Creating these new TLDs, especially.mobi, is a really bad idea for the web. The web works on Content Negotiation. I have a single URI that is accessible from any type of client that talks HTTP. That client is responsible for negotiating with the server to determine the correct MIME type of the response. So, a single URI would return XHTML for PC browsers, WML (for instance) for cell phones, or a static image for picture frames.
The point is, creating these new TLDs just splits the web in two. Does placing content in.mobi mean that content is not linkable and viewable by PC browsers? That's bad for the web.
Creating these device specific TLDs is a bad use of the system, and should be stopped. All the content on the web should be accessible by any web client. Client can't natively support a MIME type? Use a plugin, and have Content Negotiation work its magic.
I would recommend against using a Wiki clone. While it is great for the writer, it totally sucks for a reader.
A Wiki is just like a giant bathroom wall. Tons of information, and completely no organization or flow. There is no editor marking which is good and which is bad.
If you do go to a Wiki, you'll need someone there to continually categorize everything and organize it. Without a content manager, the Wiki becomes useless very quickly. Even though there might be tons of good information in there, no one will know how to find it.
I thought this whole countdown was pretty funny. Who better to complain about how games are overhyped than... those who do the hyping!
Let's think about this. GameSpy makes their money from advertising (among other things). Who advertises on their site? The game publishers! So is GameSpy going to publish that a brand new, multi-million dollar games sucks big ones? Nope! The advertisers would leave immediately.
GameSpy, including all the game magazines, can't be relied upon to deliver impartial news and reviews. It just can't happen. All those games are hyped for a reason. The trade press gets their money for doing the hyping.
Never ever trust one of those sites or magazines for impartial initial reviews. I have seen, however, after the game has been out for a while, some impartial reviews. This only happens after the wave of hype has passed. Then, and only then, will you see a game magazine or site say truthful things.
So, to GameSpy and other game press: Stop complaining about the hype, and stop being part of the problem!
First, I hope you do end up open sourcing the code to at least the client applications. I believe that you will find those interested in working with the code. I believe you'll see people doing interesting things with the code you've never thought of. That alone is worth it.
The two books I can recommend are:
Open Sources and Cathedral and the Bazaar. Both are published by O'Reilly. They are quick, invaluable in your quest to understand the open source movement, and in paperback.
It's true in that just making your application open source doesn't mean the world suddenly does all your work. To steal a common ad slogan, "Open source developers don't make the software, they make it better". In otherwords, there is always a core development group that steers the project and do the majority of the work. But once you open source, I think you'll find patches slowly come in plus developers taking the code and doing original things with it.
Of course, the better the code is to begin with, the easier it is for developers to get started with it. I believe this is one of the main reasons the mozilla project took so long to really get rolling. Their original code base was a mess, and the average developer could not just "jump right in". If your code is clean and workable, then you'll see a normal pace of outside work.
Good luck, and congrats! Going open source will definitely help you and the project out.
If you're near the NSA, you should go check out the NSA Crypto museum. Not only is the museum really interesting, but they have a wonderful library. The library is full of crypto material of all sorts. It's a public library, so have fun!
Isn't XSLT a functional language? It's a wonderfully helpful tool when working with XML. How would another language (X#?) help the situation?
I'd love to see more XSLT systems be built. XSLT becomes powerful when everything is XML, and everything can be obtained via HTTP. This is why Web Services (SOAP/etc) won't take off the way the web has. You can't address the object in a Web Service, you can only address its proxy. Not to mention that all of those objects have some odd proprietary interface to them, instead of the ubiquitous GET/PUT/DELETE of HTTP.
I recommend going wireless. Not only is it easy, it's Ethernet, and your OS likes that. You'll also like the little access point that also doubles as a firewall. Plus, the roaming with the laptop is sweet.
If you're worried about bandwidth, get an access point/router with two antennas. That will allow more devices to connect with greater bandwidth.
There's nothing better than getting 11Mbps with zero wire hassle.
Have you considered developing your web site around XML? There are two very good products out there (both open source) that enable the XML+XSLT=XHTML/WAP/PDF/whatever paradigm.
I don't know the particulars of your application, but by decoupling the content from the presentation, you gain an enormous amount of flexibility and power.
By creating content as XML, you can now create XSLT scripts to transform that pure content into an arbitrary presentation form. So you can write an XSLT script that transforms your XML content into XHTML or into WAP. This is powerful because now you can serve multiple different requestors with the same content.
There is a project called Cocoon (from the Apache Software Foundation) that does this exact thing. Cocoon itself is a servlet, so it gives you a choice of what servlet engine to run it on. It provides good caching, XSLT transformations, and even a "sitemap", which is a central location for binding look&feels to content.
There is an open source servlet engine that has built in XSLT processing, XPath processing, and XML parsing. It is extremely fast and has a lot of features. It is Resin. I recommend this one. Because this is a full blown servlet engine, you have JSP processing, session support, and it is even a small web server.
Wow... this is great timing... I've just purchased an Abit BP6 board. I've been wondering if I should use the Gentus distrobution. It has optimized UDMA 66 IDE drivers, but by using it I get locked in to using that exact distro. Because no one has found the source, I can't upgrade my kernel. Apparently, Mandrake has built in support for the BP6's IDE controller. Also, the 2.3.99 kernel has support for it, too. There are patches for the 2.2.x kernels available @ http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedr ick/ to get the UDMA/66 IDE controller to work.
I really hope Abit releases the sources. It would be great to actually pick my distrobution/and/ use their optimized drivers.
Yes, you can certainly build interactive, dynamic web sites with both servlets and mod_perl. But to correctly build the site, you have to look at the scope of the site.
For quick and dirty sites, and if you already love Perl, then mod_perl is fine (personally I think PHP is easier). For sites that have a very limited scope, and for those which code maintanence does not matter, go ahead and pick a scripting language you are comfortable with. The whole point of those scripting languages is to enable rapid development. mod_perl allows you to take the rapid development to a web server.
If your application is large, or needs to scale, you will need to engineer the site, not just hack/script it. Today's extensive interactive sites need to cope with thousands of users and millions of hits. True, mod_perl will handle it as far as execution is conserned, but a n-tier, engineered application will create a better solution.
For those n-tier type applications, servlets are only part of the solution.
In a true n-tier web application, you will see many partitions emerge. Some of those partitions are
client
presentation
business logic
data
You will also see that servlets (and Java Server Pages) only fit in the presentation layer. To create a scalable application, you will want to abstract the business logic from the presentation. There are many solutions for business logic, and the Java universe promotes EJB.
The point is that to correctly choose a development environment, look at the scope of the application. If it's large, it must be correctly engineered, and a true OO language such as Java has a lot of advantages going for it. Those advantages include architectures such as servlets, JSP, fast server side VMs, rich class heirarchy, EJB, and support for latest XML/XSL technologies.
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/63/mahir_cagri.htm l
Check this out, it's his first hit single. This is really the icing on the cake for this phenomenon. I thought the rest of the stuff was slightly humorous, but this made me die laughing.
Not that I'm an expert. With that out of the way, find them (men or women) in the real world! I think I easily spend half of my waking hours in front of this monitor, either doing work or just enjoying fine sites such as/. And I've never met one person this way. Sure, there are lots of interesting people on IRC, but those people are just nicks.
The people in the real world are the ones that matter. I met my current girlfriend at a party (which sounds so lame when I say that out loud, and she and I both know that:), and it's safe to say that that party had nothing to do with computers. But, then again, I don't want to date "me". That is, I don't want to date a computer nerd, even though I might be one.
Life is full of wonderful and interesting people. The last thing I need to do is cheat myself by limiting myself to people that are just like me. With that said, there are certain areas that you and your mate must be compatible in. For instance, the important things to me are intelligence, wit, and ability to challenge me. My mate must have those qualities, but it's important to me that she be different than me in other ways. I want to experience other things in life. I've been doing the computer thing just fine without her help, but hey, I've always needed a partner for swing dancing!
My current girlfriend knows what the web is, and checks her email all the time, so she definately knows what computers are. If I had to explain to her what a mouse was all the time, I think things wouldn't go too far. But I digress...
The point I'm trying to make is that the people worth putting your arms around at the end of the day are out in the real world. If you want to meet people, get away from that monitor sometimes. Attend parties, go out bike riding, buy a snowboard, go to concerts. At these activities, you'll find and meet attractive people that already have stuff in common with you, because they were at that same function!
OK, I think we all have better things to do than complain about a lame ad. This post should really have been "What's better? Commercial X servers or XFree?" Let's just take a deep breath and realize that what the post is about is just tride and true commercial marketing. I think we're all smart enough to see through this fluff.
I've used a lot of encoders over the years, and I keep coming back to Fraunhofer. If you're converting all of your CD's to MP3s, then pay for this encoder. You can't beat the results.
Now if someone would just make a portable "discman" for playing joliet CD-Rs, then I'd be a happy man.
Not that I have anything against Amazon, but I would recommend using BookPool.com. They are only a technical book reseller, and they have better prices than amazon. As far as I can tell, bookpool.com has the best prices for its books on the web. Just a suggestion.
Has anyone looked at the impact that this will have on the ecosystem? What are the natural predators of this bird? What is their food source? Will they slide right back into the food chain? You can't just reintroduce a species unless you have looked at its impact. Sure, it's nice to bring a species back to life, but will that upset the already fragile balance of our ecosystems?
This sounds really promising, but how does the price/performance of a Linux cluster compare to other "real" supercomputers? For example, what is the price/performance of a VERY high end SGI, and what would it take (price wise) for a Linux cluster to match that. I've heard that Linux clusters cost considerably less, but I've never seen any hard statistics.
Slashdot Mirror
This new development is dripping with irony, as the GPL itself is DRM. It legally dictates what I can and can't do with the software.
Wow, great Simposons reference!
The point is, creating these new TLDs just splits the web in two. Does placing content in .mobi mean that content is not linkable and viewable by PC browsers? That's bad for the web.
Creating these device specific TLDs is a bad use of the system, and should be stopped. All the content on the web should be accessible by any web client. Client can't natively support a MIME type? Use a plugin, and have Content Negotiation work its magic.
Tim BL said it best in New top level domains considered harmful
I would recommend against using a Wiki clone. While it is great for the writer, it totally sucks for a reader.
A Wiki is just like a giant bathroom wall. Tons of information, and completely no organization or flow. There is no editor marking which is good and which is bad.
If you do go to a Wiki, you'll need someone there to continually categorize everything and organize it. Without a content manager, the Wiki becomes useless very quickly. Even though there might be tons of good information in there, no one will know how to find it.
I thought this whole countdown was pretty funny. Who better to complain about how games are overhyped than... those who do the hyping!
Let's think about this. GameSpy makes their money from advertising (among other things). Who advertises on their site? The game publishers! So is GameSpy going to publish that a brand new, multi-million dollar games sucks big ones? Nope! The advertisers would leave immediately.
GameSpy, including all the game magazines, can't be relied upon to deliver impartial news and reviews. It just can't happen. All those games are hyped for a reason. The trade press gets their money for doing the hyping.
Never ever trust one of those sites or magazines for impartial initial reviews. I have seen, however, after the game has been out for a while, some impartial reviews. This only happens after the wave of hype has passed. Then, and only then, will you see a game magazine or site say truthful things.
So, to GameSpy and other game press: Stop complaining about the hype, and stop being part of the problem!
The two books I can recommend are: Open Sources and Cathedral and the Bazaar. Both are published by O'Reilly. They are quick, invaluable in your quest to understand the open source movement, and in paperback.
It's true in that just making your application open source doesn't mean the world suddenly does all your work. To steal a common ad slogan, "Open source developers don't make the software, they make it better". In otherwords, there is always a core development group that steers the project and do the majority of the work. But once you open source, I think you'll find patches slowly come in plus developers taking the code and doing original things with it.
Of course, the better the code is to begin with, the easier it is for developers to get started with it. I believe this is one of the main reasons the mozilla project took so long to really get rolling. Their original code base was a mess, and the average developer could not just "jump right in". If your code is clean and workable, then you'll see a normal pace of outside work.
Good luck, and congrats! Going open source will definitely help you and the project out.
If you're near the NSA, you should go check out the NSA Crypto museum. Not only is the museum really interesting, but they have a wonderful library. The library is full of crypto material of all sorts. It's a public library, so have fun!
Isn't XSLT a functional language? It's a wonderfully helpful tool when working with XML. How would another language (X#?) help the situation?
I'd love to see more XSLT systems be built. XSLT becomes powerful when everything is XML, and everything can be obtained via HTTP. This is why Web Services (SOAP/etc) won't take off the way the web has. You can't address the object in a Web Service, you can only address its proxy. Not to mention that all of those objects have some odd proprietary interface to them, instead of the ubiquitous GET/PUT/DELETE of HTTP.
Wow, I really went off topic.
To sum up: Use XSLT!
Not only the WWW, but the entire Internet is at your fingertips. It's not that the data is available, it's that it's sometimes hidden.
I recommend going wireless. Not only is it easy, it's Ethernet, and your OS likes that. You'll also like the little access point that also doubles as a firewall. Plus, the roaming with the laptop is sweet.
If you're worried about bandwidth, get an access point/router with two antennas. That will allow more devices to connect with greater bandwidth.
There's nothing better than getting 11Mbps with zero wire hassle.
First post?
I don't know the particulars of your application, but by decoupling the content from the presentation, you gain an enormous amount of flexibility and power.
By creating content as XML, you can now create XSLT scripts to transform that pure content into an arbitrary presentation form. So you can write an XSLT script that transforms your XML content into XHTML or into WAP. This is powerful because now you can serve multiple different requestors with the same content.
There is a project called Cocoon (from the Apache Software Foundation) that does this exact thing. Cocoon itself is a servlet, so it gives you a choice of what servlet engine to run it on. It provides good caching, XSLT transformations, and even a "sitemap", which is a central location for binding look&feels to content.
There is an open source servlet engine that has built in XSLT processing, XPath processing, and XML parsing. It is extremely fast and has a lot of features. It is Resin. I recommend this one. Because this is a full blown servlet engine, you have JSP processing, session support, and it is even a small web server.
Wow... this is great timing... I've just purchased an Abit BP6 board. I've been wondering if I should use the Gentus distrobution. It has optimized UDMA 66 IDE drivers, but by using it I get locked in to using that exact distro. Because no one has found the source, I can't upgrade my kernel. Apparently, Mandrake has built in support for the BP6's IDE controller. Also, the 2.3.99 kernel has support for it, too. There are patches for the 2.2.x kernels available @ http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/hedr ick/ to get the UDMA/66 IDE controller to work.
/and/ use their optimized drivers.
I really hope Abit releases the sources. It would be great to actually pick my distrobution
For quick and dirty sites, and if you already love Perl, then mod_perl is fine (personally I think PHP is easier). For sites that have a very limited scope, and for those which code maintanence does not matter, go ahead and pick a scripting language you are comfortable with. The whole point of those scripting languages is to enable rapid development. mod_perl allows you to take the rapid development to a web server.
If your application is large, or needs to scale, you will need to engineer the site, not just hack/script it. Today's extensive interactive sites need to cope with thousands of users and millions of hits. True, mod_perl will handle it as far as execution is conserned, but a n-tier, engineered application will create a better solution.
For those n-tier type applications, servlets are only part of the solution.
In a true n-tier web application, you will see many partitions emerge. Some of those partitions are
You will also see that servlets (and Java Server Pages) only fit in the presentation layer. To create a scalable application, you will want to abstract the business logic from the presentation. There are many solutions for business logic, and the Java universe promotes EJB.
The point is that to correctly choose a development environment, look at the scope of the application. If it's large, it must be correctly engineered, and a true OO language such as Java has a lot of advantages going for it. Those advantages include architectures such as servlets, JSP, fast server side VMs, rich class heirarchy, EJB, and support for latest XML/XSL technologies.
Check this out, it's his first hit single. This is really the icing on the cake for this phenomenon. I thought the rest of the stuff was slightly humorous, but this made me die laughing.
The people in the real world are the ones that matter. I met my current girlfriend at a party (which sounds so lame when I say that out loud, and she and I both know that :), and it's safe to say that that party had nothing to do with computers. But, then again, I don't want to date "me". That is, I don't want to date a computer nerd, even though I might be one.
Life is full of wonderful and interesting people. The last thing I need to do is cheat myself by limiting myself to people that are just like me. With that said, there are certain areas that you and your mate must be compatible in. For instance, the important things to me are intelligence, wit, and ability to challenge me. My mate must have those qualities, but it's important to me that she be different than me in other ways. I want to experience other things in life. I've been doing the computer thing just fine without her help, but hey, I've always needed a partner for swing dancing!
My current girlfriend knows what the web is, and checks her email all the time, so she definately knows what computers are. If I had to explain to her what a mouse was all the time, I think things wouldn't go too far. But I digress...
The point I'm trying to make is that the people worth putting your arms around at the end of the day are out in the real world. If you want to meet people, get away from that monitor sometimes. Attend parties, go out bike riding, buy a snowboard, go to concerts. At these activities, you'll find and meet attractive people that already have stuff in common with you, because they were at that same function!
But hey, that just worked for me. YMMV.
OK, I think we all have better things to do than complain about a lame ad. This post should really have been "What's better? Commercial X servers or XFree?" Let's just take a deep breath and realize that what the post is about is just tride and true commercial marketing. I think we're all smart enough to see through this fluff.
I've used a lot of encoders over the years, and I keep coming back to Fraunhofer. If you're converting all of your CD's to MP3s, then pay for this encoder. You can't beat the results.
Now if someone would just make a portable "discman" for playing joliet CD-Rs, then I'd be a happy man.
Not that I have anything against Amazon, but I would recommend using BookPool.com. They are only a technical book reseller, and they have better prices than amazon. As far as I can tell, bookpool.com has the best prices for its books on the web. Just a suggestion.
Sure, just take away any and all encryption from the net. Who needs secure ecommerce, anyway?
Has anyone looked at the impact that this will have on the ecosystem? What are the natural predators of this bird? What is their food source? Will they slide right back into the food chain? You can't just reintroduce a species unless you have looked at its impact. Sure, it's nice to bring a species back to life, but will that upset the already fragile balance of our ecosystems?
I think you're thinking of USA Networks buying Lycos. But I believe that buyout failed. But no, Microsoft does not own Lycos.
This sounds really promising, but how does the price/performance of a Linux cluster compare to other "real" supercomputers? For example, what is the price/performance of a VERY high end SGI, and what would it take (price wise) for a Linux cluster to match that. I've heard that Linux clusters cost considerably less, but I've never seen any hard statistics.
Hey, if they can tailor the advertisements to exactly what I want to see, and if it keeps the software free (as in price), then I say bring it on!