This all means that the companies are still losing something from these rips, regardless of the somewhat hollow "no substitute" argument.
Not that I disagree, but that's not a totally valid argument. That makes the assumption that the people ripping it would have otherwise gone to the theater in the first place, which may not be totally true.
Now, just because they aren't going to watch it in the theater doesn't mean they should be allowed to watch it for free.. but it also doesn't mean the movie is losing money they otherwise wouldn't have had anyways.
Actually, I think that anyone that uses windows as a general-purpose PC (ie, many different purposes, always installing apps and changing hardware) over a long period of time will eventually need to do a fresh install to get rid of everything. Between spyware, old drivers, utility apps (QuickFinder, Screen Resolution Changer, etc) and flakey uninstall programs, it just gets to the point where it is physically impossible to maintain a nice working system.
The windows registry is one cause of this.. it's a huge unmanagable beast, with many ways to have things load and hook in to various operations.
On the other hand, using it as a business system or for a specialized task where you aren't constantly changing configurations, then you probably have more chance of a long-term install working properly. But I wold imagine most/.ers would fit in the former, here. I sure do.
And this, ladies and germs, is precisely why computers crash. One system depends on another, and each layer is presumed to be solid.
But that's an implementation problem, not necessarily a design problem. Obviously even a perfect implementation of a bad design is going to fail.
Like you say, the solution is a solid design that doesn't leave room for failure. I think that often 'proper' design is put behind efficient code, and likely this is a source of problems. (For example, it's faster to directly access array values than it is to access them through a couple layers of abstraction that do error-checking for all (improbable) cases).
Likely more OO type design techniques need to come into place in overall system design - build small, abstracted pieces, and thoroughly test them before adding on the higher levels. Of course, this is MUCH easier said than done:)
Microsoft doesn't have the time to spend going through every possible software scenario and interaction, or every possible hardware configuration.
But this shouldn't be an issue. If your HAL is done properly, there is no possibility of crashes with different software/hardware combinations, because the hardware doesn't matter. If libraries etc are managed properly, and memory space is isolated properly, then there should be no software-software issues.
Hardware is a harder one to control, although with modern PCI and USB components, conflicts are becoming very rare. I don't remember the last time I had to deal with IRQ conflicts. (Although I do have an MSI motherboard that can't get past the memory test if a USB smartcard reader is plugged in...)
I wonder why people keep saying that in this Open Source age. OS has proven that developer time is not expensive. As more and more source code will be open, this argument will quickly become moot.
Hmm. BigAccountingCompany Inc needs some software that allows them to handle one of their specific business processes. So, they go out to the open source community and say "hey, would someone please make this program for us?" and proceed to publish the details of their business process.
In a 'perfect' OS world, a bunch of developers that have some spare time would gladly take up this offer and help BigAccountingCompany Inc out. And none of their competitors would look at the business process details because that would just be cheating.
I don't think I have to tell you what kind of world we actually live in..
So what really happens? BigAccountingCompany Inc hires a consulting company to in, and at at very high hourly rate, they sign an NDA saying they'll keep the details of the process and any programs created confidential, and write the software.
This development time IS NOT cheap, and can not be sourced out to the OSS community.
Of course, maybe we do live in a perfect world. When was the last time you volunteered your time towards helping out a company with a program that will be totally irrevelant to you?
My experience has been that even if a paper is submitted to a teacher or professor (I played this game five years ago in high school), the teacher immediately prints it and pulls out a red pen rather than grading it electronically.
I think this has to do with the fact that paper is easier to look at. If you have to read 100 papers, sitting at the computer reading is a lot harder on your eyes than looking at paper. Not to mention, you can sit back in a chair and read papers, while typically you have to sit at a desk to use the computer (or at least with a laptop sitting in your lap - which gives off heat, feels heavy after a while, etc).
Until there's a better way to read data electronically (and theres some promisingideas), hitting that shiny print button is still easier.
What's to stop someone sending out an email that has a program using a fake border that says "Spot" or "Fido"? Send it to 10000000 people, chances are one of them has a dog with that name and will get tricked into thinking the window is secure.
A greater concern is an app that takes a screen capture of your desktop or the contents of certain windows, and sends it off to another machine.
Yes! Don't fix the real problem -- the ability for an app that can take a screen capture of your desktop and send it off to another machine to run on your machine -- just make it so they'll have to release a second version to get around this "security measure". That ought to keep the data secure. Hackers don't have time to make second versions.
"You have a CS degree, don't you?"
Yes I do, that os why I know how to use it and have developed coding practices that all but eliminate those issues.
The reason I asked that, besides being a bit of a joke (perhaps only to me..), is that I've had similar discussions in the past about this, and anyone in CS that I talked to thought I was totally out to lunch. It's interesting to see that the view has changed quite a bit now.. only a couple people replied totally opposing my opinion. (Not that that's saying anything, but it does give me the impression, along with the articles that have been written recently, that views have changed over the past year or so).
now I am not saying either PERL or C is the ultimat language, or that other don't have merit. I am saying that most of the problems those languages have a reputation for is a result of poor practices.
My argument though is that the problems with C are fundamental. Pointers, memory allocation, string handling, even types, that needs to get abstracted away. If you need to return a string from a function, you shouldn't have to think "hm, where in memory will this get stored.. should the function allocate memory, or the caller?" That has absolutely nothing to do with application logic. Sure. From a typical CS point of view, it's important because it has to have a place in memory, and that's the way CS students are taught to think. But really, thats not application logic, thats low-level logic.
If you code in C, you have to deal with it. If you somehow manage to abstract it away in C, then.. you might as well be using another language anyways.:p
Couldn't life be based upon a different liquid than water?
beer
A different solid than carbon?
pizza
Scientists discover new life form
Based on a previously-unknown element, tentatively termed pizzate, the only other substance the collegen studentious needs to survive is based on a fermented grain.
The collegen studentious primarily lives in small square rooms, but very ocasionally can be found in large rooms when chalkboards are present. Mostly nocturnal, at night they usually spend their time trying to breed, gathering socially with others wherever their fermented nourishment is dispensed.
This is probably going to sound a bit repeatative, but I was reading your comment and I thought "here is someone looking for Python".
I've had people tell me about python before. I think at the time though, I was looking at web-based stuff, and I decided to stick with PHP. But now that you, and at least two other people have said Python to me again, maybe it's time to take a second look at it.
Any good reference-type books anyone can recommend?
But types are not 'nonsense that has nothing to do with how the program works'.
I was expecting a reply jumping all over that comment, although you didn't quite do it in the way I thought.
I can't speak for all untyped languages, but the ones i've used, it's more "loosely typed". As in, you can use them without caring about types, but there are operators to compare strictly (as in "1" == 1 is true, but "1" === 1 is false (string vs integer). You can also cast in the rare times you actually need to, or check the actual internal type.
" It still boggles my mind that C is used to do any high-level programming"
Why?
Do I really have to answer that? How about the amount of time and energy you spending thinking about types, where to allocate memory, etc. You have a CS degree, don't you?
that has nothing to mdo witrh PERL, and everything to do with sloppy coding practices.
Yeah, that was my point later on that you managed not to quote. But you have to admit that a lot of perl programs use a lot of inline regex. And you also have to admit that regex is probably one of the most unreadable syntaxes still in use today (albeit, incredibly powerful).
I get it, you are what writers call 'a hack'.
Meh, perhaps. But I can show you pages of planning, diagrams of datastructures, etc, for any even midly-large program I've written. I just prefer to spend my actual coding time thinking about the program, not how to handle some random file exception. I dunno. I guess i'm weird that way.
I think both the parent to this and the original author go too far to the windows side and linux side, respectively.
Documentation:
Windows: None
There is more documentation for windows than i can shake a stick at. To this day, i haven't met one issue that i didn't resolve via MSDN, KB or Google/Newsgroups.
The same is true for RedHat. There are also hundreds of books written for both. I don't think documentation is an issue you can compare. You espessially can't say windows has "none".
Support:
Windows: Support costs you hell a lot of money
RedHat: If you can't afford to pay RedHat, it's Linux for God's sake. There're thousands of people on the net willing to help you.
Considering you rarely need any support with Windows, and setting up the simplest things on Linux is a torture. Do we also want to spend the time figuing out something that the program creator should have?
Hardly need support for windows? I don't think so. Since the article is talking about it from a server point of view, so will we. Windows servers are a pain, with many flaws and much to learn to make them even work somewhat well. Sure, they HAVE one-click wizards and such, but when do those ever work flawlessly?
As a linux user, I find setting up the simplest things on linux fairly simple. In fact, setting up some very complex things can be fairly simple. When I first started with linux, some things were very difficult. I've paid $0 for support for linux, and know I'm decently knowledgable.
I've bought books for windows, and setup a few networks, and I still can't get everything working the way I want to. I still have mysterious problems on the network, like someone's account will suddenly not be able to run wordperfect on one particular machine without crashing (but it works fine on any other machine, or with any other accounts), and I can find no explaination. And the people that have been using MS products for years have no explanation.
Your last question here is particuarly interesting. There's a trend in the linux - and OSS, in fact - world to create highly configurable software. This means there's lots of options. Which sometimes means that there's a lot to figure out to get it to work the way you want. The difference here is that you - the user - decides how to make the program work the way you want, instead of the program telling you how to work because that's the only thing it can do.
Patches:
Windows: Waiting for patches if Microsoft has the time and mood to fix it. Service packs come out once in a blue moon.
RedHat: It's Linux. Thousands of people have access to the source code. Bug fixes come out rapidly.
This is just pure FUD bullshit. MS is very responsive to bugs, especially nowadays. Fixes are released sometimes hours after bugs are found. Subscribe to the security newsletter [microsoft.com] and find out for yourself.
Windows also reports less annual bugs than Linux, this [zdnet.com.au] is an old article, but the pattern continues to this day. A little search on SecurityFocus will show you.
Microsoft DOES in fact release a lot of patches. If you subscribe to HotFix or whatever they call it, you happen to get more of them and a bit faster, but thats a moot point. The big issue is that linux patches will say exactly what they fix, and possibly even more importantly, include source code. Microsoft patches typically are "Security Update - fixes flaw in program XXX that could allow an attacker to take control of your computer". I'd swear every patch says the same thing.:)
Anyways, a lot of admins are reluctant or slow to apply MS patches. And with good reason, it's a well known fact that often patches will break other things, or cause other unpredicable behaviour. I don't know where you work, but applying a fix to prevent someone from doing some strange non-likely hack to your SQL server that also
I agree with the article's assesment of programming, too. But for a language, I avoid PHP largely for the same reasons as Perl (and because is is largely for web stuff, and I've grown to hate web-stuff).
My biggest problem with PHP (and perl, for that matter) is that it's very easy to write sloppy code. Being untyped, it's easy to do very messy things and make it work. Of course, this leads to very unreadable, unscalable code. I don't have this problem with my own code because I follow a pretty rigid and consistent structure, but I have run into it many times before.
The way I code, it could almost be a typed language, the only difference is when you're coding and need a variable, you don't have to bother defining one. It's also nice to be able to concat an integer value into a string without thinking. Of course, these are also things that can make code messy - if you do them messily.
If you haven't given Objective-C or Cocoa a try, you should.
People have told me before how Objective-C was nice. But looking again now, it looks like it's only Mac OS-X, which is probably why I never looked into it before. I don't want to get locked into coding for a specific platform.
Oh, I agree. I know and understand the reasons. I just find that when I'm coding in Java (although admittedly, it's been a while), I spend more time writing exception-related code (handlers or triggers) than I do writing logic.
So hackers start original, and get good, and scientists start good, and get original.
What a great quote. This is so very true.
Dynamic typing is a win here because you don't have to commit to specific data representations up front. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract.
From what I've seen, very few people - espessially those with degress in computer science - share my views on programming. This article takes a different approach to it, but it's the same view I have, when it gets down to it. I usually say that when programming, you shouldn't be bothering with types, memory locations, pointers, and other nonsense that has nothing to do with how the program works. Or in other words, the formal 'scientific' aspects of programming.
Most people will disagree with me here, and I've been involved in many arguments over it. My programing language of choice right now? PHP. Why? Because it sucks less than the other choices. It still boggles my mind that C is used to do any high-level programming (ie, anything besides api's to system calls, and writing drivers and kernels). "But it's so much faster" I hear all the B.Sc's saying. And they're right, it does run faster. It also takes ten times as long to code. And ten times as long to find all the strange bugs and buffer overflows that eventually show up as exploits.
Paul Graham hints at it in his article, but there is no good language right now for writing applications in. PHP in itself is a nice language to write, although it's an interpreted language, not compilied. Perl is a bit too messy for my liking (Paul also mentions this when he says he knows people who wrote perl programs and came back and couldn't understand how they worked), although it is quite powerful. Java is nice in theory, but implemented a bit slowly, and it's a bit too scientific, really -- you spend so much time handling exceptions and making sure all your code is very formal.
So what's the answer? I don't know. But it doesn't exist yet, as far as I know. Until then I'll continue running my slow PHP programs on modern "slow" computers. That run at a mere 1.5 GHz.
I'm not sure I'd block outbound SMTP... but it depends upon which set of hassles you like the most. There seems to be a slow (or, rather, glacial...) drift on the net toward authenticated SMTP for laptop users who move around a lot and who don't want to have to keep changing their outbound SMTP settings.
This is a hard problem to get around. Traffic shaping on port 25 (with it open) might be the best option - if someone starts spamming, then you can find out, and take steps to block them, while at the same time knowing to specifically watch other actions of that tenant.
But a nice option for laptop users, and even for [lazy] desktop users that don't like changing settings whenever they move, is to create a top-level DNS entry (or one in your domain suffix, if you provide one) called "mail" and/or "smtp", so that users can enter just "mail" as their outgoing smtp server name, and it will automagically resolve to your (the ISP's) mail server.
I've had a couple ISPs that do this, and it's great. But then you switch to one that doesn't, and have to go fiddle with account settings. It would be nice if it was a more broadly-implemented setting.
Unless they shrunk the Athlon core, I don't see a lot fo room for overclocking. The 3000+ isn't an overclocking dream, so simply moving to a faster bus ain't gonna make the 3200+ any better.
Ok. So who cares? Why do you need to overclock it? We've already gone from 1ghz to 3ghz in the last year, is this not fast enough?
I suppose if theres some urge that makes people feel they absolutely have to overclock, then they can just go buy one of the older models, for a bit less money. Then spend probably as much money beefing up their cooling. Not to mention the time in getting it to work. Now they have a processor that runs as fast as this one, that cost just as much money, but is a whole lot noisier and has no warrenty.
And yet - how powerful for the public if they could go to a web site and see the water quality at the nearby beach for the past few days.
I'm not sure that this technology is going to really do anything for this application. "The public" still likes to see fancy html pages with graphics and such. It's more likely that they'd go to their city website and navigate to find the beach conditions. I don't see many people learning about SensorML, finding a place to search for sensors, and then looking at the raw data for their beach (assuming they find it.. and can interpret the results).
Actually, thats really another thing too. There is no sensor that says "overcast", this is a condition determined by looking at a number of sensors.
My cable provider (Cogeco) already offers VOD through their digital cable service. I've only looked at it a couple times, but they do offer around 20 movies. I've never actually bought any, but apparently you get the rights to watch it for 24 hours.
The problem with it is the price. They want to charge $6/movie. I can go to any video store and rent one for $5 ($CDN btw). Sure, there's the convience factor, that I can watch it without having to even get off the couch, but I don't think that's worth any more money. Espessially since it loses the whole going-to-the-video-store feel, browsing through shelves of movies, and being able to look at the boxes etc. Sure, theres the overhead of the equipment, but they don't have any additional overhead costs for doing VOD - they already own the building, they don't need a huge staff, etc - ongoing costs that a video store has to cover.
It's also unproven. If I go to the video store, and rent a VHS or DVD, I know it will work (and if it doesn't, I can rent another for free). I have no idea how well VOD will (or won't) work. If they want it to take off, they need to make their pricing on-par (or cheaper) than video stores, and probably even give people a couple free viewings, to get them comfortable with the technology. Until then, I'd rather spend less money on proven technology.
I'm not sure if it's still this way or not, but back in the day, when OS/2 was poised to take the desktop market, one of the things Microsoft did was to require their vendors to purchase a windows licence for every computer they sold, regardless of whether or not it had windows installed. So now vendors had a choice - either pay the licence, and only use windows (paying for two licences is obviously more expensive, and would cost them business, as they obviously can't compete with someone selling only one licence), or don't sell windows at all. Windows was already starting to take a foothold, so NOT selling computers with windows was cuting out a large portion of the market.
So what happened? They only sold the Windows OS, on ALL of their computers, no matter if you wanted it or not, because basically, they had to pay for it either way.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that I disagree, but that's not a totally valid argument. That makes the assumption that the people ripping it would have otherwise gone to the theater in the first place, which may not be totally true.
Now, just because they aren't going to watch it in the theater doesn't mean they should be allowed to watch it for free.. but it also doesn't mean the movie is losing money they otherwise wouldn't have had anyways.
.
The windows registry is one cause of this.. it's a huge unmanagable beast, with many ways to have things load and hook in to various operations.
On the other hand, using it as a business system or for a specialized task where you aren't constantly changing configurations, then you probably have more chance of a long-term install working properly. But I wold imagine most /.ers would fit in the former, here. I sure do.
But that's an implementation problem, not necessarily a design problem. Obviously even a perfect implementation of a bad design is going to fail.
Like you say, the solution is a solid design that doesn't leave room for failure. I think that often 'proper' design is put behind efficient code, and likely this is a source of problems. (For example, it's faster to directly access array values than it is to access them through a couple layers of abstraction that do error-checking for all (improbable) cases).
Likely more OO type design techniques need to come into place in overall system design - build small, abstracted pieces, and thoroughly test them before adding on the higher levels. Of course, this is MUCH easier said than done :)
strlen[strlen(str)]=0;
is enough to crash a computer.
In other words, another good example of why C is not suited to modern interactive application programming.
But this shouldn't be an issue. If your HAL is done properly, there is no possibility of crashes with different software/hardware combinations, because the hardware doesn't matter. If libraries etc are managed properly, and memory space is isolated properly, then there should be no software-software issues.
Hardware is a harder one to control, although with modern PCI and USB components, conflicts are becoming very rare. I don't remember the last time I had to deal with IRQ conflicts. (Although I do have an MSI motherboard that can't get past the memory test if a USB smartcard reader is plugged in...)
Hmm. BigAccountingCompany Inc needs some software that allows them to handle one of their specific business processes. So, they go out to the open source community and say "hey, would someone please make this program for us?" and proceed to publish the details of their business process.
In a 'perfect' OS world, a bunch of developers that have some spare time would gladly take up this offer and help BigAccountingCompany Inc out. And none of their competitors would look at the business process details because that would just be cheating.
I don't think I have to tell you what kind of world we actually live in..
So what really happens? BigAccountingCompany Inc hires a consulting company to in, and at at very high hourly rate, they sign an NDA saying they'll keep the details of the process and any programs created confidential, and write the software.
This development time IS NOT cheap, and can not be sourced out to the OSS community.
Of course, maybe we do live in a perfect world. When was the last time you volunteered your time towards helping out a company with a program that will be totally irrevelant to you?
remind me never to complain about /. ed's posting dupes again..
I think this has to do with the fact that paper is easier to look at. If you have to read 100 papers, sitting at the computer reading is a lot harder on your eyes than looking at paper. Not to mention, you can sit back in a chair and read papers, while typically you have to sit at a desk to use the computer (or at least with a laptop sitting in your lap - which gives off heat, feels heavy after a while, etc).
Until there's a better way to read data electronically (and theres some promising ideas), hitting that shiny print button is still easier.
What's to stop someone sending out an email that has a program using a fake border that says "Spot" or "Fido"? Send it to 10000000 people, chances are one of them has a dog with that name and will get tricked into thinking the window is secure.
In unrelated news, did anyone notice that Microsoft now powers all the computers at the Kennel Club of America?
A greater concern is an app that takes a screen capture of your desktop or the contents of certain windows, and sends it off to another machine.
Yes! Don't fix the real problem -- the ability for an app that can take a screen capture of your desktop and send it off to another machine to run on your machine -- just make it so they'll have to release a second version to get around this "security measure". That ought to keep the data secure. Hackers don't have time to make second versions.
Yes I do, that os why I know how to use it and have developed coding practices that all but eliminate those issues.
The reason I asked that, besides being a bit of a joke (perhaps only to me..), is that I've had similar discussions in the past about this, and anyone in CS that I talked to thought I was totally out to lunch. It's interesting to see that the view has changed quite a bit now .. only a couple people replied totally opposing my opinion. (Not that that's saying anything, but it does give me the impression, along with the articles that have been written recently, that views have changed over the past year or so).
now I am not saying either PERL or C is the ultimat language, or that other don't have merit. I am saying that most of the problems those languages have a reputation for is a result of poor practices.
My argument though is that the problems with C are fundamental. Pointers, memory allocation, string handling, even types, that needs to get abstracted away. If you need to return a string from a function, you shouldn't have to think "hm, where in memory will this get stored.. should the function allocate memory, or the caller?" That has absolutely nothing to do with application logic. Sure. From a typical CS point of view, it's important because it has to have a place in memory, and that's the way CS students are taught to think. But really, thats not application logic, thats low-level logic.
If you code in C, you have to deal with it. If you somehow manage to abstract it away in C, then .. you might as well be using another language anyways. :p
Scientists discover new life form
Based on a previously-unknown element, tentatively termed pizzate, the only other substance the collegen studentious needs to survive is based on a fermented grain.
The collegen studentious primarily lives in small square rooms, but very ocasionally can be found in large rooms when chalkboards are present. Mostly nocturnal, at night they usually spend their time trying to breed, gathering socially with others wherever their fermented nourishment is dispensed.
This is probably going to sound a bit repeatative, but I was reading your comment and I thought "here is someone looking for Python".
I've had people tell me about python before. I think at the time though, I was looking at web-based stuff, and I decided to stick with PHP. But now that you, and at least two other people have said Python to me again, maybe it's time to take a second look at it.
Any good reference-type books anyone can recommend?
I was expecting a reply jumping all over that comment, although you didn't quite do it in the way I thought.
I can't speak for all untyped languages, but the ones i've used, it's more "loosely typed". As in, you can use them without caring about types, but there are operators to compare strictly (as in "1" == 1 is true, but "1" === 1 is false (string vs integer). You can also cast in the rare times you actually need to, or check the actual internal type.
Why?
Do I really have to answer that? How about the amount of time and energy you spending thinking about types, where to allocate memory, etc. You have a CS degree, don't you?
that has nothing to mdo witrh PERL, and everything to do with sloppy coding practices.
Yeah, that was my point later on that you managed not to quote. But you have to admit that a lot of perl programs use a lot of inline regex. And you also have to admit that regex is probably one of the most unreadable syntaxes still in use today (albeit, incredibly powerful).
I get it, you are what writers call 'a hack'.
Meh, perhaps. But I can show you pages of planning, diagrams of datastructures, etc, for any even midly-large program I've written. I just prefer to spend my actual coding time thinking about the program, not how to handle some random file exception. I dunno. I guess i'm weird that way.
The same is true for RedHat. There are also hundreds of books written for both. I don't think documentation is an issue you can compare. You espessially can't say windows has "none".
Hardly need support for windows? I don't think so. Since the article is talking about it from a server point of view, so will we. Windows servers are a pain, with many flaws and much to learn to make them even work somewhat well. Sure, they HAVE one-click wizards and such, but when do those ever work flawlessly?
As a linux user, I find setting up the simplest things on linux fairly simple. In fact, setting up some very complex things can be fairly simple. When I first started with linux, some things were very difficult. I've paid $0 for support for linux, and know I'm decently knowledgable.
I've bought books for windows, and setup a few networks, and I still can't get everything working the way I want to. I still have mysterious problems on the network, like someone's account will suddenly not be able to run wordperfect on one particular machine without crashing (but it works fine on any other machine, or with any other accounts), and I can find no explaination. And the people that have been using MS products for years have no explanation.
Your last question here is particuarly interesting. There's a trend in the linux - and OSS, in fact - world to create highly configurable software. This means there's lots of options. Which sometimes means that there's a lot to figure out to get it to work the way you want. The difference here is that you - the user - decides how to make the program work the way you want, instead of the program telling you how to work because that's the only thing it can do.
Microsoft DOES in fact release a lot of patches. If you subscribe to HotFix or whatever they call it, you happen to get more of them and a bit faster, but thats a moot point. The big issue is that linux patches will say exactly what they fix, and possibly even more importantly, include source code. Microsoft patches typically are "Security Update - fixes flaw in program XXX that could allow an attacker to take control of your computer". I'd swear every patch says the same thing. :)
Anyways, a lot of admins are reluctant or slow to apply MS patches. And with good reason, it's a well known fact that often patches will break other things, or cause other unpredicable behaviour. I don't know where you work, but applying a fix to prevent someone from doing some strange non-likely hack to your SQL server that also
My biggest problem with PHP (and perl, for that matter) is that it's very easy to write sloppy code. Being untyped, it's easy to do very messy things and make it work. Of course, this leads to very unreadable, unscalable code. I don't have this problem with my own code because I follow a pretty rigid and consistent structure, but I have run into it many times before.
The way I code, it could almost be a typed language, the only difference is when you're coding and need a variable, you don't have to bother defining one. It's also nice to be able to concat an integer value into a string without thinking. Of course, these are also things that can make code messy - if you do them messily.
If you haven't given Objective-C or Cocoa a try, you should.
People have told me before how Objective-C was nice. But looking again now, it looks like it's only Mac OS-X, which is probably why I never looked into it before. I don't want to get locked into coding for a specific platform.
Oh, I agree. I know and understand the reasons. I just find that when I'm coding in Java (although admittedly, it's been a while), I spend more time writing exception-related code (handlers or triggers) than I do writing logic.
What a great quote. This is so very true.
Dynamic typing is a win here because you don't have to commit to specific data representations up front. But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract.
From what I've seen, very few people - espessially those with degress in computer science - share my views on programming. This article takes a different approach to it, but it's the same view I have, when it gets down to it. I usually say that when programming, you shouldn't be bothering with types, memory locations, pointers, and other nonsense that has nothing to do with how the program works. Or in other words, the formal 'scientific' aspects of programming.
Most people will disagree with me here, and I've been involved in many arguments over it. My programing language of choice right now? PHP. Why? Because it sucks less than the other choices. It still boggles my mind that C is used to do any high-level programming (ie, anything besides api's to system calls, and writing drivers and kernels). "But it's so much faster" I hear all the B.Sc's saying. And they're right, it does run faster. It also takes ten times as long to code. And ten times as long to find all the strange bugs and buffer overflows that eventually show up as exploits.
Paul Graham hints at it in his article, but there is no good language right now for writing applications in. PHP in itself is a nice language to write, although it's an interpreted language, not compilied. Perl is a bit too messy for my liking (Paul also mentions this when he says he knows people who wrote perl programs and came back and couldn't understand how they worked), although it is quite powerful. Java is nice in theory, but implemented a bit slowly, and it's a bit too scientific, really -- you spend so much time handling exceptions and making sure all your code is very formal.
So what's the answer? I don't know. But it doesn't exist yet, as far as I know. Until then I'll continue running my slow PHP programs on modern "slow" computers. That run at a mere 1.5 GHz.
This is a hard problem to get around. Traffic shaping on port 25 (with it open) might be the best option - if someone starts spamming, then you can find out, and take steps to block them, while at the same time knowing to specifically watch other actions of that tenant.
But a nice option for laptop users, and even for [lazy] desktop users that don't like changing settings whenever they move, is to create a top-level DNS entry (or one in your domain suffix, if you provide one) called "mail" and/or "smtp", so that users can enter just "mail" as their outgoing smtp server name, and it will automagically resolve to your (the ISP's) mail server.
I've had a couple ISPs that do this, and it's great. But then you switch to one that doesn't, and have to go fiddle with account settings. It would be nice if it was a more broadly-implemented setting.
Ok. So who cares? Why do you need to overclock it? We've already gone from 1ghz to 3ghz in the last year, is this not fast enough?
I suppose if theres some urge that makes people feel they absolutely have to overclock, then they can just go buy one of the older models, for a bit less money. Then spend probably as much money beefing up their cooling. Not to mention the time in getting it to work. Now they have a processor that runs as fast as this one, that cost just as much money, but is a whole lot noisier and has no warrenty.
I'm not sure that this technology is going to really do anything for this application. "The public" still likes to see fancy html pages with graphics and such. It's more likely that they'd go to their city website and navigate to find the beach conditions. I don't see many people learning about SensorML, finding a place to search for sensors, and then looking at the raw data for their beach (assuming they find it.. and can interpret the results).
Actually, thats really another thing too. There is no sensor that says "overcast", this is a condition determined by looking at a number of sensors.
The problem with it is the price. They want to charge $6/movie. I can go to any video store and rent one for $5 ($CDN btw). Sure, there's the convience factor, that I can watch it without having to even get off the couch, but I don't think that's worth any more money. Espessially since it loses the whole going-to-the-video-store feel, browsing through shelves of movies, and being able to look at the boxes etc. Sure, theres the overhead of the equipment, but they don't have any additional overhead costs for doing VOD - they already own the building, they don't need a huge staff, etc - ongoing costs that a video store has to cover.
It's also unproven. If I go to the video store, and rent a VHS or DVD, I know it will work (and if it doesn't, I can rent another for free). I have no idea how well VOD will (or won't) work. If they want it to take off, they need to make their pricing on-par (or cheaper) than video stores, and probably even give people a couple free viewings, to get them comfortable with the technology. Until then, I'd rather spend less money on proven technology.
So what happened? They only sold the Windows OS, on ALL of their computers, no matter if you wanted it or not, because basically, they had to pay for it either way.