I don't get it either. I'm 31. Been in the industry on a salary since I was 19. It's ego and self promotion thing (not that those are terrible), I think that's about it. Why do I care that someone (even a good friend) is eating dinner at so and so? Do i really need that sort of timely info?
I see it akin to blogging about industry news where you just regurgitate and add your 3 lines.
It's our job as consumers to support the war on terror through aggressive purchasing. If we don't 'play to win' - we're really losing. One to grow on.
You're right though of course. Some people really enjoy saving every aspect of their life "just in case". Like people who get depressed for weeks when they lose 10 years of email. It would suck I guess, but that's why we have memories.
There is something to be said for the "happy filter" human brains have.
Cloning Facebook would be pointless. Unless your providing something above and beyond what Facebook offers, why bother? Average users won't be engaged by the privacy angle and so, won't switch.
Cool idea though. The real take away is that creating services like facebook are fairly trivial from a development standpoint. All these features are being reabsorbed by the various web app framework makers right now. Building a facebook2 should take a lot less than a quarter billion : )
As to what's the point of a private Myspace, Facebook worked very well as a private, college-only network.)
I would not call "anyone in college" private in the sense that you'd be servicing that audience with easily identifiable stolen goods and PRESUMABLY not wanting to go to jail. : )
'Private' in conjunction with stolen goods is generally far more restrictive.
It used to be the dev version was limited to binding to localhost alone(as I recall). I haven't touched CF since the 97. As you say, total POS and it didn't even run credit cards : P
Yup, I totally agree with you, myspace is and will be a big site in the community scene for a long time to come. Eventually it'll pull a geocities and fade into the background, while never really going into the dark.
As someone in the kid space, how do you look at the valuation of facebook? Hype or reality based?
Myself, I'm a bit torn. I can see the value of their database and marketing power. I've not seen any of their financials nor do I know anyone there. So it's speculative.
Wow, congrats to those 'hackers'! Now they have a bunch of cold fusion code. Enjoy running that on your warez version of adobe's cold fusion server. Never mind the fact that you can replicate 8/10ths of myspace functionality in a few weeks with a couple of competent coders and not worry about, say, the legalities of that theft. I imagine the code base of Myspace has enough oddity that anyone foolish enough to make a public site without SIGNIFICANTLY modifying that code stands a real chance of being found out by an automated tool Myspace is/has made. As a fun mental exercise :
Indentify 3 or 4 unlinked CFM pages in your code -AND/OR- Take some recent bugs in your bug database
Scrap google for new social networking sites Test your 3 or 4 URLS / reproducible bugs against new social networking sites Email whois data on the domain to your security dept when a match appears Profit!
Unless they significantly modify the code (and then why steal it?), you're doomed unless you keep the site private. What's the point of a private Myspace?
As a guy who has worked in web development for a long time, I can tell you from personal experience those numbers are completely untrustworthy.
An extremely prevalent pattern is for kids/teens/young adults to sign up 2-20 accounts per actual human. They enjoy the "role-play" elements in taking on new identities. At one time, a site I worked with didn't limit "accounts" by email, it was astounding how many accounts per email we had - this was a kid oriented site. I think the average was 4 and a half or something.
So, even assuming they are all human derived (which they're not, but I have no educated guess on percentage), you can safely halve that figure and then you're STILL not accounting for abandoned accounts. I have two on myspace.:)
There is a real move away from user account stat usage these days, thankfully. I've been mocking it as a statistical tool for years so I feel a certain vindication. More useful now are page views and time per session (this is qualitative generally, but less so than 'account number')
Congrats to MS on purchasing a share in a great product that's clearly jumped the shark. As someone mentioned, the userbase of facebook doesn't have a lot to lose by jumping ship for a better product. Facebook seems like a smarter than the average.com though, perhaps they'll make a long term company out of it.
Actually it's not called gravatar. All they do is let you pick a picture, associate it with an email and use that on supported tools that reference their API to retrieve the avatar. Which is neat on it's own. If you use gravatar in your app you don't have to write any avatar code and the user doesn't have to set up the same avatar over and over.
TFA is talking about virtual world avatars. Presumably abstracting their apppearce to a lingua franca. Much like HTML tags. 'B' implies "bold" but not what "bold" looks like, which is up to the person implementing it on the client.
Your memo was misaddressed, apologies! Web 2.0 is all about social networking. Therefore, the entire content base of the Internet/Web (they are the same) has been supplanted with social networking sites.
"yet only 3% of students say they've ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers." - TFA
I would think this is a fundamentally flawed survey. What student hasn't heard the message that giving out personal information is considered risky?? I remember getting surveys in school that involved some rule or restriction that was unpopular and organizing group responses in the hope of getting those restrictions lessened.
Why on earth would you need to teach about social networks in school? Isn't it easy enough to pick up outside of school? Their success would indicate that to be true.
"84% of school districts have rules against online chatting in school" - TFA - OH NOES, my freedom of speech!!!!!!! Seriously maybe you should be learning where Iraq is on a world map instead of talking about your latest crush in IM.
This is why I pay for private school. Freaking tax dollars going to rubbish like this
As you can do almost anything in any language, it's all about ease of task. Ruby is great for writing complex applications in (i've found), where as bash is great for copying some files around to launch an april fools day version of my company's website via cron.
I find that when I'm writing stuff in ruby, I enjoy it a tad more, than say, perl or php. I've not measured it but I think there is a correlation between enjoyment and efficency. Maybe only in that I get sick of the project I'm working on at a later time than I otherwise would have:)
From reading some lua in WoW mods and looking at TOME code, I can see why people enjoy it for layering non-compiled configs on top of compiled engines. Just take a look, (TOME is neat as a game anyway) I'm sure you'll see the point soon enough, if not, shake your head and move along to something that does strike your fancy.
Not sure this is a point other than that, does there need to be?
IMO, as someone who REALLY liked shadowbane: what finally killed it was a combination of technical difficulties surround huge battles, and the game's tendancy toward such.
It was not HORRIBLE to lose your town (other than pride) I think many people would find that drama rewarding - if it had broader marketing. I've never played a game that people took so seriously (in a fun way). I trid wow, but the pvp in WoW seemed shallow and arcadeish.
Another point, as I ramble, you could actually make horrible characters in SB, usually the first of your SB career was "sub-optimal" to say the least. That was fun to, actually learning how to make a finely honed killer after making some really pathetic victims:)
Where does that leave sun's very large server product line? Or should in 10 years will I be dropping a 'Thumper' into my kitchen to let me know how my groceries are doing (via an AJAX enabled watch I suppose)
I'm not sure datacenters were ever *truly* built for people, I'm not that old. However, datacenters provide a clean, enviromentally controlled area for the VERY EXPENSIVE computing power to live. The way I see it, need for computing power is only going to increase (out on a limb, I know) and while prices trend down, the fancy server grade stuff is still going to cost lots of money.
I can see the point : "someday" grid computing is going to be pervasive and the norm in terms of development. That will enable organizations to utilize the spare processing power of their "cloud of devices" (very scifi!). But honestly, if you need to add X power to that, are you going to buy 15 toy bunnies that talk? no, you'll buy a server and put it in your datacenter:)
His generator analogy is flawed to boot. They go outside because they are smelly and/or loud. Computers don't have to be either of those.
You miss my point, which is my fault. I'm not saying HTML generated from PHP isn't clean. I was focusing on the experience level of the person using it. Frontpage is for the "I wish a 'homepage'!", PHP is for the begining developer[1].
Footnote 1: I relize there are many large sites using PHP with great success. Kudos. Seriously, Kudos. Why put yourself through that though?
Honestly, SQL injection and other vulnerabilities that come from trusting user data are far older that 1996. My first programming job was in 1996 and I was *fully* aware of perl's taint checking mode through documentation as well as peer review. I have had difficulty in even getting PHP developers to understand why SQL injection is scary.
Most common response: "Who would try to do that?"...
PHP:{Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc} as Frontpage:HTML
I wonder if I got that formating correct. I'm sure you get the drift though:)
To add emphasis to the "best for the job" approach
We are about to move from a LAMP environment (which we are happy with, I made it!) to a Java enviroment. Why? Because we are about to start developing a VERY complex product that would be unpleasant to manage in PHP. There is nothing wrong with PHP, there is nothing wrong with perl. Heck, there is nothing wrong with running BASIC programs and naming them with a.cgi extension. If all that's happening is your serving up some vacation photos randomly.
That's kind of the cool thing about web services and the whole "SOA" thing: fast turn around, one-shot development can achive ROI easier with tools like PHP. Using the service idealogy, PHP can fit very well into a larger, vastly complex framework. AKA best of both worlds. Just don't go and build a massive framework and hope to have an easy time of it. (Not saying it can't be done)
I work in Perl (mod_perl), PHP, and Java on a daily basis. For simple one-shot applications or very narrow focused projects (see your examples) PHP works fine and is a fairly speedy tool to use. When you introduce an enviroment like and Intranet or interacting with non-mysql database, complex procesess, interacting with (SHOCK!) non-web applications, Java has a huge advantage due to it's rigid structure. For complex, larger team applications or groups of applications, PHP falls short very quickly.
I have heard, though I have no idea from who at this moment, that very broad noncompete documents are pretty useless. The theory is that you can't cause someone to forgo their livelyhood. So even though they signed the document, the courts (supposedly) refused to enforce if they cause undue hardship. For example, a noncomp in CS in biosciences may make it fairly impossible for someone to use their 10 years of experience and force them take a lesser position outside of the bioscience domain.
That seems reasonable, but only because I am in a noncompete that if enforced would cause me much hardship:)
All games have bugs, to me shadowbane had fewer important ones than better funded games. What really set SB apart was the freeform pvp it offered. Also you actaully had the freedom to make a bad character.
PvE players aren't into the whole virtual material loss thing, really that was the problem imo. You might say they are wussies to atttached to pixels. I know I would say that:)
A few years from now, there will be a game where you can lose your possesions on death and it will be hailed as revolutionary by the WoW/EQ kids.
Slashdot Mirror
You are of course, absolutely correct.
Angry much? Worried about your job security or something?
Settle down. Plenty of large corporation rely on Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby/rails to keep their business going or provide critical services.
To deny that is to admit you've not been around much.
I don't get it either. I'm 31. Been in the industry on a salary since I was 19. It's ego and self promotion thing (not that those are terrible), I think that's about it. Why do I care that someone (even a good friend) is eating dinner at so and so? Do i really need that sort of timely info?
I see it akin to blogging about industry news where you just regurgitate and add your 3 lines.
It's our job as consumers to support the war on terror through aggressive purchasing. If we don't 'play to win' - we're really losing. One to grow on.
You're right though of course. Some people really enjoy saving every aspect of their life "just in case". Like people who get depressed for weeks when they lose 10 years of email. It would suck I guess, but that's why we have memories.
There is something to be said for the "happy filter" human brains have.
Cloning Facebook would be pointless. Unless your providing something above and beyond what Facebook offers, why bother? Average users won't be engaged by the privacy angle and so, won't switch.
Cool idea though. The real take away is that creating services like facebook are fairly trivial from a development standpoint. All these features are being reabsorbed by the various web app framework makers right now. Building a facebook2 should take a lot less than a quarter billion : )
As to what's the point of a private Myspace, Facebook worked very well as a private, college-only network.)
I would not call "anyone in college" private in the sense that you'd be servicing that audience with easily identifiable stolen goods and PRESUMABLY not wanting to go to jail. : )
'Private' in conjunction with stolen goods is generally far more restrictive.
It used to be the dev version was limited to binding to localhost alone(as I recall). I haven't touched CF since the 97. As you say, total POS and it didn't even run credit cards : P
Yup, I totally agree with you, myspace is and will be a big site in the community scene for a long time to come. Eventually it'll pull a geocities and fade into the background, while never really going into the dark.
As someone in the kid space, how do you look at the valuation of facebook? Hype or reality based?
Myself, I'm a bit torn. I can see the value of their database and marketing power. I've not seen any of their financials nor do I know anyone there. So it's speculative.
Cheers!
Wow, congrats to those 'hackers'! Now they have a bunch of cold fusion code. Enjoy running that on your warez version of adobe's cold fusion server. Never mind the fact that you can replicate 8/10ths of myspace functionality in a few weeks with a couple of competent coders and not worry about, say, the legalities of that theft. I imagine the code base of Myspace has enough oddity that anyone foolish enough to make a public site without SIGNIFICANTLY modifying that code stands a real chance of being found out by an automated tool Myspace is/has made. As a fun mental exercise :
Indentify 3 or 4 unlinked CFM pages in your code
-AND/OR-
Take some recent bugs in your bug database
Scrap google for new social networking sites
Test your 3 or 4 URLS / reproducible bugs against new social networking sites
Email whois data on the domain to your security dept when a match appears
Profit!
Unless they significantly modify the code (and then why steal it?), you're doomed unless you keep the site private. What's the point of a private Myspace?
As a guy who has worked in web development for a long time, I can tell you from personal experience those numbers are completely untrustworthy.
An extremely prevalent pattern is for kids/teens/young adults to sign up 2-20 accounts per actual human. They enjoy the "role-play" elements in taking on new identities. At one time, a site I worked with didn't limit "accounts" by email, it was astounding how many accounts per email we had - this was a kid oriented site. I think the average was 4 and a half or something.
So, even assuming they are all human derived (which they're not, but I have no educated guess on percentage), you can safely halve that figure and then you're STILL not accounting for abandoned accounts. I have two on myspace.
There is a real move away from user account stat usage these days, thankfully. I've been mocking it as a statistical tool for years so I feel a certain vindication. More useful now are page views and time per session (this is qualitative generally, but less so than 'account number')
Congrats to MS on purchasing a share in a great product that's clearly jumped the shark. As someone mentioned, the userbase of facebook doesn't have a lot to lose by jumping ship for a better product. Facebook seems like a smarter than the average
Actually it's not called gravatar. All they do is let you pick a picture, associate it with an email and use that on supported tools that reference their API to retrieve the avatar. Which is neat on it's own. If you use gravatar in your app you don't have to write any avatar code and the user doesn't have to set up the same avatar over and over.
TFA is talking about virtual world avatars. Presumably abstracting their apppearce to a lingua franca. Much like HTML tags. 'B' implies "bold" but not what "bold" looks like, which is up to the person implementing it on the client.
Sex is part of life that's pretty important. Some might say critical. Messing around on myspace is in the same category?
PWND
Your memo was misaddressed, apologies! Web 2.0 is all about social networking. Therefore, the entire content base of the Internet/Web (they are the same) has been supplanted with social networking sites.
All that unsafe stuff was thrown out.
XoXo - The Internet/Web
"yet only 3% of students say they've ever given out their email addresses, instant messaging screen names or other personal information to strangers." - TFA
I would think this is a fundamentally flawed survey. What student hasn't heard the message that giving out personal information is considered risky?? I remember getting surveys in school that involved some rule or restriction that was unpopular and organizing group responses in the hope of getting those restrictions lessened.
Why on earth would you need to teach about social networks in school? Isn't it easy enough to pick up outside of school? Their success would indicate that to be true.
"84% of school districts have rules against online chatting in school" - TFA - OH NOES, my freedom of speech!!!!!!! Seriously maybe you should be learning where Iraq is on a world map instead of talking about your latest crush in IM.
This is why I pay for private school. Freaking tax dollars going to rubbish like this
but isn't that pretty clear slander?
It would be nice to be able to read the article : )
As someone said in another post, myspace is SOOO 2004 so the whole thing is, if not boring, inane.
As you can do almost anything in any language, it's all about ease of task. Ruby is great for writing complex applications in (i've found), where as bash is great for copying some files around to launch an april fools day version of my company's website via cron.
:)
I find that when I'm writing stuff in ruby, I enjoy it a tad more, than say, perl or php. I've not measured it but I think there is a correlation between enjoyment and efficency. Maybe only in that I get sick of the project I'm working on at a later time than I otherwise would have
From reading some lua in WoW mods and looking at TOME code, I can see why people enjoy it for layering non-compiled configs on top of compiled engines. Just take a look, (TOME is neat as a game anyway) I'm sure you'll see the point soon enough, if not, shake your head and move along to something that does strike your fancy.
Not sure this is a point other than that, does there need to be?
IMO, as someone who REALLY liked shadowbane: what finally killed it was a combination of technical difficulties surround huge battles, and the game's tendancy toward such.
:)
It was not HORRIBLE to lose your town (other than pride) I think many people would find that drama rewarding - if it had broader marketing. I've never played a game that people took so seriously (in a fun way). I trid wow, but the pvp in WoW seemed shallow and arcadeish.
Another point, as I ramble, you could actually make horrible characters in SB, usually the first of your SB career was "sub-optimal" to say the least. That was fun to, actually learning how to make a finely honed killer after making some really pathetic victims
Happy gaming!
Where does that leave sun's very large server product line? Or should in 10 years will I be dropping a 'Thumper' into my kitchen to let me know how my groceries are doing (via an AJAX enabled watch I suppose)
:)
I'm not sure datacenters were ever *truly* built for people, I'm not that old. However, datacenters provide a clean, enviromentally controlled area for the VERY EXPENSIVE computing power to live. The way I see it, need for computing power is only going to increase (out on a limb, I know) and while prices trend down, the fancy server grade stuff is still going to cost lots of money.
I can see the point : "someday" grid computing is going to be pervasive and the norm in terms of development. That will enable organizations to utilize the spare processing power of their "cloud of devices" (very scifi!). But honestly, if you need to add X power to that, are you going to buy 15 toy bunnies that talk? no, you'll buy a server and put it in your datacenter
His generator analogy is flawed to boot. They go outside because they are smelly and/or loud. Computers don't have to be either of those.
You miss my point, which is my fault. I'm not saying HTML generated from PHP isn't clean. I was focusing on the experience level of the person using it. Frontpage is for the "I wish a 'homepage'!", PHP is for the begining developer[1].
Footnote 1: I relize there are many large sites using PHP with great success. Kudos. Seriously, Kudos. Why put yourself through that though?
Honestly, SQL injection and other vulnerabilities that come from trusting user data are far older that 1996. My first programming job was in 1996 and I was *fully* aware of perl's taint checking mode through documentation as well as peer review. I have had difficulty in even getting PHP developers to understand why SQL injection is scary.
:)
Most common response: "Who would try to do that?"...
PHP:{Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, etc} as Frontpage:HTML
I wonder if I got that formating correct. I'm sure you get the drift though
To add emphasis to the "best for the job" approach
.cgi extension. If all that's happening is your serving up some vacation photos randomly.
We are about to move from a LAMP environment (which we are happy with, I made it!) to a Java enviroment. Why? Because we are about to start developing a VERY complex product that would be unpleasant to manage in PHP. There is nothing wrong with PHP, there is nothing wrong with perl. Heck, there is nothing wrong with running BASIC programs and naming them with a
That's kind of the cool thing about web services and the whole "SOA" thing: fast turn around, one-shot development can achive ROI easier with tools like PHP. Using the service idealogy, PHP can fit very well into a larger, vastly complex framework. AKA best of both worlds. Just don't go and build a massive framework and hope to have an easy time of it. (Not saying it can't be done)
It's all got to do with context.
ideal != workable
I work in Perl (mod_perl), PHP, and Java on a daily basis. For simple one-shot applications or very narrow focused projects (see your examples) PHP works fine and is a fairly speedy tool to use. When you introduce an enviroment like and Intranet or interacting with non-mysql database, complex procesess, interacting with (SHOCK!) non-web applications, Java has a huge advantage due to it's rigid structure. For complex, larger team applications or groups of applications, PHP falls short very quickly.
Best tool for the job rules the day.
I have heard, though I have no idea from who at this moment, that very broad noncompete documents are pretty useless. The theory is that you can't cause someone to forgo their livelyhood. So even though they signed the document, the courts (supposedly) refused to enforce if they cause undue hardship. For example, a noncomp in CS in biosciences may make it fairly impossible for someone to use their 10 years of experience and force them take a lesser position outside of the bioscience domain.
:)
That seems reasonable, but only because I am in a noncompete that if enforced would cause me much hardship
I'm glad I'm not the only paranoid person who thought this, it's better to be paranoid in a group.
All games have bugs, to me shadowbane had fewer important ones than better funded games. What really set SB apart was the freeform pvp it offered. Also you actaully had the freedom to make a bad character.
:)
PvE players aren't into the whole virtual material loss thing, really that was the problem imo. You might say they are wussies to atttached to pixels. I know I would say that
A few years from now, there will be a game where you can lose your possesions on death and it will be hailed as revolutionary by the WoW/EQ kids.