Right, that's why everyone and their grandmother knows how to navigate around AmigaOS. It must have been Atari that made the deal with IBM to write an OS for their machines and machines like them. Remember when Commodore '95 came out and had that huge advertising blitz? I remember thinking how weird it was to see a commercial on mainstream TV for software, an operating system no less. Apple was good about getting placed into schools, at least. Oregon Trail and Number Munchers really catapulted Apple machines into people's living rooms. It's why Apple has the market share they have today.
What other CEO brought a company from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most valuable company in the world (based on market cap)?
That's just the thing - I have no clue, because I'm a programmer, not a business student. I don't know what Carlos Slim started with. I don't know what Sam Walton started with. I don't know what Ellison started with. And I also don't think the author of the article knows any of that either, he's just presenting his opinion as an "indisputable fact". I do know that Gates started with very little and built Microsoft up through a series of very good business deals (with IBM and others).
Jobs is no doubt a visionary, which is the reason he was fired from Apple, but "the most successful business leader of his generation and quite possibly of all time?" Seriously? If you walk into any business school in the country and ask them who the most successful businessman of all time is, you think 100% of the students will immediately respond with "Steve Jobs"? Because if not, then it's not indisputable.
Ten Times the man Bill Gates is. Bill Gates is now trying to buy his way to people liking him.
You realize Steve Jobs isn't going to sleep with you, right? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Bill Gates never fathered an illegitimate child and then refused to acknowledge it was his. People already like Bill Gates for the fact that he was essentially responsible for bringing personal computers into homes, regardless of how you may feel about his business practices.
If you want to talk about "likability", talk to people like Wozniak, John Sculley, or anyone else that worked directly with Jobs.
That's not to suggest that he ever became easy to work for. Jobs is even known to yell at company directors. Asked how she dealt with her boss, former Apple PR chief Laurence Clavere once told a colleague that before heading into a meeting with Jobs, she embraced the mindset of a bullfighter entering the ring: "I pretend I'm already dead." (Clavere says today that she doesn't recall making the comparison but notes that "working with Steve is incredibly challenging, incredibly interesting. It was also sometimes incredibly difficult.")
Often Jobs would suddenly "flip," taking an idea that he'd mocked (maybe your idea) and embracing it passionately - and as his own - without ever acknowledging that his view had changed. "He has this ability to change his mind and completely forget his old opinion about something," says a former close colleague who asked not to be named. "It's weird. He can say, 'I love white; white is the best.' And then three months later say, 'Black is the best; white is not the best.'"
I challenge you to find a single account from someone who personally knows Bill Gates who claims that the man is unlikeable.
I like Jobs but the phrase "the most successful business leader of his generation and quite possibly of all time." is a fallacy.
Agreed. For one, there are 42 people in the United States alone worth more than he is. The statement about Jobs is obviously from a fanboy, due to the fact it was claimed as an "indisputable fact". I didn't see a comparison with Carlos Slim, or Sam Walton, or Larry Ellison, or even Bill Gates for that matter. Just a claimed "indisputable fact".
Re:Hi, Kevin. I'm one of your victims.
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 2
Of course, your too stupid to understand, but whatever.
That line simply screams "Brilliant!" But whatever.
Re:What if they had not cought you?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 1
Start with "cought", then move on to "How do you think would have happened..."
I've never understood how FPS capture-the-flag games that had a good active spectator mode, like Tribes, etc. never caught on as a spectator sport
I felt the same way when I used to play Mechwarrior 4 online, it had a great CTF mode. You would have the big powerful mechs hanging around the flag or pushing up to support the small runners, the runner swarms with stealth radar and jump jets coordinating their runs over microphones, and the medium mechs covering the runners and intercepting the opposing runners. Seeing as how it already had a good spectator mode, there's nothing missing. You can have spectators with mics be the announcers, you can hear the audio from the two teams, and you can have dedicated spectator "cameramen", either free-roaming or attached to a player. There were several CTF clans that had good rivalries going on, and it made for a lot of exciting, high-scoring games.
There's no such thing as an anti-gravity engine, that's how.
How do you know that, Mr. Patent Examiner? 60 years ago there was no such thing as a touchscreen. Moreover, I don't see how that even factors into the patent. Let me check the Apple patent again.
Let's see.. it's a United States Design Patent from 2005. It covers an "electronic device", and has 14 inventors who have invented the groundbreaking new design for this device, which is electronic (and also looks a lot like my phone, which incidentally Apple didn't design). It's assigned to Apple Computer, Inc., of California, for a term of 14 years. It has an application number and filing date. There are a couple reference numbers, a field of search, references cited by the examiner, other publications, and, ah, here we go, the claim:
"We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described."
OK, vague enough that we're still in the bounds of my fictional anti-gravity "rocket". After that, just a list of illustrations. I'm not seeing a single place where it lists any of the functionality of the device. They don't say whether it's powered by a hamster on a wheel, or a thermonuclear battery. They don't say whether the touchscreen is capacitive, or whether it sends out a magnetic field and just detects the presence of your finger in that field from several inches away (in fact, other than the illustration of the guy kind of pointing at it, there's no indication it's a touchscreen at all). They don't say whether you have to plug it in to charge it, or whether you can just leave it out in the sun. So why does it matter what kind of engine my fake rocket uses?
You don't understand what a design patent is, do you?
I know it's not a utility patent, so it doesn't have anything to do with how my rocket works, just how it looks.
With your proposed magic engine I guess it could, but it'd still fly better within an atmosphere with the point in front. That's aerodynamics, see?
*scoff* clearly you understand nothing about anti-gravity technology. While encased in the anti-gravity bubble, there is no air resistance to deal with. The bubble doesn't move through the air, it moves the air around it. There is no disturbance after it passes, all of the air molecules are just the same as before it passed. Aerodynamics are so 20th century. My cone and fins are purely ornamental. Just approve the patent and get on with your day, thanks. It's what everyone else does anyway.
The fins of a rocket are not decorative, nor is the aerodynamic shape; they're fundamental to how it works.
How did you infer that? Why can't it have an anti-gravity engine embedded directly in the middle of it, and can freely rotate and fly at any angle? The "smoke" coming out of the "motor" at the bottom is just for show.
I'm not patenting the functionality of it, I'm patenting how the thing looks. That's the same level of detail I see in Apple's patents. They called theirs an "electronic device", so mine is a "flying device". It's a flying device which has a cone at the top, and is long and thin, with "fins" and "motors" on the bottom. I'm going to patent that and then sue anyone who designs a rocket or missile from here on out, because I invented that design for a flying device.
Just like early writers of science fiction didn't "invent" rockets.
That's true. What is also true is that I should not be able to file a design patent in this century for a generic "rocket-propelled device" which is long, thin, has a cone at the top, and fins and a motor at the bottom. I shouldn't be able to file that because I did not invent that design.
Is it apparently lost on Samsung and the frothing-at-the-mouth haters that the patents in question are not about making a touchscreen tablet, but is about using the following graphic design elements: * A sunflower for the 'photos' app * A white cartoon bubble with a green background for SMS * A calendar icon with a red bar on top, and black text showing the current day * An envelope icon against a cloudy sky * A notebook with a brown binding on top
Just to be clear, you're saying that Apple invented all of those icons for those uses, and patented that. Correct? You're saying that Apple has a patent on using a sunflower to represent a "photos app". And you have a link to that patent, right? Because as far as I can tell, this patent is what Apple is claiming.
And one should certainly rely on the fictional Star Trek(tm) universe for patent guidance...
It's not the fictional universe that's important, it's the writer or writers who created it (who actually happen to be real people in a real universe, believe it or not). Apple is claiming that the 14 people listed on their patent have invented a vague design for a generic "electronic device", which is rectangular and thin with a screen on one side, and that they did so within the past decade. Obviously they couldn't have "invented" that if writers were envisioning the same thing 50 or 60 or 100 years ago. In fact, chances are they were thinking of those fictional products during the concept phase. "Hey guys, remember that thing from Star Trek... I just invented that!"
Exactly how far do the walls of the stadium need to crack open before water rushes into the building? Do you think that sustaining and repairing earthquake damage on a structure like a stadium compares in any way to an underwater tunnel?
I never filled out a bug report or feature request or anything, but it definitely annoyed me when I would start the program and see 4 or 5 buttons appear on my taskbar, then have to hunt around my screen space to look for all of the tool and image windows (which would helpfully start out so small that they look like a single icon).
So, I never asked for it, but I definitely sent out some mental insults to the developers over it. Never once have I started Gimp and been able to launch into whatever I was trying to do. Step 1 was always figure out WTF is wrong with the windows. Step 2 is noticing how many task bar buttons just got added, and why the hell was that necessary? What is this, a dedicated Gimp computer? No, it's not. Step 3 was rearranging the windows into something that at least appears to make sense as a coherent workspace. After I got all of that worked out, step 4 was trying to remember why the hell I was starting Gimp in the first place.
Isn't that jumping the gun just a little bit? Have you seen any statements from id that custom maps will be impossible? Don't you think they would put some sort of effort into making their games easy to make content for?
It's fine with me, the only extension I use is Firebug, which incidentally is also terrible for benchmarks.
This being said, in the past we've seen speed benchmarks showing Firefox out front, with everyone here complaining about memory leaks. At that point I was advocating running the benchmarks with the top 5 or so extensions installed since virtually no-one on Slashdot runs vanilla Firefox. Those results would probably be more illustrative about how "power users" run Firefox (and would decrease or eliminate its lead). But now I'm advocating against extensions in benchmarks, because it suits my point;)
In reality though, it would be nice to see vanilla Firefox up against extended Firefox to really get a good idea about the impact of extensions, both from the security and performance perspectives.
But like I said, I don't really care. I prefer Opera anyway.
when your methodology is that only the bare browser configuration is allowed (e.g., no AdBlockPlus, no NoScript)...
... then you're doing it right. If Mozilla wants the benefit of extensions for studies, then merge them into the trunk. Because right now, neither ABP nor NoScript are part of Firefox. There's no reason that something testing Firefox should test those.
I'm fairly sure both Firefox and Chrome are the safest browsers out there
Well shit, man, what the hell are you doing? Have you contacted the authors of the study to inform them that you are "fairly sure"? I'm sure this is information that will be useful to them. All they have now are one thousand, one hundred and eighty-eight data points for each of five browsers, I doubt they even allowed themselves to dream that you would be "fairly sure" about what they were trying to study. I'm fairly sure that they only reason they didn't contact you first to get your input was because they never dreamed it possible.
especially if you use Adblock and NoScript
Don't look now, Sport, but AdBlock and NoScript aren't part of Firefox. I know this because my installation of Firefox doesn't include either of them. If Mozilla wants to enjoy the benefits of those extensions for studies like this one then they should merge them into the trunk. Any respectable study should test the vanilla browser as it ships from the vendor, without changing any defaults.
It should be zero surprise to anyone that Microsoft puts a heavy focus on security for IE9+. Microsoft has been hammered for a long time about IE's poor security, if there's any single browser vendor that would put a disproportionate amount of development work into security features, it's Microsoft. Hell, that's probably why they still lack support in other areas.
WordPress does use "wp_" as a prefix for a lot of things, but not all of them. It also uses classes for some things, but not everything. Just from looking at the code, it looks like people have been trying to improve it without breaking compatibility. It really just needs a rewrite.
Another thing: I've been using the global statement instead of the $GLOBALS superglobal array; is that bad?
It's not necessarily "bad", but it doesn't lend itself well to playing nice with other applications. Just to be clear, the problem is how the variable is originally defined, not how it's used in the function. This is the reason why WordPress didn't work for me, there was a file that had something like this, where it declared a "global" variable on one line, then was immediately followed by a function that tried to use it:
$wpdb = new wp_database();
function some_func() {
global $wpdb;
$wpdb->query... }
The error I was seeing was basically that $wpdb was not defined. The error in that code is that it assumes that the code is actually being executed in the global scope, but that's not necessarily the case. I had WordPress embedded inside a template engine, so the code was being executed via including the file from the template engine (so the "global" scope was local to the template engine, instead of being actually global). The problem could have been solved by declaring the variable like this:
$GLOBALS['wpdb'] = new wp_database();
Then if you specify the global variable in the function like above, it will actually find the global version that the function expects.
I misspoke about register_globals, I didn't have a copy of the source in front of me (I avoid it as much as possible). It is magic_quotes that they force on, not register_globals, in the wp_magic_quotes function in load.php. The register_global option gets "reverted" by unsetting any global variable that has a key in one of the superglobals.I also misspoke about the wp-settings file, which executes functions instead of defining them (but still doesn't define any settings). The load.php is what contains only function definitions.
The problem with their use of global functions is the namespace issue. The problem is because they use generic names for a lot of functions, and then expect their software to work well with other software. The problem with their use of global variables is that sometimes they're not global. They don't explicitly declare them in the global space (through $GLOBALS), they just declare them in the local scope (which they assume to be the global scope). When that code is being run in another scope then all of the sudden the global variables their functions are trying to access weren't defined in the global scope, they were defined in the scope that whatever included that code was running in. This causes it to break in things like template engines. That wouldn't be a problem if they were declaring the variables in $GLOBALS and then referring to that in their functions, or better yet, make the damn thing a class like it should be.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, that's why everyone and their grandmother knows how to navigate around AmigaOS. It must have been Atari that made the deal with IBM to write an OS for their machines and machines like them. Remember when Commodore '95 came out and had that huge advertising blitz? I remember thinking how weird it was to see a commercial on mainstream TV for software, an operating system no less. Apple was good about getting placed into schools, at least. Oregon Trail and Number Munchers really catapulted Apple machines into people's living rooms. It's why Apple has the market share they have today.
Where's the part about Gates taking over as CEO of an existing successful software company?
What other CEO brought a company from the brink of bankruptcy to being the most valuable company in the world (based on market cap)?
That's just the thing - I have no clue, because I'm a programmer, not a business student. I don't know what Carlos Slim started with. I don't know what Sam Walton started with. I don't know what Ellison started with. And I also don't think the author of the article knows any of that either, he's just presenting his opinion as an "indisputable fact". I do know that Gates started with very little and built Microsoft up through a series of very good business deals (with IBM and others).
Jobs is no doubt a visionary, which is the reason he was fired from Apple, but "the most successful business leader of his generation and quite possibly of all time?" Seriously? If you walk into any business school in the country and ask them who the most successful businessman of all time is, you think 100% of the students will immediately respond with "Steve Jobs"? Because if not, then it's not indisputable.
Ten Times the man Bill Gates is. Bill Gates is now trying to buy his way to people liking him.
You realize Steve Jobs isn't going to sleep with you, right? I may be wrong, but I'm pretty sure Bill Gates never fathered an illegitimate child and then refused to acknowledge it was his. People already like Bill Gates for the fact that he was essentially responsible for bringing personal computers into homes, regardless of how you may feel about his business practices.
If you want to talk about "likability", talk to people like Wozniak, John Sculley, or anyone else that worked directly with Jobs.
That's not to suggest that he ever became easy to work for. Jobs is even known to yell at company directors. Asked how she dealt with her boss, former Apple PR chief Laurence Clavere once told a colleague that before heading into a meeting with Jobs, she embraced the mindset of a bullfighter entering the ring: "I pretend I'm already dead." (Clavere says today that she doesn't recall making the comparison but notes that "working with Steve is incredibly challenging, incredibly interesting. It was also sometimes incredibly difficult.")
Often Jobs would suddenly "flip," taking an idea that he'd mocked (maybe your idea) and embracing it passionately - and as his own - without ever acknowledging that his view had changed. "He has this ability to change his mind and completely forget his old opinion about something," says a former close colleague who asked not to be named. "It's weird. He can say, 'I love white; white is the best.' And then three months later say, 'Black is the best; white is not the best.'"
I challenge you to find a single account from someone who personally knows Bill Gates who claims that the man is unlikeable.
I like Jobs but the phrase "the most successful business leader of his generation and quite possibly of all time." is a fallacy.
Agreed. For one, there are 42 people in the United States alone worth more than he is. The statement about Jobs is obviously from a fanboy, due to the fact it was claimed as an "indisputable fact". I didn't see a comparison with Carlos Slim, or Sam Walton, or Larry Ellison, or even Bill Gates for that matter. Just a claimed "indisputable fact".
Of course, your too stupid to understand, but whatever.
That line simply screams "Brilliant!"
But whatever.
Start with "cought", then move on to "How do you think would have happened..."
I've never understood how FPS capture-the-flag games that had a good active spectator mode, like Tribes, etc. never caught on as a spectator sport
I felt the same way when I used to play Mechwarrior 4 online, it had a great CTF mode. You would have the big powerful mechs hanging around the flag or pushing up to support the small runners, the runner swarms with stealth radar and jump jets coordinating their runs over microphones, and the medium mechs covering the runners and intercepting the opposing runners. Seeing as how it already had a good spectator mode, there's nothing missing. You can have spectators with mics be the announcers, you can hear the audio from the two teams, and you can have dedicated spectator "cameramen", either free-roaming or attached to a player. There were several CTF clans that had good rivalries going on, and it made for a lot of exciting, high-scoring games.
There's no such thing as an anti-gravity engine, that's how.
How do you know that, Mr. Patent Examiner? 60 years ago there was no such thing as a touchscreen. Moreover, I don't see how that even factors into the patent. Let me check the Apple patent again.
Let's see.. it's a United States Design Patent from 2005. It covers an "electronic device", and has 14 inventors who have invented the groundbreaking new design for this device, which is electronic (and also looks a lot like my phone, which incidentally Apple didn't design). It's assigned to Apple Computer, Inc., of California, for a term of 14 years. It has an application number and filing date. There are a couple reference numbers, a field of search, references cited by the examiner, other publications, and, ah, here we go, the claim:
"We claim the ornamental design for an electronic device, substantially as shown and described."
OK, vague enough that we're still in the bounds of my fictional anti-gravity "rocket". After that, just a list of illustrations. I'm not seeing a single place where it lists any of the functionality of the device. They don't say whether it's powered by a hamster on a wheel, or a thermonuclear battery. They don't say whether the touchscreen is capacitive, or whether it sends out a magnetic field and just detects the presence of your finger in that field from several inches away (in fact, other than the illustration of the guy kind of pointing at it, there's no indication it's a touchscreen at all). They don't say whether you have to plug it in to charge it, or whether you can just leave it out in the sun. So why does it matter what kind of engine my fake rocket uses?
You don't understand what a design patent is, do you?
I know it's not a utility patent, so it doesn't have anything to do with how my rocket works, just how it looks.
With your proposed magic engine I guess it could, but it'd still fly better within an atmosphere with the point in front. That's aerodynamics, see?
*scoff* clearly you understand nothing about anti-gravity technology. While encased in the anti-gravity bubble, there is no air resistance to deal with. The bubble doesn't move through the air, it moves the air around it. There is no disturbance after it passes, all of the air molecules are just the same as before it passed. Aerodynamics are so 20th century. My cone and fins are purely ornamental. Just approve the patent and get on with your day, thanks. It's what everyone else does anyway.
The fins of a rocket are not decorative, nor is the aerodynamic shape; they're fundamental to how it works.
How did you infer that? Why can't it have an anti-gravity engine embedded directly in the middle of it, and can freely rotate and fly at any angle? The "smoke" coming out of the "motor" at the bottom is just for show.
I'm not patenting the functionality of it, I'm patenting how the thing looks. That's the same level of detail I see in Apple's patents. They called theirs an "electronic device", so mine is a "flying device". It's a flying device which has a cone at the top, and is long and thin, with "fins" and "motors" on the bottom. I'm going to patent that and then sue anyone who designs a rocket or missile from here on out, because I invented that design for a flying device.
Just like early writers of science fiction didn't "invent" rockets.
That's true. What is also true is that I should not be able to file a design patent in this century for a generic "rocket-propelled device" which is long, thin, has a cone at the top, and fins and a motor at the bottom. I shouldn't be able to file that because I did not invent that design.
Is it apparently lost on Samsung and the frothing-at-the-mouth haters that the patents in question are not about making a touchscreen tablet, but is about using the following graphic design elements:
* A sunflower for the 'photos' app
* A white cartoon bubble with a green background for SMS
* A calendar icon with a red bar on top, and black text showing the current day
* An envelope icon against a cloudy sky
* A notebook with a brown binding on top
Just to be clear, you're saying that Apple invented all of those icons for those uses, and patented that. Correct? You're saying that Apple has a patent on using a sunflower to represent a "photos app". And you have a link to that patent, right? Because as far as I can tell, this patent is what Apple is claiming.
You've already gotten more specific than Apple did.
And one should certainly rely on the fictional Star Trek(tm) universe for patent guidance...
It's not the fictional universe that's important, it's the writer or writers who created it (who actually happen to be real people in a real universe, believe it or not). Apple is claiming that the 14 people listed on their patent have invented a vague design for a generic "electronic device", which is rectangular and thin with a screen on one side, and that they did so within the past decade. Obviously they couldn't have "invented" that if writers were envisioning the same thing 50 or 60 or 100 years ago. In fact, chances are they were thinking of those fictional products during the concept phase. "Hey guys, remember that thing from Star Trek... I just invented that!"
Flying cars will only be a reality if they're autonomous.
Exactly how far do the walls of the stadium need to crack open before water rushes into the building? Do you think that sustaining and repairing earthquake damage on a structure like a stadium compares in any way to an underwater tunnel?
I never filled out a bug report or feature request or anything, but it definitely annoyed me when I would start the program and see 4 or 5 buttons appear on my taskbar, then have to hunt around my screen space to look for all of the tool and image windows (which would helpfully start out so small that they look like a single icon).
So, I never asked for it, but I definitely sent out some mental insults to the developers over it. Never once have I started Gimp and been able to launch into whatever I was trying to do. Step 1 was always figure out WTF is wrong with the windows. Step 2 is noticing how many task bar buttons just got added, and why the hell was that necessary? What is this, a dedicated Gimp computer? No, it's not. Step 3 was rearranging the windows into something that at least appears to make sense as a coherent workspace. After I got all of that worked out, step 4 was trying to remember why the hell I was starting Gimp in the first place.
Judging by past things that Carmack has done, I think this part deserves emphasis:
Expect to build new gaming characteristics and multiplayer modes, but not much more than that for now .
Keeping in mind there is over a 1TB of source material to build RAGE, they can’t possibly put that all up for download.
That's just silly, what happened to BitTorrent? Again, "for now".
Isn't that jumping the gun just a little bit? Have you seen any statements from id that custom maps will be impossible? Don't you think they would put some sort of effort into making their games easy to make content for?
It's fine with me, the only extension I use is Firebug, which incidentally is also terrible for benchmarks.
This being said, in the past we've seen speed benchmarks showing Firefox out front, with everyone here complaining about memory leaks. At that point I was advocating running the benchmarks with the top 5 or so extensions installed since virtually no-one on Slashdot runs vanilla Firefox. Those results would probably be more illustrative about how "power users" run Firefox (and would decrease or eliminate its lead). But now I'm advocating against extensions in benchmarks, because it suits my point ;)
In reality though, it would be nice to see vanilla Firefox up against extended Firefox to really get a good idea about the impact of extensions, both from the security and performance perspectives.
But like I said, I don't really care. I prefer Opera anyway.
when your methodology is that only the bare browser configuration is allowed (e.g., no AdBlockPlus, no NoScript)...
... then you're doing it right. If Mozilla wants the benefit of extensions for studies, then merge them into the trunk. Because right now, neither ABP nor NoScript are part of Firefox. There's no reason that something testing Firefox should test those.
I'm fairly sure both Firefox and Chrome are the safest browsers out there
Well shit, man, what the hell are you doing? Have you contacted the authors of the study to inform them that you are "fairly sure"? I'm sure this is information that will be useful to them. All they have now are one thousand, one hundred and eighty-eight data points for each of five browsers, I doubt they even allowed themselves to dream that you would be "fairly sure" about what they were trying to study. I'm fairly sure that they only reason they didn't contact you first to get your input was because they never dreamed it possible.
especially if you use Adblock and NoScript
Don't look now, Sport, but AdBlock and NoScript aren't part of Firefox. I know this because my installation of Firefox doesn't include either of them. If Mozilla wants to enjoy the benefits of those extensions for studies like this one then they should merge them into the trunk. Any respectable study should test the vanilla browser as it ships from the vendor, without changing any defaults.
It should be zero surprise to anyone that Microsoft puts a heavy focus on security for IE9+. Microsoft has been hammered for a long time about IE's poor security, if there's any single browser vendor that would put a disproportionate amount of development work into security features, it's Microsoft. Hell, that's probably why they still lack support in other areas.
WordPress does use "wp_" as a prefix for a lot of things, but not all of them. It also uses classes for some things, but not everything. Just from looking at the code, it looks like people have been trying to improve it without breaking compatibility. It really just needs a rewrite.
Another thing: I've been using the global statement instead of the $GLOBALS superglobal array; is that bad?
It's not necessarily "bad", but it doesn't lend itself well to playing nice with other applications. Just to be clear, the problem is how the variable is originally defined, not how it's used in the function. This is the reason why WordPress didn't work for me, there was a file that had something like this, where it declared a "global" variable on one line, then was immediately followed by a function that tried to use it:
$wpdb = new wp_database();
function some_func()
{
global $wpdb;
$wpdb->query ...
}
The error I was seeing was basically that $wpdb was not defined. The error in that code is that it assumes that the code is actually being executed in the global scope, but that's not necessarily the case. I had WordPress embedded inside a template engine, so the code was being executed via including the file from the template engine (so the "global" scope was local to the template engine, instead of being actually global). The problem could have been solved by declaring the variable like this:
$GLOBALS['wpdb'] = new wp_database();
Then if you specify the global variable in the function like above, it will actually find the global version that the function expects.
I misspoke about register_globals, I didn't have a copy of the source in front of me (I avoid it as much as possible). It is magic_quotes that they force on, not register_globals, in the wp_magic_quotes function in load.php. The register_global option gets "reverted" by unsetting any global variable that has a key in one of the superglobals.I also misspoke about the wp-settings file, which executes functions instead of defining them (but still doesn't define any settings). The load.php is what contains only function definitions.
The problem with their use of global functions is the namespace issue. The problem is because they use generic names for a lot of functions, and then expect their software to work well with other software. The problem with their use of global variables is that sometimes they're not global. They don't explicitly declare them in the global space (through $GLOBALS), they just declare them in the local scope (which they assume to be the global scope). When that code is being run in another scope then all of the sudden the global variables their functions are trying to access weren't defined in the global scope, they were defined in the scope that whatever included that code was running in. This causes it to break in things like template engines. That wouldn't be a problem if they were declaring the variables in $GLOBALS and then referring to that in their functions, or better yet, make the damn thing a class like it should be.