What does this mean for the industry as a whole?
on
Salon in Dire Straits
·
· Score: 1, Troll
While I'm glad to Salon go (despite some really well written pieces, whoever ran it was simply TOO focused on being Anti-Republican, even to the point of publishing drivel if need be. I, and I'd imagine lots of others, would have subscribed if it hadn't been for that), I'm concerned with what it means for the Industry of online publications, especially Slashdot.
I wonder what we can do as a community to ensure Slashdot's survival? Hopefully everyone has subscribed, especially now that they take credit cards!
(Turns out this was announced during the Blackout, so a lot of folks may have missed it.)
That allowed dangling comma on the last line makes it easy to move lines around, etc. It works with any list structure in Perl.
Pretty nifty.:)
-Bill
Things that SHOULD be a bug...
on
Pet Bugs?
·
· Score: 2
This got me early in my Perl days. At first I was excited because I thought I had found a *genuine* bug in Perl:
all_show_me("please", "fire", "timothy");
sub call_show_me { &show_me(); &show_me; }
sub show_me { my ($a, $b, $c) = @_;
print "a = $a, b = $b, c = $c\n"; }
Results in: a = , b = , c = a = please, b = fire, c = timothy
Before submitting the bug report (and looking like an idoit), I dig some digging and found this in Programming Perl (section 2.7):
Subroutines may be called recursively. If a subroutine is called using the & form, the argument list is optional, and if omitted, no @_ array is set up for the subroutine: the @_ array of the calling routine at the time of the call is visible to called subroutine instead. This is an efficiency mechanism that new users may wish to avoid.
Personally, I don't really buy the efficeny argument. I understand in recursive programming it could be perceived as a big savings, but let's look at how much time it actually saves:
use Benchmark;
timethese(100000, { 'Fast' => sub { &allegedly_fast("fire ", "timothy") }, 'Slow' => sub { &allegedly_slow("fire ", "timothy") } } );
sub allegedly_fast { &silly_append; }
sub allegedly_slow { &silly_append($_[0], $_[1]); }
So far 100,000 function calls, the savings is.15 seconds. Bah! Factor in the number of developer time lost tripping over this silliness, and it's more than what's been saved by probably all Perl programs actually and intentionally using it on the planet. Personally, I hope this goes away in Perl6.:)
SELECT * FROM accurate WHERE SQL != SEQUEL No rows returned.
Actually, what most everyone knows as SQL and Sequel are the same thing, at least in the same sense that SQL-86, SQL-92, etc. are the same thing. (I.e. there are obvious enhancements, etc. to the language as time passed and it evolved, but the language itself is still what we think of as "sql".)
IBM changed the name from SEQUEL to SQL in the late 70's as SEQUEL was found to be an existing trademark.
"Anyway, the really stunning thing is that, of all the media outlets, MSNBC points out that just one of Microsoft's poor design decisions has cost consumers $8.75 billion, and wonders why nobody has sued."
If you look through the Slashdot archives, MSNBC has historically been one of the loudest mainstream (read: not theregister.co.uk) MSFT-criticisers. This is typical of them.
MSNBC didn't really criticize them. They reprinted an article that in turns quotes a consultant talking about MS's poor judgement in making it easy to run applications via email (and thus paving the road for the I Love Your virus and it's ilk.) That's quite a few degrees of seperation from them running an editorial stating MS should be sued from their 8.75 billion screwup. (Which they should be. It'll be interesting to see if a class-action law suit is ever filed, as it's probably not too late.)
It's an easy mistake to make, especially when Jamie, Timothy, or Michael post a story. (IMHO, they tend to use slashdot as a ranting board with ill-concieved ideas as they would otherwise find themselves rightly ignored or dismissed.[1] Witness that ~69.5% of the story Jamie posted was just drivel from someone who is neither a qualified economist, entrepreneur, or software engineer, yet important enough to justify *NOT* being a simple follow-up comment, but up there with the story.)
Anyway, It's well worth clicking through the story though, to get the straight scoop. Sure, you may not be the first post, but any comments you do make will be better informed, and you'll make slash a better community for it.
-Bill
[1] I know, I know, anything negative about an editor is a troll of flamebait. Mod me down. *sigh*
Please consider the fact that Blizzard is suing people who write software to interoperate with theirs when deciding whether you want to purchase this game.
Michael, what would the harm have been in posting this as a comment?
It's not a technical correction, additional information, etc. -- things that are logical as updates.
Any regular processing that requires human intervention is setting yourself up for failure, not setting yourself up for success. People are people, and we all forget things. Working late, bleary eyed, the best of us can forget to "copy files to the network server for back."
Suggestions as to have users sign papers to say I know I need to back up, and if I don't it's my fault, yada yada are bad too. That's not solving the problem, that CYA. Lame.
Workstation backup isn't that hard. If you totally lose a drive, all you need to restore it are the app and OS binaries, and the user's data. The app and OS are on CD's, so those serve as backups for that, so it's the user's data we need to focus on.
Designate a few folders to back up. E.g. where-ever email is stored, the desktop, a user folder (if it's in windows, Documents and Settings is a good one, as a lot of programs default things to save in there. if it's unix, just make it the user's home directory). You don't need to backup the entire drive. In fact, that's more than likely a waste, except in a few cases.
Users can easily understand the should work in a specified folder or folders underneath that folder. This doesn't require an additional step (it's still just saving), it's a matter of where they're saving.
Are there hypothetical holes still? Sure. Do they happen in practice that often (if ever)? Not really. If you're super paranoid (or super diligent, depending on how you look at it), you can write a process that looks for modified files outside the targeted back up region. If it's a file common on a lot of machines, it's probably a standard file (e.g. a config, preference, etc.), and you can most likely whitelist those. Others could notify yourself (or the user) via email, and politely ask that they move it if it is to be backed up.
Lastly, *test* *your* *setup*. This cannot be emphasized enough. You don't need to delete a user file or anything dumb like that. Just ask someone to name a random important file, and confirm you can restore it to a different drive. Or pretend your production server just crashed and you need to bring it back.
This has two key advantages: 1) obviously confirms your setup works, 2) lets you get comfortable with the restore process in a non-stressed manner, which things going wrong is okay. You don't want to be trying to figure it out when you're already stressed out because things have gone horribly wrong.
Your bet would be wrong. The TiVo is constantly recording and there is no low-power mode that it goes into, so that's not an issue.
That's what I thought too, but then I've always wondered what happens when I turn hit the "Power Off" on my Sony Tivo. Does it just turn the green LED off?:)
Um, yes. Slashot always has been (and I imagine it always will be) a site for Rob and friends to post stories they find interesting, review books and movies they think are worth reviewing, and just say shit they think is worth saying.
I disagree. I think some of the editors, Rob, Hemos, etc. included, have worked to make it a site they'd like to read. Rob has said as much in his posts. And they've done a great job of it, and along with it, built a sizable community.
With that community seem to have come a new wave of editors who seem like they have been appointed leaders. I would place timothy, michael, and chrisd amongst them. This is a depature from the early generation in several significant ways.
First, they didn't use slashdot as their tree stump. Sure, they would a post a story with a blurb or two throw in, but if they wanted to make a comment, they posted in the comments not make an independent story of it.
This story is a perfect example. Why couldn't have chrisd posted his comments in the earlier story on the same subject? I have no problem with him expressing his opinion, only the manner in which he expressed it. The difference is in how you perceive yourself in context of the users. I think Rob, etc. see themselves as users. I think T/M/C see themselves as above users. Obviously, some find this annoying. (Myself included.) If, as you state, this has always been the case, I challenge you to find comparable examples of Rob, Hemos, CowboyNeal, etc. doing the same. [1]
I think my case is pretty clear and simple. Based upon other discussions here, I know I'm far from the only person who's felt the same thing about the same editors. This isn't rabid I-hate-everything Slashdot critizim, but legitamite concern about a community we find ourselves members off.
Anyway, my two cents.
-Bill
[1] Although to be honest, I probably wouldn't have a problem with such posts as I'm a fan of them and consider them informed individuals.;-)
I realize how ridiculously easy it is to get a new IP address on a dialup system or in a facility where someone has access to many addresses but wouldn't a simple IP block after so many attempts help discourage the casual DoS but still allow the legitimate user access when they come to make their last minute bid?
There are a lot of solutions that seem great at first, but encounter difficulties once you try to execute them. In this instance, you're totally forgetting about a couple of factors.
1) Scalability - how do keep this IP list? How do you search it quickly? How do store the data? Expire it? Compute your run time for values of N > 100,000,000. Does it still work?
2) Proxy servers & routers/ip masquerading. While a lot of slashdotter's don't live behind them, a lot of Internet users, including those using very popular providers, such as AOL, do. If you block based upon IP, you still allow AOL users to block one other. A step up from nothing, perhaps, but far from a complete solution.
There's probably more, but those are two off the top of my head.
OFX seems like a good offering, but problematic. Why not offer users a choice of how to sync their data with financial institutions?
It wouldn't be too difficult to simulate a user logging in and screen scape the needed data. It's be pretty easy to do in Perl actually, where there are already a ton of moudules doing some similiar. Granted it's a bit hackey, but for cases where the FI won't cooperate with the Gnucash project and set up OFX, it's preferable to having nothing.
The Gnucash project is also in a good position to define an abstract class for how the interface to each institution should work. Then different programmers could go about implementing that class for different institutions. (Much like how DBI or ODBC establishes an generic database interface each database drivers handles the specific for each type of db.)
Ah, but while Perl is a nice language, it isn't purely functional.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would ever claim that Perl is a functional language. Did I miss something? It's probably better described as a procedural language with some OOP sledgehammered in.
No, Haskell is the only real choice here.
Now THAT'S ass-talking! What about Lisp, Scheme, ML, etc?
If you mean strictly Perl the Language, or strictly Perl the Interpreter, you're correct. However, if you just mean Perl, which includes the language, the intreptutor, the debugger, it's standard libraries, etc. then Perl does come with CGI.pm built in.
Rather shocking that timothy posted this one, as he's usually the worst about posting misleading stories, endless duplicates, etc.
You don't know what a relief it is to hear someone else say that. For the longest time, I thought it was just me who had problems with Timothy.
I wonder though, do others really care or is it simply a case of everyone-is-going-to-bother-someone?
I.e. some folks here seem to like Katz, some don't, and many feel strongly one way or the other. Is Timothy simply my Katz and I should quit complaining? Or is he really a really bad editor? Are there big Timothy fans out there? Are there other people who, like me, would really like to see him move from a Slashdot Editor to a regular member?
-Bill
BTW, Yes, I realize this is off-topic, or can be peceived as a troll, etc. But then again, these are the discussion boards of Slashdot, and sometimes Off-Topic is appropiate. Some of the best threads I remember from the hey-days of Usenet were the ones, that by strictist definition, were "off-topic" ones. Anyway, mod me down I guess, if you feel that strongly that this converstation shouldn't even take place.
In reality a text file configuration is worth a million GUI config tools.
Why is this always put in the context of one or the either?
Why can't you have a nice human-parasable text file AND a GUI interface?
Sure, I like the text interface for Apache. If you run multiple servers, it's *awesome*. Being able to rsync or dist one file is a huge timesaver over manually pulling up the config screen on anywhere from a dozen to fifty servers. Providing a base configuration and having machine specific settings in an include files rocks. And some of the slick tricks you can pull off w/ embedded perl (via mod_perl) is a blessing.
However, there are times when I just want to try something out, or setup something special on my dev box and HATE crawling through the apache docs to try to figure out the specific syntax I need. Ugh. It's a total pain in the ass. The distributed documentation is only decent and light on examples. The O'Reilly Apache book is one of the few that suck. I'd love a little gui application I could pop up and get the basics in place. Sure, one I know it, I'll probably do it by hand going forward, but jumpstarting would be a big timesaver.
So why not put this argument to bed and just offer both as built-in support with apache?
It depends on what field you're working in. Patterns are all the rage in OOP, and especially in Java. No doubt about that. Alas, they alone do not encompass all that is technology.
But, more to the point, patterns are a component of software engineering. Similiar to patterns, algorithms are a component of computer science. (Although it's probably safe to to say algorithms play a *much* larger compontent in CS, than patterns are in S.E.).
What's the difference between software engineering and computer science? Hard to explain, but it's a little bit akin to the difference between Physics and Engineering. The former tends to deal with matters more theoritcal, the latter, matters more pratical.
It worth noting that both algorithms and patterns feed into being a good software engineer, as least IMHO.
A shame his article isn't better written. It seems Nixon has some good arguments as to how to make yEnc better, but is having trouble making them.
Nixon seems intelligent, but he doesn't want to understand that his problems, as an admin, are different from those of his users. To quote:
And the bandwidth savings? That's an illusion. A smaller encoding scheme gives us exactly one benefit: faster downloads and uploads for the users.
... and...
The problem here isn't that we need a smaller encoding scheme, the problem is that we need a better way to post binaries on Usenet.
Well not really. What Nixon wants is a better way to distributed binaries on Usenet. Based upon the popularity, what the users want are faster downloads. That "exactly one benifit" seems to be pretty signifcant to them. As a admin, I'd guess that Nixon has pretty much high-speed access almost all the time. In that type of an enviroment, it's easy to forget the pain of life with a modem.
That disconnect is further demostrated by the iron-clad assertation that Usenet, in it's current form, is near perfect:
What was so broken? Nothing. Usenet was working just fine, and people were posting and downloading binaries just fine.
To me that conveyed a very unwelcoming aditude to anything that might rock the boat. Nixon feels everything is okay right, but it seems a lot of users seem to feel there is room for improvement.
More progress is likely to be made if the admins stop and understand why users are eger to adapt yenc instead of trying to dismiss as ignorant why they do so.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm glad to Salon go (despite some really well written pieces, whoever ran it was simply TOO focused on being Anti-Republican, even to the point of publishing drivel if need be. I, and I'd imagine lots of others, would have subscribed if it hadn't been for that), I'm concerned with what it means for the Industry of online publications, especially Slashdot.
I wonder what we can do as a community to ensure Slashdot's survival? Hopefully everyone has subscribed, especially now that they take credit cards!
(Turns out this was announced during the Blackout, so a lot of folks may have missed it.)
-Bill
This is my favorite "supported" bug in Perl:
:)
my %editors = (
'good' => [ qw{CmdrTaco Hemos CowboyNeal chrisd Cliff} ],
'bad' => [ qw{timothy michael jamie} ],
)
That allowed dangling comma on the last line makes it easy to move lines around, etc. It works with any list structure in Perl.
Pretty nifty.
-Bill
a = , b = , c =
a = please, b = fire, c = timothy
Before submitting the bug report (and looking like an idoit), I dig some digging and found this in Programming Perl (section 2.7):
Subroutines may be called recursively. If a subroutine is called using the & form, the argument list is optional, and if omitted, no @_ array is set up for the subroutine: the @_ array of the calling routine at the time of the call is visible to called subroutine instead. This is an efficiency mechanism that new users may wish to avoid.
Personally, I don't really buy the efficeny argument. I understand in recursive programming it could be perceived as a big savings, but let's look at how much time it actually saves:Benchmark: timing 100000 iterations of Fast, Slow...
Fast: 0 wallclock secs ( 0.48 usr + -0.01 sys = 0.47 CPU) @ 213333.33/s (n=100000)
Slow: 0 wallclock secs ( 0.62 usr + 0.00 sys = 0.62 CPU) @ 162025.32/s (n=100000)
So far 100,000 function calls, the savings is
-Bill
SELECT * FROM accurate WHERE SQL != SEQUEL
No rows returned.
Actually, what most everyone knows as SQL and Sequel are the same thing, at least in the same sense that SQL-86, SQL-92, etc. are the same thing. (I.e. there are obvious enhancements, etc. to the language as time passed and it evolved, but the language itself is still what we think of as "sql".)
IBM changed the name from SEQUEL to SQL in the late 70's as SEQUEL was found to be an existing trademark.
-Bill
If you're looking at software engineering as entire practice, I *strongly* recommend this book. Covers quite a lot and a lot of great points.
-Bill
"Anyway, the really stunning thing is that, of all the media outlets, MSNBC points out that just one of Microsoft's poor design decisions has cost consumers $8.75 billion, and wonders why nobody has sued."
If you look through the Slashdot archives, MSNBC has historically been one of the loudest mainstream (read: not theregister.co.uk) MSFT-criticisers. This is typical of them.
MSNBC didn't really criticize them. They reprinted an article that in turns quotes a consultant talking about MS's poor judgement in making it easy to run applications via email (and thus paving the road for the I Love Your virus and it's ilk.) That's quite a few degrees of seperation from them running an editorial stating MS should be sued from their 8.75 billion screwup. (Which they should be. It'll be interesting to see if a class-action law suit is ever filed, as it's probably not too late.)
It's an easy mistake to make, especially when Jamie, Timothy, or Michael post a story. (IMHO, they tend to use slashdot as a ranting board with ill-concieved ideas as they would otherwise find themselves rightly ignored or dismissed.[1] Witness that ~69.5% of the story Jamie posted was just drivel from someone who is neither a qualified economist, entrepreneur, or software engineer, yet important enough to justify *NOT* being a simple follow-up comment, but up there with the story.)
Anyway, It's well worth clicking through the story though, to get the straight scoop. Sure, you may not be the first post, but any comments you do make will be better informed, and you'll make slash a better community for it.
-Bill
[1] I know, I know, anything negative about an editor is a troll of flamebait. Mod me down. *sigh*
Please consider the fact that Blizzard is suing people who write software to interoperate with theirs when deciding whether you want to purchase this game.
Michael, what would the harm have been in posting this as a comment?
It's not a technical correction, additional information, etc. -- things that are logical as updates.
-Bill
Any regular processing that requires human intervention is setting
yourself up for failure, not setting yourself up for success. People
are people, and we all forget things. Working late, bleary eyed, the
best of us can forget to "copy files to the network server for back."
Suggestions as to have users sign papers to say I know I need to back
up, and if I don't it's my fault, yada yada are bad too. That's not
solving the problem, that CYA. Lame.
Workstation backup isn't that hard. If you totally lose a drive, all
you need to restore it are the app and OS binaries, and the user's
data. The app and OS are on CD's, so those serve as backups for that,
so it's the user's data we need to focus on.
Designate a few folders to back up. E.g. where-ever email is stored,
the desktop, a user folder (if it's in windows, Documents and Settings
is a good one, as a lot of programs default things to save in there.
if it's unix, just make it the user's home directory). You don't need
to backup the entire drive. In fact, that's more than likely a waste,
except in a few cases.
Users can easily understand the should work in a specified folder or
folders underneath that folder. This doesn't require an additional
step (it's still just saving), it's a matter of where they're saving.
Are there hypothetical holes still? Sure. Do they happen in practice
that often (if ever)? Not really. If you're super paranoid (or super
diligent, depending on how you look at it), you can write a process
that looks for modified files outside the targeted back up region. If
it's a file common on a lot of machines, it's probably a standard file
(e.g. a config, preference, etc.), and you can most likely whitelist
those. Others could notify yourself (or the user) via email, and
politely ask that they move it if it is to be backed up.
Lastly, *test* *your* *setup*. This cannot be emphasized enough. You
don't need to delete a user file or anything dumb like that. Just
ask someone to name a random important file, and confirm you can
restore it to a different drive. Or pretend your production server
just crashed and you need to bring it back.
This has two key advantages: 1) obviously confirms your setup works,
2) lets you get comfortable with the restore process in a non-stressed
manner, which things going wrong is okay. You don't want to be trying
to figure it out when you're already stressed out because things have
gone horribly wrong.
Anyway, HTH.
-Bill
Your bet would be wrong. The TiVo is constantly recording and there is no low-power mode that it goes into, so that's not an issue.
:)
That's what I thought too, but then I've always wondered what happens when I turn hit the "Power Off" on my Sony Tivo. Does it just turn the green LED off?
-Bill
Um, yes. Slashot always has been (and I imagine it always will be) a site for Rob and friends to post stories they find interesting, review books and movies they think are worth reviewing, and just say shit they think is worth saying.
;-)
I disagree. I think some of the editors, Rob, Hemos, etc. included, have worked to make it a site they'd like to read. Rob has said as much in his posts. And they've done a great job of it, and along with it, built a sizable community.
With that community seem to have come a new wave of editors who seem like they have been appointed leaders. I would place timothy, michael, and chrisd amongst them. This is a depature from the early generation in several significant ways.
First, they didn't use slashdot as their tree stump. Sure, they would a post a story with a blurb or two throw in, but if they wanted to make a comment, they posted in the comments not make an independent story of it.
This story is a perfect example. Why couldn't have chrisd posted his comments in the earlier story on the same subject? I have no problem with him expressing his opinion, only the manner in which he expressed it. The difference is in how you perceive yourself in context of the users. I think Rob, etc. see themselves as users. I think T/M/C see themselves as above users. Obviously, some find this annoying. (Myself included.) If, as you state, this has always been the case, I challenge you to find comparable examples of Rob, Hemos, CowboyNeal, etc. doing the same. [1]
I think my case is pretty clear and simple. Based upon other discussions here, I know I'm far from the only person who's felt the same thing about the same editors. This isn't rabid I-hate-everything Slashdot critizim, but legitamite concern about a community we find ourselves members off.
Anyway, my two cents.
-Bill
[1] Although to be honest, I probably wouldn't have a problem with such posts as I'm a fan of them and consider them informed individuals.
chrisd,
Honest question: what exactly are you qualifications that put you in such a high and mighty position to lecture us?
I mean, really, wtf?
Is Slashdot just the editor's personal soapbox?
-Bill
I disagree. He qualified his statement with:
...if you get to hundreds of tables, you need to look at what you're doing wrong.
;-)
-Bill
I'm afraid it's not that easy, CmdrTaco.
FWIW, the person you responded too wasn't CmdrTaco.
Give him points for being clever though.
-Bill
I realize how ridiculously easy it is to get a new IP address on a dialup system or in a facility where someone has access to many addresses but wouldn't a simple IP block after so many attempts help discourage the casual DoS but still allow the legitimate user access when they come to make their last minute bid?
There are a lot of solutions that seem great at first, but encounter difficulties once you try to execute them. In this instance, you're totally forgetting about a couple of factors.
1) Scalability - how do keep this IP list? How do you search it quickly? How do store the data? Expire it? Compute your run time for values of N > 100,000,000. Does it still work?
2) Proxy servers & routers/ip masquerading. While a lot of slashdotter's don't live behind them, a lot of Internet users, including those using very popular providers, such as AOL, do. If you block based upon IP, you still allow AOL users to block one other. A step up from nothing, perhaps, but far from a complete solution.
There's probably more, but those are two off the top of my head.
-Bill
OFX seems like a good offering, but problematic. Why not offer users a choice of how to sync their data with financial institutions?
It wouldn't be too difficult to simulate a user logging in and screen scape the needed data. It's be pretty easy to do in Perl actually, where there are already a ton of moudules doing some similiar. Granted it's a bit hackey, but for cases where the FI won't cooperate with the Gnucash project and set up OFX, it's preferable to having nothing.
The Gnucash project is also in a good position to define an abstract class for how the interface to each institution should work. Then different programmers could go about implementing that class for different institutions. (Much like how DBI or ODBC establishes an generic database interface each database drivers handles the specific for each type of db.)
Anyway, my two cents.
-Bill
Ah, but while Perl is a nice language, it isn't purely functional.
I don't think anyone in their right mind would ever claim that Perl is a functional language. Did I miss something? It's probably better described as a procedural language with some OOP sledgehammered in.
No, Haskell is the only real choice here.
Now THAT'S ass-talking! What about Lisp, Scheme, ML, etc?
-Bill
If you mean strictly Perl the Language, or strictly Perl the Interpreter, you're correct. However, if you just mean Perl, which includes the language, the intreptutor, the debugger, it's standard libraries, etc. then Perl does come with CGI.pm built in.
-Bill
How on earth do all you Californians deal with it?
When I grew up in the Midwest, it was Severe Thunderstorms, Snow Storms, Floods, and Tornados.
If I lived on the East Coast, I'd worry about Hurricanes.
I live on the West Coast and it's Earthquakes.
Pick your poison.
-Bill
Ever look at what's availible from Kazaa et all?
Ever look at what damage a gun can do?
Perhaps that's why they don't let guns in workplaces either?
-Bill
Rather shocking that timothy posted this one, as he's usually the worst about posting misleading stories, endless duplicates, etc.
You don't know what a relief it is to hear someone else say that. For the longest time, I thought it was just me who had problems with Timothy.
I wonder though, do others really care or is it simply a case of everyone-is-going-to-bother-someone?
I.e. some folks here seem to like Katz, some don't, and many feel strongly one way or the other. Is Timothy simply my Katz and I should quit complaining? Or is he really a really bad editor? Are there big Timothy fans out there? Are there other people who, like me, would really like to see him move from a Slashdot Editor to a regular member?
-Bill
BTW, Yes, I realize this is off-topic, or can be peceived as a troll, etc. But then again, these are the discussion boards of Slashdot, and sometimes Off-Topic is appropiate. Some of the best threads I remember from the hey-days of Usenet were the ones, that by strictist definition, were "off-topic" ones. Anyway, mod me down I guess, if you feel that strongly that this converstation shouldn't even take place.
...Provigil, whose name is shorthand for "promotes vigilance."
*sigh*
Lembas would have been such a better name.
-Bill
In reality a text file configuration is worth a million GUI config tools.
Why is this always put in the context of one or the either?
Why can't you have a nice human-parasable text file AND a GUI interface?
Sure, I like the text interface for Apache. If you run multiple servers, it's *awesome*. Being able to rsync or dist one file is a huge timesaver over manually pulling up the config screen on anywhere from a dozen to fifty servers. Providing a base configuration and having machine specific settings in an include files rocks. And some of the slick tricks you can pull off w/ embedded perl (via mod_perl) is a blessing.
However, there are times when I just want to try something out, or setup something special on my dev box and HATE crawling through the apache docs to try to figure out the specific syntax I need. Ugh. It's a total pain in the ass. The distributed documentation is only decent and light on examples. The O'Reilly Apache book is one of the few that suck. I'd love a little gui application I could pop up and get the basics in place. Sure, one I know it, I'll probably do it by hand going forward, but jumpstarting would be a big timesaver.
So why not put this argument to bed and just offer both as built-in support with apache?
-Bill
I mean really, what other algorithm also helps you move and pack a truck?
-Bill
Er, not really.
It depends on what field you're working in. Patterns are all the rage in OOP, and especially in Java. No doubt about that. Alas, they alone do not encompass all that is technology.
But, more to the point, patterns are a component of software engineering. Similiar to patterns, algorithms are a component of computer science. (Although it's probably safe to to say algorithms play a *much* larger compontent in CS, than patterns are in S.E.).
What's the difference between software engineering and computer science? Hard to explain, but it's a little bit akin to the difference between Physics and Engineering. The former tends to deal with matters more theoritcal, the latter, matters more pratical.
It worth noting that both algorithms and patterns feed into being a good software engineer, as least IMHO.
-Bill
A shame his article isn't better written. It seems Nixon has some good arguments as to how to make yEnc better, but is having trouble making them.
...
Nixon seems intelligent, but he doesn't want to understand that his problems, as an admin, are different from those of his users. To quote:
And the bandwidth savings? That's an illusion. A smaller encoding scheme gives us exactly one benefit: faster downloads and uploads for the users.
... and
The problem here isn't that we need a smaller encoding scheme, the problem is that we need a better way to post binaries on Usenet.
Well not really. What Nixon wants is a better way to distributed binaries on Usenet. Based upon the popularity, what the users want are faster downloads. That "exactly one benifit" seems to be pretty signifcant to them. As a admin, I'd guess that Nixon has pretty much high-speed access almost all the time. In that type of an enviroment, it's easy to forget the pain of life with a modem.
That disconnect is further demostrated by the iron-clad assertation that Usenet, in it's current form, is near perfect:
What was so broken? Nothing. Usenet was working just fine, and people were posting and downloading binaries just fine.
To me that conveyed a very unwelcoming aditude to anything that might rock the boat. Nixon feels everything is okay right, but it seems a lot of users seem to feel there is room for improvement.
More progress is likely to be made if the admins stop and understand why users are eger to adapt yenc instead of trying to dismiss as ignorant why they do so.
-Bill