That was just an example. Here's another one: Let us say you wanted the web application to go to a specific page or do something special on getting a 404 error, page not found (or any other server error for that matter). Your Java web application can be programmed to handle that rather than having to monkey with the server to handle it. Doing things like this with Perl and Apache rather than with a Java WebApp start to get much harder.
The point is that the J2EE WebApp paradigm has advantages over applications that are, so to speak, stitched together.
First of all, I love Perl. For years I've developed web applications with it. However, other technologies out there are better suited to developing web apps than Perl.
For example, let us say I wanted to map a directory to a particular CGI script. If I were building CGI apps with Perl, I couldn't do that. I'd have to have a controlling script in the cgi-bin that would relegate particular requests to other CGI scripts (or "require" them). But if I still wanted to map a directory to a script, I would have to add the mapping to the Apache web server configuration.
On the other hand, this can be easily accomplished by a developer building a Web App for a Java servlet container (like Tomcat) by specifying the mapping in the WEB-INF/web.xml of the web application he's building.
IMHO, I find Java WebApps to be much more flexible and better suited to developing web applications than Perl. And of course, if you want to still use Perl CGIs (or non-cgi perl scripts), Tomcat will still let you do that.
This is not to say Perl doesn't have its niche--it does, but Perl is not the be all and end all of web development.
I work in a Java shop that has inherited a huge legacy C++ system, meaning we still have to do a lot of maintenance in C++. In order to get by coding in C++ with the same ease as we do in Java, the STL is a necessity--especially when working with collections.
I expect to be moded down for this, but as a white, male American programmer who has also spent several years in India--seeing what goes on on both sides of the world--my experience with programmers in India is that they are smart, highly educated and a lot more of them than there are of us. In short, American programmers have heavy competition from India. Practically speaking there is some computer training institute on every street corner or in every hole in every Indian city with more than 500,000 people.
Programmers from India, on the average, do tend to be better educated than American programmers. Not that there aren't highly educated and skilled American programmers, but there are more from India, though.
If you were an HR person, or an IT manager, and you had to choose between hiring a less-educated American who charges more and a better educated Indian who charges less, you would have to be a socialist (or a nationalist) not to choose the Indian.
In any case, we should stop whining and meet the competition--whether it is from Russia, Poland, India, etc--by ourselves being more competitive than we are right now.
MS .doc / Adobe PostSript & PDF
on
Office 2003 and XML
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
All Microsoft needs to do is make their standard an open one (that can be used by others), like Adobe has done with their PostScript and PDF formats. Adobe has done quite well with their products based on these formats, too. Products like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (which works very well w/ bitmaps saved in PostScript) are the industry standard in digital art. If Microsoft followed a similar model, I'm sure that Microsoft Word will continue to be the industry standard in word processing software, and Microsoft as a business won't be any less richer for it.
Have there ever been any cases of an e-mail equivalent of "road rage", where someone (or a group) has actually went out and either physically harmed a spammer or killed him?
Let's face it. Doing anything in zero-g is very problematic and very expensive. Rather, efforts should be spent on establishing a moon base for research on propulsion systems that you cannot develop on earth (e.g. project orion, etc.). If you are on the moon, at least you don't have to worry about keeping your ship in orbit. You have more room to create hydroponic areas for recycling of oxygen and generation of foodstuffs, or other things you need.
Inspite of the fact they seem to get a good amount of funding for this project, it seems the equipment they can afford cannot nicely handle many, if not most, of the page requests. I tried to access a website on a date I know for certain it was up, and their proxy server timed out.
AFAIK, if you purchase something from out of state, whether it is online or over the phone, you have to pay sales tax on whatever you purchased IN the state you live in. Otherwise, if you purchase something online and the vendor happens to be in the same state, then they are responsible for remitting the tax.
Why is it like this? Because of where your taxes go. Taxes are collected by a government to provide services to those being governed. So if someone from Colorodo purchases something from someone in Maryland, why does the seller in Maryland have go to the trouble of remitting tax money to the state of Colorodo when he receives no benefit whatsoever from that state?
And like many people here realize, that if the burden of remitting taxes to each locality from which someone purchased an item is to be borne by the seller, then trying to remit tax money to the literally hundreds and thousands of localities (according to their differing laws) quickly becomes ridiculous. This will surely break all but the biggest online businesses.
I currently work as a developer in a company that acts as an online link between doctors and the insurance companies. Here are the problems we face:
Making our legacy NSF/UB systems HIPAA complient
Trying to accomodate our other clients whims who
want to be HIPAA complient and also mix their
proprietary data with the X12s they send us
The working committe who produces these $%@# specifications changes it every so often. We don't get the (real) specs until the only way we can possibly finish the work to become HIPAA complient is to go into emergency mode.
Dealing with stupid clients (on both sides) who eat up our development time.
... postscript format, or they are converted to postscript format before embedding. And who created the PostScript format? Adobe.
It's a strange world we live in.
Files in acrobat format are just artwork.
on
Adobe Gets Hit By DMCA
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I have worked in the advertising industry for 7 years, designing advertisements and catalogs -- with purchased fonts -- and I never had this problem, nor have I heard of anyone in that industry having this problem.
Presumably any fonts that shipped with product you got from a software vendor would be (should be) properly registered and legal to use out of the box. Otherwise, the fonts need to be purchased. It should be OK to distribute graphics, artwork, etc. as long as you purchased the fonts. I don't see why documents in Adobe acrobat should be considered any different from artwork produced in any other digital format.
It's a common thing that when sending files to a service bureau for ripping, that you give the service bureau your fonts, or you make sure they are *embedded* in your postscript output. I have never heard that this is considered *copyright infringement*.
The only problem I can forsee is if you can extract the fonts from Acrobat and use them for something else. Then there is a legitimate complaint.
Otherwise, if Adobe can show that Acrobat is yet another format like GIF, JPEG, etc., and that if the person who creates a particular piece of artwork with legally purchased fonts does not violate copyright, then Adobe should win.
If there is a copyright issue, it should be with the person who created the artwork and who didn't use licensed fonts, not with the people who created the file format.
The dirty secret of big databases is that most people don't know how to program them, how to configure them, and don't need most of the features. And even if they get everything right, they still end up with a very costly and complex solution, a solution that likely doesn't perform very well and needs a special DBA to keep it all running.
Damn right. I'm working in a company that uses (surprise!) Oracle, on an M$ server. Every other day the system crashes. No one in our shop is a DBA (we're all developers), and our company managers are skinflints and so won't hire a DBA.
What's more, we could be using a database like PostGres for our work. However, our management says that we MUST use Oracle. Why? Because they have their heads up their butts? (We would like to think that, wouldn't we?) No. Because our customers (we process medical claims) won't do business with us unless we can say we have a top-of-the-line, secure system.
I long for the day when the open source databases acquire the same reputation as other open source projects, like Apache.
Perl & Apache is an excellent combination for bringing sanity to legacy systems.
As far as dealing with legacy systems, nothing is better than Perl. For example, in a project I'm working on, in my company there is a vast array of legacy tools which require using telnet to get the work done. And the web interface I'm building (CGI & Net::Telnet) get's the work done beautifily. (Try doing this in PHP or Java.) The admin people are happy, and the development time so far has been almost negligible. Perl is the supreme glue language.
I lived in India for 6 years, and my experience is that, from what the article mentions as "several of the larger ISPs", they are probably talking about government ISPs like VSNL, which are ultimately run by clueless bureaucrats and dhoti-wearing politicians (netas). Basically, progress on the internet, telephone, telecommunications, etc., has been slow to an almost standstill in many sectors in India because the government can't leave business to the businesses. This is part of India's socialist heritage from the time of Nehru.
All the atrocities in the recorded human history have been carried out by the agents of whatever government has been in power at the time.
And what are governments made up of? People. And in democracies, who puts people into government positions? The people who vote for them. So don't blame the government, blame the so-called victims who voted for them.
I'm in a similar situation - programmer for the last 4 yrs but no degree / certs.
A couple of days ago I spoke with a recruiter at Phoenix U. I asked him about the value of certs like Sun Certified Java Programmer, MCSD, etc., and he said they would be evaluated for credit. He mentioned specifically that the MCSE stuff definitely has translated into credits. He further told me that between CLEPPING some exams, your certificates, and your real world experience (yes, they evaluate that too), you can get up to 60 credit hrs. right off the bat. That leaves about another balance 60 credit hours or so to graduate, which translates to two years, 10 - 15 hrs. per week of homework, and all of it can be done online.
I'm looking at some other schools too, but that's what the people at the U. of Phoenix said.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with your assessment that the book helps Perl programmers build better applications for the web.
Also, on another note, in this economy people who know Perl but not Java are probably not doing too well.
That was just an example. Here's another one: Let us say you wanted the web application to go to a specific page or do something special on getting a 404 error, page not found (or any other server error for that matter). Your Java web application can be programmed to handle that rather than having to monkey with the server to handle it. Doing things like this with Perl and Apache rather than with a Java WebApp start to get much harder.
The point is that the J2EE WebApp paradigm has advantages over applications that are, so to speak, stitched together.
First of all, I love Perl. For years I've developed web applications with it. However, other technologies out there are better suited to developing web apps than Perl.
For example, let us say I wanted to map a directory to a particular CGI script. If I were building CGI apps with Perl, I couldn't do that. I'd have to have a controlling script in the cgi-bin that would relegate particular requests to other CGI scripts (or "require" them). But if I still wanted to map a directory to a script, I would have to add the mapping to the Apache web server configuration.
On the other hand, this can be easily accomplished by a developer building a Web App for a Java servlet container (like Tomcat) by specifying the mapping in the WEB-INF/web.xml of the web application he's building.
IMHO, I find Java WebApps to be much more flexible and better suited to developing web applications than Perl. And of course, if you want to still use Perl CGIs (or non-cgi perl scripts), Tomcat will still let you do that.
This is not to say Perl doesn't have its niche--it does, but Perl is not the be all and end all of web development.
I say use the right tool for each job.
And next is a PHP-based J2EE compliant application server.
I work in a Java shop that has inherited a huge legacy C++ system, meaning we still have to do a lot of maintenance in C++. In order to get by coding in C++ with the same ease as we do in Java, the STL is a necessity--especially when working with collections.
I expect to be moded down for this, but as a white, male American programmer who has also spent several years in India--seeing what goes on on both sides of the world--my experience with programmers in India is that they are smart, highly educated and a lot more of them than there are of us. In short, American programmers have heavy competition from India. Practically speaking there is some computer training institute on every street corner or in every hole in every Indian city with more than 500,000 people.
Programmers from India, on the average, do tend to be better educated than American programmers. Not that there aren't highly educated and skilled American programmers, but there are more from India, though.
If you were an HR person, or an IT manager, and you had to choose between hiring a less-educated American who charges more and a better educated Indian who charges less, you would have to be a socialist (or a nationalist) not to choose the Indian.
In any case, we should stop whining and meet the competition--whether it is from Russia, Poland, India, etc--by ourselves being more competitive than we are right now.
All Microsoft needs to do is make their standard an open one (that can be used by others), like Adobe has done with their PostScript and PDF formats. Adobe has done quite well with their products based on these formats, too. Products like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (which works very well w/ bitmaps saved in PostScript) are the industry standard in digital art. If Microsoft followed a similar model, I'm sure that Microsoft Word will continue to be the industry standard in word processing software, and Microsoft as a business won't be any less richer for it.
Anything can be turned into a buck.
Have there ever been any cases of an e-mail equivalent of "road rage", where someone (or a group) has actually went out and either physically harmed a spammer or killed him?
Let's face it. Doing anything in zero-g is very problematic and very expensive. Rather, efforts should be spent on establishing a moon base for research on propulsion systems that you cannot develop on earth (e.g. project orion, etc.). If you are on the moon, at least you don't have to worry about keeping your ship in orbit. You have more room to create hydroponic areas for recycling of oxygen and generation of foodstuffs, or other things you need.
Inspite of the fact they seem to get a good amount of funding for this project, it seems the equipment they can afford cannot nicely handle many, if not most, of the page requests. I tried to access a website on a date I know for certain it was up, and their proxy server timed out.
AFAIK, if you purchase something from out of state, whether it is online or over the phone, you have to pay sales tax on whatever you purchased IN the state you live in. Otherwise, if you purchase something online and the vendor happens to be in the same state, then they are responsible for remitting the tax.
Why is it like this? Because of where your taxes go. Taxes are collected by a government to provide services to those being governed. So if someone from Colorodo purchases something from someone in Maryland, why does the seller in Maryland have go to the trouble of remitting tax money to the state of Colorodo when he receives no benefit whatsoever from that state?
And like many people here realize, that if the burden of remitting taxes to each locality from which someone purchased an item is to be borne by the seller, then trying to remit tax money to the literally hundreds and thousands of localities (according to their differing laws) quickly becomes ridiculous. This will surely break all but the biggest online businesses.
I currently work as a developer in a company that acts as an online link between doctors and the insurance companies. Here are the problems we face:
- Making our legacy NSF/UB systems HIPAA complient
- Trying to accomodate our other clients whims who
want to be HIPAA complient and also mix their
proprietary data with the X12s they send us
- The working committe who produces these $%@# specifications changes it every so often. We don't get the (real) specs until the only way we can possibly finish the work to become HIPAA complient is to go into emergency mode.
- Dealing with stupid clients (on both sides) who eat up our development time.
'Nuff said.... postscript format, or they are converted to postscript format before embedding. And who created the PostScript format? Adobe.
It's a strange world we live in.
I have worked in the advertising industry for 7 years, designing advertisements and catalogs -- with purchased fonts -- and I never had this problem, nor have I heard of anyone in that industry having this problem.
Presumably any fonts that shipped with product you got from a software vendor would be (should be) properly registered and legal to use out of the box. Otherwise, the fonts need to be purchased. It should be OK to distribute graphics, artwork, etc. as long as you purchased the fonts. I don't see why documents in Adobe acrobat should be considered any different from artwork produced in any other digital format.
It's a common thing that when sending files to a service bureau for ripping, that you give the service bureau your fonts, or you make sure they are *embedded* in your postscript output. I have never heard that this is considered *copyright infringement*.
The only problem I can forsee is if you can extract the fonts from Acrobat and use them for something else. Then there is a legitimate complaint.
Otherwise, if Adobe can show that Acrobat is yet another format like GIF, JPEG, etc., and that if the person who creates a particular piece of artwork with legally purchased fonts does not violate copyright, then Adobe should win.
If there is a copyright issue, it should be with the person who created the artwork and who didn't use licensed fonts, not with the people who created the file format.
... because they seem to be on top of the leading causes of war and death, and genocide.
Mr. Wall,
Do you think Perl6 will be able to compete with Java on its own ground? (Will Perl6 be a kind of OpenSource version of Java?)
Damn right. I'm working in a company that uses (surprise!) Oracle, on an M$ server. Every other day the system crashes. No one in our shop is a DBA (we're all developers), and our company managers are skinflints and so won't hire a DBA.
What's more, we could be using a database like PostGres for our work. However, our management says that we MUST use Oracle. Why? Because they have their heads up their butts? (We would like to think that, wouldn't we?) No. Because our customers (we process medical claims) won't do business with us unless we can say we have a top-of-the-line, secure system.
I long for the day when the open source databases acquire the same reputation as other open source projects, like Apache.
Perl & Apache is an excellent combination for bringing sanity to legacy systems.
As far as dealing with legacy systems, nothing is better than Perl. For example, in a project I'm working on, in my company there is a vast array of legacy tools which require using telnet to get the work done. And the web interface I'm building (CGI & Net::Telnet) get's the work done beautifily. (Try doing this in PHP or Java.) The admin people are happy, and the development time so far has been almost negligible. Perl is the supreme glue language.
I lived in India for 6 years, and my experience is that, from what the article mentions as "several of the larger ISPs", they are probably talking about government ISPs like VSNL, which are ultimately run by clueless bureaucrats and dhoti-wearing politicians (netas). Basically, progress on the internet, telephone, telecommunications, etc., has been slow to an almost standstill in many sectors in India because the government can't leave business to the businesses. This is part of India's socialist heritage from the time of Nehru.
... they use hashish.
I'm in a similar situation - programmer for the last 4 yrs but no degree / certs.
A couple of days ago I spoke with a recruiter at Phoenix U. I asked him about the value of certs like Sun Certified Java Programmer, MCSD, etc., and he said they would be evaluated for credit. He mentioned specifically that the MCSE stuff definitely has translated into credits. He further told me that between CLEPPING some exams, your certificates, and your real world experience (yes, they evaluate that too), you can get up to 60 credit hrs. right off the bat. That leaves about another balance 60 credit hours or so to graduate, which translates to two years, 10 - 15 hrs. per week of homework, and all of it can be done online.
I'm looking at some other schools too, but that's what the people at the U. of Phoenix said.