Allow you to sell a standalone application written with flash, without your potential clients needing the flash viewer.
So far all flash is good for is give-away goodies. And it probably could turn out some pretty neat stuff with commercial applications. Some games for instance (like the ones at cartoonnetwork.com) are actually pretty well done, they remind me of SNES/Genesis titles.
Those programs have nothing with the linux kernel. Other than they can be run on it
And an IIS vulnerability has nothing to do with the NT Kernel, only that it's run on it. So if an IIS or SQL worm can be called a 'windows' bug, then an Apache or mySql one can be called a 'linux' bug, it's only fair.
But that's splitting hairs.
His point is valid. Just because the source is open doesn't mean the programmers are any more skilled, although they generally believe they are. That hubris leads to mistakes.
Open source is great because it can be reviewed by it's peers. Wonderful. But who reviews it? Do you? I know I haven't pored through the source for the SAMBA tarball I just installed on one of my boxes looking for holes.
Microsoft no doubt has a team of employees who look for vulnerabilities. Linux has a decentralized team of hackers looking for vulnerabilities. In the end, from a 'how good is the code' standpoint, it's pretty much apples and apples.
There are lots of reasons to like open source (and by extension Linux), but I've never considered "It's super dooper secure!" to be very high among them.
Back in high school a compiled version of gorilla was about the only 'game' available to students in the libraries computer lab.
It was dead simple to crash it and have it dump out to a C:\ prompt. Though there wasnt much of interest to do from there on in, being a closed net with no access to anything of import.
Critically acclaimed, but it was compared to Psycho too readily when it came out, although IMO it was a much more cerebral film.
Personally I think Roman Polanski is a pitiful human being, but this film was absolutely brilliant. It gave me (and still does) chills without all the over-the-top blood and gore that's associated with the 'horror' genre.
Basically it's about a young sexually repressed woman's (Catherine Deneuve) descent into madness and homocide.
Re:ABC cuts gore from injured child's Iraq war pho
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 1
War solves nothing... unless, of course,
your company is selling to Defense...
War sucks, but read a history book.
It's solved pretty much everything from nazi occupation of europe to toppling the Roman empire.
Re:Too bad it's still around.. at all!
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4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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Even the Shi'a in the south are against the American invasion.
I can only imagine you got that little tidbit from Al Jazeera.
There's a certain percentage of all muslims, Shiite or no, that will hate America for their own fundamentalist reasons. For the same reason that some christians join the KKK. Nutballs are nutballs.
But the vast majority of them have been persecuted and tortured by Hussein's regime for 30 years for not being the 'right flavor' of muslim (sunni).
I'm seeing a lot of footage (from varied sources, even Frances media isnt denying it) that many Shiite in the south are elated that Saddam is on the outs. "Restrained jubilation" is a good term. Saddams henchmen are still everywhere, and they're still very much afraid.
There have been small uprisings (against Hussein) so far, but I doubt we'll see too much of it. They remember all to well the last time they tried to overthrow Saddam and the UN (not US, the UN) hung them out to dry.
How about just being a good coder in general, and realizing languages are tools of the trade, not trades in and of themselves.
Luckily my employer realizes this. I've worked on FORTRAN, C, Java, Visual Basic, and others. He realizes by now he can sit me in front of a console full of code written in language "X", and within a few days I'll be proficient at it.
It's all just syntax, really. (well, some sequential->functional->object oriented paradigm shifts as well)
Mainframes already are a long term solution. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
There's easily more COBOL and FORTRAN code out there than there is Perl or Java.
Systems dont get replaced just because they aren't the 'latest thing'. They get replaced because they dont work anymore. The mainframes work.
Interestingly, I read an article not too long ago about increased interest in mainframes and dumb terminals. Apparently there are those wise enough to realize that the client/server model of computing is full of flaws. When was the last virus to target the Sys/36 or HP-3000?
It's persistent connections and a real working caching scheme, and not one that webmasters cheat to force a fresh page every time (making static content 'look' dynamic so they get more ad revenue).
Propel Accelerator is designed to provide maximum acceleration for the Web sites you visit regularly.
So, the more you surf, the faster your favorite pages will load!
Specifically, Propel Accelerator speeds up the delivery of Web pages three ways:
Compression. Propel Accelerator delivers text and graphics more efficiently, using a proprietary compression technology that significantly reduces the size of Web pages and page elements sent to your browser.
Caching. Propel Accelerator intelligently retains and re-uses Web pages and page elements that have previously been sent to your PC. That's why the longer Propel Accelerator is in use on your PC, the faster your Web pages will load.
Persistent Connections. Propel Accelerator uses proprietary techniques to carefully manage and optimize the communication between your modem and our network of servers through a persistent connection. This eliminates the time wasted re-establishing and closing TCP/IP connections. Looking for more technical detail on how Propel Accelerator works? Please refer to our Technical Overview. It explains the various components and how they interact with one another.
Nothing magic. It compresses a whole page, images and all, on the ISP side, and sends it down a persistant pipe to your client, along with some more intelligent caching information than is default (ie, the/. icons would stay cached but the text wouldnt).
It would probably 'look' faster since the whole page is delivered in one package, and renders all at once, rather than having text and waiting for images to show up.
It only accelerates HTTP AFAIK, so it's useless for anyone but the mom and pop web browser. It's certainly no substitute for bandwidth. The joe users buy broadband for P2P and streaming video and VPNs, none of which this 'technology' helps.
It also sounds like it would require client side software. Support? "Windows 98/NT 4.0/2000/ME/XP (sorry, no Macintosh support yet." which goes without saying.
Which brings me to a question. I regularly route my web browsing through my squid proxy at home (through ssh). Since my home uplink is 15k, it throttles my browsing. Is there an open source clone of this, or something similar?
So far as I read it, they aren't forcing the use of OS, they're requiring that every PC be capable of running a free OS, like linux or whatever.
A great deal of them will indeed run Windows, because that's a skill that gets you a job. Outside of the IT world, noone is impressed by 'linux' on a resume.
All their doing is limiting their hardware choices.
Personally I prefer to use only hardware that works with linux, even though I dont use it on the desktop. It's generally a sign that the hardware has been around for a few years, and as a rule of thumb, by the time linux support exists, windows support is rock solid. Video cards notwithstanding.
If you want to try it out, you will (most likely) need your own machine handling mail (if you're a broadband or DSL user, this is easy enough, I'll assume you've made that step...)
Now, make sure Perl is installed.
Now, as root, type "perl -MCPAN -e shell" and follow the instructions to set up Perl's configuration system.
In that shell, type "install Mail::SpamAssassin".
Exit that shell and type "/etc/init.d/spamassassin start"
You will want to do what your OS prefers for making sure this starts at boot time, under Red Hat Linux, that's "/sbin/chkconfig --levels 35 spamassassin on"
Exit your root shell, and do the rest as your user account.
Assuming you use sendmail with procmail (see the SpamAssassin site for other MTA configuration steps), put::0fw | spamc -f into your.procmailrc.
SpamAssassin is now doing its job. It just marks messages that it thinks are spam. See the example procmailrc [spamassassin.org] on spamassassin.org for more information on how you can move the mail to another folder, delete it, or even more complex things. Also, there's a procmail bug that the example config can help you work around.
If you're doing this on a busy site, I recommend adding "-m 20" or so to your spamd command-line to throttle periods of intense mail delivery.
You can also configure SpamAssassin to do lots of useful stuff just the way you like it. There's a FAQ on your site that will walk you through it, but after the first time spamd handles mail for you, it will create a ".spamassassin/user_prefs" file that has good comments in it that guide you through common configuration needs (like whitelisting users).
The.com boom got a lot of people into programming in IT because the "wisdom" of the time was telling them that's where the money was.
I was in university during the rise of the.com boom, and watched my classes fill up with people who had never used a computer, had no passion or interest in them, barely passed their courses, but were just sweating it out for that big paycheck at the end of the tunnel.
Myself, I've always been 'into' PCs, since I got a C64 as a wee kid. I have a passion for it, I enjoy it, I consider it my calling.. I couldnt imagine doing anything else.
So when the bubble burst, I'd imagine the people who got into computers who didnt care about computers simply left. They went and started new careers doing whatever. Some are slow to learn, as we've had a steady stream of employees who have absolutely no interest in doing the job. But they're eventually learning that the free lunch is not to be had, and they're moving on.
I'm still here. I get paid to do what I love (write code and troll on slashdot). I'm not worried about losing my current job, it's in an industry niche that wont go away. But if it came down to it, I'm confident I could find another.
It was set up by the framers of the consitution this way for a specific reason. So that a very populous state with it's own regional political views cant dominate the federal government. Consider at the time, New York had probably a hundred times the population of the entire western half of the country.
This isnt the first time in which the winner lost the popular vote, but won the election.
Please learn how the system works, then you can criticize it effectively.
I'm not going to address the morality of the war today. It's a huge topic, and a can of worms I simply can't open. What I would like to chat about is dealing with traffic spikes on a major website. that is an area I'm pretty familiar with. Last night I posted our largest comment grabbing story ever. Currently it has over 3200 comments. It was posted at 10:05 EST, which means it was off peak traffic hours. This is almost identical to the story we posted following the Columbia explosion- thousands of comments on a single story, but occuring during off hours.
Last night our traffic was approximately the same as during a normal afternoon. THat is to say 40-50 pages a second. We managed to hold up just fine. In fact, much better than during the Columbia story. This is largely because we have more servers in the cluster, and we ended up transferring one server from our SSL cluster (currently in testing) to the pool. This caused the average load in the comment cluster pool to drop in half.
In preperation for more wartime coverage, we've made a few changes. One was to remove the Next/Prev links from article.pl. Those are relatively expensive DB calls, and when more users view articles, those 2 queries per article.pl add up. Someday we'll optimize them better, but they are actually quite tricky to do properly since next/prev are relative to the user. Any number of things affect them (Subscribers see stories in the future for example).
We're also going to move the AC default threshold to 2. Logged in users won't be affected, and ACs can always drop it if they want, but this means they'll be more likely to see better comments, and hopefully smaller pages and fewer clicks.
Another change we're considering is the commentsplits. Currently we split pages on 100 comments. We're considering dropping that number to 50 or something. The theory is that more-but-smaller pages will result in snappier performance overall for everyone.
Of course the obvious answer is more metal. We're also trying to see if we can't scrounge up more boxes for the comments pool. If we get a 30-40% boost in traffic, it would be nice to have at least a 10-20% increase in hardware powering it.
The good news is that because of how we now divide our traffic between smaller, more focused and optimized clusters, huge comments shouldn't affect pages (much) like the Index or static articles. It's pretty clever and Krow should be proud since he championed this division against my better judgement. It really works quite well- even when comments start bogging down, the index still serves relatively snappy. Since more than half of our page loads are index pages, that means only good stuff.
CNN crapped out last night, but we held up just fine.
The last thing we're discussing is logical ways to split discussions. Slash is fine with stories until we get above 1500 or so comments, and lots of people are using them actively simultaneously. If we could split discussions somehow, without making the UI to intrusive for readers, that may ultimately be the kludge that gets us through the next traffic bursts. 3 stories with 1k comments in them would ultimately be much faster than one story with 3k comments.
Longer term of course we plan to optimize around this so that we don't have so much concern about sizes of discussions. It used to be that 500 was the breaking point for discussions. Then a thousand. Now we need 1500 during prime time for things to really break down. So we're getting better with age...
Anyway, the next few days look to be one of those days where it takes everything you've got to survive. I suspect all of Slashteam will be losing a few winks, so thanks to krow, jamie, pudge, cowboyneal in advance.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow you to sell a standalone application written with flash, without your potential clients needing the flash viewer.
So far all flash is good for is give-away goodies. And it probably could turn out some pretty neat stuff with commercial applications. Some games for instance (like the ones at cartoonnetwork.com) are actually pretty well done, they remind me of SNES/Genesis titles.
Those programs have nothing with the linux kernel. Other than they can be run on it
And an IIS vulnerability has nothing to do with the NT Kernel, only that it's run on it. So if an IIS or SQL worm can be called a 'windows' bug, then an Apache or mySql one can be called a 'linux' bug, it's only fair.
But that's splitting hairs.
His point is valid. Just because the source is open doesn't mean the programmers are any more skilled, although they generally believe they are. That hubris leads to mistakes.
Open source is great because it can be reviewed by it's peers. Wonderful. But who reviews it? Do you? I know I haven't pored through the source for the SAMBA tarball I just installed on one of my boxes looking for holes.
Microsoft no doubt has a team of employees who look for vulnerabilities. Linux has a decentralized team of hackers looking for vulnerabilities. In the end, from a 'how good is the code' standpoint, it's pretty much apples and apples.
There are lots of reasons to like open source (and by extension Linux), but I've never considered "It's super dooper secure!" to be very high among them.
Heh.
Back in high school a compiled version of gorilla was about the only 'game' available to students in the libraries computer lab.
It was dead simple to crash it and have it dump out to a C:\ prompt. Though there wasnt much of interest to do from there on in, being a closed net with no access to anything of import.
Repulsion
Critically acclaimed, but it was compared to Psycho too readily when it came out, although IMO it was a much more cerebral film.
Personally I think Roman Polanski is a pitiful human being, but this film was absolutely brilliant. It gave me (and still does) chills without all the over-the-top blood and gore that's associated with the 'horror' genre.
Basically it's about a young sexually repressed woman's (Catherine Deneuve) descent into madness and homocide.
War solves nothing... unless, of course,
your company is selling to Defense...
War sucks, but read a history book.
It's solved pretty much everything from nazi occupation of europe to toppling the Roman empire.
Even the Shi'a in the south are against the American invasion.
I can only imagine you got that little tidbit from Al Jazeera.
There's a certain percentage of all muslims, Shiite or no, that will hate America for their own fundamentalist reasons. For the same reason that some christians join the KKK. Nutballs are nutballs.
But the vast majority of them have been persecuted and tortured by Hussein's regime for 30 years for not being the 'right flavor' of muslim (sunni).
I'm seeing a lot of footage (from varied sources, even Frances media isnt denying it) that many Shiite in the south are elated that Saddam is on the outs. "Restrained jubilation" is a good term. Saddams henchmen are still everywhere, and they're still very much afraid.
There have been small uprisings (against Hussein) so far, but I doubt we'll see too much of it. They remember all to well the last time they tried to overthrow Saddam and the UN (not US, the UN) hung them out to dry.
Seems the DNS entry isnt resolving, doesnt necessarily mean the site itself is down.
How about just being a good coder in general, and realizing languages are tools of the trade, not trades in and of themselves.
Luckily my employer realizes this. I've worked on FORTRAN, C, Java, Visual Basic, and others. He realizes by now he can sit me in front of a console full of code written in language "X", and within a few days I'll be proficient at it.
It's all just syntax, really. (well, some sequential->functional->object oriented paradigm shifts as well)
Mainframes already are a long term solution. They aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
There's easily more COBOL and FORTRAN code out there than there is Perl or Java.
Systems dont get replaced just because they aren't the 'latest thing'. They get replaced because they dont work anymore. The mainframes work.
Interestingly, I read an article not too long ago about increased interest in mainframes and dumb terminals. Apparently there are those wise enough to realize that the client/server model of computing is full of flaws. When was the last virus to target the Sys/36 or HP-3000?
It's not just compression.
It's persistent connections and a real working caching scheme, and not one that webmasters cheat to force a fresh page every time (making static content 'look' dynamic so they get more ad revenue).
Nothing magic. It compresses a whole page, images and all, on the ISP side, and sends it down a persistant pipe to your client, along with some more intelligent caching information than is default (ie, the
It would probably 'look' faster since the whole page is delivered in one package, and renders all at once, rather than having text and waiting for images to show up.
It only accelerates HTTP AFAIK, so it's useless for anyone but the mom and pop web browser. It's certainly no substitute for bandwidth. The joe users buy broadband for P2P and streaming video and VPNs, none of which this 'technology' helps.
It also sounds like it would require client side software. Support? "Windows 98/NT 4.0/2000/ME/XP (sorry, no Macintosh support yet." which goes without saying.
Which brings me to a question. I regularly route my web browsing through my squid proxy at home (through ssh). Since my home uplink is 15k, it throttles my browsing. Is there an open source clone of this, or something similar?
So far as I read it, they aren't forcing the use of OS, they're requiring that every PC be capable of running a free OS, like linux or whatever.
A great deal of them will indeed run Windows, because that's a skill that gets you a job. Outside of the IT world, noone is impressed by 'linux' on a resume.
All their doing is limiting their hardware choices.
Personally I prefer to use only hardware that works with linux, even though I dont use it on the desktop. It's generally a sign that the hardware has been around for a few years, and as a rule of thumb, by the time linux support exists, windows support is rock solid. Video cards notwithstanding.
You could run commercials during the McNeil-Lehrer report and 60 minutes and no adults are going to go and see it.
It has nothing to do with 'ignorance of the masses'.
They understand it's a "growed up" cartoon.
They simply aren't interested in seeing it.
And that's that.
Few people share your tastes in cinema, and I don't see why you or anyone else cares.
Watch your cartoons and quit preaching.
Now everyone panic about the 'privacy' of 6 year olds being violated by their parents.
That, of course, is why you want to direct grandma at a service provider that advertises their use of SpamAssassin
Ah, but my particular grandma lives out in the boonies where there is one and only one little mom and pop ISP.
So to avoid spam, a web based service is about the only way to avoid hassle.
Is that all!?
I'll forward this to my grandma toute-suite.
"We drop each one 54 times from one meter, bake it in an oven, chill it in a freezer, vibrate it, and submit it to a shower of hurricane proportions,"
Apparently so.
I asked for a VIC-20.
Instead, under the xmas tree, I got one of the C64's that came off of the very first shipment of them to Canada.
Man was I pissed. There was no software for it. My best friend had a vic-20 and had tons of cool games like berserk and radar rat race and gorf.
I had some crappy number guessing game I typed in from the manual. Then a few months later I got Choplifter for my birthday. The gap started to close.
Then a full year later, the 1541 disk drive showed up. And I was inseperable from my 64 for the next 10 years.
Ahh.. SYS 64738
SYS 64738 indeed.
The .com boom got a lot of people into programming in IT because the "wisdom" of the time was telling them that's where the money was.
.com boom, and watched my classes fill up with people who had never used a computer, had no passion or interest in them, barely passed their courses, but were just sweating it out for that big paycheck at the end of the tunnel.
I was in university during the rise of the
Myself, I've always been 'into' PCs, since I got a C64 as a wee kid. I have a passion for it, I enjoy it, I consider it my calling.. I couldnt imagine doing anything else.
So when the bubble burst, I'd imagine the people who got into computers who didnt care about computers simply left. They went and started new careers doing whatever. Some are slow to learn, as we've had a steady stream of employees who have absolutely no interest in doing the job. But they're eventually learning that the free lunch is not to be had, and they're moving on.
I'm still here. I get paid to do what I love (write code and troll on slashdot). I'm not worried about losing my current job, it's in an industry niche that wont go away. But if it came down to it, I'm confident I could find another.
The popular vote does not choose a president. The electoral college does.
It was set up by the framers of the consitution this way for a specific reason. So that a very populous state with it's own regional political views cant dominate the federal government. Consider at the time, New York had probably a hundred times the population of the entire western half of the country.
This isnt the first time in which the winner lost the popular vote, but won the election.
Please learn how the system works, then you can criticize it effectively.
That moderators do not read the articles and hence moderation does not work.
I just got modded informative for cutting and pasting Taco's journal entry.
Not only that, I added "we are gay" to the end of it, just to ensure my -1:Flamebait/Troll rating.
Not only do moderators not read the stories, they dont even read what they are moderating.
I'm not going to address the morality of the war today. It's a huge topic, and a can of worms I simply can't open. What I would like to chat about is dealing with traffic spikes on a major website. that is an area I'm pretty familiar with.
Last night I posted our largest comment grabbing story ever. Currently it has over 3200 comments. It was posted at 10:05 EST, which means it was off peak traffic hours. This is almost identical to the story we posted following the Columbia explosion- thousands of comments on a single story, but occuring during off hours.
Last night our traffic was approximately the same as during a normal afternoon. THat is to say 40-50 pages a second. We managed to hold up just fine. In fact, much better than during the Columbia story. This is largely because we have more servers in the cluster, and we ended up transferring one server from our SSL cluster (currently in testing) to the pool. This caused the average load in the comment cluster pool to drop in half.
In preperation for more wartime coverage, we've made a few changes. One was to remove the Next/Prev links from article.pl. Those are relatively expensive DB calls, and when more users view articles, those 2 queries per article.pl add up. Someday we'll optimize them better, but they are actually quite tricky to do properly since next/prev are relative to the user. Any number of things affect them (Subscribers see stories in the future for example).
We're also going to move the AC default threshold to 2. Logged in users won't be affected, and ACs can always drop it if they want, but this means they'll be more likely to see better comments, and hopefully smaller pages and fewer clicks.
Another change we're considering is the commentsplits. Currently we split pages on 100 comments. We're considering dropping that number to 50 or something. The theory is that more-but-smaller pages will result in snappier performance overall for everyone.
Of course the obvious answer is more metal. We're also trying to see if we can't scrounge up more boxes for the comments pool. If we get a 30-40% boost in traffic, it would be nice to have at least a 10-20% increase in hardware powering it.
The good news is that because of how we now divide our traffic between smaller, more focused and optimized clusters, huge comments shouldn't affect pages (much) like the Index or static articles. It's pretty clever and Krow should be proud since he championed this division against my better judgement. It really works quite well- even when comments start bogging down, the index still serves relatively snappy. Since more than half of our page loads are index pages, that means only good stuff.
CNN crapped out last night, but we held up just fine.
The last thing we're discussing is logical ways to split discussions. Slash is fine with stories until we get above 1500 or so comments, and lots of people are using them actively simultaneously. If we could split discussions somehow, without making the UI to intrusive for readers, that may ultimately be the kludge that gets us through the next traffic bursts. 3 stories with 1k comments in them would ultimately be much faster than one story with 3k comments.
Longer term of course we plan to optimize around this so that we don't have so much concern about sizes of discussions. It used to be that 500 was the breaking point for discussions. Then a thousand. Now we need 1500 during prime time for things to really break down. So we're getting better with age...
Anyway, the next few days look to be one of those days where it takes everything you've got to survive. I suspect all of Slashteam will be losing a few winks, so thanks to krow, jamie, pudge, cowboyneal in advance.
BTW we are gay.
If I could think of the name of the shop, or it's web address I would... I dont have it on me.
I found him at the market pro computer show (www.marketpro.com) in MD selling nice 17" for 45 bucks.
I heard that D stood for Donald Duck.
No, I'm serious. I saw in a 'making of' sorta disney film that Donald Duck was the radio codeword for the invasion of Normandy.
And D-Day was Donald Day.
We both know all a karma-whoring reporter would have to do to get modded up would be to say "M$NBC IS TEH SUCK!"