Sunday, August 25, 2002

Tara 4 Prez This is the link to donate to the candidate who is running against Howard Coble, the sponsor of the Hollywood-can-hack-your-computer bill. I loved JK Deter's sci-fi book "Noir", peripherally about future IP-crime enforcement. Read this review for some funny juxtaposition with the above link. There's a hardware solution to intellectual-property theft. It's called a .357 magnum. No better way for taking pirates off-line. Permanently. Properly applied to the head of any copyright-infringing little bastard, this works. [emphasis in the original] LOL. 9:03:25 PM      comment []  trackback []

Straw Men & FastCGI So DonB and I have been going back and forth on the merits of FastCGI support as a way of achieving broader platform support for OpenACS. I'm guilty of being sucked into the straw-man of performance that he's brought up. I think it's a non-issue, and probably shouldn't have attempted to prove that FastCGI can be comparable. Putting down one technology to promote another is not necessary. Portability has costs, yes. Performance is a negligible one. Also, the longer-term back-of-my-head plan which I'm guilty of not voicing more clearly is that I *want* a simple, unified, high-performance AOLServer stack to remain the preferred platform. I want to be able to deliver to clients a solution that runs on their preferred infrastructure, but has compelling benefits when run on it's native reference platform. That's exactly the kind of platform advocacy Microsoft is pursuing by pushing Rotor, and not-yet-suing Mono. They know both are going to suck, where suck means lags the Windows version by a good two years. But they can point to it, and it will allow them to attract a few fence-sitting *nix types to their camp. And maybe convince a few universities that they can write courses about their stack without making MS endow too many chairs. People will build on Mono. Their code will work. And the clients who use that software will become potential customers of Microsoft's .NET Server stack (where the real money is). I view the OpenACS/FastCGI project the same way. The customers that adopt it, who aren't ready to rip-and-replace their current infrastructure, will have one more excellent reason to consider doing so in the future. In closing, there are 100,000 apache servers deployed with mod_fastcgi compiled in, according to this survey. Not too shabby. 9:03:25 PM      comment []  trackback []

Something tells me illat will like this: http://www.bash.org/?top (via cwinters.com) 9:03:19 PM      comment []  trackback []