Well, that depends. If there is a central authority and each person has to get some sort of unique registration and provide proof of who they are, you would get one request from them an then block them FOREVER. Of course, that requires a central registry, and the communities past experiences with how DNS and SSL have been run certainly showed us that this is a mixed bag as well.
If you use the software in bad faith, you're going to get what's coming to you. I fail to see how this is a bad thing. If you're so paranoid, use the BSDs instead.
I like Mandrake a lot. We're currently running 9.0 and 9.1 on a few of our machines, but we're slowly moving over to Debian based distros. I'll give you a quick run down of why.
1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.
2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.
3. The big reason (for me personally), the Mandrake security model is totally whack. Once upon a time, Mandrake used to just run a nightly script which would email an audit of your system to the Administrator letting you know what was wrong. That's all it did, and that was nice. Now there's a set of different (horribly documented) security models that have all sorts of (horribly documented) behavior. I don't mind the security model idea, what I do mind is my system doing things for me (such as changing file permissions) without being explicitly told when and why this is going to happen. This has caused major problems for us on a few occasions and it's simply unacceptable. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place for the documentation, but I've tried to find it in the past with little success. I should have to go reading scripts to find this out.
What I've found is that with Debian I have a much better idea what's going on inside our systems. There are no surprises, things so far just straight up work the way we expect them to. We're competent programmers and system administrators, so this is great for us. If I were a newbie, I would definitely still recommend Mandrake. Whatever the security scripts are doing, it IS making the system more secure, but sometimes you don't want that.
If I wanted Mandrake to do one thing (short of switching to.debs) to get me back on the Mandrake train: Please explain in absolutely explicit detail the difference between your security modes. You *HAVE* to do this during the install process as well. If I'm rebuilding my firewall, for instance, I don't have the option to go out to the internet to find out what these things mean. This is a very important critical decision that should not be taken lightly. The only way we can properly make that decision is if the knowlege is made available to us when we need it most.
XUL is not a component framework, it's a javascript/xml based interface language that just happens to use XPCOM, which IS a component framework. XPCOM is very similar to COM+, with some of the more obscure cruft taken out and some things missing (like a global standard transaction manager and remoting support).
You make a good point, however, I just wanted to clarify what exactly XUL is, becuase it is definitely NOT a component framework.
Before you start bitching about Slashdot user's being hypocrites, keep in mind that Slashdot is a community filled with 1000's of a users who all have very different opinions on everything.
I do not support this ruling, because I do not support patents in any way shape or form. That does not mean the Slashdot community as a whole feels the same.
In fact, it's very hard to determine just what it is the Slashdot community DOES believe, because more often than not it's the negativity that makes it through the ranking system more than anything else.
Some people will call this a great victory for Open Source. I don't. I think it's a travesty, but that's my opinion and mine alone. Other's may or may not agree, but please don't let one person's opinion spoil your view of the entire community.
Nintendo: I'm your target market. I'm a 27 year old male, I have a LOT of money. I spend a lot on video games. I don't have a Game Cube and I don't want a Game Cube. Why? Your controller sucks and you've only got two games I want to play (Metroid and Zelda).
Stop making kids games. Start making games targetted at me. Until you do so, all my money is going to continue going to so Sony, Microsoft, and my PC. You can't win this war without my demographic.
It's not the fact that some people in France what to keep their language pure that bother's me (good for them, but good luck making it actually happen). What bothers me is when some govermnet agency decides to come in and start regulating this kind of thing (even if it isn't a law yet, it's only a matter of time if people don't fight back).
When the government is telling you how you should speak, well, you've got a lot more serious problems then what to call an Email.
The same way we transfer file data from an ext2fs file system to a fat 32 file system? Write some conversion code?
Now you probably won't get the ogg or mp3 conversions without a plugin installed, but you'll certain get all the important basics such as file permissions and ownership attributes.
I like this, VERY much so! Unfortunately, it's going to be a bitch to get everybody on the same page and moved over to a system like this. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just going to be incredibly hard.
We'll probably need to see a distro (probably Debian based since Debian based distros tend to do these things first) that purely focuses on stuff such as this. It would hopefully set the standard by which others would have to live by.
We'll see... too far down the road to know for sure though. Still some unanswered questions, such as performance hits and/or memory usage.
I have to disagree with you. I played with many a Team Fortress clan back in my day, some pretty damn good ones too.
Bunny hopping added a lot to matches, not the least of wich was they suddenly became more instense as the flag was that much easier to cap. One of the biggest problems with TF back in the day was getting past the snipers, and bunning hopping changed that from being nearly impossible to being almost possible. It completely changed the game, made it more competitive and better imho. What killed the game were the no-wall hacks.
Trying to find these creatures is like taking a needle and poking it into the ground blindly hoping you catch a specific kind of ant.
By that logic, if I found one fire ant in my entire history of poking the ground blindly I could assume all fire ants are endangered when they clearly are not.
Even if the species are something rarer, like, oh, say a stick bug, the likelihood of us having any kind of impact on their welfare is pretty minimal. I'd be MUCH more concerned about pollution and overfishing than this.
Re:Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 1
I took my first programming class when I was in the 6th grade (about 1968) and haven't stopped since (picking up a computer science degree along the way). I'm 47 now, which is about 300 in programmer-years, and I'm pretty much unhirable, in spite of the fact that I have spent something averaging 2 hours a day for the last 20 years on nothing but learning new stuff (that's in addition to putting food on the table USING the old stuff.) RIght now I'm making enough to get by doing contract work, but my chances of ever getting on with any large company (let's say any company that actually has an HR dept) are ZERO. And that sucks.
Seriously, start your own company or your own project. Even if you have to sell your shirt. If you've truly got the experience, and nobody is listening, then you should be able to run things better than them and blow their socks off. Find a couple cheap young programmers, a few of your well worn industry old-timers to help guide them and create create create! Be one of the few that helps change this popular belief.
The spam filter will delete *most* porns as soon as they come in
I take great exception to this statement! I used a combination of Mozilla's Bayesian filters + Spam Assassin for quite a few months (and I get on order of a 200 emails per day). I'd say on any given day a good 20% of the spam STILL got through. In fact, if anything spam assassin was better at identifying it, and after months of marking emails as spam I just gave up.
Now I only allow people on my white list to email me directly, I give every website a unique email address, and I allow emails that to:, from: or cc: the mailing lists I'm on.
Now I get no spam. It's the ONLY method that works.
Just because it doesn't have a pretty GUI doesn't mean it lacks value.
Ummmm... what kind of crack are you smoking? God, I would absolutely *LOVE* it if some of these crappy web based message boards *cough* Slashdot *cough* would provide a news based interface to their discussion boards.
I hate to say this, but even using Outlook Express to view Usenet discussions is orders of magnitudes better than dealing with these so called "web" interfaces.
That's great, except one problem... that doesn't always work.
Take my apartment, for instance: They're doing a LOT of construction just outside my apartment (one of the things they are doing is renovating the Chicago Real World house [which is freaking huge] into a Gym).
Now that the weather is warming up a bit, we are opening our windows a lot more. Yesterday, in the course of watching one movie (Commando for those who care) I had to get up and dust the TV screen 3x!
Preventative maintenance helps, but not when I have to get my ass off the couch 3x during the source of one movie.
What are you talking about? Have you played Vice City yet?
I love shooters and old Zelda games as much as the next guy, but let the truth be told: Every time I buy one I'm excited, I play it religiously for a day or two and then I'm back to playing more modern games like Vice City or Freelancer.
There are a TON of good games out there. Some of the best games ever made only came out recently, and things are only going to get bigger and better.
I have no reason to complain (other than the fact that game companies are making me go broke!).
Views on the push by the US forces ranged from "Hurrah, the people are free", to "Look how the Americans allow people to loot" - with all the channels showing the same footage.
I want to make one thing clear, the Military is NOT trained as a police force. They are trained as a killing machine to go out there and DESTROY the enemy, not police it.
That doesn't mean they can't get the job done, but when they aren't even fully deployed in Baghdad or Basra and the chaos of war is still ensuing can you honestly expect them to be able to police an entire society that numbers in the millions?
I know you didn't originally state this, but for those out there who did, let's be reasonable here. The military will get things under control and remove the power vacuum, but like all other things in life it's not going to happen over night.
Bryan
Re:Where is the unified database interfase ?
on
Introduction to PHP5
·
· Score: 1
I'm using ADODB myself. It's a lot like ADO for (what else) Microsoft products. It's actually quite nice in my opinion!
Ok, I got a little worked up. I don't mean to attack anybody on a personal level(and definitely not the poster of the original message).
I'm just sick of hearing that "so and so" language is no good and "so and so" (which unfortunately happens to usually be Java) is better. It's not true, and it just happens so often that it finally caused me to boil over.
To reiterate, the only language correct language is the language that allows you to get your work done and have fun while you are doing it. Nothing else matters in the long run.
Bryan
Re:PHP Is *not* an application server
on
Introduction to PHP5
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I was going to provide a quick and simple response. Then I decided to not get involved. Then I reread your post and couldn't help myself.
I'm going start out by getting to the point: Java is not the answer to everything. Not everything should be judged using Java as the standard. And finally, PHP is good enough for yahoo? Seems so: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963937.html?tag=lh
In the interest of full disclosure: I am a full time senior level architect/programmer for one of the largest mortgage companies in the country. Most of the work I do is C# with an XML+XSL frontend these days. I won't touch any Microsoft product for my own personal projects, so in my spare time I do a lot of C++, Ruby, Perl and PHP work. I've long since given up dealing with Java, although there are Java projects (such as Struts, Cocoon, and JBoss) that I deeply respect.
I don't even like PHP, but it gets the job done. It gets it done far quicker and far easier than Java and most other languages, and I've long since learned that worse is often better (ask the Lisp community if you don't know what that phrase means).
To start, I want to point a major flaw in your arguments: Most of these PHP sites are written by amateurs plain and simple. Even a lot of the bigger PHP projects on freshmeat are clearly created by people who do not have a wealth of knowlege, but in it's place have a lot of dedication. That's fine. In fact, that's the way it should be.
The web was built via the back breaking work of millions of amateurs around the world. These people have just as much right to participate in this medium as us professionals do. Without them the web would be a desolate wasteland of holier than thou illuminati. Instead it's a rich and beautiful medium of communication supported by everybody.
"I gave up... using shared memory was too tricky and isn't even platform independent. It's not part of the core language, and even if it worked, it would not turn PHP into an application. It still runs in a modular fashion."
Why aren't you using the session? PHP has supported sessions for sometime now. There's no reason for you to be touching shared memory in a language like PHP. Would you do the same in a JSP page? I think not... Maybe you have your reasons, and PHP session handling is certainly not perfect in all situations, but your lack of an explanation as to what you are doing leads me to believe you either did not explore all possibilities, or you are making judgements based on older versions of PHP that are simply not valid anymore.
For very simple things, that don't need to scale, both in usage, and codebase, then PHP is ok. But for design real web applications, which need to be managed by more than a few developers, integrate with legacy systems, implement a full three tier architecure, etc, PHP just doesn't cut it.
Please excuse my english: 3-tier architectures are overrated overrused bullshit. Everybody has a different meaning for them, everybody has a different use for them. The only successfull n-tier architectures I have seen (and this comes from years of distributed COM+ development experience) are those that follow this structure:
Client -> Provider -> Scarce Resource
Where client is typically the web browser, the Provider is typically your web server, and the Scarce Resource is typically your database.
Breaking that into more tiers is imho absolutely foolish. The extra code complexity introduced, the marshalling overhead, latency overhead, thread synchronization issues, deployment issues, and security considerations are simply NOT WORTH IT! Why? Because the ONLY thing that really matters in the long run are your scarce resources!! That's your database! If you minimize calls to your scarce resources, you will get MUCH better bang for your buck than through any other medium. You can always throw some smart caching in there somewhere, but caching is NOT the same as adding an extra
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that depends. If there is a central authority and each person has to get some sort of unique registration and provide proof of who they are, you would get one request from them an then block them FOREVER. Of course, that requires a central registry, and the communities past experiences with how DNS and SSL have been run certainly showed us that this is a mixed bag as well.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
If you use the software in bad faith, you're going to get what's coming to you. I fail to see how this is a bad thing. If you're so paranoid, use the BSDs instead.
At $1000/email there's a LOT of money to motivate people to do the grunt work. That's a huge payout, and we know how Lawyer's like that.
Turn the graphics settings down.
I like Mandrake a lot. We're currently running 9.0 and 9.1 on a few of our machines, but we're slowly moving over to Debian based distros. I'll give you a quick run down of why.
.debs) to get me back on the Mandrake train: Please explain in absolutely explicit detail the difference between your security modes. You *HAVE* to do this during the install process as well. If I'm rebuilding my firewall, for instance, I don't have the option to go out to the internet to find out what these things mean. This is a very important critical decision that should not be taken lightly. The only way we can properly make that decision is if the knowlege is made available to us when we need it most.
1. We're sick of RPM. We've hard RPM break on a few machines already (I think the RPM database becomes corrupted if I remember correctly). Needless to say, it's hard to upgrade your machine when your package manager goes kaput. APT/debs are SO much easier to deal with anyway.
2. Too much crap! Literally, Mandrake has TOO MUCH crap these days. I know Debian is hardly innocent, but the dependency train for whatever reason seems to be much more palatable when using Debian as opposed to Mandrake. Maybe it's all the package/package-dev combo packs that the Mandrake/RedHat people like, I'm not entirely sure. It's just too much honestly. Let me install mySQL and be done with it.
3. The big reason (for me personally), the Mandrake security model is totally whack. Once upon a time, Mandrake used to just run a nightly script which would email an audit of your system to the Administrator letting you know what was wrong. That's all it did, and that was nice. Now there's a set of different (horribly documented) security models that have all sorts of (horribly documented) behavior. I don't mind the security model idea, what I do mind is my system doing things for me (such as changing file permissions) without being explicitly told when and why this is going to happen. This has caused major problems for us on a few occasions and it's simply unacceptable. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place for the documentation, but I've tried to find it in the past with little success. I should have to go reading scripts to find this out.
What I've found is that with Debian I have a much better idea what's going on inside our systems. There are no surprises, things so far just straight up work the way we expect them to. We're competent programmers and system administrators, so this is great for us. If I were a newbie, I would definitely still recommend Mandrake. Whatever the security scripts are doing, it IS making the system more secure, but sometimes you don't want that.
If I wanted Mandrake to do one thing (short of switching to
Bryan
XUL is not a component framework, it's a javascript/xml based interface language that just happens to use XPCOM, which IS a component framework. XPCOM is very similar to COM+, with some of the more obscure cruft taken out and some things missing (like a global standard transaction manager and remoting support).
You make a good point, however, I just wanted to clarify what exactly XUL is, becuase it is definitely NOT a component framework.
Bryan
Before you start bitching about Slashdot user's being hypocrites, keep in mind that Slashdot is a community filled with 1000's of a users who all have very different opinions on everything.
I do not support this ruling, because I do not support patents in any way shape or form. That does not mean the Slashdot community as a whole feels the same.
In fact, it's very hard to determine just what it is the Slashdot community DOES believe, because more often than not it's the negativity that makes it through the ranking system more than anything else.
Some people will call this a great victory for Open Source. I don't. I think it's a travesty, but that's my opinion and mine alone. Other's may or may not agree, but please don't let one person's opinion spoil your view of the entire community.
Bryan
Nintendo: I'm your target market. I'm a 27 year old male, I have a LOT of money. I spend a lot on video games. I don't have a Game Cube and I don't want a Game Cube. Why? Your controller sucks and you've only got two games I want to play (Metroid and Zelda).
Stop making kids games. Start making games targetted at me. Until you do so, all my money is going to continue going to so Sony, Microsoft, and my PC. You can't win this war without my demographic.
Hah, good, this is what I like to hear.
It's not the fact that some people in France what to keep their language pure that bother's me (good for them, but good luck making it actually happen). What bothers me is when some govermnet agency decides to come in and start regulating this kind of thing (even if it isn't a law yet, it's only a matter of time if people don't fight back).
When the government is telling you how you should speak, well, you've got a lot more serious problems then what to call an Email.
ummm....
The same way we transfer file data from an ext2fs file system to a fat 32 file system? Write some conversion code?
Now you probably won't get the ogg or mp3 conversions without a plugin installed, but you'll certain get all the important basics such as file permissions and ownership attributes.
I like this, VERY much so! Unfortunately, it's going to be a bitch to get everybody on the same page and moved over to a system like this. I'm not saying it's impossible, it's just going to be incredibly hard.
We'll probably need to see a distro (probably Debian based since Debian based distros tend to do these things first) that purely focuses on stuff such as this. It would hopefully set the standard by which others would have to live by.
We'll see... too far down the road to know for sure though. Still some unanswered questions, such as performance hits and/or memory usage.
I have to disagree with you. I played with many a Team Fortress clan back in my day, some pretty damn good ones too.
Bunny hopping added a lot to matches, not the least of wich was they suddenly became more instense as the flag was that much easier to cap. One of the biggest problems with TF back in the day was getting past the snipers, and bunning hopping changed that from being nearly impossible to being almost possible. It completely changed the game, made it more competitive and better imho. What killed the game were the no-wall hacks.
Ok, let's give this a little perspective...
Trying to find these creatures is like taking a needle and poking it into the ground blindly hoping you catch a specific kind of ant.
By that logic, if I found one fire ant in my entire history of poking the ground blindly I could assume all fire ants are endangered when they clearly are not.
Even if the species are something rarer, like, oh, say a stick bug, the likelihood of us having any kind of impact on their welfare is pretty minimal. I'd be MUCH more concerned about pollution and overfishing than this.
Bryan
http://www.interakt.ro/products/Krysalis/
You can also use PHP as a generator in Cocon.
I took my first programming class when I was in the 6th grade (about 1968) and haven't stopped since (picking up a computer science degree along the way). I'm 47 now, which is about 300 in programmer-years, and I'm pretty much unhirable, in spite of the fact that I have spent something averaging 2 hours a day for the last 20 years on nothing but learning new stuff (that's in addition to putting food on the table USING the old stuff.) RIght now I'm making enough to get by doing contract work, but my chances of ever getting on with any large company (let's say any company that actually has an HR dept) are ZERO. And that sucks.
Seriously, start your own company or your own project. Even if you have to sell your shirt. If you've truly got the experience, and nobody is listening, then you should be able to run things better than them and blow their socks off. Find a couple cheap young programmers, a few of your well worn industry old-timers to help guide them and create create create! Be one of the few that helps change this popular belief.
The spam filter will delete *most* porns as soon as they come in
I take great exception to this statement! I used a combination of Mozilla's Bayesian filters + Spam Assassin for quite a few months (and I get on order of a 200 emails per day). I'd say on any given day a good 20% of the spam STILL got through. In fact, if anything spam assassin was better at identifying it, and after months of marking emails as spam I just gave up.
Now I only allow people on my white list to email me directly, I give every website a unique email address, and I allow emails that to:, from: or cc: the mailing lists I'm on.
Now I get no spam. It's the ONLY method that works.
Bryan
*ANYTHING* that improves the current situation is a good thing.
Nice idea, though not really new. I frequently use my own directory structures on my systems to organize things better.
:)
My only comment: the directories should be lowercase. Why? Because it's easier to type, no other reason!
Bryan
Just because it doesn't have a pretty GUI doesn't mean it lacks value.
Ummmm... what kind of crack are you smoking? God, I would absolutely *LOVE* it if some of these crappy web based message boards *cough* Slashdot *cough* would provide a news based interface to their discussion boards.
I hate to say this, but even using Outlook Express to view Usenet discussions is orders of magnitudes better than dealing with these so called "web" interfaces.
Usenet GUI's are NICE. Web GUI's are NOT.
Bryan
That's great, except one problem... that doesn't always work.
Take my apartment, for instance: They're doing a LOT of construction just outside my apartment (one of the things they are doing is renovating the Chicago Real World house [which is freaking huge] into a Gym).
Now that the weather is warming up a bit, we are opening our windows a lot more. Yesterday, in the course of watching one movie (Commando for those who care) I had to get up and dust the TV screen 3x!
Preventative maintenance helps, but not when I have to get my ass off the couch 3x during the source of one movie.
Bryan
What are you talking about? Have you played Vice City yet?
I love shooters and old Zelda games as much as the next guy, but let the truth be told: Every time I buy one I'm excited, I play it religiously for a day or two and then I'm back to playing more modern games like Vice City or Freelancer.
There are a TON of good games out there. Some of the best games ever made only came out recently, and things are only going to get bigger and better.
I have no reason to complain (other than the fact that game companies are making me go broke!).
Bryan
Views on the push by the US forces ranged from "Hurrah, the people are free", to "Look how the Americans allow people to loot" - with all the channels showing the same footage.
I want to make one thing clear, the Military is NOT trained as a police force. They are trained as a killing machine to go out there and DESTROY the enemy, not police it.
That doesn't mean they can't get the job done, but when they aren't even fully deployed in Baghdad or Basra and the chaos of war is still ensuing can you honestly expect them to be able to police an entire society that numbers in the millions?
I know you didn't originally state this, but for those out there who did, let's be reasonable here. The military will get things under control and remove the power vacuum, but like all other things in life it's not going to happen over night.
Bryan
I'm using ADODB myself. It's a lot like ADO for (what else) Microsoft products. It's actually quite nice in my opinion!
http://php.weblogs.com/ADODB
Ok, I got a little worked up. I don't mean to attack anybody on a personal level(and definitely not the poster of the original message).
I'm just sick of hearing that "so and so" language is no good and "so and so" (which unfortunately happens to usually be Java) is better. It's not true, and it just happens so often that it finally caused me to boil over.
To reiterate, the only language correct language is the language that allows you to get your work done and have fun while you are doing it. Nothing else matters in the long run.
Bryan
I was going to provide a quick and simple response. Then I decided to not get involved. Then I reread your post and couldn't help myself.
I'm going start out by getting to the point: Java is not the answer to everything. Not everything should be judged using Java as the standard. And finally, PHP is good enough for yahoo? Seems so: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-963937.html?tag=lh
In the interest of full disclosure: I am a full time senior level architect/programmer for one of the largest mortgage companies in the country. Most of the work I do is C# with an XML+XSL frontend these days. I won't touch any Microsoft product for my own personal projects, so in my spare time I do a lot of C++, Ruby, Perl and PHP work. I've long since given up dealing with Java, although there are Java projects (such as Struts, Cocoon, and JBoss) that I deeply respect.
I don't even like PHP, but it gets the job done. It gets it done far quicker and far easier than Java and most other languages, and I've long since learned that worse is often better (ask the Lisp community if you don't know what that phrase means).
To start, I want to point a major flaw in your arguments: Most of these PHP sites are written by amateurs plain and simple. Even a lot of the bigger PHP projects on freshmeat are clearly created by people who do not have a wealth of knowlege, but in it's place have a lot of dedication. That's fine. In fact, that's the way it should be.
The web was built via the back breaking work of millions of amateurs around the world. These people have just as much right to participate in this medium as us professionals do. Without them the web would be a desolate wasteland of holier than thou illuminati. Instead it's a rich and beautiful medium of communication supported by everybody.
"I gave up... using shared memory was too tricky and isn't even platform independent. It's not part of the core language, and even if it worked, it would not turn PHP into an application. It still runs in a modular fashion."
Why aren't you using the session? PHP has supported sessions for sometime now. There's no reason for you to be touching shared memory in a language like PHP. Would you do the same in a JSP page? I think not... Maybe you have your reasons, and PHP session handling is certainly not perfect in all situations, but your lack of an explanation as to what you are doing leads me to believe you either did not explore all possibilities, or you are making judgements based on older versions of PHP that are simply not valid anymore.
For very simple things, that don't need to scale, both in usage, and codebase, then PHP is ok. But for design real web applications, which need to be managed by more than a few developers, integrate with legacy systems, implement a full three tier architecure, etc, PHP just doesn't cut it.
Please excuse my english: 3-tier architectures are overrated overrused bullshit. Everybody has a different meaning for them, everybody has a different use for them. The only successfull n-tier architectures I have seen (and this comes from years of distributed COM+ development experience) are those that follow this structure:
Client -> Provider -> Scarce Resource
Where client is typically the web browser, the Provider is typically your web server, and the Scarce Resource is typically your database.
Breaking that into more tiers is imho absolutely foolish. The extra code complexity introduced, the marshalling overhead, latency overhead, thread synchronization issues, deployment issues, and security considerations are simply NOT WORTH IT! Why? Because the ONLY thing that really matters in the long run are your scarce resources!! That's your database! If you minimize calls to your scarce resources, you will get MUCH better bang for your buck than through any other medium. You can always throw some smart caching in there somewhere, but caching is NOT the same as adding an extra