In the English language, commas are completely optional. That's right. Optional.
Commas are speech inflections. The purpose of a comma is to inject the sound of speech into the written word. Or, more to the point, they are to inject, ahem, the flow of, er, speech, you know, into the written word.
Commas in numbers over 1000 likewise are optional for Americans whose comma usage is consistent across both text and numbers.
So what are you saying, that scripting is dead? That any serious web project needs an object-oriented language?
I'm asking because scripting worked for me, back in the day. Sure it was verbose - the amount of typing was excessive - but it was easy as fuck. And we wrote some pretty incredible library functions too. It was not uncommon to write a CMS from scratch. Plenty of us had to do it just to get our jobs.
I suppose if you need to do anything mathematical, you're SOL.
>their enterprise version, according to Magneto, "Start at $8,900 USD/yr"
That's a joke. For $8,900, expect no less than to have a techie visit your store, spend two weeks manually entering every item into the database, configuring the appearance of the storefront, and then spending 6 months on the phone with you making sure it's working properly.
If they provide any lower level of service than that (I'm guessing zilch?) then they are ripping you off.
For real competition in this area, look at POS (point of sale, aka cash register) systems. You might need to get your hands on a trade publication and look at the ads. I haven't installed one yet, otherwise I'd give a recommendation.
It's bad and broken because HTML was designed to be hand-coded. Once people started automating it with scripting languages, it became clear how irregular and non-repeatable HTML's syntax is. I'm really surprised there was never an HTML 6.0 that radically flattened the syntax, but at that point (circa 2000) the language was already too entrenched.
However, having PHP spit out HTML is extremely powerful. Consider how many thousands of different product view pages you can browse on a site like Amazon. Those may all come off of one PHP script, perhaps just a few pages long.
And it works on the back-end too. Instead of teaching your secretary HTML, you can just point her to the product_update.php and have her enter the product name, price, description into empty fields. You can write a GUI for your own inventory. Literally.
This is all just what I remember from Web 1.0. Now we're into Web 2.0 with a full object model (javascript, *not* related to Java) for everything in the browser window. No, they never changed HTML itself, but they created a computer-friendly model for all the div's, tables, forms, mouseovers, etc. Plus cascading style sheets, which can be useful if you want to change the appearance of the whole site with a single edit. They basically got the whole system right starting around 2003-04.
>I just think it's ridiculous to use the database for storing product descriptions and having to regenerate all that content every time someone looks at a page.
Actually, I was building ecommerce systems several years ago and we took it as dogma to hit the db a few times each page. Having the product descriptions in the db is the most important thing, for flexibility of display and back-end inventory and product maintenance.
But if you have less than 10 products, then no, you don't need any of this.
Learn cookies and make a shopping cart that puts everything into a cookie, sending it along from page to page as the user browses the store. The cookie is *basically* just a raw string of your own formatting, all you need is pairs of product_id and how many. When they are done, have the PHP script email you their order, or dump it into a plain text file, xml file or comma-delimited for importing into Excel.
Agreed. I'm looking at an example right now and I don't see the difference between "set"ting a variable and "put"ting a value "into" a variable, or why some variables are "the" varname, and others are just varname.
I've installed many a $6000 television with a $250 surround-sound amplifier. What do you want me to charge? Less than $250?
If the customer wants me to pick out equipment, great. But many times you just show up at the house and they are like, "This is the crap we bought at Best Buy today." For example, Bose speakers, pre-packaged 5.1 systems, generic in-wall speakers. I remember one house putting the crappy speakers in the main room, and the better speakers in the second room, because the main speakers had a better brand-name.
These customers are flying by the seat of their pants. As to "where?" Average home value $400k. Anywhere in suburbia.
I say "$100 amp" because I am putting my best foot forward. I know ultimately they will pay $200 to install a $200 amp and it will sound terrible the way they want it to be done. "Go buy a Bose system for $2700." Dude, a $100 amp would be a breath of fresh air. It's all that is necessary, why would I ask more?
>For all of its woes, I'm terribly happy with CD audio.
So am I.
So happy, in fact, that I make CD's almost every week and listen to them in my car. In fact they tend to be mp3 CD's, which means I'm sacrificing 10% sound quality for 10X space savings. And it's good enough.
But I also listen to deejays, and dj's are either analog (vinyl) or mixed on cd. And I can't tell you how much fun it is to guess what I'm listening to.
You would think if CD's are so perfect, it would be impossible to lose it. For example, playing a CD, recording it through some analog or sampling gear, turning the wav into an mp3, and then pressing the same song onto another CD.
I mean, you start off on a cd, and you end up on a cd. Yet clearly there's a transformation.
I'm not one of those audiophiles who thinks they can hear the faintest brush of lint on a stylus. But I do think we are operating well below ear capacity, because of low expectations for speakers, for ear frequencies, and for media.
I think you'll be interested in my parallel response, so in case you've missed it
Oh no, I saw it - all 30 replies (lol!) I wish I could have kept up with the more technical aspects of it.
All you have to do in any of these articles to be modded as 5, funny, or 5, insightful, is to bray like a jackass
Well, that's slashdot for you. I've been on here for 10 years. It's not that the mods don't take their jobs seriously - they're just not very good. I complained 5 years ago that they should hire an editor to go through the comments and pull out the ten best, hide the rest. Well, it ain't gonna happen. This site is what it is. If you were CS and saw the Perl source code that runs this monstrosity you would cough blood. The quality of this site is the people who come here.
I've been offered mod points. It's not hard once you max out your karma. The question is, do you want to play by their rules, adding +1 to random posts, without the ability to delete or re-create or move things around? It's a joke. We were joking on this site back in '01.
Oh, I apologize for conflating 44,100 and 44.1k. I multiplied 44,100 by kilobits and got 45 million.
Time Magazine covered this three months ago. The article started off by pointing out that exercise stimulates hunger, which by itself is pretty obvious. But then they went into more interesting topics like "brown fat", which burns extra calories (humans don't have as much brown fat as other species), as well as psychology - the "self-control muscle."
They say that self-control is a zero-sum game and that by running for an hour, you are actually depleting your self-control to avoid eating a bag of chips. Like any "muscle," I'm sure one's psychology can be improved, but I've certainly noticed this myself: One reason I don't exercise more often is because I like having the energy to go to work.
Anyway, exercise does make you lose weight (duh). But in a 24 hour day, there are 23 great opportunities to ruin the 1 hour of real effort that you made.
Of course, the real question is, do athletes live longer? I think if they did, we would have heard about it by now. Either that, or we've stopped funding studies in this country. Because athletes living 10 years longer than the rest of us would be the blockbuster study for sure.
DavidTC's post is awesome, but I just wanted to point out that the dont-cheat-tivo people are morons. There's like 2 guys who wrote serious hacker tools for TiVo and about 10,000 hangers-on who have little idea how to use them. So yes, TiVo could use a little hacker justice, if only so that the existing tools are properly supported.
Incidentally, swapping hard drives was a feature available on day one of TiVo's launch (would that be 0day? I never quite got the lingo).
I remember it seemed like crap. They were hyping TiVo as a kind of NAS that would feed content through the home, but you need to register the devices and use a special software player that won't break the copyright.
What they have now is much sexier. Streaming Netflix over TiVo HD.
Re:Sorry, what you're asking for is too easy to ab
on
Reusing Old TiVo Hardware?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Exactly. TiVo is so obsessed with being a subscription-model company that they will do ANYTHING to the hardware to keep the subscription model going.
Two examples:
The HD box has no general-purpose inputs. That's right. It's a DVR that can't actually record anything. You either use the RF input or you get a CableCard. This is because they don't have to have the DVD companies screaming at them that users are copying movies etc. onto their hard drives.
Well, this pissed me off so much that I avoided upgrading to an HD box. So you know what TiVo did? They gave me the HD box for free.
It makes no sense to plot one second of audio on a sheet of paper, because you are taking 45 million samples per second and converting them to instantaneous. Try comparing HD video bandwidth to RedBook bandwidth instead.
The point is therefore not frequencies at 44.1 kHz, it's to acquire the signal at 44,100 samples / second. For an 11 kHz signal - not at all unreasonable for violins, harpsichords, or synthesizers - you're getting only 4 sample points per wavelength.
W O W . . .
That's a triangle wave. Right in the middle of the vocal spectrum.
As for 16 bits vertical, I've asked whether any electronics can accurately measure line voltage divided by 65535. That's like, serious millivolts. Lot of bits are being thrown away in both directions. Don't believe me? Stand back, and turn up the volume.
With a Bose 3-2-1 system, you can have fine dining for 5 people, but only 3 sets of chairs, flatware, etc. Nobody can tell the difference. It's advanced technology.
Oh yeah, I've installed plenty of these volume controls. Next, the customer starts playing with it and says, "These only seem to turn the volume down. How do I turn the volume UP?" And we say, "You can't." The customer says, "Oh," and we walk out of the house.
Back to what some guy said about putting amplifiers in every room?
I mean, it's not like amplifiers are expensive. $100 for the amp and $100 for bookshelf speakers? We would charge more than that for the install, actually.
Agreed. Now how about when you plugged in something behind a dresser and the brain-dead US design made it impossible to do so by feeling around? I think I've gotten lucky about twice. The rest of the time I moved the dresser and did it visually. I don't see why these plugs can't be conical and with non-symmetrical pins so they go in in the dark.
Slashdot Mirror
>I can't imagine a 4 year degree program NOT having a database course.
Dude.....
Maybe things have changed in the past ten years. But 10-15 years ago, databases were UNHEARD OF in undergraduate academia.
That's why my boss went out of his way to teach us, so we could work for him. We were all CSers.
>Yeah. IP addresses are wrong too. So are revision numbers. And URLs. There is NO precedent for multiple dots in a single item
Actually, you've disproven yourself. Those aren't multiple dots per single number. Those are different numbers grouped together! With periods!
I guess you can say that IP addresses go into the billions, but that's not really how people think of them.
In the English language, commas are completely optional. That's right. Optional.
Commas are speech inflections. The purpose of a comma is to inject the sound of speech into the written word. Or, more to the point, they are to inject, ahem, the flow of, er, speech, you know, into the written word.
Commas in numbers over 1000 likewise are optional for Americans whose comma usage is consistent across both text and numbers.
Haha! Fucking eUrOfAgS. And they harass us about metric?
Quick, does 4/12/2009 translate to April 12th or December 4th? You don't know, do you? So much fun!!
But hey, the european datestamp is ANSI in reverse, that's close enough, right? Lol.
Yeah but everybody pointed out how bad the product is :D
So what are you saying, that scripting is dead? That any serious web project needs an object-oriented language?
I'm asking because scripting worked for me, back in the day. Sure it was verbose - the amount of typing was excessive - but it was easy as fuck. And we wrote some pretty incredible library functions too. It was not uncommon to write a CMS from scratch. Plenty of us had to do it just to get our jobs.
I suppose if you need to do anything mathematical, you're SOL.
>their enterprise version, according to Magneto, "Start at $8,900 USD/yr"
That's a joke. For $8,900, expect no less than to have a techie visit your store, spend two weeks manually entering every item into the database, configuring the appearance of the storefront, and then spending 6 months on the phone with you making sure it's working properly.
If they provide any lower level of service than that (I'm guessing zilch?) then they are ripping you off.
For real competition in this area, look at POS (point of sale, aka cash register) systems. You might need to get your hands on a trade publication and look at the ads. I haven't installed one yet, otherwise I'd give a recommendation.
It's bad and broken because HTML was designed to be hand-coded. Once people started automating it with scripting languages, it became clear how irregular and non-repeatable HTML's syntax is. I'm really surprised there was never an HTML 6.0 that radically flattened the syntax, but at that point (circa 2000) the language was already too entrenched.
However, having PHP spit out HTML is extremely powerful. Consider how many thousands of different product view pages you can browse on a site like Amazon. Those may all come off of one PHP script, perhaps just a few pages long.
And it works on the back-end too. Instead of teaching your secretary HTML, you can just point her to the product_update.php and have her enter the product name, price, description into empty fields. You can write a GUI for your own inventory. Literally.
This is all just what I remember from Web 1.0. Now we're into Web 2.0 with a full object model (javascript, *not* related to Java) for everything in the browser window. No, they never changed HTML itself, but they created a computer-friendly model for all the div's, tables, forms, mouseovers, etc. Plus cascading style sheets, which can be useful if you want to change the appearance of the whole site with a single edit. They basically got the whole system right starting around 2003-04.
>I just think it's ridiculous to use the database for storing product descriptions and having to regenerate all that content every time someone looks at a page.
Actually, I was building ecommerce systems several years ago and we took it as dogma to hit the db a few times each page. Having the product descriptions in the db is the most important thing, for flexibility of display and back-end inventory and product maintenance.
But if you have less than 10 products, then no, you don't need any of this.
Learn cookies and make a shopping cart that puts everything into a cookie, sending it along from page to page as the user browses the store. The cookie is *basically* just a raw string of your own formatting, all you need is pairs of product_id and how many. When they are done, have the PHP script email you their order, or dump it into a plain text file, xml file or comma-delimited for importing into Excel.
Agreed. I'm looking at an example right now and I don't see the difference between "set"ting a variable and "put"ting a value "into" a variable, or why some variables are "the" varname, and others are just varname.
Wow ty. Gotta love when sarcasm is trumped by fact. Not that I'm itching to get a Sonos but still..
That's all they buy. They buy crap.
I've installed many a $6000 television with a $250 surround-sound amplifier. What do you want me to charge? Less than $250?
If the customer wants me to pick out equipment, great. But many times you just show up at the house and they are like, "This is the crap we bought at Best Buy today." For example, Bose speakers, pre-packaged 5.1 systems, generic in-wall speakers. I remember one house putting the crappy speakers in the main room, and the better speakers in the second room, because the main speakers had a better brand-name.
These customers are flying by the seat of their pants. As to "where?" Average home value $400k. Anywhere in suburbia.
I say "$100 amp" because I am putting my best foot forward. I know ultimately they will pay $200 to install a $200 amp and it will sound terrible the way they want it to be done. "Go buy a Bose system for $2700." Dude, a $100 amp would be a breath of fresh air. It's all that is necessary, why would I ask more?
>For all of its woes, I'm terribly happy with CD audio.
So am I.
So happy, in fact, that I make CD's almost every week and listen to them in my car. In fact they tend to be mp3 CD's, which means I'm sacrificing 10% sound quality for 10X space savings. And it's good enough.
But I also listen to deejays, and dj's are either analog (vinyl) or mixed on cd. And I can't tell you how much fun it is to guess what I'm listening to.
You would think if CD's are so perfect, it would be impossible to lose it. For example, playing a CD, recording it through some analog or sampling gear, turning the wav into an mp3, and then pressing the same song onto another CD.
I mean, you start off on a cd, and you end up on a cd. Yet clearly there's a transformation.
I'm not one of those audiophiles who thinks they can hear the faintest brush of lint on a stylus. But I do think we are operating well below ear capacity, because of low expectations for speakers, for ear frequencies, and for media.
Heh. I wish I had mod points now ;)
I think you'll be interested in my parallel response, so in case you've missed it
Oh no, I saw it - all 30 replies (lol!) I wish I could have kept up with the more technical aspects of it.
All you have to do in any of these articles to be modded as 5, funny, or 5, insightful, is to bray like a jackass
Well, that's slashdot for you. I've been on here for 10 years. It's not that the mods don't take their jobs seriously - they're just not very good. I complained 5 years ago that they should hire an editor to go through the comments and pull out the ten best, hide the rest. Well, it ain't gonna happen. This site is what it is. If you were CS and saw the Perl source code that runs this monstrosity you would cough blood. The quality of this site is the people who come here.
I've been offered mod points. It's not hard once you max out your karma. The question is, do you want to play by their rules, adding +1 to random posts, without the ability to delete or re-create or move things around? It's a joke. We were joking on this site back in '01.
Oh, I apologize for conflating 44,100 and 44.1k. I multiplied 44,100 by kilobits and got 45 million.
Time Magazine covered this three months ago. The article started off by pointing out that exercise stimulates hunger, which by itself is pretty obvious. But then they went into more interesting topics like "brown fat", which burns extra calories (humans don't have as much brown fat as other species), as well as psychology - the "self-control muscle."
They say that self-control is a zero-sum game and that by running for an hour, you are actually depleting your self-control to avoid eating a bag of chips. Like any "muscle," I'm sure one's psychology can be improved, but I've certainly noticed this myself: One reason I don't exercise more often is because I like having the energy to go to work.
Anyway, exercise does make you lose weight (duh). But in a 24 hour day, there are 23 great opportunities to ruin the 1 hour of real effort that you made.
Of course, the real question is, do athletes live longer? I think if they did, we would have heard about it by now. Either that, or we've stopped funding studies in this country. Because athletes living 10 years longer than the rest of us would be the blockbuster study for sure.
DavidTC's post is awesome, but I just wanted to point out that the dont-cheat-tivo people are morons. There's like 2 guys who wrote serious hacker tools for TiVo and about 10,000 hangers-on who have little idea how to use them. So yes, TiVo could use a little hacker justice, if only so that the existing tools are properly supported.
Incidentally, swapping hard drives was a feature available on day one of TiVo's launch (would that be 0day? I never quite got the lingo).
I remember it seemed like crap. They were hyping TiVo as a kind of NAS that would feed content through the home, but you need to register the devices and use a special software player that won't break the copyright.
What they have now is much sexier. Streaming Netflix over TiVo HD.
Exactly. TiVo is so obsessed with being a subscription-model company that they will do ANYTHING to the hardware to keep the subscription model going.
Two examples:
The HD box has no general-purpose inputs. That's right. It's a DVR that can't actually record anything. You either use the RF input or you get a CableCard. This is because they don't have to have the DVD companies screaming at them that users are copying movies etc. onto their hard drives.
Well, this pissed me off so much that I avoided upgrading to an HD box. So you know what TiVo did? They gave me the HD box for free.
All this, just so they can get my $14/month.
It makes no sense to plot one second of audio on a sheet of paper, because you are taking 45 million samples per second and converting them to instantaneous. Try comparing HD video bandwidth to RedBook bandwidth instead.
The point is therefore not frequencies at 44.1 kHz, it's to acquire the signal at 44,100 samples / second. For an 11 kHz signal - not at all unreasonable for violins, harpsichords, or synthesizers - you're getting only 4 sample points per wavelength.
W O W . . .
That's a triangle wave. Right in the middle of the vocal spectrum.
As for 16 bits vertical, I've asked whether any electronics can accurately measure line voltage divided by 65535. That's like, serious millivolts. Lot of bits are being thrown away in both directions. Don't believe me? Stand back, and turn up the volume.
With a Bose 3-2-1 system, you can have fine dining for 5 people, but only 3 sets of chairs, flatware, etc. Nobody can tell the difference. It's advanced technology.
Oh yeah, I've installed plenty of these volume controls. Next, the customer starts playing with it and says, "These only seem to turn the volume down. How do I turn the volume UP?" And we say, "You can't." The customer says, "Oh," and we walk out of the house.
Back to what some guy said about putting amplifiers in every room?
I mean, it's not like amplifiers are expensive. $100 for the amp and $100 for bookshelf speakers? We would charge more than that for the install, actually.
So you're saying that by putting a Sonos in each room, you avoid putting an amplifier and speakers in each room? Please clarify.
Agreed. Now how about when you plugged in something behind a dresser and the brain-dead US design made it impossible to do so by feeling around? I think I've gotten lucky about twice. The rest of the time I moved the dresser and did it visually. I don't see why these plugs can't be conical and with non-symmetrical pins so they go in in the dark.