The HP4 series is a lot like this, too. I saw a whole crapload of them everywhere I went from about '93 to '97, in High School, College, and seemingly every business I ever visited. After a little investigation, now I know why.
The Laserjet 4 was introduced in 1992, and wasn't discontinued completely until March of 1998. The Laserjet 5 line was discontinued only a few months later in May, even though it was introduced in 1995.
My particular printer is a 4MP I got off of eBay. You have to love it when a 10 year old printer that weighs 40 pounds is still churning along without any problems. I had to replace one part, simply because the part was old and worn out. Ten years, and one part. The HP4 is a freaking tank!
Who wants to be the first to claim this is simply a huge plasma burst fired by an even larger weapon? Maybe it's just some alien race out there who wants to illustrate that they too, emjoy blowing things up with oversized guns. ^_^
Maybe not decibal ratings, but they did a pretty good job of describing how loud each supply was. One relied entirely on a heat sink, and another had a heat-sink with a small backup fan, though that one blew up during testing. ^_^
I have a trusty 4MP myself. Came with 34MB of RAM, too. God, I love eBay. $150 after shipping. While HP may be going to hell now, back in the day, their printers were the best around. Ah well.
There. Public interface calls of two black-boxes tied together. All you need to have is the documentation for the public API calls. I just must not understand. ^_^
You're right. It *is* idiotic to assume people can be civil and not try to ruin your computer with viruses, hide all of your valid email in deluges of spam, attempt to trick you into giving them private information or credit card numbers, and generally try to screw you in every way possible.
There used to be a time when you could plug in a computer and have a reasonable net experience, email included. Now a friend of mine, even with the help of a Bayesian filter, gets over 100 spam messages (down from 1500) a day. What's idiotic is that everyone has to watch their computer like it's filled with nitroglycerin, just because a few people are bound and determined to ruin the net experience for everyone.
Our company had to buy two more mail servers just to handle the spam processing and filtering load. This is costing millions of people real time, real money, and real headaches. It doesn't surprise me at all that some people are just abandoning the net as not worth the trouble.
Imagine you're a doctor, and you spend all of your time operating on people and reading medical journals. Do you think that person is going to spend hours each weekend just to make sure his computer hasn't become infested with viruses, somehow stolen his money, or wasn't being used as a bot? Software, even open source, is fallible. All it takes is one unpatched hole being open for one minute longer than the exploit is discovered, and you could be screwed.
And before you start rolling out stories about how only stupid (l)users are getting pwn3d, tell that to the Apache group, OSTG, and other major open source vendors that all got pwn3d in their CVS trees about a year ago. These were highly experienced system administrators, and the were hacked - *for months* before anyone noticed. How can you expect some poor guy who uses the net to mail his grandkids to keep up?
Maybe the examples picked for the article were hokey, but that doesn't make the problem any less real. If not for the magic of bayesian filters backed up by a strong Qmail SpamAssassin filter, I'd have given up email a long time ago, and I'm a UNIX developer! Without installing a half dozen third-party programs, computers are more of a liability than anything these days. It really is a crying shame.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't this already addressed by object-oriented programming? Separate module for security? Logging? How about a security object, a logging object, and so on? Objects are just black boxes anyway... who cares what they do, so long as they say they do it?
I mean... properly designed code has a known execution and procedural chart. If you have an object that just makes use of a bunch of other modules, and trusts what they say, you've done your goal of code separation. Aspect programming seems to break all of the rules of programming in general. So the question remains: why?
The argument for not giving it the axe is plain (in my opinion): Code carefully, and tomcat/J2EE will give you very scalable applications - not just in terms of the number of users, but to allow for significant expansion of the code size.
We didn't really have that option, unfortunately. Customers wrote the Tomcat based software, and it was eating our software alive. Maybe we were wrong to attribute the terrible performance to Tomcat, but it's hard to argue with loads of 100 and memory usage of 1GB for the sake of one customer out of a thousand.
However, if you are really only adding minor code to web pages, PHP will do fine.
We host over 3000 database-interactive newspaper websites on a cached custom PHP-based engine, and we have well over 20 other applications that are pure PHP using class-based architecture. We regularly pull 100Mb sustained bandwidth in our cluster in Chicago, all served from a handfull of dual-PIII 1U servers. We shrug off slashdottings on a regular basis (we host newspapers, so we get a pretty good share of them).
While your experiences with PHP may have limited it to small environments, ours proves PHP can scale quite easily. I think one thing we can agree on is that it's all based on the code behind the scenes, no matter what the environment.
While all of your arguments are true, SQL injection attacks are easily thwarted by the use of things like mysql_escape_string. Or if you use PEAR, you can use the prepare/execute method and placeholders (select * from bla where column=?).
It's all based on the level of care a developer puts into protecting their data. Sloppy DBAs can be just as bad at protecting data as lazy PHP coders. Though I'd like to think any company using a full RDBMS would abstract verification and security to the database to increase application modularization, you and I both know there are all types of developers out there.
Besides, we use Verisign to do all of our credit-card processing, so we don't have any sensitive information anyone could steal. See, there's lots of solutions out there. ^_^
Tomcat could be the best software on the face of the Earth, with the easiest install ever devised. Unfortunately we quit using Tomcat over two years ago after we saw it running 100 threads and using 1GB of memory (with a Java imposed memory limit in place). Not even Oracle uses that much memory, and this is just a webserver we're talking about. Nobody could come up with a single argument not to give it the axe, so away it went.
Of course software can improve in two years, but Tomcat would have had to make substantial progress for us to consider using it again. There are a lot of arguments against PHP, but PHP + Apache doesn't beat our server into the ground with a lead pipe, so that's what we use.
While you have a point here, I'm more deeply disturbed by his assertion that you lose your license even if proven innocent of a DUI in court. I don't know the particulars of this, but if he's right, something is seriously wrong with the system.
That makes me think of another point. If ads become so pervasive that they're on every surface, everywhere; like spam, who has time to read them all? Seriously, if ads were everywhere, they'd just start blurring together.
Heck, we already see so many ads today, that I can't describe to you the last Ad I saw. Web ads? TV ads? Billboards? Radio? Magazines? Newspapers? It doesn't matter. The human brain works by recording general traits, only getting specific if something stands out, or you make a mental note. With so many ads, it seems like people are starting to see ads, think "Just another ad... ignore," and move on with their lives. How does this help advertisers of any kind?
Yet oddly enough, advertisers will break their backs to find new places to put ads. So I demand more ads! The more I see, the less I'll notice. Bring 'em on, bitch!
I'd say it's mostly due to spellcheck. You don't spend as much effort to learn correct spelling when you're so used to it being automagically corrected. Personally my grammar sucks ass; mostly due to the fact that I don't really care as long as the point gets across. If It's for something "official," I'll take more care: do a spellcheck and use big words and stuff. I always thought it was kind of weird how people see the English language as set in stone, as if it says in The Bible that it is forbidden to end a sentence in a preposition, use double negatives, etc.
Unfortunately, it's more pervasive than it sometimes seems. I work at a company that interacts extensively with newspapers and other content publishers in the industry. Just the people you'd think would have a firm grasp on grammar, spelling, and punctuation, right? I could easily post dozens of examples that would unquestionably trump those cited in the article.
Though I have to admit there's something funny when the publisher of a newspaper uses the chat shortcuts we've all become accustomed to. Sometimes we'll pass along the more amusing examples around the office, though usually when an email is especially incomprehensible. Often, I've been tempted to simply respond to customer requests with: "wtf?"
4M? Why, in my day, it was "The Mad Minute." 100 problems, 60 seconds, good luck. Of course everyone started at 1x2, 1x3, etc. But if you got 100% on the quiz, you moved up. At one point, there were two of us in the class who got all the way to the 12s. Once you got there, it was smooth sailing. Oh, and the two of us at 12 always finished before everyone else. I never really figured out that part.
It's not always just a point of competing. Note that the article makes the point that total broadband penetration is very low. I'm willing to wager that even if all current dialup users switched to broadband, we'd still be "behind", whatever that means.
Who measures something like this in terms of "All US households?" That's like talking about cellphone usage in "All US Households." The statistic that matters is: All US Households that want an internet connection; everything else is just wishful thinking. Then you categorize the types of people who want an internet connection: who can't get it, who only want dialup, who has broadband, for instance. Thinking of it like a utility is getting a little ahead of the game, in my opinion.
Yeah, funny things, those digital cameras. Bought a 1MP camera in '99. Still works great, though it eats 4-AAs at a time like candy. I've told myself I won't replace it until it quits working, since I usually only take pictures in 800x600 anyway. I guess you just have to fill your requirements.
Hell, I still have a clock radio I got for my birthday 17 years ago. Sounds like crap, makes really loud noises when you change the volume, but it still wakes me up in the morning. Until that stops happening, I'm not bothering to "upgrade".
That sounds good, but I also cheat. The last computer I built around 2000 was a Dual PIII-800. Even with the new 130nm Opterons comparing favorably to 3+Ghz P4s, and factoring in the FSB improvements and things like quad-pipelined DDR, it still looks like a couple years before I'll need to upgrade.
You could build a system 7-10x faster than your 700Mhz machine by building someting like a dual Opteron with all the trimmings. And barring some crazy new technology, you *really* won't have to upgrade for a while.
That is a perfectly valid conclusion. However, I have an in-dash MP3 player, and just as I have converted my CDs to MP3 files, it's equally possible that I rip to Ogg or Flac. If a player doesn't support my preferred format, I convert to the format the player uses, and when I'm at home, my computer, and my entertainment center plays them all.
It's the same idea of back when Cassette tapes were the only way to mix tracks from CDs. Until multi-format players become the majority, you're probably best served by pandering to the current players - your originals can stay however you want them.
So make your playlist, copy the files to a temporary directory, run a batch conversion over them, and be done with it. Ogg will be supported eventually, but for now, The Industry has deemed it either too difficult, intensive, or unprofitable to support. It's ok, things change.
"... but if you look at the aggregate cost, it is pretty staggering."
Not really. Used CD stores, friends that want to sell part of their collection, the old "join BMG and quit after buying 2 CDs, ad infinitum" trick, and so on. I've accumulated a pretty fair amount of Music this way, and ripped it all to MP3. I don't download music, as having a nice shiny CD always at hand gives me comfort; nobody can accuse me of stealing music. I've never paid full retail for a CD if I could avoid it.
Now DVDs on the other hand... Aside from pawn shops (usually $5 per DVD, but low selection) and game stores that sell used DVDs who don't really cut the price that much, I need to figure out a way to get them on the cheap. ^_^
Slashdot Mirror
The HP4 series is a lot like this, too. I saw a whole crapload of them everywhere I went from about '93 to '97, in High School, College, and seemingly every business I ever visited. After a little investigation, now I know why.
The Laserjet 4 was introduced in 1992, and wasn't discontinued completely until March of 1998. The Laserjet 5 line was discontinued only a few months later in May, even though it was introduced in 1995.
My particular printer is a 4MP I got off of eBay. You have to love it when a 10 year old printer that weighs 40 pounds is still churning along without any problems. I had to replace one part, simply because the part was old and worn out. Ten years, and one part. The HP4 is a freaking tank!
Who wants to be the first to claim this is simply a huge plasma burst fired by an even larger weapon? Maybe it's just some alien race out there who wants to illustrate that they too, emjoy blowing things up with oversized guns. ^_^
Maybe not decibal ratings, but they did a pretty good job of describing how loud each supply was. One relied entirely on a heat sink, and another had a heat-sink with a small backup fan, though that one blew up during testing. ^_^
And what's wrong with just a plastic cover on a hinge that keeps someone from just pressing the button on accident?
An Emergency! Oh N0es!
1.) Lift cover.
2.) Press Button.
3.) Profit?
And now, what was described as a quick and useful overview of LCD vs. CRT displays, has become neither.
Anybody else see the irony in this?
I have a trusty 4MP myself. Came with 34MB of RAM, too. God, I love eBay. $150 after shipping. While HP may be going to hell now, back in the day, their printers were the best around. Ah well.
RIP, HP.
I still don't think that makes any sense. That's what a 3rd-party facilitator object is for:
(Pseudocode)
class wrapper
{
oSecurity = NULL;
oLogger = NULL;
wrapper()
{
this->oSecurity = new Security_Object();
this->oLogger = new Logger_Object();
}
logsecurity()
{
this->oSecurity->doSomethingSecure();
this->oLogger->logSomething("Did Security!");
}
}
There. Public interface calls of two black-boxes tied together. All you need to have is the documentation for the public API calls. I just must not understand. ^_^
You're right. It *is* idiotic to assume people can be civil and not try to ruin your computer with viruses, hide all of your valid email in deluges of spam, attempt to trick you into giving them private information or credit card numbers, and generally try to screw you in every way possible.
There used to be a time when you could plug in a computer and have a reasonable net experience, email included. Now a friend of mine, even with the help of a Bayesian filter, gets over 100 spam messages (down from 1500) a day. What's idiotic is that everyone has to watch their computer like it's filled with nitroglycerin, just because a few people are bound and determined to ruin the net experience for everyone.
Our company had to buy two more mail servers just to handle the spam processing and filtering load. This is costing millions of people real time, real money, and real headaches. It doesn't surprise me at all that some people are just abandoning the net as not worth the trouble.
Imagine you're a doctor, and you spend all of your time operating on people and reading medical journals. Do you think that person is going to spend hours each weekend just to make sure his computer hasn't become infested with viruses, somehow stolen his money, or wasn't being used as a bot? Software, even open source, is fallible. All it takes is one unpatched hole being open for one minute longer than the exploit is discovered, and you could be screwed.
And before you start rolling out stories about how only stupid (l)users are getting pwn3d, tell that to the Apache group, OSTG, and other major open source vendors that all got pwn3d in their CVS trees about a year ago. These were highly experienced system administrators, and the were hacked - *for months* before anyone noticed. How can you expect some poor guy who uses the net to mail his grandkids to keep up?
Maybe the examples picked for the article were hokey, but that doesn't make the problem any less real. If not for the magic of bayesian filters backed up by a strong Qmail SpamAssassin filter, I'd have given up email a long time ago, and I'm a UNIX developer! Without installing a half dozen third-party programs, computers are more of a liability than anything these days. It really is a crying shame.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but isn't this already addressed by object-oriented programming? Separate module for security? Logging? How about a security object, a logging object, and so on? Objects are just black boxes anyway... who cares what they do, so long as they say they do it?
I mean... properly designed code has a known execution and procedural chart. If you have an object that just makes use of a bunch of other modules, and trusts what they say, you've done your goal of code separation. Aspect programming seems to break all of the rules of programming in general. So the question remains: why?
We didn't really have that option, unfortunately. Customers wrote the Tomcat based software, and it was eating our software alive. Maybe we were wrong to attribute the terrible performance to Tomcat, but it's hard to argue with loads of 100 and memory usage of 1GB for the sake of one customer out of a thousand.
We host over 3000 database-interactive newspaper websites on a cached custom PHP-based engine, and we have well over 20 other applications that are pure PHP using class-based architecture. We regularly pull 100Mb sustained bandwidth in our cluster in Chicago, all served from a handfull of dual-PIII 1U servers. We shrug off slashdottings on a regular basis (we host newspapers, so we get a pretty good share of them).
While your experiences with PHP may have limited it to small environments, ours proves PHP can scale quite easily. I think one thing we can agree on is that it's all based on the code behind the scenes, no matter what the environment.
While all of your arguments are true, SQL injection attacks are easily thwarted by the use of things like mysql_escape_string. Or if you use PEAR, you can use the prepare/execute method and placeholders (select * from bla where column=?).
It's all based on the level of care a developer puts into protecting their data. Sloppy DBAs can be just as bad at protecting data as lazy PHP coders. Though I'd like to think any company using a full RDBMS would abstract verification and security to the database to increase application modularization, you and I both know there are all types of developers out there.
Besides, we use Verisign to do all of our credit-card processing, so we don't have any sensitive information anyone could steal. See, there's lots of solutions out there. ^_^
Tomcat could be the best software on the face of the Earth, with the easiest install ever devised. Unfortunately we quit using Tomcat over two years ago after we saw it running 100 threads and using 1GB of memory (with a Java imposed memory limit in place). Not even Oracle uses that much memory, and this is just a webserver we're talking about. Nobody could come up with a single argument not to give it the axe, so away it went.
Of course software can improve in two years, but Tomcat would have had to make substantial progress for us to consider using it again. There are a lot of arguments against PHP, but PHP + Apache doesn't beat our server into the ground with a lead pipe, so that's what we use.
While you have a point here, I'm more deeply disturbed by his assertion that you lose your license even if proven innocent of a DUI in court. I don't know the particulars of this, but if he's right, something is seriously wrong with the system.
That makes me think of another point. If ads become so pervasive that they're on every surface, everywhere; like spam, who has time to read them all? Seriously, if ads were everywhere, they'd just start blurring together.
Heck, we already see so many ads today, that I can't describe to you the last Ad I saw. Web ads? TV ads? Billboards? Radio? Magazines? Newspapers? It doesn't matter. The human brain works by recording general traits, only getting specific if something stands out, or you make a mental note. With so many ads, it seems like people are starting to see ads, think "Just another ad... ignore," and move on with their lives. How does this help advertisers of any kind?
Yet oddly enough, advertisers will break their backs to find new places to put ads. So I demand more ads! The more I see, the less I'll notice. Bring 'em on, bitch!
your?
auutomagically?
"sucks as?"
accros?
something "official" or something?
bibble?
sentance?
Trifthen's head explodes.
Here, I fixed it...
I'd say it's mostly due to spellcheck. You don't spend as much effort to learn correct spelling when you're so used to it being automagically corrected. Personally my grammar sucks ass; mostly due to the fact that I don't really care as long as the point gets across. If It's for something "official," I'll take more care: do a spellcheck and use big words and stuff. I always thought it was kind of weird how people see the English language as set in stone, as if it says in The Bible that it is forbidden to end a sentence in a preposition, use double negatives, etc.
See, was that so hard?
Unfortunately, it's more pervasive than it sometimes seems. I work at a company that interacts extensively with newspapers and other content publishers in the industry. Just the people you'd think would have a firm grasp on grammar, spelling, and punctuation, right? I could easily post dozens of examples that would unquestionably trump those cited in the article.
Though I have to admit there's something funny when the publisher of a newspaper uses the chat shortcuts we've all become accustomed to. Sometimes we'll pass along the more amusing examples around the office, though usually when an email is especially incomprehensible. Often, I've been tempted to simply respond to customer requests with: "wtf?"
40 / 3 = 13.3333333~
40 - 13 = 27
Any placing after 27 is the bottom third. Congratulations: you too are the product of the American Education System(tm). ^_~
4M? Why, in my day, it was "The Mad Minute." 100 problems, 60 seconds, good luck. Of course everyone started at 1x2, 1x3, etc. But if you got 100% on the quiz, you moved up. At one point, there were two of us in the class who got all the way to the 12s. Once you got there, it was smooth sailing. Oh, and the two of us at 12 always finished before everyone else. I never really figured out that part.
Righto!
P.s. You forgot about Post Scriptum.
It's not always just a point of competing. Note that the article makes the point that total broadband penetration is very low. I'm willing to wager that even if all current dialup users switched to broadband, we'd still be "behind", whatever that means.
Who measures something like this in terms of "All US households?" That's like talking about cellphone usage in "All US Households." The statistic that matters is: All US Households that want an internet connection; everything else is just wishful thinking. Then you categorize the types of people who want an internet connection: who can't get it, who only want dialup, who has broadband, for instance. Thinking of it like a utility is getting a little ahead of the game, in my opinion.
Yeah, funny things, those digital cameras. Bought a 1MP camera in '99. Still works great, though it eats 4-AAs at a time like candy. I've told myself I won't replace it until it quits working, since I usually only take pictures in 800x600 anyway. I guess you just have to fill your requirements.
Hell, I still have a clock radio I got for my birthday 17 years ago. Sounds like crap, makes really loud noises when you change the volume, but it still wakes me up in the morning. Until that stops happening, I'm not bothering to "upgrade".
That sounds good, but I also cheat. The last computer I built around 2000 was a Dual PIII-800. Even with the new 130nm Opterons comparing favorably to 3+Ghz P4s, and factoring in the FSB improvements and things like quad-pipelined DDR, it still looks like a couple years before I'll need to upgrade.
You could build a system 7-10x faster than your 700Mhz machine by building someting like a dual Opteron with all the trimmings. And barring some crazy new technology, you *really* won't have to upgrade for a while.
That is a perfectly valid conclusion. However, I have an in-dash MP3 player, and just as I have converted my CDs to MP3 files, it's equally possible that I rip to Ogg or Flac. If a player doesn't support my preferred format, I convert to the format the player uses, and when I'm at home, my computer, and my entertainment center plays them all.
It's the same idea of back when Cassette tapes were the only way to mix tracks from CDs. Until multi-format players become the majority, you're probably best served by pandering to the current players - your originals can stay however you want them.
So make your playlist, copy the files to a temporary directory, run a batch conversion over them, and be done with it. Ogg will be supported eventually, but for now, The Industry has deemed it either too difficult, intensive, or unprofitable to support. It's ok, things change.
Not really. Used CD stores, friends that want to sell part of their collection, the old "join BMG and quit after buying 2 CDs, ad infinitum" trick, and so on. I've accumulated a pretty fair amount of Music this way, and ripped it all to MP3. I don't download music, as having a nice shiny CD always at hand gives me comfort; nobody can accuse me of stealing music. I've never paid full retail for a CD if I could avoid it.
Now DVDs on the other hand... Aside from pawn shops (usually $5 per DVD, but low selection) and game stores that sell used DVDs who don't really cut the price that much, I need to figure out a way to get them on the cheap. ^_^
I for one, welcome our new Yellow Dragon masters.