Dvorak proclaims the death of apple, combined with the death of video games, to cause a cascade failure and cause California to sink into the ocean.
Why is it that whenever I read Dvoraks stuff these days, I hear Dennis Hoppers voice...?
There's been a lot of conversation here about American vs British audiences, and how the majority of the Amercian audience doesn't "get" "British humor. I think that point is well made, but I'm curious as to how much the British "get" British humor. I never had the impression that Monty Python and HHGTG were overwhelming cultural smashes. Appreciated yes, but by how much of the population?
In other words, does Britsh humor (aka "intellectual" humor) have a smaller audience here simply because we have a much larger population, ergo more people without the faculties to appreciate more sublime humor (aka "dumb" people).
Or in still more other words, are the British fans just as likely to share the same attributes as their Amercian counter-parts? (people who are not exactly mainstream)
Trying being a Mac user... Every time someone in the mainstream press critizes apple, they get tons of hate mail saying what a boob they are for not automatically bowing before the magnificance that is Apple.
I'm a huge OS X fan, and its done my heart good to see more and more acceptence of OS X at the enterprise level, but problems still exist, and until they are worked out, I wish the extremists would just shut up.
Chad Dickerson writes a column for InfoWorld, and a few weeks back he mentioned some issues he has with OS X. He had the nerve to mention that perhaps OS X wasn't meant for everyone and got a firestorm of hate mail. His blog offers more detail:
I know exactly the place you are talking about -- I don't remember the guys name, but he was an avid collector who ran a route (people who put machines in bars, etc and split the money) and the warehouse was where he kept his stock, as well as some favorites. He partnered briefly with a good friend of mine who had brought out a very large collection from the midwest. They had monthly parties that were awesome for pinball fans, but not exactly open to the public. There was another guy who was part of that scene who also had monthly parties at his home, which was *packed* with pins...
webtrends (the small-business edition) is the saddest, most pathetic piece of software I've ever used. It has a 1.7 GB RAM requirement, and if you don't have enough RAM is corrupts your data. On top of which its horribly slow.
Urchin beat the snot out of it performance-wise, although web-trends does have very nice looking reports.
The only real issue I have with OS X and viruses is with MCSFT Word macro viruses. Its worth having something that can sort those bad boys out because they can be spread to other users. I have one user who is constantly propagating macro-viruses, but I think I found the solution.
I'm moving him to Apple's Pages software.
Seems to handle doc files just fine, and no macro issues.
IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and.Net when developing scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at scripting languages -- particularly PHP. This scripting language has been around for a decade now, and millions of Yahoo pages are served by PHP each day.
Discussion of PHP scalability reached a high-water mark in June, when the popular social-networking site Friendster finally beat nagging performance woes by migrating from J2EE to PHP. In a comment attached to a Weblog post about Friendster's switch to PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of PHP, explained the architectural secret of PHP's capability of scaling: "Scalability is gained by using a shared-nothing architecture where you can scale horizontally infinitely."
The stateless "shared-nothing" architecture of PHP means that each request is handled independently of all others, and simple horizontal scaling means adding more boxes. Any bottlenecks are limited to scaling a back-end database. Languages such as PHP might not be the right solution for everyone, but pre-emptively pushing scripting languages aside when there are proven scalability successes is a mistake.
Good book, better teacher
on
Learning PHP 5
·
· Score: 1
I was able to attend a "PHP Bootcamp", held by the nice folks at Big Nerd Ranch. David is an able teacher, and I would highly recommend the class to anyone looking to get a leg up on PHP. My only issue was that the book's answers to the chapter excercises were sometimes a bit more complex then they needed to be. More then just answering the question, David models good programming technique, which sometimes made finding the simple answer to "how do I do that?" a bit of a challenge. However, once the answer was determined, I find myself reviewing his coding structure more closely, making his book even more valuable. It might confuse the newbie, although anyone that sticks with it is probably better off for the expereince. David's also a co-author of the excellent "PHP Cookbook," whose other author wrote O'Reilly's "Upgrading to PHP 5." Frankly, I think all three should be bundled together in a "uber-set", as I found them to complement each other nicely.
("Upgrading to PHP5" has a very nice chapter on PHP and OOP)
and no, I am not related to David... I really do enjoy these books!
With regards to two threads that seem to running here: how easy is BIND to use and how easy is sendmail to use. Like most self respecting geeks I learned how to set and manage these services, but ultimately decided I had more important things to do with my time. For BIND I started using Mice and Men's QuickDNS, which (I believe) is built on top of BIND. Very Easy to use and their support rocks. I finally bailed on that and just started using the free DNS service my domain host provides. I just didn't need more then 8 different addresses to resolve (thank you NAT), so why bother? One less machine to run and service to worry about... Similar story with Sendmail... used it forever, but finally switched to CommuniGate Pro, which is way easier to deal with and runs like a champ. I've probably saved myself the cost of the license just in saved time alone, not to mention that now I can delegate some of this work to junior IT memebers.
I'm so tired of listening to the hordes of "comic-book guys" bash George. Making movies is hard. When you have your own successful series of movies, jump-start an entire industry, then you can bitch.
George is a really decent guy. For those who don't know anything about him beyond Star Wars, he's quitely helped scores of outside groups, treats his employees very decently, and is a good citizen.
Is Star Wars without faults? No. Do you have a right to bitch? well, yeah (this is slashdot), but unless you've done something equally notable, spare me your armchair quarterbacking.
Slashdot Mirror
Dvorak proclaims the death of apple, combined with the death of video games, to cause a cascade failure and cause California to sink into the ocean. Why is it that whenever I read Dvoraks stuff these days, I hear Dennis Hoppers voice...?
In other words, does Britsh humor (aka "intellectual" humor) have a smaller audience here simply because we have a much larger population, ergo more people without the faculties to appreciate more sublime humor (aka "dumb" people).
Or in still more other words, are the British fans just as likely to share the same attributes as their Amercian counter-parts? (people who are not exactly mainstream)
I'm a huge OS X fan, and its done my heart good to see more and more acceptence of OS X at the enterprise level, but problems still exist, and until they are worked out, I wish the extremists would just shut up.
Chad Dickerson writes a column for InfoWorld, and a few weeks back he mentioned some issues he has with OS X. He had the nerve to mention that perhaps OS X wasn't meant for everyone and got a firestorm of hate mail. His blog offers more detail:
http://weblog.infoworld.com/dickerson/001225.html
I know exactly the place you are talking about -- I don't remember the guys name, but he was an avid collector who ran a route (people who put machines in bars, etc and split the money) and the warehouse was where he kept his stock, as well as some favorites. He partnered briefly with a good friend of mine who had brought out a very large collection from the midwest. They had monthly parties that were awesome for pinball fans, but not exactly open to the public. There was another guy who was part of that scene who also had monthly parties at his home, which was *packed* with pins...
good times, good times....
webtrends (the small-business edition) is the saddest, most pathetic piece of software I've ever used. It has a 1.7 GB RAM requirement, and if you don't have enough RAM is corrupts your data. On top of which its horribly slow. Urchin beat the snot out of it performance-wise, although web-trends does have very nice looking reports.
The only real issue I have with OS X and viruses is with MCSFT Word macro viruses. Its worth having something that can sort those bad boys out because they can be spread to other users. I have one user who is constantly propagating macro-viruses, but I think I found the solution.
I'm moving him to Apple's Pages software.
Seems to handle doc files just fine, and no macro issues.
Tom Yeager wrote a column that you might find interesting: Welcome to the Mac, Oracle
from "The Top 20 IT mistakes to avoid" published by Infoworld
o p2 0_5.html
.Net when developing scalable Web apps are making a mistake by not taking a second look at scripting languages -- particularly PHP. This scripting language has been around for a decade now, and millions of Yahoo pages are served by PHP each day.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/19/47FEt
18. Underestimating PHP
IT managers who look only as far as J2EE and
Discussion of PHP scalability reached a high-water mark in June, when the popular social-networking site Friendster finally beat nagging performance woes by migrating from J2EE to PHP. In a comment attached to a Weblog post about Friendster's switch to PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf, inventor of PHP, explained the architectural secret of PHP's capability of scaling: "Scalability is gained by using a shared-nothing architecture where you can scale horizontally infinitely."
The stateless "shared-nothing" architecture of PHP means that each request is handled independently of all others, and simple horizontal scaling means adding more boxes. Any bottlenecks are limited to scaling a back-end database. Languages such as PHP might not be the right solution for everyone, but pre-emptively pushing scripting languages aside when there are proven scalability successes is a mistake.
I was able to attend a "PHP Bootcamp", held by the nice folks at Big Nerd Ranch. David is an able teacher, and I would highly recommend the class to anyone looking to get a leg up on PHP. My only issue was that the book's answers to the chapter excercises were sometimes a bit more complex then they needed to be. More then just answering the question, David models good programming technique, which sometimes made finding the simple answer to "how do I do that?" a bit of a challenge. However, once the answer was determined, I find myself reviewing his coding structure more closely, making his book even more valuable. It might confuse the newbie, although anyone that sticks with it is probably better off for the expereince. David's also a co-author of the excellent "PHP Cookbook," whose other author wrote O'Reilly's "Upgrading to PHP 5." Frankly, I think all three should be bundled together in a "uber-set", as I found them to complement each other nicely. ("Upgrading to PHP5" has a very nice chapter on PHP and OOP) and no, I am not related to David... I really do enjoy these books!
With regards to two threads that seem to running here: how easy is BIND to use and how easy is sendmail to use. Like most self respecting geeks I learned how to set and manage these services, but ultimately decided I had more important things to do with my time. For BIND I started using Mice and Men's QuickDNS, which (I believe) is built on top of BIND. Very Easy to use and their support rocks. I finally bailed on that and just started using the free DNS service my domain host provides. I just didn't need more then 8 different addresses to resolve (thank you NAT), so why bother? One less machine to run and service to worry about... Similar story with Sendmail... used it forever, but finally switched to CommuniGate Pro, which is way easier to deal with and runs like a champ. I've probably saved myself the cost of the license just in saved time alone, not to mention that now I can delegate some of this work to junior IT memebers.
I'm so tired of listening to the hordes of "comic-book guys" bash George. Making movies is hard. When you have your own successful series of movies, jump-start an entire industry, then you can bitch. George is a really decent guy. For those who don't know anything about him beyond Star Wars, he's quitely helped scores of outside groups, treats his employees very decently, and is a good citizen. Is Star Wars without faults? No. Do you have a right to bitch? well, yeah (this is slashdot), but unless you've done something equally notable, spare me your armchair quarterbacking.