What is a language other than syntax? On the fly C would still be C because of the syntax. The execution, compilation, and internals don't matter. The language is the syntax.
Java would still be java if you wrote a native code compiler.
PHP is very evil. In large part PHP can be blamed for the neglect of many prior to PHP well maintained perl modules.
Of course perl modules are a nightmare in a binary package management world. Do I use CPAN or do I use the binary package? What is the binary package named? Is there any chance in hell that the module in a language that is all about modules will be available in the windows world? What type of insane hoops will I have to go through to get a unix type development platform built on my windows server in order to compile said module?
"PHP has very few web-related features. It can handle HTTP headers, cookies, sessions, GET and POST, escaping for HTML and URLs... and that's about it."
Yeah.. that's pretty much all there is to server side web development. MySQL has become pretty much standard for web and it has built-ins for that too.
"Are you trying to imply that PHP establishes an entirely new connection to the database for every query? If so, you basically lose all credibility you might otherwise have."
PHP reuses a connection within a script but afaik every time a client requests dbrequest.php from the browser that script loads in its own little world and starts up its own personal connection to the server. A script making three requests uses one connection, but a script requested 12 times uses 12 connections.
I believe he is saying that when 20k people simultaneously request data, having a memory resident C app grab all the concurrent data requests in a single swipe and reusing the same connections eternally for all page requests its much faster.
People buy those oversized SUV's because they have a herd of four or five brats, a load of groceries, and all the toys and gear required for the activities of said brats to haul on a single outing.
A van would also serve this purpose but even a mini-van is bigger than an SUV.
People also buy them because it gives you some of the transport, hauling, and four wheel drive capabilities of a truck but in a package that doesn't scream 'red neck hick' and looks more sleek and consumer friendly. But most buy if for the rugrat factor.
Most admins lack the skills and knowledge to build quality pc's anyway. They are software guys not hardware guys.
But I do wonder if these admins who just buy a dell realize that you can build a pc of any given spec with the cheapest offbrand crap and it will still seriously outperform a dell (or any other name brand) of comparable spec.
"Also no sane company trusts in the concept of Fair Use to cover them anymore."
We weren't discussing companies. We were discussing end users reselling hardware that has GPL'd software loaded on it (unless I wasn't replying to what I thought I was replying to).
"A small PC store started to include a CD of FOSS programs like Gimp, FireFox, Thunderbird, 7Zip, Putty, and other good software that everybody in the know downloads. It is a nice introduction to FOSS for the customers. Now it seems to me that the store is now responsible to keep the source code for many of those programs available to the people they gave the disk to."
OR they could just include the source on the CD with the FOSS programs.
This may be a grey area of GPL vs common sense but it doesn't matter. When an end user transfer the software along with the product the right to second sale makes the distribution qualify as fair use so Joe the burger flipper doesn't need to agree to the GPL in the first place.
Now if Joe modified the software, that wouldn't be a second sale anymore. Joe goes from end user to manufacturer.
Actually what you are mentioning doesn't matter because it qualifies as fair use under the right to second sale.
Joe is not a retailer, joe is an end user. The differences between a manufacturer, distributor, retailer, and end user is not merely numbers but well established in law and case history.
The right to second sale supersedes copyright and the requirements of the GPL. Now if Joe modifies that software and creates a derivative that isn't a second sale...
"That's a pretty bizarre comment. By that logic, Linus has been intentionally stifling the advancement of technology from the very start when it intentionally released an inferior clone of Unix to run on IBM."
Linus didn't sell an operating system that didn't exist to be only option available on THE personal computer and then provide the cheapest featureless solution he could provide to fill the hole.
Linus did not subsequently do everything in his power to force his lousy solution to be used and engage in anti-competative practices to lock vendors into his solution.
Linus did not refuse to improve his product in real and meaningful ways or use the embrace and extend philosophy. Linus does not refer to competing technologies as cancer or try to sue them out of existence.
The differences aren't as glaring today as they were in the past but Linux is among the many systems that have been dramatically superior to dos/windows along the way.
"It's quite fair to charge per so many bits, since that takes into account how much of the pie you're eating."
If I want pie and my wife wants pie and we are both willing to pay the same amount for our pie. My wife eats like a bird and takes a bite and I eat my piece and rest of hers. Do you really think I should pay more because she wanted less?
There is no shortage of bandwidth or pie. Its a myth and everywhere the ISP's have been called to question over the myth the numbers haven't held up. For instance in Canada they checked and found that despite the whining AT&T had zero congestion on their networks (boy did they fight against those numbers actually being reviewed).
"You're going to sit there and tell me there's no difference in electricity usage for a Server to feed me 1 gigabyte versus 1000 gigabytes each month?"
First servers have nothing to do with ISP's. ISP's run switches, and routers, servers are hosting providers. Hosting is paid for by the person providing the content, not the person consuming it.
As for switches no there is no difference, you can max out transfer or transfer a trickle and the electrical usage is about the same. There are other costs but they too still have to be there.
The switch (and other networking equipment) needs to be bigger to support faster peering connections (not that these connections are in anywhere near capacity like the telcos imply) so it does cost more but the cost of the network equipment and infrastructure is tiny compared to the net profit of the telcos let alone their revenue.
"All this whining about users, etc. is more due to the fact that they way oversold the capacity they have"
Thats the myth, they have tons of capacity and tons of dark fiber sitting unused. The major telcos don't have any congestion problems or anything close to it. In absolute worst case peak scenerios they even pass 50% capacity.
The problem isn't the price of the bandwidth either. Wholesale bandwidth is actually dirt cheap, end users aren't paying (much) too little, business users are paying (much to the power of 10) too much. Dedicated bandwidth costs a median average of $10-15 wholesale in the US.
The problem is twofold, yes they don't want to provide broadband to rural users (nevermind that they were already paid to do just that). But they also want net neutrality to die. That has nothing to do with QoS and everything to do with wanting to charge google to have people access google from the telcos at the same speed they access bing.
Basically the telcos want major sites to pay protection money so the telcos can protect them from having their sites function with artificial slowness.
"we need 1Mb to everybody that has a phone line now, including people in the "country""
Speak for yourself. That isn't a fast enough line to stream video at reasonable quality. You need at least 6mbps down to watch a movie streamed from Netflix without hiccups.
1mb of dedicated full duplex (1mb up AND 1mb down at the same time) costs a median of $10-14 on a GigE port wholesale. Charging businesses a grand a month for thirty bucks worth of bandwidth is rape. Those artificially inflated prices can only continue as long as ISP's don't let consumers have real dedicated bandwidth.
That's what this is about. People use the outrageous prices businesses and small ISPs pay to say consumers should be grateful for their lousy shared pipes. The reality is that consumers aren't paying too little to expect dedicated bandwidth, its the businesses and ISP's who are being overcharged.
That's why parents should be excluded from the debate and even more so from the vote.
Its a biological imperative to protect them and you lose the ability to decide with reason rather than emotion. Nothing magically changes when the kids are yours, all that changes is how you feel. If how you feel changes your stance from where it was when you could look at the issue logically as an outside observer... you need to excuse yourself from the decision making process.
It all started with idiots recognizing psycology as a legitimate field of study. All the sudden there is a regimented and very official sounding pool of opinions regarding behavior that can be used to justify coding those opinions in law.
If I starve my children or if I intentionally inflict permanent physical damage to them that's one thing. But what is or is not good for the mental and psychological development of my child should be up to me, not the government and certainly not some shrink. This includes corporal punishment.
"Yeah, that ten year old won't get the lid off, right?"
No kidding. Kids are generally brighter than adults, particularly when figuring something out that doesn't require the kind of prerequisite knowledge adults took years to learn. The first time an adult encounters one of these caps the adult will read the label and start following the instruction and figure it out shortly enough. The kid will figure it out by feel before the adult has found his/her reading glasses.
"OD?:) I'd like to hope my kid was bright enough to stop gurgling the drain cleaner after the first taste, not go on and OD on the stuff before he learns that something's wrong:)"
Maybe you'd have a different view if you didn't know what drain cleaner tastes like?
"Linux makes for an awesome hackable server and it is very flexible. The tools available for networking and development stand on their own but the awesome begins to fade after that."
Not in my experience. There are annoyances with binary drivers but that isn't really the fault of Linux, it is the fault of manufacturers.
The issues you mention are all due to vendor support. There is no technical issue with linux in the latency department for recording. In professional recording dedicated hardware is used to process the audio, the vendors don't support Linux so there are only software answers available. If the vendors did support linux performance would be better than windows, Macro kernels outperform micro kernels by definition.
The fact we have to deal with binary drivers is annoying and a vendor issue again but the headaches aren't really a modern concern. Unless you are one of those who refuses to use something like Ubuntu for your desktop Linux simply because it's headache free. You install, boot Ubuntu says "hey you've got a wifi card, lemme download some magic for ya" you click okay and it uses the wired connection to download and configure everything for you. About the same time it spotted the wifi, it also said "hey you've got a 3d accelerated card, lemme download some magic for ya". And that's it, you have working wifi and 3d accelerated video.
It's an extra two or three clicks but after that 2 min experience you can spend another 30 secs and get the sexiest 3D desktop experience available on any of the desktop OSes so far.
Of course I can point out real weaknesses. Like the inability to plug and play monitors. Users still can't drop their box off with a bench tech and bring it home after repair and expect everything to work.
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What is a language other than syntax? On the fly C would still be C because of the syntax. The execution, compilation, and internals don't matter. The language is the syntax.
Java would still be java if you wrote a native code compiler.
PHP is very evil. In large part PHP can be blamed for the neglect of many prior to PHP well maintained perl modules.
Of course perl modules are a nightmare in a binary package management world. Do I use CPAN or do I use the binary package? What is the binary package named? Is there any chance in hell that the module in a language that is all about modules will be available in the windows world? What type of insane hoops will I have to go through to get a unix type development platform built on my windows server in order to compile said module?
"PHP has very few web-related features. It can handle HTTP headers, cookies, sessions, GET and POST, escaping for HTML and URLs... and that's about it."
Yeah.. that's pretty much all there is to server side web development. MySQL has become pretty much standard for web and it has built-ins for that too.
"Are you trying to imply that PHP establishes an entirely new connection to the database for every query? If so, you basically lose all credibility you might otherwise have."
PHP reuses a connection within a script but afaik every time a client requests dbrequest.php from the browser that script loads in its own little world and starts up its own personal connection to the server. A script making three requests uses one connection, but a script requested 12 times uses 12 connections.
I believe he is saying that when 20k people simultaneously request data, having a memory resident C app grab all the concurrent data requests in a single swipe and reusing the same connections eternally for all page requests its much faster.
He said 20k connections, as in web requests, not client computers. And its not a valid excuse in that case. The arp table is cached for fuck sake.
one word, vlan
People buy those oversized SUV's because they have a herd of four or five brats, a load of groceries, and all the toys and gear required for the activities of said brats to haul on a single outing.
A van would also serve this purpose but even a mini-van is bigger than an SUV.
People also buy them because it gives you some of the transport, hauling, and four wheel drive capabilities of a truck but in a package that doesn't scream 'red neck hick' and looks more sleek and consumer friendly. But most buy if for the rugrat factor.
Most admins lack the skills and knowledge to build quality pc's anyway. They are software guys not hardware guys.
But I do wonder if these admins who just buy a dell realize that you can build a pc of any given spec with the cheapest offbrand crap and it will still seriously outperform a dell (or any other name brand) of comparable spec.
NMGrow? Yes, it is.
"Also no sane company trusts in the concept of Fair Use to cover them anymore."
We weren't discussing companies. We were discussing end users reselling hardware that has GPL'd software loaded on it (unless I wasn't replying to what I thought I was replying to).
"A small PC store started to include a CD of FOSS programs like Gimp, FireFox, Thunderbird, 7Zip, Putty, and other good software that everybody in the know downloads. It is a nice introduction to FOSS for the customers. Now it seems to me that the store is now responsible to keep the source code for many of those programs available to the people they gave the disk to."
OR they could just include the source on the CD with the FOSS programs.
This may be a grey area of GPL vs common sense but it doesn't matter. When an end user transfer the software along with the product the right to second sale makes the distribution qualify as fair use so Joe the burger flipper doesn't need to agree to the GPL in the first place.
Now if Joe modified the software, that wouldn't be a second sale anymore. Joe goes from end user to manufacturer.
Actually what you are mentioning doesn't matter because it qualifies as fair use under the right to second sale.
Joe is not a retailer, joe is an end user. The differences between a manufacturer, distributor, retailer, and end user is not merely numbers but well established in law and case history.
The right to second sale supersedes copyright and the requirements of the GPL. Now if Joe modifies that software and creates a derivative that isn't a second sale...
"You're confusing the ends with the means. The ultimate goal is to gain scientific knowledge and/or access to resources."
No, the ultimate goal is to get humans off this deathtrap of a rock. Scientific knowledge is the means and access to resources is just a bonus.
"That's a pretty bizarre comment. By that logic, Linus has been intentionally stifling the advancement of technology from the very start when it intentionally released an inferior clone of Unix to run on IBM."
Linus didn't sell an operating system that didn't exist to be only option available on THE personal computer and then provide the cheapest featureless solution he could provide to fill the hole.
Linus did not subsequently do everything in his power to force his lousy solution to be used and engage in anti-competative practices to lock vendors into his solution.
Linus did not refuse to improve his product in real and meaningful ways or use the embrace and extend philosophy. Linus does not refer to competing technologies as cancer or try to sue them out of existence.
The differences aren't as glaring today as they were in the past but Linux is among the many systems that have been dramatically superior to dos/windows along the way.
"It's quite fair to charge per so many bits, since that takes into account how much of the pie you're eating."
If I want pie and my wife wants pie and we are both willing to pay the same amount for our pie. My wife eats like a bird and takes a bite and I eat my piece and rest of hers. Do you really think I should pay more because she wanted less?
There is no shortage of bandwidth or pie. Its a myth and everywhere the ISP's have been called to question over the myth the numbers haven't held up. For instance in Canada they checked and found that despite the whining AT&T had zero congestion on their networks (boy did they fight against those numbers actually being reviewed).
"You're going to sit there and tell me there's no difference in electricity usage for a Server to feed me 1 gigabyte versus 1000 gigabytes each month?"
First servers have nothing to do with ISP's. ISP's run switches, and routers, servers are hosting providers. Hosting is paid for by the person providing the content, not the person consuming it.
As for switches no there is no difference, you can max out transfer or transfer a trickle and the electrical usage is about the same. There are other costs but they too still have to be there.
The switch (and other networking equipment) needs to be bigger to support faster peering connections (not that these connections are in anywhere near capacity like the telcos imply) so it does cost more but the cost of the network equipment and infrastructure is tiny compared to the net profit of the telcos let alone their revenue.
"All this whining about users, etc. is more due to the fact that they way oversold the capacity they have"
Thats the myth, they have tons of capacity and tons of dark fiber sitting unused. The major telcos don't have any congestion problems or anything close to it. In absolute worst case peak scenerios they even pass 50% capacity.
The problem isn't the price of the bandwidth either. Wholesale bandwidth is actually dirt cheap, end users aren't paying (much) too little, business users are paying (much to the power of 10) too much. Dedicated bandwidth costs a median average of $10-15 wholesale in the US.
The problem is twofold, yes they don't want to provide broadband to rural users (nevermind that they were already paid to do just that). But they also want net neutrality to die. That has nothing to do with QoS and everything to do with wanting to charge google to have people access google from the telcos at the same speed they access bing.
Basically the telcos want major sites to pay protection money so the telcos can protect them from having their sites function with artificial slowness.
"we need 1Mb to everybody that has a phone line now, including people in the "country""
Speak for yourself. That isn't a fast enough line to stream video at reasonable quality. You need at least 6mbps down to watch a movie streamed from Netflix without hiccups.
1mb of dedicated full duplex (1mb up AND 1mb down at the same time) costs a median of $10-14 on a GigE port wholesale. Charging businesses a grand a month for thirty bucks worth of bandwidth is rape. Those artificially inflated prices can only continue as long as ISP's don't let consumers have real dedicated bandwidth.
That's what this is about. People use the outrageous prices businesses and small ISPs pay to say consumers should be grateful for their lousy shared pipes. The reality is that consumers aren't paying too little to expect dedicated bandwidth, its the businesses and ISP's who are being overcharged.
The government is responsible for the drug issue and the porn is harmless.
That's why parents should be excluded from the debate and even more so from the vote.
Its a biological imperative to protect them and you lose the ability to decide with reason rather than emotion. Nothing magically changes when the kids are yours, all that changes is how you feel. If how you feel changes your stance from where it was when you could look at the issue logically as an outside observer... you need to excuse yourself from the decision making process.
It all started with idiots recognizing psycology as a legitimate field of study. All the sudden there is a regimented and very official sounding pool of opinions regarding behavior that can be used to justify coding those opinions in law.
If I starve my children or if I intentionally inflict permanent physical damage to them that's one thing. But what is or is not good for the mental and psychological development of my child should be up to me, not the government and certainly not some shrink. This includes corporal punishment.
"Yeah, that ten year old won't get the lid off, right?"
No kidding. Kids are generally brighter than adults, particularly when figuring something out that doesn't require the kind of prerequisite knowledge adults took years to learn. The first time an adult encounters one of these caps the adult will read the label and start following the instruction and figure it out shortly enough. The kid will figure it out by feel before the adult has found his/her reading glasses.
"OD? :) I'd like to hope my kid was bright enough to stop gurgling the drain cleaner after the first taste, not go on and OD on the stuff before he learns that something's wrong :)"
Maybe you'd have a different view if you didn't know what drain cleaner tastes like?
"Linux makes for an awesome hackable server and it is very flexible. The tools available for networking and development stand on their own but the awesome begins to fade after that."
Not in my experience. There are annoyances with binary drivers but that isn't really the fault of Linux, it is the fault of manufacturers.
The issues you mention are all due to vendor support. There is no technical issue with linux in the latency department for recording. In professional recording dedicated hardware is used to process the audio, the vendors don't support Linux so there are only software answers available. If the vendors did support linux performance would be better than windows, Macro kernels outperform micro kernels by definition.
The fact we have to deal with binary drivers is annoying and a vendor issue again but the headaches aren't really a modern concern. Unless you are one of those who refuses to use something like Ubuntu for your desktop Linux simply because it's headache free. You install, boot Ubuntu says "hey you've got a wifi card, lemme download some magic for ya" you click okay and it uses the wired connection to download and configure everything for you. About the same time it spotted the wifi, it also said "hey you've got a 3d accelerated card, lemme download some magic for ya". And that's it, you have working wifi and 3d accelerated video.
It's an extra two or three clicks but after that 2 min experience you can spend another 30 secs and get the sexiest 3D desktop experience available on any of the desktop OSes so far.
Of course I can point out real weaknesses. Like the inability to plug and play monitors. Users still can't drop their box off with a bench tech and bring it home after repair and expect everything to work.
Yes, we do, people may change tactics or even goals but the people themselves never change.