Tools have given us incredible power over just about any language - C/C++, Perl, Java, etc. But does the average programer really understand what they're creating?
I've tried several IDEs for Java and Perl, and still end up back at my basic text editor (EditPadPro). Why? Because those IDEs tend to throw so much extra crap in my code, and I don't even know what that code is doing half the time! I don't know how many times I've seen programs that have every possible bell-and-whistle thrown in, but if I have a question about the code (why is this routine trying to connect to another computer?), the IDE author isn't sure. "Well, I just dragged it onto the tree, and there it was!".
The same can be said for most WYSIWYG HTML editors. I prefer using Dreamweaver, simply because I can easily look at the code I'm creating. But I am always leary to suggest Dreamweaver to someone with no HTML experience - where we have, we've ended up with 500k web pages with crap bouncing all over the screen.
Tool or no tool, there's no substitue for experience and knowledge.
From the article on Salon, it would seem that Microsoft's phone browser would require a Microsoft phone operating system (sound familiar?). With as many security & privacy breaches Microsoft products are known for - is this a good idea? I'd be expecting my MS-powered phone to ring at odd-hours with commercials. I'd expect my list of phone numbers to be 'accidentally' transfered to Microsoft. We've heard about Microsoft using unique id's on their OSs and X-Box to track their victims, er, I mean customers - why wouldn't they do the same on the phone, if they could. Move over, Homeland Security! Here comes Big Brother Bill! (the butterfly is watching you!)
4th paragraph, last sentance: I said "first stop JServ, and then stop Tomcat". Hopefully the error is apparent to all, but just in case, I meant to say "... then START Tomcat".
The biggest problem in migrating from JServ to Tomcat is that the two products, while similar in what they do, are very different in implementation. JServ had one bulk directory for all of it's servlets (insecure! insecure!), and did not support JSP very easily (IMHO). Tomcat, based on a later servlet specification than JServ, introduces the concept of a 'webapp', one or more descrete containers that allow for better security. I would say the concept of webapps is crucial to understanding the differences between JServ and Tomcat.
As far as installing Tomcat - how are you receiving the distribution? RPM? TGZ? I have only worked with the tgz archives, not the RPMs, but here's what I did:
My JServ installation was in/usr/local/jserv, so I extracted tomcat to/usr/local/tomcat. Since jserv and Tomcat both bind to the same ports (8080 for http, 8007 for Ajp12 - and then tomcat adds 8009 for Ajp13), so you can't run both at the same time without reconfiguring all these ports (which has it's own set of problems if you're trying to integrate with Apache). So, the best solution is to first stop JServ, and then stop Tomcat.
If you want to have all your old servlets work like they used to, take them from the JServ's servlet folder, and copy them to $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/ - be careful doing this, that you don't overwrite any sample files that ship with Tomcat that you may want to look at in the future. There is no guarentee that they will instantly work - there are some changes in the Servlet spec in Tomcat vs. JServ, so if something doesn't run, look at your error messages, etc, etc. But from my experience, it worked pretty well.
Using a 'webapp' container is so much easier once you get used to it - libraries can be self-contained in your app, if you have virtual hosts, you can allow some webapps on host, and other webapps for another. And be sure to check out about setting Context parameters in the WEB-INF/web.xml file - much, much easier (and more robust) that having to set init parameters for each individual servlet!
A friend of mine is using MSN (but please don't hold that against him). In order for me to send him messages, I had to download the MSN Messenger client, and then sign up for a hotmail account.
As soon as I had it all set up and running, a little window popped up saying I had 327 messages. How the heck did I get so many pieces of spam when I just opened my account?!? I would have to wonder if either a) microsoft is working with the spammers, bombarding the hotmail user, or b) there's a serious security hole in their mail services (hard to believe, I know).
Worse, I had a legitimate email account in my own domain, that is now nothing but spam. I've told friends not to use this address, because there is so much noise (about 45 messages a day, where maybe once a month I get a real email). Part of this is from the US Congress and their "f*ck the citizen" opt-out policy. My wife actually believed those lines in spam email that said "click here to opt-out". But instead of being removed, most of these links only confirm your email address is valid, so it can be sold as a confirmed email address. This just goes to show why 'opt-out' does not work (unless you're a spammer!).
What I would like to see, is a fee for sending email (go ahead and gasp here). Let's say your ISP lets you send to 50 (or any set number) addresses a month for free, and charges for each additional address beyond that number. For most users, things would seem pretty normal, but for those spammers, suddenly there's a cost involved!
I'm not pretending that this would wipe out spam - but I think it would at least give them a little pause before blanket emailing the entire network!
Or how about this - start calling spam a form of digital terrorism!
Since Bush & co hijacked the election, and our government continues to send aid to terrorists, and our courts continue to favor the companies with $ vs. the consumers without, I've been pretty disappointed in this country, but didn't really know where things would be better.
Maybe it's time I checked out Peru. yo habla espaniol? Nicht sehr gut - uh oh!
2 years ago, I bought a digital camera. I won't mention the brand - it was a junky $100 job from Best Buy. It used its own proprietary batteries, which costed about $10 a piece. With the price of batteries alone, I was spending about $10/hr to use my camera.
So I dumped the camera for another one, spending $400 this time (got a much better camera), and also found one that took AA batteries. Alkaline batteries drain a little faster - but they are so much cheaper because they are massed produced - now I pay about $2/hr to use my camera - still too expensive, but better than before.
So apply this to printers - if someone developed a 'universal' print cartridge that would work in multiple printers, the cost of production would drop, and likewise the consumer's cost would also drop.
The big question is, who would be the first printer company to turn down their profits from ink-cartridge sales and develop the universal cartridge?
"Hi, this is Pete with Help Desk. We need to migrate your account to a new system this weekend, and will need your password . .." and while you're at it, why don't you give me your SSN and any credit card numbers you have.
I would guess that a small percentage of employees who pose security risks are actually disgruntaled. They're not actually stupid, either - just unaware of the danger, or feel that the danger doesn't affect them.
Smoking causes cancer, yet I puff down a pack a day. Yeah, I should probably quit.
We don't support Outlook, and ask people not to use it - but that's what they like, so they still use it - and then their whole network is infected with viruses. They're not disgruntaled.
They run Morphius on their desktops so they can listen to music while they work - and bring in a bunch of viruses. Not disgrunataled.
I have only once in my career had 'problems' with a disgruntaled employee. We let him go, locked him out of the system, and removed any software that he had installed that wasn't being used (and checked what was being used). Saw a couple of failed logins, but that was it.
I've seen many more security problems with the well-intentioned (gruntaled?) employee.
Did I read this right? Microsoft claims to be working on a way to automatically send patches to all the XP users? That would certainly seem like another security hole! I can see the headline now: Microsoft to fix security holes with new security hole
I've found that OpenOffice.org works much more reliably than MS Office. When I'd use Word, I'd have a crash every day. With Writer, every couple of weeks I'll have a crash - and their method of recovery after a crash isn't nearly as confusing as MS Word.
Now if only OpenOffice.org could open these silly wp files people keep sending me . ..
It really seems to me that Netscape is the one keeping their browser from being competative. Maybe once the Mozilla 1.0 can be integrated, it will finally spring back to life, but by then it may be too late for that lethargic browser.
Get me strait - I hate IE, and only use it on sites that I administer and trust. At home, you need the admin password just to use the damn thing (since so many p2p clients just work through IE, this is how I keep my son from downloading viruses). But the reason Netscape is dropping in usage has more to do with the quality of the product, rather than what's bundled on the OS. When Win95 OSR2 came out with it's bundled IE 3.0, Netscape remained the leader - because it was a much better product. Netscape continued to be the most widely used browser until they stopped improving it (wasn't that about the time AOL bought them?). If the next version of Netscape should manage to be a better product (which is possible - the latest Mozilla is EXCELLENT!!! (http://www.mozilla.org/)), it may be too little, too late.
I used to work for a company that would break every Friday at 3 to play UnrealTournament or HalfLife. Two hours of every week we'd spend splattering eachother's body parts across digital walls and floors. A good time was had by all. And when the boss stopped paying us because he'd wasted all the company funds, we simply walked away, and called our lawyers. We didn't kill him, like we had done so many Fridays in the digital universe - we didn't even give him a severe pounding (which he sorely deserved). Somehow, despite the excellent sound and graphics of the game, we still seemed to grasp the difference between the game and reality.
Wow, M$ must be really hurting for cash! They usually just buy a good rating!
Re:i'm going to suffer for this but...
on
KDE Wins 3 awards
·
· Score: 1
But windows still has the same bugs it's had for years!
The fragmented CPM (er, DOS) filesystem is aweful! I do keep in mind that NTFS 5 finally lets you mount drives to a folder, but you still end up dealing with drives, and not the filesystem
But my worst complaint is the poor threading of explorer. If I toss a CD in, and double-click the My Computer, I get a blank window until explorer can read the CD and figure out it's name and icon. If the CD's corrupt, explorer will hang, and your system will crash. Hey Redmond! Thread the damn thing!!! Why can't it listen for the 'Esc' key? Why can't it simply display the default icon and say '(loading...)' or something? Good God! Java-Swing is more graceful than that!!! Same with networked printers - explorer will hang until it can pop open a print dialog. I actually had explorer go tits up over this little issue! And it's rediculous. Microsoft never seems to fix bad code, only add more bad code on top of it.
KDE is constantly improving, adding those features that back in the days of slackware and the 1.2 kernel, we were saying 'why doesn't it do this . ..' and now it does, thanks to KDE. And best of all - the Konqueror browser does not have some virus-prone scripting language to help websites destroy your system - security is still just as tight as it ever was, while windows keeps adding more hooks that open up new holes.
The linux desktop is not quite ready for the average end-user, but KDE has pushed the limits to where we can see that day on the horizon
GUIs are wonderful to have for the novice, but for most experts, they only get in the way. I administer redundant machines, where the config files must be exact matches except for IP addresses. So I use variables for the IP addresses, and run the config through a perl filter and distribute! Anybody want to try that with a GUI?
I think a GUI for apache configuration would be a good to for those first learning apache. Potentially, you could even plug the apache manual into the GUI tool to provide contextual help. It would be a great way to get started with Apache. (I teach a class on managing web servers, focusing on Apache - students would certainly benefit from a GUI tool that would show possible options for a directive).
But as an administrator of a production site, I certainly wouldn't want it! Give me vi and a text file, I'll reconfigure the server without a single click of the mouse (well, except maybe to copy & paste).
I had to set up a hotmail account just to chat with a friend on MSN Instant Messanger. If someone did break in an read my mail, I'm glad. I hate to think of all those bytes sitting there unused.
A long time ago, in a city not that far away, six months of begging my parents finally got me in to see Star Wars. I had never seen a movie like it, and have yet to see another movie that could get me as excited as this one did (save 'Empire Strikes Back'). Lucas offered special effects like no one had seen before, mostly due to time-intesive work on the part of Lucas and Crew. So the plot was a little weak - I didn't catch half of the lines anyway, I was so busy being amazed at the ships and dogfights.
I, too, am disappointed in the title for Epi2, but no more than I was at 'The Phantom Menace', or even 'Revenge of the Jedi' (the title I originally heard). 'Empire Strikes Back' is really pretty stupid, but I certainly didn't care when the film was released. Let's face it, titles for sequels suck, and I'm sure it sucks trying to come up with one. And even if Lucas named the movie 'Anakin contemplates his navel', it would still break records in the box office.
I'm not too worried about disapointment in the new movie. Lucas usually puts on a dazzling show at least. It's cinema, not deeply philisophical sci-fi. In my opinion, good cinema can be a lot more fun. 'Good' sci fi usually leaves me just a little bit unnerved (I like it to!). Star Wars movies are just plain fun. And if it's that bad, I'll just rent 'Star Trek: Insurrection' to put things into perspective.
This story looks all too familiar. Over a year ago, I build some dynamic 'Not Found' error pages for a webserver. The error page would attempt to provide some useful links, such as the site map, and a search engine form to try and get the user back on track. I went to show off my work to my manager, who uses Internet Explorer. I just about hit the roof when the page came up that pointed to msn's search engine! Rather than displaying the page sent back from the server (like a good HTTP-compliant browser), IE provides it's own error page! If Microsoft can throw away something as open as HTTP and replace it with their own proprietary subset, it's little wonder that their internal drivers would do the same.
Face the facts, if you use Microsoft products, you should expect to have to do things Microsoft's way. What Kodak needs to learn from this is how important it is to start developing for other OS's like linux. By making their drivers / software run only on Windows, not only are they doing potential customers a great disservice, they're also shooting themselves in the foot!
Within the past 6 months, I took a new job, leaving behind Oracle, for MySQL. I also packed away my $300 worth of Oracle books, and replaced them with one book on MySQL.
There are many things I now miss about Oracle. MySQL does allow user functions, but they must be written in C (instead of PL/SQL), and they need to be recompiled for each environment. MySQL doesn't have the useful ON DELETE CASCADE, or any of the features Oracle gives you for foriegn references. MySQL's procedure for creating unique ids is to set AUTO_INCREMENT for a field - much simpler and easier than Oracle's procedure: create a SEQUENCE, then create a TRIGGER ON INSERT to pull the next number from the sequence and insert it as the id. The Oracle version is a lot more complicated, but offers a much better functionality, functionality that I wish I could use in MySQL - more than one table in Oracle can use the same sequence! (This means you can join multiple tables, and they can still have unique ids). Oracle also allows you to create a VIEW - kind of a virtual table based on a select statement - which other developers can then use as if it were a table. And probably the most important to it's users, Oracle has a multitude of very decent front-end tools for administration as well as simple data access.
If you (and your staff) have a larger checkbook than development & database experience, you may be better off investing in Oracle, Oracle-related books, and maybe even some Oracle classes. It's arguably the best relational database that money can buy. There are also a ton of books, and classes available to bring your staff up to speed with using Oracle.
But being in a shop full of developers, we can get around what isn't there on MySQL, and do it for far cheaper (including the cost of our time) than purchasing an Oracle installation
As far as support, if you think MySQL is unsupported, you better read their licensing policy. I've found they actually have very good support - that is, after all, where they make their money!
I will be the first to admit that linux is very intimidating to the newbie. However, if you want to talk bloat, Windows won't be any better!
I think the real problem for new linux users is that linux has so many things that can be configured, changed and optomized (isn't that why we love it?). The Linux-Mandrake install does a nice job of walking you through the install, but there are always a few things (like xvidtune) that most newbies won't know about. It's not a bloat issue, it's a knowledge issue!
If you're worried about bloat, go to http://qnx.com/, and download their operating system on a floppy! By the way, you won't be able to configure too much!
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, straying off topic - I love your tag line! Speaking of recursive, what do you think of NT Technology? or PHP Hypertext Preprocessor?
Tools have given us incredible power over just about any language - C/C++, Perl, Java, etc. But does the average programer really understand what they're creating?
I've tried several IDEs for Java and Perl, and still end up back at my basic text editor (EditPadPro). Why? Because those IDEs tend to throw so much extra crap in my code, and I don't even know what that code is doing half the time! I don't know how many times I've seen programs that have every possible bell-and-whistle thrown in, but if I have a question about the code (why is this routine trying to connect to another computer?), the IDE author isn't sure. "Well, I just dragged it onto the tree, and there it was!".
The same can be said for most WYSIWYG HTML editors. I prefer using Dreamweaver, simply because I can easily look at the code I'm creating. But I am always leary to suggest Dreamweaver to someone with no HTML experience - where we have, we've ended up with 500k web pages with crap bouncing all over the screen.
Tool or no tool, there's no substitue for experience and knowledge.
From the article on Salon, it would seem that Microsoft's phone browser would require a Microsoft phone operating system (sound familiar?). With as many security & privacy breaches Microsoft products are known for - is this a good idea? I'd be expecting my MS-powered phone to ring at odd-hours with commercials. I'd expect my list of phone numbers to be 'accidentally' transfered to Microsoft. We've heard about Microsoft using unique id's on their OSs and X-Box to track their victims, er, I mean customers - why wouldn't they do the same on the phone, if they could. Move over, Homeland Security! Here comes Big Brother Bill! (the butterfly is watching you!)
Damn! Why didn't I preview!
4th paragraph, last sentance: I said "first stop JServ, and then stop Tomcat". Hopefully the error is apparent to all, but just in case, I meant to say "... then START Tomcat".
Been there, my friend!
/usr/local/jserv, so I extracted tomcat to /usr/local/tomcat. Since jserv and Tomcat both bind to the same ports (8080 for http, 8007 for Ajp12 - and then tomcat adds 8009 for Ajp13), so you can't run both at the same time without reconfiguring all these ports (which has it's own set of problems if you're trying to integrate with Apache). So, the best solution is to first stop JServ, and then stop Tomcat.
The biggest problem in migrating from JServ to Tomcat is that the two products, while similar in what they do, are very different in implementation. JServ had one bulk directory for all of it's servlets (insecure! insecure!), and did not support JSP very easily (IMHO). Tomcat, based on a later servlet specification than JServ, introduces the concept of a 'webapp', one or more descrete containers that allow for better security. I would say the concept of webapps is crucial to understanding the differences between JServ and Tomcat.
As far as installing Tomcat - how are you receiving the distribution? RPM? TGZ? I have only worked with the tgz archives, not the RPMs, but here's what I did:
My JServ installation was in
If you want to have all your old servlets work like they used to, take them from the JServ's servlet folder, and copy them to $TOMCAT_HOME/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes/ - be careful doing this, that you don't overwrite any sample files that ship with Tomcat that you may want to look at in the future. There is no guarentee that they will instantly work - there are some changes in the Servlet spec in Tomcat vs. JServ, so if something doesn't run, look at your error messages, etc, etc. But from my experience, it worked pretty well.
Using a 'webapp' container is so much easier once you get used to it - libraries can be self-contained in your app, if you have virtual hosts, you can allow some webapps on host, and other webapps for another. And be sure to check out about setting Context parameters in the WEB-INF/web.xml file - much, much easier (and more robust) that having to set init parameters for each individual servlet!
Good Luck!
SubWay is an excellent way to loose weight in a hurry - nothing takes off the pounds like salmonella!
Something about deli meat sitting out on the counter all day . . .
My advice - find a good asian restaurant. Or better yet, get your own wok!
If only people could protest from home, anonymously, on real issues - then people might actually get involved.
Does anyone know if McDonald's has paid any lobbyists to join Sims Online to fight these protests?
A friend of mine is using MSN (but please don't hold that against him). In order for me to send him messages, I had to download the MSN Messenger client, and then sign up for a hotmail account. As soon as I had it all set up and running, a little window popped up saying I had 327 messages. How the heck did I get so many pieces of spam when I just opened my account?!? I would have to wonder if either a) microsoft is working with the spammers, bombarding the hotmail user, or b) there's a serious security hole in their mail services (hard to believe, I know). Worse, I had a legitimate email account in my own domain, that is now nothing but spam. I've told friends not to use this address, because there is so much noise (about 45 messages a day, where maybe once a month I get a real email). Part of this is from the US Congress and their "f*ck the citizen" opt-out policy. My wife actually believed those lines in spam email that said "click here to opt-out". But instead of being removed, most of these links only confirm your email address is valid, so it can be sold as a confirmed email address. This just goes to show why 'opt-out' does not work (unless you're a spammer!). What I would like to see, is a fee for sending email (go ahead and gasp here). Let's say your ISP lets you send to 50 (or any set number) addresses a month for free, and charges for each additional address beyond that number. For most users, things would seem pretty normal, but for those spammers, suddenly there's a cost involved! I'm not pretending that this would wipe out spam - but I think it would at least give them a little pause before blanket emailing the entire network! Or how about this - start calling spam a form of digital terrorism!
Since Bush & co hijacked the election, and our government continues to send aid to terrorists, and our courts continue to favor the companies with $ vs. the consumers without, I've been pretty disappointed in this country, but didn't really know where things would be better.
Maybe it's time I checked out Peru. yo habla espaniol? Nicht sehr gut - uh oh!
2 years ago, I bought a digital camera. I won't mention the brand - it was a junky $100 job from Best Buy. It used its own proprietary batteries, which costed about $10 a piece. With the price of batteries alone, I was spending about $10/hr to use my camera.
So I dumped the camera for another one, spending $400 this time (got a much better camera), and also found one that took AA batteries. Alkaline batteries drain a little faster - but they are so much cheaper because they are massed produced - now I pay about $2/hr to use my camera - still too expensive, but better than before.
So apply this to printers - if someone developed a 'universal' print cartridge that would work in multiple printers, the cost of production would drop, and likewise the consumer's cost would also drop.
The big question is, who would be the first printer company to turn down their profits from ink-cartridge sales and develop the universal cartridge?
"Hi, this is Pete with Help Desk. We need to migrate your account to a new system this weekend, and will need your password . . ." and while you're at it, why don't you give me your SSN and any credit card numbers you have.
I would guess that a small percentage of employees who pose security risks are actually disgruntaled. They're not actually stupid, either - just unaware of the danger, or feel that the danger doesn't affect them.
Smoking causes cancer, yet I puff down a pack a day. Yeah, I should probably quit.
We don't support Outlook, and ask people not to use it - but that's what they like, so they still use it - and then their whole network is infected with viruses. They're not disgruntaled.
They run Morphius on their desktops so they can listen to music while they work - and bring in a bunch of viruses. Not disgrunataled.
I have only once in my career had 'problems' with a disgruntaled employee. We let him go, locked him out of the system, and removed any software that he had installed that wasn't being used (and checked what was being used). Saw a couple of failed logins, but that was it.
I've seen many more security problems with the well-intentioned (gruntaled?) employee.
Did I read this right? Microsoft claims to be working on a way to automatically send patches to all the XP users? That would certainly seem like another security hole! I can see the headline now: Microsoft to fix security holes with new security hole
I've found that OpenOffice.org works much more reliably than MS Office. When I'd use Word, I'd have a crash every day. With Writer, every couple of weeks I'll have a crash - and their method of recovery after a crash isn't nearly as confusing as MS Word.
.
Now if only OpenOffice.org could open these silly wp files people keep sending me . .
It really seems to me that Netscape is the one keeping their browser from being competative. Maybe once the Mozilla 1.0 can be integrated, it will finally spring back to life, but by then it may be too late for that lethargic browser.
Get me strait - I hate IE, and only use it on sites that I administer and trust. At home, you need the admin password just to use the damn thing (since so many p2p clients just work through IE, this is how I keep my son from downloading viruses). But the reason Netscape is dropping in usage has more to do with the quality of the product, rather than what's bundled on the OS. When Win95 OSR2 came out with it's bundled IE 3.0, Netscape remained the leader - because it was a much better product. Netscape continued to be the most widely used browser until they stopped improving it (wasn't that about the time AOL bought them?). If the next version of Netscape should manage to be a better product (which is possible - the latest Mozilla is EXCELLENT!!! (http://www.mozilla.org/)), it may be too little, too late.
There goes the internet! Make way for the MSiNet.
I used to work for a company that would break every Friday at 3 to play UnrealTournament or HalfLife. Two hours of every week we'd spend splattering eachother's body parts across digital walls and floors. A good time was had by all. And when the boss stopped paying us because he'd wasted all the company funds, we simply walked away, and called our lawyers. We didn't kill him, like we had done so many Fridays in the digital universe - we didn't even give him a severe pounding (which he sorely deserved). Somehow, despite the excellent sound and graphics of the game, we still seemed to grasp the difference between the game and reality.
see attached.
Wow, M$ must be really hurting for cash! They usually just buy a good rating!
But windows still has the same bugs it's had for years!
The fragmented CPM (er, DOS) filesystem is aweful! I do keep in mind that NTFS 5 finally lets you mount drives to a folder, but you still end up dealing with drives, and not the filesystem
But my worst complaint is the poor threading of explorer. If I toss a CD in, and double-click the My Computer, I get a blank window until explorer can read the CD and figure out it's name and icon. If the CD's corrupt, explorer will hang, and your system will crash. Hey Redmond! Thread the damn thing!!! Why can't it listen for the 'Esc' key? Why can't it simply display the default icon and say '(loading...)' or something? Good God! Java-Swing is more graceful than that!!! Same with networked printers - explorer will hang until it can pop open a print dialog. I actually had explorer go tits up over this little issue! And it's rediculous. Microsoft never seems to fix bad code, only add more bad code on top of it.
KDE is constantly improving, adding those features that back in the days of slackware and the 1.2 kernel, we were saying 'why doesn't it do this . . .' and now it does, thanks to KDE. And best of all - the Konqueror browser does not have some virus-prone scripting language to help websites destroy your system - security is still just as tight as it ever was, while windows keeps adding more hooks that open up new holes.
The linux desktop is not quite ready for the average end-user, but KDE has pushed the limits to where we can see that day on the horizon
If they sell millions of subscription licenses for XP, and then they get shut down . . . where does the consumer go? Did they just pay for vaporware?
GUIs are wonderful to have for the novice, but for most experts, they only get in the way. I administer redundant machines, where the config files must be exact matches except for IP addresses. So I use variables for the IP addresses, and run the config through a perl filter and distribute! Anybody want to try that with a GUI?
I think a GUI for apache configuration would be a good to for those first learning apache. Potentially, you could even plug the apache manual into the GUI tool to provide contextual help. It would be a great way to get started with Apache. (I teach a class on managing web servers, focusing on Apache - students would certainly benefit from a GUI tool that would show possible options for a directive). But as an administrator of a production site, I certainly wouldn't want it! Give me vi and a text file, I'll reconfigure the server without a single click of the mouse (well, except maybe to copy & paste).
I had to set up a hotmail account just to chat with a friend on MSN Instant Messanger. If someone did break in an read my mail, I'm glad. I hate to think of all those bytes sitting there unused.
A long time ago, in a city not that far away, six months of begging my parents finally got me in to see Star Wars. I had never seen a movie like it, and have yet to see another movie that could get me as excited as this one did (save 'Empire Strikes Back'). Lucas offered special effects like no one had seen before, mostly due to time-intesive work on the part of Lucas and Crew. So the plot was a little weak - I didn't catch half of the lines anyway, I was so busy being amazed at the ships and dogfights.
I, too, am disappointed in the title for Epi2, but no more than I was at 'The Phantom Menace', or even 'Revenge of the Jedi' (the title I originally heard). 'Empire Strikes Back' is really pretty stupid, but I certainly didn't care when the film was released. Let's face it, titles for sequels suck, and I'm sure it sucks trying to come up with one. And even if Lucas named the movie 'Anakin contemplates his navel', it would still break records in the box office.
I'm not too worried about disapointment in the new movie. Lucas usually puts on a dazzling show at least. It's cinema, not deeply philisophical sci-fi. In my opinion, good cinema can be a lot more fun. 'Good' sci fi usually leaves me just a little bit unnerved (I like it to!). Star Wars movies are just plain fun. And if it's that bad, I'll just rent 'Star Trek: Insurrection' to put things into perspective.
This story looks all too familiar. Over a year ago, I build some dynamic 'Not Found' error pages for a webserver. The error page would attempt to provide some useful links, such as the site map, and a search engine form to try and get the user back on track. I went to show off my work to my manager, who uses Internet Explorer. I just about hit the roof when the page came up that pointed to msn's search engine! Rather than displaying the page sent back from the server (like a good HTTP-compliant browser), IE provides it's own error page! If Microsoft can throw away something as open as HTTP and replace it with their own proprietary subset, it's little wonder that their internal drivers would do the same.
Face the facts, if you use Microsoft products, you should expect to have to do things Microsoft's way. What Kodak needs to learn from this is how important it is to start developing for other OS's like linux. By making their drivers / software run only on Windows, not only are they doing potential customers a great disservice, they're also shooting themselves in the foot!
Within the past 6 months, I took a new job, leaving behind Oracle, for MySQL. I also packed away my $300 worth of Oracle books, and replaced them with one book on MySQL.
There are many things I now miss about Oracle. MySQL does allow user functions, but they must be written in C (instead of PL/SQL), and they need to be recompiled for each environment. MySQL doesn't have the useful ON DELETE CASCADE, or any of the features Oracle gives you for foriegn references. MySQL's procedure for creating unique ids is to set AUTO_INCREMENT for a field - much simpler and easier than Oracle's procedure: create a SEQUENCE, then create a TRIGGER ON INSERT to pull the next number from the sequence and insert it as the id. The Oracle version is a lot more complicated, but offers a much better functionality, functionality that I wish I could use in MySQL - more than one table in Oracle can use the same sequence! (This means you can join multiple tables, and they can still have unique ids). Oracle also allows you to create a VIEW - kind of a virtual table based on a select statement - which other developers can then use as if it were a table. And probably the most important to it's users, Oracle has a multitude of very decent front-end tools for administration as well as simple data access.
If you (and your staff) have a larger checkbook than development & database experience, you may be better off investing in Oracle, Oracle-related books, and maybe even some Oracle classes. It's arguably the best relational database that money can buy. There are also a ton of books, and classes available to bring your staff up to speed with using Oracle.
But being in a shop full of developers, we can get around what isn't there on MySQL, and do it for far cheaper (including the cost of our time) than purchasing an Oracle installation
As far as support, if you think MySQL is unsupported, you better read their licensing policy. I've found they actually have very good support - that is, after all, where they make their money!
The next generation search engine -- TRY IT!
I will be the first to admit that linux is very intimidating to the newbie. However, if you want to talk bloat, Windows won't be any better!
I think the real problem for new linux users is that linux has so many things that can be configured, changed and optomized (isn't that why we love it?). The Linux-Mandrake install does a nice job of walking you through the install, but there are always a few things (like xvidtune) that most newbies won't know about. It's not a bloat issue, it's a knowledge issue!
If you're worried about bloat, go to http://qnx.com/, and download their operating system on a floppy! By the way, you won't be able to configure too much!
The next generation search engine -- TRY IT!