You would register your e-mail program as the only application that could talk SMTP, POP3, etc. If Microsoft Word wanted to send an e-mail, your e-mail program would pop up, ask you to authenticate yourself and explicitly send the message.
If someone suggested this on Unix, people would just laugh - 'lose the ability to script my whole system using my favourite glue language; no way'. Why it seems any more appealing on Windows, I have no idea.
Use a development machine to build your system, then burn it to bootable CD. Make sure the only RW directories are/tmp/var and/home
Alternatively, if you'd like a system that's slightly easier to update, choose hard drives that have read-only jumper settings. Keep all your executables on read-only disks. When you need to update, shutdown, change the hardware write protection, disconnect from the network and boot up.
I've always felt that two uniprocessor machines are better than one dual-processor machine, especially if you're already considering loadbalancing multiple webservers. If you're being charge for rackspace, you might consider buying a custom-built box containing two PCs. here's one available in the UK (retailing for just under £2000 for a decent spec).
We recently build an adserver that delivers ads to this site. I know that Engage are currently building user profiling into their Adbureau software - the problem is that no advertiser ever asks for it. The most a client ever asks is that we cap the number of impressions any user receives of a particular advert - but some advertisers even dispute whether this is counter-productive. Clients aren't asking for user profiling because they are already targeting the ads to the required level simply by choosing their list of websites that they advertise upon.
Obviously, performance is rarely the prime objetive in a software project, compared to, say, completing on schedule and within budget. However, here's what a skilled OO Perl developer has to say...
A single method call is about 30 percent slower than a regular call to the same subroutine... In general, it's fair to say that an OO implementation of a system in Perl will almost never be faster than the equivalent non-OO implementation, and will usually be somewhere between 20 and 50 percent slower.
I guess [anyone got any figures?] that the same might be true when trying to use any procedural language in an object-oriented fashion.
In the UK, it seems that the quango's are the most poorly equiped to deal with new media. I worked as Electronic Publishing Producer at FEDA (Further Education Development Agency), which has recently changed its name to The Learning and Skills Development Agency. I'm now out of the place, happily coding Perl for a dot-com that knows its arse from its elbow.
FEDA's IT team were recruited from further education colleges, most of which had not made the transition from IPX to TCP/IP. Because of the poor candidates attracted by low salaries, the staff were unmotivated and refused to get involved with any new IT projects that would increase their workload. The Internet strategy was therefore devolved to the publications department, who had plenty of experience in print, but no experience of building a webserver (I was learning as I went along). From talking with blokes from other agencies, it seems common practice for IT departments to avoid involvement in Internet projects at all costs.
However, all capital expenditure for IT had to be agreed by the head of IT, who was firmly commited to NetWare as the Network OS. It was only by slight of hand that I secured funding for a Compaq box, which myseriously transformed itself into a Linux/Apache webserver one night.
In late 1998, FEDA secured a (£200k) government tender to run the Key Skills Support Programme - most of the cash was earmarked to build a website and a small web database. As soon as real cash had been sniffed, the IT department took control and started hiring Oracle contractors. After nine months work, they launched the pig-ugly beast, which promptly started attracting in excess of 30 page impressions a day!
Towards the end of the Key Skills projects, the funds ran dry (inevitably), so earlier plans for an upgrade system for the database, and a design pitch for the website, were canned. However, no one seemed to care - the money had been spent, and a website and database had been delivered.
I left, and my webserver was converted initially to Novell, then to NT. Here's what I learned at FEDA:
Government has unrealistic budgets for IT projects (either way too high, or way too low).
Government tenders are not won by the best companies, but by agencies (closely linked to government departments) that need something to do.
Specs for Government web projects are too loose
No plans are made for project maintenance
Visitor projections are unrealistic [Millennium Dome, anyone?]
My usual reference text is 'Building Apache modules with Perl and C', but this book still has some tricks to teach even the experienced mod_perl developer
The mod_perl book doesn't cover http file upload in any way, and I'd been looking around for ages for a book that covered the topic. After reading the section in The Rat Book - File Uploads with CGI.pm (p.97) - I was able to quickly build my image upload facility.
Last time I looked, the guys at slashcode still hadn't worked out how to do this. Perhaps chromatic should donate his copy to pudge?!
What annoys me is that my Mac browsers ignore *different* bad HTML to the same versions on Windows. For example, IE 4.5 on the Mac barfs with the nested tables in/. but IE 4.5 on NT ignores the bad coding. >>>> Here is a summary of the information that Doctor HTML has learned about your Web page: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/07/1913 240&mode=thread
16 Pentium Pro Processors x 5 Fast Ethernet interfaces + 2 Gbytes RAM + 50 Gbytes Disk + 2 Fast Ethernet switches + Linux ------------------------------ = 1.2 real Gflops for $63,000
(Free) Fortran is neither dead, nor should it be. Instead, at present it is in an unfortunate limbo.
Many university maths departments code almost exclusively in F77: everyone understands it, and it has no pointers to slow down your code. If the GNU project gets back on track, we could see a rennaisance in Fortran coding for Beowolf and SMP?
As far as commercial use of Fortran, alexk pointed out a couple of weeks ago that Bloomberg has the bulk of its system written in Fortran. Especially, anything that has to do with their terminals and proprietary databases.
I'd love to base a discussion board around the slashdot concept: it has everything I need. However, how would I explain using the self-proclaimed alpha version of slash?
Please! Spend a couple of days putting together a tar ball; otherwise, numerous others will have to repeat all the work you've already done.
FROM CODE PAGE: You can download an ancient version of [slash] below... I'm too busy ironing out kinks and adding features to take a couple days and create a distributable tar ball...
...you will have problems! This is fairly alpha code) you are on your own.
Can't believe they'd ever ship without an OS - the average consumer would never buy it.
Shipping a full(ish) version of Un*x is also very unlikely: the costs for AOL of building helpdesk systems to cover X, a shell and Internet applications would kill this idea.
Most likely idea: free Un*x kernel for stability with no user shell. Configure through a couple of control panels. If the user rings with any problems, first support option is to re-install from CD.
Apple had a similar idea with the crippleware bundled with Performa series. Universally hated idea, but they probably saved a ton of cash on support costs: if the average user doesn't need access to a config file, lock them out!
A more interesting survey would have included a trawl of the universities to find out what languages they're using. Although no one in business now seems to be using Fortran (apart from in legacy systems), many maths departments code almost exclusively in F77: everyone understands it, and it has none of those new-fangled pointer things to slow down your code. As it's fast and 'easily' parallelized, maybe we're about to see a rennaisance in Fortran coding for Beowolf and SMP? It's a shame the GNU project seems to be in limbo.
From the README: The DC265 camera has a PPC 823 running a 66Mhz. It's about like a Powermac6100/66 but without a big processor cache. So expect the older games to run well but the newer games to run a bit sluggish.
Slashdot Mirror
If someone suggested this on Unix, people would just laugh - 'lose the ability to script my whole system using my favourite glue language; no way'. Why it seems any more appealing on Windows, I have no idea.
HPV - human papillomavirus
Use a development machine to build your system, then burn it to bootable CD. Make sure the only RW directories are /tmp /var and /home
Alternatively, if you'd like a system that's slightly easier to update, choose hard drives that have read-only jumper settings. Keep all your executables on read-only disks. When you need to update, shutdown, change the hardware write protection, disconnect from the network and boot up.
Computers think like submarines swim.
I've always felt that two uniprocessor machines are better than one dual-processor machine, especially if you're already considering loadbalancing multiple webservers. If you're being charge for rackspace, you might consider buying a custom-built box containing two PCs. here's one available in the UK (retailing for just under £2000 for a decent spec).
$*STRONG being the force;
%I was the global variable, holding stuff like $I{dbh} - the database handle.
It's fairly useful having one global variable in a small program, but it becomes cludgy once you modularize.
We recently build an adserver that delivers ads to this site. I know that Engage are currently building user profiling into their Adbureau software - the problem is that no advertiser ever asks for it. The most a client ever asks is that we cap the number of impressions any user receives of a particular advert - but some advertisers even dispute whether this is counter-productive. Clients aren't asking for user profiling because they are already targeting the ads to the required level simply by choosing their list of websites that they advertise upon.
Ha! This is the funniest post I've read all day. Must have taken all of 5 minutes for this server to die.
err... many Perl programmers will admit it.
Obviously, performance is rarely the prime objetive in a software project, compared to, say, completing on schedule and within budget. However, here's what a skilled OO Perl developer has to say...
From Damian Conway's excellent Object Oriented Perl:
I guess [anyone got any figures?] that the same might be true when trying to use any procedural language in an object-oriented fashion.
I think you should change your homepage to an even better subversion
In the UK, it seems that the quango's are the most poorly equiped to deal with new media. I worked as Electronic Publishing Producer at FEDA (Further Education Development Agency), which has recently changed its name to The Learning and Skills Development Agency. I'm now out of the place, happily coding Perl for a dot-com that knows its arse from its elbow.
FEDA's IT team were recruited from further education colleges, most of which had not made the transition from IPX to TCP/IP. Because of the poor candidates attracted by low salaries, the staff were unmotivated and refused to get involved with any new IT projects that would increase their workload. The Internet strategy was therefore devolved to the publications department, who had plenty of experience in print, but no experience of building a webserver (I was learning as I went along). From talking with blokes from other agencies, it seems common practice for IT departments to avoid involvement in Internet projects at all costs.
However, all capital expenditure for IT had to be agreed by the head of IT, who was firmly commited to NetWare as the Network OS. It was only by slight of hand that I secured funding for a Compaq box, which myseriously transformed itself into a Linux/Apache webserver one night.
In late 1998, FEDA secured a (£200k) government tender to run the Key Skills Support Programme - most of the cash was earmarked to build a website and a small web database. As soon as real cash had been sniffed, the IT department took control and started hiring Oracle contractors. After nine months work, they launched the pig-ugly beast, which promptly started attracting in excess of 30 page impressions a day!
Towards the end of the Key Skills projects, the funds ran dry (inevitably), so earlier plans for an upgrade system for the database, and a design pitch for the website, were canned. However, no one seemed to care - the money had been spent, and a website and database had been delivered.
I left, and my webserver was converted initially to Novell, then to NT. Here's what I learned at FEDA:
$random = int(rand 10); # random number, 0-9
Alternatively, use the CPAN module Math::TrulyRandom
My usual reference text is 'Building Apache modules with Perl and C', but this book still has some tricks to teach even the experienced mod_perl developer
The mod_perl book doesn't cover http file upload in any way, and I'd been looking around for ages for a book that covered the topic. After reading the section in The Rat Book - File Uploads with CGI.pm (p.97) - I was able to quickly build my image upload facility.
Last time I looked, the guys at slashcode still hadn't worked out how to do this. Perhaps chromatic should donate his copy to pudge?!
What annoys me is that my Mac browsers ignore *different* bad HTML to the same versions on Windows. For example, IE 4.5 on the Mac barfs with the nested tables in /. but IE 4.5 on NT ignores the bad coding. 3 240&mode=thread
>>>>
Here is a summary of the information that Doctor HTML has learned about your Web page:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/07/191
* There were 212 table structure problems found.
---
Late st news
---
Here's a link to the real Loki.
16 Pentium Pro Processors
x 5 Fast Ethernet interfaces
+ 2 Gbytes RAM
+ 50 Gbytes Disk
+ 2 Fast Ethernet switches
+ Linux
------------------------------
= 1.2 real Gflops for $63,000
---
Many university maths departments code almost exclusively in F77: everyone understands it, and it has no pointers to slow down your code. If the GNU project gets back on track, we could see a rennaisance in Fortran coding for Beowolf and SMP?
As far as commercial use of Fortran, alexk pointed out a couple of weeks ago that Bloomberg has the bulk of its system written in Fortran. Especially, anything that has to do with their terminals and proprietary databases.
---
I'd love to base a discussion board around the slashdot concept: it has everything I need. However, how would I explain using the self-proclaimed alpha version of slash?
... I'm too busy ironing out kinks and adding features to take a couple days and create a distributable tar ball...
Please! Spend a couple of days putting together a tar ball; otherwise, numerous others will have to repeat all the work you've already done.
FROM CODE PAGE: You can download an ancient version of [slash] below
...you will have problems! This is fairly alpha code) you are on your own.
---
Can't believe they'd ever ship without an OS - the average consumer would never buy it.
Shipping a full(ish) version of Un*x is also very unlikely: the costs for AOL of building helpdesk systems to cover X, a shell and Internet applications would kill this idea.
Most likely idea: free Un*x kernel for stability with no user shell. Configure through a couple of control panels. If the user rings with any problems, first support option is to re-install from CD.
Apple had a similar idea with the crippleware bundled with Performa series. Universally hated idea, but they probably saved a ton of cash on support costs: if the average user doesn't need access to a config file, lock them out!
---
A more interesting survey would have included a trawl of the universities to find out what languages they're using. Although no one in business now seems to be using Fortran (apart from in legacy systems), many maths departments code almost exclusively in F77: everyone understands it, and it has none of those new-fangled pointer things to slow down your code. As it's fast and 'easily' parallelized, maybe we're about to see a rennaisance in Fortran coding for Beowolf and SMP? It's a shame the GNU project seems to be in limbo.
---
From the README: The DC265 camera has a PPC 823 running a 66Mhz. It's about like a Powermac6100/66 but without a big processor cache. So expect the older games to run well but the newer games to run a bit sluggish.
---
Yep, not an econimical way to pirate a movie. More likely that you'd use this method for backing up DVDs.
---
>Does anyone know if you can easily copy video
>DVDs with a DVD-RAM drive?
Should be feasible to duplicate whole disks by using scsi-to-scsi copying of a DVD drive to a DVD-RAM.
Part-copying no doubt requires proprietary code.
Nigel
---