Ultima I was a great game, and I ground my Apple II+ floppy drives to dust playing it. I fondly remember outrageous playability bugs like stealing in town and then killing absolutely everyone in it with the sci-fi weapons that become available at one point. I also remember the cool downview graphics that looked like they were done with nothing fancier than a custom font. Remaking this game in 3D would rob of it of its charm.
With things like Resin (very fast servlet runner), Tomcat, jboss, Jonas, and OpenEJB, why would we care about Enhydra? It was always kind of a bizarre product anyway, with one of the lamest templating languages I've seen. Open source Java is alive and well.
Many Perl projects seem to have a good community contributing to them. I've noticed that Template Toolkit (http://template-toolkit.org/) in particular gets contributions from multiple sources. These range from add-ons to bug fixes to documentation corrections. Some are major.
I don't know if this is because of Perl's easier level of entry, or the quality of coders interested in the project, or the project leader Andy Wardley, but it's great to see. It's one of the reasons this project has gone so far so quickly. Not too long ago, TT was just an idea, and now it generates every page on Slashdot.
I'm the maintainer of Apache::SizeLimit. I suggest you use the MAX_UNSHARED_SIZE setting. It's the most effective for heavilly loaded sites. If you have suggestions or questions about usage, send them to the mod_perl mailing list. I monitor it and will see them and respond.
On the one hand there's a "strong kinship" and on the other there's an assumption that hackers will immediately decide to turn on you by doing something extreme.
You know what? They're dead on. If you look at the history of Slashdot you'll see many cases of this kind of behavior. One day, the geeks love such-and-such.com that gives them something they like. The next day, they're up in arms over some political issue and people are posting DoS scripts in the comments. It has happened before right here, and the Legos people are right to be concerned.
If you were coding *well* in Perl, your code would be beautiful. Perl can be very aesthetically pleasing and easy to read when done right. Don't blame it all on your tools.
eBooks are an expensive product that replaces a cheap and ubiquitous one, with worse usability. And they have had little or no marketing. Who is surprised at their failure?
If you want to know what content people want to download and use, take a look at the list of the most popular short films on Yahoo: http://movies.yahoo.com/shorts. It looks "Digitopia" is probably not as good a title as "Five Sex Scenes" when it comes to grabbing consumers attention.
Miguel says "If you have Visual Studio, you can deploy Web services right away; they are SOAP-enabled. You can automatically generate WSDL descriptions."
Am I the only one who thinks that all of this web services BS has gone way too far? Raise your hand if you really believe that companies are going to build WSDL descriptions of their totally standardized, SOAP-enabled tire selling applications. Raise it higher if you think consumers will be excited enough about this to wait 5 minutes while the intelligent agent on MSN TireZone contacts directories, identifies tire sellers, contacts their servers, and compares prices.
You want a web service? There are Perl modules available to retrieve package tracking information from UPS. How do they do it? They regex the HTML from a publicly available HTTP interface. It's not ideal, but it's not exactly hard either.
God help us if the next version of Gnome uses web services.
The main reason that Perl, despite its poor performance compared with PHP and Java, is so cool is the regular-expression stuff that's built in.
Poor performance? What are you basing this on? When my company was deciding between mod_perl and Java servlets, we looked at a benchmark by the folks at Caucho, who make the Resin servlet runner. Their test seemd to show Java doing better than mod_perl on Linux. Then we looked at their code. The mod_perl stuff was not coded optimally. We fixed it, and added some more tests that used Oracle for simple interactions. The results showed mod_perl beating Java servlets by a significant margin, even on the fastest (at the time) servlet runner and JVM (from IBM). This was a year ago, and both Perl and Java have new releases since then, but the point is that you should check your assumptions when it comes to server-side performance of languages.
Before everyone starts screaming about how we must abolish all trademarks, consider the fact that trademark laws help protect your consumer rights. What if someone decided to cash in on the name recognition of Coca-Cola by selling their own soda product with a very similar name and logo design? They call it Cock-Cola, and use the Coke letter style. They open a concession booth at your local baseball stadium and hang a sign saying "Have a Cock and a smile!" Not everyone will notice they've been duped, and may get a nasty surprise when they open that can.
In the case of Open.L, it does seem like a newbie who knows about OpenGL might think that things like Open[AIC]L are associated with SGI. I mean, I certainly assumed they were styling the name after OpenGL. If this guy who wrote OpenIL had just called it Open Image Library (OIL), he would probably never have had a problem.
Let's be honest, the main reason to style your name in this way is to say that it's something similar in quality or purpose to OpenGL, and SGI does have a right to refuse that association.
considering most of Yahoo is based on its once highly visited search engines, lets face it, google kicks its ass on searching
You don't pay much attention, do you? Yahoo's searching is powered by Google. Does Google kick its own ass then?
Yahoo is one ugly ass website nowadays
On the contrary, Yahoo is the only site that sticks valiantly by its principles and delivers excellent content in pages that are fast and easy to use. You can actually use Yahoo on a modem, with an older browser. I love that.
Yahoo can't offer much that newer websites can
Name one website that offers the breadth and quality of services that Yahoo has. MSN? Nope. AOL? Nope. Not every single piece of the Yahoo site is the absolute best of its kind, but as a whole it is an amazingly useful piece site. I wish there were more like it.
You can't blame slashdot for a site's inability to keep up with legitimate demand
Interestingly enough though, you can blame Slashdot for inciting DDoS attacks. When the editors post articles claiming that such and such company did something bad, you will often see comments (highly rated!) saying "let's DoS them" and even posting scripts to do it. I didn't take this seriously until one day Slashdot decided to pick on a place where I worked and suddenly hundreds of DoS attacks started.
This kind of thing doesn't exactly help with the hacker/cracker distinction that Slashdotters seem so keen to enforce.
Against:
1) created Slashdot in _perl_ for god's sake!
Slashdot is the kind of application that begs for Perl. The entire thing is just string manipulation and database querying. You go write your version of it in Java's J2EE with Enterprise Java Beans, JTA, JSP, JNDI, and the rest of the alphabet, and then in a few years when you're finished we'll see which one runs faster on Linux.
I think you are mixed up about the eToys suit. Etoy had been running their art website years before Etoys came along - Etoy weren't trying to
confuse Etoys customers - they weren't even interested in Etoys until Etoys started messing with them.
Sounds like you never actually saw their site before the lawsuit. Yes, they were around before eToys, but at the time of the suit they were clearly aware of the confusion they were causing and loving it. They did their fake IPO thing as a joke about the eToys IPO, and had pictures of little plastic toys on their front page. Remember, the major achievement these guys are famous for is putting the word "playboy" in their META tags to lead people who searched for Playboy astray.
On the one hand, I deeply dislike organizations that try and bully
all and sundry (remember eToys?) about domain names.
[...]
I have a right to tell you what I think of Bush--I don't have the right to tell you I
*AM* Bush.
Whether you agreed with it or not, the eToys lawsuit had many similarities to this. The etoy site had pictures of toys on the front page, and kids were going there by accident, getting tricked by the toy pictures, and clicking around on the etoy site which contained various S & M pictures, etc. They refused to say something on their site about not being eToys (unless they were paid a hefty sum), so eToys took them to court to stop the complaints they were getting from parents.
Now these anti-GATT people are deliberately trying to dupe visitors into thinking they are officially represent an organization they have no affiliation with. I don't think they should be allowed to do that. They can parody or insult GATT, but this was no parody.
The damage done by the legel BS etoys pulled is far worse than good they have done by using Open Source software.
The damage done? What damage was that? Pulling a lame website down for a few weeks? Have you spent a lot of time reading the insightful commentary at etoy.com since they went back up? It's about 99% Flash.
Its not like etoys was a great developer either, so they used Open Source, and
didn't really contribute anything back.
And how would you know this? Do you spend a lot of time working on mod_perl? Do you track the patches to CPAN modules sent in by eToys employees? Did you ask VA Linux or the Apache foundation what they did with the money they received from eToys?
It looks as if you meant to say that you suspect the "major decision makers" at eToys of intentionally creating the etoy fiasco for the sake of publicity. That's absurd. If you actually look at what happened, it's quite clear that they were not looking for publicity at all. They were trying to respond to complaints from angry parents. The publicity was all a result of the people at etoy and the "denial of service attacks are okay when it's someone we don't like" crew at Slashdot.
Whether you agree with the legal actions or not (you clearly don't), there are no grounds for saying that they were driven by a scheming desire for publicity unless you subscribe to some kind of bizarre consipracy theory. Can you imagine, just for a moment, that eToys might be run by good people who acted too quickly in response to their customers' complaints and made a mistake?
All that aside, eToys dropped the lawsuit and paid the etoy legal bills, which is presumably what you wanted. It doesn't make sense to continue boycotting a company after they have done what you asked of them.
The real irony with Slashdot dancing on eToys still-empty grave is that eToys is a major customer of VA Linux. You remember them, right? The ones who pay the bills for Slashdot?
Again, the blocking of that IP number, their website, does not stop a single piece of spam from being sent or received. What it does do is punish the folks at
MarketingMasters, whose website can't be seen by RBL subscribers.
There are several ways to use RBL. Using sendmail to implement RBL just blocks e-mail from those sites. So, it's exactly the opposite of what you said - it stops spam from those sites but doesn't block their web pages from being viewed.
Maybe you should take a little more time to understand the story before you try to turn it into a piece of drama.
Slashdot Mirror
If all crackers were this funny, I'd drop my firewall now!
Ultima I was a great game, and I ground my Apple II+ floppy drives to dust playing it. I fondly remember outrageous playability bugs like stealing in town and then killing absolutely everyone in it with the sci-fi weapons that become available at one point. I also remember the cool downview graphics that looked like they were done with nothing fancier than a custom font. Remaking this game in 3D would rob of it of its charm.
With things like Resin (very fast servlet runner), Tomcat, jboss, Jonas, and OpenEJB, why would we care about Enhydra? It was always kind of a bizarre product anyway, with one of the lamest templating languages I've seen. Open source Java is alive and well.
I don't know if this is because of Perl's easier level of entry, or the quality of coders interested in the project, or the project leader Andy Wardley, but it's great to see. It's one of the reasons this project has gone so far so quickly. Not too long ago, TT was just an idea, and now it generates every page on Slashdot.
I know people like to bag on Perl around here, but it has better portability than Java and is faster for many applications.
I'm the maintainer of Apache::SizeLimit. I suggest you use the MAX_UNSHARED_SIZE setting. It's the most effective for heavilly loaded sites. If you have suggestions or questions about usage, send them to the mod_perl mailing list. I monitor it and will see them and respond.
You should read Peopleware. It has a lot of discussion on this subject and describes how quality benefits the company. Great stuff.
You know what? They're dead on. If you look at the history of Slashdot you'll see many cases of this kind of behavior. One day, the geeks love such-and-such.com that gives them something they like. The next day, they're up in arms over some political issue and people are posting DoS scripts in the comments. It has happened before right here, and the Legos people are right to be concerned.
If you were coding *well* in Perl, your code would be beautiful. Perl can be very aesthetically pleasing and easy to read when done right. Don't blame it all on your tools.
If you want to know what content people want to download and use, take a look at the list of the most popular short films on Yahoo: http://movies.yahoo.com/shorts. It looks "Digitopia" is probably not as good a title as "Five Sex Scenes" when it comes to grabbing consumers attention.
Miguel says "If you have Visual Studio, you can deploy Web services right away; they are SOAP-enabled. You can automatically generate WSDL descriptions."
Am I the only one who thinks that all of this web services BS has gone way too far? Raise your hand if you really believe that companies are going to build WSDL descriptions of their totally standardized, SOAP-enabled tire selling applications. Raise it higher if you think consumers will be excited enough about this to wait 5 minutes while the intelligent agent on MSN TireZone contacts directories, identifies tire sellers, contacts their servers, and compares prices.
You want a web service? There are Perl modules available to retrieve package tracking information from UPS. How do they do it? They regex the HTML from a publicly available HTTP interface. It's not ideal, but it's not exactly hard either.
God help us if the next version of Gnome uses web services.
Poor performance? What are you basing this on? When my company was deciding between mod_perl and Java servlets, we looked at a benchmark by the folks at Caucho, who make the Resin servlet runner. Their test seemd to show Java doing better than mod_perl on Linux. Then we looked at their code. The mod_perl stuff was not coded optimally. We fixed it, and added some more tests that used Oracle for simple interactions. The results showed mod_perl beating Java servlets by a significant margin, even on the fastest (at the time) servlet runner and JVM (from IBM). This was a year ago, and both Perl and Java have new releases since then, but the point is that you should check your assumptions when it comes to server-side performance of languages.
The art of "Dude, Where's My Car?"
Before everyone starts screaming about how we must abolish all trademarks, consider the fact that trademark laws help protect your consumer rights. What if someone decided to cash in on the name recognition of Coca-Cola by selling their own soda product with a very similar name and logo design? They call it Cock-Cola, and use the Coke letter style. They open a concession booth at your local baseball stadium and hang a sign saying "Have a Cock and a smile!" Not everyone will notice they've been duped, and may get a nasty surprise when they open that can.
In the case of Open.L, it does seem like a newbie who knows about OpenGL might think that things like Open[AIC]L are associated with SGI. I mean, I certainly assumed they were styling the name after OpenGL. If this guy who wrote OpenIL had just called it Open Image Library (OIL), he would probably never have had a problem.
Let's be honest, the main reason to style your name in this way is to say that it's something similar in quality or purpose to OpenGL, and SGI does have a right to refuse that association.
Unfortunately, their site says that they require you to run Windows and that it's not good for on-line gaming, presumably because of high latency.
You don't pay much attention, do you? Yahoo's searching is powered by Google. Does Google kick its own ass then?
Yahoo is one ugly ass website nowadays
On the contrary, Yahoo is the only site that sticks valiantly by its principles and delivers excellent content in pages that are fast and easy to use. You can actually use Yahoo on a modem, with an older browser. I love that.
Yahoo can't offer much that newer websites can
Name one website that offers the breadth and quality of services that Yahoo has. MSN? Nope. AOL? Nope. Not every single piece of the Yahoo site is the absolute best of its kind, but as a whole it is an amazingly useful piece site. I wish there were more like it.
Interestingly enough though, you can blame Slashdot for inciting DDoS attacks. When the editors post articles claiming that such and such company did something bad, you will often see comments (highly rated!) saying "let's DoS them" and even posting scripts to do it. I didn't take this seriously until one day Slashdot decided to pick on a place where I worked and suddenly hundreds of DoS attacks started.
This kind of thing doesn't exactly help with the hacker/cracker distinction that Slashdotters seem so keen to enforce.
I'm not a moderator, but damn, that was funny.
1) created Slashdot in _perl_ for god's sake!
Slashdot is the kind of application that begs for Perl. The entire thing is just string manipulation and database querying. You go write your version of it in Java's J2EE with Enterprise Java Beans, JTA, JSP, JNDI, and the rest of the alphabet, and then in a few years when you're finished we'll see which one runs faster on Linux.
Sounds like you never actually saw their site before the lawsuit. Yes, they were around before eToys, but at the time of the suit they were clearly aware of the confusion they were causing and loving it. They did their fake IPO thing as a joke about the eToys IPO, and had pictures of little plastic toys on their front page. Remember, the major achievement these guys are famous for is putting the word "playboy" in their META tags to lead people who searched for Playboy astray.
Whether you agreed with it or not, the eToys lawsuit had many similarities to this. The etoy site had pictures of toys on the front page, and kids were going there by accident, getting tricked by the toy pictures, and clicking around on the etoy site which contained various S & M pictures, etc. They refused to say something on their site about not being eToys (unless they were paid a hefty sum), so eToys took them to court to stop the complaints they were getting from parents.
Now these anti-GATT people are deliberately trying to dupe visitors into thinking they are officially represent an organization they have no affiliation with. I don't think they should be allowed to do that. They can parody or insult GATT, but this was no parody.
The damage done? What damage was that? Pulling a lame website down for a few weeks? Have you spent a lot of time reading the insightful commentary at etoy.com since they went back up? It's about 99% Flash.
Its not like etoys was a great developer either, so they used Open Source, and didn't really contribute anything back.
And how would you know this? Do you spend a lot of time working on mod_perl? Do you track the patches to CPAN modules sent in by eToys employees? Did you ask VA Linux or the Apache foundation what they did with the money they received from eToys?
You don't know what you're talking about.
It looks as if you meant to say that you suspect the "major decision makers" at eToys of intentionally creating the etoy fiasco for the sake of publicity. That's absurd. If you actually look at what happened, it's quite clear that they were not looking for publicity at all. They were trying to respond to complaints from angry parents. The publicity was all a result of the people at etoy and the "denial of service attacks are okay when it's someone we don't like" crew at Slashdot.
Whether you agree with the legal actions or not (you clearly don't), there are no grounds for saying that they were driven by a scheming desire for publicity unless you subscribe to some kind of bizarre consipracy theory. Can you imagine, just for a moment, that eToys might be run by good people who acted too quickly in response to their customers' complaints and made a mistake?
All that aside, eToys dropped the lawsuit and paid the etoy legal bills, which is presumably what you wanted. It doesn't make sense to continue boycotting a company after they have done what you asked of them.
The real irony with Slashdot dancing on eToys still-empty grave is that eToys is a major customer of VA Linux. You remember them, right? The ones who pay the bills for Slashdot?
There are several ways to use RBL. Using sendmail to implement RBL just blocks e-mail from those sites. So, it's exactly the opposite of what you said - it stops spam from those sites but doesn't block their web pages from being viewed.
Maybe you should take a little more time to understand the story before you try to turn it into a piece of drama.