SilverStripe, one of the PHP/MySQL applications included in Microsoft's Web Application gallery, gets 40% of its installs on Windows currently. So, to streamline those installs makes a good set of sense, especially as a high number of those would be purely for evaluation purposes, where the focus is to get a copy quickly running with all the correct dependencies sorted.
http://silverstripe.org/silverstripe-installation-trends-march2009/
Speaking from experience when we ran demconvention.com over the very busy Democratic National Convention week, traffic went from effectively nothing to massive spikes in hours.
This was about double the website traffic that the Republican convention (gopconvention2008.com) got.
It will be interesting to learn what sort of infrastructure and platforms are used to support the major election coverage news websites. DemConvention.com ran on just a few servers running the LAMP (Redhat) stack with the PHP5-based SilverStripe open source CMS...
Yeah, tasks are very transparent and obvious before you commit to anything. (Examples for the SilverStripe project)
and you're more likely to get useful opportunities out of putting "Worked on some cool tasks for an open source project in a Google contest for two weekends" than a year's worth of cleaning your Dad's car, babysitting, working at the cinema candy booth, starbucks etc.
Well it was CmdrTaco who mentioned building stuff during High School, but come to think of it, had Google extended the newly launched High School contest even further, to grade/elementary/primary school I could have entered, but that would have needed to have been launched before Google got big:)
Back in my day I wrote a large number of QuickBasic (compiled as soon as they got to a certain size) and Borland C programs; which would cover the spectrum of multiplayer addons to games like Doom (and later Quake), all manner of small utilities, and some nostelgic Screen 13 (VGA 320x200x256 colour) games which used assembly on the tighter loops. I was sad to say my real only access to a LAN at that time was our school, fitted with low-end 386s, meaning I never really finished my IPX networking code because it was infuriatingly slow in comparison to my trusty 486DX2/66 at the time.
Sadly somewhere all that sourcecode was lost, although I'm some of may lurk around old Geocities homepages etc:P
But never mind, I still get to benefit from the program because I went off to co-found the SilverStripe web platform/CMS project, one of the open source projects involved in this high school contest...;)
Well, except for a few countries (Cuba, etc), and the reason for that is I believe Google is sanctioned against including those due to US law? (Being one of the entities involved, but from New Zealand, I am not certain on US law restrictions)
My main point is that there are far more variables that need exploring, and then you can find the right too.
For instance, one decision would be: Is it a small team of people working on this project, who want to rapidly work together in a closed application (e.g. building a software as a service application)? If so, then Ruby on Rails could work better, but on the other hand, if your website/project is going to be open source, or needs a community of people to look at it, then PHP might be better.
I think sites like opensourcecms.com could do better at seperating the tools out with questions like that!
And yet, PHP and ROR are like scattered lego blocks on the floor, waiting to be patiently assembled. If someone asks me "to build a website", I would use a system that is much closer to a working website, and tweak it.
The comments in this read about "building a digg" etc, are in my opinion, not what people generally think of "when building a website". Digg is a custom-built application that cannot leverage from existing systems as well as a website can. It probably could have just as well been done in perl or ROR. There would be different challenges, and a different number of servers and staff, but fundamentally it would have been successful enough to pay people to figure out how to overcome those challenges.
I'd only heard of SugarCRM, but I guess that doesn't preclude these apps from being innovative.
This article was more pushing companies who are financially successful. Actually, on second thought, perhaps more to do with successful investment rounds (the funding section only talked about the fact they wowed Investors, so we should assume not all of them have wowed enough customers to make profit)
If the article was actually about innovation (And had to concentrate on recent, so sorry, RMS doesn't count) then it should look at more diverse areas. Sure, have some enterprise app. Have some collaboration app. But there is a one heck of a lot of interesting stuff going on the web, and while SugarCRM is a great CRM (we use it for our work/open source project), and I don't necesssarily think it should be removed from the list, it seems to be missing some peers.
I haven't scoured for what lives in the open source world, but we have sites and companies like delcious, digg, flickr, google maps/spreadsheets and all of that. An interesting article about innovation would brougt to light at least one open source offering of that sort of style, i.e. interesting technology to DO something cool and innovative on the web. (e.g. Zimbra, but my point would be I want NEWs, stuff I don't know yet...?:)
have you tried APC with PHP5 extensively?
When I tried it some time ago (months) it crashed lots. Eaccelerator was better but not perfect (occasional but dramatic problems). Interested in knowing your thoughts.
Ahh, which language are you implying DOES support 600 simutanous users on a server?
I've never heard someone yell out to me that Python, Perl or.NET or Java are in any way performance-oriented (they're far more of postgres than mysql focus, say)
Horde3 is a system written in PHP, and could probably be improved to work far better. We've created our own complex PHP systems and if someone pays us to optimise, it is fairly easy to get page creation times to 50ms. On an average dual processor machine (e.g Xeon 2.2ghz, which I've tested) that means 40 pages/sec, which supports 600 users if you assume a user changing page on average every 15 seconds.
Also, PHP5 has a number of accelerator projects, which presumeably could be incorporated as a debian package if only a maintainer had the time (this would quickly heighten adoption of it. Presumeably, though, that would limit Zend's accelerator sales and thus isn't actively pushed?). See http://eaccelerator.net/
Seems you need to sign up to the store. NZ isn't one of the country options. I go so far as to pretend being in Australia and enter in my credit card number (without any intention of actually buying something), and it says my credit card number isn't from Australia (true)... so I guess this album art feature aint for me until I move to Australia or iTunes opens in New Zealand (unlikely this decade...?)
What's the point of having a hybrid when the AirCar seems to operate perfectly just on air? (And it also purifies the air).
Actually, I've always been skeptical about the AirCar... I presumed if it really was legitimate, it would have proliferated and been covered extensively by the media. (Or are we to think the oil companies are keeping it quiet until we finally run out of oil?)
DreamWeaver is a nice tool for many things, (such as rapid prototyping or completing web design) but using it for templating is a nightmare. Its also a stretch to get it to create Pure CSS designs. Biased ofcourse, as I helped create the project, but using SilverStripe alongside a WYSIWIG or raw-html editor is your best bet. It seperates the HTML, the "templating", CSS, and content, and among many other advantages, makes it easy to generate forms, and re-use ("repurpose") content. The content, and the ability to add pages, etc, is all handled by a content management system. This is how the process of building and maintaining websites is going to evolve --- no longer do we need to deal with spagetti messes of HTML, textual content, Javascript, CSS, and server side scripts such as PHP, ASP, or Perl all being tangled. Instead, they will each be neatly seperated with seperate access controls that suit business owners, designers and programmer/scripter's needs and skillsets. Check out silverstripe.com for details... (and yes, to please the slashdot massses, it is a server technology that runs on linux servers exclusively)
One thing the otherwise nicely written article didn't mention: why is the area suddenly now eligable to being claimed by neighbouring countries based on the fact the temperature is warmer and some ice turned to water?? Surely these countries either have "rights" to the area now, or they don't have any such rights at all. It certainly wouldn't work the otherway -- would a country such as Norway have its northern tip politically shed off if an ice age descended upon it?? I bet not!
Finally - wouldn't it be nice if the UN (or some such) would appoint the government of the country least involved with environmental disaster and commercial wreaklessness (It would seem Russia and US would be excluded on these points. I imagine Canada and Denmark fare better but I won't assume so).
I think a new segment should form on Slashdot, formed by a band of people whose only relation is the fact they oppose MySQL.
They can then limit "feedback" by appointing a single person from the segment, as a spokesperson, so that the rest of us can divulge in useful conversations whenever MySQL hits the press on here, and continue to use MySQL happily where it is appropriate (which, is "most of the time"):P
Know what you mean.
We just do the 'fastest' options for mysqldump for a database, and given our systems (content managed sites) are (almost exclusively) used by businesses within a single country, this happening at 5am has proved to work, without hiccups, for several years.
Given the backups occur on a daily basis, it doesn't seem to be much different that you've come up with a bit of data that is inconsistent amoung tables to where we've plain lost a several hours data,it now being half way through the day.
Our "important" data (bookings, payments, sign-ups) etc are emailed as a backup to general disaster, and are useful in this case. Obviously this doesn't scale, but we don't need it to currently.
While, yes, always prompting is essential, as soon as FireFox gains market share into the general base of 'standard pc literacy', people are way too careless to click 'ok' to anything, and hence install/wipe/ruin their computing experience.
Having a prompt is a definate edge, but I hope from your implication above that XPI doesn't let runaway extensions on Mozilla to wreak as much damage.
Until last year, we had a very good run with using pretty standard machines as linux web and file servers that were accessed constantly over a LAN. The only things that needed replacement were harddisks (so ensure you perform nightly backups to another machine on the LAN), and the occasional birthday present of extra RAM or bigger harddisks.
This year we noticed Dell had very good rates for renting their rack servers, so we grabbed a couple, and will upgrade them on a 18-24 month basis. The affordability of these makes them much cheaper than buying a desktop machine, and the Dell warrantee/support has in our experience been sufficient when we've had problems (e.g. another damned harddisk crap-out).
So now, we have the leased rack 2.8ghz servers for our webservers, and our trusty P~500s still keeping up fine with our file serving, mail, and routing needs, etc (Thanks Linux... ).
At a glance, I cannot see the Caconicalisation bug the main article mentions, in this secuna report.
Assuming the volumne of bugs "is correct", you need to take into account;
- the criticality and impact of the bugs
- the turn-around time for resolution
It news to no-one that open source software consistantly is open to discovery of DoS, buffer-overrun and other exploits, however its common place to expect that where bugs are critical and have a major forseen repercussion, they are resolved very quickly, with patches available and encouragement to upgrade advertised in numerous popular internet locations.
On the other hand, vendors have a much harder time tracking down such problems, and/or issueing statements, which could well be the reason for ASP's low volume of bugs.
I thought the gravitational pull, over time, degraded all orbits - if I remember correctly, in a number of million years time, the earth would theoretically finally come to hit earth, and the earth hit sol, however it was anticipated our sun would have come to the deterimental part of its life and swallow us up well before then.
Re:Currect track record
on
Latest SP2 News
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually, to be honest XP is quite good. The masses really mainly seem to understand how to use it. My mum can write CDs, scan photos and so on:P... which previously with Win98 was always a sure way for a phone call to me for support.
I really enjoy the fact hardware is finally really plug n play. No stuffing around finding the drivers. I slapped it on an old Pentium 500 recently and it detected everything, breathing new life into the box.
And yes, while I say this, I prefer (and are browsing on) Firefox, and we have a bunch of linux servers. (Its a shame I have to justify any decision to use anything which aint a "postgres server on some box where i have personally contributed into a branch of a kernel i compiled mysel" when on slashdot. ah well).
Re:'Flaws' Not that big of a deal
on
Latest SP2 News
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Yes - agreed - to be exact;
"With Service Pack 2, Microsoft introduces a new security feature which warns users before executing files that originate from an untrusted location (zone) such as the Internet.
There are two flaws in the implementation of this feature: a cmd issue and the caching of ZoneIDs in Windows Explorer. The Windows command shell cmd ignores zone information and starts executables without warnings. Virus authors could use this to spread viruses despite the new security features of SP2.
Windows Explorer does not update zone information properly when files are overwritten. So it can be tricked to execute files from the internet without warning."
Slashdot Mirror
SilverStripe, one of the PHP/MySQL applications included in Microsoft's Web Application gallery, gets 40% of its installs on Windows currently. So, to streamline those installs makes a good set of sense, especially as a high number of those would be purely for evaluation purposes, where the focus is to get a copy quickly running with all the correct dependencies sorted. http://silverstripe.org/silverstripe-installation-trends-march2009/
Well done Sam -- you've been working on this for quite some time. In addition, big props for Catalyst IT, Wellington, and open source!
"Will traffic approach record levels? "?
Most likely!
Speaking from experience when we ran demconvention.com over the very busy Democratic National Convention week, traffic went from effectively nothing to massive spikes in hours.
All in all the website got 2.6 billion hits, 3.2 million visitors, 350,000 hours of video watched... in the four day/96 hour period of the convention!
This was about double the website traffic that the Republican convention (gopconvention2008.com) got.
It will be interesting to learn what sort of infrastructure and platforms are used to support the major election coverage news websites. DemConvention.com ran on just a few servers running the LAMP (Redhat) stack with the PHP5-based SilverStripe open source CMS...
Yeah, tasks are very transparent and obvious before you commit to anything. (Examples for the SilverStripe project) and you're more likely to get useful opportunities out of putting "Worked on some cool tasks for an open source project in a Google contest for two weekends" than a year's worth of cleaning your Dad's car, babysitting, working at the cinema candy booth, starbucks etc.
Well it was CmdrTaco who mentioned building stuff during High School, but come to think of it, had Google extended the newly launched High School contest even further, to grade/elementary/primary school I could have entered, but that would have needed to have been launched before Google got big :)
Back in my day I wrote a large number of QuickBasic (compiled as soon as they got to a certain size) and Borland C programs; which would cover the spectrum of multiplayer addons to games like Doom (and later Quake), all manner of small utilities, and some nostelgic Screen 13 (VGA 320x200x256 colour) games which used assembly on the tighter loops. I was sad to say my real only access to a LAN at that time was our school, fitted with low-end 386s, meaning I never really finished my IPX networking code because it was infuriatingly slow in comparison to my trusty 486DX2/66 at the time.
Sadly somewhere all that sourcecode was lost, although I'm some of may lurk around old Geocities homepages etc :P
But never mind, I still get to benefit from the program because I went off to co-found the SilverStripe web platform/CMS project, one of the open source projects involved in this high school contest... ;)
Well, except for a few countries (Cuba, etc), and the reason for that is I believe Google is sanctioned against including those due to US law? (Being one of the entities involved, but from New Zealand, I am not certain on US law restrictions)
I would advocate all three, together with our own Google Summer of Codey-licous SilverStripe platform :)
My main point is that there are far more variables that need exploring, and then you can find the right too.
For instance, one decision would be: Is it a small team of people working on this project, who want to rapidly work together in a closed application (e.g. building a software as a service application)? If so, then Ruby on Rails could work better, but on the other hand, if your website/project is going to be open source, or needs a community of people to look at it, then PHP might be better.
I think sites like opensourcecms.com could do better at seperating the tools out with questions like that!
And yet, PHP and ROR are like scattered lego blocks on the floor, waiting to be patiently assembled. If someone asks me "to build a website", I would use a system that is much closer to a working website, and tweak it.
The comments in this read about "building a digg" etc, are in my opinion, not what people generally think of "when building a website". Digg is a custom-built application that cannot leverage from existing systems as well as a website can. It probably could have just as well been done in perl or ROR. There would be different challenges, and a different number of servers and staff, but fundamentally it would have been successful enough to pay people to figure out how to overcome those challenges.
These ads screen in New Zealand; I hope they continue to do so!
I'd only heard of SugarCRM, but I guess that doesn't preclude these apps from being innovative.
This article was more pushing companies who are financially successful. Actually, on second thought, perhaps more to do with successful investment rounds (the funding section only talked about the fact they wowed Investors, so we should assume not all of them have wowed enough customers to make profit)
If the article was actually about innovation (And had to concentrate on recent, so sorry, RMS doesn't count) then it should look at more diverse areas. Sure, have some enterprise app. Have some collaboration app. But there is a one heck of a lot of interesting stuff going on the web, and while SugarCRM is a great CRM (we use it for our work/open source project), and I don't necesssarily think it should be removed from the list, it seems to be missing some peers.
I haven't scoured for what lives in the open source world, but we have sites and companies like delcious, digg, flickr, google maps/spreadsheets and all of that. An interesting article about innovation would brougt to light at least one open source offering of that sort of style, i.e. interesting technology to DO something cool and innovative on the web. (e.g. Zimbra, but my point would be I want NEWs, stuff I don't know yet...? :)
I'm sure a hack will come out before you've walked down to your phone store ... :P
(so go down there now, for the benefit of all)
have you tried APC with PHP5 extensively? When I tried it some time ago (months) it crashed lots. Eaccelerator was better but not perfect (occasional but dramatic problems). Interested in knowing your thoughts.
Ahh, which language are you implying DOES support 600 simutanous users on a server?
.NET or Java are in any way performance-oriented (they're far more of postgres than mysql focus, say)
I've never heard someone yell out to me that Python, Perl or
Horde3 is a system written in PHP, and could probably be improved to work far better. We've created our own complex PHP systems and if someone pays us to optimise, it is fairly easy to get page creation times to 50ms. On an average dual processor machine (e.g Xeon 2.2ghz, which I've tested) that means 40 pages/sec, which supports 600 users if you assume a user changing page on average every 15 seconds.
Also, PHP5 has a number of accelerator projects, which presumeably could be incorporated as a debian package if only a maintainer had the time (this would quickly heighten adoption of it. Presumeably, though, that would limit Zend's accelerator sales and thus isn't actively pushed?). See http://eaccelerator.net/
Seems you need to sign up to the store. NZ isn't one of the country options. I go so far as to pretend being in Australia and enter in my credit card number (without any intention of actually buying something), and it says my credit card number isn't from Australia (true)... so I guess this album art feature aint for me until I move to Australia or iTunes opens in New Zealand (unlikely this decade...?)
Wow, never read about something like this on Slashdot before. (Actually, I think the Space Elevator idea is very cool)
What's the point of having a hybrid when the AirCar seems to operate perfectly just on air? (And it also purifies the air). Actually, I've always been skeptical about the AirCar... I presumed if it really was legitimate, it would have proliferated and been covered extensively by the media. (Or are we to think the oil companies are keeping it quiet until we finally run out of oil?)
DreamWeaver is a nice tool for many things, (such as rapid prototyping or completing web design) but using it for templating is a nightmare. Its also a stretch to get it to create Pure CSS designs. Biased ofcourse, as I helped create the project, but using SilverStripe alongside a WYSIWIG or raw-html editor is your best bet. It seperates the HTML, the "templating", CSS, and content, and among many other advantages, makes it easy to generate forms, and re-use ("repurpose") content. The content, and the ability to add pages, etc, is all handled by a content management system. This is how the process of building and maintaining websites is going to evolve --- no longer do we need to deal with spagetti messes of HTML, textual content, Javascript, CSS, and server side scripts such as PHP, ASP, or Perl all being tangled. Instead, they will each be neatly seperated with seperate access controls that suit business owners, designers and programmer/scripter's needs and skillsets. Check out silverstripe.com for details... (and yes, to please the slashdot massses, it is a server technology that runs on linux servers exclusively)
One thing the otherwise nicely written article didn't mention: why is the area suddenly now eligable to being claimed by neighbouring countries based on the fact the temperature is warmer and some ice turned to water?? Surely these countries either have "rights" to the area now, or they don't have any such rights at all. It certainly wouldn't work the otherway -- would a country such as Norway have its northern tip politically shed off if an ice age descended upon it?? I bet not! Finally - wouldn't it be nice if the UN (or some such) would appoint the government of the country least involved with environmental disaster and commercial wreaklessness (It would seem Russia and US would be excluded on these points. I imagine Canada and Denmark fare better but I won't assume so).
I think a new segment should form on Slashdot, formed by a band of people whose only relation is the fact they oppose MySQL. They can then limit "feedback" by appointing a single person from the segment, as a spokesperson, so that the rest of us can divulge in useful conversations whenever MySQL hits the press on here, and continue to use MySQL happily where it is appropriate (which, is "most of the time") :P
Know what you mean. We just do the 'fastest' options for mysqldump for a database, and given our systems (content managed sites) are (almost exclusively) used by businesses within a single country, this happening at 5am has proved to work, without hiccups, for several years. Given the backups occur on a daily basis, it doesn't seem to be much different that you've come up with a bit of data that is inconsistent amoung tables to where we've plain lost a several hours data,it now being half way through the day. Our "important" data (bookings, payments, sign-ups) etc are emailed as a backup to general disaster, and are useful in this case. Obviously this doesn't scale, but we don't need it to currently.
While, yes, always prompting is essential, as soon as FireFox gains market share into the general base of 'standard pc literacy', people are way too careless to click 'ok' to anything, and hence install/wipe/ruin their computing experience. Having a prompt is a definate edge, but I hope from your implication above that XPI doesn't let runaway extensions on Mozilla to wreak as much damage.
Until last year, we had a very good run with using pretty standard machines as linux web and file servers that were accessed constantly over a LAN. The only things that needed replacement were harddisks (so ensure you perform nightly backups to another machine on the LAN), and the occasional birthday present of extra RAM or bigger harddisks.
This year we noticed Dell had very good rates for renting their rack servers, so we grabbed a couple, and will upgrade them on a 18-24 month basis. The affordability of these makes them much cheaper than buying a desktop machine, and the Dell warrantee/support has in our experience been sufficient when we've had problems (e.g. another damned harddisk crap-out).
So now, we have the leased rack 2.8ghz servers for our webservers, and our trusty P~500s still keeping up fine with our file serving, mail, and routing needs, etc (Thanks Linux... ).
At a glance, I cannot see the Caconicalisation bug the main article mentions, in this secuna report. Assuming the volumne of bugs "is correct", you need to take into account; - the criticality and impact of the bugs - the turn-around time for resolution It news to no-one that open source software consistantly is open to discovery of DoS, buffer-overrun and other exploits, however its common place to expect that where bugs are critical and have a major forseen repercussion, they are resolved very quickly, with patches available and encouragement to upgrade advertised in numerous popular internet locations. On the other hand, vendors have a much harder time tracking down such problems, and/or issueing statements, which could well be the reason for ASP's low volume of bugs.
I thought the gravitational pull, over time, degraded all orbits - if I remember correctly, in a number of million years time, the earth would theoretically finally come to hit earth, and the earth hit sol, however it was anticipated our sun would have come to the deterimental part of its life and swallow us up well before then.
Actually, to be honest XP is quite good. The masses really mainly seem to understand how to use it. My mum can write CDs, scan photos and so on :P ... which previously with Win98 was always a sure way for a phone call to me for support.
I really enjoy the fact hardware is finally really plug n play. No stuffing around finding the drivers. I slapped it on an old Pentium 500 recently and it detected everything, breathing new life into the box.
And yes, while I say this, I prefer (and are browsing on) Firefox, and we have a bunch of linux servers. (Its a shame I have to justify any decision to use anything which aint a "postgres server on some box where i have personally contributed into a branch of a kernel i compiled mysel" when on slashdot. ah well).
Yes - agreed - to be exact; "With Service Pack 2, Microsoft introduces a new security feature which warns users before executing files that originate from an untrusted location (zone) such as the Internet. There are two flaws in the implementation of this feature: a cmd issue and the caching of ZoneIDs in Windows Explorer. The Windows command shell cmd ignores zone information and starts executables without warnings. Virus authors could use this to spread viruses despite the new security features of SP2. Windows Explorer does not update zone information properly when files are overwritten. So it can be tricked to execute files from the internet without warning."