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Long time ago :)

http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

Ok, so maybe it's not as sophisticated as this version...

Have you never come across the game of life:
http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/
or the mandelbrot set: from very simple rules you can get some remarkably complex behaviour.

If you're a PHP programmer, you're irresponsible if you're not already aware of its flaws, because you have not educated yourself by reading any of the following well publicized articles. Once you understand the flaws of PHP, you can't honestly make the statement that it's a well designed language suitable for teaching programming to kids.

First there is this classic article, Edwin Martin's "What I don't Like about PHP", which goes into detail about the following fundamental flaws:

1. Bad recursion
2. Many PHP-modules are not thread safe
3. PHP is crippled for commercial reasons
4. No namespaces
5. Non-standard date format characters
6. Confusing licenses
7. Inconsequent function naming convention
8. Magic quotes hell
9. Framework seldom used
10. No Unicode
11. Slow

Then there is the mind-set of the PHP language designers and community, which is deeply flawed. Ian Bicking's "PHP Ghetto" article sums up the problem with PHP's design and community pretty well:

I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.

Jonathan Ellis' "Why PHP sucks" article makes a lot of good points and links to many other sites with more information to back up the claim that PHP sucks.

He perfectly summarizes the yapping of the PHP apologists when he says: Basically these all boil down to, "I don't have enough experience to recognize PHP's flaws because I haven't used anything better."

He summarizes:

In short, PHP sucks because, PHP's authors are prone to confuse "pragmatism" (a fine design goal, if done well) with "adding random features without considering how they impact the language as a whole." Thus, its authors have found it necessary to correct obvious flaws in both minor and major releases, with the result that the recent PHP5 breaks with the past to an unprecedented degree while still leaving many fundamental flaws un-addressed. I don't know if this is because they didn't recognize those flaws, or more likely, because they were willing to impose "requires a lot of pain to upgrade" but not "requires a complete re-write."

There is also a lot of great stuff about why PHP is so bad on http://www.ranting-wolf.info/category/technology/programming/php/ including a concise description of why the "Smarty" templating system is such a horribly ill conceive and terribly implemented idea.

And if you're still not convinced the design of PHP is deeply flawed, because language design is HARD and should only be attempted on purpose by experienced people, here's what the Father of PHP Rasmus Lerdorf himself said in an ITConversations interview, quoted in "Why PHP sucks, Part III":

"I don't know how to stop it, there was never any intend to writ

I thought pie day was the day when Bill Gates was hit in the face by a pie.

February 4th, 1998 is when it happened. See the action here:

http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/

For a few years I took pies into work on that day. Everyone really liked them.

Taken from http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php/

1. Bad recursion

Recursion is the mechanism in which a function calls itself. This is a powerful feature which can make something complex something simple. An example of a function using recursion is quicksort. Unfortunately, PHP is not good at recursion. Zeev, one or the developers of PHP, says this: "PHP 4.0 (Zend) uses the stack for intensive data, rather than using the heap. That means that its tolerance recursive functions is significantly lower than that of other languages." See bug 1901. This is a poor excuse. Every programming language should provide good recursion support.

2. Many PHP-modules are not thread safe

A couple of years ago, Apache released version 2.0 of its web server. This version supports multithreaded mode, in which one piece of software can run multiple times simultaneously. The makers of PHP say that the core of PHP is thread safe, only the non-core modules often aren't. But nine out of ten times, you do want to use such a module in your PHP-script, making your script unsuitable for Apache's multithreaded mode. That's why The PHP Group doesn't recommend running PHP on Apache 2 in multithreaded mode. The bad multithreaded mode support of PHP is often seen as the reason Apache 2 still didn't catch on.

3. PHP is crippled for commercial reasons

The performance of PHP can be increased to 500% by using caching [benchmarks]. So why is caching not build into PHP? Because Zend, the maker of PHP is selling its own Zend Accelerator and of course, they don't want to cannibalize on there own commercial products.

4. No namespaces

Suppose someone creates a PHP-module that can read files. One of the functions in this module is called read. And someone else's module can read web pages and also contains a function read. Then it is impossible to use these modules together because PHP will not know which read function you want.

An easy solution to this is namespaces. It was a suggested feature for PHP 5, but unfortunately it didn't make it. Now, without namespaces, every function has to be prefixed with the module name, to prevent name collisions. This leads to terrible long function names like xsl_xsltprocessor_transform_to_xml which makes code harder to write and read.

5. Non-standard date format characters

Many programmers are familiar with the date format characters known from UNIX and the C programming language. Other programming languages adopted this standard, but strangely enough, PHP has its own, completely incompatible date format characters. While in C, "%j" stands for the day of the year, in PHP this stands for the day of the month. To make things even more confusing: the function strftime and the date_format of Smarty, a PHP templating engine, do use the C/UNIX format characters.

6. Confusing licenses

You might think PHP is free and all PHP-modules in the manual are free too. Wrong. For example, if you want to generate a PDF-file from PHP you will find two modules in the manual: PDF or ClibPDF. But both come with commercial licenses. So for every module you use, you have to make sure you agree with its license.

7. Inconsequent function naming convention

Some function names consist of more than one word. There are three conventions for combining these words:

1. Glued together: getnumberoffiles
2. Separated with underscores: get_number_of_files
3. Camel case: getNumberOfFiles

Most Languages choose one of these variants. PHP uses all of them.

For example, it you want to convert special characters to HTML entities, you use the function htmlentities (Words glued together). If you want to do the opposite, you use its little brother function html_entity_decode. For some reason the words are now separated by underscores. Why is this bad? You know there is a function named strpad. Or was it str_pad? Every time you hav

As other physicists will tell you, there are all kinds of ways in which you can define a death. I would strongly encourage you to mess with Conway's Game of life, because that is exactly how it works for us humans. In fact, the page I just linked to loads with a perfect example -- a glider. You'll probably want to download a bigger version of this, drop the scale down to one pixel, maybe, but the essential result is the same: A glider can be observed as an entity which moves across the screen, wiggling as it goes, where, in fact, it is a bunch of tiny organisms (think of them as bacteria) living and dying every step of the way. Nothing in the Game of life moves, but new things are born and old ones die.

The glider is also very cool for other reasons, too -- it's an emergent phenomenon. Grab any Game of Life simulator, set the resolution to one pixel per bacterium, scribble a nonsensical pattern on it with your mouse, and let it run -- it's almost a certainty that more than a few gliders will spin off of it and go sliding off towards the edge of the screen. It is an example of how patterns arise from chaos, and a very visual demonstration of why evolution works.

But back to the subject at hand... Various parts of your body live and die at different rates. I'm not sure how long it takes to replace everything, but I think it's only a month or so.

You can approach this two ways: Either get over your fear of death, or start to identify yourself as a pattern -- a meme, a program, a chunk of data. Even cloning doesn't diminish you -- if anything, it makes you stronger.

However, if you insist on the depressing/disturbing interpretation, watch The Prestige. I'll say no more, just watch it.

Such is life. John Conway's game of life, that is. And it's been around a lot longer than this rebranded form of cellular automaton called "Swarm Theory" has. Note that Conway also worked at Princeton. Small world, and smaller attribution.

So this stuff is about this http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

• no first-class functions (and no, create_function does not count)
• no usable object-model (check out response of developer below!)
• no namespaces
• problems with recursion
• general problems with consistency
• countless other horrible mis-designed "features" (not even starting on the security problems)

If you saw him on video getting pied in the face, you know that he has no sense of humor

hey, whatever happened to the guy who pie'd Gates? I want to firstly shake his hand and secondly buy him several beers

video is here

Turn on pipelining and use more connections per host with this Firefox-Add-on

Tweak Network Settings:

http://www.bitstorm.org/extensions/tweak/

Very easy to use: just use the "Power profile".

p.s.: I hope they don't program it with an option to play global thermonuclear war! =P

Or worse, John Conway's "Game of Life"

Here is a good summary of some of my complaints. But wait, there is more:

As a programming language, php is extremelly poor. Off the top of my head:

1. Very poor object oriented language. Not everything is an object, no multiple inheritance, use destructors and you get segfaults, etc... They improved a lot with v5 but still.
2. No higher order functions. As opposed to Python, Perl, Ruby, and hundred others.
3. No closures
4. No operator overloading
5. No aspect oriented constructs, metaclasses, decorators, nada

and then there is the issue of all the weird behaviours it has

1. consider this code:

   $x = NULL;
   $x->a = 10;

   What do you expect to happen? well, an exception obviously. NOT, php guesses you really meant to create an object, assign it to $x and that the object has an attribute a. It does not even issue a warning in the logs. Makes it really fun to debug some programs.
2. References are just weird. And they are so different from version 4.0 to version 5.0 that it made it imposible to upgrade for an existing project
3. arrays are passed by value, but objects are passed by reference, WTF?
4. variables are case sensitive, but methods are not. WTF?

The language itself seems to promote what Rasmus calls "broken" code. Magic quotes are just an open invitation for SQL Injection, and XSS vulnerabilities.

For fck sake, the php tutorial teaches how to write cross site script vulnerable code which is what Rasmus is complaining about. WTF?????

P.S. Forgive my grammar, english is my second language

Yes, maybe this explains why many people think that PHP sucks?

That said, I still like to use PHP for the 'quick hack' weekend projects as much as the next guy, but I really wouldn't recommend building serious applications with it. Although it certainly can be done, it's much more of a pain to build well-designed software using PHP than, well, basically any other programming language I could come up with (except Visual Basic or Brainfuck maybe ;)

Apart from a google search for "PHP sucks", here's a few I have bookmarked:

1. Experiences of Using PHP in Large Websites - PHP suffers from "oversimplification leading to excessive complexity".
2. What I don't like about PHP - a general shopping list of complaints.
3. "PHP IN CONTRAST TO PERL" - How PHP is a mess and Perl does more with less.
4. List of PHP's shortcomings from perl.advocacy
5. Re^2: Is Perl a good career move? on PerlMonks

I bet he still remembers Belgium as the place where he got a pie smeared in his face a few years ago :)

http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/

people don't throw their panties at me

What else don't people throw at Linus? Can we say . . . Baked Goods?

Evolution happens - not too many people - either creationist or secular dispute that because there is so much proof of it happening.

However, the controversial part is the mechanism that drives evolution. Did God/aliens/Flying Spaghetti Monsters cause the changes in organisms over time or did a natural, scientifically valid mechanism do it? Creationists say that there is no natural process that could adequately explain the mind boggling variety of life, while scientists say that the process of natural selection is sufficient to explain it all.

Personally, I like to think that God set the rules and let it run - sort of like a cosmic version of Life (http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/), and our job is to figure it out.

If memory serves me correctly Cisco is playing by the Microsoft rulebook. If you can't create great new technologies, BUY THEM!!! Now all we have to do is wait for Microsoft to buy Cisco and Bill Gates will finally have ULTIMATE POWAR!!!!

The local LUGs have the whipped cream and pie pans ready for him!

What about pie detectors? :)

http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/

Muahhaaahahhaaa!!

Hope so.

Windows Wrap: [I'm a big-shot] I won't get pantsed anymore

No, just pied: http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/

Neurons do not act like transistor gates. (AND/OR/NAND etc.)
Neurons has multiple states. Active / Semi active / Sleep. Operating many connection lines in between other neurons.

The task whould be to simulate single neurons (with code) and make theese simulated neurons interact on a weighted level. You whould need at least a billion of those sim-neurons just to be equal to a insects brain. Every sim neuron should be pre-coded with a specialized task, but allso be able to take another sim-neurons task is it should be necesary.

Makes me think of john Conway and his life algo's http://www.bitstorm.org/gameoflife/

It's like Conway's Game of Life: A glider is not composed in the population rules instead it is an emergent behavior of the system.

The key point you're missing is that people are dumb.

The clue you missed is that pretty much everything written in PHP was fairly obviously written by somebody who wasn't very bright. Have you ever seen a well-written PHP application?

Not that java/jsp is the best system ever invented... but PHP is awful, and so it calls out to the legions of bad programmers in the world.

Here is a good article on why PHP is awful, for those who haven't actually used it: http://www.bitstorm.org/edwin/en/php-sucks/. It also links to a number of other articles which also make good points, at the bottom.

Only if the picture does not include, targets, crosshairs, or cream pie.

Make sure you get a streaming video.

... and beyond! French is not only spoken in France, but also in Canada, large parts of Africa, Belgium, and lots of other places as well.

Shouldn't these other countries also have a say about what happens to the French culture?

Yes, a large cream pie would be fine.

But isn't that a Belgian dish, rather than French?

what is he being knighted for? hell the EU is trying to prosecute microsoft for screwing customers. i'm not saying ms hasn't done good, but this is kind of stupid imho. anyone going to pie him?

btw, i'm not sure about being born a citizen of the US but you can't have a royal 'title' if you are a naturalized citizen as you have to drop any recognition of royalty if you go through naturalization. anyone know if this extends to citizens born in the US?

I actually thought immediately of Cellular Automata when I read some of the specs on the new Cell, and the name may just be a coincidence, but maybe not. It would be interesting to see a Cell architecture where there are 27 Cell sub-processors, because my Life is more than two dimensional.

Where's the cream pie guy when you need him? ;)

Interesting choice of country to be trying to do this in.

Some people in Belgium apparently don't like him. He got a pie in the face there.

http://www.bitstorm.org/gates/

Tweak Network Setting is a FF extension that does this.

Working link

Not in 1998 it wasn't...
Gates gets Pie in Face...

As a geek, I prefer playing with John Conway's Life.

Sort of like a Bill Gates cream pie!

Have you ever looked at a fractal? The math is simple, but that patterns are infinitely complex and varied. Conway's game of life, perhaps? Simple rules, complex patterns right between chaos and order. Simple rules can create complex things.

We both look at nature and see boundless complexity. You say, "whoever designed this must be way smarter than us." I say, "whatever designed this must not be constrained to understanding it."

We design things with a top-down approach. You can see how this affects our designs. For example, we were able to jump to the concept of wheels; our designs aren't restricted by what has gone before. But our designs are limited by our understanding; we don't like spaghetti logic which is common in natural designs.

Check this out. He took an FPGA, started with random patterns, tested them, took the best ones, mutated them, and repeated this a few thousand times. As expected, the circuits got good at doing what he selected for. But the circuits took advantages of defects in the FPGA, the temperature, crosstalk etc. Just like life, they worked very well in the environment they evolved in, but they were very dependant upon it. And the most important thing - when the circuits were done, they couldn't figure out how they worked.

My point is that a simple, mindless process, not encumbered by understanding, can produce amazingly complex things. Is that so hard to believe?

But a pie attack suggestion is much more likely to be acted upon. (Reading Luskin in context, I'm pretty convinced he wasn't being satirical.) Many celebrities have been victims, including Bill Gates and (as your own posting shows) people don't sympathise so much or even view it as a violent attack.

So is egging celebrities the new pieing?

Emergence basically means that we can't predict ahead of time what will happen, we have to 'see it through all the way'. Many higher-level processes in the universe are emergent phenomena (life, for one thing), which is one of the reasons why we'll never be able to predict the future.

So if you're trying to prove a mathematical theorem, I might agree that brute force could make you lazy (I'm a computer scientist though - so probably not :-), but in this case, there's no other way.

A big net of connected nodes. Inputs coming from plants. Switches. Hmmm.

You don't need much more to make a universal computer (i.e. somthing equivalent to a Turing machine).

Just be sure that a correctly guided surge of power can operate switch, i.e. change the direction of other another electric stream.

The input being plants, to perform a computation, you'd just have to blow up a few of them in order to provide the desired input.

Then just watch the cities of northern america twinkle like a biiiig game of Life !

Thomas Miconi

This world never learns that vandalism is not art.

Art and vandalism can certainly coexist.

I've certainly seem some carefully crafted, beautiful graffiti that the artist regrettably chose to place on someone else's property without permission. That it's illegal and messes with someone else's property doesn't invalidate that it is also art.

Similarly you can engage in political speech and do something illegal at the same time. Burning draft cards was both illegal and a political statement. Hitting someone with a cream pie can be both assault and speech. Destruction of property (Say, dumping a bunch of tea in a harbor) can be intended as a political message.

Mind you, that someone is making art or engaging in political speech doesn't justify the crime! I can both appreciate the quality of some skilled graffiti while simultaneously wishing that the artist would get caught for damaging someone else's property. I'd rather the artist had not chosen to do so. But to deny that it could be art is just silly.

This one Noel's Revenge.

Nice writeup (w/ movie) here.

Share and enjoy!

Yeah, but Eric Raymond sticks to his guns too, but I like his philosophy better.

Indeed, how are you gonna fight against Microsoft if your only weapon is a cream pie? Guns are much more effective!

No, that's what billg really looks like ever since the pie incident... notice he looks a bit fatter in recent years - that's the makeup fx covering it all up.