If I sold a car to the government that didn't run at all, I'd be in jail for fraud.
Why don't they do the same for software?
But if you bought a car, you wouldn't
be constantly harrassing the designers
with new features ("It must be able to
turn 90 degrees instantly! Oh, and
I forgot to say I want it to fly!")
while they were still building it.
Please fix this issue, which has been
outstanding for more than 2 years,
then get back to me. (Oh yes, and
there's even a working patch, but the Apache
developers won't integrate it).
I've used XmlHttpRequest before in various
places, including on the edit page of
this wiki which I wrote.
The MS and non-MS implementations are
subtly different, but nothing major.
Have a look at the Javascript
source. I do some clever stuff
to measure the round trip time to the
server and slow down updates if they
are taking too long. Anyone know how
to make updates run in another thread
so they don't stop the browser if they're
really slow?
These languages face a Catch-22: until they're more popular, they won't attract enough developers to ameliorate the library situation, yet until they offer better libraries, [...]
Objective CAML (OCaml) is a very cool and powerful
language. We use it at our company extensively, and
we've released a lot of tools under open source licenses
(see my signature). You can, for example, call Perl
and Python libraries, and COM objects directly from
OCaml, and interfacing with C is trivial.
(By the way, they still make the Excel -- but they renamed it "Accent" in 1995)
<cheapshot>
Because they didn't want the name associated
with crashes?
</cheapshot>
Rich.
Competing with Microsoft's 5bn?
on
Google Index Doubles
·
· Score: 4, Informative
On the same day that
this story hits the BBC. In that
story Microsoft claim that they have
5 billion pages indexed, more than
the 4.2 billion pages indexed (at that
point) by Google. The BBC have just
updated the story with the 8bn figure.
Get the photos of the swiss cops here with this torrent
Ironically, in a non-free format (RAR)
which cannot, in this case, be extracted by an free
tools. All it is is 3 JPEGs. What was wrong
with tar or zip?
I have downloaded some torrents for, ahem,
experimental purposes - mainly BBC programs
which are fair game because I live in the
UK and pay my license fee. [IANAL]
Bittorrent downloads get faster when you
allow others to upload. So you do need
to punch some controlled holes in your
firewall to make it work.
I allow ports 6881 - 6889 back through
my firewall to my local computer, allowing
up to 9 other bittorrent clients to connect
back to me for uploads. Unfortunately
I have yet to find a firewall which
understands the bittorrent protocol enough
to actually create these ports on the fly
(with sufficient IP-based access controls).
People seem to forget that if Microsoft were to completely pull out of the Operating System, Office, games and internet markets (and just about everything else) and devote themselves to say... selling sol.exe (Solitaire for the non windows persons) for a dozen different platforms... even without a single sale, the pile of cash they are sitting on, in addition to their assets would be sufficient to keep them afloat for many many years.
Not true at all. If Microsoft did this, their
shareholders would demand the cash pile be given
back to them immediately. If they didn't
comply, the investors would get rid of the
board and install another one with
a sensible business plan. Microsoft could
well implode under such extreme conditions.
Apparently, the "we're seizing all your servers' hard drives" tactic isn't new. [...]
They're taking the drives not because they were used in the commission of a crime (necessarily), but because they want evidence off of them, possibly just incidental.
How is this different from the police
raiding my home and stealing my written
notes and papers? In communist China,
this was a real concern, so much so that
dissidents didn't write anything down if
they could help it. The famous doctor and
author of Chairman Mao's biography
Li
Zhisui (read this book - it's great)
burned all his contemporary notes at the
time, many many books worth of material,
because he was so afraid of this.
It's a great state of affairs when we can
compare Britain 2004 with China in the
'60s and '70s.
It allows you to create object-oriented
web apps in C which compile into tiny
servers (and I mean tiny - the web server
fits into the L1 cache on most computers).
But they come with all the usual features
like a templating system, database
access and so on.
Having seperate servers for groups of users seems like an appropriate thing to do. Why is that a bad thing?
I guess the answer would be: why do that?
It just multiplies the administration overhead
by the number of these servers.
The alternative is a central database
(probably a clustered database if you have
an absolutely huge client population, but in
the common case it really is just the one
database server). All changes occur in one
place exactly.
On another note, can someone enlighten me as to why they are upgrading the accounts so slowly? Shouldn't it be a quick and easy scripted task (unless they're editing the records one at a time)?
The service is database-backed, with a
normal CGI/mod_perl front end, so you
might think that all upgrades would
be instantaneous, and for many types
of upgrades this is indeed the case.
However, it's not always so straightforward.
Firstly, you've got the issue of multiple
webservers, which have to be upgraded essentially
by hand, and that takes some time.
More seriously, you may need to run scripts
to move data around. One example being
we used to store the emails themselves in
the SQL database, but we soon realised
that was a stupid thing to do and we moved
to a NFS/IMAP solution for the mail, with
the metadata only stored in the database.
Because of the sheer volume of data involved
we had to migrate each account individually.
The strategy we used was to store a
"migrated" flag with the user, and when
they logged in first time since migration
started, we would migrate their
email (the process took up to 60 seconds
per user depending on the amount of mail
they had). In addition, we had a background
process running which migrated unmigrated
accounts one at a time. The whole
process took several weeks to complete.
Another massive migration for us was
the original migration of the code from
Lotus Notes (true!) to database + mod_perl.
This was horrible because it took
ages to export the mail from Notes, so
we had to maintain essentially two
separate systems with a common front
end. The custom-designed Apache front
end decided whether the user was on the
"old" system or the "new" system and
redirected requests accordingly. Yuck.
Now I understand that Hotmail isn't
the best architected system in the world.
Looking at the URLs, it seems to me that
each person has a "home" server, and so
it's quite possible that sysadmins are
now patiently upgrading each server by
hand, in the process increasing the
storage for that group of users. I
don't envy them.
Rich.
[1] Not anymore, so don't
blame me for their current failings!
It's down at the moment (too many people
tried to download the whole thing for
their Baysian filters or whatever), but
I've collected all my spam since
Aug 1997
here.
er, um, Windowsupdate.microsoft.com????
I mean everybody goes there... Even linux geeks have to go there to get updates for their friends who are stuck on Windows and too virus-infected to get updates from via own computers.
Actually, I go there from my Linux
machine to get updates for Exploder running
under Crossover Office...
Rich.
Re:Microsoft. Software patents. Mono
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 1
Mono scares the living daylights out of me.... Letting Mono burrow its way into Linux culture, software, infrastructure, and support is ASKING for trouble a few years down the road. It's putting a giant SUE ME sign out.
That's complete drivel..Net is nothing more
than a half-baked attempt to clone (the existing,
patent-free) Java. Java is a clone of
many earlier systems (eg. the UCSD p-System).
Mono does nothing more than
UCSD p-System or Smalltalk did
20 or more years ago, and so there's huge amounts of prior art
which will invalidate any patents. If Mono
becomes a significant part of Linux then some
large backer (eg. IBM, Red Hat) will protect
Linux from frivolous lawsuits, and if they
don't who cares anyway - we'll just go on
using our technology despite what any
court says.
Marriage -- the license isn't as much a permission as a document proving it happened on the public record.
In the UK you very much have to get permission
before getting married. It's the local council
you gives you permission, which is then valid for
(IIRC) 14 days after to up to one year after.
They give you a particularly rigorous test too
to check that you know each other, and it's not
just for immigration reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Why don't they do the same for software?
But if you bought a car, you wouldn't be constantly harrassing the designers with new features ("It must be able to turn 90 degrees instantly! Oh, and I forgot to say I want it to fly!") while they were still building it.
Rich.
http://www.timhunkin.com/94_illegal_engineering.ht m
Rich.
http://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id= 27550
http://merjis.com/developers/mod_caml/apache_2.0
Rich.
The MS and non-MS implementations are subtly different, but nothing major.
Have a look at the Javascript source. I do some clever stuff to measure the round trip time to the server and slow down updates if they are taking too long. Anyone know how to make updates run in another thread so they don't stop the browser if they're really slow?
Rich.
These languages face a Catch-22: until they're more popular, they won't attract enough developers to ameliorate the library situation, yet until they offer better libraries, [...]
This may have been true 5 years ago, but today you can call Perl 5 libraries and Python libraries directly from OCaml.Rich.
(and also!) If you're a business using Objective CAML, find other businesses and people using it here.
I've also written an OCaml tutorial for people coming from 'conventional' languages like C, Perl and Java.
Rich.
(By the way, they still make the Excel -- but they renamed it "Accent" in 1995)
<cheapshot>Because they didn't want the name associated with crashes?
</cheapshot>Rich.
I smell competition!
Rich.
Ironically, in a non-free format (RAR) which cannot, in this case, be extracted by an free tools. All it is is 3 JPEGs. What was wrong with tar or zip?
Rich.
Rich.
Bittorrent downloads get faster when you allow others to upload. So you do need to punch some controlled holes in your firewall to make it work.
I allow ports 6881 - 6889 back through my firewall to my local computer, allowing up to 9 other bittorrent clients to connect back to me for uploads. Unfortunately I have yet to find a firewall which understands the bittorrent protocol enough to actually create these ports on the fly (with sufficient IP-based access controls).
http://btfaq.com/serve/cache/25.html explains this in a bit more detail.
Rich.
Note that on the sail barge, the light source is somewhere forward and to the left.
Look at the dunes in the background. The light source is clearly somewhere behind and to the left.
Yeah, I don't think they really went to Tatooine at all. It was all filmed in a studio in the Nevada desert.
Rich.
People seem to forget that if Microsoft were to completely pull out of the Operating System, Office, games and internet markets (and just about everything else) and devote themselves to say... selling sol.exe (Solitaire for the non windows persons) for a dozen different platforms... even without a single sale, the pile of cash they are sitting on, in addition to their assets would be sufficient to keep them afloat for many many years.
Not true at all. If Microsoft did this, their shareholders would demand the cash pile be given back to them immediately. If they didn't comply, the investors would get rid of the board and install another one with a sensible business plan. Microsoft could well implode under such extreme conditions.
Rich.
Apparently, the "we're seizing all your servers' hard drives" tactic isn't new. [...] They're taking the drives not because they were used in the commission of a crime (necessarily), but because they want evidence off of them, possibly just incidental.
How is this different from the police raiding my home and stealing my written notes and papers? In communist China, this was a real concern, so much so that dissidents didn't write anything down if they could help it. The famous doctor and author of Chairman Mao's biography Li Zhisui (read this book - it's great) burned all his contemporary notes at the time, many many books worth of material, because he was so afraid of this.
It's a great state of affairs when we can compare Britain 2004 with China in the '60s and '70s.
Rich.
It allows you to create object-oriented web apps in C which compile into tiny servers (and I mean tiny - the web server fits into the L1 cache on most computers). But they come with all the usual features like a templating system, database access and so on.
Rich.
... or even (my) free software cocanwiki.
I guess the answer would be: why do that? It just multiplies the administration overhead by the number of these servers.
The alternative is a central database (probably a clustered database if you have an absolutely huge client population, but in the common case it really is just the one database server). All changes occur in one place exactly.
Rich.
Well, I used to run this free email service[1] so I have some insights here.
The service is database-backed, with a normal CGI/mod_perl front end, so you might think that all upgrades would be instantaneous, and for many types of upgrades this is indeed the case.
However, it's not always so straightforward. Firstly, you've got the issue of multiple webservers, which have to be upgraded essentially by hand, and that takes some time.
More seriously, you may need to run scripts to move data around. One example being we used to store the emails themselves in the SQL database, but we soon realised that was a stupid thing to do and we moved to a NFS/IMAP solution for the mail, with the metadata only stored in the database. Because of the sheer volume of data involved we had to migrate each account individually. The strategy we used was to store a "migrated" flag with the user, and when they logged in first time since migration started, we would migrate their email (the process took up to 60 seconds per user depending on the amount of mail they had). In addition, we had a background process running which migrated unmigrated accounts one at a time. The whole process took several weeks to complete.
Another massive migration for us was the original migration of the code from Lotus Notes (true!) to database + mod_perl. This was horrible because it took ages to export the mail from Notes, so we had to maintain essentially two separate systems with a common front end. The custom-designed Apache front end decided whether the user was on the "old" system or the "new" system and redirected requests accordingly. Yuck.
Now I understand that Hotmail isn't the best architected system in the world. Looking at the URLs, it seems to me that each person has a "home" server, and so it's quite possible that sysadmins are now patiently upgrading each server by hand, in the process increasing the storage for that group of users. I don't envy them.
Rich.
[1] Not anymore, so don't blame me for their current failings!
Internet Archive version.
Rich.
Actually, I go there from my Linux machine to get updates for Exploder running under Crossover Office ...
Rich.
That's complete drivel. .Net is nothing more
than a half-baked attempt to clone (the existing,
patent-free) Java. Java is a clone of
many earlier systems (eg. the UCSD p-System).
Mono does nothing more than
UCSD p-System or Smalltalk did
20 or more years ago, and so there's huge amounts of prior art
which will invalidate any patents. If Mono
becomes a significant part of Linux then some
large backer (eg. IBM, Red Hat) will protect
Linux from frivolous lawsuits, and if they
don't who cares anyway - we'll just go on
using our technology despite what any
court says.
Rich.
Marriage -- the license isn't as much a permission as a document proving it happened on the public record.
In the UK you very much have to get permission before getting married. It's the local council you gives you permission, which is then valid for (IIRC) 14 days after to up to one year after.
They give you a particularly rigorous test too to check that you know each other, and it's not just for immigration reasons.
Sucks, I know ...
Rich.
I really hope this is some sort of bizarre joke ...