If Mozilla comes up with an alternative to XAML that works well across all platforms it has the potential to not just thwart Microsoft's new lock-in plans
Wrong. Mozilla has come up with an "alternative" and has been using it for at least the past five years. What, did you think Microsoft is innovating with XAML? They're just reinventing XUL because they don't like its license!
The stuff Microsoft promises with XAML -- rich user interfaces over the web -- already works fine with XUL. However, since Mozilla's market share isn't big enough, no websites use XUL instead of HTML.
It doesn't look like Mozilla is going to be thwarting Microsoft's new lock-in plans. IMO, our only hope in that domain is Linux itself (Novell/IBM/GNOME are worth watching).
This is more like just leaving your doors unlocked. There is no protocol for a system to advertise it's vulnerabilities.
Yes there is -- TCP/IP. Leaving certain ports open is just begging for trouble. For example, Netbios (port 137-139) or CIFS (port 445).
Basically, grep -i microsoft/etc/services; if any of those ports are open on your network, you are advertising not only your vulnerabilities, but your complete lack of care about them.
By the time Longhorn comes out I would imagine that it is a pretty normal requirment. 2 years from now is a long time in the PC world. Keep in mind that the average home users is close to (if not above) 3.0 HT procs today....
I hope these specs are true. That would almost certainly spell certain doom for Microsoft.
Imagine you're a CEO of a medium/large business and your IT manager tells you that you need another 1000 machines. Will you buy: (a) 1000 machines at $1500 each, plus $100 for Longhorn (plus software assurance); or: (b) 1000 machines at $300 each, plus $80 for Red Hat Desktop?
Would you pay $1.6 million or $380 thousand? Especially after your IT manager tells you some horror stories with Microsoft support. And Microsoft has an absolutely pitiful track record with new software releases....
Requirements like that would pretty much guarantee that the business world unanimously chooses Linux.
And who (besides perhaps gamers, a large portion of whom would be pirating Longhorn) would use Longhorn at home if they use Linux at work and it's free? In two years its barriers to entry will be pretty much gone.
Microsoft may be selling a great product and platform, but there is no market for it.
Thus, taking into account the fact that Microsoft is not stupid, I call bullshit on this story.
Features like exception handling with full stack trace in Java are great, but nothing beats the Smalltalk system of suspending execution and keeping the application 'alive', so it can be modified, inspected and resumed, when an error occurs.
The author is right on every point. And every point, it seems, is Mac-specific.
For example, the cost is Mac-specific. The fact that the menu is in different places is Mac-specific (fits right in in my GNOME desktop...). Having to install X to use this one program is Mac-specific. That horrible font rendering is Mac-specific (c'mon, if you see awful text like that, you don't actually think the developers meant for it to look that way, do you?).
On the other hand, I simply cannot see how somebody who uses Photoshop has trouble getting used to a grand total of 25 icons. Yes, having 25 icons in your toolbox sucks. But Photoshop sucks much more in that respect.
Of course, I'm not a graphic designer, so what would I know. But people go to school to learn Photoshop... and then bash the GIMP about its UI? Admit it: Photoshop is very difficult to use (the Windows version, anyway). For example: I had a.png and wanted to convert its white background to transparent. I had to spend more than half an hour to figure out this simple task using Photoshop; it took about one minute on the GIMP.
Obviously if you have used a program every day of your life you'll find it easier than something foreign -- especially if you're a Mac user; apparently this GIMP port is very bad.
The reviewer did try to give the GIMP its chance; however, he does not understand the slightest thing about Free Software. For example, he went and bought it (mistake number one). And he didn't even consider asking the developers why its font rendering is godawful on his system (mistake number two). He simply took what he found and gave his opinion. Sure, this is what most people end up doing, and this is exactly how things are done with proprietary software, but that means he was missing out on... everything!
People who upgrade to Longhorn and.Net wont be migrating to Linux anytime soon. So making the migration path is pointless
Wow, what a stupid conclusion!
If there's no migration path from Longhorn, people won't be migrating ever. Starting in 2006-2007, just about every new Windows computer will be a Longhorn computer. That means GNU/Linux would never become widespread.
Sun: has done a couple of usability studies, and contributed StarOffice (then a lousy office suite) four years ago.
Ximian: mono, evolution, GNOME bounties, IRC discussions, Project Utopia, and countless patches to and bug reports to any and every GNOME project.
Same kind of situation applies to Red Hat, which Sun actually has the gall to insult.
Face it: Sun was a thorn in Microsoft's backside so it was kind of seen as a good guy. But now I see no reason for any self-respecting developer to like Sun. At least Microsoft has the honesty to declare a straightforward stance with respect to open-source software. Sun tries to treat the open-source community as some unsuspecting supplier of free goods.
what blows my mind is those that use the DB column name in a webform to be passed.
Along the same vein: I cannot count the number of scripts I've seen which use <select> tags and simply assume in the processing script that the only possible values are those which were given in <option> tags. Ditto for text inputs with a maxlength.
It all stems from a complete ignorance of the specs, or a bunch of reading-between-the-lines which is utterly stupid. Nowhere in the HTML spec does it say that the page referenced in a form action will always be requested with valid input.
The other thing which irritates me is how so many people assume using mysql_ functions is the best way to talk with a database. The PEAR project has had a fully-functional, object-oriented database package for years which handles escaping all by itself. It also makes INSERT/UPDATE queries much easier to write with its auto-queries.
In my opinion, this is the tutorials' fault. But it's kind of the same with any language, I suppose: everybody learns C with the standard library and with fixed-length char[] arrays, without learning all the pitfalls (i.e., buffer overflows) and other libraries (i.e., glib) which work around them.
Proper layering and abstraction should be a primary focus of any intro-to-programming class or tutorial.
In that respect I do think distros such as Debian and Gentoo will fade away to a large extent. They will always be around, but not widely used.
Debian is a sysadmin's dream. It's *so* easy to apply security updates and even upgrade an entire system.
And while stable is very dated, testing and unstable are viable choices for a desktop system, and they are not. For example, subversion 1.0 made it into Debian unstable a couple of days after release; and GNOME 2.6 is available at http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org.
Are users being given the option of download the source code?
The GPL requires disclosure of source code upon request of people who have acquired the binaries. Most Montreal residents don't have the binaries, so they aren't entitled to the source code. If the city itself bought the program (and the parking meters aren't being run through a proxy company such as the parking meter manufacturers), then the city is entitled to source code.
Parking meters are simple and reliable. Nothing like taking something that just works and replacing it with something else that is infinitely more complex, break-prone and expensive.
Old-style parking meters are mechanical. As anyone can tell you, a machine with moving parts is infinitely more break-prone than a machine with no moving parts.
Not to mention, it does cost the city a hefty amount to hire people to go and empty out meter after meter all day. And it's not all that easy for the ticket-writers to see the red flag on a parking meter. Or to know by heart which parking meters are broken and thus should be ignored and not ticketed.
Parking meters are simple, but they're not reliable and they have many, many disadvantages.
People are going to pay for the wrong parking spots, pay too much money, and so on. Bad idea.
These machines have been in Montreal for -- what -- a year now? I haven't heard of anyone ever paying for the wrong spot. And honestly, it's just as easy for people to put money in the wrong spot with regular parking meters, if they're not placed perfectly or cars are parked slightly out of position.
Is it just me, or does Novell really have a problem with the images of these two companies? It seems to me they're trying to give the impression that Ximian and SuSE are in competition....
First that weird article about adopting QT across the board, now this. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some other such issues too. It gives me the impression that SuSE people and Ximian people have never even had a conversation with each other.
The author of this article fell into the very temping trap of least effort: not actually giving any examples whatsoever to back up her points. The only example (Firefox) is basically an admission that her points are not universal.
What's more, it is easy to argue (with examples) that all of the points in the article except for "programming for the self" are far, far more prominent in the proprietary software world than in the open-source software world. As for "programming for the self," there isn't an example and it's only true in a small subset of open-source projects.
So what can you expect? With no examples, no programs even mentioned in passing, and basing the entire article on a seemily-fictional piece of software called Project X... there's simply no content.
Exactly what I was going to say. Outlook probably renders many things into a URL which are not technically URLs. Who's to say a content filter can catch them all? If the content filter parses Javascript, then spammers will send in emails which run infinite loops and bog down the mail server. But even without, I'll bet there are quite a few Outlook bugs/features which render quite questionable URLs as links.
After reading the whole article, I wonder if Gruber has in fact used any software at all. I also wonder if he knows about anything that's happening with Linux in the news.
ESR's rant made sense. It did have facts, and it was centered around a case study. However, Gruber seems to like abstracting so much that he simply does not mention any software whatsoever!
He simply states that Apple and Microsoft have talent and create good user interfaces and that Linux developers don't. I wonder if he's ever seen a "Aunt Tillie"-esque person in front of a computer. I wonder if he realizes these people exist. I wonder if he's ever used the latest versions of KDE or GNOME. I wonder if he knows what they are....
I suppose my opinion on the essay can be best summed up in Gruber's dismissal of ESR's claims that user interfaces can be improved. ESR specifically details exact changes which would make the CUPS printer installation better. Gruber retorts that user interface design isn't possible without a guru. My point? He takes more time writing an essay on the futility of UI design than it would take to implement most of ESR's UI-improving changes.
Sure, UI design is difficult. But after somebody gave specific UI suggestions, it seems ironic that Gruber would turn around and say that the FOSS community is unable to create good UIs.
To my knowledge, Debian isn't targetted towards Windows converts. I'd suggest Fedora Core or Mandrake to them, even though Debian is by far my favourite Linux distribution.
The "user" in the review could have simply left a rock on his Enter key and come back half an hour later. It would be faster and more exciting, while giving the exact same outcome:).
Why do people still keep using MySQL, in spite of their atrocious license changes?
Some people wouldn't call a switch from LGPL to GPL "atrocious." They've been arguing for ages that the GPL is better. And since they wrote both licenses, they must know what they're talking about.
Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.
The GNU GPL is about 15 years old now. That's precisely the kind of software abuse it's made for. If ATI released its drivers under the GPL, nVidia would have to do the same to copy any code from the ATI drivers.
Drivers aren't (supposed to be) what you pay for when you buy a piece of hardware; you pay for the hardware. The common excuse to keep drivers closed-source isn't the one quoted above; the concern is (supposedly) that ATI is afraid nVidia will notice architectural advantages of the Radeon series and integrate those into its hardware.
But what's the big deal? From drawing board to mass production is a matter of years; by the time a driver is released it's too late for the competition to integrate design ideas into its current product line.
What would open-source drivers bring, then? They'd bring the competition back to where it belongs: the hardware. Is GeForce or Radeon design better for most games? Nobody knows -- the driver hides how good the chips themselves are. (Personally, I'm under the impression ATI's chips are more powerful and their drivers are garbage.) Open-source drivers and open specs would benefit any company that released them; they'd also benefit the customer. And what if all hardware companies saw the light and released open-source drivers and open specs? Then they'd still compete much as they do today, and their customers would be better off.
If anybody's wondering about how long it takes to switch from CVS: it's about half an hour before you see it start to pay off.
install (apt-get install subversion)
Use svnadmin to create a new repository
Use cvs2svn (apt-get install subversion-tools) to migrate the old (CVS) repository to the new (SVN) one. It'll keep all your revisions, tags, etc.
svn co file:///path/to/repos/trunk repos
And if you're used to using CVS through ssh, it's even easier with SVN: svn co svn+ssh:///host/path/to/repos/trunk repos
All that's left to do is get used to the different keys. Oh, and instead of doing a 'svn up' before committing, use 'svn status' -- it actually does something useful.
I don't see a compelling reason not to switch.
Re:Using revision control for Web Development
on
Subversion 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
This is fine for most types of code, but for web development you really do not want to maintain a different local webserver for each developer, so my question is this:
That's like saying that for C code you don't want to keep the libraries installed on every developer's computer.
...which is obviously wrong. You do want to maintain a different local webserver for each developer. That's the whole point of revision control: more people can work on it at once. Not to mention, the website doesn't fall to pieces every time you make a typo.
How long does it take to set up a web server, anyway? "apt-get install apache php4" and you're done.
I do this for one-person development too: I hack on my desktop machine, and then "svn commit" and it gets committed to the repository and automatically checked out on my web server. (Look in [repos-path]/hooks of any SVN repository for how to do this, it's very easy and less of a hack than in CVS.)
Slashdot Mirror
If Mozilla comes up with an alternative to XAML that works well across all platforms it has the potential to not just thwart Microsoft's new lock-in plans
Wrong. Mozilla has come up with an "alternative" and has been using it for at least the past five years. What, did you think Microsoft is innovating with XAML? They're just reinventing XUL because they don't like its license!
The stuff Microsoft promises with XAML -- rich user interfaces over the web -- already works fine with XUL. However, since Mozilla's market share isn't big enough, no websites use XUL instead of HTML.
It doesn't look like Mozilla is going to be thwarting Microsoft's new lock-in plans. IMO, our only hope in that domain is Linux itself (Novell/IBM/GNOME are worth watching).
For example SMB (MS standard) often beats Microsoft's own implementations in benchmarks.
Fuck benchmarks, and just try copying files around on a day-to-day basis. The speed difference is huge: Samba absolutely flies compared to Windows.
Also, Samba can do far, far more than Windows when it comes to file serving. Unfortunately, it's an absolute nightmare to configure.
This is more like just leaving your doors unlocked. There is no protocol for a system to advertise it's vulnerabilities.
Yes there is -- TCP/IP. Leaving certain ports open is just begging for trouble. For example, Netbios (port 137-139) or CIFS (port 445).
Basically, grep -i microsoft /etc/services; if any of those ports are open on your network, you are advertising not only your vulnerabilities, but your complete lack of care about them.
By the time Longhorn comes out I would imagine that it is a pretty normal requirment. 2 years from now is a long time in the PC world. Keep in mind that the average home users is close to (if not above) 3.0 HT procs today....
I hope these specs are true. That would almost certainly spell certain doom for Microsoft.
Imagine you're a CEO of a medium/large business and your IT manager tells you that you need another 1000 machines. Will you buy: (a) 1000 machines at $1500 each, plus $100 for Longhorn (plus software assurance); or: (b) 1000 machines at $300 each, plus $80 for Red Hat Desktop?
Would you pay $1.6 million or $380 thousand? Especially after your IT manager tells you some horror stories with Microsoft support. And Microsoft has an absolutely pitiful track record with new software releases....
Requirements like that would pretty much guarantee that the business world unanimously chooses Linux.
And who (besides perhaps gamers, a large portion of whom would be pirating Longhorn) would use Longhorn at home if they use Linux at work and it's free? In two years its barriers to entry will be pretty much gone.
Microsoft may be selling a great product and platform, but there is no market for it.
Thus, taking into account the fact that Microsoft is not stupid, I call bullshit on this story.
I have yet to find a more immersive game than Tetris. I guess other games are less immersive because their graphics are far worse.
Oh, wait a second, I know why: because the developers spend too long on stupid graphics.
(Of course, I should mention exceptions to the rule, such as Viewtiful Joe, anything Mario, and Half-Life...)
Features like exception handling with full stack trace in Java are great, but nothing beats the Smalltalk system of suspending execution and keeping the application 'alive', so it can be modified, inspected and resumed, when an error occurs.
GDB does this. gdb --pid=[running process].
The author is right on every point. And every point, it seems, is Mac-specific.
For example, the cost is Mac-specific. The fact that the menu is in different places is Mac-specific (fits right in in my GNOME desktop...). Having to install X to use this one program is Mac-specific. That horrible font rendering is Mac-specific (c'mon, if you see awful text like that, you don't actually think the developers meant for it to look that way, do you?).
On the other hand, I simply cannot see how somebody who uses Photoshop has trouble getting used to a grand total of 25 icons. Yes, having 25 icons in your toolbox sucks. But Photoshop sucks much more in that respect.
Of course, I'm not a graphic designer, so what would I know. But people go to school to learn Photoshop... and then bash the GIMP about its UI? Admit it: Photoshop is very difficult to use (the Windows version, anyway). For example: I had a .png and wanted to convert its white background to transparent. I had to spend more than half an hour to figure out this simple task using Photoshop; it took about one minute on the GIMP.
Obviously if you have used a program every day of your life you'll find it easier than something foreign -- especially if you're a Mac user; apparently this GIMP port is very bad.
The reviewer did try to give the GIMP its chance; however, he does not understand the slightest thing about Free Software. For example, he went and bought it (mistake number one). And he didn't even consider asking the developers why its font rendering is godawful on his system (mistake number two). He simply took what he found and gave his opinion. Sure, this is what most people end up doing, and this is exactly how things are done with proprietary software, but that means he was missing out on... everything!
People who upgrade to Longhorn and .Net wont be migrating to Linux anytime soon. So making the migration path is pointless
Wow, what a stupid conclusion!
If there's no migration path from Longhorn, people won't be migrating ever. Starting in 2006-2007, just about every new Windows computer will be a Longhorn computer. That means GNU/Linux would never become widespread.
Sun: 35000 employees
Ximian: 70 employees
Sun: has done a couple of usability studies, and contributed StarOffice (then a lousy office suite) four years ago.
Ximian: mono, evolution, GNOME bounties, IRC discussions, Project Utopia, and countless patches to and bug reports to any and every GNOME project.
Same kind of situation applies to Red Hat, which Sun actually has the gall to insult.
Face it: Sun was a thorn in Microsoft's backside so it was kind of seen as a good guy. But now I see no reason for any self-respecting developer to like Sun. At least Microsoft has the honesty to declare a straightforward stance with respect to open-source software. Sun tries to treat the open-source community as some unsuspecting supplier of free goods.
If only Sun were more like Ximian....
what blows my mind is those that use the DB column name in a webform to be passed.
Along the same vein: I cannot count the number of scripts I've seen which use <select> tags and simply assume in the processing script that the only possible values are those which were given in <option> tags. Ditto for text inputs with a maxlength.
It all stems from a complete ignorance of the specs, or a bunch of reading-between-the-lines which is utterly stupid. Nowhere in the HTML spec does it say that the page referenced in a form action will always be requested with valid input.
The other thing which irritates me is how so many people assume using mysql_ functions is the best way to talk with a database. The PEAR project has had a fully-functional, object-oriented database package for years which handles escaping all by itself. It also makes INSERT/UPDATE queries much easier to write with its auto-queries.
In my opinion, this is the tutorials' fault. But it's kind of the same with any language, I suppose: everybody learns C with the standard library and with fixed-length char[] arrays, without learning all the pitfalls (i.e., buffer overflows) and other libraries (i.e., glib) which work around them.
Proper layering and abstraction should be a primary focus of any intro-to-programming class or tutorial.
In that respect I do think distros such as Debian and Gentoo will fade away to a large extent. They will always be around, but not widely used.
Debian is a sysadmin's dream. It's *so* easy to apply security updates and even upgrade an entire system.
And while stable is very dated, testing and unstable are viable choices for a desktop system, and they are not. For example, subversion 1.0 made it into Debian unstable a couple of days after release; and GNOME 2.6 is available at http://pkg-gnome.alioth.debian.org.
Are users being given the option of download the source code?
The GPL requires disclosure of source code upon request of people who have acquired the binaries. Most Montreal residents don't have the binaries, so they aren't entitled to the source code. If the city itself bought the program (and the parking meters aren't being run through a proxy company such as the parking meter manufacturers), then the city is entitled to source code.
Parking meters are simple and reliable. Nothing like taking something that just works and replacing it with something else that is infinitely more complex, break-prone and expensive.
Old-style parking meters are mechanical. As anyone can tell you, a machine with moving parts is infinitely more break-prone than a machine with no moving parts.
Not to mention, it does cost the city a hefty amount to hire people to go and empty out meter after meter all day. And it's not all that easy for the ticket-writers to see the red flag on a parking meter. Or to know by heart which parking meters are broken and thus should be ignored and not ticketed.
Parking meters are simple, but they're not reliable and they have many, many disadvantages.
People are going to pay for the wrong parking spots, pay too much money, and so on. Bad idea.
These machines have been in Montreal for -- what -- a year now? I haven't heard of anyone ever paying for the wrong spot. And honestly, it's just as easy for people to put money in the wrong spot with regular parking meters, if they're not placed perfectly or cars are parked slightly out of position.
But with old-style parking meters, city guys go out and manually clean out each machine by hand every day.
Is it just me, or does Novell really have a problem with the images of these two companies? It seems to me they're trying to give the impression that Ximian and SuSE are in competition....
First that weird article about adopting QT across the board, now this. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some other such issues too. It gives me the impression that SuSE people and Ximian people have never even had a conversation with each other.
The author of this article fell into the very temping trap of least effort: not actually giving any examples whatsoever to back up her points. The only example (Firefox) is basically an admission that her points are not universal.
What's more, it is easy to argue (with examples) that all of the points in the article except for "programming for the self" are far, far more prominent in the proprietary software world than in the open-source software world. As for "programming for the self," there isn't an example and it's only true in a small subset of open-source projects.
So what can you expect? With no examples, no programs even mentioned in passing, and basing the entire article on a seemily-fictional piece of software called Project X... there's simply no content.
Exactly what I was going to say. Outlook probably renders many things into a URL which are not technically URLs. Who's to say a content filter can catch them all? If the content filter parses Javascript, then spammers will send in emails which run infinite loops and bog down the mail server. But even without, I'll bet there are quite a few Outlook bugs/features which render quite questionable URLs as links.
After reading the whole article, I wonder if Gruber has in fact used any software at all. I also wonder if he knows about anything that's happening with Linux in the news.
ESR's rant made sense. It did have facts, and it was centered around a case study. However, Gruber seems to like abstracting so much that he simply does not mention any software whatsoever!
He simply states that Apple and Microsoft have talent and create good user interfaces and that Linux developers don't. I wonder if he's ever seen a "Aunt Tillie"-esque person in front of a computer. I wonder if he realizes these people exist. I wonder if he's ever used the latest versions of KDE or GNOME. I wonder if he knows what they are....
I suppose my opinion on the essay can be best summed up in Gruber's dismissal of ESR's claims that user interfaces can be improved. ESR specifically details exact changes which would make the CUPS printer installation better. Gruber retorts that user interface design isn't possible without a guru. My point? He takes more time writing an essay on the futility of UI design than it would take to implement most of ESR's UI-improving changes.
Sure, UI design is difficult. But after somebody gave specific UI suggestions, it seems ironic that Gruber would turn around and say that the FOSS community is unable to create good UIs.
Two small comments:
Why do people still keep using MySQL, in spite of their atrocious license changes?
Some people wouldn't call a switch from LGPL to GPL "atrocious." They've been arguing for ages that the GPL is better. And since they wrote both licenses, they must know what they're talking about.
mozilla was last released yesterday - ie6 was released 2+ years ago.
You're right, that's another thing that's wrong with IE6: it's abandonware.
Because when nVidia wants to know something about ATI drivers it's only slightly less trivial to get the information when the driver source is closed than open.
The GNU GPL is about 15 years old now. That's precisely the kind of software abuse it's made for. If ATI released its drivers under the GPL, nVidia would have to do the same to copy any code from the ATI drivers.
Drivers aren't (supposed to be) what you pay for when you buy a piece of hardware; you pay for the hardware. The common excuse to keep drivers closed-source isn't the one quoted above; the concern is (supposedly) that ATI is afraid nVidia will notice architectural advantages of the Radeon series and integrate those into its hardware.
But what's the big deal? From drawing board to mass production is a matter of years; by the time a driver is released it's too late for the competition to integrate design ideas into its current product line.
What would open-source drivers bring, then? They'd bring the competition back to where it belongs: the hardware. Is GeForce or Radeon design better for most games? Nobody knows -- the driver hides how good the chips themselves are. (Personally, I'm under the impression ATI's chips are more powerful and their drivers are garbage.) Open-source drivers and open specs would benefit any company that released them; they'd also benefit the customer. And what if all hardware companies saw the light and released open-source drivers and open specs? Then they'd still compete much as they do today, and their customers would be better off.
This external input disqualifies it from being a perpetual motion machine, but could allow it to fly for unseemly amounts of time.
That's already been invented.
As for this story... I call bullshit.
If anybody's wondering about how long it takes to switch from CVS: it's about half an hour before you see it start to pay off.
And if you're used to using CVS through ssh, it's even easier with SVN: svn co svn+ssh:///host/path/to/repos/trunk repos
All that's left to do is get used to the different keys. Oh, and instead of doing a 'svn up' before committing, use 'svn status' -- it actually does something useful.
I don't see a compelling reason not to switch.
This is fine for most types of code, but for web development you really do not want to maintain a different local webserver for each developer, so my question is this:
That's like saying that for C code you don't want to keep the libraries installed on every developer's computer.
...which is obviously wrong. You do want to maintain a different local webserver for each developer. That's the whole point of revision control: more people can work on it at once. Not to mention, the website doesn't fall to pieces every time you make a typo.
How long does it take to set up a web server, anyway? "apt-get install apache php4" and you're done.
I do this for one-person development too: I hack on my desktop machine, and then "svn commit" and it gets committed to the repository and automatically checked out on my web server. (Look in [repos-path]/hooks of any SVN repository for how to do this, it's very easy and less of a hack than in CVS.)