Last month I had to prepare a presentation about the perspectives of P2P networks and the CNET article The P2P Myth was one of the most usefu
l sources of both ideas and links for further reading.
The War on Drugs problem could be solved by dropping a small nuclear warhead on every plantation the US satelites could locate. Naturally, marijuana erradication would call for some droppings in continental US, what lead us to the minority religions problem.
The judicious use of tactical nuclear weapons could solve the minority religions problem too (or at least avoid the main problem presented by Wacco, survivors). The same solution can be used with marijuana fields in continental US.
My bias against CF may be even outdated, since the last time I saw it being used was two years ago. But, and I commnet from a software development professional perspective:
a) It still seems to suffer from performance problems.
b) It is not portable.
c) CF experience is not transferable from a field of application to another. With Java, PHP and ASP, I can easily use/hire developers without web/internet experience and have them learn something that will complement their knowledge (in Java, C/C++, VB, respectively). And the contrary is also true, I can easily take the web developers and grow them into full-fledged programmers. It does not seem to aply to CF.
As for your first point, I never said Perl is easy to learn. I was only pointing that leaving Perl out is unfair and incorrect. Perl codebase running real life sites probably outnumber CF,PHP and JSP codebases taken together. And what you say of CF is probably true for Python or ASP too.
In my view, both should be all-out contestants in any serious comparison. What would be the point of excluding Perl if, for instance, all platforms your analize were worst than Perl? If you exclude it as "old", how would you know?.
The exclusion of Python is also unforgivable. Just a look at Python's API is enough to notice how serious this language is becoming.
A good web development team, no matter which language or platform you choose, will have a mix of people coming all the way from the pure inteface guys (including here the designers) down to the bare metal guys (including the usual daily-kernel-compiling guy). All projects larger than toys I have been working on for two years have had this configuration.
As for ASP, the mix ASP/COM is the Microsoft-blessed way to use the technology since the beginnings of 1999 (almost two years ago). So, yes, you must have a good C++ guy in your team, otherwise you will be unable to scale up for too long with ASP. PHP will take you a bit higher before entropy takes over. Python is even better (now if only Guido would put the braces back where Nature intended them to be...:)).
Perl is the mother of all scripting language, Python is a rising star with lots of supporters and amj already huge codebase
scripting languages
an already huge codebase
access to COM objects let you write smaller and sipler scripts.
simpler scripts
The the author did not had the time or the will to learn the APIs ("Users must make a concerted effort to keep track of the indepen dently changing components of PHP they are using")
That the author did not had the time or the will to learn the APIs ("Users must make a concerted effort to keep track of the independently changing components of PHP they are using") does not change this.
This article is rather simplistic and poor, both in content and in conclusions. I will not discuss the fact that the "winner" is probably the only potential advertiser (PHP does not advertise, Microsoft and Sun won't advertise only for yet another article about ASP or JSP), but let us see what was left out, misinterpreted or plainly wrong:
a) Python, Perl: How do you write a serious article about web scripting languages leaving these two out? Perl is the mother of all scripting language, Python is a rising star with lots of supporters and amj already huge codebase. And both perform as well as any of the examined technologies.
b) Their priorities were "of speedy development, ease of use, and a complete and powerful API". In a real corporate environment, maintainability and portability would probably outshine all three, ruling CF and ASP out (my opinion, yuor mileage may vary) and leaving the stage for PHP, Python and JSP (more or less in this order, from worst to best).
c) How on earth would COM support make ASP harder to write? In my experience, access to COM objects let you write smaller and sipler scripts.
d) PHP is probably as easy as ASP to learn, it fells rather natural to any C/C++ programmer and it has probably the most powerful API for Web programming of the pack. The the author did not had the time or the will to learn the APIs ("Users must make a concerted effort to keep track of the indepen dently changing components of PHP they are using")
e) Also, the lack of an standardized database API in PHP is botha curse and a blessing. First, there are some PHP libraries out there addressing this issue. Second, the trade here is speed for convenience. Third, all data acess function were made similar, so changing database is not harder than it should be. And finally, PHP supports ODBC.
f) Tomcat is a reference implementation. There are faster alternatives out there.
I will not go on. Forget this article.
If you need speed, ease of use, a fair price (let us say, zero or less), good portability and good mantainability, use PHP, Python or JSP. Or even, if you are really sure your code will never have to leave a Windows box, ASP/COM.
Shit, she seems a bit cool. And good at what she does
Ivan was/is one of the most influent government officials in Brazil, specially in Computer/Internet/Telecom related issues. He was also a important player in defining the structure of the Internet in Brazil. He is indeed good at what he does, and was by a large margin the best canditate for the Latin America zone.
The moderation guidelines says clearly that moderators should be more concerned about moderating up than down. Also, I never said the opinions or moderations I metamod as fair were "restating of my own, sheeplike, beliefs". First, aside from a small tendency to flee when I see a wolf coming in my direction, most of my beliefs are hardly sheeplike. Second, I think I haven't made myself clear. I metamod ALL positive moderations as Fair. Never or almost never read the comments they refer to. So I don't have the faintest idea if they restate my beliefs (sheeplike or not). On the other hand, I look very carefully at the negative moderations. Many times I even open the comment thread, to understand both the comment and the moderation. I really believe that a false positive is better than a false negative (and a false positive tend to be corrected far more frequently than a false negative).
"In fact, metamoderation encourages moderators to moderate conservatively since trying to champion an unpopular opinion is likely to lose you karma points in the metamoderation phase."
I have never had this experience. I can't confirm this alone, but I think most people metamoderate the way I do: Give an "a priori" Fair to all positive moderation, pay attention to the comments moderated down to see if any prejudice/persecution/plain stupidity
was the real reason behind the negative moderation.
Since we are here, where it reads "more useful for Web programming in the Web" it shoud read "more useful for Web programming" or "more useful for programming in the Web", but not both.:)
A few years ago, when I started using PHP (somewhere between versions 1.x and 2.x) for professional web programming, the sole sources of documentation were a tiny manual written by Ramus himself (the same Ramus of the second reviewed book - the reviewer fails to note that Ramus Ledorf was PHP primary creator and maintained it almost by himself until the 3.0 effort) and the mailing list.
It was pretty hard to understand some features without delving in the C source (incidentally, PHP is one of the most well behaved coding efforts I have seem to date. The 1.x,2.x and 3.x sources compile without a flaw in almost any flavour of Unix, and I say almost because I haven't tried them all).
Nowadays, besides the wonderful online documentation, you have lots of books (9 available, 12 coming soon, according to Amazon). It is an easy world.
And, the reviewer opinion notwithstanding, buy Ramus book and let it rest beside K&R, Wirth and Stroustrup books for a while. Not exactly Ramus league, but PHP is more useful for Web programming in the Web than C,C++ and all Wirth languages combined.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I was rather tired of hearing the mass-media crying bloody murder against one or another teenager that happened to set free the newest and lamest VBA macro-virus.
At least this time it is a real bug, not a feature, and it has Microsoft working overnight to correct it. Those who remember the glorious days of early sendmail versions know that we've already been there, done that.
It figures. But the.NET services could be argued to be OS services, a integral part of Windows.NET. It would not be the first time we see that reasoning, would it?
In any case, is it a good thing to have people publishing design documents for killer virii?
One of worst things that can happen is the information about virii and other security threats to be shared only among some selected few. You may have seen the story about a 3 year old AOL security hole this weekend. The only way to prevent this kind of problem to become a major problem is to publicize the risk to the maximun possible extend. It guarantees that every system administrator in the world will hear about it and take the necessary steps to protect his/her piece of the network.
1) As we saw earlier today, PDC was not so good and the developers were not very receptive to the whole.NET idea (and to the idea of having to learn yet another language). Expect O'Reilly sales to hit the skies during the next weeks and the FSF download sites to scream under the added trafic.
2) The Supremes (the judges, not the 70's disco group) will be back from vacation and will take a look at judge Jackson's work. They will find it worth its weight in kilograms and let the company be broken. Then Microsoft A and B will hit the courts to see who gets.NET, since it is not an operating system nor an application.
3) The free-software community, taken away by its manifest destiny felling, will get Star Office, AbiSource and whatever and make all of them into the meanest office package in town. Every Fortune 2000 company will have to install it or face a class-action suit from its shareholders for spending money in bloated payware.
4)Wishful thinking is one of our better developed mental function.:)
If it is true, I would really like to see all the people that keep saying how crappy and bloated Star Office is lend a hand to fix it.
Hell, I would certanly like to help. If there is something the software base needs now is a application that can seamlessly substitute Word and Excell at the secretary's (or, in political correct terms, "executive assistant for coffe grabbing and bill paying") desk. Which company would then keep paying U$800 a sit for the other package?
The worries of Microsoft are not of my concern. The point is, how far can they take it? From my point of view, not very far. I switched packages. If StarOffice grows up to be a real alternative, will Microsoft be able to keep up with this kind of privacy invasion?
And I will not even start to argue about the whole "intelectual property" concept here, because I am sure other post in this page will cover it better than I could (isn't it always so when the letter G, P and L appear together in a headline?).
Is StarOffice really bloatware, or is there just a lot of code because it does so many things? In particular, how much "bloat" is input/output filters to make it actually useful? Well, the computer I use at work is a PIII 500 with 128 MBs of RAM. I can use SO confortably along with JBuilder, IE 5, Outlook Express, sometimes Acrobat Reader, Erwin and Rational Rose. None of these applications are particularly small or memory effcient. The filters work well and I don't think they take all that space.
Does it produce output that MS Word users can include without further massaging? Or does it produce "close, but not quite" results? As far as I can tell, it produce files identical to Office 98. I haven't really tested it with Office 2000 files, but I think it does well too.
Does it produce something that would let me be a "stealth StarOffice" user? Well, that is exactly what I am, except that I warned everybody about what I was doing. I haven't had any problems. You could probably start isntalling it and trying to read the files you receive. Then try sending them one, and see what happens.
Oh, I "own" it or at least the company I am currently working for has one of those all-out licensing schemes with Microsoft. But I think this kind of thing is outrageous. I (or the company) paid for the software. I shouldn't be harassed to tell MS where and when and by whon it will be used.
Also, I haven't investigated if there was any other way to register or if I could avoid the online registering procedure. I dumped and installed SO. I just said No...:)
I have been using StarOffice for a while now, both under Windows2K and Linux.
I started using it under Windows 2K when I noticed the new licensing scheme for Office 2000. It will force you to register online, or cease to work at all. As I am in no particular urge to feed Redmond's databases, I dumped it and started using SO in a mostly Windows shop (my current client).
I concede that my machine has lots of memory, but StarOffice works fast and well.
I haven't experienced any serious bug and no file-format problem whatsoever. My most serious complain is about StarOffice wanting to be my browser too, and making windows believe it is now offline (in a LAN connected to a T1) everytime SO starts.
If SO goes GPL, I would expect it to get better support and better add-ons, and certanly keep updated with Office file-format tricks (a serious problem in a mostly MSWord world).
Slashdot Mirror
Last month I had to prepare a presentation about the perspectives of P2P networks and the CNET article The P2P Myth was one of the most usefu
l sources of both ideas and links for further reading.
...they are recycling!
:))
(Yeah, pretty lame. But I couldn't resist..
The War on Drugs problem could be solved by dropping a small nuclear warhead on every plantation the US satelites could locate. Naturally, marijuana erradication would call for some droppings in continental US, what lead us to the minority religions problem.
The judicious use of tactical nuclear weapons could solve the minority religions problem too (or at least avoid the main problem presented by Wacco, survivors). The same solution can be used with marijuana fields in continental US.
My bias against CF may be even outdated, since the last time I saw it being used was two years ago. But, and I commnet from a software development professional perspective:
a) It still seems to suffer from performance problems.
b) It is not portable.
c) CF experience is not transferable from a field of application to another. With Java, PHP and ASP, I can easily use/hire developers without web/internet experience and have them learn something that will complement their knowledge (in Java, C/C++, VB, respectively). And the contrary is also true, I can easily take the web developers and grow them into full-fledged programmers. It does not seem to aply to CF.
As for your first point, I never said Perl is easy to learn. I was only pointing that leaving Perl out is unfair and incorrect. Perl codebase running real life sites probably outnumber CF,PHP and JSP codebases taken together. And what you say of CF is probably true for Python or ASP too.
In my view, both should be all-out contestants in any serious comparison. What would be the point of excluding Perl if, for instance, all platforms your analize were worst than Perl? If you exclude it as "old", how would you know?.
The exclusion of Python is also unforgivable. Just a look at Python's API is enough to notice how serious this language is becoming.
A good web development team, no matter which language or platform you choose, will have a mix of people coming all the way from the pure inteface guys (including here the designers) down to the bare metal guys (including the usual daily-kernel-compiling guy). All projects larger than toys I have been working on for two years have had this configuration.
:)).
As for ASP, the mix ASP/COM is the Microsoft-blessed way to use the technology since the beginnings of 1999 (almost two years ago). So, yes, you must have a good C++ guy in your team, otherwise you will be unable to scale up for too long with ASP. PHP will take you a bit higher before entropy takes over. Python is even better (now if only Guido would put the braces back where Nature intended them to be...
Perl is the mother of all scripting language, Python is a rising star with lots of supporters and amj already huge codebase
:)
scripting languages
an already huge codebase
access to COM objects let you write smaller and sipler scripts.
simpler scripts
The the author did not had the time or the will to learn the APIs ("Users must make a concerted effort to keep track of the indepen dently changing components of PHP they are using")
That the author did not had the time or the will to learn the APIs ("Users must make a concerted effort to keep track of the independently changing components of PHP they are using") does not change this.
Preview is your friend...
This article is rather simplistic and poor, both in content and in conclusions. I will not discuss the fact that the "winner" is probably the only potential advertiser (PHP does not advertise, Microsoft and Sun won't advertise only for yet another article about ASP or JSP), but let us see what was left out, misinterpreted or plainly wrong:
a) Python, Perl: How do you write a serious article about web scripting languages leaving these two out? Perl is the mother of all scripting language, Python is a rising star with lots of supporters and amj already huge codebase. And both perform as well as any of the examined technologies.
b) Their priorities were "of speedy development, ease of use, and a complete and powerful API". In a real corporate environment, maintainability and portability would probably outshine all three, ruling CF and ASP out (my opinion, yuor mileage may vary) and leaving the stage for PHP, Python and JSP (more or less in this order, from worst to best).
c) How on earth would COM support make ASP harder to write? In my experience, access to COM objects let you write smaller and sipler scripts.
d) PHP is probably as easy as ASP to learn, it fells rather natural to any C/C++ programmer and it has probably the most powerful API for Web programming of the pack. The the author did not had the time or the will to learn the APIs ("Users must make a concerted effort to keep track of the indepen dently changing components of PHP they are using")
e) Also, the lack of an standardized database API in PHP is botha curse and a blessing. First, there are some PHP libraries out there addressing this issue. Second, the trade here is speed for convenience. Third, all data acess function were made similar, so changing database is not harder than it should be. And finally, PHP supports ODBC.
f) Tomcat is a reference implementation. There are faster alternatives out there.
I will not go on. Forget this article.
If you need speed, ease of use, a fair price (let us say, zero or less), good portability and good mantainability, use PHP, Python or JSP. Or even, if you are really sure your code will never have to leave a Windows box, ASP/COM.
Shit, she seems a bit cool. And good at what she does
Ivan was/is one of the most influent government officials in Brazil, specially in Computer/Internet/Telecom related issues. He was also a important player in defining the structure of the Internet in Brazil. He is indeed good at what he does, and was by a large margin the best canditate for the Latin America zone.
The moderation guidelines says clearly that moderators should be more concerned about moderating up than down. Also, I never said the opinions or moderations I metamod as fair were "restating of my own, sheeplike, beliefs". First, aside from a small tendency to flee when I see a wolf coming in my direction, most of my beliefs are hardly sheeplike. Second, I think I haven't made myself clear. I metamod ALL positive moderations as Fair. Never or almost never read the comments they refer to. So I don't have the faintest idea if they restate my beliefs (sheeplike or not). On the other hand, I look very carefully at the negative moderations. Many times I even open the comment thread, to understand both the comment and the moderation. I really believe that a false positive is better than a false negative (and a false positive tend to be corrected far more frequently than a false negative).
Click to go somewhere else
:)
"In fact, metamoderation encourages moderators to moderate conservatively since trying to champion an unpopular opinion is likely to lose you karma points in the metamoderation phase."
I have never had this experience. I can't confirm this alone, but I think most people metamoderate the way I do: Give an "a priori" Fair to all positive moderation, pay attention to the comments moderated down to see if any prejudice/persecution/plain stupidity
was the real reason behind the negative moderation.
Where it reads "Ramus", it should read "Rasmus".
:)
Since we are here, where it reads "more useful for Web programming in the Web" it shoud read "more useful for Web programming" or "more useful for programming in the Web", but not both.
A few years ago, when I started using PHP (somewhere between versions 1.x and 2.x) for professional web programming, the sole sources of documentation were a tiny manual written by Ramus himself (the same Ramus of the second reviewed book - the reviewer fails to note that Ramus Ledorf was PHP primary creator and maintained it almost by himself until the 3.0 effort) and the mailing list.
It was pretty hard to understand some features without delving in the C source (incidentally, PHP is one of the most well behaved coding efforts I have seem to date. The 1.x,2.x and 3.x sources compile without a flaw in almost any flavour of Unix, and I say almost because I haven't tried them all).
Nowadays, besides the wonderful online documentation, you have lots of books (9 available, 12 coming soon, according to Amazon). It is an easy world.
If you are looking for a place to start, the site is certanly this place. If you need a book, try Core PHP Programming. For a deeper look, Professional Php Programming seems to be the way to go.
And, the reviewer opinion notwithstanding, buy Ramus book and let it rest beside K&R, Wirth and Stroustrup books for a while. Not exactly Ramus league, but PHP is more useful for Web programming in the Web than C,C++ and all Wirth languages combined.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I was rather tired of hearing the mass-media crying bloody murder against one or another teenager that happened to set free the newest and lamest VBA macro-virus.
At least this time it is a real bug, not a feature, and it has Microsoft working overnight to correct it. Those who remember the glorious days of early sendmail versions know that we've already been there, done that.
It figures. But the .NET services could be argued to be OS services, a integral part of Windows .NET. It would not be the first time we see that reasoning, would it?
:)
But then again I was just joking...
One of worst things that can happen is the information about virii and other security threats to be shared only among some selected few. You may have seen the story about a 3 year old AOL security hole this weekend. The only way to prevent this kind of problem to become a major problem is to publicize the risk to the maximun possible extend. It guarantees that every system administrator in the world will hear about it and take the necessary steps to protect his/her piece of the network.
1) As we saw earlier today, PDC was not so good and the developers were not very receptive to the whole .NET idea (and to the idea of having to learn yet another language). Expect O'Reilly sales to hit the skies during the next weeks and the FSF download sites to scream under the added trafic.
2) The Supremes (the judges, not the 70's disco group) will be back from vacation and will take a look at judge Jackson's work. They will find it worth its weight in kilograms and let the company be broken. Then Microsoft A and B will hit the courts to see who gets .NET, since it is not an operating system nor an application.
3) The free-software community, taken away by its manifest destiny felling, will get Star Office, AbiSource and whatever and make all of them into the meanest office package in town. Every Fortune 2000 company will have to install it or face a class-action suit from its shareholders for spending money in bloated payware.
4)Wishful thinking is one of our better developed mental function. :)
Maybe, but it doesn't change nothing in my feelings about the whole thing.
If it is true, I would really like to see all the people that keep saying how crappy and bloated Star Office is lend a hand to fix it.
Hell, I would certanly like to help. If there is something the software base needs now is a application that can seamlessly substitute Word and Excell at the secretary's (or, in political correct terms, "executive assistant for coffe grabbing and bill paying") desk. Which company would then keep paying U$800 a sit for the other package?
The worries of Microsoft are not of my concern. The point is, how far can they take it? From my point of view, not very far. I switched packages. If StarOffice grows up to be a real alternative, will Microsoft be able to keep up with this kind of privacy invasion?
And I will not even start to argue about the whole "intelectual property" concept here, because I am sure other post in this page will cover it better than I could (isn't it always so when the letter G, P and L appear together in a headline?).
Is StarOffice really bloatware, or is there just a lot of code because it does so many things? In particular, how much "bloat" is input/output filters to make it actually useful?
Well, the computer I use at work is a PIII 500 with 128 MBs of RAM. I can use SO confortably along with JBuilder, IE 5, Outlook Express, sometimes Acrobat Reader, Erwin and Rational Rose. None of these applications are particularly small or memory effcient. The filters work well and I don't think they take all that space.
Does it produce output that MS Word users can include without further massaging? Or does it produce "close, but not quite" results?
As far as I can tell, it produce files identical to Office 98. I haven't really tested it with Office 2000 files, but I think it does well too.
Does it produce something that would let me be a "stealth StarOffice" user?
Well, that is exactly what I am, except that I warned everybody about what I was doing. I haven't had any problems.
You could probably start isntalling it and trying to read the files you receive. Then try sending them one, and see what happens.
Oh, I "own" it or at least the company I am currently working for has one of those all-out licensing schemes with Microsoft. But I think this kind of thing is outrageous. I (or the company) paid for the software. I shouldn't be harassed to tell MS where and when and by whon it will be used.
:)
Also, I haven't investigated if there was any other way to register or if I could avoid the online registering procedure. I dumped and installed SO. I just said No...
I have been using StarOffice for a while now, both under Windows2K and Linux.
I started using it under Windows 2K when I noticed the new licensing scheme for Office 2000. It will force you to register online, or cease to work at all. As I am in no particular urge to feed Redmond's databases, I dumped it and started using SO in a mostly Windows shop (my current client).
I concede that my machine has lots of memory, but StarOffice works fast and well.
I haven't experienced any serious bug and no file-format problem whatsoever. My most serious complain is about StarOffice wanting to be my browser too, and making windows believe it is now offline (in a LAN connected to a T1) everytime SO starts.
If SO goes GPL, I would expect it to get better support and better add-ons, and certanly keep updated with Office file-format tricks (a serious problem in a mostly MSWord world).
ibm.shit