I have to agree that this ask-slashdot question is silly.
Either do it or don't do it and stop bitching about the money. I run a big auction site and I probably could charge fees or membership dues or something to make money, but I don't. Just because you want to make money at something - or do it for a living - doesn't mean you can or will.
So my advice to these guys would be:
Get a day job. Focus on your career. Do the journalism website thing in your free time as a hobby. Don't expect to make a career out of it. In fact, don't expect to make any money out of it whatsoever. Actually - plan to spend serious cash going into debt over your project without ever recovering the expense. I"ve suck at least $25,000 into my project in the last six or seven years and I don't make a dime from it. I never expect that I will. In fact, I don't even care if it's popular or not. Everyone can just go away and stop using it and find another service for all I really care.
If you're doing it for any other reason than you like spending your time on it - give up and stop it right now. You will never enjoy what you do if your enjoyment depends on someone else putting up some cash. Because they never will.
And while I'm at it - be wary of anyone offering to help you out. I've had people offer to buy my site and keep me on "staff" to run it from the creative/coding end of things and let them "handle the business side". Um. it's a free site. There is no business side. I question the help of anyone who thinks there is a business side to it.
I actually did finally start accepting advertising - but only after five years of having a policy against it. And that was just because I was tired of spending a big chunk of my paycheck on it if I could maybe easily avoid it... but I would have kept paying if I had to, I guess.
Asshole. I totally had that written and formatted and copied and ready to paste as soon as the story went live, but then I got pre-occupied with.... uh.... something.
Please stop making crappy "literary cinema" out of crappy comic books. Most of us are not twelve years old any more. Please consider going back to making good, original movies instead of ripping off stupid ideas from stupid comic books that nobody outside of some dude's D&D gaming circle in his mom's basement knows about.
Oh wait, you never really did that in the first place. Okay -well, start doing the original thing for the first time at all, then.
Seriously - that Sin City is the best you've got is sad. It didn't suck, but it was little more than average. And you wonder why you're "losing" money this year.
I can't believe this "research" is considered so ground breaking.
Ask any attorney, judge, cop or crime investigator and they will tell you that victims and witnesses very often blow things out of proportion due to the emotional intensity of the situation. Suddenly that.38 looks like a Clint Eastwood 45 with a barrel the size of an A-Frame house. That 6' chubby guy becomes a 6'6" football player.
Even better, watch Mad Dog (or whatever that show is with the bounty hunter guy in Hawaii). He doesn't carry a gun. He comes up to his "victims" and shouts at them and draws out a large tank of mace and treats it as if it's a gun. His "victims" always seem to fall for it - not realizing it isn't a gun until it's too late.
And more than anything, who hasn't lost site after whacking off to furry-porn?
Are you suggesting we just give up? And that anyone who doesn't is naive? Do you apply the "get over it" wisdom to yourself? [slashdot.org].
No. I'm stating that walking around with a sign or a bumper sticker or a lapel pin or paying $50 to the EFF or ACLU means dick. The EFF and ACLU won't even stand up for a lot of people in many cases (think Mitnick for example). They're just a political machine like anything else. And if someone in this administration decided to do away with them by fabricating some connection to terrorist funding to shut them down, what are you going to do about it? What are they going to do about it? Take up arms? Or just whine and moan and nod to the talking heads on CNN and FNC?
You have precisely the freedom your government allows you and no more. What it says in the constitution means very little. If you have a population that is willing to take action at whatever cost to prevent or overthrow tyranny, that's great. But you don't have that in America. The almost exclusive majority is far more concerned with the price of gas, the cost of babysitters, violent videogames and Paul Abul's American Idol controversy. Even when you bring up issues of civil rights and protected liberties, they are glass-eyed and uninterested.
Are you going to form your own gun-toting Arizona Minute-Men to keep the power-grabbing arbiters of "freedom" from wresting it from us? Unlikely.
Okay, I'll tell you what - go pick up a gun and start a revolution. I'm sure everyone will be right alongside you. Wait - what? You're not willing to do that? Right - and neither is anybody else.
The only sure defense against a tyrannical government is a population that is willing to fight for what they believe in. You can only fight for what you believe in as long as they let you. Remember the "free speech zone" at the RNC? Was that in violation of a right to free speech and assembly and a right to demonstrate? Most likely. Did anyone do anything about it that made a different? No.
The fact of the matter is that if the powers that be decided, tomorrow, that there would no longer be a right to vote - for anyone - there's not a god damn thing you can do about it. Some politicians might try to fight it, but that's about it. What are you going to say "but it says I get to vote in the constitution!". So what? They're the ones with the politicians. And the money. And the military. And the police. And the guns. And the media.
Unless people are willing to stand up and fight in whatever way necessary and with whatever costs are necessary, they only have the freedoms that the government allows them to have. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. Look at Kevin Mitnick, for example. Was he denied his right to due process? Absolutely. Could he do anything about it? Nope. Did anyone care? Nope.
So unless you want to be the one voice out of a million that understands the situation and is willing to physically fight for it if push comes to shove, you're all talk. 95% of people couldn't fucking care less. In fact, a lot of them think that the measures limiting our freedoms are just great. Out of the other five percent, how many do you think actually would do anything more than send a check to the EFF or ACLU and spend their time chatting about it at the bus stop or in the office to people who either don't care or already agree?
Those who give a fuck are a vocal minority and this is not an age where the minority can afford to be vocal. You're a loud voice that's easy to pick out of the crowd. And when they come to your door to make you stop doing whatever it is they don't like that you're doing - what are you going to do about it? Are you going to some how stop the FBI or the CIA or your local police force from doing whatever they want with you by reciting amendments that mean dick to anyone but a handful of us?
I'd been looking at Rails for awhile, but I'm still unclear on how powerful it is. Sure, it will apparently run a blog - but will it run an auction site swiftly and reliably? And Rails (without learning Ruby in-depth first) seems like setting myself up for a catastrophe.
I had never heard of Catalyst before today, believe it or not. It might be worth my time. I know Perl fairly well (I don't think I deserve the Monk status I have on perlmonks by any stretch, but I'd say I'm somewhat beyond intermediate). That is a bonus. And if it will help provide me with a structure, it would be valuable.
That's what I really need (and I've said it several times in this thread, I know). I need to see "this is how it's done". Then I can do it. I'm great at taking off on something once I know I'm doing it the right way. it's the concern that what I'm doing, while working, might be fraught with pitfalls that an experienced programmer would laugh over and give me a list of everything I'm doing wrong. And actually, I'd LOVE that. I try to pick things up here and there, but sometimes you just need someone to set you straight so you can proceed with confidence.
Trying to pick up OO has been the biggest pain in the ass ever. So much so that I've started buying the "OO is useless in a lot of situations and is overhyped" line, just because it saves me from having to figure it out.:)
I get the gist of it. I can even semi-implement it. It was easier once I learned about singletons. But when it comes to doing OO in perl, it seems a case of "You know how to cook noodles, but depending on how you cook them you can end up with top ramen or something from Spago's".
Have you ever thought of open-sourcing your engine? If some of the gurus come by and optimize your code, you would benefit immidiately and learn quite a bit in the process.
I've considered it ever since I had the first version written a few years ago. Originally, I used some flat-files based auction system that (I think) might have been open-sourced. At least, at the time. Then they came out with a version that used mysql, but I had already started writing it from scratch on my own (mostly because I wanted the security of transactions which Postgres did and MySQL did not at the time).
I still think about doing it from time to time, but the biggest things stopping me are that I fear my code might be completely useless and nobody would want to expand on it and that I don't have the experience necessary to head, say, a project on sourceforge for it.
On the other hand, I've actually had people ask to buy my software. Or at least, have me set it up and install it for them and build them their own auction site (probably a couple dozen requests in the last three years). I barely have time to run my own site after work, much less help someone else - so I've declined. Plus, I don't want to charge people for what is essentially a bunch of crappy-ass amateur code.
If I had the money (my site is free - I don't make a dime) I would probably hire someone to help refactor my code and school me as they do it. Then I'd GPL it.
I know, I know... it sounds a lot like cleaning your house before the maid comes so that you aren't embarrassed by your mess...
And that's totally what my problem is right now. I can make things work, sure. I can make them work very well. But I have about 500k worth of code (my own - not counting imports and not counting HTML::Template templates) and while it performs well, it's a bitch to maintain. Especially since various aspects of the system tie together (which is where my interest in trying OO comes in). For example, I wrote my own forum software, image manipulation software (for resizing, watermarking, logo-ifying images), auction-tracking system, private-messaging system.. you name it, my system has it... and much of it is intermixed, which is why I've been refactoring my code in my free time.
But when it comes right down to it, it's a problem of "great - this way works - but is it the RIGHT way?".
And by "right way", I mean - is it the proper way as far as a design aspect. I'm not a child prodigy who has been writing code since he was 10 or something. Outside of Perl, my only experience is in being able to vaguely read C/C++ enough to debug things when presented with the source code and GDB/ADB/DBX and a core file.
Actually, I'm pretty familiar with mod_perl and could probably recite the red and white mod_perl cookbook front to back. But knowing the anecdotal performance increase that mod_perl offers and actually implementing it safely are two different things. Sure, I can take the cheap way and triple performance - but to do it the proper way is a tad more difficult. For one thing, if you're fairly inexperienced outside of Perl - how can you possibly be certain that your code is "clean" enough to run without incident in mod_perl? And it's difficult to hit it with the same degree of testing that it will see in the wild, where hundreds of users making thousands of connections might introduce strange glitches that you didn't see in your own direct testing.
My main intention for rewriting in another language (instead of rewriting in Perl) was that I expected another language to better prepare me than Perl has. In perl, it's real easy to make things work - but not always in the "best" or "proper" way. So you don't really learn anything of value. Something like Ruby (I presumed) would instill a structured knowledge that I wouldn't otherwise have gained.
The best Perl programmers seem to be guys who are from another language and have the foundation on which to manipulate perl to do their bidding in a really strong way. I constantly doubt myself with Perl, because I may know "how to do it" but I don't know if the way I'm doing it is "right". Even after four or five years. Short of going through a few years of CS to grasp programming theory and design, I don't know that I'll ever have that sort of strength. And, really, that's what has kept me from doing a switch to mod_perl (or even OO-ing my codebase for that matter) for the last three years.
Fortunately, pgpool increased my performance significantly about a year ago. Even with proper indexing, things tend to slow down a bit after a few million records in a particular table. My code is actually not all that inefficient. It really comes down to a concern of maintenance so I can continue to expand on things. Perl makes it very easy to do things the way you want to do them if you know how to do them, but as a first language, it's very difficult to figure out what the right ways to do them are in the first place. You don't have a rigid structure in which to gather the basics.
Just look at any discussion on OO with regard to perl, for example. Almost every discussion of it (including books) tell you how you can do it similar to C++ or Java. They tell you "it's just like doing it in this other language, except you do XYZ". Well, that's great. But there are a lot of people who aren't coming from another language and they don't need to know the 20 difference ways they can implement it. They need to know the proper way and they can expand on that once they have a clue.
I was going to bring this up in the thread about beginning programming the other day, but I came too late to the party. Hopefully someone can offer me some advice.
First, I'm not really a programmer. Not professionally, at least. I've been writing Perl for about four or five years, though. I'm not well-versed in OO and I'd like to be. I've just found it such a stumbling block in Perl and that's probably because I'm doing in Perl in the first place. It's the first language I picked up since I played around with BASIC and Pascal as a little kid.
I run a large auction site. Maybe 40,000 members. I wrote the entire engine (auction, forums - everything) in Perl. But it's getting complex and difficult to maintain as it is. And the performance is not holding up. I could move to mod_perl, but rather than re-writing everything (and possibly doing so in OO), I thought I'd just write it in another language.
I don't want PHP. So that leaves me mostly with Python and Ruby. I've done a lot of reading, but am not sure which would be more appropriate. I think Python might stick me back in the old "easy to do things wrong and blow your foot off" world of Perl. Ruby on the other hand would probably help me gain a better understanding and real-world use of OO.
Performance is an issue. So are available packages. My backend is postgresql and I need whatever language I use to have an extremely capable and flexible and mature postgresql DBI.
At the moment, I have to say I'm leaning toward Ruby. But it does seem that Python might have more mature packages available to it and be a bit more widely used. I'm just skittish because everything I've heard has given me the impression that it's very Perl-ish and if I'm going to be in that world, I might as well just stick with Perl in the first place.
Whatever your "expectation" may be, you have a right to jack shit. That's just life these days. Any pretense of privacy, presumption of innocence, independence and so forth is misplaced outside of a historical context.
All of these people jumping on the bandwagon are a little late. Whitebreads who are suddenly shocked into the situation because their precious little princess can't get on the airplane because the two year old is on a terror no-fly list or perverts who are shocked when someone turns them in for something on their computer or soccer moms who are upset when the cable guy reports to the TIA that there is "something weird about that person" are like firemen showing up to a pile of smoldering ashes.
Face it - people see the EFF, ACLU, NCAA and other organizations that have anything to do with free speech, privacy or freedom as "communist hippies" at best and "terrorists/sympathizers" at worst. Am I the only one who hasn't missed all the polls and commentaries from joe-random on the street who clearly states that the necessary cost of safety is freedom and that we have to be willing to give some of our freedom up in the modern world of "terror"?
We already lost. Your rights couldn't be any more flatlined.
Of course a lot of them are hypocrites, but that's besides the point when it comes to the political and religious aspect of condemning anything short of "This Little House" (or whatever that stupid little cartoon from the 1970s was that they showed kids at church). You can certainly count on a lot of those who are "morally opposed" to the things they publically oppose actually being quite enamored with it in their personal life.
If you want your child to be restricted to 10-and-under content, create a special domain that only has completely child-friendly content added to it. It's MUCH easier to define content that every age group can see than it is to define specific content that only certain age groups should NOT see.
Why should 100% of the internet be reduced to the level of what is appropriate for one small age group? And what nation decides what is appropriate for the entire world?
It's pretty easy to control what your kids access on the internet. Have the computer in a relatively open part of your house.
If you support freedom, free speech and the constitution, yes.
But they don't care about that. Remember, Bush has the support of the type of people that form organizations who then go and send a 250,000 complaints to the FCC about ridiculous things on television from three or four individual people claiming to represent the entire country. He has the support of people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who think 9/11 was God's way of telling us that lesbians are evil. He has the support of people who think that a flash of a boob with a pin-covered nipple for one second on television is going to harm people.
These are groups that want all "inappropriate" material to be done away with. It isn't a matter of "only adults should have this". It's a matter of "this is filthy and we should burn it". Politically, his most staunch supporters would see any step to set aside an area just for porn as condoning it.
Oh, and using the ESRB to suggest that this is just "a way of rating content" is silly. How are you going to rate content that belongs in.XXX universally? In Australia, it's not a big deal to show naked people on television (at least after a certain hour). I've heard the word "shit" on British television. In America, you can't even say "nuts" if you're clearly referring to testicles.
Would the web-equivalent of what you see on Fox News Channel be considered.XXX? I've seen film clips of chicks making out, Dr. Ruth and a news woman talking about vaginal dryness. Car chases. Discussion about beheadings. Half naked strippers sitting around and giggling with Donut Boy (Neil Cavuto). Not to mention stuff on the actual Fox Network. Or even the big three broadcasters.
Should I have to register my entire domain as a.XXX because I have a couple pages mentioning a wild party with some hot chicks I was at? Or because I have a webcam and my girlfriend happens to walk by it without a shirt one day? If some middle eastern country finds that showing a woman's face is pornographic and offensive, does that mean that any website anywhere in the world where a woman isn't clad in a burka belongs in the.XXX TLD?
Since Netflix rents rated R movies, does that make them an adult site? Do they have to become a.XXX? Does a medical website with photos of genitalia have to be a.XXX?
Is a website about boxing or professional wrestling acceptable, even though it "promotes violence" but a site about swimsuit models isn't? Is ICANN going to become the arbiter of what is is "adult" the world-over? Or is some American agency going to be responsible for that? If I'm Korean and I have a.COM site that someone in the US finds offensive are they going to seek to have me extradited to face charges in the United States?
What about Amazon.com? What about your local library's card catalogue? Both link to and provide adult content (everything from Fanny Hill to "art" books of lesbians in latex whipping each other and sex manuals). Do they both have to move into the.XXX TLD?
And, more importantly, if we MUST do something stupid like this, doesn't it follow more with the Supreme Courts previous rulings to have a.KIDS TLD into which only completely kid-friendly content can be placed? When regulating free speech, they've typically ruled that you must choose the solution that will least impact the freedoms and rights of the majority. Rather than sanitizing the entire internet for the sake of toddlers, it would be easier to sanitize a single TLD for them.
Anyway, in my entire life I've never accidentally come across mass quantities of adult material. Or any quantities really. You have to go looking for the content. If you're coming across hard core facial sites or something, it's because you're looking specifically for them or you're clicking on links at illegal warez sites. Either way, your eight year old is not going to "accidentally
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree that this ask-slashdot question is silly.
Either do it or don't do it and stop bitching about the money. I run a big auction site and I probably could charge fees or membership dues or something to make money, but I don't. Just because you want to make money at something - or do it for a living - doesn't mean you can or will.
So my advice to these guys would be:
Get a day job. Focus on your career. Do the journalism website thing in your free time as a hobby. Don't expect to make a career out of it. In fact, don't expect to make any money out of it whatsoever. Actually - plan to spend serious cash going into debt over your project without ever recovering the expense. I"ve suck at least $25,000 into my project in the last six or seven years and I don't make a dime from it. I never expect that I will. In fact, I don't even care if it's popular or not. Everyone can just go away and stop using it and find another service for all I really care.
If you're doing it for any other reason than you like spending your time on it - give up and stop it right now. You will never enjoy what you do if your enjoyment depends on someone else putting up some cash. Because they never will.
And while I'm at it - be wary of anyone offering to help you out. I've had people offer to buy my site and keep me on "staff" to run it from the creative/coding end of things and let them "handle the business side". Um. it's a free site. There is no business side. I question the help of anyone who thinks there is a business side to it.
I actually did finally start accepting advertising - but only after five years of having a policy against it. And that was just because I was tired of spending a big chunk of my paycheck on it if I could maybe easily avoid it... but I would have kept paying if I had to, I guess.
And to make sure they have plenty of tea forever, I suggest we start a "Teabag the British" volunteer campaign.
In Korea, only old people beat jokes into the ground.
In soviet russia, jokes beat you.
Hot naked petrified natalie portman oatmeal rental.
I'd like to see a beowolf cluster of dead beaten jokes.
This is hardly new. Slashdot has reported on this a number of times in the last... what... four years?
That's why all the guys who ran Enron and Worldcom are in jail.
Oh, wait...
Asshole. I totally had that written and formatted and copied and ready to paste as soon as the story went live, but then I got pre-occupied with.... uh.... something.
Shit.
Dear Hollywood:
Please stop making crappy "literary cinema" out of crappy comic books. Most of us are not twelve years old any more. Please consider going back to making good, original movies instead of ripping off stupid ideas from stupid comic books that nobody outside of some dude's D&D gaming circle in his mom's basement knows about.
Oh wait, you never really did that in the first place. Okay -well, start doing the original thing for the first time at all, then.
Seriously - that Sin City is the best you've got is sad. It didn't suck, but it was little more than average. And you wonder why you're "losing" money this year.
I use Packet8.net. $20/mo for unlimited to anywhere in the states and canada. Never any problems. Been using it for a year.
I can't believe this "research" is considered so ground breaking.
.38 looks like a Clint Eastwood 45 with a barrel the size of an A-Frame house. That 6' chubby guy becomes a 6'6" football player.
Ask any attorney, judge, cop or crime investigator and they will tell you that victims and witnesses very often blow things out of proportion due to the emotional intensity of the situation. Suddenly that
Even better, watch Mad Dog (or whatever that show is with the bounty hunter guy in Hawaii). He doesn't carry a gun. He comes up to his "victims" and shouts at them and draws out a large tank of mace and treats it as if it's a gun. His "victims" always seem to fall for it - not realizing it isn't a gun until it's too late.
And more than anything, who hasn't lost site after whacking off to furry-porn?
Are you suggesting we just give up? And that anyone who doesn't is naive? Do you apply the "get over it" wisdom to yourself? [slashdot.org].
No. I'm stating that walking around with a sign or a bumper sticker or a lapel pin or paying $50 to the EFF or ACLU means dick. The EFF and ACLU won't even stand up for a lot of people in many cases (think Mitnick for example). They're just a political machine like anything else. And if someone in this administration decided to do away with them by fabricating some connection to terrorist funding to shut them down, what are you going to do about it? What are they going to do about it? Take up arms? Or just whine and moan and nod to the talking heads on CNN and FNC?
You have precisely the freedom your government allows you and no more. What it says in the constitution means very little. If you have a population that is willing to take action at whatever cost to prevent or overthrow tyranny, that's great. But you don't have that in America. The almost exclusive majority is far more concerned with the price of gas, the cost of babysitters, violent videogames and Paul Abul's American Idol controversy. Even when you bring up issues of civil rights and protected liberties, they are glass-eyed and uninterested.
Are you going to form your own gun-toting Arizona Minute-Men to keep the power-grabbing arbiters of "freedom" from wresting it from us? Unlikely.
Okay, I'll tell you what - go pick up a gun and start a revolution. I'm sure everyone will be right alongside you. Wait - what? You're not willing to do that? Right - and neither is anybody else.
The only sure defense against a tyrannical government is a population that is willing to fight for what they believe in. You can only fight for what you believe in as long as they let you. Remember the "free speech zone" at the RNC? Was that in violation of a right to free speech and assembly and a right to demonstrate? Most likely. Did anyone do anything about it that made a different? No.
The fact of the matter is that if the powers that be decided, tomorrow, that there would no longer be a right to vote - for anyone - there's not a god damn thing you can do about it. Some politicians might try to fight it, but that's about it. What are you going to say "but it says I get to vote in the constitution!". So what? They're the ones with the politicians. And the money. And the military. And the police. And the guns. And the media.
Unless people are willing to stand up and fight in whatever way necessary and with whatever costs are necessary, they only have the freedoms that the government allows them to have. Anyone who thinks otherwise is deluding themselves. Look at Kevin Mitnick, for example. Was he denied his right to due process? Absolutely. Could he do anything about it? Nope. Did anyone care? Nope.
So unless you want to be the one voice out of a million that understands the situation and is willing to physically fight for it if push comes to shove, you're all talk. 95% of people couldn't fucking care less. In fact, a lot of them think that the measures limiting our freedoms are just great. Out of the other five percent, how many do you think actually would do anything more than send a check to the EFF or ACLU and spend their time chatting about it at the bus stop or in the office to people who either don't care or already agree?
Those who give a fuck are a vocal minority and this is not an age where the minority can afford to be vocal. You're a loud voice that's easy to pick out of the crowd. And when they come to your door to make you stop doing whatever it is they don't like that you're doing - what are you going to do about it? Are you going to some how stop the FBI or the CIA or your local police force from doing whatever they want with you by reciting amendments that mean dick to anyone but a handful of us?
I'm pretty sure most people figured out that what I meant to type was the NAACP. :P
I'd been looking at Rails for awhile, but I'm still unclear on how powerful it is. Sure, it will apparently run a blog - but will it run an auction site swiftly and reliably? And Rails (without learning Ruby in-depth first) seems like setting myself up for a catastrophe.
:)
I had never heard of Catalyst before today, believe it or not. It might be worth my time. I know Perl fairly well (I don't think I deserve the Monk status I have on perlmonks by any stretch, but I'd say I'm somewhat beyond intermediate). That is a bonus. And if it will help provide me with a structure, it would be valuable.
That's what I really need (and I've said it several times in this thread, I know). I need to see "this is how it's done". Then I can do it. I'm great at taking off on something once I know I'm doing it the right way. it's the concern that what I'm doing, while working, might be fraught with pitfalls that an experienced programmer would laugh over and give me a list of everything I'm doing wrong. And actually, I'd LOVE that. I try to pick things up here and there, but sometimes you just need someone to set you straight so you can proceed with confidence.
Trying to pick up OO has been the biggest pain in the ass ever. So much so that I've started buying the "OO is useless in a lot of situations and is overhyped" line, just because it saves me from having to figure it out.
I get the gist of it. I can even semi-implement it. It was easier once I learned about singletons. But when it comes to doing OO in perl, it seems a case of "You know how to cook noodles, but depending on how you cook them you can end up with top ramen or something from Spago's".
Have you ever thought of open-sourcing your engine? If some of the gurus come by and optimize your code, you would benefit immidiately and learn quite a bit in the process.
I've considered it ever since I had the first version written a few years ago. Originally, I used some flat-files based auction system that (I think) might have been open-sourced. At least, at the time. Then they came out with a version that used mysql, but I had already started writing it from scratch on my own (mostly because I wanted the security of transactions which Postgres did and MySQL did not at the time).
I still think about doing it from time to time, but the biggest things stopping me are that I fear my code might be completely useless and nobody would want to expand on it and that I don't have the experience necessary to head, say, a project on sourceforge for it.
On the other hand, I've actually had people ask to buy my software. Or at least, have me set it up and install it for them and build them their own auction site (probably a couple dozen requests in the last three years). I barely have time to run my own site after work, much less help someone else - so I've declined. Plus, I don't want to charge people for what is essentially a bunch of crappy-ass amateur code.
If I had the money (my site is free - I don't make a dime) I would probably hire someone to help refactor my code and school me as they do it. Then I'd GPL it.
I know, I know... it sounds a lot like cleaning your house before the maid comes so that you aren't embarrassed by your mess...
And that's totally what my problem is right now. I can make things work, sure. I can make them work very well. But I have about 500k worth of code (my own - not counting imports and not counting HTML::Template templates) and while it performs well, it's a bitch to maintain. Especially since various aspects of the system tie together (which is where my interest in trying OO comes in). For example, I wrote my own forum software, image manipulation software (for resizing, watermarking, logo-ifying images), auction-tracking system, private-messaging system.. you name it, my system has it... and much of it is intermixed, which is why I've been refactoring my code in my free time.
But when it comes right down to it, it's a problem of "great - this way works - but is it the RIGHT way?".
And by "right way", I mean - is it the proper way as far as a design aspect. I'm not a child prodigy who has been writing code since he was 10 or something. Outside of Perl, my only experience is in being able to vaguely read C/C++ enough to debug things when presented with the source code and GDB/ADB/DBX and a core file.
Actually, I'm pretty familiar with mod_perl and could probably recite the red and white mod_perl cookbook front to back. But knowing the anecdotal performance increase that mod_perl offers and actually implementing it safely are two different things. Sure, I can take the cheap way and triple performance - but to do it the proper way is a tad more difficult. For one thing, if you're fairly inexperienced outside of Perl - how can you possibly be certain that your code is "clean" enough to run without incident in mod_perl? And it's difficult to hit it with the same degree of testing that it will see in the wild, where hundreds of users making thousands of connections might introduce strange glitches that you didn't see in your own direct testing.
My main intention for rewriting in another language (instead of rewriting in Perl) was that I expected another language to better prepare me than Perl has. In perl, it's real easy to make things work - but not always in the "best" or "proper" way. So you don't really learn anything of value. Something like Ruby (I presumed) would instill a structured knowledge that I wouldn't otherwise have gained.
The best Perl programmers seem to be guys who are from another language and have the foundation on which to manipulate perl to do their bidding in a really strong way. I constantly doubt myself with Perl, because I may know "how to do it" but I don't know if the way I'm doing it is "right". Even after four or five years. Short of going through a few years of CS to grasp programming theory and design, I don't know that I'll ever have that sort of strength. And, really, that's what has kept me from doing a switch to mod_perl (or even OO-ing my codebase for that matter) for the last three years.
Fortunately, pgpool increased my performance significantly about a year ago. Even with proper indexing, things tend to slow down a bit after a few million records in a particular table. My code is actually not all that inefficient. It really comes down to a concern of maintenance so I can continue to expand on things. Perl makes it very easy to do things the way you want to do them if you know how to do them, but as a first language, it's very difficult to figure out what the right ways to do them are in the first place. You don't have a rigid structure in which to gather the basics.
Just look at any discussion on OO with regard to perl, for example. Almost every discussion of it (including books) tell you how you can do it similar to C++ or Java. They tell you "it's just like doing it in this other language, except you do XYZ". Well, that's great. But there are a lot of people who aren't coming from another language and they don't need to know the 20 difference ways they can implement it. They need to know the proper way and they can expand on that once they have a clue.
I was going to bring this up in the thread about beginning programming the other day, but I came too late to the party. Hopefully someone can offer me some advice.
First, I'm not really a programmer. Not professionally, at least. I've been writing Perl for about four or five years, though. I'm not well-versed in OO and I'd like to be. I've just found it such a stumbling block in Perl and that's probably because I'm doing in Perl in the first place. It's the first language I picked up since I played around with BASIC and Pascal as a little kid.
I run a large auction site. Maybe 40,000 members. I wrote the entire engine (auction, forums - everything) in Perl. But it's getting complex and difficult to maintain as it is. And the performance is not holding up. I could move to mod_perl, but rather than re-writing everything (and possibly doing so in OO), I thought I'd just write it in another language.
I don't want PHP. So that leaves me mostly with Python and Ruby. I've done a lot of reading, but am not sure which would be more appropriate. I think Python might stick me back in the old "easy to do things wrong and blow your foot off" world of Perl. Ruby on the other hand would probably help me gain a better understanding and real-world use of OO.
Performance is an issue. So are available packages. My backend is postgresql and I need whatever language I use to have an extremely capable and flexible and mature postgresql DBI.
At the moment, I have to say I'm leaning toward Ruby. But it does seem that Python might have more mature packages available to it and be a bit more widely used. I'm just skittish because everything I've heard has given me the impression that it's very Perl-ish and if I'm going to be in that world, I might as well just stick with Perl in the first place.
Thoughts?
You've never heard of mod_perl?
I'm pretty sure Amazon runs heavily on perl.
Best troll ever.
Whatever your "expectation" may be, you have a right to jack shit. That's just life these days. Any pretense of privacy, presumption of innocence, independence and so forth is misplaced outside of a historical context.
All of these people jumping on the bandwagon are a little late. Whitebreads who are suddenly shocked into the situation because their precious little princess can't get on the airplane because the two year old is on a terror no-fly list or perverts who are shocked when someone turns them in for something on their computer or soccer moms who are upset when the cable guy reports to the TIA that there is "something weird about that person" are like firemen showing up to a pile of smoldering ashes.
Face it - people see the EFF, ACLU, NCAA and other organizations that have anything to do with free speech, privacy or freedom as "communist hippies" at best and "terrorists/sympathizers" at worst. Am I the only one who hasn't missed all the polls and commentaries from joe-random on the street who clearly states that the necessary cost of safety is freedom and that we have to be willing to give some of our freedom up in the modern world of "terror"?
We already lost. Your rights couldn't be any more flatlined.
Screw you!
I'm an insensitive programmer, you insensitive clod!
Of course a lot of them are hypocrites, but that's besides the point when it comes to the political and religious aspect of condemning anything short of "This Little House" (or whatever that stupid little cartoon from the 1970s was that they showed kids at church). You can certainly count on a lot of those who are "morally opposed" to the things they publically oppose actually being quite enamored with it in their personal life.
I have a better idea.
If you want your child to be restricted to 10-and-under content, create a special domain that only has completely child-friendly content added to it. It's MUCH easier to define content that every age group can see than it is to define specific content that only certain age groups should NOT see.
Why should 100% of the internet be reduced to the level of what is appropriate for one small age group? And what nation decides what is appropriate for the entire world?
It's pretty easy to control what your kids access on the internet. Have the computer in a relatively open part of your house.
If you support freedom, free speech and the constitution, yes.
.XXX universally? In Australia, it's not a big deal to show naked people on television (at least after a certain hour). I've heard the word "shit" on British television. In America, you can't even say "nuts" if you're clearly referring to testicles.
.XXX? I've seen film clips of chicks making out, Dr. Ruth and a news woman talking about vaginal dryness. Car chases. Discussion about beheadings. Half naked strippers sitting around and giggling with Donut Boy (Neil Cavuto). Not to mention stuff on the actual Fox Network. Or even the big three broadcasters.
.XXX because I have a couple pages mentioning a wild party with some hot chicks I was at? Or because I have a webcam and my girlfriend happens to walk by it without a shirt one day? If some middle eastern country finds that showing a woman's face is pornographic and offensive, does that mean that any website anywhere in the world where a woman isn't clad in a burka belongs in the .XXX TLD?
.XXX? Does a medical website with photos of genitalia have to be a .XXX?
.COM site that someone in the US finds offensive are they going to seek to have me extradited to face charges in the United States?
.XXX TLD?
.KIDS TLD into which only completely kid-friendly content can be placed? When regulating free speech, they've typically ruled that you must choose the solution that will least impact the freedoms and rights of the majority. Rather than sanitizing the entire internet for the sake of toddlers, it would be easier to sanitize a single TLD for them.
But they don't care about that. Remember, Bush has the support of the type of people that form organizations who then go and send a 250,000 complaints to the FCC about ridiculous things on television from three or four individual people claiming to represent the entire country. He has the support of people like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson who think 9/11 was God's way of telling us that lesbians are evil. He has the support of people who think that a flash of a boob with a pin-covered nipple for one second on television is going to harm people.
These are groups that want all "inappropriate" material to be done away with. It isn't a matter of "only adults should have this". It's a matter of "this is filthy and we should burn it". Politically, his most staunch supporters would see any step to set aside an area just for porn as condoning it.
Oh, and using the ESRB to suggest that this is just "a way of rating content" is silly. How are you going to rate content that belongs in
Would the web-equivalent of what you see on Fox News Channel be considered
Should I have to register my entire domain as a
Since Netflix rents rated R movies, does that make them an adult site? Do they have to become a
Is a website about boxing or professional wrestling acceptable, even though it "promotes violence" but a site about swimsuit models isn't? Is ICANN going to become the arbiter of what is is "adult" the world-over? Or is some American agency going to be responsible for that? If I'm Korean and I have a
What about Amazon.com? What about your local library's card catalogue? Both link to and provide adult content (everything from Fanny Hill to "art" books of lesbians in latex whipping each other and sex manuals). Do they both have to move into the
And, more importantly, if we MUST do something stupid like this, doesn't it follow more with the Supreme Courts previous rulings to have a
Anyway, in my entire life I've never accidentally come across mass quantities of adult material. Or any quantities really. You have to go looking for the content. If you're coming across hard core facial sites or something, it's because you're looking specifically for them or you're clicking on links at illegal warez sites. Either way, your eight year old is not going to "accidentally