Sorry, you're wrong, at least one some points. UK2 probably doesn't buy bandwidth from the Planet (though it is possible). When companies host at the Planet, they almost always receive additional services such as tech support and server administration, though they may retain ownership of their servers. UK2 is one of those groups. Chances are they do oversell, as most webhosts do nowadays, but that's probably not the main issue here. My guess is that SimpleCDN is just run by a dumbass with a Slashdot account (See above where users claim SimpleCDN was responsible for submitting the story).
In all likelyhood, the SimpleCDN owner overran his bandwidth limit for the month (it's common practice at the Planet to simply shut down users that overrun their bandwidth, often without notice. Whether this is a good business practice or not is up for debate), and while investigating the incident, people at The Planet found out that SimpleCDN was allowing users to upload copyrighted material to the site. Once they realized that his site just sat around serving up (possibly illegal) files all day, The Planet refused to bring their site back up. The Planet has used similar tactics when dealing with "proxy" sites. In fact, the correspondence posted above was probably just one of dozens of responses the Planet has given him in an ongoing email cockfight, so he probably has more information than he's letting on. There's no chance in hell that this was the only email he's gotten from them, as Planet employees are required to respond to every email they get from a customer.
When the story claims that The Planet is a "hosting giant", what they really mean is that it's a company with under 100 employees attempting to manage technical support for hundgreds of servers. UK2 is probably a bigger company than The Planet, but UK2 is just one of their clients. They can't be bothered to respond to every incident where an end user or reseller gets caught up in a copyright legal battle, so they play it on the safe side and terminate the account to avoid that scenario. Its totally within their rights too, because its probably *already* in their TOS that they can terminate a user on any grounds. If SimpleCDN wants to run their service, then they need to get their own server and fight their own legal battles instead of pulling in an unwitting UK2 and the Planet and expecting safe harbor.
In my opinion, the editors should have never posted this story. It's simply the tale of a dispute between a customer and their webhost over their TOS (which certainly already disallows the hosting of copyrighted material). The title should read "Hosting company disallows CDNs on their network", which would have been cast away by the editors because it wouldn't have surprised anyone. If they were hosted by GoDaddy, people would have given even less of a fuck.
Source - Former Planet employee who probably had root access to their server at one time or another.
Here's another analogy. Leaving your keys in the ignition when you go to the store. It's a stupid thing to do, it's against the law (just as leaving your wifi open is in Germany) but that doesn't mean when someone steals your car the police shouldn't go after the thief.
Excuse me sir, but do you realize which forum you're posting on? You just directly compared intellectual property to physical property as the basis of your argument. Slashdot users generally give the double bird to such arguments.
Where the hell'd you find that? I was looking all over for them, but the original rapidshare appears to have been taken down. Any way you could post a list of the full password data without the email addresses? This would rock my professor's statistics world.
Hello,
I work for a very similar company that provides support. How do they root your box? If your company is like mine, they can't simply reboot the box and log in via singles to gain root access, so how is it possible that they even get in? Are you suggesting that they hack it somehow to gain root access? That would surprise me greatly because no one in this field would care enough to go through the trouble of a sophisticated hack of your server, and besides, if they could do it, so can anyone else. Because of the hazy situation here, I'm going to assume that you are running this "server" as a VPS as opposed to a dedicated server plan. If that's the case, then they can easily log into your root account because your server is already run under VMWare. Chances are they asked you for your password in order to bypass looking up the vzid of your container. After that, it's typical procedure to restart the container if you're eating up massive resources. That will usually clear out the http/svn/mysql connections that are eating away at your container, and likely the entire VPS node. Also, I'm pretty sure that they do retain the legal right for such procedures for the purpose of cleaning up your VPS in order to keep it from taking down the entire node. Because they can gain root access on your server, VMWare would just eat up more resources, and probably not fix the overall problem at all. It may keep them from viewing your files, but they'll still restart the container when they check top and see it at a load of 50 or something.
So the next time that your 'server' goes down, ask them if they can tell you exactly wtf happened, and provide some examples so that you can show that you know enough about it to handle a mildly complex answer. For instance, ask them, "Why did you restart my server, was the load too high? Is there any way you can help me identify what was causing the server load?", or at the very least optimize PHP and MySQL in your scripts. If you don't like them logging into you VPS without permission, you really need to be upgrading to an approximately $300/month actual dedicated server. You may need to anyway, considering that load is most likely the reason that they restart your container.
Regards,
A Pissy Tech Support Lacky
I agree with this too, not only as a red-blooded Microsoft hating Linux commie, but as a programmer who started out in this age group. The second language that I learned was VB6 (right after Liberty BASIC, a classic line-by-line language that I found in Programming for Dummies). Trust me, the complexities of programming through a GUI like Visual Basic takes much more thought than simple code. The class should focus first on getting the students to understand core programming fundamentals such as arrays, control structures, and the fact that the program is simply running a series of commands. In my view, Visual Basic is built against these core fundamentals because it takes over control of the program and keeps the kids from seeing the code underneath. Also, the interface of VB is overly-complex for the beginning programmer. The biggest obstacle of the language seems to be searching Microsoft's interface to find the thing you want to do.
I had a lot of trouble finding ways to practice arrays and loops in VB because it can be difficult to find ideas for programs that require a simple GUI such that you can create with VB. Besides that, most kids wanting to learn to make programs don't usually see writing GUI applications as a goal to their efforts. They usually have one thing in mind when they decide to learn programming: Video Games. Trying to create basic games would be much easier in a classical line-by-line programming language than having to manipulate a canvas for drawing (or however you do it in VB, gave up after a while) or a text box for outputting the text of a too-high-too-low guess-the-number program.
Even though it's a favorite of mine, I also wouldn't really recommend JavaScript as a first programming language. It can be extremely difficult to debug code in IE, or even in Firefox. Also, the fact that it's integrated with HTML, Flash, and God knows what else to actually do anything cool is a major negative to me. Kids don't really care about programming if they know their programs suck, and these are going to be kids that know their way around the web. It seems to me that they would end up focusing too much on the looks of their website rather than on the actual programming task. In addition, they have to first be introduced to HTML, which I don't think is really a good starting point for kids.
The language that really, really got me into programming was Blitz Plus (evolved from Blitz Basic, which the website is named after). The language is based on game creation, but it has extensions for GUI applications. I'm pretty sure you can still find the free trial version of their software on their site, along with user-submitted work and great forum support (if you pay $20 for the full language). It's missing support for final compiling of exe's, but still includes nearly complete, integrated documentation of the language and awesome drawing, GUI, networking (TCP and UDP), sound, and console commands (though it doesn't actually use stdin or stdout). The other thing about B+ is the amazing debugging support. It allows you to step through your program line by line and browse variables to see how they're changing and evolving. It does lacks support for project management, but honestly most of their programs probably won't be complex enough to require it. There's also a great (for me at least) book you might want to check out by Sethi Maneesh named "Game Programming For Teens" that starts off with a basic Pong game and guessing games (cool graphics included).
Obviously, I'd definitely recommend a BASIC language over anything hard-core like Perl (Regex's, odd syntax, difficult documentation of some libraries, and terrifying object orientation support) or C++, but you may also still want to look into other lesser known languages that are a bit newer (I first started in on B+ about 5 or 6 years ago), but I'd definitely recommend a BASIC language with a good debugger and plenty of simplicity. Hope this helps and good luck, I still remember what it feels like to be in their situation.
I can confirm the libraries for Perl at least. I used a Linux library (libmarc-perl?) to convert them to CSV ( 100 lines of code) and created a PHP interface for my school's library. Unfortunately, they were upgrading their software the next year and so my free work was overridden by the school cooperation-wide switch to the new programs. If it had ever gone live, I guess I might have been nailed by OCLC for infringement?
I'm not sure about AT&T, but I've got a few blind friends that use the LG VX8300 on Verizon. It's got dedicated music controls on the front of the phone and 512 MB cards for it are fairly cheap.
Same as above (Probably imperfect grammar as well), but with missing BR's (Didn't realize you needed to add them in when using any HTML. Yeah, yeah, preview I know. I used it this time)
1. My parents are NOT contributing $30K/year to my education, they've saved $10K/year for a public school. The $30,000 comes from the fact that MIT is about $40K-$45K ($40K-$10K=$30K)
2. My brother could never find financial aid, and scholarships only go so far.
3. My cousin was accepted to MIT but couldn't find enough money.
4. I'm not saying that I haven't considered public schools; I simply much prefer a school that I'm not in the top 1% of math SAT scores. If that sounds arrogant I apologize, but I'm just tired of going to schools like my high school that don't have a *single* person (student or otherwise) who knows C.
5. I want to go to MIT because I think that I can learn something about programming from other students and teachers (the computer programming class is taught with JavaScript and teachers certified by a one day course) for the first time in my life.
6. Yes, Mr. Troll, I'd say McDonalds could be called work.
7. Yes, I was about to call the MIT admissions office, but my mother brought up the argument "don't even try, we won't have the money for that", hence this ask slashdot article.
8. I want to find scholarships from FOSS organizations because I want to support the community and working for a FOSS company would be a dream come true. I love Linux and free software, and would be proud to put some time into the cause.
9. I hate to respond to my own article, but I felt like I needed to clear up a few things.
1. My parents are NOT contributing $30K/year to my education, they've saved $10K/year for a public school. The $30,000 comes from the fact that MIT is about $40K-$45K ($40K-$10K=$30K)
2. My brother could never find financial aid, and scholarships only go so far.
3. My cousin was accepted to MIT but couldn't find enough money.
4. I'm not saying that I haven't considered public schools; I simply much prefer a school that I'm not in the top 1% of math SAT scores. If that sounds arrogant I apologize, but I'm just tired of going to schools like my high school that don't have a *single* person (student or otherwise) who knows C.
5. I want to go to MIT because I think that I can learn something about programming from other students and teachers (the computer programming class is taught with JavaScript and teachers certified by a one day course) for the first time in my life.
6. Yes, Mr. Troll, I'd say McDonalds could be called work.
7. Yes, I was about to call the MIT admissions office, but my mother brought up the argument "don't even try, we won't have the money for that", hence this ask slashdot article.
8. I want to find scholarships from FOSS organizations because I want to support the community and working for a FOSS company would be a dream come true. I love Linux and free software, and would be proud to put some time into the cause.
9. I hate to respond to my own article, but I felt like I needed to clear up a few things.
Well, a friend of mine said he heard the monster was just a child during the movie... So maybe it came to Earth as an egg or something? But yeah, I definitely missed it as well...
If net neutrality is destroyed, what will happen to the small internet developers such as the high schooler running the server out of his parent's basement or the guy trying to work out a few bugs in a new program that needs large automatic updates? From my position, it seems like there would be a great risk of losing some of the hobbyist programmers necessary to the open source community, especially considering the dropping of packets. I know that I (the high schooler running a web-server from his basement and the programmer) would just find a different hobby if I had to pay outrageous (or any) rates to test and implement my programs and setups at a decent speed (besides what my family is paying for broadband already).
I guess I didn't explain my idea well enough. I don't want to convert the config files themselves to xml, I want to create an xml script that describes the GUI. The program itself will load up the xml and use it like HTML. There is a tag that creates an text entry, one for creating a file browser, one for creating tabs, one for creating check boxes, etc. It will then follow patterns which the script writer can specify in the XML code to output what the user selects to an external configuration file (like httpd.conf in apache) easily. And no, I don't intend to include every single feature apache has to offer in the GUI. If you're technical enough to realize the purpose of many of those features, then you're probably going to prefer the text editor over my any XML GUI I can create anyway. For example, the main things I want for the apache XML script is easy CGI configuration and the ability to activate SSL.
I was also thinking about adding in shell scripting so that you could, say, restart apache whenever the user saved their configuration file. However, when talking about user-submitted scripts, this seems to be a bit too large of a security hole. Eventually, I'd also like to see this either integrated into a GUI package installer like synaptic, or have one built around it, that way you could install and instantly be given the option to configure whatever you've just installed.
What I mean is that you have to search for the names and valid values. It takes me forever just to find the documentation, let alone the variable that makes the changes I need. Half the time I'm also missing out on some of the functionality of the program because I haven't found some of the options. This is where configuration GUI's really shine, because you don't have to know the names. It also leads you into finding a legal value through check boxes, entries, browse buttons, and so forth.
I'm hoping all three, but no one has made a system wide database (which has its strong points and its weaknesses) and I don't intend to. The proprietary interfaces are great because they're a part of the program, and who wants to open up another program just to disable a button in firefox? If your making a reference to the many plugins available in firefox, you're right, I/the user who wants to create the script probably won't be able to write a script for each of the plugins, but for the main program, and any larger extensions, there needs to be some way to configure them if they lack one. I don't much enjoy searching through man pages for some obscure variable to set in a text file somewhere in/etc. Also, it's worth pointing out that I don't plan on centralizing the many configuration files, I plan on editing them in place. The idea of the program is based on the idea that the target programs are usually configured using a text editor, and keeping you away from it.
I'm hoping I won't have to contact the developers because I'm hoping to create a user supported repository, so anyone could make a configuration utility for their favorite programs and put them up for everyone else to use. I wondered why there didn't seem to be one out there already, but maybe I should have looked harder. Also, what do you mean by "dumb down" the user interface? Considering the fact that there isn't a user interface for configuring many server programs like samba, apache, and vsftpd, I'm not sure this is possible.
Yes, I have to admit, it probably wasn't the best idea... I knew about libxml when I started writing the program, but writing my own xml parser sounded pretty fun, so I went for it. I probably will switch it over to libxml if I ever make a release version because I don't want anyone who looks at my code to hate me, but for testing at least, it's usable for me. I'm still learning C and this helped me learn how to make inheritance with structures (similar to GTK's system), so despite being a waste of time, it was pretty fun.
I'm with you 100% on the text-based configuration. The first thing I found that really aggravated me was how hard it was to set up a simple FTP server (the whole reason I started using Linux). I still don't even know what the last two 0's on/etc/fstab lines are supposed to mean. Thankfully though, I also ditched windows for the easier to learn GUI programming... This little annoyance is at the top of my list. I'm thinking maybe a repository of XML based configuration frontends loaded up by a single dynamic configuration program would be a good start...
P.S., I've already written my own XML parser and half of the GUI functionality;)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, you're wrong, at least one some points. UK2 probably doesn't buy bandwidth from the Planet (though it is possible). When companies host at the Planet, they almost always receive additional services such as tech support and server administration, though they may retain ownership of their servers. UK2 is one of those groups. Chances are they do oversell, as most webhosts do nowadays, but that's probably not the main issue here. My guess is that SimpleCDN is just run by a dumbass with a Slashdot account (See above where users claim SimpleCDN was responsible for submitting the story).
In all likelyhood, the SimpleCDN owner overran his bandwidth limit for the month (it's common practice at the Planet to simply shut down users that overrun their bandwidth, often without notice. Whether this is a good business practice or not is up for debate), and while investigating the incident, people at The Planet found out that SimpleCDN was allowing users to upload copyrighted material to the site. Once they realized that his site just sat around serving up (possibly illegal) files all day, The Planet refused to bring their site back up. The Planet has used similar tactics when dealing with "proxy" sites. In fact, the correspondence posted above was probably just one of dozens of responses the Planet has given him in an ongoing email cockfight, so he probably has more information than he's letting on. There's no chance in hell that this was the only email he's gotten from them, as Planet employees are required to respond to every email they get from a customer.
When the story claims that The Planet is a "hosting giant", what they really mean is that it's a company with under 100 employees attempting to manage technical support for hundgreds of servers. UK2 is probably a bigger company than The Planet, but UK2 is just one of their clients. They can't be bothered to respond to every incident where an end user or reseller gets caught up in a copyright legal battle, so they play it on the safe side and terminate the account to avoid that scenario. Its totally within their rights too, because its probably *already* in their TOS that they can terminate a user on any grounds. If SimpleCDN wants to run their service, then they need to get their own server and fight their own legal battles instead of pulling in an unwitting UK2 and the Planet and expecting safe harbor.
In my opinion, the editors should have never posted this story. It's simply the tale of a dispute between a customer and their webhost over their TOS (which certainly already disallows the hosting of copyrighted material). The title should read "Hosting company disallows CDNs on their network", which would have been cast away by the editors because it wouldn't have surprised anyone. If they were hosted by GoDaddy, people would have given even less of a fuck.
Source - Former Planet employee who probably had root access to their server at one time or another.
Here's another analogy. Leaving your keys in the ignition when you go to the store. It's a stupid thing to do, it's against the law (just as leaving your wifi open is in Germany) but that doesn't mean when someone steals your car the police shouldn't go after the thief.
Excuse me sir, but do you realize which forum you're posting on? You just directly compared intellectual property to physical property as the basis of your argument. Slashdot users generally give the double bird to such arguments.
Where the hell'd you find that? I was looking all over for them, but the original rapidshare appears to have been taken down. Any way you could post a list of the full password data without the email addresses? This would rock my professor's statistics world.
Hello, I work for a very similar company that provides support. How do they root your box? If your company is like mine, they can't simply reboot the box and log in via singles to gain root access, so how is it possible that they even get in? Are you suggesting that they hack it somehow to gain root access? That would surprise me greatly because no one in this field would care enough to go through the trouble of a sophisticated hack of your server, and besides, if they could do it, so can anyone else. Because of the hazy situation here, I'm going to assume that you are running this "server" as a VPS as opposed to a dedicated server plan. If that's the case, then they can easily log into your root account because your server is already run under VMWare. Chances are they asked you for your password in order to bypass looking up the vzid of your container. After that, it's typical procedure to restart the container if you're eating up massive resources. That will usually clear out the http/svn/mysql connections that are eating away at your container, and likely the entire VPS node. Also, I'm pretty sure that they do retain the legal right for such procedures for the purpose of cleaning up your VPS in order to keep it from taking down the entire node. Because they can gain root access on your server, VMWare would just eat up more resources, and probably not fix the overall problem at all. It may keep them from viewing your files, but they'll still restart the container when they check top and see it at a load of 50 or something. So the next time that your 'server' goes down, ask them if they can tell you exactly wtf happened, and provide some examples so that you can show that you know enough about it to handle a mildly complex answer. For instance, ask them, "Why did you restart my server, was the load too high? Is there any way you can help me identify what was causing the server load?", or at the very least optimize PHP and MySQL in your scripts. If you don't like them logging into you VPS without permission, you really need to be upgrading to an approximately $300/month actual dedicated server. You may need to anyway, considering that load is most likely the reason that they restart your container. Regards, A Pissy Tech Support Lacky
Oops, meant to respond to the VB Post, but the thread had changed by the time I had typed up my response. Sorry PHP.
I agree with this too, not only as a red-blooded Microsoft hating Linux commie, but as a programmer who started out in this age group. The second language that I learned was VB6 (right after Liberty BASIC, a classic line-by-line language that I found in Programming for Dummies). Trust me, the complexities of programming through a GUI like Visual Basic takes much more thought than simple code. The class should focus first on getting the students to understand core programming fundamentals such as arrays, control structures, and the fact that the program is simply running a series of commands. In my view, Visual Basic is built against these core fundamentals because it takes over control of the program and keeps the kids from seeing the code underneath. Also, the interface of VB is overly-complex for the beginning programmer. The biggest obstacle of the language seems to be searching Microsoft's interface to find the thing you want to do.
I had a lot of trouble finding ways to practice arrays and loops in VB because it can be difficult to find ideas for programs that require a simple GUI such that you can create with VB. Besides that, most kids wanting to learn to make programs don't usually see writing GUI applications as a goal to their efforts. They usually have one thing in mind when they decide to learn programming: Video Games. Trying to create basic games would be much easier in a classical line-by-line programming language than having to manipulate a canvas for drawing (or however you do it in VB, gave up after a while) or a text box for outputting the text of a too-high-too-low guess-the-number program.
Even though it's a favorite of mine, I also wouldn't really recommend JavaScript as a first programming language. It can be extremely difficult to debug code in IE, or even in Firefox. Also, the fact that it's integrated with HTML, Flash, and God knows what else to actually do anything cool is a major negative to me. Kids don't really care about programming if they know their programs suck, and these are going to be kids that know their way around the web. It seems to me that they would end up focusing too much on the looks of their website rather than on the actual programming task. In addition, they have to first be introduced to HTML, which I don't think is really a good starting point for kids.
The language that really, really got me into programming was Blitz Plus (evolved from Blitz Basic, which the website is named after). The language is based on game creation, but it has extensions for GUI applications. I'm pretty sure you can still find the free trial version of their software on their site, along with user-submitted work and great forum support (if you pay $20 for the full language). It's missing support for final compiling of exe's, but still includes nearly complete, integrated documentation of the language and awesome drawing, GUI, networking (TCP and UDP), sound, and console commands (though it doesn't actually use stdin or stdout). The other thing about B+ is the amazing debugging support. It allows you to step through your program line by line and browse variables to see how they're changing and evolving. It does lacks support for project management, but honestly most of their programs probably won't be complex enough to require it. There's also a great (for me at least) book you might want to check out by Sethi Maneesh named "Game Programming For Teens" that starts off with a basic Pong game and guessing games (cool graphics included).
Obviously, I'd definitely recommend a BASIC language over anything hard-core like Perl (Regex's, odd syntax, difficult documentation of some libraries, and terrifying object orientation support) or C++, but you may also still want to look into other lesser known languages that are a bit newer (I first started in on B+ about 5 or 6 years ago), but I'd definitely recommend a BASIC language with a good debugger and plenty of simplicity. Hope this helps and good luck, I still remember what it feels like to be in their situation.
I can confirm the libraries for Perl at least. I used a Linux library (libmarc-perl?) to convert them to CSV ( 100 lines of code) and created a PHP interface for my school's library. Unfortunately, they were upgrading their software the next year and so my free work was overridden by the school cooperation-wide switch to the new programs. If it had ever gone live, I guess I might have been nailed by OCLC for infringement?
So now we know HOW exactly this whole ordeal was started, and there is a lesson to be learned here... somewhere.
Did you check your c:\windows\configsetroot?
I'm not sure about AT&T, but I've got a few blind friends that use the LG VX8300 on Verizon. It's got dedicated music controls on the front of the phone and 512 MB cards for it are fairly cheap.
Goddamn Mongols! Stop breaking down my shitty firewall!
That's almost an order of magnitude more than the percent of linux market share in 2004.
.29 percent in 2004." source.
"According to Market Share, Linux's market penetration stagnated at
Same as above (Probably imperfect grammar as well), but with missing BR's (Didn't realize you needed to add them in when using any HTML. Yeah, yeah, preview I know. I used it this time)
1. My parents are NOT contributing $30K/year to my education, they've saved $10K/year for a public school. The $30,000 comes from the fact that MIT is about $40K-$45K ($40K-$10K=$30K)
2. My brother could never find financial aid, and scholarships only go so far.
3. My cousin was accepted to MIT but couldn't find enough money.
4. I'm not saying that I haven't considered public schools; I simply much prefer a school that I'm not in the top 1% of math SAT scores. If that sounds arrogant I apologize, but I'm just tired of going to schools like my high school that don't have a *single* person (student or otherwise) who knows C.
5. I want to go to MIT because I think that I can learn something about programming from other students and teachers (the computer programming class is taught with JavaScript and teachers certified by a one day course) for the first time in my life.
6. Yes, Mr. Troll, I'd say McDonalds could be called work.
7. Yes, I was about to call the MIT admissions office, but my mother brought up the argument "don't even try, we won't have the money for that", hence this ask slashdot article.
8. I want to find scholarships from FOSS organizations because I want to support the community and working for a FOSS company would be a dream come true. I love Linux and free software, and would be proud to put some time into the cause.
9. I hate to respond to my own article, but I felt like I needed to clear up a few things.
1. My parents are NOT contributing $30K/year to my education, they've saved $10K/year for a public school. The $30,000 comes from the fact that MIT is about $40K-$45K ($40K-$10K=$30K) 2. My brother could never find financial aid, and scholarships only go so far. 3. My cousin was accepted to MIT but couldn't find enough money. 4. I'm not saying that I haven't considered public schools; I simply much prefer a school that I'm not in the top 1% of math SAT scores. If that sounds arrogant I apologize, but I'm just tired of going to schools like my high school that don't have a *single* person (student or otherwise) who knows C. 5. I want to go to MIT because I think that I can learn something about programming from other students and teachers (the computer programming class is taught with JavaScript and teachers certified by a one day course) for the first time in my life. 6. Yes, Mr. Troll, I'd say McDonalds could be called work. 7. Yes, I was about to call the MIT admissions office, but my mother brought up the argument "don't even try, we won't have the money for that", hence this ask slashdot article. 8. I want to find scholarships from FOSS organizations because I want to support the community and working for a FOSS company would be a dream come true. I love Linux and free software, and would be proud to put some time into the cause. 9. I hate to respond to my own article, but I felt like I needed to clear up a few things.
Well, a friend of mine said he heard the monster was just a child during the movie... So maybe it came to Earth as an egg or something? But yeah, I definitely missed it as well...
If net neutrality is destroyed, what will happen to the small internet developers such as the high schooler running the server out of his parent's basement or the guy trying to work out a few bugs in a new program that needs large automatic updates? From my position, it seems like there would be a great risk of losing some of the hobbyist programmers necessary to the open source community, especially considering the dropping of packets. I know that I (the high schooler running a web-server from his basement and the programmer) would just find a different hobby if I had to pay outrageous (or any) rates to test and implement my programs and setups at a decent speed (besides what my family is paying for broadband already).
Oh, by the way, nice use of quotation marks :P.
Period XD
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=279871&thr eshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=20362805#20 363083
I guess I didn't explain my idea well enough. I don't want to convert the config files themselves to xml, I want to create an xml script that describes the GUI. The program itself will load up the xml and use it like HTML. There is a tag that creates an text entry, one for creating a file browser, one for creating tabs, one for creating check boxes, etc. It will then follow patterns which the script writer can specify in the XML code to output what the user selects to an external configuration file (like httpd.conf in apache) easily. And no, I don't intend to include every single feature apache has to offer in the GUI. If you're technical enough to realize the purpose of many of those features, then you're probably going to prefer the text editor over my any XML GUI I can create anyway. For example, the main things I want for the apache XML script is easy CGI configuration and the ability to activate SSL. I was also thinking about adding in shell scripting so that you could, say, restart apache whenever the user saved their configuration file. However, when talking about user-submitted scripts, this seems to be a bit too large of a security hole. Eventually, I'd also like to see this either integrated into a GUI package installer like synaptic, or have one built around it, that way you could install and instantly be given the option to configure whatever you've just installed.
What I mean is that you have to search for the names and valid values. It takes me forever just to find the documentation, let alone the variable that makes the changes I need. Half the time I'm also missing out on some of the functionality of the program because I haven't found some of the options. This is where configuration GUI's really shine, because you don't have to know the names. It also leads you into finding a legal value through check boxes, entries, browse buttons, and so forth.
I'm hoping all three, but no one has made a system wide database (which has its strong points and its weaknesses) and I don't intend to. The proprietary interfaces are great because they're a part of the program, and who wants to open up another program just to disable a button in firefox? If your making a reference to the many plugins available in firefox, you're right, I/the user who wants to create the script probably won't be able to write a script for each of the plugins, but for the main program, and any larger extensions, there needs to be some way to configure them if they lack one. I don't much enjoy searching through man pages for some obscure variable to set in a text file somewhere in /etc. Also, it's worth pointing out that I don't plan on centralizing the many configuration files, I plan on editing them in place. The idea of the program is based on the idea that the target programs are usually configured using a text editor, and keeping you away from it.
I'm hoping I won't have to contact the developers because I'm hoping to create a user supported repository, so anyone could make a configuration utility for their favorite programs and put them up for everyone else to use. I wondered why there didn't seem to be one out there already, but maybe I should have looked harder. Also, what do you mean by "dumb down" the user interface? Considering the fact that there isn't a user interface for configuring many server programs like samba, apache, and vsftpd, I'm not sure this is possible.
Yes, I have to admit, it probably wasn't the best idea... I knew about libxml when I started writing the program, but writing my own xml parser sounded pretty fun, so I went for it. I probably will switch it over to libxml if I ever make a release version because I don't want anyone who looks at my code to hate me, but for testing at least, it's usable for me. I'm still learning C and this helped me learn how to make inheritance with structures (similar to GTK's system), so despite being a waste of time, it was pretty fun.
I'm with you 100% on the text-based configuration. The first thing I found that really aggravated me was how hard it was to set up a simple FTP server (the whole reason I started using Linux). I still don't even know what the last two 0's on /etc/fstab lines are supposed to mean. Thankfully though, I also ditched windows for the easier to learn GUI programming... This little annoyance is at the top of my list. I'm thinking maybe a repository of XML based configuration frontends loaded up by a single dynamic configuration program would be a good start...
;)
P.S., I've already written my own XML parser and half of the GUI functionality
XD