I note that this is dated the same date as the update that fixes this.
We'll see what happens.
It's going to be one after another after another after another...
Is there a release of anything that isn't?
Drupal is no Nuke. It's been rock solid. Security lapses happen all the time, even with Apple (10.4.oops!). It's held up to quite a bit of use, with some big adopters such as Deanspace, Spreadfirefox, Kerneltrap, Yahoo. Nobody likes security breaches, but they are a fact of life. If you'd been working with the developers, maybe they'd have anticipated the xml-rpc issue sooner. I hope you'll download the tarball (available on their temp page) and see for yourself.
Is that a cvs patch? You and I both know that cvs risks instability because of constant meddling with the code. Patches get submitted by all sorts of people -- it's a mostly open community -- but only some get committed to head.
You and I also know that an open source software system is going to evolve slowly over time. If you're arguing against open source software, then I wonder why you're posting on this thread. If not, then what open source CMS/community software would you recommend over Drupal?
If you have a critique, then RTFC and point out the flaws. Everything else is just posing. There are plenty of posts here written that cite some high profile sites using Drupal that presumably would benefit from your insights.
And as I said before, if you have no use for Drupal, it's no skin off my back.
There are many excellent and rather honest discussions on this comparison, which happens more than any other on the Drupal forums. I'd point to them, but as the server is down.... You might Google it in a couple of days.
I hope many others got as much out of this discussion as I did. As the instigator, I thought I'd follow-up with what I did since submitting this question to Slashdot. I should note that I went forward without this sage advice, having visited this discussion only now (after Technorati so kindly reminded me). (You submit a story and then drift on, not hearing the echo a few days later.)
In the end, I went with Drupal. I like the clean code. I like the community. But also the decision was helped in part due to my not wanting at this time to change web hosts. (Call it laziness.) Mod_perl is a toughie for shared hosting, and that ruled out Scoop, which held a lot of appeal. Zope is not supported either (though Python is), so Plone was out. That left a ton of others, including WordPress, Typo3, and some of the others mentioned in this thread. In the end, I just wanted to go with something, knowing that no one CMS was going to be the panacea, and I am in this as much for learning and developing sites as for facilitating sites with existing needs using existing software. So I went with (eenie meenie minie moe) Mambo and Drupal for first tries.
Drupal went in rather easily on site 1, a community-type of site. Site 2 is a budding business site, though, and I thought I'd try Mambo there. Mambo, however, has proved to be a bit to "user friendly" for my taste, requiring not so much understanding of PHP, MySQL and CSS as how they've constructed the doors to achieving this or that. I like the end results of Mambo so I think I'll keep tinkering with it on an unlisted subdirectory, but Drupal has my first implementation focus.
Drupal still lacks some features I was looking for -- such as customizable/theme-able user blogs -- but there's a team effort to get those going, and I plan to do my part to the extent my skills let me.
This topic certainly has not been put to rest in my book. I've bookmarked this discussion and will investigate further all of your suggestions when I have more time.
A fair enough observation. I ended up going with Drupal. I like the code and I like the people. Do I fit into that community? You tell me. I'm there under the same handle.:)
As I suggested, this is the first time one of the Fix stories has moved fully into the mainstream media. In so saying, I'm not dismissing the blogosphere. Hell, I'm in the blogosphere now, and there have been nights when I've gotten far more web hits than television viewers (thank you, Debate Scorecard readers). Even the overt partisanship of blogs don't bother me - Tom Paine was a pretty partisan guy, and ultimately that served truth a lot better than a ship full of neutral reporters would have. I was just reading last night of the struggles Edward R. Murrow and William L. Shirer had during their early reporting from Europe in '38 and '39, because CBS thought them too anti-Nazi.
The only reason I differentiate between the blogs and the newspapers is that in the latter, a certain bar of ascertainable, reasonably neutral, fact has to be passed, and has to be approved by a consensus of reporters and editors. The process isn't flawless (ask Dan Rather) but the next time you read a blog where bald-faced lies are accepted as fact, ask yourself whether we here in cyberspace have yet achieved the reliability of even the mainstream media. In short, a lot gets left out of newspapers, radio, and tv - but what's left in tends to be, in the words of my old CNN Sports colleague NickCharles, a lead-pipe cinch.
Thus the majority of the media has yet to touch the other stories of Ohio (the amazing Bush Times Ten voting machine in Gahanna) or the sagas of Ohio South: huge margins for Bush in Florida counties in which registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans 2-1, places where the optical scanning of precinct totals seems to have turned results from perfect matches for the pro-Kerry exit poll data, to Bush sweeps.
Actually I'm surprised that more people have not sounded off on this here. It seems all this is not yet hitting people's radar. Personally I think governmental-corporate control of the internet is a pretty f-ing scary idea.
All of you cynics who are refusing to vote, congratulations! You're claiming all the rights of a citizen of Nazi Germany -- i.e., nothing! By staying home, you are doing exactly what many in power want. They want apathy. They want helplessness. Have you noticed that there are concerted efforts by certain parties to prevent people from voting?
The purpose of voting is to provide ballast against special interests. If everyone who could vote actually did vote, imagine the earthshaking implications -- not so much in this election (which I personally still consider EXTREMELY important) but in all elections in the future. If only a few people vote, then the powers only have to pay attention to them... and not to you. You bitch about government not responding to your interests and needs, and you guarantee it by not voting. You whine about your vote not making a difference, and you prove it by not voting at all.
What can your vote do? Well, for one thing it can cancel out one vote of some dumb ninny who is out there voting against everything you're for (whatever that may be). Sometimes you just do your small part, take out one ninny vote, and you've made a difference.
I imagine many of you will go back to your RPGs and 1st person shooters rather than vote. And you know what? In 4 years you'll pull your heads back out of your backsides and see that the government still isn't doing what you want. And it will be your own doing.
Get your butt out there and vote. If you bothered to register, you must have some inkling of giving a shit. I don't care whom you vote for. (Well, I do, but it's not for me to say.) If everyone who can vote does vote, at least we start to get a government that responds to the people instead of the special interests.
And you guys who really really really really just don't want to bother -- you're the ones who should really motivate and get out there. There are a lot of rabid knuckleheads trying to steal our country. Stand up and be counted. Or sneer your way right into a police state, a welfare state, a fundamentalist state, whatever (it doesn't matter, because you chose not to care).
Facts seem to have gone by the wayside in the press. And confusion about simple things seems to be the standard of the day.
I'm totally confused about all this. I know it cannot be copyright. And I think patent infringement would have to be proven in court before any governmental action. Which leaves trademark.
It costs something like $900 to register a trademark. I guess this shows you get your money's worth.:p
A T-Mobile dealer in a shopping mall was offering me the Treo 600 unlocked for $300. When the phones get pricier, or also serve as PDAs, the value of having one unlocked becomes more apparent and many cellular dealers use an unlocked phone to draw you into their service. It's no loss to them, since you still have to sign a contract, which is where they make their money.
Maybe I'm just too cheap, but $40 to be able to use the phone's full internet capability per month seems pretty outrageous to me, considering that's more than either my cable or DSL bill. Maybe I'm biased because I first saw T-Mobile's WiFi "deal" at a Starbucks in SF; $20/month in a city where WiFi is practically ubiquitous and free struck me as ridiculous.
If I were to open a coffee shop, the first thing I would do is install WiFi and offer it for free, just to help draw customers. I think Starbucks blew it on this one. All any competitor would have to do is offer free WiFi and Starbucks would lose a signficant part of their coffee-on-the-couch crowd.
It's double-talk. The problem is that AT&T phones have been locked into AT&T, so that you cannot take your phone to another carrier. That adds a barrier to switching and enforces loyalty. At least that's the theory. All the carriers do it.
I haven't seen any figures, but I have seen a lot of newfound rage against Verizon here and there of late. Their disabling of advertised features in a big-selling phone or two really ticked off a lot of customers. I considered switching to them, but their website is about as confusing as any cellular company's I've seen.
Customer service can improve or worsten with a simple and quick change in management priorities. But if you're getting dropped calls, that's harder to fix... unless a whole lotta people defect, thereby unburdening the overburdened, oversold cellular networks.
AT&T's GSM service is appalling. How is Cingular's?
This is off the top of my head, so don't hold me to it, but I thought I read in Wired like 2 years ago that DoCoMo was an AT&T partner. I wonder how that plays into this merger.
I think one thing to remember is that if Kerry wins, he almost certainly will be dealing with a Republican Congress. And that means that draconian anti-privacy legislation is unlikely to get a fast track from either party. And that is all good in my book!
The Treo 600 and 650 are worldwide compatible phones. But you have to buy an unlocked phone to be able to do this. Fairly easy hacks to unlock the 600 were out there pretty quickly, but one can assume the 650 will be a tougher nut to crack.
The GSM carriers here (T-Mobile, AT&T, for starters; I belive Verizon carries the Treo only with the CDMA system) sell phones with software locks that prevent you from being able to use the phones on any other system, even if you change the SIM. To buy the unlocked phone, you have to pay $100 or more extra.
However, deals can be had. A year ago a T-Mobile vendor in a mall was ready to sell me an unlocked Treo 600 for $300 (still contingent on a T-Mobile contract, but I wasn't even haggling because I wanted to wait for the next model). I bet a deal will be hard to find at first, but a little patience and shopping around could lead to a decent deal.
I like Mac OSX. I am typing this on my PowerBook. I hated the prior Apple OS systems for being narrow, overly simplistic and more unstable than anything Microsoft came out with. They crashed like a cuckoo clock! OSX is much much better. But I have to say I do not see Apple much in my future, except in peripheral ways.
The system is fairly stable. I've had some pretty scary disintegration moments, but running the hardware check disc has brought it back every time so far (knock wood).
But Macs have two big limitations:
1) Hardware. Having basically one source of hardware makes system maintenance a nightmare. In my 29-month-old PowerBook, so far I have had to replace the hard drive, DVD drive and keyboard. My firewire port also failed, which means at least $400 in repairs with an Apple certified repair center. I have had to resort to a PCMCIA firewire card. Obviously they are using inferior parts in order to shave off costs and maximize profits. -Which is fine, they're a business. But in the Mac world, they are a monopoly, and having no alternatives is a darned shame.
2) Software selection. With only minor indie apps out there, you're stuck with Apple programs and (unstable) Microsoft and (unstable) Adobe programs.
I am planning on building a turnkey HD post-production editing/compositing platform, and while Apple is somewhat competitive overall, you're stuck with the clunky klugy Final Cut Pro and an unreliable, hard-to-maintain hardware platform. I cannot go with Apple for this -- not when my business depends upon it. There are many competitive systems in the XP and Linux realm, many with much much better software and superior hardware performance, for the same or less money.
My old system is on NT4, is six years old and still is solid as a rock. If something goes wrong, I go on the market and find the best affordable component and replace it.
No, Apple is pretty, and I like the interface, and finding open source apps to run on it is a pleasure. But aside from perhaps a graphics and DVD Studio Pro platform, I don't feel I can count on Apple to give me the support I need to run a business.
AMPAS (the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences), aka "The Academy," has been watching and fretting over these kinds of developments in the music industry (--All the more so since this upending of the music biz is happening right after the studios (and/or their owners) spent a couple decades devouring just about every music company they could find and stomach.) There is a whole thicket of contractual and union entanglements with movies -- for example, actors in the Screen Actors Guild and directors and production managers in the Directors Guild of America see a large part of their income from movies (and commercials) in residuals paid out per airing on tv, video sales, etc. How Creative Commons licensing would work affect the Hollywood economy, I don't know.
From the corporate perspective, the Hollywood studios are starting off from a stronger position than the music industry, though. CDs were always easy to copy analog, but most DVD players will MacroVision scramble (possibly multiplied with other copy proteciton systems) a program so that the everyday consumer cannot copy it. Yes, there are hacks for these protections and codecs for pulling off the Mpeg-2 video into a DVD+/-R-friendly format. But it's not as easy as making a tape off an album was.
But it can't last. With digital television and broader-band internet (e.g., WiMax) coming, something is going to have to give. Mandating chips into players and burners only can go so far. It cannot last forever against the democratic marketplace of Open Source and Creative Commons economics.
But it will take time, and pain. For music, it's proving to be not as painful as it might have been for the musicians, though the tassled-loafer boys living in Bel Air might be feeling the pinch. But with movies, a lot more people are involved in each project. And what this spells for the big movie, I don't know. (If the blockbusters go, no real loss, some would say.)
We are in a time of upheaval, and one of the biggest sectors of our economy -- entertainment -- is going to be pretty much unrecognizable to our soon-to-be-outdated perspective in just a few years.
Bombs as smart as a rat
on
Flying By Brain
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My hunch is that these could lead to new, smarter bombs, cruise missiles etc., thus reducing armed forces recruitment demands while advancing the cause of the Crusade, which should please the Christian conservatives to no end. They can call the the control modules RABBAI SADs (for RAt Brain Biometrically Adapted Intelligent Stealth Aeronautical Devices), a name which would no doubt score points with the Evangelicals at the polls.
Slashdot Mirror
I note that this is dated the same date as the update that fixes this. We'll see what happens. It's going to be one after another after another after another... Is there a release of anything that isn't?
Drupal is no Nuke. It's been rock solid. Security lapses happen all the time, even with Apple (10.4.oops!). It's held up to quite a bit of use, with some big adopters such as Deanspace, Spreadfirefox, Kerneltrap, Yahoo. Nobody likes security breaches, but they are a fact of life. If you'd been working with the developers, maybe they'd have anticipated the xml-rpc issue sooner. I hope you'll download the tarball (available on their temp page) and see for yourself.
Is that a cvs patch? You and I both know that cvs risks instability because of constant meddling with the code. Patches get submitted by all sorts of people -- it's a mostly open community -- but only some get committed to head. You and I also know that an open source software system is going to evolve slowly over time. If you're arguing against open source software, then I wonder why you're posting on this thread. If not, then what open source CMS/community software would you recommend over Drupal?
If you have a critique, then RTFC and point out the flaws. Everything else is just posing. There are plenty of posts here written that cite some high profile sites using Drupal that presumably would benefit from your insights. And as I said before, if you have no use for Drupal, it's no skin off my back.
When it comes to Drupal, you're talking out of your hat. But it's of no interest to me whether you use it or not.
There was no date on the post you linked to, so I assumed you were referring to the xml-rpc issue. My mistake in questioning your superior intellect!
There are many excellent and rather honest discussions on this comparison, which happens more than any other on the Drupal forums. I'd point to them, but as the server is down.... You might Google it in a couple of days.
That was addressed on June 29th.
I hope many others got as much out of this discussion as I did. As the instigator, I thought I'd follow-up with what I did since submitting this question to Slashdot. I should note that I went forward without this sage advice, having visited this discussion only now (after Technorati so kindly reminded me). (You submit a story and then drift on, not hearing the echo a few days later.)
In the end, I went with Drupal. I like the clean code. I like the community. But also the decision was helped in part due to my not wanting at this time to change web hosts. (Call it laziness.) Mod_perl is a toughie for shared hosting, and that ruled out Scoop, which held a lot of appeal. Zope is not supported either (though Python is), so Plone was out. That left a ton of others, including WordPress, Typo3, and some of the others mentioned in this thread. In the end, I just wanted to go with something, knowing that no one CMS was going to be the panacea, and I am in this as much for learning and developing sites as for facilitating sites with existing needs using existing software. So I went with (eenie meenie minie moe) Mambo and Drupal for first tries.
Drupal went in rather easily on site 1, a community-type of site. Site 2 is a budding business site, though, and I thought I'd try Mambo there. Mambo, however, has proved to be a bit to "user friendly" for my taste, requiring not so much understanding of PHP, MySQL and CSS as how they've constructed the doors to achieving this or that. I like the end results of Mambo so I think I'll keep tinkering with it on an unlisted subdirectory, but Drupal has my first implementation focus.
Drupal still lacks some features I was looking for -- such as customizable/theme-able user blogs -- but there's a team effort to get those going, and I plan to do my part to the extent my skills let me.
This topic certainly has not been put to rest in my book. I've bookmarked this discussion and will investigate further all of your suggestions when I have more time.
Thanks to all for your input!
A fair enough observation. I ended up going with Drupal. I like the code and I like the people. Do I fit into that community? You tell me. I'm there under the same handle. :)
Actually I'm surprised that more people have not sounded off on this here. It seems all this is not yet hitting people's radar. Personally I think governmental-corporate control of the internet is a pretty f-ing scary idea.
All of you cynics who are refusing to vote, congratulations! You're claiming all the rights of a citizen of Nazi Germany -- i.e., nothing! By staying home, you are doing exactly what many in power want. They want apathy. They want helplessness. Have you noticed that there are concerted efforts by certain parties to prevent people from voting?
... and not to you. You bitch about government not responding to your interests and needs, and you guarantee it by not voting. You whine about your vote not making a difference, and you prove it by not voting at all.
The purpose of voting is to provide ballast against special interests. If everyone who could vote actually did vote, imagine the earthshaking implications -- not so much in this election (which I personally still consider EXTREMELY important) but in all elections in the future. If only a few people vote, then the powers only have to pay attention to them
What can your vote do? Well, for one thing it can cancel out one vote of some dumb ninny who is out there voting against everything you're for (whatever that may be). Sometimes you just do your small part, take out one ninny vote, and you've made a difference.
I imagine many of you will go back to your RPGs and 1st person shooters rather than vote. And you know what? In 4 years you'll pull your heads back out of your backsides and see that the government still isn't doing what you want. And it will be your own doing.
Get your butt out there and vote. If you bothered to register, you must have some inkling of giving a shit. I don't care whom you vote for. (Well, I do, but it's not for me to say.) If everyone who can vote does vote, at least we start to get a government that responds to the people instead of the special interests.
And you guys who really really really really just don't want to bother -- you're the ones who should really motivate and get out there. There are a lot of rabid knuckleheads trying to steal our country. Stand up and be counted. Or sneer your way right into a police state, a welfare state, a fundamentalist state, whatever (it doesn't matter, because you chose not to care).
I'm totally confused about all this. I know it cannot be copyright. And I think patent infringement would have to be proven in court before any governmental action. Which leaves trademark.
It costs something like $900 to register a trademark. I guess this shows you get your money's worth. :p
A T-Mobile dealer in a shopping mall was offering me the Treo 600 unlocked for $300. When the phones get pricier, or also serve as PDAs, the value of having one unlocked becomes more apparent and many cellular dealers use an unlocked phone to draw you into their service. It's no loss to them, since you still have to sign a contract, which is where they make their money.
If I were to open a coffee shop, the first thing I would do is install WiFi and offer it for free, just to help draw customers. I think Starbucks blew it on this one. All any competitor would have to do is offer free WiFi and Starbucks would lose a signficant part of their coffee-on-the-couch crowd.
If I go GSM, I'm definitely going unlocked.
Customer service can improve or worsten with a simple and quick change in management priorities. But if you're getting dropped calls, that's harder to fix ... unless a whole lotta people defect, thereby unburdening the overburdened, oversold cellular networks.
AT&T's GSM service is appalling. How is Cingular's?
This is off the top of my head, so don't hold me to it, but I thought I read in Wired like 2 years ago that DoCoMo was an AT&T partner. I wonder how that plays into this merger.
I think one thing to remember is that if Kerry wins, he almost certainly will be dealing with a Republican Congress. And that means that draconian anti-privacy legislation is unlikely to get a fast track from either party. And that is all good in my book!
The GSM carriers here (T-Mobile, AT&T, for starters; I belive Verizon carries the Treo only with the CDMA system) sell phones with software locks that prevent you from being able to use the phones on any other system, even if you change the SIM. To buy the unlocked phone, you have to pay $100 or more extra.
However, deals can be had. A year ago a T-Mobile vendor in a mall was ready to sell me an unlocked Treo 600 for $300 (still contingent on a T-Mobile contract, but I wasn't even haggling because I wanted to wait for the next model). I bet a deal will be hard to find at first, but a little patience and shopping around could lead to a decent deal.
The system is fairly stable. I've had some pretty scary disintegration moments, but running the hardware check disc has brought it back every time so far (knock wood).
But Macs have two big limitations:
1) Hardware. Having basically one source of hardware makes system maintenance a nightmare. In my 29-month-old PowerBook, so far I have had to replace the hard drive, DVD drive and keyboard. My firewire port also failed, which means at least $400 in repairs with an Apple certified repair center. I have had to resort to a PCMCIA firewire card. Obviously they are using inferior parts in order to shave off costs and maximize profits. -Which is fine, they're a business. But in the Mac world, they are a monopoly, and having no alternatives is a darned shame.
2) Software selection. With only minor indie apps out there, you're stuck with Apple programs and (unstable) Microsoft and (unstable) Adobe programs.
I am planning on building a turnkey HD post-production editing/compositing platform, and while Apple is somewhat competitive overall, you're stuck with the clunky klugy Final Cut Pro and an unreliable, hard-to-maintain hardware platform. I cannot go with Apple for this -- not when my business depends upon it. There are many competitive systems in the XP and Linux realm, many with much much better software and superior hardware performance, for the same or less money.
My old system is on NT4, is six years old and still is solid as a rock. If something goes wrong, I go on the market and find the best affordable component and replace it.
No, Apple is pretty, and I like the interface, and finding open source apps to run on it is a pleasure. But aside from perhaps a graphics and DVD Studio Pro platform, I don't feel I can count on Apple to give me the support I need to run a business.
I was talking about music, movies and television. It adds up to billions a year and is one of our biggest exports.
From the corporate perspective, the Hollywood studios are starting off from a stronger position than the music industry, though. CDs were always easy to copy analog, but most DVD players will MacroVision scramble (possibly multiplied with other copy proteciton systems) a program so that the everyday consumer cannot copy it. Yes, there are hacks for these protections and codecs for pulling off the Mpeg-2 video into a DVD+/-R-friendly format. But it's not as easy as making a tape off an album was.
But it can't last. With digital television and broader-band internet (e.g., WiMax) coming, something is going to have to give. Mandating chips into players and burners only can go so far. It cannot last forever against the democratic marketplace of Open Source and Creative Commons economics.
But it will take time, and pain. For music, it's proving to be not as painful as it might have been for the musicians, though the tassled-loafer boys living in Bel Air might be feeling the pinch. But with movies, a lot more people are involved in each project. And what this spells for the big movie, I don't know. (If the blockbusters go, no real loss, some would say.)
We are in a time of upheaval, and one of the biggest sectors of our economy -- entertainment -- is going to be pretty much unrecognizable to our soon-to-be-outdated perspective in just a few years.
My hunch is that these could lead to new, smarter bombs, cruise missiles etc., thus reducing armed forces recruitment demands while advancing the cause of the Crusade, which should please the Christian conservatives to no end. They can call the the control modules RABBAI SADs (for RAt Brain Biometrically Adapted Intelligent Stealth Aeronautical Devices), a name which would no doubt score points with the Evangelicals at the polls.