Yes, hard to believe that a multi-billion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of employees would choose to focus on more than just one product. I guess companies like HP, Apple and IBM must have this same identity crisis?
I can just picture you running into your local Staples and yelling "Make up your mind! Are you a pen store or a staples store?"
As far as MySQL. It has always been dual licensed and some things were not always available in the community version. The things that were available under the GPL licenses will always be available. From the reports I've read, the things that are closed were in the works before Sun purchased them.
Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix. Whether SCO had a right to sell licenses isn't the issue. SCO was supposed to sell licenses, send 100% of the license fee to Novell and Novell would send SCO back 5% which was their fee for acting as the licensing agent. The only thing Novell is saying is that SCO didn't give them the money. That's not Sun's fault.
If you go to a store and purchase something, you give the cashier the money, but the cashier puts it in their pocket instead of the register, the store owner can't come take what you purchased away from you.
From my limited understanding, I think it wasn't just SYSV licenses Sun purchased. SCO had a good product called UnixWare that had very good driver support in the x86 world. I think I remember reading somewhere that part of Sun's licensing deal with SCO was for drivers, which I would assume were for SCO's UnixWare and not just for Unix SYSV licenses. So what SCO owes Novell for what Sun paid them, may not be the entire amount.
Regardless, I highly doubt Sun wouldn't indemnify the OpenSolaris community. They indemnify customer's they sell RedHat and SuSE to. So to even think they wouldn't indemnify users of their own codebase is just ridiculous.
You mentioned you went from 125,000 lines of code to 14,000 with Ruby on Rails. Why did you chose to move to RoR in the first place? What was the impetus to write 14,000 lines of code, retrain the development team, etc.
Were you using some sort of Java framework like Struts, Spring, JATO, Websphere, etc? If not it doesn't seem fair to compare LoC. I can't say that my Java apps don't have a lot lines, but most of that code is automatically generated for me. Things like getters and setters to allow me to control access to private properties which the IDE generates, as well as the data access layer which is automatically generated for me as well. I use my own reusable webapp framework so when it's time to build an application the only hand coding I do is in defining what the application does, which is solely dependent on the complexity of the application.
I'm not trying to suggest that RoR doesn't have an edge in terms of LoC, but are we really comparing apples to apples here? Struts does tend to have a lot of configuration in xml files, which adds to the LoC count. I did find it a pain which is why I came up with my own.
The problem is that people keep trying to make web programming easier and more accessible. To do that you have to hide more and more stuff from the developer. More advanced guesswork needs to be made by the application framework.
One of the things Ruby On Rails fans always boast about is how few lines of code it takes to write an application. Assuming that RoR isn't ignoring the instructions that normally are done by other languages, it means that the RoR framework is doing it behind the scenes for the developer. When frameworks do this they usually have to be as generic and flexible as possible which can attribute to some overheard. At least from what I've seen.
If you wanat really good performance you can write your application in C/C++ but you're going to have to write in all the scalability infrastructure yourself.
Java web application servers are designed with scalability in mind so that it can be easy to make your application scale. There are also other frameworks that you can use to make developing your application faster as well.
I use my own home grown webapp framework. Back when I tested it with PHP4/Apache1.3/mod_php I was able to get better performance with Tomcat/Apache2 testing against applications that were doing basically the same thing. Actually the java application was doing slightly more work. At the time there were threading issues with using Apache2 with PHP and a lot of scripts weren't able to use it. I'm not sure what the current state is now if php modules have been updated to be thread aware.
To get PHP apps to run fast the best option is to use mod_php in apache. This is great if you have a VPS or dedicated server. If you're in shared hosting environment, mod_php runs every user's script using the same permissions and if you're not careful you could have some problems. One of my clients were on a shared hosting site and even though they don't use PHP another user's PHP script was able to deface all the pages on that server.
There are ways to try and isolate mod_php to only have write access in a particular directory but a script can be setup to ignore something like that. The best way would be to use FastCGI to run a separate instance of the PHP engine for each user under their own account. Though this will decrease the performance compared to using mod_php. Though PHP files seem to compile faster than JSP files, compilation only happens once and from then on acess time is very fast. When you're running a separate out of process instance of the PHP engine for each user, you're also going to be using more memory.
When RoR first came out, a lot of people were saying that it was a great way for prototyping applications but wouldn't trust the performance for production. I guess not much has changed.
A lot also has to do with the backend data store you're using and how it's scalability integrates with the application.
Joyent.com is one of the few places that are using OpenSolaris as a hosting platform. They provide Solaris Containers (Zones) for users. Similiar to other types of VPS options from other providers. Twitter was originally hosted at Joyent but due to performance problems they moved to a different provider. One of Joyent's claimed benefits is that they are an RoR shop and can help with Rails apps. So I don't think anyone can say that Twitter was just written incorrectly but people that didn't know what they were doing. It's a shame that Joyent got the bad press when Twitter left. Though from what I understand they were having some network issues at one point and a big problem when one of their Thumpers (Sun X4500) got corrupted. Joyent seems like a good platform run by some good people and what I'm basically saying is that I'm glad to see that Twitter's problems weren't Joyent's fault. I don't have any financial interest in Joyent and don't know any of them personally nor do I have an account with them. I was just looking into them but I wound up getting a dedica
I've read similar stories online but always thought it was the company trying to scare off people from using third party inks. I used it on the recommendation of someone I knew that had been buying this brand of inks for a while.
The printer I had wasn't a 25k freestanding workhorse, but it wasn't one of those get a printer free when you buy 12 packs of gum promos. It was a wide format desktop printer. It was one of the first consumer printers to come out to support 6 ink colors. It was before the ultrachrome inks came out but I used a spray to seal the print to protect against uv damage. It was old and slow but printed well. I don't remember exactly what I paid for it, but the MSRP was $499 at the time.
I'm happy I got the laser printer. It's much better than the inkjet when it comes to printing regular documents, which is what I mainly print anyway. I'm hoping to get a better epson for photographs at some point though.
And if you've ever read the APA, you'd see that this is exactly what is required by SCO - to remit 1000% of the payments to Novell, and then Novell would return 5% as a fee for SCO handling the account. Uhm... that's exactly what I said. (I'm assuming you meant 100% not 1000%.) The person I was replying to said "SCO Group had no right to license (SYSV)" which is obviously not the case.
Remember how we kept your company from being split up into different pieces and imposing various fines and regulations that would limit your operations as a result of your abuse of your monopoly?
It's a shame this favor we did for you did not allow you to fix your exchange product so that we would not lose all these important emails. *wink* *wink*
"It's not a big deal to install Apache, mod_php, tomcat, database on a development server or even locally to be able to test things out in a real environment."
Depending on your corporate environment, it can be a huge deal. If you're not properly staging the site/application on an equivalent platform that you are deploying to production you run the risk of major problems. I don't see why anyone wouldn't do this.
I'm sure they were very embarrassed when they received that big "search and replace" bill for that month. Too bad those credits don't roll over from month to month.
That's still no reason to make your whole site one big table.
This is definitely something that should have been taken care of with CSS a while ago. There is a vertical-align property but only works in some browsers if you define the display property as table-cell or something like that. Another trick is to create three nested divs and set the top property to 50% and -50% for two of them. I forget the details but it's a pain in the ass to work consistently across browsers for something that used to be so simple before.
Stupid comment by Vinh about Dreamweaver. 1. DW lets you code at the source code level if you choose. 2. DW is much faster--in Design View--at creating tables. 3. DW allows for flipping back and forth or split view. 4. DW does not rewrite your code (for the most part).
I use DW every day. I am not even conscious of flipping between the 2 views. Some things are done better in Design View and some in Code View.
CSS support is very good in DW. 1. Why use a heavy tool like DreamWeaver if you're mostly just editing the source directly? 2. Nobody uses tables anymore, at least not as much as they incorrectly used to before for formatting since CSS gives you a lot more control. This practice thankfully died out. 3. Alt-Tab is just as fast if you have your browser open, or multiple browsers. I usually check IE and FF when I'm working on layout. 4. For some people, even a little bit of code changes is too much.
If I'm working on a php or jsp page that retreives content from a database how does DreamWeaver get it? Does it have a php engine or a servlet engine? If I want to include a page fragement from a php or jsp page or text from a java bean can it do that?
Back when I was playing around with it, it couldn't do any of that. Even if it can now, I'm better off testing it directly in the servlet engine or php/apache setup I plan to deploy on to make sure there are no problems with db connections, unexpected session behavior, etc.
When dealing with sites that have a lot of dynamic content and or more complex interactive attributes, like more and more sites are having, DreamWeaver seems to get in the way for me. I have, on ocassion used it to generate the initial design and then cut and paste the pieces in the appropriate php/jsp files then work from there. It never seemed necessary though.
It's not a big deal to install Apache, mod_php, tomcat, database on a development server or even locally to be able to test things out in a real environment.
For simple sites, or for the initial design of the site it may have it's place but for me that's not worth the price.
Just because he said they hardcode the HTML, CSS and javascript doesn't mean they create each page from scratch. They have some sort of content management system based on a number of templates that do most of the grunt work.
I haven't used Dreamweaver in a while and it was only to check it out but I never found an easy way to easily preview dynamic content.
This is also how businesses appease a loud but small market segment. They make some noise, but don't actually do anything. When the hardware manufacturers don't comply, they can shift the blame on them.
Hans tried to represent himself, he used the "Geek" defense and it failed. He should have at least paid for a lawyer or used a public defender who would have advised him to STFU as he didn't know what he was talking about and only made his case look worse.
It is like Richard Dawkins trying to debate theology, or George W. Bush trying to pronounce words correctly, or Charles Mansion trying to run the NAACP, or Adolph Hitler trying to run a Jewish Temple. It just does not make sense, and they are better off letting someone else not them do the job.
Or you trying to make an accurate point on/. He had an attorney, he did not represent himself.
Table 5 on page 51 shows the breakdown by company for "Cost estimate for FLOSS code contributed by firms" Total contribution from firms Number of firms 986 Top contributors Rank Name Person-months Cost (mil euro) 1 sun microsystems inc. 51372 312 2 ibm corp. 14865 90 3 red hat corp. 9748 59 4 silicon graphics corp. 7736 47 5 sap ag 7493 46 6 mysql ab 5747 35 7 netscape communications corp. 5249 32 8 ximian inc. 4985 30 9 realnetworks inc 4412 27 10 At&t 4286 26
I don't know if RMS ever said anything along the same lines or not.
MySQL had always been under a dual license and some items were available in the paid version that weren't available in the community edition. From what I've read, the changes being attributed to Sun were in the works before the acquisition.
Not sure why Sun always gets a bad wrap from the F/OSS community.
he biggest issue remaining to be resolved by this trial is how much of the "license" monies given to SCO Group by Microsoft and SUN were for that which SCO Group had no right to license (SYSV), and how much was for SCO Group's product. Given the non-dizzying speed at which SCO's products have been improved and maintained, Novell argues that the vast majority of those millions was due to Novell.
Novell made an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for SYSV Unix. For their services, SCO would get 5% of the licensing fees. Novell is claiming that SCO should have sent 100% of the fees to Novell and Novell would send back 5%. SCO did not send any of the money to Novell according to Novell's claim.
What would be interesting to see if after all this, will SCO sue Novell over the initial licensing deal because Novell didn't give SCO the necessary authority to properly defend licensing claims?
I had an epson photo printer for many years and always bought epson inks.
Then I found a link to third party inks at a great bargain. I bought 5 sets of color and black cartridges for about the price of one set of epson brand inks.
Within a relatively short period of time the print head got clogged up and the printer was useless. I tried everything I could to clean it, all the way to taking it completely apart. Nothing I did got the printer working again.
The printer was very old but never had any problems before. I think epson overcharges for ink but the third party ink cost me more. I wound up getting a color laser printer for normal printing and will be getting another epson photo printer at some point for photos. Though I mostly send out stuff to the lab since I prefer the tone and quality of lamda or fuji frontier prints over inkjet ones when I'm not printing them myself in my darkroom.
I agree. Databases are complex for a reason. These tools seem to try and hide this complexity through abstraction. In doing so you lose access to some of the great features of the underlying database, which may be fine if you're using some crippled version of a database, but with more advanced databases you're locking yourself out of some great db features.
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But Novell already stated they won't be pursuing Unix copyrights. So OpenSolaris has nothing to fear, which is what the original poster was trying to imply.
Someone should do something then about those billions of phones that are less powerful than an iPhone and currently run Java then.
Yes, hard to believe that a multi-billion dollar corporation with tens of thousands of employees would choose to focus on more than just one product. I guess companies like HP, Apple and IBM must have this same identity crisis?
I can just picture you running into your local Staples and yelling "Make up your mind! Are you a pen store or a staples store?"
As far as MySQL. It has always been dual licensed and some things were not always available in the community version. The things that were available under the GPL licenses will always be available. From the reports I've read, the things that are closed were in the works before Sun purchased them.
Uhm, Novell and SCO had an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for Unix. Whether SCO had a right to sell licenses isn't the issue. SCO was supposed to sell licenses, send 100% of the license fee to Novell and Novell would send SCO back 5% which was their fee for acting as the licensing agent. The only thing Novell is saying is that SCO didn't give them the money. That's not Sun's fault.
If you go to a store and purchase something, you give the cashier the money, but the cashier puts it in their pocket instead of the register, the store owner can't come take what you purchased away from you.
From my limited understanding, I think it wasn't just SYSV licenses Sun purchased. SCO had a good product called UnixWare that had very good driver support in the x86 world. I think I remember reading somewhere that part of Sun's licensing deal with SCO was for drivers, which I would assume were for SCO's UnixWare and not just for Unix SYSV licenses. So what SCO owes Novell for what Sun paid them, may not be the entire amount.
Regardless, I highly doubt Sun wouldn't indemnify the OpenSolaris community. They indemnify customer's they sell RedHat and SuSE to. So to even think they wouldn't indemnify users of their own codebase is just ridiculous.
You mentioned you went from 125,000 lines of code to 14,000 with Ruby on Rails. Why did you chose to move to RoR in the first place? What was the impetus to write 14,000 lines of code, retrain the development team, etc.
Were you using some sort of Java framework like Struts, Spring, JATO, Websphere, etc? If not it doesn't seem fair to compare LoC. I can't say that my Java apps don't have a lot lines, but most of that code is automatically generated for me. Things like getters and setters to allow me to control access to private properties which the IDE generates, as well as the data access layer which is automatically generated for me as well. I use my own reusable webapp framework so when it's time to build an application the only hand coding I do is in defining what the application does, which is solely dependent on the complexity of the application.
I'm not trying to suggest that RoR doesn't have an edge in terms of LoC, but are we really comparing apples to apples here? Struts does tend to have a lot of configuration in xml files, which adds to the LoC count. I did find it a pain which is why I came up with my own.
The problem is that people keep trying to make web programming easier and more accessible. To do that you have to hide more and more stuff from the developer. More advanced guesswork needs to be made by the application framework.
One of the things Ruby On Rails fans always boast about is how few lines of code it takes to write an application. Assuming that RoR isn't ignoring the instructions that normally are done by other languages, it means that the RoR framework is doing it behind the scenes for the developer. When frameworks do this they usually have to be as generic and flexible as possible which can attribute to some overheard. At least from what I've seen.
If you wanat really good performance you can write your application in C/C++ but you're going to have to write in all the scalability infrastructure yourself.
Java web application servers are designed with scalability in mind so that it can be easy to make your application scale. There are also other frameworks that you can use to make developing your application faster as well.
I use my own home grown webapp framework. Back when I tested it with PHP4/Apache1.3/mod_php I was able to get better performance with Tomcat/Apache2 testing against applications that were doing basically the same thing. Actually the java application was doing slightly more work. At the time there were threading issues with using Apache2 with PHP and a lot of scripts weren't able to use it. I'm not sure what the current state is now if php modules have been updated to be thread aware.
To get PHP apps to run fast the best option is to use mod_php in apache. This is great if you have a VPS or dedicated server. If you're in shared hosting environment, mod_php runs every user's script using the same permissions and if you're not careful you could have some problems. One of my clients were on a shared hosting site and even though they don't use PHP another user's PHP script was able to deface all the pages on that server.
There are ways to try and isolate mod_php to only have write access in a particular directory but a script can be setup to ignore something like that. The best way would be to use FastCGI to run a separate instance of the PHP engine for each user under their own account. Though this will decrease the performance compared to using mod_php. Though PHP files seem to compile faster than JSP files, compilation only happens once and from then on acess time is very fast. When you're running a separate out of process instance of the PHP engine for each user, you're also going to be using more memory.
When RoR first came out, a lot of people were saying that it was a great way for prototyping applications but wouldn't trust the performance for production. I guess not much has changed.
A lot also has to do with the backend data store you're using and how it's scalability integrates with the application.
Joyent.com is one of the few places that are using OpenSolaris as a hosting platform. They provide Solaris Containers (Zones) for users. Similiar to other types of VPS options from other providers. Twitter was originally hosted at Joyent but due to performance problems they moved to a different provider. One of Joyent's claimed benefits is that they are an RoR shop and can help with Rails apps. So I don't think anyone can say that Twitter was just written incorrectly but people that didn't know what they were doing. It's a shame that Joyent got the bad press when Twitter left. Though from what I understand they were having some network issues at one point and a big problem when one of their Thumpers (Sun X4500) got corrupted. Joyent seems like a good platform run by some good people and what I'm basically saying is that I'm glad to see that Twitter's problems weren't Joyent's fault. I don't have any financial interest in Joyent and don't know any of them personally nor do I have an account with them. I was just looking into them but I wound up getting a dedica
What part of "it's not cute" don't you get? Leave your techno mumbo jumbo out of this.
Properly stored means in an acid free box in a dark, dry, place.
Not pressed up against glass in the frame you bought at the dollar store that is sitting on your desk.
I've read similar stories online but always thought it was the company trying to scare off people from using third party inks. I used it on the recommendation of someone I knew that had been buying this brand of inks for a while.
The printer I had wasn't a 25k freestanding workhorse, but it wasn't one of those get a printer free when you buy 12 packs of gum promos. It was a wide format desktop printer. It was one of the first consumer printers to come out to support 6 ink colors. It was before the ultrachrome inks came out but I used a spray to seal the print to protect against uv damage. It was old and slow but printed well. I don't remember exactly what I paid for it, but the MSRP was $499 at the time.
I'm happy I got the laser printer. It's much better than the inkjet when it comes to printing regular documents, which is what I mainly print anyway. I'm hoping to get a better epson for photographs at some point though.
Dear Mr. Gates;
Remember how we kept your company from being split up into different pieces and imposing various fines and regulations that would limit your operations as a result of your abuse of your monopoly?
It's a shame this favor we did for you did not allow you to fix your exchange product so that we would not lose all these important emails. *wink* *wink*
They're just trying to do for the middle east crisis what Colbert was able to do for the elephant population.
Depending on your corporate environment, it can be a huge deal. If you're not properly staging the site/application on an equivalent platform that you are deploying to production you run the risk of major problems. I don't see why anyone wouldn't do this.
Time for you to upgrade to a text editor with good regular expression search and replace capabilities. I like Textpad myself.
I'm sure they were very embarrassed when they received that big "search and replace" bill for that month. Too bad those credits don't roll over from month to month.
That's still no reason to make your whole site one big table.
This is definitely something that should have been taken care of with CSS a while ago. There is a vertical-align property but only works in some browsers if you define the display property as table-cell or something like that. Another trick is to create three nested divs and set the top property to 50% and -50% for two of them. I forget the details but it's a pain in the ass to work consistently across browsers for something that used to be so simple before.
1. DW lets you code at the source code level if you choose.
2. DW is much faster--in Design View--at creating tables.
3. DW allows for flipping back and forth or split view.
4. DW does not rewrite your code (for the most part).
I use DW every day. I am not even conscious of flipping between the 2 views. Some things are done better in Design View and some in Code View.
CSS support is very good in DW. 1. Why use a heavy tool like DreamWeaver if you're mostly just editing the source directly?
2. Nobody uses tables anymore, at least not as much as they incorrectly used to before for formatting since CSS gives you a lot more control. This practice thankfully died out.
3. Alt-Tab is just as fast if you have your browser open, or multiple browsers. I usually check IE and FF when I'm working on layout.
4. For some people, even a little bit of code changes is too much.
If I'm working on a php or jsp page that retreives content from a database how does DreamWeaver get it? Does it have a php engine or a servlet engine? If I want to include a page fragement from a php or jsp page or text from a java bean can it do that?
Back when I was playing around with it, it couldn't do any of that. Even if it can now, I'm better off testing it directly in the servlet engine or php/apache setup I plan to deploy on to make sure there are no problems with db connections, unexpected session behavior, etc.
When dealing with sites that have a lot of dynamic content and or more complex interactive attributes, like more and more sites are having, DreamWeaver seems to get in the way for me. I have, on ocassion used it to generate the initial design and then cut and paste the pieces in the appropriate php/jsp files then work from there. It never seemed necessary though.
It's not a big deal to install Apache, mod_php, tomcat, database on a development server or even locally to be able to test things out in a real environment.
For simple sites, or for the initial design of the site it may have it's place but for me that's not worth the price.
Just because he said they hardcode the HTML, CSS and javascript doesn't mean they create each page from scratch. They have some sort of content management system based on a number of templates that do most of the grunt work.
I haven't used Dreamweaver in a while and it was only to check it out but I never found an easy way to easily preview dynamic content.
This is also how businesses appease a loud but small market segment. They make some noise, but don't actually do anything. When the hardware manufacturers don't comply, they can shift the blame on them.
No way of knowing what will really come of it.
It is like Richard Dawkins trying to debate theology, or George W. Bush trying to pronounce words correctly, or Charles Mansion trying to run the NAACP, or Adolph Hitler trying to run a Jewish Temple. It just does not make sense, and they are better off letting someone else not them do the job.
Or you trying to make an accurate point on
Table 5 on page 51 shows the breakdown by company for "Cost estimate for FLOSS code contributed by firms"
Total contribution from firms
Number of firms 986
Top contributors
Rank Name Person-months Cost (mil euro)
1 sun microsystems inc. 51372 312
2 ibm corp. 14865 90
3 red hat corp. 9748 59
4 silicon graphics corp. 7736 47
5 sap ag 7493 46
6 mysql ab 5747 35
7 netscape communications corp. 5249 32
8 ximian inc. 4985 30
9 realnetworks inc 4412 27
10 At&t 4286 26
I don't know if RMS ever said anything along the same lines or not.
MySQL had always been under a dual license and some items were available in the paid version that weren't available in the community edition. From what I've read, the changes being attributed to Sun were in the works before the acquisition.
Not sure why Sun always gets a bad wrap from the F/OSS community.
Novell made an agreement where SCO would be the licensing agent for SYSV Unix. For their services, SCO would get 5% of the licensing fees. Novell is claiming that SCO should have sent 100% of the fees to Novell and Novell would send back 5%. SCO did not send any of the money to Novell according to Novell's claim.
What would be interesting to see if after all this, will SCO sue Novell over the initial licensing deal because Novell didn't give SCO the necessary authority to properly defend licensing claims?
I had an epson photo printer for many years and always bought epson inks.
Then I found a link to third party inks at a great bargain. I bought 5 sets of color and black cartridges for about the price of one set of epson brand inks.
Within a relatively short period of time the print head got clogged up and the printer was useless. I tried everything I could to clean it, all the way to taking it completely apart. Nothing I did got the printer working again.
The printer was very old but never had any problems before. I think epson overcharges for ink but the third party ink cost me more. I wound up getting a color laser printer for normal printing and will be getting another epson photo printer at some point for photos. Though I mostly send out stuff to the lab since I prefer the tone and quality of lamda or fuji frontier prints over inkjet ones when I'm not printing them myself in my darkroom.
I agree. Databases are complex for a reason. These tools seem to try and hide this complexity through abstraction. In doing so you lose access to some of the great features of the underlying database, which may be fine if you're using some crippled version of a database, but with more advanced databases you're locking yourself out of some great db features.