I've had a good working relationship for some years with SoftRP.net . The Web site says they're in Canada, and this may be true, but the outfit originates from the Ukraine. AFAIK, most are graduates from the University of Kiev.
These are a varied and skilled bunch of coding mercenaries, and they quickly and graciously executed a number of small projects for me (figureheading for a small company that was the actual customer). Their prices are a bit higher than your run-of-the-mill Indian/Chinese shop, but that was compensated by their ability to think for themselves and produce a working product off a simple, not overly detailed spec. Also, and I find this important, they ask questions rather than stumbling into blind alleys. As I mentioned, I'm a one man show and my projects were small, on the order of few man-weeks, and I was sorry not to have a decent-sized job for them to chew on. They certainly suggested they had manpower in reserve.
No, I'm not affiliated or kickbacked or anything. I'm just a satisfied customer and would likely hire them again for the next project that comes up.
My only experience with IIS is the exercise of exorcising it on sight whenever I accidentally activate it in Windows. One reason I do this is that I'm reasonably familiar and comfortable with Apache, and would rather take the trouble to install Apache on a Windows box than fiddle with the available IIS. Another is that I've heard some bad things. Don't sue me for this, I don't know if this is true:
Frequent security issues. AFAIK, more than Apache.
Microsoft once tried to switch a Web site of their own from Apache to IIS, and failed. They quickly fell back to Apache after their IIS-based site crashed and burned in some way. I seem to remember the name Akmai associated with this story.
Yes, Apache (Web server) is somewhat hard to configure. There's a large file with a lot of (documented) features and settings, and a lot of ways to go wrong there.
On the other hand, Apache is incredibly flexible: You can use it as a proxy, it does ssl, it fronts for Java Web servers, it rewrites URLs, it authenticates, it slices, it dices and I'm probably just scratching the surface.
Someone who knows his way around the config file - and that's really the only crucial thing to know about Apache - is able to get it to sing and dance. The header in the file warns people to read in-depth documentation rather than relying on comments in the file. There is documentation, there are books. If you're going to play at being a 'professional' Web admin, then you need some of this stuff.
For the less seriously inclined Web maker, programs like Webmin let you fiddle with a subset of Apache settings through a HTML front end. On an even broader front, many Web site hosters provide a dumbed-down interface that allows only a small subset of configuration options and keeps the user from doing anything really stupid.
And for anyone not covered above, yes, I'd recommend getting a simpler Web server. Personally, I find Tomcat a little easier to configure than Apache, but that's just me. I'm sure there are dramatically simpler products. Hell, lots of people have written their own!
The discussion in this topic is not about the complexity of using the Apache Web server, but the complexity of managing an Apache project. I'm not sure if I'd be perfectly happy "doing" an OS project under Apache, but... that's what choice is about, right?
I'm deeply concerned about the rapid decline of species, about global warming, the limping economy, political corruption, the war in Iraq and the ever-shortening attention spans of
"... Andreas Scheuer, a parliamentarian serving under the banner of the conservative Christian Social Union, told Der Spiegel that violent games 'have no place in Germany's bedrooms.'
It just so happens that my girlfriend happen to be into bedroom activities that involve bondage, whips and canes. If he wants to take that away I'm gonna show him violence!
Ignorant ugly bastard. As if his useless outdated party didn't have worthwhile problems to take on. Oh right, I forgot - they don't have a clue as to where to begin, so instead of twiddling their thumbs and picking their noses they prefer to fix what ain't broke.
From the sound of it, this shiny new UI adds some long-awaited convenience for users.
On the other hand, it also means that OO.org, which has been playing catch-up on the GUI front, will want to go back to the drawing board yet again.
Also, users will once again need to learn new gestures and procedures. Some people, such as my girlfriend (oops - what am I doing on/. ?) have been annoyed for many years at all the subtle but irritating changes from version to version of Word & Co. Yes, there are compatibility switches, but they only lighten the pain, they don't relieve it completely.
No government that fears its citizens should be permitted to have anything to say on running the Internet. They should be regularly mocked and condemned, their leaders lampooned and their citizens encouraged to throw out the tyrants.
I agree fully. This is exactly why attempts are being made to wrest control of the TLDs away from the US government.
Oh wait... the US government no longer fears anything: thanks to Diebold, the citizens don't matter any more.
The first time I heard of CMP was when I got a letter telling me my subscription to BYTE was being phased out, along with BYTE magazine itself. As compensation, CMP generously offered me a choice of one of the worthless other magazines they were carrying. I don't know how long ago this was, but you can probably tell from my tone that I'm still angry about this.
I can no longer call CMP's entire assortment of rags worthless, because there are at least one or two I enjoy reading once in a while, and which I respect. But all in all, I see CMP as one of the first behemoths of dumbed-down conglomerated corporate press. I believe CMP has done useful, unbiased, technically qualified coverage of computer-news a disservice.
I find some small consolation in two publications: ct and SlashDot.
While this will not do much to encourage the Unwashed Masses to embrace Linux, it certainly shows that Linux is a serious operating system suited to high-powered computing (or at least to hosting high-powered computing applications). I hope at least a few Fortune 500 CIOs will take notice.
Got it, and thank you for your insightful comments.
I think the truth is about halfway between our stances. As you point out, late adoptation is not necessarily a bad thing, but in my company late adoptation is not combined with seeing how it went for others. It's not "slow and cautious," learning from the experience of others, it's just slow. This partly has to do with the fact that my outfit is in Germany, and technological/business trends from the US come here with some delay, always, the good as well as the bad.
As it is, if XP comes here it will be too late for me. Thanks to outsourcing, I'm now an analyst rather than a developer. Better than no job, I guess, but I happen to like developing, and it's what I got myself hired for.
I'm happy to hear that XP practices are helping some high-profile companies. Alas,
I work for a company that adopts new trends at least 5 years late - that's about when they're being phased out elsewhere. For example, we're now deeply committed (or should I say sentenced?) to J2EE, RUP and outsourcing;
Our company works on a contract basis, with complete and "firm" specifications (BDUF, anybody?) going in and deliverables coming out, with no wiggle room, no negotiation (at least from our side), no onsite customer.
Given such an environment, which I'm sure will sound familiar to others, do we stand a chance of ever being able to work this way too?
Come to think of it, you may be right. Modern Capitalism and the way it is curtailing freedom of intellectual property may be in the process of burying the best and most efficient in favor of the most advertised, best funded, most highly FUDded, what have you.
SAP is consultingware, sold to bosses, not users. Its user friendliness is abysmal, and the company bleeds its customers for obscene amounts of money in exchange for catering to their fears of not being able to take care of their business. Business processes worldwide are bent and pushed to fit the SAP way of working, rather than the other way around. In other words, yes, SAP is, umm, "evil" in the./ sense.
They are also a corporation, and pretty much a monopolist riding a one-trick pony. Of course they see Open Source as a threat! And as a competition, they must combat whatever threatens their bottom line.
In other words, they had to say this or something like it, sooner or later. You could say they're legally obligated to.
Nothing new or unusual, in other words. Just the usual FUD. *sigh*
Justice, no. But it's enough for me that they have differently aligned interests.
During the Clinton administration, MS was investigated, tried and found guilty of illegal business practices. If I remember correctly, they were about to get slapped with hefty remedies when Bush took control and changed the verdict to a slap on the wrist. I guess from this that the Reps support MS even more than the Dems did. But of course it could be just that they paid Bush better than Clinton.
Our entire government is up for sale to the highest bidder. "Disgusted" doesn't even come close to what I feel. I want to see the whole lot of them marched out in handcuffs and at gunpoint. Exceptions, granted.
In the interest of not getting its creator, Christian Ghisler, into unnecessary trouble with MS, I did not raise a fuss when they forced him to stop calling it Windows Commander.
But still, years later, I continue to be very, very pissed off. Windows Commander is a Norton Commander workalike for Windows, so I think the name is highly apt. The product, which arguably stands head and shoulders over a number of similar, competing products, has been known under that name for years and provides significantly enhanced functionality over what Explorer does. I find that Windows Commander works around some major flaws and lacking functionality in Explorer, and that life without it is difficult and awkward. Instead of coming down on the guy, Microsoft should be thanking him for making their crappy product more useable.
I hope that when Bush leaves office (hopefully by impeachment), MS will be hit with an abuse-of-monopoly charge and resultant damages that they will never fully recover. I want to see the 300 lb gorilla chained and bound, then whittled down to size. That, I feel, would be justice.
For all those not familiar with it, Windows Commander is now known as Total Commander and can be found here. No, I'm not affiliated or anything, just a very satisfied user.
In a perfect world, you and TFA would be correct. However, in this world you can't rule out that he's lying, or at least misinterpreting his results. I would not count an unsubstantiated claim as a success.
"He's lying" is a pretty strong claim that I'm not completely ready to make. But the fact that he's not working within the standard protocol of science (peer reviewed papers, etc, and I hear some claims of plagiarism) is to me a strong indicator that this might be the case.
Friend, you make the mistake of applying Newtonian mechanics in the quantum realm. An electron can't be slowed down a bit like a satellite can. Also, there's no atmosphere around an atom like the stuff that decelerated the Mir.
Quantum theory has many, many successful experiments, even applications backing it up. This Mills guy has still not a single successful experiment behind him.
As another Slashdotter pointed out (with simple elegance) in this thread, the "normal" state of hydrogen we all know and love is apparently the lowest-energy state. Bringing the electrons in closer to the nucleus would consume energy, not produce it, according to conventional wisdom.
Maybe this would-be physicist is smarter than all the quantum physicists, including Einstein, who came before him. But my money and Occam's is on the Establishment in this case.
I find your statement hard to reconcile with the fact that public urination, in the US, is met with punishment for a sexual offense. From earlier digging, I remember that in Utah, public urination is a "Class C Sexual misdemeanor".
it has to do with the fact that noone wants to clean urine off their wall.
Understood and agreed. But when I think of "public urination," I tend to think of "outside." When I think of "outside" I think of "rain." Guess what? All the constituents of urine are water soluble! Still, it would take a pretty bad urge before I would let go in a residential area.
Human urine also has some nasty chemicals and if concentrated in any particular area is pretty bad for the enviroment.
Do you live in the Washington, DC area? Do you know how much arsenic is in your tap water?
Yes, the salt and urea concentration can make grass turn yellow. And in really massive concentrations (like if you directly pipe a public outhouse into a river), the phosphate can cause algal bloom - just like most fertilizers. Incidentally, I live not far from some small farms. Once in a while, the farmer sprays the strawberry plants with -would you believe?- cow piss.
Having taken the trouble to research, at least on the 'Net, I take offense at your snotty put-down about Slashdot that's aimed directly at me. Pray tell, which friend told you that urine is an environmental hazard?
In summary: Looking at only the first 2 pages and without digging thru the lists themselves, I was only able to find mention of one woman who's registered as a sex offender for public urination. But (a) I think that's one person too many and (b) I'm confident that where there's one, there's more.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had a good working relationship for some years with SoftRP.net . The Web site says they're in Canada, and this may be true, but the outfit originates from the Ukraine. AFAIK, most are graduates from the University of Kiev.
These are a varied and skilled bunch of coding mercenaries, and they quickly and graciously executed a number of small projects for me (figureheading for a small company that was the actual customer). Their prices are a bit higher than your run-of-the-mill Indian/Chinese shop, but that was compensated by their ability to think for themselves and produce a working product off a simple, not overly detailed spec. Also, and I find this important, they ask questions rather than stumbling into blind alleys. As I mentioned, I'm a one man show and my projects were small, on the order of few man-weeks, and I was sorry not to have a decent-sized job for them to chew on. They certainly suggested they had manpower in reserve.
No, I'm not affiliated or kickbacked or anything. I'm just a satisfied customer and would likely hire them again for the next project that comes up.
Yes, Apache (Web server) is somewhat hard to configure. There's a large file with a lot of (documented) features and settings, and a lot of ways to go wrong there.
On the other hand, Apache is incredibly flexible: You can use it as a proxy, it does ssl, it fronts for Java Web servers, it rewrites URLs, it authenticates, it slices, it dices and I'm probably just scratching the surface.
Someone who knows his way around the config file - and that's really the only crucial thing to know about Apache - is able to get it to sing and dance. The header in the file warns people to read in-depth documentation rather than relying on comments in the file. There is documentation, there are books. If you're going to play at being a 'professional' Web admin, then you need some of this stuff.
For the less seriously inclined Web maker, programs like Webmin let you fiddle with a subset of Apache settings through a HTML front end. On an even broader front, many Web site hosters provide a dumbed-down interface that allows only a small subset of configuration options and keeps the user from doing anything really stupid.
And for anyone not covered above, yes, I'd recommend getting a simpler Web server. Personally, I find Tomcat a little easier to configure than Apache, but that's just me. I'm sure there are dramatically simpler products. Hell, lots of people have written their own!
The discussion in this topic is not about the complexity of using the Apache Web server, but the complexity of managing an Apache project. I'm not sure if I'd be perfectly happy "doing" an OS project under Apache, but... that's what choice is about, right?
I'm deeply concerned about the rapid decline of species, about global warming, the limping economy, political corruption, the war in Iraq and the ever-shortening attention spans of
OOH! COOL! COLORFUL BUBBLES!!
Ignorant ugly bastard. As if his useless outdated party didn't have worthwhile problems to take on. Oh right, I forgot - they don't have a clue as to where to begin, so instead of twiddling their thumbs and picking their noses they prefer to fix what ain't broke.
Good thing I wasn't mad when I wrote this.
Dang, I had mod points yesterday but foolishly spent them.
Malor is so right it hurts. I'll be sure to read the article linked in TFA, but in the meantime I recommend re-reading the parent.
From the sound of it, this shiny new UI adds some long-awaited convenience for users.
/. ?) have been annoyed for many years at all the subtle but irritating changes from version to version of Word & Co. Yes, there are compatibility switches, but they only lighten the pain, they don't relieve it completely.
On the other hand, it also means that OO.org, which has been playing catch-up on the GUI front, will want to go back to the drawing board yet again.
Also, users will once again need to learn new gestures and procedures. Some people, such as my girlfriend (oops - what am I doing on
Oh wait... the US government no longer fears anything: thanks to Diebold, the citizens don't matter any more.
The first time I heard of CMP was when I got a letter telling me my subscription to BYTE was being phased out, along with BYTE magazine itself. As compensation, CMP generously offered me a choice of one of the worthless other magazines they were carrying. I don't know how long ago this was, but you can probably tell from my tone that I'm still angry about this.
I can no longer call CMP's entire assortment of rags worthless, because there are at least one or two I enjoy reading once in a while, and which I respect. But all in all, I see CMP as one of the first behemoths of dumbed-down conglomerated corporate press. I believe CMP has done useful, unbiased, technically qualified coverage of computer-news a disservice.
I find some small consolation in two publications: ct and SlashDot.
While this will not do much to encourage the Unwashed Masses to embrace Linux, it certainly shows that Linux is a serious operating system suited to high-powered computing (or at least to hosting high-powered computing applications). I hope at least a few Fortune 500 CIOs will take notice.
Thank you, thank you! No applause please, just throw money!
Got it, and thank you for your insightful comments.
I think the truth is about halfway between our stances. As you point out, late adoptation is not necessarily a bad thing, but in my company late adoptation is not combined with seeing how it went for others. It's not "slow and cautious," learning from the experience of others, it's just slow. This partly has to do with the fact that my outfit is in Germany, and technological/business trends from the US come here with some delay, always, the good as well as the bad.
As it is, if XP comes here it will be too late for me. Thanks to outsourcing, I'm now an analyst rather than a developer. Better than no job, I guess, but I happen to like developing, and it's what I got myself hired for.
- I work for a company that adopts new trends at least 5 years late - that's about when they're being phased out elsewhere. For example, we're now deeply committed (or should I say sentenced?) to J2EE, RUP and outsourcing;
- Our company works on a contract basis, with complete and "firm" specifications (BDUF, anybody?) going in and deliverables coming out, with no wiggle room, no negotiation (at least from our side), no onsite customer.
Given such an environment, which I'm sure will sound familiar to others, do we stand a chance of ever being able to work this way too?Eulogize? Interesting choice of word there.
Come to think of it, you may be right. Modern Capitalism and the way it is curtailing freedom of intellectual property may be in the process of burying the best and most efficient in favor of the most advertised, best funded, most highly FUDded, what have you.
Good one! :)
I'd never considered that.
SAP is consultingware, sold to bosses, not users. Its user friendliness is abysmal, and the company bleeds its customers for obscene amounts of money in exchange for catering to their fears of not being able to take care of their business. Business processes worldwide are bent and pushed to fit the SAP way of working, rather than the other way around. In other words, yes, SAP is, umm, "evil" in the ./ sense.
They are also a corporation, and pretty much a monopolist riding a one-trick pony. Of course they see Open Source as a threat! And as a competition, they must combat whatever threatens their bottom line.
In other words, they had to say this or something like it, sooner or later. You could say they're legally obligated to.
Nothing new or unusual, in other words. Just the usual FUD. *sigh*
Justice, no. But it's enough for me that they have differently aligned interests.
During the Clinton administration, MS was investigated, tried and found guilty of illegal business practices. If I remember correctly, they were about to get slapped with hefty remedies when Bush took control and changed the verdict to a slap on the wrist. I guess from this that the Reps support MS even more than the Dems did. But of course it could be just that they paid Bush better than Clinton.
Our entire government is up for sale to the highest bidder. "Disgusted" doesn't even come close to what I feel. I want to see the whole lot of them marched out in handcuffs and at gunpoint. Exceptions, granted.
In the interest of not getting its creator, Christian Ghisler, into unnecessary trouble with MS, I did not raise a fuss when they forced him to stop calling it Windows Commander.
But still, years later, I continue to be very, very pissed off. Windows Commander is a Norton Commander workalike for Windows, so I think the name is highly apt. The product, which arguably stands head and shoulders over a number of similar, competing products, has been known under that name for years and provides significantly enhanced functionality over what Explorer does. I find that Windows Commander works around some major flaws and lacking functionality in Explorer, and that life without it is difficult and awkward. Instead of coming down on the guy, Microsoft should be thanking him for making their crappy product more useable.
I hope that when Bush leaves office (hopefully by impeachment), MS will be hit with an abuse-of-monopoly charge and resultant damages that they will never fully recover. I want to see the 300 lb gorilla chained and bound, then whittled down to size. That, I feel, would be justice.
For all those not familiar with it, Windows Commander is now known as Total Commander and can be found here. No, I'm not affiliated or anything, just a very satisfied user.
In a perfect world, you and TFA would be correct. However, in this world you can't rule out that he's lying, or at least misinterpreting his results. I would not count an unsubstantiated claim as a success.
"He's lying" is a pretty strong claim that I'm not completely ready to make. But the fact that he's not working within the standard protocol of science (peer reviewed papers, etc, and I hear some claims of plagiarism) is to me a strong indicator that this might be the case.
Friend, you make the mistake of applying Newtonian mechanics in the quantum realm. An electron can't be slowed down a bit like a satellite can. Also, there's no atmosphere around an atom like the stuff that decelerated the Mir.
Quantum theory has many, many successful experiments, even applications backing it up. This Mills guy has still not a single successful experiment behind him.
As another Slashdotter pointed out (with simple elegance) in this thread, the "normal" state of hydrogen we all know and love is apparently the lowest-energy state. Bringing the electrons in closer to the nucleus would consume energy, not produce it, according to conventional wisdom.
Maybe this would-be physicist is smarter than all the quantum physicists, including Einstein, who came before him. But my money and Occam's is on the Establishment in this case.
I find your statement hard to reconcile with the fact that public urination, in the US, is met with punishment for a sexual offense. From earlier digging, I remember that in Utah, public urination is a "Class C Sexual misdemeanor".
Understood and agreed. But when I think of "public urination," I tend to think of "outside." When I think of "outside" I think of "rain." Guess what? All the constituents of urine are water soluble! Still, it would take a pretty bad urge before I would let go in a residential area.
Do you live in the Washington, DC area? Do you know how much arsenic is in your tap water?
Yes, the salt and urea concentration can make grass turn yellow. And in really massive concentrations (like if you directly pipe a public outhouse into a river), the phosphate can cause algal bloom - just like most fertilizers. Incidentally, I live not far from some small farms. Once in a while, the farmer sprays the strawberry plants with -would you believe?- cow piss.
Having taken the trouble to research, at least on the 'Net, I take offense at your snotty put-down about Slashdot that's aimed directly at me. Pray tell, which friend told you that urine is an environmental hazard?
In summary: Looking at only the first 2 pages and without digging thru the lists themselves, I was only able to find mention of one woman who's registered as a sex offender for public urination. But (a) I think that's one person too many and (b) I'm confident that where there's one, there's more.
or that all-time favorite,