I used to have istop when I lived in Ottawa. When I first went on, they were having a lot of problems.. I was considering moving some colo's I have there. But their network would go up and down constantly. It was at the point that I was pinging one of their routers and graphing it, just to show how much they went down. After a month or so though, they seemed to get it straightened out, and it was good after that - however, we decided against colo there. The one thing I can say for them is that they posted every outage on their status page, along with the reason.
why don't artists just give away their music, and charge for concerts?
the cost of distributing used to be the promotion of a cd, the making of the cds, yadda. but with p2p those costs go to nothing.
the cost of a CD is more than just distributing: it is also the manufacture of the cd (ok, this again goes to $0 when you just go via P2P), cost of recording, administrative overhead,....
Recording music is not cheap. While yes, it is possible to setup a home recording studio fairly inexpensivly that sounds decent, to get really good quality sound you're paying lots of money (for example, a good studio mic can run thousands of dollars). Building a studio is expensive, and thus renting one is expensive. Not to mention, you have to pay your sound engineer, support staff, etc.
Also, someone's gotta figure out how you're doing with fans (which is much harder to do with P2P than CD sales). Are you popular enough in Toronto that it's worth looking into playing a concert there?
You've also got to pre-pay for a lot of the production - renting a stage if required, sound gear, lights, trucks (if touring), paying security, roadies, hotels, food..
Now, here's the big problem. Where do you get that money? Do you go to the bank and say "hey look, I need $80,000 to put on this concert.."? Perhaps mortgage your house or sell your car.. what happens if you only sell 20% of the tickets you expected, because 5 other bands that are bigger than you are playing the same city the same night (since that's the only way they can make money now)?
While I disagree a lot with the way record companies work, there's not many places that will spend $1-million on you, and if you don't "make it", just let it go..
It's fairly well known in the web development community (espessially among php developers) that PhpNuke is a horribly designed piece of software. I haven't looked at in a while, but it looks to me like the foundation of everything is flawed, and thus there are tons of security holes. It's basically at the point that PhpNuke is the Windows of the CMS world (take that however you want).
I personally hate most CMS, because they're almost always created in the same pattern: design small CMS to post news articles, expand till it's doing the whole site, realize that your structure isn't flexible enough, continue modifying until you have something that is upgradable on your existing structure but that ALMOST gets the flexibility you need. I've been there - I had a very nice CMS at an old job during the.com that had been redesigned once already, and was about to be totally overhauled again to be based entirely on the concept of "blocks" - each page would be constructed of them. Add a header block, then a news listing block. If you wanted to, you could use multiple blocks on one page (ie, a file download section, and a forum). Unfortunately, that was when the company became a dot bomb, and I never got to finish it.
The best CMS I've come across so far is Mambo. It's design is relatively good, and it's interface is fairly nice. It does suffer from the same growing pains syndrome as the rest (ie, it has "components" and "modules" - components make up the bulk of a page, modules can be added along the side, or top/bottom). They're starting to merge them now so there's less of a difference - but again, it really should be designed that way from the ground up.
He is absolutely correct on what happens to "big vision" software. Too many projects that started big have fizzled, and small applications that work tend to grow and morph into ground-shaking applications as they mature.
I think it depends on what angle you look at it from. Looking at this from the commerical development side (worked on by many people in one location, not necessarily proprietary), as opposed to the open source (many people, many locations) distributed development side, I've done far too many "small" web applications that get big.
Originally, they are there to fufill a specific task, and then a month later, when we're still working on it and adding functionality, we find we have to rewrite most of it from scratch because the foundation we designed initially is not flexible enough to support a large application (ie, not putting effort in to make it modular, since it has one task and thus one 'module').
Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.
I agree that you can overdesign, from what I've seen most overdesigning tends to be because of management issues and not coding. A friend of mine is working on a course management project for a university, and it expanded and added a bunch of scheduling functions and mail etc support (partly because it HAD to have that). It turns out there was another group at the university that has been working on a very similar project (except it's specifically the scheduling part, and a couple other things). They found out what he was doing and it caused a big uproar - because they've been working on it for two years or something, and while they have a fair chunk of code, none of it works and it's still a year off from even being complete. My friend's not even been working there for a year yet, and his entire system is already on-line and in production use. The biggest difference is their team has one coder (who is a freelancer outsourced from the US somewhere) and like 4 management people making design decisions, while on his side it's him coding and desiging most of it, with a bit of input from the faculty.
They both basically have the same architecture - his system is easy to expand - but theirs is overdesigned in the sense that too many people have their fingers in it and it takes forever to get anything done.
It's a similar issue with being "scared away" by the size. You can't work on a big project, you HAVE to break it down into smaller sub-tasks and pieces. Then it becomes a lot more manageable, and as long as you concentrate on one thing at a time, you should be ok.
So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed.
I somewhat disagree with this. This logic leads to cutting corners because you can get away with it. For example, maybe you hardcode something because it's easier than writing some stuff to handle reading it from a config file or whatever. That sort of decision can make a LOT more work later on in development when the program gets bigger and you need to have a config file to change things - now you have to write the config handler anyways, plus go through and find all the places something got hardcoded. Much easier to miss something that way, and end up chasing it down later when it gets filed as a bug report.
And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
but i think the magic questions will be : Just how functional is this? Is it going to have a lot of flashy bells and whistles and doodads, or is it going to be efficent?
They're marketing it to DJ's.. but I don't see how it would be all that great. Tactile control is very important, espessially in a dark club and when you're trying to be fast. Think about trying to type on a keyboard that you couldn't feel (like, try touch-typing on your desk). How accurate is that going to be? When you're DJing, tactile feedback helps a lot - you can grab a fader by touch, without having to look, or you can feel when you've hit the end of the slider.
The www is something that can be surfed at home on personal time. Work is for work.
Many other people have pointed out the value of being able to surf sites for work-related information (booking hotels, looking at competition, finding reference materials, finding suppliers/products, finding potential customers, posting job listings,...).
There are other ways to prevent misuse as well, rather than blocking port 80 - block specific sites (ie, hotmail) and/or use content filtering to stop people from looking at pr0n while at work. Keep in mind that these can be detrimental - at a health care related job, for example, there will be legitimate reasons to look up legitimate sites that will be blocked by content filtering.
One thing that has been shown (I know I've read articles about this before, unfortunately I can't find referencse) is denying people "personal time" at works leads to an increase in sick days and other time off. Basically, if you don't let someone spend half an hour doing something personal while "at work", then they end up just taking an entire day off to get what they need done. This is my take on the matter, and I don't block any sites on our connection. (and no, I don't consider pr0n to be a legitmate "personal" use of time, but we're also a small company and no one really has much of a private office to use..)
I discovered Synergy a while back, and I use it at work all the time now. I have a PC sitting on my desk (Linux), and most of the time have my laptop (Windowws) sitting next to it. With synergy, I basically use my laptop as a second monitor, for browsing the web, reading email (since I have it with me all the time), looking at reference manuals, etc. It's very handy to be able to have a web page open explaining a problem, showing example code, etc, while coding in the other monitor. It's an extra boost to be able to control them with one keyboard/mouse, and be able to copy&paste.
I've also been using a dual-monitor setup at home lately (one PC) while working on a video project, though my second monitor is a TV. It's handy to have the output preview on there though, as it keeps my main screen less cluttered, and I can see what the output will actually look like on a TV. (For some reason, with strobe lights in the background for example, if I watch it on a CRT the whole picture flickers, while on a TV it looks normal.. however, if I actually render and watch the output of the project on the CRT, it looks fine.. likely this is an issue with the way it's doing preview or something, but either way having the TV is functional).
You'd have to find something else to rip, but Music Player Daemon is a pretty neat little player that has various front-ends (including a web-based one with an API). I use it at work to play music-on-hold over our telephone system, and it can be controlled from our intranet.
I have many large apps that I've written in PHP that have been around for years, and I can still maintain them. I have also written apps at other companies that I can see are still in use (though I don't know how much code they may have rewritten).
As someone else pointed out, you can write one huge file full of static methods in Java.. that doesn't mean Java is not maintainable, it means the programmer is an idiot.
And writing 'scripting code' vs actual front end code are two very different things.
What's your definition of 'front end code'? I don't understand this comment
Sorry, I don't buy into your PHP propaganda.
Well, like I said, I'm not trying to sell it. I'm just tired of the same old view-point that PHP is useless from developers who have no experience with it. I've never written J2EE apps, and I don't plan to anytime soon because PHP fulfills my needs right now.. but I also don't think it's useless.
Does that really matter?? Those merchant transaction companies have jus been burned - hopefully they'll learn from the experience and do due diligence in making sure that the companies opening accounts are legitimate.
I was involved with a company that just did this. I had setup a website for a university to do online registrations for the frosh week packages. After dealing with all the red tape you deal with at a university, they finally got their merchant stuff setup in mid August, and we put the system live. Within two weeks, about 800 people registered (since frosh week starts in September), which at $75 a pop comes out to $60k. They told me that a couple people had actually dropped by from the payment processor, just to be sure it was legit. It was nice to see that happen.
The company, btw, was Paradata, and as a developer I'd recommend them to people. Nice API.. the only thing that's a bit lacking is their interface to look at your account, but it's still usable.
Yeah. It's not like any large websites use php. I was at a PHP conference about two weeks ago, where Rasmus Lerdorf (the lead developer, who happens to work at Yahoo now) was talking about their infrastructure. He didn't give an exact number, but said it was in the area of 10,000 servers (running FreeBSD), and handles literally billions of hits a day.
It's too bad it doesn't scale: once they get 10 billion hits a day they'll probably have to rewrite and switch to.NET or something.
but good luck convincing a large financial institution to use PHP on their giant web apps.
The only problem here is reputation. Microsoft pushes.NET as a large enterprise system, same thing with Sun and Java. No one really pushes PHP, besides people that use it.
There's no reason PHP can't be used to write "enterprise" applications from a technical standpoint. I think the problem comes from the fact that generally schools teach Java, because it was hip during dot com, and.NET, because Microsoft gives them lots of free software when they do. When all your developers - espessially the lead developers and CIO's making language and platform decisions - are trained on a certain platform, that's what they'll choose.
I'd really like to hear the reason you don't think PHP is scalable, or why you don't think it's suited (a technial reason, not by reputation), but to be honest, I don't think you'll be able to give me one because by the way you talk, my guess is the only thing you know about PHP is what you've heard from other people and/or companies who sell a product that competes.
PHP runs on basically every platform (instant cost savings vs.NET). It can connect to any major DBMS. It runs on a ton of web servers, most importantly Apache. It's lightweight, has probably the lowest learning curve of any language (read: your designers can use it), easily extensible with C, and it's open source (so you never have vendor lock-in, and you're never stuck with a problem that can't be solved).
I use PHP for lots of my stuff, and it saves me money and allows me to do things a lot faster than if I was using another language. I don't care if you agree or not, because it doesn't really affect me in the end. It's a competitive advantage for my company - I don't have the overhead of paying extra thousands of dollars per sever for licences, for one thing.
OR... do you sit begind them at 50mph until there's a place where you can safely overtake without breaking the law? Do you know the road like the back of your hand?
Good point, maybe you don't know the road. You could be sitting behind them forever. Here in Ontario, there's very few places to "legally" overtake someone on two-lane highways without going in the opposing lane. I can only think of two passing lanes (where one side gets an extra lane) and I drive the small highways a lot.
Is there a blind exit up ahead, or sudden downhill turn followed by a sharp corner that conceals oncoming traffic? Is it really that important to make that extra 10 mph?
See, this is why signs and road lines exist. It is legal to pass on a dotted line. The solid line indicates that there is a downhill turn followed by a short corner up ahead, so don't pass.. or theres a hill and you can't see traffic. There's signs showing blind intersections. There's even signs telling you to slow down to a certain speed for the upcoming corner because it's sharp.
Time to give that up. I don't know about anyone else, but none of the sites I run support Netscape 4 anymore. It's not only 10 years old, but it's been replaced by several newer versions of Netscape, all of which function just fine with DHTML.
I decided this a few years ago while working at a company doing ecommerce stuff. Basically our policy was for the site to be usable with NS4, but we never went out of our way to get DHTML stuff to work. One example I can remember is selecting options for a product (ie. size/color) wouldn't dynamically update the prices and images etc in NS4, but would in any other browsers.
Now, I don't think I'd even bother doing that at all. NS4 just has so many problems, and its so out of date.
Innocent people who didn't deserve to be sued would be confident of their ability to countersue the RIAA for legal costs.
Fair enough, but where do they get the money in the interm while they're getting sued? The other side has - for our purposes - infinite resources, and can drag a case on for a very long time. You need money to defend against them. Are you going to go to a bank to get a loan and tell them "Oh, don't worry, once I win this case and countersue, I'll be able to pay it back". Perhaps you could sell your car/house/etc and then just buy them all back after you win a countersuit a few years later?
If the RIAA were really suing innocent people, their lawsuit wouldn't survive summary judgement in any court.
Not necessarily. IANAL, but there needs to be some precidents set in order for this to happen. Off the top of my head (and maybe this is set already, who knows) how about downloading a song which you own on CD, instead of ripping it yourself? Or downloading a song from a CD you own that got scratched or broken? If there is a prior case that's been won on that argument that can be used as a precident, then maybe you could get it thrown out quickly (you'd still have to pay a lawyer to find this case, of course). And there's no guarantee you'll win a countersuit.
If there are no prior cases, then it's a good chance to set one. Of course, you have to win. To win you have to spend money on lawyers. (see above). Of course, if you lose, then you set the wrong precident and make it incredibly difficult for anyone else to win again. Or perhaps you could get another loan, and appeal the decision....
Suppose after they've spun tens of thousands of these things they might realize they're on the wrong track with automating such a lame process?
That would be an interesting protest. If a whole crapload of people were to setup file structures like that on ie, free hosting providers, isp webspace accounts, whatever, it would act as kind of a DDoS attack against their process, with the two pronged effect of getting the ISPs completely irritated at having to deal with hundreds or thousands of C&D's that are all groundless - which would hopefully lead to the ISPs either ignoring them, or lobbying for some kind of law that restricts their behaviour
Re:Have it do something worthwhile
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The PDAs are perfect for jotting down little notes. I have hundreds of them. For me doing that on most cellphone with thumb input is torture.
I used to do this with the voice record feature of my old phone, and it was incredibly handy. Hold a button on the side, say your note, and flip it closed.
Unfortunately, my new phone doesn't have that anymore- had to upgrade because I need tri-mode, and the only other flip model at the time with that feature had an incredibly bad interface (I actually bought it and took it back the next day because I hated it so much. My calender went from being one keypress away to closer to 10 after scrolling through a stupid menu system- among other problems).
Re:Far off, but going to happen
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Other than the calendar and address book, I really don't see a need to have yet another thing in my pocket
I use my cell phone for these functions, and it works great. The cell is small enough and I have it with me all the time. I also use it as a watch*, and really I fell lost without it (as a side effect, I almost never forget it - except that time I was drunk and left it in a cab (got it back tho).. and the other time I was drunk and lost it..somewhere.. in downtown Ottawa. that turned out to be an expensive night..)
then again, I'm the guy who turns his phone off when going to the movie theatre and leaves it in the car when we go camping.... I hate having a cellphone because people get angry when they call it and I don't answer
I carry my cell phone with me pretty much 24/7, and I don't feel like that. If I'm camping, provided I get service, I'll probably take it.. but chances are I won't answer, and just let them leave a message. I have caller ID so that really helps too. In fact, I wouldn't be able to stand having my phone without caller id.
I guess the key is to just not feel compelled to answer. I could care less if someone is pissed off at me for ignoring them - if I didn't have a phone, they couldn't get ahold of me at all, and for that matter, I wouldn't even know that they were trying to. If I'm sleeping, watching a movie, on the can, having a conversation with someone, eating, or otherwise busy, I probably won't answer (and this is where caller ID helps). And if you don't leave me a message, I'll assume it wasn't important anyways.
It's like anything, really: If you let it control you, it will.
* I used to wear a watch all the time, and I'd be completely lost all day long if I forgot it. I got a cell phone and about the same time, got a job programming full-time. When typing all day long, the watch bugged me, so I'd take it off. I'd often forget it when I went to lunch, or went home, etc, and started using my cell (which is clipped on my pocket or belt). Eventually I figured the watch is pointless..
How about sending out an object that transmits a signal? You still have a limited range around the object, but at least it will broadcast farther than earth broadcasts. Sending out a signal also increases the chances that an object will be located.. if we were to start picking up some mysterious signal that was nearby, we'd sure try to locate it. It could run on solar power, and only wake up and start broadcasting when it's actually close enough to a sun (in a solar system) that it gets enough power. I'm not sure what it would broadcast - zipping it around our own planet and having SETI alarms going off would probably be a good test.
The other problem with earth-based transmission is that we don't do it anymore. We'd need large antennas broadcasting "we're here" signals outwards, and considering SETI already has problems with credibility while looking for signals, I'd imagine getting funding to send out signals would be even harder.
If this is successful, wouldn't it (eventually) put most of the ISPs in Philly out of business? Who wants to pay $40/mo for a cable connection when you can buy a $60 access point and get access for free?
Obviously there will still be a market for business, people requiring higher bandwidth, etc., but I would think the majority of people would switch.
My employer had previously deployed 2,000 modified NetBSD thin clients from IBM that ran off of 200+ Linux boxes that provided the OS, print and storage facilities, but let the thin client do the grinding on the apps... only difference here is that the thin client doesn't grind on the data, just renders screen shots. Fact of the mater is, both approaches are highly manageable ways to provide low-cost computing to the masses...
Sorry to be OT, but do you have links to any more information on this? I've always liked the idea of thin clients from an administration perspective, but they're always such a waste of resources. If you have a bunch of desktops that are all, say, 1ghz machines and turn them into thin clients, it's a pretty big waste of power -- not to mention money, since you're now duplicating that power on an expensive server.
It would be nice to have the systems interchangable (one breaks, swap in another) like thin clients, but at the same time, use the processing power of the thin client to allow the server(s) to be less powerful (cheaper), or allow fewer servers to do the same job.
I guess you've never been in the situation where some faceless company decided you owed them money for no reason.
Bell Canada decided our office owed them money. We had a DSL account with them for about two years. One day, all of a sudden, I could no longer connect to port 25. Called them up, and asked. First guy said "No, we haven't made any changes at all. must be your end". Looked around some more, found I was definately being blocked. Called back, and this guy told me that they had noticed one of their connection racks hadn't been blocking port 25, so they "fixed it". Fine, whatever, created a dns alias for the network to send our smtp mail to their smtp server.
This was fine for a month or so, but then it would randomly die.. their SMTP server just stopped working intermittently, for an hour or so. About the third time it happened (and this time it lasted a few hours, beyond the point of being a major annoyance, where it was hindering the business), and I was actually in the office this time, I called them to see what was going on. The tech told me that they were getting hammered by viruses sending spam, and that it would go away eventually. "Eventually" does not work for business.
So I asked them to unblock port 25 for me (since it's virus free), even if to only my own properly configured mail server, so I could send email. He told me they can't. So I asked how I was supposed to be able to send email, to which he replied that their webmail was working. Yeah, that's great, I have webmail too.. but I can't tell everyone in the office to switch to webmail. I also had no interest in going around and reconfiguring everyone's mail client to use a non-standard port (my router at the time didn't have the capability to do that itself).
So I called up another ISP, and asked them when they could have DSL in.. they said 5 days, which just happened to correspond with my billing period with Bell. So I called bell back, and told them to cancel the account.
Here's where it got real fun. They said ok, we can cancel, but you will still owe us $300 or something for terminating the contract early. Contract? I looked at our bills.. initially, we had signed on with a one-year contract, but all of our bills after that just said "monthly recurring charge" with absolutely no mention of a yearly contract. The month where it would have renewed was no different from any of the rest of them.
So we pointed this out, and they said that regardless of what the bills said, we were on a year contract still. So we asked them to fax the contract to us. "Uh.. we don't have it". Well, we didn't have this supposed contract either.. most people at this point would assume with no contract anywhere, that there was no contract. Well, next they told us it was a "verbal contract" to renew, but couldn't tell us who exactly made this contract (only me and the owner would be authorized to do that, and being the IT person, I'm the only one who actually would have done it), nor produce a recording of it or anything. So at this point we said, well, no contract, come get your modem, we're done.
A few months later, we got a notice in the mail from bell saying we owed them $500 or something now, for an outstanding balance plus interest plus late fees etc. Called them up to clairify this, and again went through the same stupid banter, with the same conclusion. That was about a year ago, and we haven't heard anything else from them since. Maybe they'll decide to sue us or something, I don't know. But taking us to court over a "verbal contract" without knowing who exactly made it or anyone at our company who's authorized having any recollection of it seems a bit flakey to me.
Since that happened, I've learned a few other people have been burnt by them as well. The trick is, they'll never take you to a collection agency. They have their own internal collections, and they'll get it through their subsidary companies. Ie, If you owe money (or they think you do) on a Sympatico internet
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I used to have istop when I lived in Ottawa. When I first went on, they were having a lot of problems.. I was considering moving some colo's I have there. But their network would go up and down constantly. It was at the point that I was pinging one of their routers and graphing it, just to show how much they went down. After a month or so though, they seemed to get it straightened out, and it was good after that - however, we decided against colo there. The one thing I can say for them is that they posted every outage on their status page, along with the reason.
just playing devil's advocate here, but:
....
why don't artists just give away their music, and charge for concerts?
the cost of distributing used to be the promotion of a cd, the making of the cds, yadda. but with p2p those costs go to nothing.
the cost of a CD is more than just distributing: it is also the manufacture of the cd (ok, this again goes to $0 when you just go via P2P), cost of recording, administrative overhead,
Recording music is not cheap. While yes, it is possible to setup a home recording studio fairly inexpensivly that sounds decent, to get really good quality sound you're paying lots of money (for example, a good studio mic can run thousands of dollars). Building a studio is expensive, and thus renting one is expensive. Not to mention, you have to pay your sound engineer, support staff, etc.
Also, someone's gotta figure out how you're doing with fans (which is much harder to do with P2P than CD sales). Are you popular enough in Toronto that it's worth looking into playing a concert there?
You've also got to pre-pay for a lot of the production - renting a stage if required, sound gear, lights, trucks (if touring), paying security, roadies, hotels, food..
Now, here's the big problem. Where do you get that money? Do you go to the bank and say "hey look, I need $80,000 to put on this concert.."? Perhaps mortgage your house or sell your car.. what happens if you only sell 20% of the tickets you expected, because 5 other bands that are bigger than you are playing the same city the same night (since that's the only way they can make money now)?
While I disagree a lot with the way record companies work, there's not many places that will spend $1-million on you, and if you don't "make it", just let it go..
I would do ALMOST ANYTHING for a high bandwith connection.
How about satellite?
I pay ~CAD$32 after taxes for 3Mbs/800Kbs (down/up) DSL with static IP and no restrictions.
.. who's your provider?
That's pretty good
I pay $32 at home and I get 3Mb/600Kb (i think?) with dynamic IP (but otherwise no restrictions) via Internet Horizions (who is a reseller for Trytel)
It's fairly well known in the web development community (espessially among php developers) that PhpNuke is a horribly designed piece of software. I haven't looked at in a while, but it looks to me like the foundation of everything is flawed, and thus there are tons of security holes. It's basically at the point that PhpNuke is the Windows of the CMS world (take that however you want).
.com that had been redesigned once already, and was about to be totally overhauled again to be based entirely on the concept of "blocks" - each page would be constructed of them. Add a header block, then a news listing block. If you wanted to, you could use multiple blocks on one page (ie, a file download section, and a forum). Unfortunately, that was when the company became a dot bomb, and I never got to finish it.
I personally hate most CMS, because they're almost always created in the same pattern: design small CMS to post news articles, expand till it's doing the whole site, realize that your structure isn't flexible enough, continue modifying until you have something that is upgradable on your existing structure but that ALMOST gets the flexibility you need. I've been there - I had a very nice CMS at an old job during the
The best CMS I've come across so far is Mambo. It's design is relatively good, and it's interface is fairly nice. It does suffer from the same growing pains syndrome as the rest (ie, it has "components" and "modules" - components make up the bulk of a page, modules can be added along the side, or top/bottom). They're starting to merge them now so there's less of a difference - but again, it really should be designed that way from the ground up.
I think it depends on what angle you look at it from. Looking at this from the commerical development side (worked on by many people in one location, not necessarily proprietary), as opposed to the open source (many people, many locations) distributed development side, I've done far too many "small" web applications that get big.
Originally, they are there to fufill a specific task, and then a month later, when we're still working on it and adding functionality, we find we have to rewrite most of it from scratch because the foundation we designed initially is not flexible enough to support a large application (ie, not putting effort in to make it modular, since it has one task and thus one 'module').
I agree that you can overdesign, from what I've seen most overdesigning tends to be because of management issues and not coding. A friend of mine is working on a course management project for a university, and it expanded and added a bunch of scheduling functions and mail etc support (partly because it HAD to have that). It turns out there was another group at the university that has been working on a very similar project (except it's specifically the scheduling part, and a couple other things). They found out what he was doing and it caused a big uproar - because they've been working on it for two years or something, and while they have a fair chunk of code, none of it works and it's still a year off from even being complete. My friend's not even been working there for a year yet, and his entire system is already on-line and in production use. The biggest difference is their team has one coder (who is a freelancer outsourced from the US somewhere) and like 4 management people making design decisions, while on his side it's him coding and desiging most of it, with a bit of input from the faculty.
They both basically have the same architecture - his system is easy to expand - but theirs is overdesigned in the sense that too many people have their fingers in it and it takes forever to get anything done.
It's a similar issue with being "scared away" by the size. You can't work on a big project, you HAVE to break it down into smaller sub-tasks and pieces. Then it becomes a lot more manageable, and as long as you concentrate on one thing at a time, you should be ok.
I somewhat disagree with this. This logic leads to cutting corners because you can get away with it. For example, maybe you hardcode something because it's easier than writing some stuff to handle reading it from a config file or whatever. That sort of decision can make a LOT more work later on in development when the program gets bigger and you need to have a config file to change things - now you have to write the config handler anyways, plus go through and find all the places something got hardcoded. Much easier to miss something that way, and end up chasing it down later when it gets filed as a bug report.
This is absol
This is surely a nice idea, i personally hate having to use my mouse when mixing music,
.. but I don't see how it would be all that great. Tactile control is very important, espessially in a dark club and when you're trying to be fast. Think about trying to type on a keyboard that you couldn't feel (like, try touch-typing on your desk). How accurate is that going to be? When you're DJing, tactile feedback helps a lot - you can grab a fader by touch, without having to look, or you can feel when you've hit the end of the slider.
It's too bad no one's thought of a way around that...
but i think the magic questions will be : Just how functional is this? Is it going to have a lot of flashy bells and whistles and doodads, or is it going to be efficent?
They're marketing it to DJ's
The www is something that can be surfed at home on personal time. Work is for work.
...).
Many other people have pointed out the value of being able to surf sites for work-related information (booking hotels, looking at competition, finding reference materials, finding suppliers/products, finding potential customers, posting job listings,
There are other ways to prevent misuse as well, rather than blocking port 80 - block specific sites (ie, hotmail) and/or use content filtering to stop people from looking at pr0n while at work. Keep in mind that these can be detrimental - at a health care related job, for example, there will be legitimate reasons to look up legitimate sites that will be blocked by content filtering.
One thing that has been shown (I know I've read articles about this before, unfortunately I can't find referencse) is denying people "personal time" at works leads to an increase in sick days and other time off. Basically, if you don't let someone spend half an hour doing something personal while "at work", then they end up just taking an entire day off to get what they need done. This is my take on the matter, and I don't block any sites on our connection. (and no, I don't consider pr0n to be a legitmate "personal" use of time, but we're also a small company and no one really has much of a private office to use..)
If you have Office, it makes it so much easier for the user because instead of having to learn ALL new programs, they just have to use a different internet browser. ..that is, if for some reason you don't have them using Firefox already. I switched my office a few months ago, everyone either loves it, or doesn't even notice they're using something different.
I didn't do this, but you could easily get away with making it have the blue "e" icon. Really no one would even notice.
I discovered Synergy a while back, and I use it at work all the time now. I have a PC sitting on my desk (Linux), and most of the time have my laptop (Windowws) sitting next to it. With synergy, I basically use my laptop as a second monitor, for browsing the web, reading email (since I have it with me all the time), looking at reference manuals, etc. It's very handy to be able to have a web page open explaining a problem, showing example code, etc, while coding in the other monitor. It's an extra boost to be able to control them with one keyboard/mouse, and be able to copy&paste.
.. however, if I actually render and watch the output of the project on the CRT, it looks fine .. likely this is an issue with the way it's doing preview or something, but either way having the TV is functional).
I've also been using a dual-monitor setup at home lately (one PC) while working on a video project, though my second monitor is a TV. It's handy to have the output preview on there though, as it keeps my main screen less cluttered, and I can see what the output will actually look like on a TV. (For some reason, with strobe lights in the background for example, if I watch it on a CRT the whole picture flickers, while on a TV it looks normal
You'd have to find something else to rip, but Music Player Daemon is a pretty neat little player that has various front-ends (including a web-based one with an API). I use it at work to play music-on-hold over our telephone system, and it can be controlled from our intranet.
One word: Maintainability
.. that doesn't mean Java is not maintainable, it means the programmer is an idiot.
It's all up to the programmer.
I have many large apps that I've written in PHP that have been around for years, and I can still maintain them. I have also written apps at other companies that I can see are still in use (though I don't know how much code they may have rewritten).
As someone else pointed out, you can write one huge file full of static methods in Java
And writing 'scripting code' vs actual front end code are two very different things.
What's your definition of 'front end code'? I don't understand this comment
Sorry, I don't buy into your PHP propaganda.
Well, like I said, I'm not trying to sell it. I'm just tired of the same old view-point that PHP is useless from developers who have no experience with it. I've never written J2EE apps, and I don't plan to anytime soon because PHP fulfills my needs right now.. but I also don't think it's useless.
Does that really matter?? Those merchant transaction companies have jus been burned - hopefully they'll learn from the experience and do due diligence in making sure that the companies opening accounts are legitimate.
I was involved with a company that just did this. I had setup a website for a university to do online registrations for the frosh week packages. After dealing with all the red tape you deal with at a university, they finally got their merchant stuff setup in mid August, and we put the system live. Within two weeks, about 800 people registered (since frosh week starts in September), which at $75 a pop comes out to $60k. They told me that a couple people had actually dropped by from the payment processor, just to be sure it was legit. It was nice to see that happen.
The company, btw, was Paradata, and as a developer I'd recommend them to people. Nice API.. the only thing that's a bit lacking is their interface to look at your account, but it's still usable.
Yeah. It's not like any large websites use php. I was at a PHP conference about two weeks ago, where Rasmus Lerdorf (the lead developer, who happens to work at Yahoo now) was talking about their infrastructure. He didn't give an exact number, but said it was in the area of 10,000 servers (running FreeBSD), and handles literally billions of hits a day.
.NET or something.
.NET as a large enterprise system, same thing with Sun and Java. No one really pushes PHP, besides people that use it.
.NET, because Microsoft gives them lots of free software when they do. When all your developers - espessially the lead developers and CIO's making language and platform decisions - are trained on a certain platform, that's what they'll choose.
.NET). It can connect to any major DBMS. It runs on a ton of web servers, most importantly Apache. It's lightweight, has probably the lowest learning curve of any language (read: your designers can use it), easily extensible with C, and it's open source (so you never have vendor lock-in, and you're never stuck with a problem that can't be solved).
It's too bad it doesn't scale: once they get 10 billion hits a day they'll probably have to rewrite and switch to
but good luck convincing a large financial institution to use PHP on their giant web apps.
The only problem here is reputation. Microsoft pushes
There's no reason PHP can't be used to write "enterprise" applications from a technical standpoint. I think the problem comes from the fact that generally schools teach Java, because it was hip during dot com, and
I'd really like to hear the reason you don't think PHP is scalable, or why you don't think it's suited (a technial reason, not by reputation), but to be honest, I don't think you'll be able to give me one because by the way you talk, my guess is the only thing you know about PHP is what you've heard from other people and/or companies who sell a product that competes.
PHP runs on basically every platform (instant cost savings vs
I use PHP for lots of my stuff, and it saves me money and allows me to do things a lot faster than if I was using another language. I don't care if you agree or not, because it doesn't really affect me in the end. It's a competitive advantage for my company - I don't have the overhead of paying extra thousands of dollars per sever for licences, for one thing.
OR... do you sit begind them at 50mph until there's a place where you can safely overtake without breaking the law? Do you know the road like the back of your hand?
Good point, maybe you don't know the road. You could be sitting behind them forever. Here in Ontario, there's very few places to "legally" overtake someone on two-lane highways without going in the opposing lane. I can only think of two passing lanes (where one side gets an extra lane) and I drive the small highways a lot.
Is there a blind exit up ahead, or sudden downhill turn followed by a sharp corner that conceals oncoming traffic? Is it really that important to make that extra 10 mph?
See, this is why signs and road lines exist. It is legal to pass on a dotted line. The solid line indicates that there is a downhill turn followed by a short corner up ahead, so don't pass.. or theres a hill and you can't see traffic. There's signs showing blind intersections. There's even signs telling you to slow down to a certain speed for the upcoming corner because it's sharp.
Time to give that up. I don't know about anyone else, but none of the sites I run support Netscape 4 anymore. It's not only 10 years old, but it's been replaced by several newer versions of Netscape, all of which function just fine with DHTML.
I decided this a few years ago while working at a company doing ecommerce stuff. Basically our policy was for the site to be usable with NS4, but we never went out of our way to get DHTML stuff to work. One example I can remember is selecting options for a product (ie. size/color) wouldn't dynamically update the prices and images etc in NS4, but would in any other browsers.
Now, I don't think I'd even bother doing that at all. NS4 just has so many problems, and its so out of date.
IBM is a few orders of magnitude beyond that.
350,000 globally, according to a presenter from IBM I saw at a conference last week.
Innocent people who didn't deserve to be sued would be confident of their ability to countersue the RIAA for legal costs.
Fair enough, but where do they get the money in the interm while they're getting sued? The other side has - for our purposes - infinite resources, and can drag a case on for a very long time. You need money to defend against them. Are you going to go to a bank to get a loan and tell them "Oh, don't worry, once I win this case and countersue, I'll be able to pay it back". Perhaps you could sell your car/house/etc and then just buy them all back after you win a countersuit a few years later?
If the RIAA were really suing innocent people, their lawsuit wouldn't survive summary judgement in any court.
Not necessarily. IANAL, but there needs to be some precidents set in order for this to happen. Off the top of my head (and maybe this is set already, who knows) how about downloading a song which you own on CD, instead of ripping it yourself? Or downloading a song from a CD you own that got scratched or broken? If there is a prior case that's been won on that argument that can be used as a precident, then maybe you could get it thrown out quickly (you'd still have to pay a lawyer to find this case, of course). And there's no guarantee you'll win a countersuit.
If there are no prior cases, then it's a good chance to set one. Of course, you have to win. To win you have to spend money on lawyers. (see above). Of course, if you lose, then you set the wrong precident and make it incredibly difficult for anyone else to win again. Or perhaps you could get another loan, and appeal the decision....
Suppose after they've spun tens of thousands of these things they might realize they're on the wrong track with automating such a lame process?
That would be an interesting protest. If a whole crapload of people were to setup file structures like that on ie, free hosting providers, isp webspace accounts, whatever, it would act as kind of a DDoS attack against their process, with the two pronged effect of getting the ISPs completely irritated at having to deal with hundreds or thousands of C&D's that are all groundless - which would hopefully lead to the ISPs either ignoring them, or lobbying for some kind of law that restricts their behaviour
The PDAs are perfect for jotting down little notes. I have hundreds of them. For me doing that on most cellphone with thumb input is torture.
I used to do this with the voice record feature of my old phone, and it was incredibly handy. Hold a button on the side, say your note, and flip it closed.
Unfortunately, my new phone doesn't have that anymore- had to upgrade because I need tri-mode, and the only other flip model at the time with that feature had an incredibly bad interface (I actually bought it and took it back the next day because I hated it so much. My calender went from being one keypress away to closer to 10 after scrolling through a stupid menu system- among other problems).
Other than the calendar and address book, I really don't see a need to have yet another thing in my pocket
..somewhere.. in downtown Ottawa. that turned out to be an expensive night..)
.... I hate having a cellphone because people get angry when they call it and I don't answer
I use my cell phone for these functions, and it works great. The cell is small enough and I have it with me all the time. I also use it as a watch*, and really I fell lost without it (as a side effect, I almost never forget it - except that time I was drunk and left it in a cab (got it back tho).. and the other time I was drunk and lost it
then again, I'm the guy who turns his phone off when going to the movie theatre and leaves it in the car when we go camping
I carry my cell phone with me pretty much 24/7, and I don't feel like that. If I'm camping, provided I get service, I'll probably take it.. but chances are I won't answer, and just let them leave a message. I have caller ID so that really helps too. In fact, I wouldn't be able to stand having my phone without caller id.
I guess the key is to just not feel compelled to answer. I could care less if someone is pissed off at me for ignoring them - if I didn't have a phone, they couldn't get ahold of me at all, and for that matter, I wouldn't even know that they were trying to. If I'm sleeping, watching a movie, on the can, having a conversation with someone, eating, or otherwise busy, I probably won't answer (and this is where caller ID helps). And if you don't leave me a message, I'll assume it wasn't important anyways.
It's like anything, really: If you let it control you, it will.
* I used to wear a watch all the time, and I'd be completely lost all day long if I forgot it. I got a cell phone and about the same time, got a job programming full-time. When typing all day long, the watch bugged me, so I'd take it off. I'd often forget it when I went to lunch, or went home, etc, and started using my cell (which is clipped on my pocket or belt). Eventually I figured the watch is pointless..
How about sending out an object that transmits a signal? You still have a limited range around the object, but at least it will broadcast farther than earth broadcasts. Sending out a signal also increases the chances that an object will be located .. if we were to start picking up some mysterious signal that was nearby, we'd sure try to locate it. It could run on solar power, and only wake up and start broadcasting when it's actually close enough to a sun (in a solar system) that it gets enough power. I'm not sure what it would broadcast - zipping it around our own planet and having SETI alarms going off would probably be a good test.
The other problem with earth-based transmission is that we don't do it anymore. We'd need large antennas broadcasting "we're here" signals outwards, and considering SETI already has problems with credibility while looking for signals, I'd imagine getting funding to send out signals would be even harder.
If this is successful, wouldn't it (eventually) put most of the ISPs in Philly out of business? Who wants to pay $40/mo for a cable connection when you can buy a $60 access point and get access for free?
Obviously there will still be a market for business, people requiring higher bandwidth, etc., but I would think the majority of people would switch.
My employer had previously deployed 2,000 modified NetBSD thin clients from IBM that ran off of 200+ Linux boxes that provided the OS, print and storage facilities, but let the thin client do the grinding on the apps... only difference here is that the thin client doesn't grind on the data, just renders screen shots. Fact of the mater is, both approaches are highly manageable ways to provide low-cost computing to the masses...
Sorry to be OT, but do you have links to any more information on this? I've always liked the idea of thin clients from an administration perspective, but they're always such a waste of resources. If you have a bunch of desktops that are all, say, 1ghz machines and turn them into thin clients, it's a pretty big waste of power -- not to mention money, since you're now duplicating that power on an expensive server.
It would be nice to have the systems interchangable (one breaks, swap in another) like thin clients, but at the same time, use the processing power of the thin client to allow the server(s) to be less powerful (cheaper), or allow fewer servers to do the same job.
I guess you've never been in the situation where some faceless company decided you owed them money for no reason.
.. but I can't tell everyone in the office to switch to webmail. I also had no interest in going around and reconfiguring everyone's mail client to use a non-standard port (my router at the time didn't have the capability to do that itself).
Bell Canada decided our office owed them money. We had a DSL account with them for about two years. One day, all of a sudden, I could no longer connect to port 25. Called them up, and asked. First guy said "No, we haven't made any changes at all. must be your end". Looked around some more, found I was definately being blocked. Called back, and this guy told me that they had noticed one of their connection racks hadn't been blocking port 25, so they "fixed it". Fine, whatever, created a dns alias for the network to send our smtp mail to their smtp server.
This was fine for a month or so, but then it would randomly die.. their SMTP server just stopped working intermittently, for an hour or so. About the third time it happened (and this time it lasted a few hours, beyond the point of being a major annoyance, where it was hindering the business), and I was actually in the office this time, I called them to see what was going on. The tech told me that they were getting hammered by viruses sending spam, and that it would go away eventually. "Eventually" does not work for business.
So I asked them to unblock port 25 for me (since it's virus free), even if to only my own properly configured mail server, so I could send email. He told me they can't. So I asked how I was supposed to be able to send email, to which he replied that their webmail was working. Yeah, that's great, I have webmail too
So I called up another ISP, and asked them when they could have DSL in.. they said 5 days, which just happened to correspond with my billing period with Bell. So I called bell back, and told them to cancel the account.
Here's where it got real fun. They said ok, we can cancel, but you will still owe us $300 or something for terminating the contract early. Contract? I looked at our bills.. initially, we had signed on with a one-year contract, but all of our bills after that just said "monthly recurring charge" with absolutely no mention of a yearly contract. The month where it would have renewed was no different from any of the rest of them.
So we pointed this out, and they said that regardless of what the bills said, we were on a year contract still. So we asked them to fax the contract to us. "Uh.. we don't have it". Well, we didn't have this supposed contract either.. most people at this point would assume with no contract anywhere, that there was no contract. Well, next they told us it was a "verbal contract" to renew, but couldn't tell us who exactly made this contract (only me and the owner would be authorized to do that, and being the IT person, I'm the only one who actually would have done it), nor produce a recording of it or anything. So at this point we said, well, no contract, come get your modem, we're done.
A few months later, we got a notice in the mail from bell saying we owed them $500 or something now, for an outstanding balance plus interest plus late fees etc. Called them up to clairify this, and again went through the same stupid banter, with the same conclusion. That was about a year ago, and we haven't heard anything else from them since. Maybe they'll decide to sue us or something, I don't know. But taking us to court over a "verbal contract" without knowing who exactly made it or anyone at our company who's authorized having any recollection of it seems a bit flakey to me.
Since that happened, I've learned a few other people have been burnt by them as well. The trick is, they'll never take you to a collection agency. They have their own internal collections, and they'll get it through their subsidary companies. Ie, If you owe money (or they think you do) on a Sympatico internet