The firings were illegal if they were done to interfere with prosecutions (like in the case of California Attorney Carol Lam who let go after prosecuting Duke Cunningham and apparently had other prosecutions against Republicans in the works, or like David Iglesias because they refused to prosecute Democrats when their congress critter called them up and asked them to). The justice department is supposed to be just that, a justice department not a political wing of the republican party that can be called upon when their dirty tricks campaign needs to disenfranchise minority voters who tend to vote Democrat. Iglasias is a lifelong Republican and he now believes people in the Whitehouse (mostly Rove and Gonzolas) should (and probably will) be going to jail for subverting the justice department. Republicans keep arguing that while the firings weren't illegal they just weren't handled properly (David Iglasias they claimed was fired because he missed to many days. The days he missed where because of his mandatory 40-day per year service as part of the Reserve) but if the attorneys where fired because they we conducting investigations into Republican congressmen, or because they refused to perform show trials against Democrats or harass minority voters to the point they are so scared to vote then it definitely is illegal. Why do you think that Monica Goodling took the fifth amendment? Why do you think that Gonzolas can't remember anything? Why did Karl Rove spend several days prepping justice officials before they came to congress? Why did they delete all the emails? If it was just politically embarrassing they would swallow their pride, get it over with and the story would die. No, this is part of the plan to re-elect the president (even if it isn't Bush) and has all the same smell of Watergate, although instead of a minor little B&E the whole system of justice has been gutted and turned into a Republican party office.
However most sites haven't supported it yet, I'm sure it will be a cold day in hell before hotmail and exchange 2000 web mail supports it, but complain loudly enough and maybe we can get yahoo, and other other sites to start using it.
Most of the points that the author makes are irrelevant, wrong or just plain silly.
1) IPV4 vs IPV6 - Well, eventually we will run out of IP addresses (yes, I know people have been yelling the sky is falling for years, but eventually it will happen) and all of the new routers will support IPV6 so a natural progression will occur. Is IPV6 harming me in any way? No, and am I glad that slowly IP Stacks are being written for it, and one day I will wake up and IPV6 will be a reality.
2) Apache 1.x really didn't need any more work, and yes, I don't use 2.x anywhere yet (mostly because PHP doesn't work seamlessly on it yet), but it is MUCH better for windows and eventually I know that I will switch to it. As long as people still maintain security patches and the like on the old version, kudus for the much nicer architecture on the old system.
3) Perl 5 vs Perl 6. Well I guess we will see how good the backwards compatibility is when it gets released, once again silly to argue against something that hasn't even been released yet.
4) Don't use emperl, so I can't comment on this.
5) Netscape 4 vs Mozilla. Netscape 4 sucked. It was a bane to all web developers that had to maintain pages that worked with it. Half-assed CSS, a terrible dom, nasty hacks to make DHTML pages half work, and it was hardly light weight. Mozilla Firebird works just fine on my old PII-400, much better than Netscape 4.6 does so the argument that it is poorly written in specious. The CSS/DOM support for it is fantastic, it is faster than IE on windows, plus has features like pop-up blocking and tabs that you just can't get for Netscape 4.x.
6) Obviously the author hasn't done any real web development, or creates nasty web pages full of font tags, etc. CSS was a great development, and XML and its related technologies (XSL, XPath, XQuery, etc) certainly have their place.
7) Windows 9x and ME are based on windows ontop of DOS technology, Windows NT/200x/XP are based on the New Technology and are complete rewrites. XP is not a rewrite of 2000, it is 2000 with a different Shell. 2003 is 2000 with a bunch of new features added as well as a completely new security paradigm (disabled everything and force the use to enabled features one by one rather than the old Microsoft paradigm of enabling everything and forcing users to shut down services as their security holes become apparent.). Re-writing windows 9x was one of the only good things that Microsoft has ever done. The old dos/windows kernal was about as stable as a two legged table with an elephant perched atop it.
In short, sometimes things shouldn't be completely re-written to save time and keep things compatable, but most of the time after 5-15 years of cruft being added to it, it is good to take a fresh clean start and get a well designed architecture in place that you can build upon. Examples of this include
1) PHP - PHP2, PHP3, and PHP4 where all complete rewrites of the lexical engine (they kept the functions, but the parser was completely re-written and everytime it has only improved things). PHP5 the jury is still out on (I haven't tried running our legacy code on it), and it is more of an evolution than a re-write.
2) Windows 9x - 2000 - Windows 2000 is a real, stable operating system rather than a cobbled together file manager/shell on top of a 16 bit joke of an operating system.
3) OSX - OSX is much more stable than its predecessors, and actually supports modern OS features like pre-emptive multitasking.
4) Mozilla - It took far too long (and basically killed the Netscape brand) but the wait was worth it. Much better browser than IE, and the old Netscape.
There are more examples, but they don't quickly come to mind.
* No namespaces (and they were dropped from PHP 5). include()/require()'ing a file just dumps its namespace into the big happy global namespace, and it's a freaking nightmare. Static class methods, and some of the syntactical sugar introduced in PHP5 solve this problem.
* OOP sucks. You have to litter &'s everywhere to get references, and lots of other problems that I'll refrain from typing out. Ok here's one -- how do you pass an instance method for use as a callback? Something like array($object, "method_name_in_a_string"). Good god.
No more &'s anymore in PHP5 all objects and arrays are passed as references. The rest of the whole OOP has made a generational jump as well, with private member variables, interfacs, abstract classes and destructors. Agreed that it was basically a functional language with OO tacked on in PHP3->PHP4 but, in PHP5 it actually has become an OOP language.
* No exception handling. Want to "handle" an error? Toss a @ in front of it, then you'll never see it. How helpful.
Exception handling built in to PHP5. Current error handling is done with set_error_handler(), which I agree is not the best methodology (exception handling would be), but it is certainly better than tossing an @ in front of the function call.
* Type handling is a nightmare, sure, they make it real easy for the newbies to use numbers-in-strings as numbers, but when you're not a newbie, you begin to run into issues where it's expecting you to be stupid and as a result ends up being stupid itself, and causing you to write disgusting checks just to make sure things are sane.
PHP5 now allows type hints for variables passed to functions. Also, how do you expect a loosely typed language to handle type handling? The type handling in PHP is far better than any other loosely typed lanaguage that I know of.
If you want some examples of well written PHP, take a look at PEAR. Granted not all of it is the best code in the world, but most of it is pretty well written.
PHP and IIS don't mix particularly well (search bugs.php.net for ISAPI and you will see what I mean, most of the PHP developers just aren't interested in building a rock solid ISAPI extension). They work fine together until placed under load and then you get random crashes all over the place (actually this is completely dependent upon which modules you use and has to do with the fact that all of the modules are not thread safe which they have to be for IIS -- but IIS and MSSQL does not work in ISAPI mode you have to use the CGI version which is not really a reasonable enterprise solution as it is far too slow especially with the fact that database connections are not pooled, etc). We have tried to get the FastCGI sapi running, without much luck but have heard that other people have had successes with it recently. Other problems with PHP and MSSQL is that PHP uses the old C interface to the MSSQL libraries which takes a lovely 200 millisecond speed hit if the query exceeds 512 Bytes (you might think that 200 milliseconds is not that bad but have 4 or 5 512 Byte queries on your page and see what your web page response is like) -- While this isn't the fault the the PHP authors (it is a fault of the ancient ntwdblib.dll library and happens when called from C), it makes MSSQL and PHP on windows a bad choice. Although I don't have much experience with PHP and Apache on Windows, PHP and Apache 2 are still considered alpha quality (on any platform) as well, and Apache 1.3 is not designed to run with any kind of performance on windows.
Of course, this is just my experiences with PHP on Windows, YMMV. Now that said, (running PHP on windows in an enterprise environment is not a good idea), running PHP for developing almost all other inter/intra-net operations is a great idea as long as your enforce some standards. PHP is a fantastic language, however due to its intrinsic nature of growing from an embedded HTML language it is very easy to produce very bad unmanagable code - and there are lots of examples of this throughout the web - so keep a strict coding policy manual in your shop.
>You can throw it on top of an application layer to do the real work. >Last I checked, you could only use SOAP to do this - has anyone tested how well that performs? When did you last check, PHP3? PHP has had a Java binding, a Corba binding, and a COM binding for years (since early PHP4). And you can extend PHP with C if you need speed (rather than a more robust OO environment), you can even write your c code inline with php (see Inline_C) for a cool pear package.
The added OO features (and more importantly for speed matters, the fact that objects are now passed by reference and not by value by default) are just going to be a bonus. Exception handling will be nice for large projects.
>Just curious, how can you have an object model without namespaces? Or interfaces for that matter?
The objects in PHP where initially just glorified arrays (like Javascript). However, interfaces and namespaces -- useful as they are -- are certainly not necessary for an object model. You can do very nice OO programming in C if you are disciplined enough. You don't really need the language to hold your hand.
It's simple to remove ActiveX controls (or as people have pointed out, COM components). </sarcasm>
From the start menu, select RUN. Then type "regedit" in the run box. Open up the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. Find the interface (this is not the name of the activeX control, or the the DLL but one of the objects that can be insantiated through the activeX dll, there can be many). Note: Only some of the entires in the HKCR hive are interfaces, they can be many other things. Now expand the entry and if it has a CLSID it is an interface. Write down the CLSID, and then find it in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID (this is another major entry in HKCR, this will be something like:
Now expand that branch and look for the InprocServer32 entry. If it is a single dll entry (foo.dll) then it will "probably" be in
/%%SYSTEM_DIR%%/System32
, but it could be anywhere in your path. Usually it will be a fully qualified path (unless it is a microsoft product).
Go the the command prompt and type:
regsvr32/u FULLY_QUALIFIED_PATH
E.g. regsvr32/u c:\winnt\system32\foo.dll
And that is it, simple n'est pas? (Yes there are tools to do this, or you could write one yourself). However, finding out what the.dll's actually do is a lot more difficult. Some vendors place a little bit of information in the dll so you can right click on it, and select properties.
WARNING: Uninstalling DLL's may cause (in)stability in your system. Even looking at the registry can cause the heavens to open and the sky to fall. Always backup your registry before booting up windows. And if you have to re-install the dll the above command without the/u will re-install it.
What I find interesting is the most compelling feature of Mozilla (at least the feature that I find most usefull) is the tabbed browsing, which is (sort of) an ancient Win16 feature MDI (Multi Document Interface) properly implimented. MDI was supposed to go away with the arrival of Windows 95 (at least SDI was the preferred look and feel that M$ wanted), however I wish that most applications (Word Processors, Spradsheets, Telnet SSH clients, etc) would impliment them. Also a standardized way to shift between tabs would be nice (I always find myself hitting Alt-Tab and find myself in the wrong app...).
And why do you think this is? It's because Microsoft wanted to embed the browser into the operating system. If they wanted to make the browser easy to install, without tying directly into the operating system, it would be done that way. People have managed to do it with Mozilla http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm . Heck the mozilla control even has basically the same API as the IE control so it could be a drop in replacement for the dreaded MSHTML.DLL (which has umpteen versions and you have to do a test in your code anyway to see what features you have available, etc).
In Canada Future Shop = Best Buy
on
Worst Buy
·
· Score: 1
Just a little thing for us Canadians to remember. Best Buy bought Future Shop last August (http://www.thestandard.com/wire/0,2231,23724,00.h tml) and completed the deal in November (http://www.newswire.ca/releases/November2001/05/c 3516.html).
A bunch of different OS versions, like say Windows 95, Windows 95OSR, Windows 95OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 95 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Data Center, Windows CE, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, and a bunch more on their way (Windows.Net, etc)...
The problem is that we can't buy the version of Windows that we want, just the one that M$ wants to sell us (see Monopoly in dictionay). If I could buy a version of windows with the NT core, DirectX 8A, Windows media codecs with the evil MediaPlyaer and nothing else (use Litestep as a shell, cygwin as a command prompt, Mozilla as a browser) I should be able to. But no I have to buy Windows2000 Pro as long as I can still buy it (I will never allow Windows XP near one of my machines) which I am paying for crap like the $2 billion R&D that M$ punched into IE, Active Directory, etc. Heck since I am not using 3/4er's of the functions, don't want them added, I should be paying less for my OS.
Can you imagine if you couldn't buy a car without Air Conditioning? You must have the Mag Wheels option and the Tow package? It doesn't happen in any other industry because there is competition...
>IIS can be made just as secure as Apache, and those that think it's security is flawed are doing nothing >but showing their ignorance of the product. Sure out the box it's going to get reemed, but takes no more 5 >mins (or 10secs if you saved a copy of the registry keys;) to tighten it up. Hmmm, another Slashdot reader not reading the article and the points like "Just last week, Microsoft announced that 10 new security holes (several of which were serious buffer overruns) had been discovered in IIS." It's not just the incredibly insecure default configuration that is the problem with IIS.
>ASP offers me pretty much everything I'd want from PHP except for easy dynamic image creation >(still possible, just not as slick) and cheap and easy dynamic PDG creation. Sure, let's see ASP talk to Corba or Java (PHP can talk to com as well, but..). There are so many built-in functions in PHP that for ASP you have to buy as COM components (Spell checking, PDF creation, Flash creation, Mail manipulation, I18n through gettext, Shared Memory and the simple ability to treal any HTTP or FTP address as a simple file).
Besides which, with Apache 2.0 you get stacked modules, and a control over the entire serving process that you can't even begin to dream of in IIS. Take your mod_ssi output and then pump it through PHP and ram the output through mod_gzip. The kind of power that is available now in Apache is amazing, plus Windows users aren't really second (well maybe fifth or sixth with Apache 1.x) class citizens anymore.
>As for costs... thats a non issue. What possible advantages does running apache on a Win32 box offer >me? I've already paid for the OS license, and I get IIS for free with it whether I use it or not.
If your running server, otherwise you are running PWS, which, well we won't even go there. With Apache 2.0 you have no real need to buy Server anymore unless you need the SMP features of it.
>If you wanna get down and dirty, you can still play with registry settings.
Yes, the joy of the windows registry. The reason to re-install your operating system every year. And people complain about Apache conf files, which are at least documented...
ASP has been available on Apache for quite a while. For Linux, Aix, Solaris and even windows. Costs a bit, but does have the advantage that you can swap all of your scripts over, for a much more stable platform, and if you run Windows Professional rather than Windows Server you certainly save a few bucks (the $500 for chillisoft asp is a lot less than the $1000 dollar difference between Win2000 Pro and Win2000 Server). Of course you can't actually run a production web server off of Pro due to Eula, but... You can also run asp on Linux, etc, however most real production shops that serve.asp pages have a ton of COM objects that would take forever to port to Java (now I understand why Micro$oft was so keen to do their N-Tier windows DNA with most of the business logic in DCom components on an application server somewhere, they realised that if ASP could be ported then realiance on Windows would be limited...)
I neither work for Chillisoft or Sun (who seem to own Chillisoft now...) Have only used the product once a long time ago, but I would certainly recommend looking into it for shops that are stuck on IIS. Anything to get away from evil IIS (which I am stuck working on now...)
This is exactly the problem. Forward thinking people build up a company up to a point where they either retire, are bought out, or forced off the board. Then then they bring in CEO's who instead of innovating, only understand merge and purge (buy new companies and amalgamate them into their structure by firing 3/4 of the workforce), and then they wonder why they don't have any successful products any more. Compaq has been doing this for years, they have killed off several successful companies, and now their only future is to get eaten by someone bigger than them. I hope for HP's sake that the merger/buyout failed, but if not if it doesn't I would dump any HP/Compaq stock I had now.
BDE is the Borland Database Engine. It probably is required by the program to run (or the authors are hiding their spyware as BDE), a lot of programs written in Delphi or C++Builder require this (for database access).
Real has long been spying on what you listen to, and practicing such general bad privacy pracices that I refuse to have even antiquited versions of the real player on my system. Even windows media player (before 7.0, which seems as bad as real) is better.
I mean, if you are installing freeware from a commercial company, buyer beware, you should expect that their may be hidden (or well disguised) nasty spyware there. It's like a non-technical friend who complains about all the virus's he gets downloaded warez from Morpheus, and asks me how to stop getting all of his viruses. Personally on Windows, I won't install anything unless I know a fair amount about the source of the software. One tip in 2000/XP is to run as a user rather than someone with administrator access. A lot of software won't install properly (needs access to Registry, and installing DLL's), but harmless, properly written software will (you can still write to HKEY_CURRENT_USER which is all most software should need, unless they have COM dll's to register).
Re:Salon lost major tech and street cred
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 1
It looks like Salon's business model has changed from Pay to Read -> Pay to Write.
Hmmm 12 bits in a byte? No, so actually we have 1.5 megabytes per second maximum transfer rate...
20 Gigabyte is acutally 20480 MB. Which gives us about 3.8 hours transfer at maximum rate.
Not that it really matters, you never get the whole thing transfered in under 5 or 6 hours anyway, but then again you would probably only do this once, and then add and remove music every now and then. The real problem with this thing is the size, not the USB port...
It was designed to be mediocre for a reason. IBM made a lot of money selling mini computers back then, and the previous PC designs came close to performing almost as well as the mini-computers. IBM didn't believe that the PC would take off in the way that it did (they didn't really see the PC market as that big of a market, and they where right until Visicalc came out), but it did believe that the PC's might take a huge bite out of its very profitable mini-computer market. Why would anyone spend $100,000 on a mini-computer when you can get something that performs almost as well for $4000? That was the mandate that was delivered to Phil Estridge, and he managed to stall the development of PC's for 5 years and allowed IBM to milk a lot of money out of companies purchasing mini-computers.
You mean that IE became better than Netscape about a year after Microsoft began giving the browser away, effectively cutting off of Netscapes browser revenue... Now, lets see. I am president of a company that is making a product that has been making a lot of money, and now I can't make any more money on it because my competition with an unlimited warchest is giving it away. Should I
Throw lots of money down the toilet on the browser because I know I won't be able to make any money on it.
Switch my focus to the currently profitable Portal and Server business.
That is why IE became such a better browser, because Netscape could not justify spending the half billion dollars on development and promotion of their browser when sales of the browser had been cut off as a revenue stream. Can't blame them, really.
I have to admit that it is interesting to see what Anders Hejlsberg (The senior arcitect behind Delphi) has been doing since Microsoft hired him away from Borland (other than the less than successful WFC - which will probably be the API toolkit behind C#). Since C# is supposed to have a virtual machine, I wonder why Microsoft would submit it to standards bodies. Does this mean they are going open it up? Wouldn't this effectively create another Java and all the problems that Visual J++ seemed to have been created to for (mainly, making Java only run on windows machines)? Or perhaps they will open the language up, but keep the WFC closed...
Slashdot Mirror
The firings were illegal if they were done to interfere with prosecutions (like in the case of California Attorney Carol Lam who let go after prosecuting Duke Cunningham and apparently had other prosecutions against Republicans in the works, or like David Iglesias because they refused to prosecute Democrats when their congress critter called them up and asked them to). The justice department is supposed to be just that, a justice department not a political wing of the republican party that can be called upon when their dirty tricks campaign needs to disenfranchise minority voters who tend to vote Democrat. Iglasias is a lifelong Republican and he now believes people in the Whitehouse (mostly Rove and Gonzolas) should (and probably will) be going to jail for subverting the justice department. Republicans keep arguing that while the firings weren't illegal they just weren't handled properly (David Iglasias they claimed was fired because he missed to many days. The days he missed where because of his mandatory 40-day per year service as part of the Reserve) but if the attorneys where fired because they we conducting investigations into Republican congressmen, or because they refused to perform show trials against Democrats or harass minority voters to the point they are so scared to vote then it definitely is illegal. Why do you think that Monica Goodling took the fifth amendment? Why do you think that Gonzolas can't remember anything? Why did Karl Rove spend several days prepping justice officials before they came to congress? Why did they delete all the emails? If it was just politically embarrassing they would swallow their pride, get it over with and the story would die. No, this is part of the plan to re-elect the president (even if it isn't Bush) and has all the same smell of Watergate, although instead of a minor little B&E the whole system of justice has been gutted and turned into a Republican party office.
Most of the points that the author makes are irrelevant, wrong or just plain silly.
1) IPV4 vs IPV6 - Well, eventually we will run out of IP addresses (yes, I know people have been yelling the sky is falling for years, but eventually it will happen) and all of the new routers will support IPV6 so a natural progression will occur. Is IPV6 harming me in any way? No, and am I glad that slowly IP Stacks are being written for it, and one day I will wake up and IPV6 will be a reality.
2) Apache 1.x really didn't need any more work, and yes, I don't use 2.x anywhere yet (mostly because PHP doesn't work seamlessly on it yet), but it is MUCH better for windows and eventually I know that I will switch to it. As long as people still maintain security patches and the like on the old version, kudus for the much nicer architecture on the old system.
3) Perl 5 vs Perl 6. Well I guess we will see how good the backwards compatibility is when it gets released, once again silly to argue against something that hasn't even been released yet.
4) Don't use emperl, so I can't comment on this.
5) Netscape 4 vs Mozilla. Netscape 4 sucked. It was a bane to all web developers that had to maintain pages that worked with it. Half-assed CSS, a terrible dom, nasty hacks to make DHTML pages half work, and it was hardly light weight. Mozilla Firebird works just fine on my old PII-400, much better than Netscape 4.6 does so the argument that it is poorly written in specious. The CSS/DOM support for it is fantastic, it is faster than IE on windows, plus has features like pop-up blocking and tabs that you just can't get for Netscape 4.x.
6) Obviously the author hasn't done any real web development, or creates nasty web pages full of font tags, etc. CSS was a great development, and XML and its related technologies (XSL, XPath, XQuery, etc) certainly have their place.
7) Windows 9x and ME are based on windows ontop of DOS technology, Windows NT/200x/XP are based on the New Technology and are complete rewrites. XP is not a rewrite of 2000, it is 2000 with a different Shell. 2003 is 2000 with a bunch of new features added as well as a completely new security paradigm (disabled everything and force the use to enabled features one by one rather than the old Microsoft paradigm of enabling everything and forcing users to shut down services as their security holes become apparent.). Re-writing windows 9x was one of the only good things that Microsoft has ever done. The old dos/windows kernal was about as stable as a two legged table with an elephant perched atop it.
In short, sometimes things shouldn't be completely re-written to save time and keep things compatable, but most of the time after 5-15 years of cruft being added to it, it is good to take a fresh clean start and get a well designed architecture in place that you can build upon. Examples of this include
1) PHP - PHP2, PHP3, and PHP4 where all complete rewrites of the lexical engine (they kept the functions, but the parser was completely re-written and everytime it has only improved things). PHP5 the jury is still out on (I haven't tried running our legacy code on it), and it is more of an evolution than a re-write.
2) Windows 9x - 2000 - Windows 2000 is a real, stable operating system rather than a cobbled together file manager/shell on top of a 16 bit joke of an operating system.
3) OSX - OSX is much more stable than its predecessors, and actually supports modern OS features like pre-emptive multitasking.
4) Mozilla - It took far too long (and basically killed the Netscape brand) but the wait was worth it. Much better browser than IE, and the old Netscape.
There are more examples, but they don't quickly come to mind.
* No class attributes, only instance attributes
Fixed in PHP5. Classes can have constants.
* No namespaces (and they were dropped from PHP 5). include()/require()'ing a file just dumps its namespace into the big happy global namespace, and it's a freaking nightmare.
Static class methods, and some of the syntactical sugar introduced in PHP5 solve this problem.
* OOP sucks. You have to litter &'s everywhere to get references, and lots of other problems that I'll refrain from typing out. Ok here's one -- how do you pass an instance method for use as a callback? Something like array($object, "method_name_in_a_string"). Good god.
No more &'s anymore in PHP5 all objects and arrays are passed as references. The rest of the whole OOP has made a generational jump as well, with private member variables, interfacs, abstract classes and destructors. Agreed that it was basically a functional language with OO tacked on in PHP3->PHP4 but, in PHP5 it actually has become an OOP language.
* No exception handling. Want to "handle" an error? Toss a @ in front of it, then you'll never see it. How helpful.
Exception handling built in to PHP5. Current error handling is done with set_error_handler(), which I agree is not the best methodology (exception handling would be), but it is certainly better than tossing an @ in front of the function call.
* Type handling is a nightmare, sure, they make it real easy for the newbies to use numbers-in-strings as numbers, but when you're not a newbie, you begin to run into issues where it's expecting you to be stupid and as a result ends up being stupid itself, and causing you to write disgusting checks just to make sure things are sane.
PHP5 now allows type hints for variables passed to functions. Also, how do you expect a loosely typed language to handle type handling? The type handling in PHP is far better than any other loosely typed lanaguage that I know of.
If you want some examples of well written PHP, take a look at PEAR. Granted not all of it is the best code in the world, but most of it is pretty well written.
Kris
PHP and IIS don't mix particularly well (search bugs.php.net for ISAPI and you will see what I mean, most of the PHP developers just aren't interested in building a rock solid ISAPI extension). They work fine together until placed under load and then you get random crashes all over the place (actually this is completely dependent upon which modules you use and has to do with the fact that all of the modules are not thread safe which they have to be for IIS -- but IIS and MSSQL does not work in ISAPI mode you have to use the CGI version which is not really a reasonable enterprise solution as it is far too slow especially with the fact that database connections are not pooled, etc). We have tried to get the FastCGI sapi running, without much luck but have heard that other people have had successes with it recently. Other problems with PHP and MSSQL is that PHP uses the old C interface to the MSSQL libraries which takes a lovely 200 millisecond speed hit if the query exceeds 512 Bytes (you might think that 200 milliseconds is not that bad but have 4 or 5 512 Byte queries on your page and see what your web page response is like) -- While this isn't the fault the the PHP authors (it is a fault of the ancient ntwdblib.dll library and happens when called from C), it makes MSSQL and PHP on windows a bad choice. Although I don't have much experience with PHP and Apache on Windows, PHP and Apache 2 are still considered alpha quality (on any platform) as well, and Apache 1.3 is not designed to run with any kind of performance on windows.
Of course, this is just my experiences with PHP on Windows, YMMV. Now that said, (running PHP on windows in an enterprise environment is not a good idea), running PHP for developing almost all other inter/intra-net operations is a great idea as long as your enforce some standards. PHP is a fantastic language, however due to its intrinsic nature of growing from an embedded HTML language it is very easy to produce very bad unmanagable code - and there are lots of examples of this throughout the web - so keep a strict coding policy manual in your shop.
Hope this helps,
Kris
>You can throw it on top of an application layer to do the real work.
>Last I checked, you could only use SOAP to do this - has anyone tested how well that performs?
When did you last check, PHP3? PHP has had a Java binding, a Corba binding, and a COM binding for years (since early PHP4). And you can extend PHP with C if you need speed (rather than a more robust OO environment), you can even write your c code inline with php (see Inline_C) for a cool pear package.
The added OO features (and more importantly for speed matters, the fact that objects are now passed by reference and not by value by default) are just going to be a bonus. Exception handling will be nice for large projects.
>Just curious, how can you have an object model without namespaces? Or interfaces for that matter?
The objects in PHP where initially just glorified arrays (like Javascript). However, interfaces and namespaces -- useful as they are -- are certainly not necessary for an object model. You can do very nice OO programming in C if you are disciplined enough. You don't really need the language to hold your hand.
It's simple to remove ActiveX controls (or as people have pointed out, COM components).
</sarcasm>
From the start menu, select RUN.
Then type "regedit" in the run box.
Open up the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. Find the interface (this is not the name of the activeX control, or the the DLL but one of the objects that can be insantiated through the activeX dll, there can be many). Note: Only some of the entires in the HKCR hive are interfaces, they can be many other things.
Now expand the entry and if it has a CLSID it is an interface. Write down the CLSID, and then find it in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/CLSID (this is another major entry in HKCR, this will be something like: Now expand that branch and look for the InprocServer32 entry. If it is a single dll entry (foo.dll) then it will "probably" be in , but it could be anywhere in your path. Usually it will be a fully qualified path (unless it is a microsoft product).
Go the the command prompt and type: And that is it, simple n'est pas? (Yes there are tools to do this, or you could write one yourself). However, finding out what the
WARNING: Uninstalling DLL's may cause (in)stability in your system. Even looking at the registry can cause the heavens to open and the sky to fall. Always backup your registry before booting up windows. And if you have to re-install the dll the above command without the
What I find interesting is the most compelling feature of Mozilla (at least the feature that I find most usefull) is the tabbed browsing, which is (sort of) an ancient Win16 feature MDI (Multi Document Interface) properly implimented. MDI was supposed to go away with the arrival of Windows 95 (at least SDI was the preferred look and feel that M$ wanted), however I wish that most applications (Word Processors, Spradsheets, Telnet SSH clients, etc) would impliment them. Also a standardized way to shift between tabs would be nice (I always find myself hitting Alt-Tab and find myself in the wrong app...).
And why do you think this is? It's because Microsoft wanted to embed the browser into the operating system. If they wanted to make the browser easy to install, without tying directly into the operating system, it would be done that way. People have managed to do it with Mozilla http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm . Heck the mozilla control even has basically the same API as the IE control so it could be a drop in replacement for the dreaded MSHTML.DLL (which has umpteen versions and you have to do a test in your code anyway to see what features you have available, etc).
Just a little thing for us Canadians to remember. Best Buy bought Future Shop last August (http://www.thestandard.com/wire/0,2231,23724,00.h tml)c 3516.html).
and completed the deal in November (http://www.newswire.ca/releases/November2001/05/
A bunch of different OS versions, like say Windows 95, Windows 95OSR, Windows 95OSR2, Windows 98, Windows 95 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional, Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Windows 2000 Data Center, Windows CE, Windows XP Home, Windows XP Professional, and a bunch more on their way (Windows .Net, etc)...
The problem is that we can't buy the version of Windows that we want, just the one that M$ wants to sell us (see Monopoly in dictionay). If I could buy a version of windows with the NT core, DirectX 8A, Windows media codecs with the evil MediaPlyaer and nothing else (use Litestep as a shell, cygwin as a command prompt, Mozilla as a browser) I should be able to. But no I have to buy Windows2000 Pro as long as I can still buy it (I will never allow Windows XP near one of my machines) which I am paying for crap like the $2 billion R&D that M$ punched into IE, Active Directory, etc. Heck since I am not using 3/4er's of the functions, don't want them added, I should be paying less for my OS.
Can you imagine if you couldn't buy a car without Air Conditioning? You must have the Mag Wheels option and the Tow package? It doesn't happen in any other industry because there is competition...
>IIS can be made just as secure as Apache, and those that think it's security is flawed are doing nothing
>but showing their ignorance of the product. Sure out the box it's going to get reemed, but takes no more 5
>mins (or 10secs if you saved a copy of the registry keys
Hmmm, another Slashdot reader not reading the article and the points like "Just last week, Microsoft announced that 10 new security holes (several of which were serious buffer overruns) had been discovered in IIS." It's not just the incredibly insecure default configuration that is the problem with IIS.
>ASP offers me pretty much everything I'd want from PHP except for easy dynamic image creation
>(still possible, just not as slick) and cheap and easy dynamic PDG creation.
Sure, let's see ASP talk to Corba or Java (PHP can talk to com as well, but..). There are so many built-in functions in PHP that for ASP you have to buy as COM components (Spell checking, PDF creation, Flash creation, Mail manipulation, I18n through gettext, Shared Memory and the simple ability to treal any HTTP or FTP address as a simple file).
Besides which, with Apache 2.0 you get stacked modules, and a control over the entire serving process that you can't even begin to dream of in IIS. Take your mod_ssi output and then pump it through PHP and ram the output through mod_gzip. The kind of power that is available now in Apache is amazing, plus Windows users aren't really second (well maybe fifth or sixth with Apache 1.x) class citizens anymore.
>As for costs... thats a non issue. What possible advantages does running apache on a Win32 box offer
>me? I've already paid for the OS license, and I get IIS for free with it whether I use it or not.
If your running server, otherwise you are running PWS, which, well we won't even go there. With Apache 2.0 you have no real need to buy Server anymore unless you need the SMP features of it.
>If you wanna get down and dirty, you can still play with registry settings.
Yes, the joy of the windows registry. The reason to re-install your operating system every year. And people complain about Apache conf files, which are at least documented...
ASP has been available on Apache for quite a while. For Linux, Aix, Solaris and even windows. .asp pages have a ton of COM objects that would take forever to port to Java (now I understand why Micro$oft was so keen to do their N-Tier windows DNA with most of the business logic in DCom components on an application server somewhere, they realised that if ASP could be ported then realiance on Windows would be limited...)
Costs a bit, but does have the advantage that you can swap all of your scripts over, for a much more stable platform, and if you run Windows Professional rather than Windows Server you certainly save a few bucks (the $500 for chillisoft asp is a lot less than the $1000 dollar difference between Win2000 Pro and Win2000 Server). Of course you can't actually run a production web server off of Pro due to Eula, but... You can also run asp on Linux, etc, however most real production shops that serve
I neither work for Chillisoft or Sun (who seem to own Chillisoft now...) Have only used the product once a long time ago, but I would certainly recommend looking into it for shops that are stuck on IIS. Anything to get away from evil IIS (which I am stuck working on now...)
This is exactly the problem. Forward thinking people build up a company up to a point where they either retire, are bought out, or forced off the board. Then then they bring in CEO's who instead of innovating, only understand merge and purge (buy new companies and amalgamate them into their structure by firing 3/4 of the workforce), and then they wonder why they don't have any successful products any more. Compaq has been doing this for years, they have killed off several successful companies, and now their only future is to get eaten by someone bigger than them. I hope for HP's sake that the merger/buyout failed, but if not if it doesn't I would dump any HP/Compaq stock I had now.
BDE is the Borland Database Engine. It probably is required by the program to run (or the authors are hiding their spyware as BDE), a lot of programs written in Delphi or C++Builder require this (for database access).
Real has long been spying on what you listen to, and practicing such general bad privacy pracices that I refuse to have even antiquited versions of the real player on my system. Even windows media player (before 7.0, which seems as bad as real) is better.
I mean, if you are installing freeware from a commercial company, buyer beware, you should expect that their may be hidden (or well disguised) nasty spyware there. It's like a non-technical friend who complains about all the virus's he gets downloaded warez from Morpheus, and asks me how to stop getting all of his viruses. Personally on Windows, I won't install anything unless I know a fair amount about the source of the software. One tip in 2000/XP is to run as a user rather than someone with administrator access. A lot of software won't install properly (needs access to Registry, and installing DLL's), but harmless, properly written software will (you can still write to HKEY_CURRENT_USER which is all most software should need, unless they have COM dll's to register).
It looks like Salon's business model has changed from Pay to Read -> Pay to Write.
Math Correction...
Hmmm 12 bits in a byte? No, so actually we have 1.5 megabytes per second maximum transfer rate...
20 Gigabyte is acutally 20480 MB. Which gives us about 3.8 hours transfer at maximum rate.
Not that it really matters, you never get the whole thing transfered in under 5 or 6 hours anyway, but then again you would probably only do this once, and then add and remove music every now and then. The real problem with this thing is the size, not the USB port...
It was designed to be mediocre for a reason. IBM made a lot of money selling mini computers back then, and the previous PC designs came close to performing almost as well as the mini-computers. IBM didn't believe that the PC would take off in the way that it did (they didn't really see the PC market as that big of a market, and they where right until Visicalc came out), but it did believe that the PC's might take a huge bite out of its very profitable mini-computer market. Why would anyone spend $100,000 on a mini-computer when you can get something that performs almost as well for $4000? That was the mandate that was delivered to Phil Estridge, and he managed to stall the development of PC's for 5 years and allowed IBM to milk a lot of money out of companies purchasing mini-computers.
Now, lets see. I am president of a company that is making a product that has been making a lot of money, and now I can't make any more money on it because my competition with an unlimited warchest is giving it away. Should I
- Throw lots of money down the toilet on the browser because I know I won't be able to make any money on it.
- Switch my focus to the currently profitable Portal and Server business.
That is why IE became such a better browser, because Netscape could not justify spending the half billion dollars on development and promotion of their browser when sales of the browser had been cut off as a revenue stream. Can't blame them, really.I have to admit that it is interesting to see what Anders Hejlsberg (The senior arcitect behind Delphi) has been doing since Microsoft hired him away from Borland (other than the less than successful WFC - which will probably be the API toolkit behind C#). Since C# is supposed to have a virtual machine, I wonder why Microsoft would submit it to standards bodies. Does this mean they are going open it up? Wouldn't this effectively create another Java and all the problems that Visual J++ seemed to have been created to for (mainly, making Java only run on windows machines)? Or perhaps they will open the language up, but keep the WFC closed...