Hmm, ok, I'll admit to missing that. Still, there's a difference between as subtle joke (as the VV headline was), and a punchline out of context (as this one was) -- maybe from the yes-the-spelling-is-a-joke dept. would have been clearer...
Slashdot editors run for office, film at eleven
on
Nucular Hydrogen Economy
·
· Score: -1, Informative
Just because idiot politicians pronounce the word "nuclear" as "nucular" does not mean that "nucular" is an accepted spelling of the term. Two wrongs don't make a right, and two abuses of the English language don't make for proper grammar -- just proper dummies:)
I've been looking into upgrading the DVD-ROM drive on my old dual G4/450 tower, but want to be sure that the drive I get will work with both OSX and my DVD player. So not only have I been trying to figure out which DVD recording format makes the most sense (the timing of this article is wonderful for me:-), but I want to be sure that the drive is compatible with open firmware or whatever it need be so that I can actually use the thing.
I've poked at Apple's DVD compatibility page, but that seems oriented towards players that will accept discs made by the drive Apple is putting on their new computers; I can't find an authoritative source on what drives will work well with older Macs, but have heard horror stories about drives not working in hardware similar to my Mac.
Has anyone upgraded their "vintage" Mac to DVD+/-R/RW/whatever? How did it go? What problems did you find? Where were the good deals on workable drives? I've seen generic rebranded Pioneer drives as low as $180 (Apple's superdrive also seems to be a rebranded Pioneer, so this is encouraging), but I'm not opposed to paying a little more for reliable compatibility if the no-name ones could be problematic.
Overkill. This is just overkill. If you want to learn how to non-drastically keep a Windows box alive & well, you could do a lot worse than to poke through O'Reilly's Annoyances books & web site -- you can find the Win95 edition in a lot of remainders bins these days, and the advice really hasn't changed drastically with later versions of Windows.
Essentially, if you just get passingly familiar with browsing the registry, you can save yourself a lot of headaches in the long run. If anything is a problem, it's not that the registry is unmanagable, but that that regedit.exe is such a crude tool for browsing the database: really you ought to be able to use something with global find & replace, etc, but regedit doesn't provide anything like that. A better alternative is Lavasoft's RegHance, which makes working with the registry a bit easier -- and while you're at it, Lavasoft's AdAware for cleaning out spyware regularly.
In any case though, if you just get a rough feel for how things are organized, then you realize that there are only a handful of places where broken software can pull the system performance down. Just keeping the registry key for launching software on boot time well pruned gets you 80% of the way there, and pruning IE's reg tree of parasites (as AdAware can do for you automagically) gets you to 95% there most of the time.
Hearing people say that a regular reinstall is a better idea than registry maintainence is like hearing people advocate regular engine rebuilds on your car when a periodic oil change would have been much cheaper & much less painful -- it's a weird combination of naivete, ignorance, and cargo cultism that has never really made sense, and is only worse now that Win2k & WinXP are really pretty mature operating systems that don't need to be handled in such a hamfisted way anymore. Please join the 21st century & quit reinstalling your OS -- you'll be glad you did:-)
Re:Symantec spam reporting address
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Thank you -- my addressbook has been updated accordingly. Now let's see if they actually respond...
Re:He's the Norton SystemWorks guy!
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
I get the Norton spam a lot, and less frequently I get spam offering obviously pirated versions of software like Office, Adobe's graphics suite, AutoCAD, etc. As was pointed out by Jon Praed at the MIT Spam Conference back in January, almost all of these offers are not legit, and so count as fraud, and so can be prosecuted under existing (i.e. not spam specific) law. And your biggest ally here is the vendor -- they don't want people selling this stuff any more than you want to be receiving the spam.
With that in mind, I've taken to forwarding the most egregious of these to piracy@microsoft.com, piracy@adobe.com, piracy@apple.com, etc, and they all consistently get right back to me about it -- not by an automated response, but by someone that's actually investigating the situation.
Not so with Norton / Symantec -- I can't find a working piracy@... address for them, have never received a response to piracy@symantec.com, etc. As far as I can tell, they just don't care -- which is exactly why the problem has gotten so far out of hand with Norton Systemworks, and why offers for other applications are so infrequent.
When people say that allowing these spams to go on is some kind of guerrilla marketing on Norton's part, it's not hard to believe...
Interesting. What if you don't want to avoid all popups though, but would rather force them into new tabs instead -- is this possible? Some of us have to use web apps that are annoyingly popup happy, and simply disabling popups is unfortunately overkill...
Musings on an 18 cent coin
on
Making Change
·
· Score: 1
verification, n.
An optional method of compounding the errors of data entry: e.g., the
situation where Jo(e) decides that the "8" that Fred(a) thought was a
"3" is really a "5."
-- from _The Computer Contradictionary_, Stan Kelly-Bootle, 1995
Or in this case, that the 0 was an 8 -- repeatedly:-)
I like the section on available GCC flags, specifically:
-archarch
Compile for the specified target architecture arch. Currently Apple supported arch is ppc.
"Currently" supported? What does that mean?
It doesn't seem like such a stretch to assume that other architectures are officially not out of the question, with a hedge statement like this one. Very interesting...
With Winamp & MediaPlayer, I agree, they're silly in too many ways to bother enumerating. But Quicktime is a special case -- it runs on Windows, but it's really a Macintosh application -- sort of literally. From what I've read, it has a major fraction of the Mac (Carbon) toolkit as part of the application. The lack of a maximize UI function is more or less a side effect of that -- Mac applications pretty much never minimize, so that UI guideline is carried over to the Windows version. In Macland, that's consistency. On the PC, maybe it's an example of how hard it is to get cross platform right.
Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple. Internet ads annoy you because you're paying for internet access, but television ads don't bother you because you can receive the signal for free.
But is that really accurate? No, it isn't.
For one thing, you're paying for electricity to power the tv [and computer etc] that gets the ads, and you paid for the equipment you're using -- so that half of your equation is already questionable.
Then there's the content you're getting access to, usually for free. None of the money you pay your ISP goes to these sites, just as little if any of the money you'd pay your cable tv station actually makes it back to the stations.
The content you get over the web, television, and in print is expensive, more than the market will bear directly, so advertisers have stepped in as a proxy: they subsidize the material so that you in turn get to use it for little or no money. This happens in pretty much all mass media: the actual cost of your newspaper, tv show, web site usage, etc are all far higher than the actual cost that you pay directly -- advertisers always cover the difference.
If you have a problem with this arrangement, that's fine, but you have to think through what you're thinking of doing about it. I would speculate that any website used by an ad filtering ISP would have grounds to bring suit against that ISP, because its users are getting the content at a loss to them that probably violates the contracts that site has gone into with its advertisers. You may be able to get around this by having your users pay to use filtered sites, but that raises lots of other issues. There's a privacy aspect -- will you monitor your activity logs to see who is browsing where so that the appropriate sites can get their monthly checks? There's a logistical aspect -- how will you make sure that every site gets the right payment without coming up with a solution to the micropayments problem? There's a practical aspect -- are people really going to be willing to pay a [steep?] premium to use such an ad-free service?
Saying "we're not going to pass these fees on to the customer" probably isn't a viable option, and saying that this can be done without some kind of financial arrangement with filtered sites probably isn't realistic.
I wish you the best of luck, but I just don't see it happening.
The most viable option I can think of is to steer ISP users towards manual ad prevention techniques -- popup blocking browsers, turning off Javascript, etc -- but doing none of this at the network level. Doing so opens up a very messy can of worms.
If you don't like the current economic model for modern mass media, that's fine, "patches are always welcome". But if you're going for an overhaul like this, don't think that it'll be possible without a fight.
(NB: I happen to sympathize with you, but unfortunately I just don't think that the way you're suggesting to go about this has much of a chance. If I'm wrong, that's wonderful, but I don't think it'll work...)
As egomaniac summarized, the argument for Dvorak just isn't that compelling. A lot of the supposed benefits are apocryphal. For a great summary of the facts, you could do a lot worse than to read the relevant chapter from Donald Norman's The Psychology of Everyday Things, which says, basically
But as a left handed person, my reasons for not switching to Dvorak are pretty specific: one of the supposed benefits of Dvorak is that it puts the most frequently used letters on the right, under the "dominant" hand. But that ain't my dominant hand:-)
So if the Dvorak proponents are correct, the layout would actually be an impediment to me, and if they're wrong, then what's the point? As it is, I can touch type pretty rapidly on any (American) keyboard I'm likely to come across -- any PC, Mac, or Unix workstation I find is going to have essentially the same standard layout. I have nothing to gain by switching to a new layout at this point, and much to lose by trying, whether or not I succeed.
Just to give one example, I'll be damned if I'm going to learn vi all over again, or a new arrangement for my emacs / bash / pine / readline keybindings. I don't know where the "jump to line start" keychord is, I just know that my left pinky holds down the control key and my ring finger twitches just above it, and magically the cursor jumps where I wanted it. Isn't that magical? Isn't it foolish to rewire that beauty after all the work went in to learn it once?
Aren't there more interesting things to be learning than a whole new keyboard arrangement?
Or use w3m, or if you want to be retro-cool, lynx. Whatever. Every good Unix nerd knows that every good site will work perfectly fine in a text browser, and this is a perfect example of such an opportunity: if all you want is a forms driven enterprise application, people have been moving these things to the web for years now, and there are huge, well tested toolkits for doing this in every language you could ever want to use (Perl / mod_perl, Python / Zope...others too, or so I've heard -- something about Java or something).
Among other benefits, writing your network console app this way lets your developers leverage web & database skills that they've already mastered over the past few years, and your users can either have the console mode interface or if GUIs are that important to them they can use a standard graphical browser instead: no decision is imposed on them (well, aside from the snarky login script:).
I still like console apps, and don't mean to disparage them -- my main mail client, for example, is still Pine, and I wouldn't feel nearly as productive with any of the GUI mail clients I've tried (many of them). At the same time, I also wouldn't feel as productive in a web based mail client -- too clunky in the best case, and almost always a disaster in a text browser. Obviously there is a sweet spot to be hit and some applications don't work well through a web browser.
But for a lot of the network applications I've seen (the DOS based inventory lookup software in retail stores, etc) where the client is essentially dumb and all you're doing is the more equivalent of "SELECT Product FROM InventoryTable WHERE ProductID LIKE "%whatever%", that works very well in a Perl or mod_perl CGI/DBI script, and there's no reason that such a script can't be engineered to be just as easy to use in a good quality text browser like links.
If I were writing a network aware console app today, I would strongly consider such an implementation. There are cons -- it can be clunky compared to a pure console app -- but the pros are interesting enough -- interface flexibility, leveraging of well-honed skills, etc -- that it just might be the right approach in many situations.
Maybe because Bugzilla is also a real pain in the ass?
Now Request Tracker -- that is a high quality bug - slash - general-purpose issue tracker. Bugzilla is great if you happen to be Mozilla, but if your needs are at all different from those of the Mozilla project (hint: everyone's project needs are more or less unique, at least to an extent) then customizing Bugzilla is a pain in the ass. RT on the other hand is extremely flexible, adapts well to people's normal work flows, and scales very well. Check it out, you'll probably like it:)
Oh, so he's the mofo that's helping soup up these hotrod stereo systems so that their disaffected college dropout testosterone fueled drivers can take them blaring back & forth down my street at all hours of the day & night. Next time you see that brother of yours, tell him Chris from Somerville said thanks a fuckin' lot.
:-)
It's okay, it's been a good 30 minutes since one of these guys has gone by, so I can laugh about it at the moment. Just don't ask 30 minutes from now, by which time another one will have bombed down the street. Who knows, maybe the next one will even have good taste in music -- nah, that's too much to hope for...:)
/me puts the headphones back on & listens to "Kind of Blue" again...
I think the Darth Vader gargoyle may have been done a decade or more ago -- nice to see Slashdot keep up with the times:)
It's not that they're trying to pay homage to Star Wars as much as they're trying to position this modern cathedral in our time & place. With that in mind, a lot of the gargoyles & other decorations are modern in some way: another of the gargoyles is one of the flying monkeys from "Wizard of Oz", for example, and supposedly one of the gargoyles has Hitler's face (not American of course, but about as clear an example of modern evil as you're likely to find).
As interesting as modern history & pop culture is though, my favorite is the stellar rose window in the cathedral: the design itself is really cool (psychedelic even), but the centerpiece is a moon rock. No other cathedral in the world can claim a souvenier like that, I think it's safe to say:)
Broadly, the point isn't that Hitler was bad or that movies are cool or that NASA had ingenuity, but that all of these things and more are aspects of our 20th/21st century lives. Think of the cathedral as a kind of epic time capsule, meant as much as a post card to our descendants of 1000 or more years from now as it is a simple place of everyday worship. If people are still watching movies at that point, the face of Vader will be our way of saying "yeah -- we invented that" (well no, actually the Lumiere family did in Paris, but the McCarthyites would probably object to that:). Broadly, it's a way of saying "those other cathedrals are great, but this one is ours, and this is who we are/were."
If you take the public tour of the Boston Globe's headquarters, they'll tell you that it costs something like $2.50 to print each copy of the daily paper (more on Sunday, obviously). And yet the cover price is only fifty cents -- obviously advertisements are defraying the majority of that cost. You do the math:-)
The ratio will vary from paper to paper, but I think that consistently you can assume that advertisements are paying for the bulk of the cost for any media.
In some arrangements, advertisement is high enough that the cost for the product is actually free -- radio is free, broadcast television is free, basic cable channels are "free", etc. In other cases, the audience pays for some or all of the cost that goes into production -- subscription fees for newspapers & magazines, the additional cost of premium cable channels, etc. In still others, the publication takes little or not commercial sponsorship, and the audience has to bear the cost explicitly -- think "Consumer Reports", public broadcasting, and technical publications like scientific journals (aren't "Science" & "Nature" each in the ballpark of $1000/year?).
If you look at things in terms of "following the money", then most media are not there to deliver a product (information, entertainment) to the audience, but to sell that audience to their sponsored advertisers. The only [partial] exception I can think of is public broadcasting, where the audience is the sponsor, and is begged for money several times a year. But really, that's not an exception -- that's just making the dynamic that's always there more visible to the general public.
This dynamic sheds a lot of light on the advertiser/subscriber ratio that goes into the costs of any media, including newspapers. The idea is that a non-paying audience is worth some value N, but a paying audience must be more valuable, because the act of paying a subscription fee demonstrates that they actively want this product. That's why, of the three biggest newspapers here in Boston, the Globe & Herald are both fifty cents per day, but the Phoenix has experimented for the past few years with not charging anything for a copy. This has probably increased their readership while impacting their income; if they can sell that larger audience to their advertisers, then maybe they come out ahead anyway -- I don't know. But for the other two papers, I'm sure that both (and every other fee-charging paper in the country/world) are using their paid subscription population as a bargaining chip with advertisers.
So putting all this together, web publications are just another point on the spectrum. Since very few sites have managed to do well with a subscription model (WSJ.com and Salon being maybe the most prominent attempts), most are leaning towards the advertising end of the spectrum -- just like radio, TV, and the "Boston Phoenix". This is a model that has been used for many decades now, so it's not like the web is just starting to "catch up" with traditional newspapers. Indeed, since most newspapers have seen steadily declining readership for the past 15 years or so, its not necessarily that the web is learning the newspaper world's tricks, but that one is coming up while the other is coming down. Maybe.
More optimistically, I prefer to think that the web is starting to mature & hit its stride, and certain areas are beginning to become self-sufficient & even profitable. Not all, obviously, but we're moving beyond nonsense like Pets.com:-)
(Note that, even though I happen to work for a newspaper's site, I don't speak for my employer. Moreover, I'm not giving away anything that I didn't learn in media studies 101 in college -- the economics of mass media is a well studied & analyzed subject. Just to be clear about that
Not that you're on the wrong track -- Oracle is more powerful than MySQL, there's no questioning that assertion -- but the functionality you describe exists in MySQL as well. For an equivalent to Oracle's sql*loader, MySQL offers the command line tool mysqlimport, or the SQL command LOAD DATA INFILE. I believe there are also equivalents to the CREATE/INSERT... SELECT. For all the advantages that Oracle has over MySQL, these aren't among them:-)
Most (all?) of the publishers today will have a web site dedicated to each title, and the better ones (all again?) will have an errata page somewhere in there. Look for it. Consider basing purchasing decisions on the presence & quality of that errata page:
If it has such a page, and it's short (all books will have at least some typos -- that's life), then you're in good shape.
If it looks like the errata page is updated often, that's also a good sign -- it means the publisher is paying attention. That may be even better.
If it has an errata page, and it's really long, then maybe the book is just sub-par: be careful here.
If it has no errata page, the publisher is lying, or hasn't gotten around to it yet: be careful here, too.
I don't know which book you got, but O'Reilly's Programming PHP has its own confirmed and unconfirmed errata pages. If this is the book you've got, feel free to go over the corrections noted on these pages and jot them down in your copy -- I've done that with a couple of my books, and would have missed many of the glitches without that hint. If you see an error that isn't on this page, O'Reilly offers a error submission form that you can use for that book (and others of course) -- so use it! If the publisher doesn't find out about these mistakes, they aren't going to get fixed. A good publisher will offer revised printings -- not that that helps you once you've got a copy, but it will prevent other learners from having to hit the same obstacles you did.:-)
You can't, unfortunately, expect books to be perfect & pristine. (Well, maybe Knuth's books, but everyone else has to deal with typos & thinkos:-). You can, however, and should expect the publisher to own up to their little mistakes and offer you corrections on their site. Go find that info and get the fixes into your copy and you'll be a happier camper.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, their accounts show this, but there seems to be some question as to their veracity -- they may value a steady profit just a tad too much...
Hmm, ok, I'll admit to missing that. Still, there's a difference between as subtle joke (as the VV headline was), and a punchline out of context (as this one was) -- maybe from the yes-the-spelling-is-a-joke dept. would have been clearer...
Just because idiot politicians pronounce the word "nuclear" as "nucular" does not mean that "nucular" is an accepted spelling of the term. Two wrongs don't make a right, and two abuses of the English language don't make for proper grammar -- just proper dummies :)
Thus proving that even the blind can hit an occasional bullseye -- it's not accuracy, it's random luck ;-)
I've poked at Apple's DVD compatibility page, but that seems oriented towards players that will accept discs made by the drive Apple is putting on their new computers; I can't find an authoritative source on what drives will work well with older Macs, but have heard horror stories about drives not working in hardware similar to my Mac.
Has anyone upgraded their "vintage" Mac to DVD+/-R/RW/whatever? How did it go? What problems did you find? Where were the good deals on workable drives? I've seen generic rebranded Pioneer drives as low as $180 (Apple's superdrive also seems to be a rebranded Pioneer, so this is encouraging), but I'm not opposed to paying a little more for reliable compatibility if the no-name ones could be problematic.
Thanks :-)
Why couldn't it be Pabst Blue Ribbon or Milwaukee's Best ("Microsoft's Beast?") or something?
I don't want to drink Borg Beer, man.... ;-)
Essentially, if you just get passingly familiar with browsing the registry, you can save yourself a lot of headaches in the long run. If anything is a problem, it's not that the registry is unmanagable, but that that regedit.exe is such a crude tool for browsing the database: really you ought to be able to use something with global find & replace, etc, but regedit doesn't provide anything like that. A better alternative is Lavasoft's RegHance, which makes working with the registry a bit easier -- and while you're at it, Lavasoft's AdAware for cleaning out spyware regularly.
In any case though, if you just get a rough feel for how things are organized, then you realize that there are only a handful of places where broken software can pull the system performance down. Just keeping the registry key for launching software on boot time well pruned gets you 80% of the way there, and pruning IE's reg tree of parasites (as AdAware can do for you automagically) gets you to 95% there most of the time.
Hearing people say that a regular reinstall is a better idea than registry maintainence is like hearing people advocate regular engine rebuilds on your car when a periodic oil change would have been much cheaper & much less painful -- it's a weird combination of naivete, ignorance, and cargo cultism that has never really made sense, and is only worse now that Win2k & WinXP are really pretty mature operating systems that don't need to be handled in such a hamfisted way anymore. Please join the 21st century & quit reinstalling your OS -- you'll be glad you did :-)
Thank you -- my addressbook has been updated accordingly. Now let's see if they actually respond...
With that in mind, I've taken to forwarding the most egregious of these to piracy@microsoft.com, piracy@adobe.com, piracy@apple.com, etc, and they all consistently get right back to me about it -- not by an automated response, but by someone that's actually investigating the situation.
Not so with Norton / Symantec -- I can't find a working piracy@... address for them, have never received a response to piracy@symantec.com, etc. As far as I can tell, they just don't care -- which is exactly why the problem has gotten so far out of hand with Norton Systemworks, and why offers for other applications are so infrequent.
When people say that allowing these spams to go on is some kind of guerrilla marketing on Norton's part, it's not hard to believe...
Interesting. What if you don't want to avoid all popups though, but would rather force them into new tabs instead -- is this possible? Some of us have to use web apps that are annoyingly popup happy, and simply disabling popups is unfortunately overkill...
Or in this case, that the 0 was an 8 -- repeatedly :-)
Spoilsport :-)
It doesn't seem like such a stretch to assume that other architectures are officially not out of the question, with a hedge statement like this one. Very interesting...
With Winamp & MediaPlayer, I agree, they're silly in too many ways to bother enumerating. But Quicktime is a special case -- it runs on Windows, but it's really a Macintosh application -- sort of literally. From what I've read, it has a major fraction of the Mac (Carbon) toolkit as part of the application. The lack of a maximize UI function is more or less a side effect of that -- Mac applications pretty much never minimize, so that UI guideline is carried over to the Windows version. In Macland, that's consistency. On the PC, maybe it's an example of how hard it is to get cross platform right.
But is that really accurate? No, it isn't.
For one thing, you're paying for electricity to power the tv [and computer etc] that gets the ads, and you paid for the equipment you're using -- so that half of your equation is already questionable.
Then there's the content you're getting access to, usually for free. None of the money you pay your ISP goes to these sites, just as little if any of the money you'd pay your cable tv station actually makes it back to the stations.
The content you get over the web, television, and in print is expensive, more than the market will bear directly, so advertisers have stepped in as a proxy: they subsidize the material so that you in turn get to use it for little or no money. This happens in pretty much all mass media: the actual cost of your newspaper, tv show, web site usage, etc are all far higher than the actual cost that you pay directly -- advertisers always cover the difference.
If you have a problem with this arrangement, that's fine, but you have to think through what you're thinking of doing about it. I would speculate that any website used by an ad filtering ISP would have grounds to bring suit against that ISP, because its users are getting the content at a loss to them that probably violates the contracts that site has gone into with its advertisers. You may be able to get around this by having your users pay to use filtered sites, but that raises lots of other issues. There's a privacy aspect -- will you monitor your activity logs to see who is browsing where so that the appropriate sites can get their monthly checks? There's a logistical aspect -- how will you make sure that every site gets the right payment without coming up with a solution to the micropayments problem? There's a practical aspect -- are people really going to be willing to pay a [steep?] premium to use such an ad-free service?
Saying "we're not going to pass these fees on to the customer" probably isn't a viable option, and saying that this can be done without some kind of financial arrangement with filtered sites probably isn't realistic.
I wish you the best of luck, but I just don't see it happening.
The most viable option I can think of is to steer ISP users towards manual ad prevention techniques -- popup blocking browsers, turning off Javascript, etc -- but doing none of this at the network level. Doing so opens up a very messy can of worms.
If you don't like the current economic model for modern mass media, that's fine, "patches are always welcome". But if you're going for an overhaul like this, don't think that it'll be possible without a fight.
(NB: I happen to sympathize with you, but unfortunately I just don't think that the way you're suggesting to go about this has much of a chance. If I'm wrong, that's wonderful, but I don't think it'll work...)
But as a left handed person, my reasons for not switching to Dvorak are pretty specific: one of the supposed benefits of Dvorak is that it puts the most frequently used letters on the right, under the "dominant" hand. But that ain't my dominant hand :-)
So if the Dvorak proponents are correct, the layout would actually be an impediment to me, and if they're wrong, then what's the point? As it is, I can touch type pretty rapidly on any (American) keyboard I'm likely to come across -- any PC, Mac, or Unix workstation I find is going to have essentially the same standard layout. I have nothing to gain by switching to a new layout at this point, and much to lose by trying, whether or not I succeed.
Just to give one example, I'll be damned if I'm going to learn vi all over again, or a new arrangement for my emacs / bash / pine / readline keybindings. I don't know where the "jump to line start" keychord is, I just know that my left pinky holds down the control key and my ring finger twitches just above it, and magically the cursor jumps where I wanted it. Isn't that magical? Isn't it foolish to rewire that beauty after all the work went in to learn it once?
Aren't there more interesting things to be learning than a whole new keyboard arrangement?
Or use w3m, or if you want to be retro-cool, lynx. Whatever. Every good Unix nerd knows that every good site will work perfectly fine in a text browser, and this is a perfect example of such an opportunity: if all you want is a forms driven enterprise application, people have been moving these things to the web for years now, and there are huge, well tested toolkits for doing this in every language you could ever want to use (Perl / mod_perl, Python / Zope ...others too, or so I've heard -- something about Java or something).
Among other benefits, writing your network console app this way lets your developers leverage web & database skills that they've already mastered over the past few years, and your users can either have the console mode interface or if GUIs are that important to them they can use a standard graphical browser instead: no decision is imposed on them (well, aside from the snarky login script :).
I still like console apps, and don't mean to disparage them -- my main mail client, for example, is still Pine, and I wouldn't feel nearly as productive with any of the GUI mail clients I've tried (many of them). At the same time, I also wouldn't feel as productive in a web based mail client -- too clunky in the best case, and almost always a disaster in a text browser. Obviously there is a sweet spot to be hit and some applications don't work well through a web browser.
But for a lot of the network applications I've seen (the DOS based inventory lookup software in retail stores, etc) where the client is essentially dumb and all you're doing is the more equivalent of "SELECT Product FROM InventoryTable WHERE ProductID LIKE "%whatever%", that works very well in a Perl or mod_perl CGI/DBI script, and there's no reason that such a script can't be engineered to be just as easy to use in a good quality text browser like links.
If I were writing a network aware console app today, I would strongly consider such an implementation. There are cons -- it can be clunky compared to a pure console app -- but the pros are interesting enough -- interface flexibility, leveraging of well-honed skills, etc -- that it just might be the right approach in many situations.
Now Request Tracker -- that is a high quality bug - slash - general-purpose issue tracker. Bugzilla is great if you happen to be Mozilla, but if your needs are at all different from those of the Mozilla project (hint: everyone's project needs are more or less unique, at least to an extent) then customizing Bugzilla is a pain in the ass. RT on the other hand is extremely flexible, adapts well to people's normal work flows, and scales very well. Check it out, you'll probably like it :)
:-)
It's okay, it's been a good 30 minutes since one of these guys has gone by, so I can laugh about it at the moment. Just don't ask 30 minutes from now, by which time another one will have bombed down the street. Who knows, maybe the next one will even have good taste in music -- nah, that's too much to hope for... :)
It's not that they're trying to pay homage to Star Wars as much as they're trying to position this modern cathedral in our time & place. With that in mind, a lot of the gargoyles & other decorations are modern in some way: another of the gargoyles is one of the flying monkeys from "Wizard of Oz", for example, and supposedly one of the gargoyles has Hitler's face (not American of course, but about as clear an example of modern evil as you're likely to find).
As interesting as modern history & pop culture is though, my favorite is the stellar rose window in the cathedral: the design itself is really cool (psychedelic even), but the centerpiece is a moon rock. No other cathedral in the world can claim a souvenier like that, I think it's safe to say :)
Broadly, the point isn't that Hitler was bad or that movies are cool or that NASA had ingenuity, but that all of these things and more are aspects of our 20th/21st century lives. Think of the cathedral as a kind of epic time capsule, meant as much as a post card to our descendants of 1000 or more years from now as it is a simple place of everyday worship. If people are still watching movies at that point, the face of Vader will be our way of saying "yeah -- we invented that" (well no, actually the Lumiere family did in Paris, but the McCarthyites would probably object to that :). Broadly, it's a way of saying "those other cathedrals are great, but this one is ours, and this is who we are/were."
The ratio will vary from paper to paper, but I think that consistently you can assume that advertisements are paying for the bulk of the cost for any media.
In some arrangements, advertisement is high enough that the cost for the product is actually free -- radio is free, broadcast television is free, basic cable channels are "free", etc. In other cases, the audience pays for some or all of the cost that goes into production -- subscription fees for newspapers & magazines, the additional cost of premium cable channels, etc. In still others, the publication takes little or not commercial sponsorship, and the audience has to bear the cost explicitly -- think "Consumer Reports", public broadcasting, and technical publications like scientific journals (aren't "Science" & "Nature" each in the ballpark of $1000/year?).
If you look at things in terms of "following the money", then most media are not there to deliver a product (information, entertainment) to the audience, but to sell that audience to their sponsored advertisers. The only [partial] exception I can think of is public broadcasting, where the audience is the sponsor, and is begged for money several times a year. But really, that's not an exception -- that's just making the dynamic that's always there more visible to the general public.
This dynamic sheds a lot of light on the advertiser/subscriber ratio that goes into the costs of any media, including newspapers. The idea is that a non-paying audience is worth some value N, but a paying audience must be more valuable, because the act of paying a subscription fee demonstrates that they actively want this product. That's why, of the three biggest newspapers here in Boston, the Globe & Herald are both fifty cents per day, but the Phoenix has experimented for the past few years with not charging anything for a copy. This has probably increased their readership while impacting their income; if they can sell that larger audience to their advertisers, then maybe they come out ahead anyway -- I don't know. But for the other two papers, I'm sure that both (and every other fee-charging paper in the country/world) are using their paid subscription population as a bargaining chip with advertisers.
So putting all this together, web publications are just another point on the spectrum. Since very few sites have managed to do well with a subscription model (WSJ.com and Salon being maybe the most prominent attempts), most are leaning towards the advertising end of the spectrum -- just like radio, TV, and the "Boston Phoenix". This is a model that has been used for many decades now, so it's not like the web is just starting to "catch up" with traditional newspapers. Indeed, since most newspapers have seen steadily declining readership for the past 15 years or so, its not necessarily that the web is learning the newspaper world's tricks, but that one is coming up while the other is coming down. Maybe.
More optimistically, I prefer to think that the web is starting to mature & hit its stride, and certain areas are beginning to become self-sufficient & even profitable. Not all, obviously, but we're moving beyond nonsense like Pets.com :-)
(Note that, even though I happen to work for a newspaper's site, I don't speak for my employer. Moreover, I'm not giving away anything that I didn't learn in media studies 101 in college -- the economics of mass media is a well studied & analyzed subject. Just to be clear about that
Picture, if you will, a web publishing system built around Word95 macros. Not Word97 or higher -- Word95 only.
"The horror..." :)
Not that you're on the wrong track -- Oracle is more powerful than MySQL, there's no questioning that assertion -- but the functionality you describe exists in MySQL as well. For an equivalent to Oracle's sql*loader, MySQL offers the command line tool mysqlimport, or the SQL command LOAD DATA INFILE. I believe there are also equivalents to the CREATE/INSERT ... SELECT. For all the advantages that Oracle has over MySQL, these aren't among them :-)
I don't know which book you got, but O'Reilly's Programming PHP has its own confirmed and unconfirmed errata pages. If this is the book you've got, feel free to go over the corrections noted on these pages and jot them down in your copy -- I've done that with a couple of my books, and would have missed many of the glitches without that hint. If you see an error that isn't on this page, O'Reilly offers a error submission form that you can use for that book (and others of course) -- so use it! If the publisher doesn't find out about these mistakes, they aren't going to get fixed. A good publisher will offer revised printings -- not that that helps you once you've got a copy, but it will prevent other learners from having to hit the same obstacles you did. :-)
You can't, unfortunately, expect books to be perfect & pristine. (Well, maybe Knuth's books, but everyone else has to deal with typos & thinkos :-). You can, however, and should expect the publisher to own up to their little mistakes and offer you corrections on their site. Go find that info and get the fixes into your copy and you'll be a happier camper.