Yeah, this attitude is frustrating. I love PHP, I code in it daily. Me an PHP, we go way back;-)
I do want to point out however, JDBC the unified DB API for Java is a very appealing feature. ODBC is a very slow API and requires a Microsoft environment to run your DBs (I think there might be ODBC implmentations on Unix [variants] but this is hole in my knowledge). I have developed *many* DB (MySQL, MSSQL, mSQL) apps with PHP and what I would give to have the flexibility of a unified API.
I have heard that phplib can mimic a unified DB API but I have not yet used it for fear of performance problems using an external foreign 'lib'. I gather this mainly from the fact that many great PHP+MySQL projects do not use phplib and have the problem of porting to other DBs
If you are a phplib fan and want to try to convince me I am all ears.
Free to whom? MCSP = Microsoft Certified Solution Provider. To become an MCSP you must have 2 Microsoft Certified Professionals on staff. Microsoft Certification is NOT free! The Knowledge Base is free, but it does not include all Knowledge Base articles, you have to BUY technet to get all of them, invariably all the high end bugs are located on technet rather than the "FREE Knowledge Base". Not all bug fixes are free: specific example: spool32 error in windows 95. The fix was released but only for Windows 95b
I have just completed my undergraduate degree in something other than CS (social psychology and architecture). Like many of my geek friends I got tired of paying for a CS education that was either taught by a really old guy or an MS prostitue. Had I intended to get a CS degree I wouldn't have chosen the college I attended but who knows what they are doing when they are 18 anyway? Though I gleaned alot of valuable information from my minor in CS (data structures and OO come to mind) I am having problems locating a good masters program that does not require an undergrad degree in CS. I am willing to make up a few classes to bring me up to speed, I just don't want to go to college for another 5 years (there's too much money out here in the 'real world'). State schools are prefered...
I used to go to a coffee shop where the coffee was good and the decor was old and tattered, mostly consisting of second-hand furniture. The coffee shop became so successful they "remodeled" and bought all new artistic furniture.
I stopped going to that coffee shop, it lost it's charm.
That was about 3 years ago, last week I went to visit that same coffee shop and discovered that they must have realised the same thing because there were 4 old fat cushy chairs in dining area!
In short we don't want fancy HTML (furniture) we just want good content (coffee). And maybe an occasional new feature (muffins, cookies, etc) that will improve our experience, like a custom page for AvantGo offline browsing (it does not pickup cgi links).;-)
I agree. Y2K is not a non-event! It has been an event for the last 3 years. Just because today is quiet doesn't mean "Y2K" wasn't a problem. It's a catch 22, now all of the nay-sayers will say I told you so. As for me (sysadmin) I am burned-out...
My blood pressure is at an all-time low! 106/78 Wahoo!
A PAPER COMPUTER? That is exactly what we do not need... I'm not a tree hugger but I warm up to the idea of a paperless office, merely for the fact that it saves valuable resources. There is a company, the name escapes me now, working on a computer that functions much like paper. The computer is shaped like a piece of paper (more like a clipboard probably) and it can hold many pages. IMO this is the direction we want to move.
MS Word Stuff? As far as I can tell they don't have MS Word for Palm size computers (they may have it for hand held computers). I have quite a few applications loaded on mine and I am not even using 8MB.
I haven't played MP3's yet. The key here is, I have the option to do so!
After a full charge, 6 hrs of continuous use. 3 hours for recharge. You can purchase a second battery. The screen can automatically dim to standby mode to save power. I have mine set to 1 minute. Basically it just turns off the backlight.
I got an E100 for Christmas (I am considering returning it for the E105). I love it! The sound and graphics are very crisp. The Compaq Aero is another one with similar specs.
Last week I went to the store to pick out my first PDA. I had my heart set on a Palm VII. Once I got to the store and started fiddling around with the different models the Cassiopeia won my heart.
Let me just say the PalmVII is UGLY! The PalmV is pretty slick looking but the modem was OUTRAGEOUS in price. Combined with the fact tat I am not color blind and the 65,000+ colors emitted from my TFT screen tickles my eyeballs, it was really a pretty easy decision.
I realize that I am limiting some of my functionality by using WindowsCE but for getting e-mail and browsing the web I believe I have the superior product. Not to mention that it has 16MB of RAM and a 131MHz proc comapred to 2 MB and 16MHz on the Palm VII.
By the way I would love to get Slashdot to go using AvantGo but AvantGo does not allow linking to CGI applications, any word on this?
I would like to restate, "Documentation is sparse and scattered...". This is my number one gripe with MS Software. They deliberately keep you in the dark on many issues so you will by all of the M$ Press publications (which are mostly crap anyway). READMEs and man pages are not always the most pretty but they are useful and they are DISTRIBUTED WITH THE APPLICATION!
I'm not advocating NT, but I ran across a situation where NT was the only solution. I searched the world over for a *nix substitute but found zilch.
The situation: Our administration wanted virus protection on our mail server to scan every message. Because of a poorly written but very popular application our Exchange server crashed, and consequently we removed this nasty program from our server. This same product has a version that can be placed on a proxy server. So guess what... we (not me) implemented an MS Proxy server just so we could scan out-going and in-coming e-mail. Our main firewall/proxy is not MS so we don't have to worry about all of those holes but it sure would be nice not to have another machine to maintain.
If you know of a product that would fit this need and runs on *nix platform please reply.
I currently run RedHat6.0. Though I enjoy all of the bells and whistles to some extent, I find myself continually miffed at the overhead my system seems to have. I think in my case (being somwhat of a newby) Debian may be a better alternative, maybe you can enlighten me. Though I am not truely a newby (I've worked on UNIX systems for a few years), I am new to the actual systems cosmetic portion and I find it very difficult to configure my system with RedHat. (Note: I have successfully setup a proxy/firewall and webserver, I'm talking here more about the 'look and feel') I know it can be done but I would rather have a stripped down version and build my way up,rather than a bloated version and work my way down. Does debian have more of this approach? If not, does anyone have a recommendation for a distribution.
BTW: I realize there are options in the installation process, and I have tried different configurations. But it always seems that my changes to certain files always get overwritten by some script at the next boot-up. For example in FVWM I change the menu items and the next time I reboot those menu items are gone. I could take the time to figure this all out but I would rather not. Besides I am on a P120 with 32 MB RAM, my GUI is killing my system, I want something good but simple.
NT For Brains: I had the plessure of siting down with a suprisingly intelligent individual who has his eggs in the M$ basket (I realize there is an inherent paradox in this statement). It was refreshing to talk with an M$ advocate who actually knew what he was talking about, or at least could speak inteligibly about computer technologies. Unfortunately this meeting came $160/hr.
While we were waiting for the NT server to reboot multiple times (he was hired to help us with a specific M$ product) I probed his thought on Linux/Unix related matters to see what kind of person I was dealing with. He said a few things that clued me in to the extent of his brainwa$hing. Here are a few comments he made:
"At least they [M$] put a GUI on the thing."
"It's an administrative nightmare to maintain all those text files."(specifically refering to the nature of Unix static DNS name tables)
"Unix is stagnate, they have not inovated in years."
The Point: Many NT users think standards are created by Microsoft and since *nix does not find it necessary to incorporate some of the same bells'n'whistles then they are falling behind and not "innovating". Unfortunately M$ marketing uese these same, so called, examples to prove NT is so much better.
Case Study: I used to be an NT zealot, it's not something I am proud of, but we all have our pasts. As I made my way through my CS degree my mind changed a little bit but it was once I got to the "real world" that I did a total 180. I work in a mid sized company we have 6 Unix servers 2 Linux servers and 7 NT servers. We have 1 guy who administrates all of the Unix servers which are all mission critical and 4 people administrating the NT servers which are not mission critical (except for maybe 1).
NT Admins: NT admins are not programmers, or at least VERY few of them are. That's why there is only one very limiting shell script. They are programmed to memorize things. There problem solving skills are relatively moot as a result. A saying we have around here is "In windows, if there is not a button or a checkbox for it it can't be done.".
No $TANDARD$ So it's true Linux has no $tandard$, it has something far greater StandardS that work, and a boatload of intelligence maintaining it.
Oh wait I think an Expresso is a type of car. I wander what kind of conflict 2 ounces of water, some crushed up beans and 6 ounces of milk could possibly have with an automobile?
Maybe that explains why the latte jumps off of my dashboard onto my lap without fail.
He calls his computer a third hemisphere of his brain, capable of storing more data and crunching more numbers than his organic brain ever could.
It has occured to me that there is such a thing as "to much information". Though I get jazzed learning and aquiring new information, I think there is something to be said for ignorance. Maybe that means I'm not a geek/nerd after all. DS
Anything they can do, we can do better. I have no doubts that there are "smart enough" people to carry out such tasks in gooberment, but unfuck.exe proves that if it can be done it can also be undone. I am not at the height of my hacking abilities, but we got alot of geniuses around us and I am confident that in the long run we will all be protected. The common user, well, sorry about your ignorance.
So where does this leave us, the people who are smart enough to participate in white collar crime will also be able to protect themselves, the common folk, the unprotected, will leave there balls blowing in the wind and they will get busted for downloading to many MP3s.
I have to say though, I tossed and turned after watching "Enemy of the State". If you haven't seen it I recommend it, it displays well the corruption that could/would take place when implementing these privacy invasions.
Have any of you actually used Quicken, the interface is terrible and from what I can tell it is pretty buggy. I used it for about a month, and then realized that it sucked. If you read the Quicken News Groups you will get the same bashing from people who have used it for years, and hate the newest versions. They have indirectly been ruined by Microsoft. They have thrown together old code with some new code and may a mess all in the name of "keeping up" with M$ Money. I hate M$, but I also hate balancing my check book, so Money does it for me. Maybe soon my bank will be supporting GNU Cash (I have no idea what GNU Cash is) statements instead, that would rock.
Surely someone can come up with a better piece of software, from scratch. (I am on my way to check out GNU cash right now)
What's really a bitch is when you try to install the client on a machine and it doesn't work, you come back the next day and it has installed itself on all of the machines that you don't want it to install on (servers), and it misses the one you tried to install it on (lowly workstation). I already control the servers! Dang it!
If you were thinking about buying SMS save yourself the hastle and replace all the PCs with terminals. The cycle continues: centralize -> decentralize -> centralize ->...
I am also a PHP developer and personally I think it is great if the PHP/ZEND sites are being/. (if indeed that is what happened). PHP has done very little, IMHO, to publicize itself. Most people know what ASP and Perl is, but very few (that I have run accross) people have ever heard of PHP.
publicity => more users => more developers => better product
The site will likely be available, as usuall, 8 hours from now. I have been chompin' at the bit for this release for months, a few more hours won't kill me.
Yeah, I was thinking about that, I thought maybe it would serve them right to have a stack dump. Those who recover quickly, 3rd or 4th iteration, shouldn't have any problems (as long as they are using the OS they are advocating). For code integrity I concede that your way is more solid, so we shall use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, this attitude is frustrating. I love PHP, I code in it daily. Me an PHP, we go way back ;-)
I do want to point out however, JDBC the unified DB API for Java is a very appealing feature. ODBC is a very slow API and requires a Microsoft environment to run your DBs (I think there might be ODBC implmentations on Unix [variants] but this is hole in my knowledge). I have developed *many* DB (MySQL, MSSQL, mSQL) apps with PHP and what I would give to have the flexibility of a unified API.
I have heard that phplib can mimic a unified DB API but I have not yet used it for fear of performance problems using an external foreign 'lib'. I gather this mainly from the fact that many great PHP+MySQL projects do not use phplib and have the problem of porting to other DBs
If you are a phplib fan and want to try to convince me I am all ears.
Nothing better than my favorite cartoon rendered with my favorite operating system.
DS
Free to whom? MCSP = Microsoft Certified Solution Provider. To become an MCSP you must have 2 Microsoft Certified Professionals on staff. Microsoft Certification is NOT free! The Knowledge Base is free, but it does not include all Knowledge Base articles, you have to BUY technet to get all of them, invariably all the high end bugs are located on technet rather than the "FREE Knowledge Base". Not all bug fixes are free: specific example: spool32 error in windows 95. The fix was released but only for Windows 95b
[Know of any good graduate programs?]
I admit this is a bit off topic but...
I have just completed my undergraduate degree in something other than CS (social psychology and architecture). Like many of my geek friends I got tired of paying for a CS education that was either taught by a really old guy or an MS prostitue. Had I intended to get a CS degree I wouldn't have chosen the college I attended but who knows what they are doing when they are 18 anyway? Though I gleaned alot of valuable information from my minor in CS (data structures and OO come to mind) I am having problems locating a good masters program that does not require an undergrad degree in CS. I am willing to make up a few classes to bring me up to speed, I just don't want to go to college for another 5 years (there's too much money out here in the 'real world'). State schools are prefered...
Thanks,
DS
I used to go to a coffee shop where the coffee was good and the decor was old and tattered, mostly consisting of second-hand furniture. The coffee shop became so successful they "remodeled" and bought all new artistic furniture.
I stopped going to that coffee shop, it lost it's charm.
That was about 3 years ago, last week I went to visit that same coffee shop and discovered that they must have realised the same thing because there were 4 old fat cushy chairs in dining area!
In short we don't want fancy HTML (furniture) we just want good content (coffee). And maybe an occasional new feature (muffins, cookies, etc) that will improve our experience, like a custom page for AvantGo offline browsing (it does not pickup cgi links). ;-)
I agree. Y2K is not a non-event! It has been an event for the last 3 years. Just because today is quiet doesn't mean "Y2K" wasn't a problem. It's a catch 22, now all of the nay-sayers will say I told you so. As for me (sysadmin) I am burned-out...
My blood pressure is at an all-time low! 106/78 Wahoo!
DS
A PAPER COMPUTER? That is exactly what we do not need... I'm not a tree hugger but I warm up to the idea of a paperless office, merely for the fact that it saves valuable resources. There is a company, the name escapes me now, working on a computer that functions much like paper. The computer is shaped like a piece of paper (more like a clipboard probably) and it can hold many pages. IMO this is the direction we want to move.
MS Word Stuff? As far as I can tell they don't have MS Word for Palm size computers (they may have it for hand held computers). I have quite a few applications loaded on mine and I am not even using 8MB.
I haven't played MP3's yet. The key here is, I have the option to do so!
After a full charge, 6 hrs of continuous use. 3 hours for recharge. You can purchase a second battery. The screen can automatically dim to standby mode to save power. I have mine set to 1 minute. Basically it just turns off the backlight.
Onsale.com, now Egghead.com sold a 21" 256 grayscale monitor (with high res and low dot)the other day for $11. ELEVEN BUCKS!!
I got an E100 for Christmas (I am considering returning it for the E105). I love it! The sound and graphics are very crisp. The Compaq Aero is another one with similar specs.
Last week I went to the store to pick out my first PDA. I had my heart set on a Palm VII. Once I got to the store and started fiddling around with the different models the Cassiopeia won my heart.
Let me just say the PalmVII is UGLY! The PalmV is pretty slick looking but the modem was OUTRAGEOUS in price. Combined with the fact tat I am not color blind and the 65,000+ colors emitted from my TFT screen tickles my eyeballs, it was really a pretty easy decision.
I realize that I am limiting some of my functionality by using WindowsCE but for getting e-mail and browsing the web I believe I have the superior product. Not to mention that it has 16MB of RAM and a 131MHz proc comapred to 2 MB and 16MHz on the Palm VII.
By the way I would love to get Slashdot to go using AvantGo but AvantGo does not allow linking to CGI applications, any word on this?
DS
I would like to restate, "Documentation is sparse and scattered...". This is my number one gripe with MS Software. They deliberately keep you in the dark on many issues so you will by all of the M$ Press publications (which are mostly crap anyway). READMEs and man pages are not always the most pretty but they are useful and they are DISTRIBUTED WITH THE APPLICATION!
I'm not advocating NT, but I ran across a situation where NT was the only solution. I searched the world over for a *nix substitute but found zilch.
The situation: Our administration wanted virus protection on our mail server to scan every message. Because of a poorly written but very popular application our Exchange server crashed, and consequently we removed this nasty program from our server. This same product has a version that can be placed on a proxy server. So guess what... we (not me) implemented an MS Proxy server just so we could scan out-going and in-coming e-mail. Our main firewall/proxy is not MS so we don't have to worry about all of those holes but it sure would be nice not to have another machine to maintain.
If you know of a product that would fit this need and runs on *nix platform please reply.
Thanks for the help (from both posters)! I think I'll try it out when I get home. ;-)
I currently run RedHat6.0. Though I enjoy all of the bells and whistles to some extent, I find myself continually miffed at the overhead my system seems to have. I think in my case (being somwhat of a newby) Debian may be a better alternative, maybe you can enlighten me. Though I am not truely a newby (I've worked on UNIX systems for a few years), I am new to the actual systems cosmetic portion and I find it very difficult to configure my system with RedHat. (Note: I have successfully setup a proxy/firewall and webserver, I'm talking here more about the 'look and feel') I know it can be done but I would rather have a stripped down version and build my way up ,rather than a bloated version and work my way down. Does debian have more of this approach? If not, does anyone have a recommendation for a distribution.
BTW: I realize there are options in the installation process, and I have tried different configurations. But it always seems that my changes to certain files always get overwritten by some script at the next boot-up. For example in FVWM I change the menu items and the next time I reboot those menu items are gone. I could take the time to figure this all out but I would rather not. Besides I am on a P120 with 32 MB RAM, my GUI is killing my system, I want something good but simple.
NT For Brains:
I had the plessure of siting down with a suprisingly intelligent individual who has his eggs in the M$ basket (I realize there is an inherent paradox in this statement). It was refreshing to talk with an M$ advocate who actually knew what he was talking about, or at least could speak inteligibly about computer technologies. Unfortunately this meeting came $160/hr.
While we were waiting for the NT server to reboot multiple times (he was hired to help us with a specific M$ product) I probed his thought on Linux/Unix related matters to see what kind of person I was dealing with. He said a few things that clued me in to the extent of his brainwa$hing. Here are a few comments he made:
The Point:
Many NT users think standards are created by Microsoft and since *nix does not find it necessary to incorporate some of the same bells'n'whistles then they are falling behind and not "innovating". Unfortunately M$ marketing uese these same, so called, examples to prove NT is so much better.
Case Study:
I used to be an NT zealot, it's not something I am proud of, but we all have our pasts. As I made my way through my CS degree my mind changed a little bit but it was once I got to the "real world" that I did a total 180. I work in a mid sized company we have 6 Unix servers 2 Linux servers and 7 NT servers. We have 1 guy who administrates all of the Unix servers which are all mission critical and 4 people administrating the NT servers which are not mission critical (except for maybe 1).
NT Admins:
NT admins are not programmers, or at least VERY few of them are. That's why there is only one very limiting shell script. They are programmed to memorize things. There problem solving skills are relatively moot as a result. A saying we have around here is "In windows, if there is not a button or a checkbox for it it can't be done.".
No $TANDARD$
So it's true Linux has no $tandard$, it has something far greater StandardS that work, and a boatload of intelligence maintaining it.
Oh wait I think an Expresso is a type of car. I wander what kind of conflict 2 ounces of water, some crushed up beans and 6 ounces of milk could possibly have with an automobile?
Maybe that explains why the latte jumps off of my dashboard onto my lap without fail.
Anything they can do, we can do better. I have no doubts that there are "smart enough" people to carry out such tasks in gooberment, but unfuck.exe proves that if it can be done it can also be undone. I am not at the height of my hacking abilities, but we got alot of geniuses around us and I am confident that in the long run we will all be protected. The common user, well, sorry about your ignorance.
So where does this leave us, the people who are smart enough to participate in white collar crime will also be able to protect themselves, the common folk, the unprotected, will leave there balls blowing in the wind and they will get busted for downloading to many MP3s.
I have to say though, I tossed and turned after watching "Enemy of the State". If you haven't seen it I recommend it, it displays well the corruption that could/would take place when implementing these privacy invasions.
Enough of babbling.
DS
Have any of you actually used Quicken, the interface is terrible and from what I can tell it is pretty buggy. I used it for about a month, and then realized that it sucked. If you read the Quicken News Groups you will get the same bashing from people who have used it for years, and hate the newest versions. They have indirectly been ruined by Microsoft. They have thrown together old code with some new code and may a mess all in the name of "keeping up" with M$ Money. I hate M$, but I also hate balancing my check book, so Money does it for me. Maybe soon my bank will be supporting GNU Cash (I have no idea what GNU Cash is) statements instead, that would rock.
Surely someone can come up with a better piece of software, from scratch. (I am on my way to check out GNU cash right now)
What's really a bitch is when you try to install the client on a machine and it doesn't work, you come back the next day and it has installed itself on all of the machines that you don't want it to install on (servers), and it misses the one you tried to install it on (lowly workstation). I already control the servers! Dang it!
...
If you were thinking about buying SMS save yourself the hastle and replace all the PCs with terminals. The cycle continues:
centralize -> decentralize -> centralize ->
DS
I am also a PHP developer and personally I think it is great if the PHP/ZEND sites are being /. (if indeed that is what happened). PHP has done very little, IMHO, to publicize itself. Most people know what ASP and Perl is, but very few (that I have run accross) people have ever heard of PHP.
publicity => more users => more developers => better product
The site will likely be available, as usuall, 8 hours from now. I have been chompin' at the bit for this release for months, a few more hours won't kill me.
Relax a bit.
DS
Forgive me for my ignorance but who is Iliad and Artur.
DS
---
"There is no such thing as a stupid question, only stupid people who ask questions."
;-)
Yeah, I was thinking about that, I thought maybe it would serve them right to have a stack dump. Those who recover quickly, 3rd or 4th iteration, shouldn't have any problems (as long as they are using the OS they are advocating). For code integrity I concede that your way is more solid, so we shall use it.
bitterness = infinite_loop = downward_spiral = stack_dump
/*Advice from a college prof of mine, translated to code.*/
//Perform before sending
function eval_attitude()
{
$mail = $self.thoughts;
if($self.angry)
{
kill($mail);
echo "Have a smoke and create new message.";
eval_attitude();
}
else
{
send($mail);
echo "Mail Sent!";
exit;
}
}
My 2, DS