's drivers play nice together. When you're talking about a $100,000+ machine with major support contracts and liabliity concerns - "slaping together server hardware" really isn't.
wouldn't you want boards that are optimized for use with either Xeon OR Itanium?
In this order, I want: 1) Stability 2) Performance
I don't care if the board is optimized for the Apple II. If it runs Itanium with equal or higher stability and equal or higher performance of the next best thing - I'll buy it.
Wouldn't creating compatability on this hardware reduce its performance? Or is this a non-issue?
Well, it's too soon to tell since nobody has one of these boards. And this is only a "plan" so it still may never happen. But I suspect the answer is "not necessarily."
If you can do tricks like this, then I would think there is hope you could create a board like this and not suffer any performance problems. (But I am not a chip designer so who the hell am I?)
Spoken like a true sheep. Why don't you look it up yourself instead of letting the/. crowd feed you BS.
I choose AMD and VIA mini/nano-ITX whenever possible, voting with $.
Further proof you have no idea what this is about... Intel does not want YOU to buy an Itanium. Get real - you couldn't afford it even if you wanted to.
They want the Fortune 100 companies that need machines with 128+ processors for manhandling multi-gig datasets in seconds to buy them.
They could really give a shit about you. Your dollars, in this case, don't prove anything.
Look, radicals are just about the only humans who actually DO think; everyone else just outputs a program. Well, that may be a little overbroad, but that is the gist of it.....
A little overbroad?
That's funny, there are some religous radicals out there who blew up some large buildings somewhere.. they thought god really wanted them to I guess. Or so someone told them.... and you're basically saying they're "thinking" and nobody else is...
Care to clarify what you mean by "radical" now?
Ya see, because one could say those same radicals were just outputing a program as well. So even if you were correct, the definition of "radical" is completely relative and your statement is worthless anyway.
If you want to know who the radicals are, look at those who can paint the world completely in black or white. These are people who blind themselves to the opposition as a matter of pride. They are right and there is nothing you can say to change their mind. These people, who see eachother as radicals and who you paint as the "real thinkers" of society, are the mindless drones.
Take someone who sees both sides of an issue. Someone who realizes that matters of importance are usually extremely complex and sees it all as a shade of grey. Those are the thinkers out there. And they're not usually considered radical, they're just "on the fence" and are usually ignored.
Re:Why should "cross platform" always mean Java/.N
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Ars Technica Tours Mono
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· Score: 1, Informative
I mean, take Python! (my favorite high level cross-platform programming languate)
No, Python is a SCRIPTING languate [sic]. It is already being used in places where it makes sense to embed a scripting language. Website programming, app automation and some Linux distros use Python to build a lot of their tools. For the latter, I don't think Python is a good choice but that's another thread entirely.
Java is a programming language. The differences between it and Python (as seen here) are largely semantic/structural. I would also add that the Java SDK supplies developers with FAR more common libraries than Python does which tends to cut development time. Semantically, Java is a pure-OO language. Python is not.
Furthermore, a lot of the verboseness and non-compactness of Java provides a lot of flexability. Opening a file in Python is a one liner. In Java you need 2 or more objects and 3+ lines of code. But you have much greater control over how the descripter is read.
What I don't understand is that when people are talking about "cross platform" programming, it almost always is about Java or.NET/Mono.
Maybe because nobody has a mainstream cross platform app that is written in a scripting language? Where as Java already has lots of exposure in that area thanks to Applets and other applications.
I don't think you can think of.NET as cross platform yet. Mono is a huge step in the right direction but there are several large pieces of.NET that are not ported to Linux or OSX yet. Winforms, to name one and RDBMS access is another. I'm not sure how RDBMS works under Mono but I imagine it's different from Win32.NET. Can someone prove me wrong here? Please?
Re:looks promissing but what is it really against?
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Ars Technica Tours Mono
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· Score: 4, Interesting
What are the methods currently used by GIMP, OpenOffice, Mozilla among others that already support multiple OS's?
Those projects are all written in C++. They all use libraries that are cross-platform but they're littered with #ifdef WINDOWS... do_win32_specifics(); #endif.
The theory is that with.NET you won't need ANY platform specfic code. If that turns out true, I will be completely amazed.
Maybe Ill start learning coding with this and kill more birds with the same shot:)
That's a really good idea. Mono and DotGNU make.NET really cross platform (which is neat) but a lot of companies will switch to.NET platforms. I know some pretty big ones that already have and are loving it.
What I *really* want to see is mod_mono with class wrappers for the identical IIS hooks. Imagine being able to develop web apps on your WinXP laptop on the road and push up to your Linux server farm without any worries. I'm crushing already.
RedHat AS/ES or Suse for the enterprise. The logic being that Suse and RedHat invest a lot in the mid-range to high-end server market. Not only do they make sure their kernels take advantage of this hardware but they'll support them as well. RPM may have it's problems but a well trained admin should know how to avoid them.
Gentoo's growth really shouldn't suprise anyone. The ideals behind Gentoo fit well with the entry-level sys admin / "hacker" types that run servers for most small companies.
I think it's sad that Debian, which is one of the best (if not THE best) server distro, appears to be losing momentum. I'm sure that will change though. Who knows, these stats are merely an indication.
Just my two cents on the matter. Heh, there goes the karma....
...we'll always have China to remind us that the good old USA still remains the land of the free.
"It could be worse" is an awful justification for the present. If you continue to think that way your statement above will look slightly different in a few years.......we'll always have China to remind us how good we used to have it.
That is to say, we could fall farther down the slippery sloap than China ever has.
(Yes, this post is BS - but this is YRO, such is the norm under that flag.)
I don't know about you guys, but I think having the source code to recompile it manually would help out immensely.
That's funny, I don't.
First, fixing this stack size problem is not a simple re-compile of the same code. Depending on how the driver is written this is certainly a non-trivial task.
Second, even if you had the source that does not mean that you could distribute a fixed version. Open source != Free Software.
Third, they may be closed source drivers but they are miles ahead of the current FOSS drivers. The Zealots can run their "pure" systems and suffer graphics glitches and poor 3d performance. I'd rather just use something that works. If that meant sticking with by old kernel a bit longer then so be it.
they just don't want to fork it over because somehow you may "magically" make the component up yourself out of basement and not have to buy it.
Not you - their competition. ATI has always been plauged by crap drivers. If ATI had a peak into how NVidia does it you can be sure they'd take something away from it. NVidia would lose a competitive advantage. The GPU war is nasty. The competition is killer - they'll take any advantage they can get.
Whenever you install software, or perform an update, don't just jump into the RPMs. Build it from scratch on a dev box or something. Get really really familiar with the package. RPMs gloss over a lot of detail that a good sys admin should know or at least have written down somewhere. Aside from the minuta of the package you're bound to learn a thing or two about how to set up a system. Some packages require a lot of security prep-work before they will work. Others will not. After you've seen enough of both worlds you'll understand why they should and how to implement it. Last but not least, all the README files you'll go through will likely teach you some neat tricks that can be applied everywhere.
Second, embrace your distro. If you're going to stick with RedHat see if you can get up2date working properly. Or with debian, apt-get hourly from a local "approved" package mirror. These things make your life a lot easier if done right.
Books are fine and good but they're usually out of date. Understanding the system will enable you to handle the changes between the print date of the book and the release date of the software.
Try to get topic-specific books if you can. It's impossible to cram all aspects of the admin life into a great tomb - even a dozen of them. You'll certainly be lacking detail. Check out Safari (no link, sorry.) They have an enourmous library and their parent company makes some of the best techincal books ever.
Lastly, KISS. Use a real load balancer, get an SSL accelerator, get a hardware firewall. Yes yes, Linux can do all these things - but you'll spend much more time maintaining it than you would the Cisco box. (If that won't start a flamewar on here, nothing will.)
How many ways does it have to be said: open source is winning so let's just relax.
It's not clear that open source is winning. Small battles here and there surely but the war is far from over.
Even if it were, the OS community should never "relax." This is business, and business is tough. Let your guard down at the wrong time and it's game over.
So I'm a Windows 2000 user. Where's the documentation?
Do you really need documentation? Maybe. Are you sure you represent the majority of Win 2k users? Probably not.
When you install Windows 2000 you never read the docs. You only open them up when you have problems or need to do something. How often is that (again, for most people?) Rarely. And you're more likely to go clicking around trying to find what you need before you crack open the 1,000 page manual that covers all the stuff you mentioned. Microsoft doesn't print it because it is a waste of money.
Besides, OS software install length runs into the years. How many patches go into it and the various smaller apps it comes with within that time span? Enough to render all that printed documentation useless or incomplete.
Online docs that can be downloaded are a much better alternative to dead trees. The vendor can update the documentation and be assured that the people who need to know will know. It can be printed if need be and electronic docs can be searched very quickly. And, most importantly, it saves them money.
Look at it another way - if not printing all the manuals with the product alows the vendor employ a couple more programmers leading to a better product or a shorter launch date, it's well worth it.
The aim is to get the thousands of applications and websites to drop MD5 for SHA-1 or SHA-256 by finding a counter-example of a security requirement in MD5.
Just make your alternative PORTABLE. I have 3 different md5 sum utilities on Unix that all give different checksums for the same data. The.NET libraries also produce different results.
It really sucks, MD5 has a lot uses when integrating disparate systems. Too bad nobody agrees on how MD5 should be calculated.
It really is usable now. After re-installing XP the other day I decided to try OO instead of installing office. (Mainly because I was too lazy to find the Office CD)
I'm somewhat pleased. It still has it's rough edges, mainly in the spreadsheet. Sorting does not always pick up table column headers. And something as simple as importing a text-deliminated file into the spreadsheet is NOT intuative.
The windowing toolkit needs to be shot. It really doesn't look like it belongs in Windows. The lack of XP themes and the UI components are slightly off. These are not crtiical issues, but if you want an application to "feel" solid it should conform to it's window environment.
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RIP. He was a visionary.
I guess Bill Gates won eh?
On that note, my vision prevents me from reading most street signs far enough in advance to make traffic changes (change langes, slow down and turn, etc.) safely. So I cannot make out Elmendorf DR at 50 yards but the funny looking church, the large hill, the abandoned school are very easy to spot well off in the distance. Or maybe I just drive too fast, that's almost certainly true. I use maps whenever I can but mostly to find the landmarks I'll use to make the turn instead of the name of the street. Obviously, a good GPS would solve this problem too but I've gotten very good at this and google maps on my phone is good enough.
There are some places, like Utah, where most of the streets are named after their grid line. That changes things since I can guess that 1550 is shortly after (or before) 1500 which I just passed.
I purchased a Viao a few months back and was surprised to see Chrome appear on the desktop instead of IE. If Google wants to buy browser market share more power to them. I had not tried Chrome before and I'm glad I have, its a great browser.
Not exactly revolutionary but this is a great description of the game mechanics involved in playing to the casual audience. Like it or not any game that wants widespread adoption will not be targeting the hardcore players more willing to reroll when they fail. It's too bad really since those games were far more entertaining than end-game World of Warcraft is today.
Another good reason for games to reward players for their time is that it requires far less testing. if your Cow kills my level 99 Amazon because of a glitch then I may uninstall rather than rerolling. If I only lose the time it takes to run from the graveyard then I don't care as much about how well tuned the encounters are. Perhaps the article mentions this but I'm too lazy to read it.
Hopefully this line of research can be focused so that scientists can say "Get the hell out of SF before 5pm tonight!" and save some lives, you know?
Of course, with such little time between warning and the real event we'd likely have as many (or more) injuries and deaths as a result of the rush out the Oakland bridge or the panic that would ensue.
Having lived in an Earthquake prone state (Alaska) and somewhere near Tornado Alley (Kansas) I have been through both events many times and I would gladly take Earthquakes over tornados. Earthquakes come and go with very little warning so there isn't much you can do but run under a door or hide under a table. They're also very short lived and don't usually do too much damage. Tornados, OTOH, can be predicted to some extent leaving you huddled in fear for hours while a major storm cell passes overhead. And if you're unfortunate enough to have that cyclone of death drop on you-you are guarunteed to lose everything you own and maybe (although it seems unlikely these days) even your life.
Today was a gentle reminder of home for me today. I was on the phone with a guy in Cali when the quake hit. I can't remember the last time I had to tell someone "Hold on, earthquake.......... ok."
The PHP layer issues either a SOAP or XML-RPC call to a Python server. You can either write a stand-alone server or use Zope to handle the requests.
I count PL/PgSQL and postgres different tiers because they have different functions and in the case of one system I'm working on all database interactions are moderated by PL/PgSQL stored procedures.
That's interesting, what you have certainly provides the ideal MVC separation but I'm not sure that it would technically qualify as 3-tier. Only because you couldn't scale up or swap-out the PL/PgSQL without also affecting Postgres.
<crazy mode>
That being said, it might be possible though. (And this is probably a really bad idea.... lol) but you could deploy middle-tier Postgres installations that held no data and used the dblink contrib package to do the real work. It would probably work. Albiet slower and maybe breaking atomicity.. But you would then be able to scale the stored procs without touching the database. The whole thing would be purely academic since most SP time is spent dealing with data anyway... Oh well.
</crazy mode>
You need to get over your favorite language/technology/term you read in the trade-rag you read last week. And then you need to get over yourself.
Give it up slashdot crowd. mod_perl is not a valid technology for a large scale website! Perl was designed for a task, and that task was NOT enterprise application development.
Spoken like someone who has never had to build a very large site (doing "real" work) completely in Perl/mod_perl. I can tell you that it most certainly can scale to enterprise needs. Did this guy do it right? I don't think so either but he most certainly learned a valuable lesson. Hopefully other people will study what he has done and improve their own systems based on his work.
For the record, Java wasn't built for enterprise application development either. As with Perl, people discovered that Java had a future there and here we are today.
A properly designed website with n-tier sepperation will be able to handle a large load and scale infinitly. You'll note that large websites who actually do real things besides logging people's daily problems don't use mod_perl and a thousand servers. There's a reason for this.
You're assuming two dangerous things... (1) That you can't have n-tier and Perl. And (2) that large mod_perl sites require lots of servers. To believe any of these things is to demonstrate your horrific misunderstanding of computer science in general. I pity the company that lets you design their architecture. Wait, no I don't.... I'll gladly take their money for fixing your mistakes.
Oh yeah, and let us not forget some other languages that are showing promise... specifically Python+Zope. In fact, I know of several people implementing n-tier applications with PHP on the front, Python in the middle and PostgreSQL in the back with much success.
And for the record, here are some large companies and sites heavily using mod_perl.
Want more?
Because Intel is scurrying to try and play catch-up to AMD in the high-end market, time-to-market is critical for them.
I should point out that a VAST majority of AMD64/Opteron deployments are anything but "high-end." Where as most of the Itanium installations I've seen or heard of are of the >64 processor variety and most certainly qualify for the high-end badge.
You're statement would only be slightly more accurate if you had used "mid-range market" instead. But even there, Intel's saving grace has been a lack of a [stable / production ready] 64bit Windows platform.
What a world we live in. What happened to the nice Lycos dog?
Well, I don't have this first hand but they say he had a nasty run in with drugs... PHP maybe... He was known to burn his Lycos shares just to try the new designer drugs.. then came the booze... and the hookers.. One day, the cops found him face down in his own vomit on the sidewalk all coked up. They put him in the slammer for 20 to life where is is now known as Spot the Bead Freak. (Don't ask...)
What a world indeed.
...which would clearly fall into the realm of an antitrust lawsuit should it carry on long enough for evidence to mount.
but that could be avoided by loading software to memory as needed
...like a disk cache?
/bin/ls a lot and sticks it in ram to make it faster. No ramdisk needed.
/tmp anyone?
</sarcasim>
That is the crux of the argument. You issue 'ls' a lot on a Unix server. But you don't use 'dd' all too often. So why allocate a ramdisk to store 'dd' when you don't really need it? The Linux kernel knows you hit
On the flip side, ramdisks ensure that whatever you want WILL be in RAM. So maybe temporary data files should go on a ramdisk.
Not that slaping together server hardware is that dificult
It's not as easy as you might think. Maybe the dual proc you set up for the small biz you work for was simple, and it is, but that really doesn't qualify as a server anywhere near the league of an Itanium. Even high-end Dell machines go through a lot of QA to ensure the hardware and it's drivers play nice together. When you're talking about a $100,000+ machine with major support contracts and liabliity concerns - "slaping together server hardware" really isn't.
wouldn't you want boards that are optimized for use with either Xeon OR Itanium?
In this order, I want:
1) Stability
2) Performance
I don't care if the board is optimized for the Apple II. If it runs Itanium with equal or higher stability and equal or higher performance of the next best thing - I'll buy it.
Wouldn't creating compatability on this hardware reduce its performance? Or is this a non-issue?
Well, it's too soon to tell since nobody has one of these boards. And this is only a "plan" so it still may never happen. But I suspect the answer is "not necessarily."
If you can do tricks like this, then I would think there is hope you could create a board like this and not suffer any performance problems. (But I am not a chip designer so who the hell am I?)
The Itanium is crap isn't it?
/. crowd feed you BS.
Spoken like a true sheep. Why don't you look it up yourself instead of letting the
I choose AMD and VIA mini/nano-ITX whenever possible, voting with $.
Further proof you have no idea what this is about... Intel does not want YOU to buy an Itanium. Get real - you couldn't afford it even if you wanted to.
They want the Fortune 100 companies that need machines with 128+ processors for manhandling multi-gig datasets in seconds to buy them.
They could really give a shit about you. Your dollars, in this case, don't prove anything.
Look, radicals are just about the only humans who actually DO think; everyone else just outputs a program. Well, that may be a little overbroad, but that is the gist of it.....
... and you're basically saying they're "thinking" and nobody else is ...
A little overbroad?
That's funny, there are some religous radicals out there who blew up some large buildings somewhere.. they thought god really wanted them to I guess. Or so someone told them.
Care to clarify what you mean by "radical" now?
Ya see, because one could say those same radicals were just outputing a program as well. So even if you were correct, the definition of "radical" is completely relative and your statement is worthless anyway.
If you want to know who the radicals are, look at those who can paint the world completely in black or white. These are people who blind themselves to the opposition as a matter of pride. They are right and there is nothing you can say to change their mind. These people, who see eachother as radicals and who you paint as the "real thinkers" of society, are the mindless drones.
Take someone who sees both sides of an issue. Someone who realizes that matters of importance are usually extremely complex and sees it all as a shade of grey. Those are the thinkers out there. And they're not usually considered radical, they're just "on the fence" and are usually ignored.
I mean, take Python! (my favorite high level cross-platform programming languate)
.NET/Mono.
.NET as cross platform yet. Mono is a huge step in the right direction but there are several large pieces of .NET that are not ported to Linux or OSX yet. Winforms, to name one and RDBMS access is another. I'm not sure how RDBMS works under Mono but I imagine it's different from Win32.NET. Can someone prove me wrong here? Please?
No, Python is a SCRIPTING languate [sic]. It is already being used in places where it makes sense to embed a scripting language. Website programming, app automation and some Linux distros use Python to build a lot of their tools. For the latter, I don't think Python is a good choice but that's another thread entirely.
Java is a programming language. The differences between it and Python (as seen here) are largely semantic/structural. I would also add that the Java SDK supplies developers with FAR more common libraries than Python does which tends to cut development time. Semantically, Java is a pure-OO language. Python is not.
Furthermore, a lot of the verboseness and non-compactness of Java provides a lot of flexability. Opening a file in Python is a one liner. In Java you need 2 or more objects and 3+ lines of code. But you have much greater control over how the descripter is read.
What I don't understand is that when people are talking about "cross platform" programming, it almost always is about Java or
Maybe because nobody has a mainstream cross platform app that is written in a scripting language? Where as Java already has lots of exposure in that area thanks to Applets and other applications.
I don't think you can think of
What are the methods currently used by GIMP, OpenOffice, Mozilla among others that already support multiple OS's?
... do_win32_specifics(); #endif.
.NET you won't need ANY platform specfic code. If that turns out true, I will be completely amazed.
:)
.NET really cross platform (which is neat) but a lot of companies will switch to .NET platforms. I know some pretty big ones that already have and are loving it.
Those projects are all written in C++. They all use libraries that are cross-platform but they're littered with #ifdef WINDOWS
The theory is that with
Maybe Ill start learning coding with this and kill more birds with the same shot
That's a really good idea. Mono and DotGNU make
What I *really* want to see is mod_mono with class wrappers for the identical IIS hooks. Imagine being able to develop web apps on your WinXP laptop on the road and push up to your Linux server farm without any worries. I'm crushing already.
RedHat AS/ES or Suse for the enterprise. The logic being that Suse and RedHat invest a lot in the mid-range to high-end server market. Not only do they make sure their kernels take advantage of this hardware but they'll support them as well. RPM may have it's problems but a well trained admin should know how to avoid them.
Gentoo's growth really shouldn't suprise anyone. The ideals behind Gentoo fit well with the entry-level sys admin / "hacker" types that run servers for most small companies.
I think it's sad that Debian, which is one of the best (if not THE best) server distro, appears to be losing momentum. I'm sure that will change though. Who knows, these stats are merely an indication.
Just my two cents on the matter. Heh, there goes the karma....
...we'll always have China to remind us that the good old USA still remains the land of the free.
...we'll always have China to remind us how good we used to have it.
"It could be worse" is an awful justification for the present. If you continue to think that way your statement above will look slightly different in a few years....
That is to say, we could fall farther down the slippery sloap than China ever has.
(Yes, this post is BS - but this is YRO, such is the norm under that flag.)
I don't know about you guys, but I think having the source code to recompile it manually would help out immensely.
That's funny, I don't.
First, fixing this stack size problem is not a simple re-compile of the same code. Depending on how the driver is written this is certainly a non-trivial task.
Second, even if you had the source that does not mean that you could distribute a fixed version. Open source != Free Software.
Third, they may be closed source drivers but they are miles ahead of the current FOSS drivers. The Zealots can run their "pure" systems and suffer graphics glitches and poor 3d performance. I'd rather just use something that works. If that meant sticking with by old kernel a bit longer then so be it.
they just don't want to fork it over because somehow you may "magically" make the component up yourself out of basement and not have to buy it.
Not you - their competition. ATI has always been plauged by crap drivers. If ATI had a peak into how NVidia does it you can be sure they'd take something away from it. NVidia would lose a competitive advantage. The GPU war is nasty. The competition is killer - they'll take any advantage they can get.
Before I get modded to oblivion, hear me out.
Whenever you install software, or perform an update, don't just jump into the RPMs. Build it from scratch on a dev box or something. Get really really familiar with the package. RPMs gloss over a lot of detail that a good sys admin should know or at least have written down somewhere. Aside from the minuta of the package you're bound to learn a thing or two about how to set up a system. Some packages require a lot of security prep-work before they will work. Others will not. After you've seen enough of both worlds you'll understand why they should and how to implement it. Last but not least, all the README files you'll go through will likely teach you some neat tricks that can be applied everywhere.
Second, embrace your distro. If you're going to stick with RedHat see if you can get up2date working properly. Or with debian, apt-get hourly from a local "approved" package mirror. These things make your life a lot easier if done right.
Books are fine and good but they're usually out of date. Understanding the system will enable you to handle the changes between the print date of the book and the release date of the software.
Try to get topic-specific books if you can. It's impossible to cram all aspects of the admin life into a great tomb - even a dozen of them. You'll certainly be lacking detail. Check out Safari (no link, sorry.) They have an enourmous library and their parent company makes some of the best techincal books ever.
Lastly, KISS. Use a real load balancer, get an SSL accelerator, get a hardware firewall. Yes yes, Linux can do all these things - but you'll spend much more time maintaining it than you would the Cisco box. (If that won't start a flamewar on here, nothing will.)
And, lest I forget, good luck!
How many ways does it have to be said: open source is winning so let's just relax.
It's not clear that open source is winning. Small battles here and there surely but the war is far from over.
Even if it were, the OS community should never "relax." This is business, and business is tough. Let your guard down at the wrong time and it's game over.
I hope you were being sarcastic...
So I'm a Windows 2000 user. Where's the documentation?
Do you really need documentation? Maybe. Are you sure you represent the majority of Win 2k users? Probably not.
When you install Windows 2000 you never read the docs. You only open them up when you have problems or need to do something. How often is that (again, for most people?) Rarely. And you're more likely to go clicking around trying to find what you need before you crack open the 1,000 page manual that covers all the stuff you mentioned. Microsoft doesn't print it because it is a waste of money.
Besides, OS software install length runs into the years. How many patches go into it and the various smaller apps it comes with within that time span? Enough to render all that printed documentation useless or incomplete.
Online docs that can be downloaded are a much better alternative to dead trees. The vendor can update the documentation and be assured that the people who need to know will know. It can be printed if need be and electronic docs can be searched very quickly. And, most importantly, it saves them money.
Look at it another way - if not printing all the manuals with the product alows the vendor employ a couple more programmers leading to a better product or a shorter launch date, it's well worth it.
The aim is to get the thousands of applications and websites to drop MD5 for SHA-1 or SHA-256 by finding a counter-example of a security requirement in MD5.
.NET libraries also produce different results.
Just make your alternative PORTABLE. I have 3 different md5 sum utilities on Unix that all give different checksums for the same data. The
It really sucks, MD5 has a lot uses when integrating disparate systems. Too bad nobody agrees on how MD5 should be calculated.
It really is usable now. After re-installing XP the other day I decided to try OO instead of installing office. (Mainly because I was too lazy to find the Office CD)
I'm somewhat pleased. It still has it's rough edges, mainly in the spreadsheet. Sorting does not always pick up table column headers. And something as simple as importing a text-deliminated file into the spreadsheet is NOT intuative.
The windowing toolkit needs to be shot. It really doesn't look like it belongs in Windows. The lack of XP themes and the UI components are slightly off. These are not crtiical issues, but if you want an application to "feel" solid it should conform to it's window environment.