ubuntuftw

They told me the same thing.

Blog post: https://getfinal.com/company-news/2017/12/06/a-final-farewel...

This is such a shock to me! I've been a Final customer for a year or so now, and I have absolutely loved their product. I told all of my friends about it. I'm so sad to hear they're shutting down, and very curious as to why.

For me, the real draw was how easy it is to setup a cluster with high availability and automatic failover. Having used MySQL in production on a mission critical web app for years, failing over between data centers and setting up replication again every time there was some kind of hiccup got very old very fast.

FYI, emails to oss@rethinkdb.com are bouncing back. That email is listed on https://rethinkdb.com/contribute.

Bounceback message:

Hello REDACTED,

We're writing to let you know that the group you tried to contact (oss) may not exist, or you may not have permission to post messages to the group. A few more details on why you weren't able to post:

* You might have spelled or formatted the group name incorrectly. * The owner of the group may have removed this group. * You may need to join the group before receiving permission to post. * This group may not be open to posting.

If you have questions related to this or any other Google Group, visit the Help Center at https://support.google.com/a/rethinkdb.com/bin/topic.py?topi....

Thanks,

rethinkdb.com admins

+1 for using a mix of two providers. That's what we do at my startup. Never had a problem since (knock on wood).

I'm no stranger to Node.js. We use it in production for all of our real-time/async stuff. The new ES6 features async/await are cool and all, but it's a late addition to a language that was clearly not designed for synchronous code. If you use them, you just end up with bloated, complex code. For an API, I think Node.js is the wrong tool for the job, personally. PHP is a better fit, IMHO. For real-time/async stuff, it's a different story.

Job server + reasonable timeout/retry limits

My company's product backend is written in PHP. I'm currently rewriting it, and when I started the process, I tried doing it in Node.js because 1) the possibility of client/server code sharing and 2) that's what all the cool kids were doing. That lasted all of a few weeks before the async nature of Node made my head nearly explode. I scraped that and went back to PHP where you can depend on code being executed line-by-line, synchronously, without hacks.

As a language, PHP definitely has some warts. But, it's come a long way, and it keeps getting better all the time.

Personally, I don't think it deserves all the hate it gets. Some criticism is warranted, but definitely not all of it. I think a lot of it stems from the fact that the language is so easy to learn and lets you do things your own way, which (at least in the early days) led to a lot of newbies writing insecure code. See: register_globals (since removed).

That all said, I love PHP. It's simple, yet powerful. It grows with you, and most importantly, it gets the job done.

>completing people's sentences or not allowing someone to finish talking before I say something

That used to be me too. After I started taking medication, I was a little surprised to notice I became a lot more patient with people. Specifically, I didn't feel the need to hurry social interactions along, etc.

If you have difficulty concentrating, are easily distracted, impulsive (i.e. checks Hacker News a lot), are irritable, etc, you might look into whether you have ADD/ADHD.

I had all of those symptoms, but never considered I might have ADD until a few months ago. My doctor had me try Adderall, and the difference has been like night and day.

I'm not saying you have ADD or ADHD. I'm not a doctor. But just based off of what you said, I wanted to mention it, because I wish someone had mentioned it to me like 10 years ago.

>The police does have a vested interest in making the public think that turning the phone off is pointless.

An interesting point, but...

If I were a criminal (I am not), and I were going to commit a crime (I am not), and I knew turning off my phone was pointless because the police can still track it, then I would just leave my phone at home, or give it to a friend.

>and even law enforcement cannot look up the cell tower logs to see where it's been.

I'm not so sure about that...

I worked at a TV news station in a major city where police told us they could track cell phones that were turned off. IIRC, it came up during an interview after they apprehended a suspect in a big rape/murder case. The suspect's phone was off, but they were able to track him. They told us they didn't really want the public to know they could do this, but it seems it's too late for that [1].

I'm not sure what the limitations are-- whether it'll work if the battery is removed (maybe there's amother battery?) or whether it only works with certain phones.

[1] https://www.quora.com/Can-law-enforcement-track-someone-by-t...

I don't know why that would make you happy. My comment was not positive.

This is great. I'm sorry to say that my startup was guilty of this as well. Not anymore though. Thanks for your article.

I, too, am getting really tired of this. It's not just Microsoft though. It's a lot of different companies.

Right now, I'm in the middle of an epic battle with Adobe to get a refund. I bought an educational version of the CS3 master collection back in 2007 when I was in college. I tried to upgrade it because a chat representative said I could, but they were wrong.

After calling their support line 10 times, spending 2-3 hours of my life either on hold or talking to them, being told twice they would call me in X hours and them not calling, they have still refused to honor the deal. It has been the worst customer service experience of my life.

At this point, it's up to some committee at Adobe to decide whether I should get my refund. Like, really? It's that hard of a decision? You told me X when X wasn't true. Give me my money back! Quit being tools.

Anyways, I'm hoping I get it. It's a lost opportunity for them though. They could have said, "Hey, we screwed up. Here are three licenses. We value your business and hope you'll stay a loyal customer." Then, they could have kept my money, and kept me as a customer. But that's not what they did.

Going forward, I really don't think I'll be buying Adobe products anymore. Not because their products are bad. It's that they're over-priced and their customer service sucks.

"I have always been annoyed about the privacy complaints I've seen about them, but never cared enough to switch. Now I do care enough to switch, thanks."

+1. GoDaddy, you lost a customer today.

I think they're helpful too! Just use isset() to check whether variables exist, and you shouldn't get any errors unless you make a mistake (in which case, wouldn't it be nice to know?).

The problem is that the reporter doesn't know that the details of the breach mentioned in this article are facts. The figures, that there were 6,480 files totaling 300 GB of data likely came from the prosecution. So the reporter needs to get himself off the hook and either attribute it ("the prosecution says") or use words like "allegedly," "reportedly," etc.

Former TV news person here.

While I agree with you on your first point (that the reporter shouldn't have to use the word "allegedly" if he/she can confirm the man was charged), personally, I think using allegedly in the sentence about the files being knocked out is warranted. "The data breach" is referring to the data breach the man *allegedly carried out.

TV news reporters != attorneys. So when in doubt, attribution is your best friend.

I <3 Ubuntu (server and desktop)

I was just looking at the demo. Haven't tried installing it on my own server because I'm traveling at the moment. Can't wait though.

YES FINALLY!

I was equally surprised!

+1 for this. It worked for me. Although (and there may have been other reasons for this), the effect fleeted with time.

I do! A killer tip too.

The Linode tutorials teach you one way of installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL... but there is another.

If you're using Ubuntu and you run the command "sudo tasksel", that'll launch a program that lets you pick from a bunch of preconfigured options. Need a LAMP server? Just "sudo tasksel" and select LAMP. Need a mail server? Same thing. Need an SSH server? Well, you get the idea.

In the past, I've had problems getting Apache, PHP, and MySQL to play nicely when installed manually, so this can sometimes be helpful.

As far as security tips: 1. Use password-protected SSH keys to login as opposed to just using a password. SSH is the protocol you will use to manage your VPS. It is also what you should use (instead of FTP, which is insecure) to transfer files. 2. Use UFW (it's short for uncomplicated firewall) to block all traffic by default and allow only necessary ports (80 for HTTP, 22 for SSH, etc). UFW is one GREAT reason to use Ubuntu. With other distributions, you have to use iptables to setup a firewall, which is incredibly complicated. UFW is easy as pie. 3. Run the command "sudo mysql_secure_installation" to secure your MySQL server 4. Keep the software on your VPS up to date. Run the commands "sudo aptitude update" and "sudo aptitude safe-upgrade" to do this.

I was in a similar position about nine months ago. I was on a shared server, and now I'm rocking a VPS with a pretty good confidence level. Here's what I did.

First, I picked a Linux distribution. I went with Ubuntu because of ease of use.

Second, I ordered a copy of "The Official Ubuntu Server Book" (http://www.amazon.com/Official-Ubuntu-Server-Book-2nd/dp/013...) and read it from cover to cover. In some cases, I had to read chapters several times to completely understand it, but because I did that and took copious notes, I feel pretty good about things now. P.S. If you do read a book, take notes. I refer to them almost everyday.

Finally, I picked a VPS provider. I tried Slicehost, VPS.net, and Dreamhost, but finally settled on Linode. I picked them because I heard great things about them, and they haven't let me down. Back then, it was something like 386mb of RAM for $19.95. Now, they're even better. They offer 512mb for the same price! With Slicehost, you only get 256mb for that price. At VPS.net, it's 376mb. So Linode is the best deal, hands down.

Oh and Linode has an excellent user library with how-to articles on doing EVERYTHING. http://library.linode.com/

Hope that helps some!