Can't help but notice the .pl in the pollBooth's URL. Perl is the most godawful example of this problem, but I tend to think it's more an unwillingness to evolve than simply being replacable.

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.

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'm soooo glad you didn't make a reference to nails in the hands and feet here.

Fear not my neglected chum, you could still participate in the vote! When your planar surface of existence was fixed vertically to another, what was used to keep it fixed there?

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?