Why is it a silly attitude to expect that software I bought 6 months ago will work on my computer today?
Yeah I can buy an upgrade, yeah I can screw with older libs, yeah I can hound their CS dept for a recompile(and no it shouldn't take a patch, none of my self compiled free apps did), yeah I can check with every software vendor I buy from before upgrading my OS(now I gotta ask these guys permission to upgrade my PC???)...
But the above are all hassles I don't have to put up with when using free software.
Commercial software is pretty much a trap. You buy software and you have to use it on their terms, not yours, and you have no guarantees it'll be there tomorrow.
I bought Zend Studio for a few hundred bucks, it was a good deal, really nice software. Only it doesn't work for me now, it won't run under a glibc2.3 system. Most likely I'll have to buy an upgrade(the new 2.6 version they're pushing) to see it work under my new system.
Cold Fusion 5.0 at work has DB driver problems. Their solution for a fix? Upgrade to MX(which has its own problems under Linux).
So it's back xemacs for an IDE for me and at work it's PHP in our future. No forced upgrades. 5 years from now emacs will still be there for me, most likely PHP will be as well.
You can't say the same thing for any software you buy from a company. 8 years back I bought Symantec's Cafe for Java and used emacs on the side. Cafe is dead, even Visual Cafe is pretty much dead, but emacs lives on.
I used to buy a lot of software. But the more I buy the more I find out that in the long term, it just isn't worth it.
Yes, it's the same "circumlocution" you find all over the Bill of Rights.
My freedom of speach is another person's inability to restrict what I say. My freedom of religion is another person's inability to hold school prayers. And so on.
By your logic free speach in the US really isn't free because I can't remove your ability to use that Ben Franklink quote you're so found of.
After all, if free speach were really free wouldn't I have the freedom to make it less free?
The GPL is a free license(as in free speach), because it guarantees the continued free access to the software code.
Your use of Franklink's fallacy is a straw man, the GPL restricts no liberties rather it inhibits the ability to restrict the freedom of the code. Get a dictionary, look up liberty, see if it says "restrict freedom".
FSF software is actually quite a bit more business friendly than MS software. With Linux I don't have some corp looking over my shoulder telling me how I can use their software and asking me to upgrade every 2 years for large sums of cash.
I don't believe the FSF has ever sicked the BSA on anyone either.
What's driving the economy isn't the software business, it's businesses using software. When businesses use open source software they can take ownership of it in ways they never could with proprietary software. There are no license restrictions, no pay to be current upgrade schemes, no sales reps dropping by the manager's office selling beta technology.
If Linux wasn't helping to drive the US economy, then Oracle and IBM wouldn't be standing behind it.
I hate MS as much as anybody, but this is yet another example of one company that produces nothing but ideas holding hostage a company that's actually implementing ideas.
I often wonder if we're at the point today where patents hurt innovation more than they help it. Especially in the computer industry, do we really need a patent system?
How did Amazon's 1 click patent help society?
If patents aren't helping society, then they should be nixed. Copyright and patent systems are only useful so long as it benefits society. I believe firmly that copyright law benefits society, but I'm not so sure about patents anymore.
I wish I could mod this up. Humans have been creating fantasies forever. I think it's part of our nature that we want to live in a world full of wonder, excitement and danger. When the world is dull and boring, we make crap up.
Today we have terrorists lurking behind every corner, 3 years ago the world was going to explode because of the Y2K bug. Meanwhile ghosts inhabit the old house down the street and aliens are impregnating our women and mutilating our cattle.
If they regulated US companies then all I'd have to do is block all non-US email. This would also work fine for a considerable number of businesses in the US as well.
Re:Using PHP on a professional site
on
Professional PHP4
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I've been using php for about 5 years professionally and have actually been looking into using Java, mostly because I'm interested in the concepts behind MVC design.
But one of the things php has given me over the last 5 years is total rock solid stability. I mean, I've hacked up some complete crap code over the years but I've never once had a php related crash(and apache only ever crashed when we tried integrating Cold Fusion into it).
In testing Java servlets I have gotten out of memory errors in a database app I've written, but that could very well have been a lack of knowledge on my part(maybe I had the server misconfigged). I'm reading up more on admining/designing for Java now and will do more serious tests in the future.
But don't dismiss php as a toy language. The code you create can be messy, but it's rock solid stable. 5 years of 80k+ lines of code without any crashes is nothing to laugh at.
Does anyone have links to news/features on what's supposed to be in PHP5? I've been hearing rumors that it's going to be much more object oriented and easier to do serious design work in.
No gun in the hands of a citizen, or a million citizens, can "defend freedom".
Huh? Why don't you go back in time and tell that to the people behind the American revolution.
Or do you think this has changed because of modern warfare? Crude single shot guns called Liberators were air dropped into France during it's occupation in WW2, and they helped the resistance there considerably.
Don't think a hunting rifle is effective against a tank? You'd be suprised how well it works when the guys inside the tank get out to take a piss or go to sleep.
From the "reasons" for this: I'll say it flatly--a character record in SWG is FAR larger than you think. There's a business reality to see here. We share fancy databases over multiple servers. Said fancy databases cost $X up to a certain size. Then they cost ten times that if you go over that limit by one byte because you have to buy the "next size up."
What database system charges on a per size basis? The only thing I can think of is them talking about disk space, which should not be the killer they seem to make it out to be.
If each character record took 100k worth of storage, you could put 800k characters on about 80 gigs of storage.
And really, if you're even using 100k per character record you've got some really ineffecient data use going on.
It's not like binary data should be stored with each character. A character record should just be a reference of IDs pointing to a master database.
Get together with that layed off employee and a few other hot shots in your company, then approach your clients behind your boss' back with a proposal to do more work on their systems for the same cost if they'd contract with you guys directly.
You have the skills, not your boss. You're what's up for sale. You don't have to put up with any shit if you don't really want to.
Any mention of what license this OS uses? And if it's non-free, why on earth would I want to tie myself to using it when there are free(as in free to do whatever I want, free to not be controlled by a company's whims) OSes with more software support.
I played muds off and on from 92-96 or so, even coded for a few. I played EQ, DAOC, AO, you name it.
Wanna know how many active MMORPG accounts I have? Zero. Haven't played one for a year or so.
I just got bored with the genre and quit. It didn't ruin my life any more than watching old episodes of Star Trek did in the 80's, I didn't suffer from any withdrawel or it didn't scar my life(well, maybe William Shatner's bad acting did).
The horror, the horror.
How about instead of blaming mud "addiction" you just fess up and admit you were young and irresponsible?
It's okay to have character flaws, not every mistake in your life needs an excuse.
Oh, and LPC was a BITCH to debug though. But I was always fond of the Nightmare lib.
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Why is it a silly attitude to expect that software I bought 6 months ago will work on my computer today?
Yeah I can buy an upgrade, yeah I can screw with older libs, yeah I can hound their CS dept for a recompile(and no it shouldn't take a patch, none of my self compiled free apps did), yeah I can check with every software vendor I buy from before upgrading my OS(now I gotta ask these guys permission to upgrade my PC???)...
But the above are all hassles I don't have to put up with when using free software.
And that was kinda my point.
Commercial software is pretty much a trap. You buy software and you have to use it on their terms, not yours, and you have no guarantees it'll be there tomorrow.
I bought Zend Studio for a few hundred bucks, it was a good deal, really nice software. Only it doesn't work for me now, it won't run under a glibc2.3 system. Most likely I'll have to buy an upgrade(the new 2.6 version they're pushing) to see it work under my new system.
Cold Fusion 5.0 at work has DB driver problems. Their solution for a fix? Upgrade to MX(which has its own problems under Linux).
So it's back xemacs for an IDE for me and at work it's PHP in our future. No forced upgrades. 5 years from now emacs will still be there for me, most likely PHP will be as well.
You can't say the same thing for any software you buy from a company. 8 years back I bought Symantec's Cafe for Java and used emacs on the side. Cafe is dead, even Visual Cafe is pretty much dead, but emacs lives on.
I used to buy a lot of software. But the more I buy the more I find out that in the long term, it just isn't worth it.
If the local PD starts using these things, how long do you think it'll take before someone figures out how to jam them?
Wouldn't that be an interesting use of the 802 card in your PDA.
Just carry a garage door opener with you that you can fine tune the signal on. I'm sure the crook will wait while you find the right frequency.
1> Yes.
2> Dead people can't sue.
Yes, it's the same "circumlocution" you find all over the Bill of Rights.
My freedom of speach is another person's inability to restrict what I say.
My freedom of religion is another person's inability to hold school prayers.
And so on.
By your logic free speach in the US really isn't free because I can't remove your ability to use that Ben Franklink quote you're so found of.
After all, if free speach were really free wouldn't I have the freedom to make it less free?
The GPL is a free license(as in free speach), because it guarantees the continued free access to the software code.
Your use of Franklink's fallacy is a straw man, the GPL restricts no liberties rather it inhibits the ability to restrict the freedom of the code. Get a dictionary, look up liberty, see if it says "restrict freedom".
Except for that bit about not being allowed to change the license terms. That's a bit of a sticky wicket, isn't it?
If you own the copyright on the software you're free to change the license anytime you want.
If you don't own the copyright, then no you can't steal it and release it under your own license. Wow, what a bummer.
FSF software is actually quite a bit more business friendly than MS software. With Linux I don't have some corp looking over my shoulder telling me how I can use their software and asking me to upgrade every 2 years for large sums of cash.
I don't believe the FSF has ever sicked the BSA on anyone either.
What's driving the economy isn't the software business, it's businesses using software. When businesses use open source software they can take ownership of it in ways they never could with proprietary software. There are no license restrictions, no pay to be current upgrade schemes, no sales reps dropping by the manager's office selling beta technology.
If Linux wasn't helping to drive the US economy, then Oracle and IBM wouldn't be standing behind it.
I hate MS as much as anybody, but this is yet another example of one company that produces nothing but ideas holding hostage a company that's actually implementing ideas.
I often wonder if we're at the point today where patents hurt innovation more than they help it. Especially in the computer industry, do we really need a patent system?
How did Amazon's 1 click patent help society?
If patents aren't helping society, then they should be nixed. Copyright and patent systems are only useful so long as it benefits society. I believe firmly that copyright law benefits society, but I'm not so sure about patents anymore.
I wish I could mod this up. Humans have been creating fantasies forever. I think it's part of our nature that we want to live in a world full of wonder, excitement and danger. When the world is dull and boring, we make crap up.
Today we have terrorists lurking behind every corner, 3 years ago the world was going to explode because of the Y2K bug. Meanwhile ghosts inhabit the old house down the street and aliens are impregnating our women and mutilating our cattle.
I guess it keeps life from being boring.
If they regulated US companies then all I'd have to do is block all non-US email. This would also work fine for a considerable number of businesses in the US as well.
I've been using php for about 5 years professionally and have actually been looking into using Java, mostly because I'm interested in the concepts behind MVC design.
But one of the things php has given me over the last 5 years is total rock solid stability. I mean, I've hacked up some complete crap code over the years but I've never once had a php related crash(and apache only ever crashed when we tried integrating Cold Fusion into it).
In testing Java servlets I have gotten out of memory errors in a database app I've written, but that could very well have been a lack of knowledge on my part(maybe I had the server misconfigged). I'm reading up more on admining/designing for Java now and will do more serious tests in the future.
But don't dismiss php as a toy language. The code you create can be messy, but it's rock solid stable. 5 years of 80k+ lines of code without any crashes is nothing to laugh at.
Does anyone have links to news/features on what's supposed to be in PHP5? I've been hearing rumors that it's going to be much more object oriented and easier to do serious design work in.
No gun in the hands of a citizen, or a million citizens, can "defend freedom".
Huh? Why don't you go back in time and tell that to the people behind the American revolution.
Or do you think this has changed because of modern warfare? Crude single shot guns called Liberators were air dropped into France during it's occupation in WW2, and they helped the resistance there considerably.
Don't think a hunting rifle is effective against a tank? You'd be suprised how well it works when the guys inside the tank get out to take a piss or go to sleep.
They're not talking about running the server under Linux, but the game client.
Or were you running the client under NetBSD some way?
From the "reasons" for this:
I'll say it flatly--a character record in SWG is FAR larger than you think. There's a business reality to see here. We share fancy databases over multiple servers. Said fancy databases cost $X up to a certain size. Then they cost ten times that if you go over that limit by one byte because you have to buy the "next size up."
What database system charges on a per size basis? The only thing I can think of is them talking about disk space, which should not be the killer they seem to make it out to be.
If each character record took 100k worth of storage, you could put 800k characters on about 80 gigs of storage.
And really, if you're even using 100k per character record you've got some really ineffecient data use going on.
It's not like binary data should be stored with each character. A character record should just be a reference of IDs pointing to a master database.
Get together with that layed off employee and a few other hot shots in your company, then approach your clients behind your boss' back with a proposal to do more work on their systems for the same cost if they'd contract with you guys directly.
You have the skills, not your boss. You're what's up for sale. You don't have to put up with any shit if you don't really want to.
Any mention of what license this OS uses? And if it's non-free, why on earth would I want to tie myself to using it when there are free(as in free to do whatever I want, free to not be controlled by a company's whims) OSes with more software support.
I played muds off and on from 92-96 or so, even coded for a few. I played EQ, DAOC, AO, you name it.
Wanna know how many active MMORPG accounts I have? Zero. Haven't played one for a year or so.
I just got bored with the genre and quit. It didn't ruin my life any more than watching old episodes of Star Trek did in the 80's, I didn't suffer from any withdrawel or it didn't scar my life(well, maybe William Shatner's bad acting did).
The horror, the horror.
How about instead of blaming mud "addiction" you just fess up and admit you were young and irresponsible?
It's okay to have character flaws, not every mistake in your life needs an excuse.
Oh, and LPC was a BITCH to debug though. But I was always fond of the Nightmare lib.
Wow, so I guess your comment is meaningless because it wasn't given to me in person, therefore it's not "real".
Your viewpoint is very 80's.
The government wants harder to break 802.11b. The entire complaint is that 802.11b security is a joke and it's too easy to crack.
So "Big Brother" in this case is saying, "Make your data harder to snoop".
But my Roomba does. And it only cost me 200 bucks.
As for whether or not Windows is a registered trademark in Russia or not, I have to say I'd be very, very surprised if it is not.
It's not even a trademark in the US.
The MS reps I've heard have stated multiple times .NET is a Windows-only system, only that it would "play nice" with other standards.
.NET on windows and windows only.
.NET vs Java: Java gives you multiple vendors while .NET traps you into one.
.NET run on other platforms, but you can bet the bank they'll do everything in their power to keep it a "windows preferred" platform.
They're quite frank about keeping
In fact that's what Sun is selling in every debate about
MS may let