I never watched the series, and just happened to catch the movie two days before it disappeared from my local theatre. It was the matinee, and there were three other people in there with me. I have to say, I've been avoiding going out to see movies in recent years, because there always seems to be some asshat sitting behind me who feels that it's perfectly ok to discuss plot points in a normal voice, or be in a constant state of candy rustling, or other noise that just ruins the whole thing.
Anyway, back to the real point: Serenity has restored my faith in movies. Star Wars (the recent run of prequals) almost killed off my hope totally. I just felt so... empty... walking out of those movies. All special effect, no humanity, no heart. Is anyone else yawning these days at the latest, greatest special effects? I mean, it's been a while since I was really wowed by this stuff - I think Terminator II was the last movie that really made me go "hey, neat!". The Matrix was ok (the first one only, please, not the travesty that the other two became), but it was mostly the style (and bullet time) that make that movie.
Serenity was a return to something that George Lucas almost had in his grasp with his very first Star Wars movie: A sense of real people, experiencing real life, only in a very, very different environment to ours. This is true escapism - not Grand Councils and "sheratons in space" (thanks Joss), but real, gritty, imperfect, cowardly, funny, wisecracking people. The sort of characters you would probably like if you met them in real life. Who can imagine interacting with any of the recent Star Wars characters in real life? Sheesh.
Joss Whedon is one of those people who has a talent for mixing the real with the fantastic in a funny, witty way. I think Serenity is right up there at the top of my list of all-time favorite movies. It rocks because it has heart, which so many movies these days lack. The big mistake action movies make is that if you don't care about the characters, then who cares what happens to them? In Serenity, I cared. I took my wife to see it for a second time (had to travel a bit, since it was gone from most places by then). She is not a Sci-Fi fan, but I had a hunch, and I was right - she loved it. That says something.
I also went right out and bought the Firefly DVD set, and we both watched it all the way through over the next few nights. I have to say I am totally amazed that this show was canceled. They canned this in favor of what? More reality sludge? Yikes.
... as all the Google fanboys do mental summersaults to twist reality to fit the conflicting notions that Google can do nothing wrong, and yet web patents are so very, very wrong...
I can see it now, future headline:
Google CEO Revealed as Beelzebub Prince of Darkness, Mountain View New 7th Circle of Hell
Slashdot comments:
"Well, you know, Satan *is* very misunderstood"
"Gmail still rocks! I don't care if the Google minions sacrifice a kitten every time I check my mail, as long as I have my 100 TB of storage! Whoohoo!"
"I just sold my eternal soul for more relevant search results - but hey, I got a great price on this DVD player! Thanks Asmodeus!"
"My monitor smokes a bit when I do searches now, but hey - I can find out what all my friends have been *really* thinking about me! Hey, this new GoogleBrainCrawler kicks butt! Go Google! But... make the voices stop, please?"
"Yahoo! made a deal with the ancient Nordic Gods but they're just playing catch up at this point"
"Jeez guys, if it was Microsoft making a deal with Belial then we'd be all over it but just because it's Google, you're all... erk... ack... (transmission terminated)"
Thanks for the link, that's very interesting. It seems to show that MySQL is still faster than PostgreSQL, at least for simple jobs and one user. However the anecdotes I have heard would seem to be harder to test - they say that PostgreSQL is faster under load from many multiple users, perhaps because of its row-level locking capabilities while doing transactions. It seems that in order to get the same kind of functionality under MySQL you have to use InnoDB, which generally seems to be slower than MyISAM, although I have also read that this isn't actually true either - some seem to find InnoDB faster than MyISAM for some applications. It's really hard to find definitive benchmarks which aren't slanted or trivial, I guess because to properly test these things requires time, knowledge, hardware resources, and a balanced outlook, which appears to be in increasingly short supply these days!;-)
Thanks, that's interesting experience. I am currently stuck at 4.0.x, because MySQL saw fit to change the way that TIMESTAMP fields are formatted in 4.1 and up. These used to be in the form of straight numbers, e.g. 1212340985098, but now they are going to be using the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format, which really screws with all my Perl code that does calculations assuming that the value is numeric. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, I wish they hadn't done it, but I guess one of these days I'll just have to sit down and sift through my code to see what this will affect. Here's the documentation for the change, linked from the Upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 document.
I think I'll be sticking with MySQL too, it works just fine so far, and "so far" is turning into a significant period of time.
You seem certain that PostgreSQL can use more than one index per query. Well, a cursory search on Google comes up with this page. The "Red Hat Database" is basically PostgreSQL (I think!), and a little way down this page you can see this comment:
"Note that a query or data manipulation commands can only use at most one index per table."
I believe I have seen comments somewhere regarding experimental support for multiple indexes in queries in PostgreSQL, but I am interested as to whether this is a mature technology, rather than new and/or experimental, or limited to special cases.
Perhaps I should have made something more clear: In six years of use, I have never had a corrupted table with MySQL, ever. The worst that has happened has been a couple of indices that needed to be repaired; I think this happened during one of the big solar flares, so I have my suspicions that it was some kind of weird side effect of that. However even this caused no downtime, and it was easily repaired using the MySQL tools.
MySQL has been rock solid for me, no doubt about it. It just chugs away, day in, day out.
As regards your other comments on MySQL: I know that the MySQL folks said in the past that nobody really needs x or y - and that's perfectly true. Nobody really *needs* that stuff. They added features over time, because some people clearly wanted it - that's called listening to your customers. But it's certainly not essential for the use of MySQL to implement significant databases. I wasn't aware that they argued against backups, but that seems a little unlikely since the mysqldump tool has been around forever, and replication has too - and that takes good care of instant backups nowadays. In any case, most of the major things that they maintained could be done without (subselects, views, cursors, stored procedures, even transactions) - guess what? I've been doing just fine without them, how about that. People can go right ahead and tell me I'm not running a "real" database, and I guess I'll just go right ahead and keep running...
I've been using MySQL for about six years now, and it's been working very well for me. I utilize it on my crazyguyonabike.com, a bicycle tour journals website. It has about 750 journals on there, with over 60,000 pictures. I use replication to back up the database remotely, and all in all it works very well. I honestly can't understand the level of hatred towards the tool that emanates from many of the posts here.
I have to say that I cringe every time I see a MySQL story on slashdot these days, because it just seems like there is a legion of PostgreSQL zealots just waiting for any chance to denigrate MySQL. It's the same littany every time - PostgreSQL is so much better, have they fixed the "Gotchas" yet, etc etc. Even when MySQL AB adds a feature or does fix some perceived failing, then the detractors simply ignore this and move on to some other apparent showstopper. For example, it's not enough that MySQL has transactional capabilities - no, now they simply moan that it's not the default (MyISAM still is).
We seem to have people who have what can only be described as a religious mindset when it comes to these issues. "Religious" in the sense that their minds are closed, and no matter what new facts come to light, they will simple twist everything around to match with their existing worldview. So, in these people's minds, MySQL AB adding features is not a positive thing, it's rather a sign of how wrong Monty was in the past to suggest that most people really don't need transactions for everything. Well, at what point exactly do we have "proof" that I don't really need transactions for my website? Is six years of 24/7 use enough? If not, then how long exactly?
Yes, I've had problems, of course I have. You will with any tool, PostgreSQL included. No matter the fact that PG has had transactions from day 1, people still got corrupted tables occasionally. But at the end of the day, the results are the same - do you still have your data? Is it intact and internally consistent? I can answer yes to that. I don't mind having some logic in my application to delete some records when some other records get deleted. It works really well, and while in theory it could cause data inconsistency, in practice this has never happened. Even if it did, a quick perl script would be sufficient to clean things up - I'm doing that kind of thing all the time anyway, as the database evolves and I need to shift stuff around or change table structures. It's no big deal, really! Some will say No, this is a Horrible Solution and you should put business logic into stored procedures... I say, get a life. That's *your* solution, it's not everybody's. You're simply moving your complexity around, you'll never really get rid of it. Some people are more comfortable with their complexity in stored procedures, I'm perfectly comfortable with it in my Perl application. So what, does it work for you? If so, then who cares.
There *are* some things in MySQL that disturb me, but I don't know if they are common to other DBMS solutions out there. One of the big ones for me currently is that the query optimizer only uses one index in queries. I know you can have multi-column indexes, but I still see this being a problem for some of my more complex queries. Does PostgreSQL do this better? Informed opinions please, rather than fanboy noise.
Also, speed. I hear lots of anecdotal tales about how much faster PostgreSQL is these days, especially under load from multiple connections. I'd like to hear from anybody who has actually made a transition from MySQL to PostgreSQL for a high-load Web application. Can PostgreSQL really replace MySQL now? Or is this another case of wishful thinking?
I recently spent a good long week or three while trying to set up a new dual Opteron server which couldn't recognize the RAID card. This isn't even anything to do with GUIs, mind you - this is simply getting Linux to see the hard drives. The big problem, in a nutshell, is hardware drivers. Hardware support remains one of the big problems for Linux, and I don't care how much you love Linux, I guarantee you'll be swearing at it before too long if you try installing on any kind of non-run-of-the-mill box. Windows, like it or not, generally has drivers. You even get them on nice convenient CDs with whatever cards are causing the problem, which is doubly frustrating. I tell you, the headaches I've had setting up Linux are no joke. It seems like every time I have to do it (every couple of years or so currently), there are a whole bunch of new little gotchas to waste my time for days. And the knowledge (once you finally figure out the magic keywords to google for) isn't even useful or transferrable - it's probably something you'll never encounter again, ever, in this form. The answer is generally some obscure incantation in some god forsaken configuration file three levels down in some/etc directory you didn't even know existed. I've had kernels refuse to boot because devfs was enabled. I've had kernels refuse to see a storage device because some other totally unrelated module happened to be enabled. I've had to go and patch the kernel code with some obscure fix to make the thing work under 64-bit mode. I've battled endlessly with weird errors that give no clue as to their source.
Ok, ok, I don't hate Linux. It's actually rock-solid most of the time, once you get it dialed in. But I just have to say that I have the utmost sympathy for anyone who jacks it all in and goes with Windows - particularly for a desktop environment. I mean, come on - Windows 2000 (never used XP) is pretty rock solid, hardly ever crashes on me and you can get drivers for all the hardware without any hassles. Anyone who says that Linux beats Windows in this regard is just delusional, sorry. And on the desktop, Windows "just works" for most users. And it has all the software they expect, and it works the way they expect. And as for all the viruses and malware - that's an education problem. You could fix most of the Windows issues out there by using Firefox or Opera, and any reasonable email client but Outlook Express, from behind a Linksys cable/dsl router or any other firewall.
Ok, sorry, had to get that off my chest... I just get so tired of reading all these pious comments putting down anybody who chooses Windows over Linux. Get real! Linux rocks, much of the time, but come on - when it sucks, it sucks big time.
You're right, I did have to code the URL generation routine myself... but the code itself is really trivial (the hard part was thinking of the right way to do it), and yes, it is very portable to other contexts. I also think that the arguments for Java solutions can be applied equally to LAMP, particularly Perl, largely because of the existence of CPAN. I can code up some very powerful stuff very rapidly because just about anything you might need to do is probably already up on CPAN as a module. However that's another (probably endless) discussion - I think which language to use is a matter of taste and style, if you know what you're doing then you can write scalable apps in most any of them.
The stuff I did in Perl isn't really onerous at all, at least no more than any other framework out there, with the added benefit that I have full control over its behavior, and I don't inherit a lot of bloat that I don't need. Making sure to call a particular routine whenever you want to generate a link isn't hard, and as a whole it was fun to do... I keep thinking I should write this stuff up, because I don't think I've seen this approach talked about much (if at all - about all you see is the talk of using a reverse proxy, which itself is more than most people seem to be aware of)...
Ironically, I was driven to do this work with reverse proxies after my first slashdotting - the mod_perl backend was getting hit for every request, and about 40,000 people came to visit!;-O
I agree, the issue of what to set for the expiration times is critical. I use a combination of approaches: Short expiration times (1 minute) for "what's new" type pages, which ensures that people will never see very old content (one minute is fast enough for anything but real real-time data such as stock quotes, but that's probably a case where you'd be setting 'no-cache' anyway)... this also means that the backend is being called at most once a minute for these pages, which isn't going to be a problem for any db unless the queries are just insane.
Then I also use URL arguments to make links look "new" to the front-end proxy when things change. For example, there is a 'v' field for documents that gets incremented whenever the document is modified. So then if a page is added, then all the links on subsequent generated pages have '&v=123', which looks like a new page and so the user doesn't get stale data. I also use the same technique for user options, which (as well as storing in a cookie) I compress and pass around as 'o=xxx'. This is useful for browsers, some of which do not distinguish pages which are otherwise identical but with different cookies.
Finally, user editing pages get 'no-cache', since these really are dynamic and are only being seen by one person anyway. But if I got slashdotted by someone posting a link to one of the journal pages on a popular site, the server would hardly break a sweat because it would generate that page just once and then serve it to all the other requests as static from the front-end.
FYI, You don't need caching to be a part of the application server. Just make sure you generate good expiration times for your pages, and then use a reverse proxy front-end server. The proxy will cache requests, and pass new ones to the backend. I use this with great results on mod_perl, with a lightweight apache front end on the same machine for the reverse proxy.
Actually, the number of results returned has nothing to do (necessarily) with the size of the index. That was my point, which is relevant to the article. Besides, this is a discussion, and discussions have a way of, well, talking about things related to the article. Maybe Yahoo! just gives more relevant results, who knows. But just going by the number of results returned isn't a useful metric, in my book.
Surely it's the quality of the results that counts, rather than the quantity? Who needs 1,000,000 matches anyway, when most people don't go past the first page or two of the results? The article doesn't talk at all about how relevant the matches were. I'm not saying that it invalidates their study, but I would say that any search engine that returns millions of hits for any query is simply showing off. Give me a search engine that shows me fewer matches, but the best hits anyday. Lately, Google has increasingly been giving me a bunch of useless links when I search for stuff. For example, looking for reviews on various bits of hardware just gives you a bunch of websites that are selling the products, and *seem* to have reviews, but then you go to the page and it says something like "no reviews have been posted". Lots of ghost towns out there on the web these days. Anyway, the point holds: Give me relevant results and allow me to screen out the marketing junk and link farms. Beyond that I don't really care how many pages they have in the index.
Every time the patent issue comes up on slashdot, people rant about how little sense it all makes. Perhaps instead of trying to make sense of the patents, we should simply acknowledge the fact that people generally act primarily out of self interest. Companies are the same, amplified tenfold because they have no "conscience" as an individual does.
Politicians have always been influenced by business. Business has the money, and politicians are human. Therefore until we have some kind of semi-godlike being who is separate from day-to-day worldly needs and desires (e.g. money, sex, power, etc) then we're going to have laws which benefit business, at the expense of the individual. It is indeed ironic that at the collective level we are all behaving in this way, and yet at the individual level we are all hurt by it. We claim to be "advanced", but we certainly do not really act like it.
I have been interested lately in how ideas seem to spread in a community like viruses. Groups of people do have a kind of ability to collectively develop ideas - the audience at a play all decides to give a standing ovation as one, and the clapping stops all at once too. This also operates at a larger scale - look at fads. Blogging has been around since day one in terms of people being able to update web pages with their daily diary, but for some reason it only really took off as an idea relatively recently.
Once an idea has spread among a certain critical mass of people, then it reaches the "tipping point" and effectively becomes epidemic, or pandemic. I see ideas spread like this, and some are more viral than others - religion is a good example, because part of its DNA is a desire to spread itself to other people (hosts?). I saw in New Scientist recently a good discussion of this - it was talking about War, and how it becomes inevitable after a certain point, because it (the idea) has simply spread too far. So the article talked about the possibility of "innoculating" certain key people in the population (i.e. influential individuals) against the idea, to stop it spreading. It may sound strange, but these ideas do spread, and perhaps if the people in charge already had seen arguments and evidence to contradict the idea, then the idea wouldn't take hold.
The order in which people hear stuff is important, because as we all know, it's very hard to change someone's mind once they've reached a conclusion in their head. We see arguments all the time where people aren't really debating the points, but rather simply defending their own preconceived conclusions, sometimes in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary. See the defence of the current war in Iraq, which was started because Iraq was supposed to be an imminent thread to America. But after it became apparent that there were in fact no WMDs, many people who supported the war initially did not change their minds - rather, they simply changed their rationale to continue to support their previous stance (now, apparently, it was all about "freeing the Iraqi people"). People will contort themselves in all sorts of ways rather than change ideas. In other words, the idea that got in there first has a huge advantage. Hence the concept of innoculation.
So, what we really need here is not more laws or different regulations, but different ideas to take hold in the population at large. It won't work by simply changing systems, we need to change ideas about how we want to live. The crucial new idea that we really need might be this: Think about the good to the world, instead of just the good to myself or my little tribe (family, company, city, sports team, country, race). This would take care of a lot of stuff, including patents, global warming, famine, deforestation, endangered species, polution, and war.
But don't hold your breath. It's just an idea, after all.
Careful if you're doing this on a remote host that you don't have easy console access to (e.g. co-located or rented from a hosting company). If you happen to delete or otherwise lose the key on your local computer (or if you need to login from another computer for some reason) then you'll be unable to.
I am using subversion quite successfully on both RedHat 7.3 (my workstation) and Debian Woody (my server). I compile from source. Not sure why you're having a problem, but just wanted to let you know that it can work...
Yes, providing the recipe with every cake sold would destroy the restaurant and food service industries, if it enabled you to make and have cake whenever you wanted, for free, without having to go outside. Who would go to the market if you could just get it for free from home? Sure, there might be some market for people who packaged up food into "meals" but still all the components would be available for free, and most people would not then be willing to pay.
There is a basic truth underlying all Open Source software, which most people here don't seem to really grok: If it is available for free, then hardly anybody will pay you for it. And forget the "difference" between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". Most people see only the fact that they can get it for free. Making pedantic distinctions ignores the practical realities of the matter: It's free. Period. Name anyone who markets Open Source software without it also being available for no cost. And then, instantly, we all know what happens: 99% of people zero straight in on the "free download" option and ignore the "professional version" or whatever the paid option is. We all do it, it's human nature. How many times did you run WinZip and click on the "Use Evaluation Version"?
This is surely one of the "dirty little secrets" of the Open Source movement (of which I am a part, btw), in that we are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot by destroying the marketplace for selling the thing that we produce. I write software for a living; but it's very hard to sell anything these days, since you have to be either a very large company or else make it available for free download, and hope for the odd trickle of donations.
I see the only model that really works being the Web service - see Google, Yahoo!, and all the other services out there. They all use Open Source software in one form or another, and yet they are not required to reveal their code or give it away, and nobody is screaming for them to either. So doing a website is perhaps the only way to make any money from software now, for the small guy. Of course, you still have to get past the problem of everybody expecting all content on the web to be free too...
It's a problem that you don't really appreciate until you have tried actually making a living from programming. If you are happy consulting and doing little bespoke, vertical market apps for business clients, then fine. But what about the larger ideas that may be out there, waiting for someone to come along and implement it? What is the lone programmer supposed to look forward to there? A long period of hacking away for no money, followed by another long period of maintaining the thing, for no money (and the trickle of donations thrown his way). And then, if he's really lucky, he'll get some big company to take him under it's wing and sponsor him. Great - so now he's back to working for someone else again. How about the classic story of the little guy making it rich? I guess that's not allowed any more. You can apparently be a successful writer or musician or scientist or artist or just about any other profession, and expect to make real money in your own right, without having to work for someone else. But the lone programmer, well, the best he can hope for is to get picked up by IBM. Anyone who responds with "Well you could try selling it if you want to" is just sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the real issue. Again: If you have an open source program, then people expect it to be made available for free. In other words, No Payment. At this point I don't care about the "Free beer / Free speech" distinction, you have to put food on the table and it would be nice to be able to do this without having to work for MegaCorp. Selling free software is just such an oxymoron that I'm frankly surprised anyone tries to push this as a valid business model.
Sure, Open Source is great. Like I said, I use it all the time. But it is something of a bitter-sweet affair, if we are to be honest with ourlselves. College students haven't had to try surviving "out there" yet, you won't really "get it" until you've done a bunch of stuff and slowly come to realize that you'll basically never make any money off any of it.
I see a lot of comments along the lines of "there's not enough selection", "it'll never work as a business model", "Can't do it without the major labels", et cetera ad nauseam.
I guess I am just starting to get rather irritated with the sense of spoiled entitlement that many in the "open source" linux world seem to have these days. They expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, free, or else it must be crap and doomed to failure.
Whenever we hear about the latest shenanigans by the RIAA or MPAA, we hear a chorus of shrieks and wails bemoaning the fact that there are no "fair" music services out there that are unencumbered by the DRM mess.
Well, here we are: A guy actually stepped up and started something that seems to provide a very reasonable service: Songs you can download without any restrictions on subsequent use, for a very reasonable fee. And (this is what kills me) he even caters directly to Linux users. But still we hear a chorus of complaints. There isn't enough selection? He just started for crying out loud! Give him a chance to build the thing. I've often wondered myself why someone couldn't do just this sort of thing for the independent artists, just a really straightforward service that charges reasonable fees, doesn't try to screw the customer and rewards the artists. Here it is! He's trying to do it.
Here's an idea: Be grateful, try it, give him feedback, help him make it work. This is what you've been waiting for.
I don't know, sometimes I read Slashdot these days and all I see is people who want everything handed to them on a silver platter. They want everything for free, and if it isn't Open Source then it must be spawn of the devil. Unless, that is, it's Google.
I say, good luck to this guy, he's trying to do something that seems to be very worthwhile.
This attempt to "classify" website types more precisely using the TLD is a big mistake, because all classification schemes are fundamentally flawed. Whatever taxonomy you try to come up with, there will always be other ways to look at it, exceptions and other things that just don't "fit". For example, what if I have a website that has some jobs on it, and other classifieds, but isn't dedicated to jobs? Do I get the.com or the.jobs? Oh, I get it, I am supposed to just buy all the applicable domains (and, presumably, confuse my customers with a multitude of possible web addresses).
Having the top level domain suffix be so specific is just a horribly simplistic way of trying to classify websites. Also, why can't they realize that the website owners themselves don't really want it. It just multiplies the number of domains you have to register in order to prevent confusion and squatters.
If they want to fix something real, then how about the problem of all those domain names out there that have been registered simply to display a stupid "search page", with a message saying "this domain is for sale". I seem to remember in the early 1990's that if you didn't use a domain for a "valid purpose" then it simply got returned to the pool. It irritates me no end to think of a domain and check its availability, only to find some asshat registered it for no purpose but to sit on it and hope to squeeze some money out of someone who really wants to use it.
If we were to free up all THOSE domains then that would be a helluva lot more useful to the internet than new TLDs. And isn't ICAAN sposed to be looking after the interests of the internet, rather than simply representing business interests?
Some people seem to be mystified as to why some others find obnoxious cellphone users so annoying. Personally, I think it's because those loud, one-sided conversations are a bit like audio spam. Not in the sense that it's trying to sell you something, but because the listener is effectively powerless to do anything about it (unless you want to get into a confrontation, which most don't). Think about it: Spam is annoying because there is this sense that someone can reach out and plant irrelevant messages in your inbox that you have to spend time and attention deleting. It's this feeling that someone else has power over you (despite the best filters, I still get a few every day) is what is so annoying. In the same way, it's that these people yacking in a very loud voice is effectively subjecting you to something that you have little or no control over, and you have to spend time and valuable "mental space" trying to ignore or block out. It takes effort. Noise can be very, very irritating, since it's so hard to screen out. The sense of hearing is one of those (like smell) that we cannot easily tune out, without substantial inconvenience (i.e. blocking out all other sounds).
It's no coincidence that the most common "quality of life" complaint is about noise from your neighbors.
So, for all those people who are saying "just chill out, relax, tune it out", you should realize that this is pretty much the same response that spammers give when they are criticized for sending out thousands of useless messages to people who aren't remotely interested in what they have to sell. Saying "oh just chill out and don't listen to it" and "oh, just hit delete and relax" is pretty much the same thing. The key is to realize that even if you personally don't find it annoying, MANY other people do.
I think that with all the loud background noise on planes, this would mean that people would talk even more loudly than normal on a cellphone. And, in my experience, there is always someone who seems totally oblivious to the loudness of their own phone voice. They are totally focused on their conversation, and simply don't care about the people around them. Or, perhaps they actually believe that other people are interested in what they are saying - I certainly think that this is the case sometimes. I have heard cellphone users talking loudly about stuff that seems purposely designed to be heard by the passers by, particularly when it pertains to something "cool" that the person did, e.g. a sexual conquest, or when the person is trying to be "wise" and demonstrate to everyone around them what a great person they are. There's something about having an audience that makes people behave a little differently. In a twisted way, they believe everyone else will be interested in what they have to say, just like those people who believe that everyone in the vicinity simply *MUST* love the song that's playing on their music system (of course, they totally forget that treble doesn't travel so well, so other people mostly just hear the thudding "dmpha dmpha dmpha" of the bass, like a bad headache), or the guys who drive around very aggressively with screeching tires for no apparent reason ("ooooohhhh, he must be *such* a great driver" is what is going through their little heads, methinks)...
I believe that if cellphones became formally permissable on planes then we are going to see an increase in "air rage" incidents because of the closed space and already somewhat tense environment. People are already primed to be annoyed by the time they step on the plane, what with all the parking hassles, lines, delays, security checks and other impediments to their getting from A to B. We certainly don't need to finally settle down into that airplane seat, only to realize that the asshat behind us wants to talk to Lenny in marketing about the latest sales figures. When that happens in the terminal, I simply get up and walk away. On a plane, not really an option.
Yes. That was actually the first thing that occurred to me... so you can imagine how aghast I was to discover that it was the real thing. I checked the source IP addresses and while some were unresolvable, they all definitely came from Google's subnet. I also found other references to the new bot on Webmaster forums (can't find the link now), and the existence of the new version has been confirmed by Google. This was definitely the real Googlebot and not a spoofer.
I think it's too soon for a good alternative to have appeared. All of the existing competitors suffer from the "also ran" syndrome. Everybody uses Google, and they still work quite well as a search engine, so hardly anyone uses the other engines. However I would imagine that as Google loses its reputation, eventually another engine will come up in the same way that Google did. Back in 1998, Alta Vista, Lycos and Yahoo! were the main contenders (maybe others, I can't remember now). So it's possible for everything to change, if another little-engine-that-could appeared on the scene with the same smart, simple approach that Google had early on. But there would still be a danger of them being gobbled up by the hungry-for-acquisitions behemoth that Google is becoming. I predict that over the following years, the "good" culture that Brin and Page fostered in the early years will become a hollow shell of what it once was, endlessly re-iterated in corporate mottos while being forgotten where it counts.
Google has attained the position of being a household word, being a verb in its own right and known by everybody as "the" search engine. As such it occupies an enviable position similar to Microsoft, eBay, Amazon and a few other companies. That kind of momentum is hard to stop. It would take a rather special kind of company, one that was focused not on corporate growth but rather just being good at one thing and being happy with that... and I don't see any likely contenders at the moment. It may be too soon. But we can be sure that as time goes by, if more and more people decide that Google has gone to the dark side then someone will fill the vacuum. Until then I guess we just have to wait and see.
Sorry! No easy answers here. This is a work in progress.
This may be a little off-topic, but it's been on my mind recently so I thought I'd mention that I recently blocked Googlebot from my website. Why? Because they were using a new version of the bot that was requesting pages WAY too rapidly, as in tens of pages every second. This new version pretends to be a "real" browser (using the "Mozilla (compatible)" format). The old version (User-Agent begins with "Googlebot") was also present, and requesting pages politely. I think this new version was part of their recent effort to regenerate their index and "deep scan" websites, because it was shortly after this that they advertised their index doubling in size.
There were other issues as well as the rapacious spidering (which reminded me of some of the worst spambots out there), but I won't go into the details here. I didn't get any satisfactory resolution from Google when I tried contacting them.
Website suicide? I don't know. All I do know is that Google seems to be fulfilling my biggest fears - they are going downhill as they get bigger. Funny how the bigger a company gets, the more it tends to suck. Also, having an IPO is never a good thing, in my experience - it always leads to short-termism and corporate decisions based more on the bottom line than what's actually good for the users. Sure, any company has to look after its shareholders and investors, but they never seem to really grok that being so focused on the short-term negatively impacts things in the longer term, particularly if it loses you goodwill in the userspace. Also, as a company grows you do tend to get the sort of braindead, clueless decisions coming out that we apparently see here.
So now we have Google restricting what we can do with old Usenet posts... didn't they buy up all the archives for this stuff a while back? This would appear to give them some amount of power, but also (they should realize) responsibility as stewards of the past. This is not something that they are simply indexing on someone else's website, it's data that they actually own. But in this case it's not really their data at all - it's the community's.
Google seems to be slowly using up the goodwill they built up since 1998 when they came onto the scene, a small, fast, simple, charming and relevant search engine that kicked ass. Why can't a company just keep doing what it does well, and be satisfied with that? Why does everything have to eventually grow, expand, gobble up other companies, and then inevitably start to suck?
Slashdot Mirror
I never watched the series, and just happened to catch the movie two days before it disappeared from my local theatre. It was the matinee, and there were three other people in there with me. I have to say, I've been avoiding going out to see movies in recent years, because there always seems to be some asshat sitting behind me who feels that it's perfectly ok to discuss plot points in a normal voice, or be in a constant state of candy rustling, or other noise that just ruins the whole thing.
... empty ... walking out of those movies. All special effect, no humanity, no heart. Is anyone else yawning these days at the latest, greatest special effects? I mean, it's been a while since I was really wowed by this stuff - I think Terminator II was the last movie that really made me go "hey, neat!". The Matrix was ok (the first one only, please, not the travesty that the other two became), but it was mostly the style (and bullet time) that make that movie.
Anyway, back to the real point: Serenity has restored my faith in movies. Star Wars (the recent run of prequals) almost killed off my hope totally. I just felt so
Serenity was a return to something that George Lucas almost had in his grasp with his very first Star Wars movie: A sense of real people, experiencing real life, only in a very, very different environment to ours. This is true escapism - not Grand Councils and "sheratons in space" (thanks Joss), but real, gritty, imperfect, cowardly, funny, wisecracking people. The sort of characters you would probably like if you met them in real life. Who can imagine interacting with any of the recent Star Wars characters in real life? Sheesh.
Joss Whedon is one of those people who has a talent for mixing the real with the fantastic in a funny, witty way. I think Serenity is right up there at the top of my list of all-time favorite movies. It rocks because it has heart, which so many movies these days lack. The big mistake action movies make is that if you don't care about the characters, then who cares what happens to them? In Serenity, I cared. I took my wife to see it for a second time (had to travel a bit, since it was gone from most places by then). She is not a Sci-Fi fan, but I had a hunch, and I was right - she loved it. That says something.
I also went right out and bought the Firefly DVD set, and we both watched it all the way through over the next few nights. I have to say I am totally amazed that this show was canceled. They canned this in favor of what? More reality sludge? Yikes.
... as all the Google fanboys do mental summersaults to twist reality to fit the conflicting notions that Google can do nothing wrong, and yet web patents are so very, very wrong...
... make the voices stop, please?"
... erk ... ack ... (transmission terminated)"
I can see it now, future headline:
Google CEO Revealed as Beelzebub Prince of Darkness, Mountain View New 7th Circle of Hell
Slashdot comments:
"Well, you know, Satan *is* very misunderstood"
"Gmail still rocks! I don't care if the Google minions sacrifice a kitten every time I check my mail, as long as I have my 100 TB of storage! Whoohoo!"
"I just sold my eternal soul for more relevant search results - but hey, I got a great price on this DVD player! Thanks Asmodeus!"
"My monitor smokes a bit when I do searches now, but hey - I can find out what all my friends have been *really* thinking about me! Hey, this new GoogleBrainCrawler kicks butt! Go Google! But
"Yahoo! made a deal with the ancient Nordic Gods but they're just playing catch up at this point"
"Jeez guys, if it was Microsoft making a deal with Belial then we'd be all over it but just because it's Google, you're all
Thanks for the link, that's very interesting. It seems to show that MySQL is still faster than PostgreSQL, at least for simple jobs and one user. However the anecdotes I have heard would seem to be harder to test - they say that PostgreSQL is faster under load from many multiple users, perhaps because of its row-level locking capabilities while doing transactions. It seems that in order to get the same kind of functionality under MySQL you have to use InnoDB, which generally seems to be slower than MyISAM, although I have also read that this isn't actually true either - some seem to find InnoDB faster than MyISAM for some applications. It's really hard to find definitive benchmarks which aren't slanted or trivial, I guess because to properly test these things requires time, knowledge, hardware resources, and a balanced outlook, which appears to be in increasingly short supply these days! ;-)
Thanks again,
-Neil
Thanks, that's interesting experience. I am currently stuck at 4.0.x, because MySQL saw fit to change the way that TIMESTAMP fields are formatted in 4.1 and up. These used to be in the form of straight numbers, e.g. 1212340985098, but now they are going to be using the YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS format, which really screws with all my Perl code that does calculations assuming that the value is numeric. It's a bit of a pain in the ass, I wish they hadn't done it, but I guess one of these days I'll just have to sit down and sift through my code to see what this will affect. Here's the documentation for the change, linked from the Upgrading from 4.0 to 4.1 document.
I think I'll be sticking with MySQL too, it works just fine so far, and "so far" is turning into a significant period of time.
-Neil
You seem certain that PostgreSQL can use more than one index per query. Well, a cursory search on Google comes up with this page. The "Red Hat Database" is basically PostgreSQL (I think!), and a little way down this page you can see this comment:
"Note that a query or data manipulation commands can only use at most one index per table."
Here's another link which seems to confirm this.
I believe I have seen comments somewhere regarding experimental support for multiple indexes in queries in PostgreSQL, but I am interested as to whether this is a mature technology, rather than new and/or experimental, or limited to special cases.
Thanks,
-Neil
Perhaps I should have made something more clear: In six years of use, I have never had a corrupted table with MySQL, ever. The worst that has happened has been a couple of indices that needed to be repaired; I think this happened during one of the big solar flares, so I have my suspicions that it was some kind of weird side effect of that. However even this caused no downtime, and it was easily repaired using the MySQL tools.
/Neil
MySQL has been rock solid for me, no doubt about it. It just chugs away, day in, day out.
As regards your other comments on MySQL: I know that the MySQL folks said in the past that nobody really needs x or y - and that's perfectly true. Nobody really *needs* that stuff. They added features over time, because some people clearly wanted it - that's called listening to your customers. But it's certainly not essential for the use of MySQL to implement significant databases. I wasn't aware that they argued against backups, but that seems a little unlikely since the mysqldump tool has been around forever, and replication has too - and that takes good care of instant backups nowadays. In any case, most of the major things that they maintained could be done without (subselects, views, cursors, stored procedures, even transactions) - guess what? I've been doing just fine without them, how about that. People can go right ahead and tell me I'm not running a "real" database, and I guess I'll just go right ahead and keep running...
Thanks,
I've been using MySQL for about six years now, and it's been working very well for me. I utilize it on my crazyguyonabike.com, a bicycle tour journals website. It has about 750 journals on there, with over 60,000 pictures. I use replication to back up the database remotely, and all in all it works very well. I honestly can't understand the level of hatred towards the tool that emanates from many of the posts here.
I have to say that I cringe every time I see a MySQL story on slashdot these days, because it just seems like there is a legion of PostgreSQL zealots just waiting for any chance to denigrate MySQL. It's the same littany every time - PostgreSQL is so much better, have they fixed the "Gotchas" yet, etc etc. Even when MySQL AB adds a feature or does fix some perceived failing, then the detractors simply ignore this and move on to some other apparent showstopper. For example, it's not enough that MySQL has transactional capabilities - no, now they simply moan that it's not the default (MyISAM still is).
We seem to have people who have what can only be described as a religious mindset when it comes to these issues. "Religious" in the sense that their minds are closed, and no matter what new facts come to light, they will simple twist everything around to match with their existing worldview. So, in these people's minds, MySQL AB adding features is not a positive thing, it's rather a sign of how wrong Monty was in the past to suggest that most people really don't need transactions for everything. Well, at what point exactly do we have "proof" that I don't really need transactions for my website? Is six years of 24/7 use enough? If not, then how long exactly?
Yes, I've had problems, of course I have. You will with any tool, PostgreSQL included. No matter the fact that PG has had transactions from day 1, people still got corrupted tables occasionally. But at the end of the day, the results are the same - do you still have your data? Is it intact and internally consistent? I can answer yes to that. I don't mind having some logic in my application to delete some records when some other records get deleted. It works really well, and while in theory it could cause data inconsistency, in practice this has never happened. Even if it did, a quick perl script would be sufficient to clean things up - I'm doing that kind of thing all the time anyway, as the database evolves and I need to shift stuff around or change table structures. It's no big deal, really! Some will say No, this is a Horrible Solution and you should put business logic into stored procedures... I say, get a life. That's *your* solution, it's not everybody's. You're simply moving your complexity around, you'll never really get rid of it. Some people are more comfortable with their complexity in stored procedures, I'm perfectly comfortable with it in my Perl application. So what, does it work for you? If so, then who cares.
There *are* some things in MySQL that disturb me, but I don't know if they are common to other DBMS solutions out there. One of the big ones for me currently is that the query optimizer only uses one index in queries. I know you can have multi-column indexes, but I still see this being a problem for some of my more complex queries. Does PostgreSQL do this better? Informed opinions please, rather than fanboy noise.
Also, speed. I hear lots of anecdotal tales about how much faster PostgreSQL is these days, especially under load from multiple connections. I'd like to hear from anybody who has actually made a transition from MySQL to PostgreSQL for a high-load Web application. Can PostgreSQL really replace MySQL now? Or is this another case of wishful thinking?
Thanks,
-Neil
I recently spent a good long week or three while trying to set up a new dual Opteron server which couldn't recognize the RAID card. This isn't even anything to do with GUIs, mind you - this is simply getting Linux to see the hard drives. The big problem, in a nutshell, is hardware drivers. Hardware support remains one of the big problems for Linux, and I don't care how much you love Linux, I guarantee you'll be swearing at it before too long if you try installing on any kind of non-run-of-the-mill box. Windows, like it or not, generally has drivers. You even get them on nice convenient CDs with whatever cards are causing the problem, which is doubly frustrating. I tell you, the headaches I've had setting up Linux are no joke. It seems like every time I have to do it (every couple of years or so currently), there are a whole bunch of new little gotchas to waste my time for days. And the knowledge (once you finally figure out the magic keywords to google for) isn't even useful or transferrable - it's probably something you'll never encounter again, ever, in this form. The answer is generally some obscure incantation in some god forsaken configuration file three levels down in some /etc directory you didn't even know existed. I've had kernels refuse to boot because devfs was enabled. I've had kernels refuse to see a storage device because some other totally unrelated module happened to be enabled. I've had to go and patch the kernel code with some obscure fix to make the thing work under 64-bit mode. I've battled endlessly with weird errors that give no clue as to their source.
Ok, ok, I don't hate Linux. It's actually rock-solid most of the time, once you get it dialed in. But I just have to say that I have the utmost sympathy for anyone who jacks it all in and goes with Windows - particularly for a desktop environment. I mean, come on - Windows 2000 (never used XP) is pretty rock solid, hardly ever crashes on me and you can get drivers for all the hardware without any hassles. Anyone who says that Linux beats Windows in this regard is just delusional, sorry. And on the desktop, Windows "just works" for most users. And it has all the software they expect, and it works the way they expect. And as for all the viruses and malware - that's an education problem. You could fix most of the Windows issues out there by using Firefox or Opera, and any reasonable email client but Outlook Express, from behind a Linksys cable/dsl router or any other firewall.
Ok, sorry, had to get that off my chest... I just get so tired of reading all these pious comments putting down anybody who chooses Windows over Linux. Get real! Linux rocks, much of the time, but come on - when it sucks, it sucks big time.
You're right, I did have to code the URL generation routine myself... but the code itself is really trivial (the hard part was thinking of the right way to do it), and yes, it is very portable to other contexts. I also think that the arguments for Java solutions can be applied equally to LAMP, particularly Perl, largely because of the existence of CPAN. I can code up some very powerful stuff very rapidly because just about anything you might need to do is probably already up on CPAN as a module. However that's another (probably endless) discussion - I think which language to use is a matter of taste and style, if you know what you're doing then you can write scalable apps in most any of them.
;-O
:)
The stuff I did in Perl isn't really onerous at all, at least no more than any other framework out there, with the added benefit that I have full control over its behavior, and I don't inherit a lot of bloat that I don't need. Making sure to call a particular routine whenever you want to generate a link isn't hard, and as a whole it was fun to do... I keep thinking I should write this stuff up, because I don't think I've seen this approach talked about much (if at all - about all you see is the talk of using a reverse proxy, which itself is more than most people seem to be aware of)...
Ironically, I was driven to do this work with reverse proxies after my first slashdotting - the mod_perl backend was getting hit for every request, and about 40,000 people came to visit!
http://www.neilgunton.com/spambot_trap/
Subsequent slashdottings have been no problem, though they haven't actually hit crazyguyonabike itself (yet...)
Fun stuff!
I agree, the issue of what to set for the expiration times is critical. I use a combination of approaches: Short expiration times (1 minute) for "what's new" type pages, which ensures that people will never see very old content (one minute is fast enough for anything but real real-time data such as stock quotes, but that's probably a case where you'd be setting 'no-cache' anyway)... this also means that the backend is being called at most once a minute for these pages, which isn't going to be a problem for any db unless the queries are just insane.
Then I also use URL arguments to make links look "new" to the front-end proxy when things change. For example, there is a 'v' field for documents that gets incremented whenever the document is modified. So then if a page is added, then all the links on subsequent generated pages have '&v=123', which looks like a new page and so the user doesn't get stale data. I also use the same technique for user options, which (as well as storing in a cookie) I compress and pass around as 'o=xxx'. This is useful for browsers, some of which do not distinguish pages which are otherwise identical but with different cookies.
Finally, user editing pages get 'no-cache', since these really are dynamic and are only being seen by one person anyway. But if I got slashdotted by someone posting a link to one of the journal pages on a popular site, the server would hardly break a sweat because it would generate that page just once and then serve it to all the other requests as static from the front-end.
I use these techniques successfully on my bike journals website: http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/
FYI, You don't need caching to be a part of the application server. Just make sure you generate good expiration times for your pages, and then use a reverse proxy front-end server. The proxy will cache requests, and pass new ones to the backend. I use this with great results on mod_perl, with a lightweight apache front end on the same machine for the reverse proxy.
Actually, the number of results returned has nothing to do (necessarily) with the size of the index. That was my point, which is relevant to the article. Besides, this is a discussion, and discussions have a way of, well, talking about things related to the article. Maybe Yahoo! just gives more relevant results, who knows. But just going by the number of results returned isn't a useful metric, in my book.
Surely it's the quality of the results that counts, rather than the quantity? Who needs 1,000,000 matches anyway, when most people don't go past the first page or two of the results? The article doesn't talk at all about how relevant the matches were. I'm not saying that it invalidates their study, but I would say that any search engine that returns millions of hits for any query is simply showing off. Give me a search engine that shows me fewer matches, but the best hits anyday. Lately, Google has increasingly been giving me a bunch of useless links when I search for stuff. For example, looking for reviews on various bits of hardware just gives you a bunch of websites that are selling the products, and *seem* to have reviews, but then you go to the page and it says something like "no reviews have been posted". Lots of ghost towns out there on the web these days. Anyway, the point holds: Give me relevant results and allow me to screen out the marketing junk and link farms. Beyond that I don't really care how many pages they have in the index.
Every time the patent issue comes up on slashdot, people rant about how little sense it all makes. Perhaps instead of trying to make sense of the patents, we should simply acknowledge the fact that people generally act primarily out of self interest. Companies are the same, amplified tenfold because they have no "conscience" as an individual does.
Politicians have always been influenced by business. Business has the money, and politicians are human. Therefore until we have some kind of semi-godlike being who is separate from day-to-day worldly needs and desires (e.g. money, sex, power, etc) then we're going to have laws which benefit business, at the expense of the individual. It is indeed ironic that at the collective level we are all behaving in this way, and yet at the individual level we are all hurt by it. We claim to be "advanced", but we certainly do not really act like it.
I have been interested lately in how ideas seem to spread in a community like viruses. Groups of people do have a kind of ability to collectively develop ideas - the audience at a play all decides to give a standing ovation as one, and the clapping stops all at once too. This also operates at a larger scale - look at fads. Blogging has been around since day one in terms of people being able to update web pages with their daily diary, but for some reason it only really took off as an idea relatively recently.
Once an idea has spread among a certain critical mass of people, then it reaches the "tipping point" and effectively becomes epidemic, or pandemic. I see ideas spread like this, and some are more viral than others - religion is a good example, because part of its DNA is a desire to spread itself to other people (hosts?). I saw in New Scientist recently a good discussion of this - it was talking about War, and how it becomes inevitable after a certain point, because it (the idea) has simply spread too far. So the article talked about the possibility of "innoculating" certain key people in the population (i.e. influential individuals) against the idea, to stop it spreading. It may sound strange, but these ideas do spread, and perhaps if the people in charge already had seen arguments and evidence to contradict the idea, then the idea wouldn't take hold.
The order in which people hear stuff is important, because as we all know, it's very hard to change someone's mind once they've reached a conclusion in their head. We see arguments all the time where people aren't really debating the points, but rather simply defending their own preconceived conclusions, sometimes in the face of blatant evidence to the contrary. See the defence of the current war in Iraq, which was started because Iraq was supposed to be an imminent thread to America. But after it became apparent that there were in fact no WMDs, many people who supported the war initially did not change their minds - rather, they simply changed their rationale to continue to support their previous stance (now, apparently, it was all about "freeing the Iraqi people"). People will contort themselves in all sorts of ways rather than change ideas. In other words, the idea that got in there first has a huge advantage. Hence the concept of innoculation.
So, what we really need here is not more laws or different regulations, but different ideas to take hold in the population at large. It won't work by simply changing systems, we need to change ideas about how we want to live. The crucial new idea that we really need might be this: Think about the good to the world, instead of just the good to myself or my little tribe (family, company, city, sports team, country, race). This would take care of a lot of stuff, including patents, global warming, famine, deforestation, endangered species, polution, and war.
But don't hold your breath. It's just an idea, after all.
Careful if you're doing this on a remote host that you don't have easy console access to (e.g. co-located or rented from a hosting company). If you happen to delete or otherwise lose the key on your local computer (or if you need to login from another computer for some reason) then you'll be unable to.
the Internal Revenue Service had developed some new way of finding me?
Mass Extinction Underway
The Sixth Extinction
The Holocene Extinction Event
The Current Mass Extinction
The earth, it appears, might be better off without us.
I am using subversion quite successfully on both RedHat 7.3 (my workstation) and Debian Woody (my server). I compile from source. Not sure why you're having a problem, but just wanted to let you know that it can work...
Yes, providing the recipe with every cake sold would destroy the restaurant and food service industries, if it enabled you to make and have cake whenever you wanted, for free, without having to go outside. Who would go to the market if you could just get it for free from home? Sure, there might be some market for people who packaged up food into "meals" but still all the components would be available for free, and most people would not then be willing to pay.
There is a basic truth underlying all Open Source software, which most people here don't seem to really grok: If it is available for free, then hardly anybody will pay you for it. And forget the "difference" between "free as in beer" and "free as in speech". Most people see only the fact that they can get it for free. Making pedantic distinctions ignores the practical realities of the matter: It's free. Period. Name anyone who markets Open Source software without it also being available for no cost. And then, instantly, we all know what happens: 99% of people zero straight in on the "free download" option and ignore the "professional version" or whatever the paid option is. We all do it, it's human nature. How many times did you run WinZip and click on the "Use Evaluation Version"?
This is surely one of the "dirty little secrets" of the Open Source movement (of which I am a part, btw), in that we are collectively shooting ourselves in the foot by destroying the marketplace for selling the thing that we produce. I write software for a living; but it's very hard to sell anything these days, since you have to be either a very large company or else make it available for free download, and hope for the odd trickle of donations.
I see the only model that really works being the Web service - see Google, Yahoo!, and all the other services out there. They all use Open Source software in one form or another, and yet they are not required to reveal their code or give it away, and nobody is screaming for them to either. So doing a website is perhaps the only way to make any money from software now, for the small guy. Of course, you still have to get past the problem of everybody expecting all content on the web to be free too...
It's a problem that you don't really appreciate until you have tried actually making a living from programming. If you are happy consulting and doing little bespoke, vertical market apps for business clients, then fine. But what about the larger ideas that may be out there, waiting for someone to come along and implement it? What is the lone programmer supposed to look forward to there? A long period of hacking away for no money, followed by another long period of maintaining the thing, for no money (and the trickle of donations thrown his way). And then, if he's really lucky, he'll get some big company to take him under it's wing and sponsor him. Great - so now he's back to working for someone else again. How about the classic story of the little guy making it rich? I guess that's not allowed any more. You can apparently be a successful writer or musician or scientist or artist or just about any other profession, and expect to make real money in your own right, without having to work for someone else. But the lone programmer, well, the best he can hope for is to get picked up by IBM. Anyone who responds with "Well you could try selling it if you want to" is just sticking his head in the sand and ignoring the real issue. Again: If you have an open source program, then people expect it to be made available for free. In other words, No Payment. At this point I don't care about the "Free beer / Free speech" distinction, you have to put food on the table and it would be nice to be able to do this without having to work for MegaCorp. Selling free software is just such an oxymoron that I'm frankly surprised anyone tries to push this as a valid business model.
Sure, Open Source is great. Like I said, I use it all the time. But it is something of a bitter-sweet affair, if we are to be honest with ourlselves. College students haven't had to try surviving "out there" yet, you won't really "get it" until you've done a bunch of stuff and slowly come to realize that you'll basically never make any money off any of it.
JMHO, of course.
I see a lot of comments along the lines of "there's not enough selection", "it'll never work as a business model", "Can't do it without the major labels", et cetera ad nauseam.
I guess I am just starting to get rather irritated with the sense of spoiled entitlement that many in the "open source" linux world seem to have these days. They expect everything to be handed to them on a silver platter, free, or else it must be crap and doomed to failure.
Whenever we hear about the latest shenanigans by the RIAA or MPAA, we hear a chorus of shrieks and wails bemoaning the fact that there are no "fair" music services out there that are unencumbered by the DRM mess.
Well, here we are: A guy actually stepped up and started something that seems to provide a very reasonable service: Songs you can download without any restrictions on subsequent use, for a very reasonable fee. And (this is what kills me) he even caters directly to Linux users. But still we hear a chorus of complaints. There isn't enough selection? He just started for crying out loud! Give him a chance to build the thing. I've often wondered myself why someone couldn't do just this sort of thing for the independent artists, just a really straightforward service that charges reasonable fees, doesn't try to screw the customer and rewards the artists. Here it is! He's trying to do it.
Here's an idea: Be grateful, try it, give him feedback, help him make it work. This is what you've been waiting for.
I don't know, sometimes I read Slashdot these days and all I see is people who want everything handed to them on a silver platter. They want everything for free, and if it isn't Open Source then it must be spawn of the devil. Unless, that is, it's Google.
I say, good luck to this guy, he's trying to do something that seems to be very worthwhile.
Just my opinion.
This attempt to "classify" website types more precisely using the TLD is a big mistake, because all classification schemes are fundamentally flawed. Whatever taxonomy you try to come up with, there will always be other ways to look at it, exceptions and other things that just don't "fit". For example, what if I have a website that has some jobs on it, and other classifieds, but isn't dedicated to jobs? Do I get the .com or the .jobs? Oh, I get it, I am supposed to just buy all the applicable domains (and, presumably, confuse my customers with a multitude of possible web addresses).
Having the top level domain suffix be so specific is just a horribly simplistic way of trying to classify websites. Also, why can't they realize that the website owners themselves don't really want it. It just multiplies the number of domains you have to register in order to prevent confusion and squatters.
If they want to fix something real, then how about the problem of all those domain names out there that have been registered simply to display a stupid "search page", with a message saying "this domain is for sale". I seem to remember in the early 1990's that if you didn't use a domain for a "valid purpose" then it simply got returned to the pool. It irritates me no end to think of a domain and check its availability, only to find some asshat registered it for no purpose but to sit on it and hope to squeeze some money out of someone who really wants to use it.
If we were to free up all THOSE domains then that would be a helluva lot more useful to the internet than new TLDs. And isn't ICAAN sposed to be looking after the interests of the internet, rather than simply representing business interests?
Some people seem to be mystified as to why some others find obnoxious cellphone users so annoying. Personally, I think it's because those loud, one-sided conversations are a bit like audio spam. Not in the sense that it's trying to sell you something, but because the listener is effectively powerless to do anything about it (unless you want to get into a confrontation, which most don't). Think about it: Spam is annoying because there is this sense that someone can reach out and plant irrelevant messages in your inbox that you have to spend time and attention deleting. It's this feeling that someone else has power over you (despite the best filters, I still get a few every day) is what is so annoying. In the same way, it's that these people yacking in a very loud voice is effectively subjecting you to something that you have little or no control over, and you have to spend time and valuable "mental space" trying to ignore or block out. It takes effort. Noise can be very, very irritating, since it's so hard to screen out. The sense of hearing is one of those (like smell) that we cannot easily tune out, without substantial inconvenience (i.e. blocking out all other sounds).
It's no coincidence that the most common "quality of life" complaint is about noise from your neighbors.
So, for all those people who are saying "just chill out, relax, tune it out", you should realize that this is pretty much the same response that spammers give when they are criticized for sending out thousands of useless messages to people who aren't remotely interested in what they have to sell. Saying "oh just chill out and don't listen to it" and "oh, just hit delete and relax" is pretty much the same thing. The key is to realize that even if you personally don't find it annoying, MANY other people do.
I think that with all the loud background noise on planes, this would mean that people would talk even more loudly than normal on a cellphone. And, in my experience, there is always someone who seems totally oblivious to the loudness of their own phone voice. They are totally focused on their conversation, and simply don't care about the people around them. Or, perhaps they actually believe that other people are interested in what they are saying - I certainly think that this is the case sometimes. I have heard cellphone users talking loudly about stuff that seems purposely designed to be heard by the passers by, particularly when it pertains to something "cool" that the person did, e.g. a sexual conquest, or when the person is trying to be "wise" and demonstrate to everyone around them what a great person they are. There's something about having an audience that makes people behave a little differently. In a twisted way, they believe everyone else will be interested in what they have to say, just like those people who believe that everyone in the vicinity simply *MUST* love the song that's playing on their music system (of course, they totally forget that treble doesn't travel so well, so other people mostly just hear the thudding "dmpha dmpha dmpha" of the bass, like a bad headache), or the guys who drive around very aggressively with screeching tires for no apparent reason ("ooooohhhh, he must be *such* a great driver" is what is going through their little heads, methinks)...
I believe that if cellphones became formally permissable on planes then we are going to see an increase in "air rage" incidents because of the closed space and already somewhat tense environment. People are already primed to be annoyed by the time they step on the plane, what with all the parking hassles, lines, delays, security checks and other impediments to their getting from A to B. We certainly don't need to finally settle down into that airplane seat, only to realize that the asshat behind us wants to talk to Lenny in marketing about the latest sales figures. When that happens in the terminal, I simply get up and walk away. On a plane, not really an option.
Just my opinion...
Yes. That was actually the first thing that occurred to me... so you can imagine how aghast I was to discover that it was the real thing. I checked the source IP addresses and while some were unresolvable, they all definitely came from Google's subnet. I also found other references to the new bot on Webmaster forums (can't find the link now), and the existence of the new version has been confirmed by Google. This was definitely the real Googlebot and not a spoofer.
I think it's too soon for a good alternative to have appeared. All of the existing competitors suffer from the "also ran" syndrome. Everybody uses Google, and they still work quite well as a search engine, so hardly anyone uses the other engines. However I would imagine that as Google loses its reputation, eventually another engine will come up in the same way that Google did. Back in 1998, Alta Vista, Lycos and Yahoo! were the main contenders (maybe others, I can't remember now). So it's possible for everything to change, if another little-engine-that-could appeared on the scene with the same smart, simple approach that Google had early on. But there would still be a danger of them being gobbled up by the hungry-for-acquisitions behemoth that Google is becoming. I predict that over the following years, the "good" culture that Brin and Page fostered in the early years will become a hollow shell of what it once was, endlessly re-iterated in corporate mottos while being forgotten where it counts.
Google has attained the position of being a household word, being a verb in its own right and known by everybody as "the" search engine. As such it occupies an enviable position similar to Microsoft, eBay, Amazon and a few other companies. That kind of momentum is hard to stop. It would take a rather special kind of company, one that was focused not on corporate growth but rather just being good at one thing and being happy with that... and I don't see any likely contenders at the moment. It may be too soon. But we can be sure that as time goes by, if more and more people decide that Google has gone to the dark side then someone will fill the vacuum. Until then I guess we just have to wait and see.
Sorry! No easy answers here. This is a work in progress.
This may be a little off-topic, but it's been on my mind recently so I thought I'd mention that I recently blocked Googlebot from my website. Why? Because they were using a new version of the bot that was requesting pages WAY too rapidly, as in tens of pages every second. This new version pretends to be a "real" browser (using the "Mozilla (compatible)" format). The old version (User-Agent begins with "Googlebot") was also present, and requesting pages politely. I think this new version was part of their recent effort to regenerate their index and "deep scan" websites, because it was shortly after this that they advertised their index doubling in size.
There were other issues as well as the rapacious spidering (which reminded me of some of the worst spambots out there), but I won't go into the details here. I didn't get any satisfactory resolution from Google when I tried contacting them.
Website suicide? I don't know. All I do know is that Google seems to be fulfilling my biggest fears - they are going downhill as they get bigger. Funny how the bigger a company gets, the more it tends to suck. Also, having an IPO is never a good thing, in my experience - it always leads to short-termism and corporate decisions based more on the bottom line than what's actually good for the users. Sure, any company has to look after its shareholders and investors, but they never seem to really grok that being so focused on the short-term negatively impacts things in the longer term, particularly if it loses you goodwill in the userspace. Also, as a company grows you do tend to get the sort of braindead, clueless decisions coming out that we apparently see here.
So now we have Google restricting what we can do with old Usenet posts... didn't they buy up all the archives for this stuff a while back? This would appear to give them some amount of power, but also (they should realize) responsibility as stewards of the past. This is not something that they are simply indexing on someone else's website, it's data that they actually own. But in this case it's not really their data at all - it's the community's.
Google seems to be slowly using up the goodwill they built up since 1998 when they came onto the scene, a small, fast, simple, charming and relevant search engine that kicked ass. Why can't a company just keep doing what it does well, and be satisfied with that? Why does everything have to eventually grow, expand, gobble up other companies, and then inevitably start to suck?
Never mind... for now, Goodbye Google.