77 karma · joined October 21, 2010
I would look for schools who start their students in C or even C++ right off the bat. I know some people who took intro to programming in Java and would never learn C now, not sure why.
I honestly didn't know (and still don't) if you can make any money doing an honest penny auction site. We are just breaking even with this one so far.
The fact is that every time an auction goes up we have more risk than anyone else involved. If I put up a $500 iPad it could go for extremely cheap. The lowest one has ever gone for is 64 cents. That means we made less than $64 and still had to buy and ship that $500 iPad. And we have never sold anything for more than $26 which still isn't the $2600 you think it is because some packages give you more bids per dollar.
The legitimate complaint is when sites cheat. Which I would guess alot of them do. Using Facebook is not some trick to get people to trust us. Its a way for people to verify for themselves that they are in fact bidding against other real people.
How can you say that its a scam? Do you think we are just out there creating all these fake accounts with fake profile and personal photos and relationships etc. I can see maybe if we had 5 or 6 or even 20 users. But we have 100's of winners. That's a stretch even for the most paranoid and cynical of people.
Not everybody wins every time. But the data we have so far says that the majority of users that buy more than just a few bids are actually the ones getting all the deals. Its the people who come in and spend $24 expecting to win a $1500 item then leave when they don't. Those are the people who are losing. The users who are logical enough to see how the system works are the ones who get far more than they put in.
And some countries outlaw all kinds of crazy things, some countries are considering passing legislation to ban homosexuality so I guess we should all agree that its bad now too according to your theory?
Fork Bombs are easier to pull off from the command line. Not so much with DOS. I would say that loading a large webserver for each request would use up more resources than a tiny C program. Thats the whole point of the post.
Right now the C app listens on a different port that lighttpd will redirect to if a pertinent request comes in.
There is a parent process that will fork upon connection and pass the socket to child which pulls the requested data and quickly returns it.
The one thing you will also need if you go this route is a SIGALRM handler. You just basically call signal() and set a flag before each socket read and write. So if the socket takes too long to return the signal gets called and kills the child process. Then you clear the flag on the other side of the socket read/write call so that the signal doesn't kill the process if the call returns on time.
stringstream response; response << "HTTP/1.1 200 OK\r\n" << "Server: BTB Auction Updater 1.0\r\n" << "X-Powered-By:BTB Update Engine\r\n" << "Content-Length: " << msg.length() << "\r\n" << "Content-Type: text/html\r\n\r\n" << msg;
int n = write(s, response.str().c_str(), response.str().length());
if(n < 0) error("Error writing to socket");