How do you suggest people generate dynamic web pages?
What, me? You're not asking me, are you?
Well, anyway, at the moment I'm developing a web application using CGI and Perl, together with a handful of useful libraries such as CGI.pm . Later, I can move it to something like mod_perl (or in this case, PerlIIS) to increase performance.
I think the most important decision is how you will store your data. Will you use an SQL database, a flat file, serialization (something like the Perl Storable module) or even something funky like OpenLDAP?
If you want SQL, it might be good to go for something like PHP or ASP that has extensive SQL support 'built-in'. Of course Perl has SQL modules too, but it's probably not quite as easy (I haven't used PHP / ASP). If you don't, you have a much freer choice. For groups I really cannot say what to use, but if you're working on your own, just use your favourite high-level language. It probably isn't worth learning a new scripting language just for Web development - there are too many already.
If you don't already know a scripting language, go out and learn Perl at once. Yes, I know Python and many others are a lot cleaner, but Perl is fun to learn, there are lots of good books on it, and you'll probably end up having to use it someday anyway.
Has anyone else noticed that O'Reilly have their own web server which competes with Apache?
I expect the publishing and software divisions are kept separate, to avoid the IBM syndrome of products being squashed / crippled to avoid 'cannibalizing' sales of products from another division. But it still seems a bit strange.
Why anyone would want to burden their server with modules written in Perl is beyond me though.
I think the idea is that the Perl interpreter is loaded at startup as part of the Apache process. The Perl programs are also compiled just once at startup. Once you've done this, running modules written in Perl simply involves interpreting bytecode, which although not as fast as C, is probably fast enough for most applications. Process creation overhead and loading / compiling scripts is usually the real killer for performance, not executing them.
Besides, how much time does the machine spend in the Perl script, and how much calling Apache API functions? And how relevant is any of this, given that the biggest bottleneck is often bandwidth, not CPU time?
There is a free NFS server for NT called Soss, which would probably do the job for lone NT boxes. I don't think you'd want to base your whole network around it however.
It does suck moderately, based on my experience. If you feed it invalid XML, or an invalid XSL style sheet, it tends to crash with a NullPointerException, rather than giving a helpful error message.
I actually heard many compliments about NT 3.51 stability that all but vanshed in NT 4. Unfortunately, 3.51 has that ghastly Windows 3.1 interface that I absolutely cannot stand:-(.
You should try Calmira, which is a GPLed replacement shell for Win3.1 giving a Win95 look and feel. It works on NT 3.51 too, and even runs under Wine, which is really freaky.
Wow. Remember the early 1990's... back before that "Internet" thing became popular? Back when Boardwatch was all the rage and magazines like Wired didn't even matter?
I don't understand what they mean by saying that the new processor will be able to run 32-bit applications 'without emulation'. All processors have a certain amount of legacy stuff they have to support. Journalists would have us believe that while Merced will 'emulate' x86 instructions, the Intel 686 CPUs can run them natively. But the i686 uses a RISC core and translates instructions before executing them.
Not to mention being a better Windows than Windows.
I've just installed OS/2 3.0 on a machine at home, and I'm disappointed with it. In particular, it doesn't run Windows applications! If you want to use Windows apps on it, you have to install a copy of Windows as well.
Issue a share or two to the first 1000 slashdotters or something!
Why not issue every reader with a number of shares equal to their karma? Or give a hundred shares to each successful 'first post'.
It's a shame about the quiet period, I was looking forward to Jon Katz's article about how the Andover.net IPO 'Dutch auction' system is challenging the conventional mindset of Wall Street investors (along with the pirated Buffy episode, of course).
If traffic decreases, will changes be forced upon you to try and increase readership?
I don't think that's very likely - or at least, I don't think Andover would try to 'alter' Slashdot to attract more readers. It's snowballing new users as it is. Even if traffic did start to drop, it's not so much the number of eyeballs, as the brains behind those eyeballs. What I mean is that Slashdot has a particular, valuable audience - just accumulating millions of AOLers probably wouldn't be as commercially valuable.
If Slashdot gets 'broken', everyone will stop reading it. There are plenty of other news sites. Heck, you even have the Slashdot source to make your own version (a 'fork'), you're not subject to a monopoly supplier.
I always rather liked Visio, even though they were a bit too keen on Microsoft "technologies".
Yes, Visio have consistently been the most pro-Microsoft of the major software companies:
Gates: Windows 98 delay would be a disaster: In addition to Gates, speakers included Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer, CompUSA Inc. President and CEO Jim Halpin, Storm Technology Inc. President and CEO Bill Krause, Visio Corp. Chief Technology Officer Ted Johnson and N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard University economics professor. Most of them pounded home the theme that if the government were to stop Microsoft from shipping Windows 98 on June 25, it would have significant impact on consumers and the U.S. economy.
1) If I call you on the telephone and tell you where to find MP3 files, can I be prosecuted for copyright violations?
According to the judge in Sweden, no. But you could be prosecuted for helping others commit copyright violations. (IANAL.)
So linking to USA Today would not be illegal, unless you did so in order to help others rip images from the site or something.
There was a stupid judgment in the UK (Scotland, I think, probably applies to the rest of the country) where one local newspaper's website was ordered to stop linking to another paper's site. I'm not sure what the justification for this was, certainly they hadn't copied anything, nor were they inciting others to illegaly copy things.
It may be a bad thing that you can be arrested for helping others break copyright laws, but it's certainly a very good thing that *linking itself is not a violation of copyright*, which is implied by the judge's decision.
I think there is a certain confusion in the idea of 'karma'. Is it there to decide who would make a good moderator, or does it decide whose posts should get +1 or -1 bonuses? The two are not necessarially related.
At the moment, karma just seems to be a 'nice person-ometer' which doesn't do either job properly. For example, you could sit around and meta-moderate each day, getting a small karma bonus, and then after a few weeks, all your comments would be posted at Score: 2. But meta-moderating has nothing to do with your ability to post meaningful comments! Similarly, if somebody M2s a moderation you have made, and says it was 'unfair', you lose karma not just for moderation but also for comment posting. Maybe you are just a good poster, but a bad moderator.
To continue an earlier analogy, if you award kills for destroying asteroids, then combat ratings no longer accurately reflect fighting ability.
But does ucLinux have a GUI? I can't imagine trying to use a command line with a pen!
Something like compressed X protocol over a wireless link to my Linux box, together with a small web browser running locally, would be sweet. VNC is more lightweight in terms of CPU usage, but it hammers the network more than X does.
What will you do when Y2k happens in 'real life'? Will the comic continue 'as if nothing had happened'? Or maybe After Y2K is an accurate prediction of the future 8-)
It has always been a problem with sci-fi that the dates chosen tend to be far too close, so we 'overrun' them quickly. But less than 4 months away is ridiculous!
BTW, today, 1999 September 13th, is the day when the Moon was knocked out of Earth's orbit in Space: 1999. There are still a few hours left for it to happen...
Surely the only problem is one of patents, not copyrights. But we already have 'free' software which is restricted in the US and Japan by patents, and some licenses (eg IBM's licence for Jikes) restrict your use of certain patents, while the software itself is still considered free. (It is at least free in Europe, but maybe not for much longer; see freepatents.org.)
I don't expect Linus will pay any attention to the W2k launch date. He's often said that he enjoys doing The Right Thing for technical reasons, and not being driven by marketing.
If, OTOH, he has taken the Mindcraft study personally, we might see kernel development targetted specifically towards beating NT. But personally, I think that other features deserve more attention - Linux is already much faster than NT for me.
I don't mean to nitpick, but that's not a BSOD. The BSOD is a NT term.
You are right, but the term seems to have filtered downwards to WinDOS. Take a look at BSOD Properties which lets you have a Red Screen of Death, etc, on WinDOS.
In my four years of experience administering NT boxes, every BSOD I've seen has been caused by NT not liking a particular combination of hardware devices or drivers.
I will probably be flamed for this, but I have found NT to be _very_ stable for me as long as the hardware is stable.
I used to run WfWG 3.11 and MS Word 6.0, and they crashed all the time. Then I moved the machine (an IBM PS/2 Model 80, circa 1989) onto NT3.51 and the 32-bit version of Word, and have never had a crash. Ever. NT4 on the other hand doesn't seem as stable for me. Maybe Win2k will go back to the 'good old days' of NT stability.
Slashdot Mirror
What, me? You're not asking me, are you?
Well, anyway, at the moment I'm developing a web application using CGI and Perl, together with a handful of useful libraries such as CGI.pm . Later, I can move it to something like mod_perl (or in this case, PerlIIS) to increase performance.
I think the most important decision is how you will store your data. Will you use an SQL database, a flat file, serialization (something like the Perl Storable module) or even something funky like OpenLDAP?
If you want SQL, it might be good to go for something like PHP or ASP that has extensive SQL support 'built-in'. Of course Perl has SQL modules too, but it's probably not quite as easy (I haven't used PHP / ASP). If you don't, you have a much freer choice. For groups I really cannot say what to use, but if you're working on your own, just use your favourite high-level language. It probably isn't worth learning a new scripting language just for Web development - there are too many already.
If you don't already know a scripting language, go out and learn Perl at once. Yes, I know Python and many others are a lot cleaner, but Perl is fun to learn, there are lots of good books on it, and you'll probably end up having to use it someday anyway.
Has anyone else noticed that O'Reilly have their own web server which competes with Apache?
I expect the publishing and software divisions are kept separate, to avoid the IBM syndrome of products being squashed / crippled to avoid 'cannibalizing' sales of products from another division. But it still seems a bit strange.
I think the idea is that the Perl interpreter is loaded at startup as part of the Apache process. The Perl programs are also compiled just once at startup. Once you've done this, running modules written in Perl simply involves interpreting bytecode, which although not as fast as C, is probably fast enough for most applications. Process creation overhead and loading / compiling scripts is usually the real killer for performance, not executing them.
Besides, how much time does the machine spend in the Perl script, and how much calling Apache API functions? And how relevant is any of this, given that the biggest bottleneck is often bandwidth, not CPU time?
There is a free NFS server for NT called Soss, which would probably do the job for lone NT boxes. I don't think you'd want to base your whole network around it however.
It does suck moderately, based on my experience. If you feed it invalid XML, or an invalid XSL style sheet, it tends to crash with a NullPointerException, rather than giving a helpful error message.
You should try Calmira, which is a GPLed replacement shell for Win3.1 giving a Win95 look and feel. It works on NT 3.51 too, and even runs under Wine, which is really freaky.
Er... has Wired ever mattered?
I don't understand what they mean by saying that the new processor will be able to run 32-bit applications 'without emulation'. All processors have a certain amount of legacy stuff they have to support. Journalists would have us believe that while Merced will 'emulate' x86 instructions, the Intel 686 CPUs can run them natively. But the i686 uses a RISC core and translates instructions before executing them.
I've just installed OS/2 3.0 on a machine at home, and I'm disappointed with it. In particular, it doesn't run Windows applications! If you want to use Windows apps on it, you have to install a copy of Windows as well.
I thought it started in late 1997. Have we had Slashdot's second birthday yet? (In dog years / Internet time, that would make it fourteen.)
Why not issue every reader with a number of shares equal to their karma? Or give a hundred shares to each successful 'first post'.
It's a shame about the quiet period, I was looking forward to Jon Katz's article about how the Andover.net IPO 'Dutch auction' system is challenging the conventional mindset of Wall Street investors (along with the pirated Buffy episode, of course).
I don't think that's very likely - or at least, I don't think Andover would try to 'alter' Slashdot to attract more readers. It's snowballing new users as it is. Even if traffic did start to drop, it's not so much the number of eyeballs, as the brains behind those eyeballs. What I mean is that Slashdot has a particular, valuable audience - just accumulating millions of AOLers probably wouldn't be as commercially valuable.
If Slashdot gets 'broken', everyone will stop reading it. There are plenty of other news sites. Heck, you even have the Slashdot source to make your own version (a 'fork'), you're not subject to a monopoly supplier.
Hmm, is this sounding familiar?
The only thing I've ever seen by World of Wonder was the excellent Adam and Joe Show (although it got a bit samey in the third and final series).
Yes, Visio have consistently been the most pro-Microsoft of the major software companies:
Gates: Windows 98 delay would be a disaster: In addition to Gates, speakers included Compaq CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer, CompUSA Inc. President and CEO Jim Halpin, Storm Technology Inc. President and CEO Bill Krause, Visio Corp. Chief Technology Officer Ted Johnson and N. Gregory Mankiw, a Harvard University economics professor. Most of them pounded home the theme that if the government were to stop Microsoft from shipping Windows 98 on June 25, it would have significant impact on consumers and the U.S. economy.According to the judge in Sweden, no. But you could be prosecuted for helping others commit copyright violations. (IANAL.)
So linking to USA Today would not be illegal, unless you did so in order to help others rip images from the site or something.
There was a stupid judgment in the UK (Scotland, I think, probably applies to the rest of the country) where one local newspaper's website was ordered to stop linking to another paper's site. I'm not sure what the justification for this was, certainly they hadn't copied anything, nor were they inciting others to illegaly copy things.
It may be a bad thing that you can be arrested for helping others break copyright laws, but it's certainly a very good thing that *linking itself is not a violation of copyright*, which is implied by the judge's decision.
This is a message to Mr Katz.
Please don't feel obliged to limit your paragraphs to one or two sentences.
It breaks up the flow and makes text harder to read.
The idea with paragraphs is they hold one idea each.
So you should group sentences together in the same paragraph, if they are part of the same idea.
I think there is a certain confusion in the idea of 'karma'. Is it there to decide who would make a good moderator, or does it decide whose posts should get +1 or -1 bonuses? The two are not necessarially related.
At the moment, karma just seems to be a 'nice person-ometer' which doesn't do either job properly. For example, you could sit around and meta-moderate each day, getting a small karma bonus, and then after a few weeks, all your comments would be posted at Score: 2. But meta-moderating has nothing to do with your ability to post meaningful comments! Similarly, if somebody M2s a moderation you have made, and says it was 'unfair', you lose karma not just for moderation but also for comment posting. Maybe you are just a good poster, but a bad moderator.
To continue an earlier analogy, if you award kills for destroying asteroids, then combat ratings no longer accurately reflect fighting ability.
But does ucLinux have a GUI? I can't imagine trying to use a command line with a pen!
Something like compressed X protocol over a wireless link to my Linux box, together with a small web browser running locally, would be sweet. VNC is more lightweight in terms of CPU usage, but it hammers the network more than X does.
Neither do the other free software 'big guys', as far as I can tell:
Maybe this is because of the difference between ordinary hacker and project leader.
What will you do when Y2k happens in 'real life'? Will the comic continue 'as if nothing had happened'? Or maybe After Y2K is an accurate prediction of the future 8-)
It has always been a problem with sci-fi that the dates chosen tend to be far too close, so we 'overrun' them quickly. But less than 4 months away is ridiculous!
BTW, today, 1999 September 13th, is the day when the Moon was knocked out of Earth's orbit in Space: 1999. There are still a few hours left for it to happen...
Surely the only problem is one of patents, not copyrights. But we already have 'free' software which is restricted in the US and Japan by patents, and some licenses (eg IBM's licence for Jikes) restrict your use of certain patents, while the software itself is still considered free. (It is at least free in Europe, but maybe not for much longer; see freepatents.org.)
I don't expect Linus will pay any attention to the W2k launch date. He's often said that he enjoys doing The Right Thing for technical reasons, and not being driven by marketing.
If, OTOH, he has taken the Mindcraft study personally, we might see kernel development targetted specifically towards beating NT. But personally, I think that other features deserve more attention - Linux is already much faster than NT for me.
You are right, but the term seems to have filtered downwards to WinDOS. Take a look at BSOD Properties which lets you have a Red Screen of Death, etc, on WinDOS.
Try running the DOS binary of XaoS.
I used to run WfWG 3.11 and MS Word 6.0, and they crashed all the time. Then I moved the machine (an IBM PS/2 Model 80, circa 1989) onto NT3.51 and the 32-bit version of Word, and have never had a crash. Ever. NT4 on the other hand doesn't seem as stable for me. Maybe Win2k will go back to the 'good old days' of NT stability.