Filesystem configuration options in PHP

Name	Default	Description	Changeable
allow_url_fopen	"1"	Allows fopen()-type functions to work with URLs (available since PHP 4.0.4)	PHP_INI_SYSTEM
user_agent	NULL	Defines the user agent for PHP to send (available since PHP 4.3)	PHP_INI_ALL
default_socket_timeout	"60"	Sets the default timeout, in seconds, for socket based streams (available since PHP 4.3)	PHP_INI_ALL
from	""	Defines the anonymous FTP password (your email address)	PHP_INI_ALL
auto_detect_line_endings	"0"	When set to "1", PHP will examine the data read by fgets() and file() to see if it is using Unix, MS-Dos or Mac line-ending characters (available since PHP 4.3)	PHP_INI_ALL

Cloud computing........ It’s called SaaS.

Cloud-based servers simple enough to be at the beck and call of every Joe Schmo off the street are a compelling vision, but presently not a realistic one. At this point, in fact, one could argue that the holy grail of the consumer cloud has already been realized. In the business world, it’s called software as a service, but the rest of the world just knows it as “the cloud.”

In a blog post on Thursday, Anil Dash laid out a vision that pretty much boils down to this quote: “[W]e need a consumer cloud offering. An app store for EC2 or a marketplace for Rackspace. The same one-click stores that offer us easy apps on our own local devices should let us purchase consumer-friendly apps that run on our own individual cloud servers.” It reads well, but until cloud computing prices drop far enough that individual servers cost next to nothing, the vision seems infeasible. That’s why multitenant cloud services, what Dash calls “centralized services,” are proving so popular.

Although Dash dismisses the idea of centralized services as being primarily the realm of profit-hungry platform companies such as Google and Facebook, and archaic compared with the type of edge innovation that mobile apps enable, that’s not entirely the case. The truth is that there’s a whole slew of entrepreneurs building consumer-friendly services atop cloud platforms — like almost every popular web and mobile app you can think of, including Instagram, Draw Something , Tumblr, Wordnik, Foursquare, you name it.

Yes, it’s true there isn’t yet a cloud service for every possible need a consumer could have, but new ones are popping up every day. Some of them are actually targeting the compute-intensive workloads Dash thinks aren’t profitable enough for large platform providers to build but that might require an entire virtual server. I’m thinking of Zencoder (and the host of other video-rendering services), Animoto and Aviary, but there are plenty of other examples floating about.

It’s all about cost and architecture

For a variety of reasons economic and architectural, a centralized model is just so much more efficient than having every version of an app running on its own server. A big one is that most apps don’t need the power of an entire server, which is why multitenancy works so well. There’s also the issue of OS patches and other administrative tasks that are a lot easier with centralized control and not so easy when apps are running on their own servers god-knows-where. These are among the same reason businesses love SaaS, by the way.

And then there’s the cost; applications that rely on consumers spinning up their own servers are not going to be cheap. If an app were running 24 hours a day on a standard Amazon Machine Image (a requirement if you don’t want to wait minutes for a new server to power on every time you open the app), it would cost just less than $60 a month for compute alone, not to mention charges for storage, database calls, etc. I can’t imagine a freemium model that can support than kind of cost. Multitenant SaaS providers can keep prices low and still turn a profit by taking into account peaks and valleys in usage, but I don’t see how that’s possible in a single-tenant model.

Amazon Web Services actually has an AWS Marketplace, but it consists primarily of business applications — and for good reason. While tens to hundreds of dollars a month is a relatively good deal for business software, it’s a terrible deal for consumers. That’s why multitenant, or centralized, cloud architectures work so well.

It’s also why many mobile applications have a foot in the cloud to provide a distributed datastore, but offload computing where possible to our increasingly powerful mobile phones and laptops. Such architectures also provide the added benefit of letting apps run offline but sync with the cloud backend when devices are back online.

Built right (that can be easier said than done, I know) a centralized cloud service can stay online during an outage that would knock individual servers offline and take consumers’ instances with them.

Don’t get me wrong, I completely see where Dash is coming from in wanting, essentially, a world in which consumers can buy cloud apps that mirror and perhaps outdo their PC apps in terms of features and computing power. I just don’t see it happening given the myriad advantages cloud services have as a business model. Anyone can write and host their own application in the cloud — the advent of platform as a service makes that easier than ever before — but if they build something the rest of the world might want to use, the economics of a single-tenant architecture just aren’t there yet.

Can a Browser App Pop the Internet Filter Bubble?

The Internet's ability to show us only what we want to see is notorious. We click things we like. Algorithms look at what we've clicked on and deliver more of the same. Author Eli Pariser called it the filter bubble: the sphere of agreeable viewpoints we find ourselves trapped in once the Web figures out what we pay attention to. rbutr, an app for the Chrome browser, aims to pop that bubble.

The Problem

Pariser coined the phrase filter bubble in his 2011 book of the same name. As Pariser sees it, the online world is increasingly controlled by behemoths like Facebook and Google. Because they want to sell us ads, they present to us a version of the Internet that suits our tastes and exposes us to content that we find agreeable.

Clicking on an article about Obama while skipping one about Romney, for instance, speaks volumes about a user's taste. Over time, we create an Internet that matches our world view through the click signals we send. We aren’t exposed to different points of view, which Pariser says is a threat to everything from creativity to democracy. Adding to the threat is that the filter bubble usually works behind the scenes: In fact, it must go unnoticed to be effective. So while we make the media that ultimately makes us, we don’t notice that we’re being exposed to certain content because we never see the content we’re missing.

Pariser outlines several ways to address the problem, including building serendipity into search engines and helping users find alternative viewpoints, particularly when it comes to news. That’s the angle rbutr is trying to address.

How rbutr Works

rbutr is an add-on app for Chrome, with versions for Firefox and Internet Explorer in the works. Its goal is lofty: to give you other points of view by listing content that shows a counterpoint to whatever it is you’re reading. Say you land on the The Guardian’s negative review of Noam Chomsky’s new book. If you have the app installed, you can click on the rbutr button and see that someone has posted a link to Chomsky’s response to the review:

Read that sentence again and see if you can spot the problem phrase: “someone has posted.”

While the filter bubble works automatically and behind the scenes, rbutr needs lots of people to actively find rebuttals and post them: a cumbersome process that needs a five-minute how-to video to explain.

rbutr does have some interesting concepts built in, including an upvote feature to push the most useful links to the top. And to be fair, it is perhaps too soon to be reviewing rbutr: the app depends on people posting links to content, and it's new enough that few people have. rbutr openly acknowledges the issue on its website, saying “this is a real problem, and our primary focus at this point.”

No Solution in Sight

Blog comments are not a perfect vehicle for airing a diversity of opinion, but they work - better than rbutr, at least. At this writing, 71 comments follow the Guardian’s review of Chomsky, which provide a diverse set of viewpoints, as well as a link to the same alternative commentary rbutr turned up.

If I’m going to take the time to find a link and a counterpoint of view, why would I post it in rbutr without comment - presumably where only other rbutr users will see it - when I could post it in the comments section of the post? rbutr ultimately takes a simple task and makes it monumentally complex. Sad to say, the filter bubble won't be going away anytime soon.

Windows 8 is out in a Release Preview with some Awesome metro style applications

Windows 8 is only out in a Release Preview so far, but there are already a ton of new Metro-style apps built just for it—all free. Here's our pick of the crop.

One of the first things Microsoft did when drawing up plans for Windows 8, its hybrid tablet/desktop operating system, was to include an app store that mirrored Apple's wildly successful iTunes App Store. The Windows Store is where Windows 8 users can get the "Metro-style" apps—full screen, highly touch input friendly apps that use a consistent, intuitive interface. Microsoft even detailed terms for the developers were more generous than Apple's.

Windows 8 will run all existing Windows apps in its Desktop, in addition to the new Metro-style apps we're including below, so the whole universe of Windows apps isn't represented here by a long shot. For complex pro-level apps like Adobe Photoshop, you're still going to want to run apps in the Desktop.

All the apps in the Windows Store right now are free, since the OS is in the testing phase. Once developers can start charging for their work, we'll certainly see a lot more powerful choices. As with the offerings in the Mac App Store, any app you buy in the Windows store can be installed on up to 5 other computers, and the apps are consistently updated through the Windows Store.

The OS will come with standard Metro apps created by Microsoft for everyday necessities—Mail, Calendar, People (for social networking), Messaging, Photos, SkyDrive, Reader, Music, and Video—but both small and well-known software publishers alike have already released Windows 8 Metro apps, including Autodesk, Cyberlink, and several major news publishers.

One of the most exciting things for a software review has to be checking out a new operating system, and maybe even more importantly all the new-style apps that come with it. Keep in mind that all these free apps are in early stages, so you shouldn't expect full or even flawless functionality. But many of them show a lot of promise. For a taste of what you can get from some of the better early Windows 8 apps, click through these slides