What is this nonsense? When I first started reading/., it was about Linux, damn it! If you brought up Windows, it was solely for the point of ridicule ("look at that Swiss cheese of an OS!"), never to put it above Linux. Windows support? Excuse me why I go laugh myself silly. I cannot be the only person disappointed with the trend/. is making in stories like these, can I?
My user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050517 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-2)
Why, oh why, are you creating a function and not actually mandating that anyone pass in functions? You're obviously changing the original code to *call* the new function - why not actually pass in what variables you need rather than rely on 'global'?
What I didn't elaborate on was that this code was being included. I was trying to gently coax the code into a sane place. It was a log function - originally, each file referenced the file pointer declared in the include file, and wrote to that location. I was transitioning the code to a function, log_action($foo), that would use that existing file pointer, and write to it. Once done, I moved the pointer and file name inside the function, and simply did include foo; log_action($foo);. Until I had edited all the files, I wanted the existing code to work, and there was simply no reason to pass the file name (always the same) as an attribute. Now, I believe I'm going to change the include to a 'require_once.' *This* is why you read the fine manual, and learn what the 'language' offers / how to use it.
The best part of all this? 2 SQL queries were being done to fetch the date and time. Those were replaced with simply date/time calls.
Re:Backgrounds of the PHP developers.
on
PHP 5.1.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
Unlike some of the other replies, I agree wholeheartedly. I am a Perl programmer, who actually has a clue about programming. (And I write legible Perl, thank you very much. [most of the time;)])
I've just 'inherited' a PHP project, and I want to scream. I've finally had to 'learn my enemy.' So, wanting to know what the heck I was getting into, I bought a ton of O'Reilly books, and I read through a bunch of "Programming PHP" before beginning, so I wouldn't make the mistake of just slapping together whatever worked. Getting right into it, I was appalled at how poor the 'design' of the language is. It's a poor ripoff of many decent languages, slapped together in whatever Q&D way would 'make it work.' Why are phonetic string comparison functions part of the core language?! Those should be in a library! Why, oh why, was the scoping done so utterly backwards?! I was cleaning up some code, moving it into a function, and suddenly it stopped working. I had realized the answer the first time I tweaked it, but summarily forgot the second time around. What was it? Why, naturally, I had forgotten to do 'global $foo' inside my function - how stupid could I be to think code inside a function wouldn't pick up the contents of the variable as declared outside it?
*sigh* I've gotten a project with 15,600 lines of 'code,' and already gotten rid of 1200 lines of repetitive junk by applying some common sense to it. I have another 120 lines lined up to be shot today. (A diff -uw of 2 files turned up exactly 5 differences.)
PHP makes it way to easy for people without a clue to 'write code' that 'works.' Thank you all the same, but I prefer to keep my brain engaged in 'drive,' rather than 'park.'
Amen! I've been wanting that for quite some time now. I think this could also be done online - fill in your contact/contract information, and get placed in the queue for a callback. It could even call you sporadically to confirm you're there if they want that assurance. Heck, maybe it could tell you to call in n minutes, and enter code 1234. I can dream, can't I?
Indeed. I remember many a time when I'd download an Ogg from my server to my laptop and start playing it. While playing, I'd `rm` it, the song would stay playing, and as soon as `ogg123` was done, it was completely gone. I found that to be a very nice thing.
You will get run over if you do the speed limit in many places in Westchester. Why else do you think the speed limit on 684 was raised to 65 MPH. There would be serious accidents if a cop tried to pull someone over for speeding during rush hour. OTOH, it's ill-advised to speed at night or during other off-peak hours -- they're just sitting there waiting. (And no...I don't speed/much/ on there, nor have I ever gotten ticketed.)
Same here - I love Netflix - the turnaround time is fine for me, and I've been with them practically since their inception (and so am grandfathered in at 4/mo.). If I mail a disc back over the weekend, such that makes the Monday 6 AM pickup (leave it in the post office box Sat-Sun night), I'll have a new disc Wednesday night.
This lawsuit is nonsense, and the settlement is bunk.
Most people have no clue how to set the time. OTOH, I do, and I have one such clock, just like you.;) The DVD industry is protecting people from stupidity.:) Also, modern VCRs can set themselves from time signals broadcast in some station's blanking interval, but DVD players are far less likely to be hooked up to such a network.
MTA vending machines give them as change. Oh, [deity], do they ever...
Buy a $12 roundtrip ticket with a $20, and get 8 fscking dollar coins back!
Mind you, I've started to find/some/ use for them - I mean, they are worth something, but well...we just don't use change like that over here. The best use I've found for them is NYC parking meters - some of them are damnably expensive, and a dollar coin is far more convenient than 4 quarters. (Some meters charge $0.50/15 mins)
And that's why they're illegal in new construction in the US (or at least where I am). I was staying with a friend in London, and I was trying to go out one afternoon, and I could open the door, but I couldn't get the bloody key out of the lock! I couldn't leave his flat unlocked, so I tried, and tried, and tried, and maybe 15 minutes later, I twisted it just right and it worked. I then went through the effort of getting it to lock and unlock from the outside, and was met with similar difficulties - but I made sure that the door would *open.* I'd feel dreadful if he came home, and couldn't open his own door - what kind of house guest would that make me?! I think I was rather glad to get home to my nice, well working Medeco lock.:P
Granted, most people would now pronounce it like "H-T-T-P colon forward-slash forward-slash slash dot dot org", which loses some of the cleverness.
Yes, that's because there are lots of people who feel they're 'clever' about computers, and assume that "because it has to do with a computer, it must be a backslash." Those peole really irritate me - when I overhear someone say, "Go to h-t-t-p-colon-BACKslash-BACKslash-w-w-w-dot-yahoo- dot-com," I would like to strangle them with Cat-5. Then, when you try to explain to such a person over the phone which key you should be using, I sometimes have to say, "It's the slash - a forward slash - the one you use in dates!" (Mind you, I had a former cow-orker who was such a moron he used backslashes when writing dates...) Really...it's not so hard to figure out - I think we do need one of those "Internet driver's license" programs after all. *sigh*
Re (GP): It's supposed to be/., but many people type it incorrectly. Either it's because they don't 'get it,' or because it's far more common for users of a *nix shell to type things like `./configure`.
There's no way I would every trust something that important to UPS - I'd expect to find the thing with a switchblade in it, as someone had to use the package in 'self-defense' or the box would otherwise be bashed and beaten. If I absolutely had to ship it, I'd use DHL (formerly Airborne Express).
Actually, I read a bunch of the YoSucker(..sf.net) source code awhile ago, and as far as I could tell, Yahoo! apparently did Javascript hashing (~MD5) of your password before sending it over HTTP, with some kind of session negotiation/salt done before the form submission page. I thought that was pretty damn cool. Personally, I always hit "Shift-tab, 'sec [enter]" in Firefox before ever logging into Yahoo! mail, but I think you stand a bit more of a chance with security on their site than others.
Can this be put in an unpowered thumb drive? I feel it would be nice to have large, easily removable, USB storage that does not require external power.
But yes, the distinction of "flash" memory is that it is non-volitile, meaning it requires no power to keep the data once written, so it's exactly what is used for these kind of memory sticks/keydrives.
Actually, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about the fact that older keys don't require bus powered USB ports. My Lexar Jumpdrive (1.0) 128 MB key can be plugged into an Apple Pro keyboard, or just about anything and "just works." My Sandisk Cruzer Mini (512 MB), much as I love the storage, profile, and everything, does not work on nearly as many machines/ports - balking about "needs a powered port," nevermind the fact that it works best on USB 2.0.
Damn...whoops...I'm wrong. Many other posts are right. I'd consider blaming TFA, which appears to be poorly put together (it is CNN, after all), but I didn't pull all the facts together correctly myself. *shrug*
Well, for the zip example, I bet the newer version of Winzip, with it's context menu: "Extract to ____" (where ____ is the name of the archive...or 'extract to here'), would extract the stuff and preserve structure. I do have a paid version of Winzip at work, and it is worth it, even though XP has Zip stuff built in, as it is simply more efficient.
However, needless to say, for the examples you provide, I'd certainly hit the Start menu, and choose 'rxvt,' and use Cygwin bash.:D Oh, and for the.doc example, you might want to give Win32::OLE (http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/04/21/win32ole.htm l) a try. I bet that could be used to script M$ Word. It'd be an evil hack to end all evil hacks, but would probably be quite cool. Needless to say, if it was on Linux, and you were using OOo, the file format would likely be manageable by sed.:D (Or LaTeX, or just about anything on *nix)
I may not like Windows a whole lot, but I do make it my business to use it as efficiently as I can. Naturally, this means that I spend a good >=3/4 of my time using FL/OSS on it.;) I can't imagine how much time I'd waste without Perl, cygwin, vim, Firefox, PuTTY, WinSCP, & co.
Actually, you can do that in Windows. If you do search for files, you can select the files in the results page, and do any sort of action you would do to typical files. I use this to remove entries from lists of e-mail addresses when they change - I do a search on a given location (recursively) for a certain pattern, and when the results appear, I select the search results, and drag it onto the vim icon. I then do a little bit of editing magic in vim, and it's all done. If I was doing it on my own workstation, I'd probably just do it with perl/awk/sed via cygwin, but the machine I'm working on doesn't have very many goodies on it.:-/
There's no doubt in my mind that a shell is the fastest way to get most things done, but unfortunately, the majority of people refuse to learn how to do things efficiently, and want a dumbed down interface for everything. The trick is to learn the best way to use the available tools, and hope to get somewhere near the efficiency of a CLI.
*sigh* Only ~>2 hours before I can return to my *nix boxen at home.:D
Death. Death brings serious legal and media attention on the company in a very bad way. If a client of theirs loses money because of their shabby product, the company probably doesn't care much at all - it's "not their problem." It becomes their problem when the client decides not to buy from them again, but depending on what kind of hold they have on the market, that might not even be enough to lose a significant number of clients. How many companies have lost a significant amount of money due to downtime on Windows systems? How many of those companies have actually tried to get some of that money back from Microsoft, or even considered leaving the Windows platform?
That would *rock*. I think you'd find people clamoring for them, to be able to take a very usable system all around with them (if Apple made a serious go of it, I have a feeling it'd be great). IT managers would be pulling their hair out trying to prevent workers from bypassing the cool blue of 2k from running on their nice hardware.:P (Yes, I know you can prevent USB/CD/floppy booting from the BIOS, but depending on the IT shop, how much of that is done can vary quite a bit.)
Yes, this is true, but there's one teensy glitch in this model - I do want to know what time the server is sending out some times.
A big pet peeve of mine with Google News is that it doesn't actually show the current time. It tells you how recent news is "n minutes ago" for lots of stuff, but if I don't know all the news events going on in the world, I might not know if it's really current.
Why should I care so much, you ask? Easy - network testing... I want to be sure I'm not getting a cached copy. Hell,/. is a more reliable test for that, as stories all have times associated with them, however, they aren't updated nearly as often as Google News. For serious stuff, I'm sure I can get better answers, like time.gov, but Google is just quick and handy.
Nearly all Google's services work in such a fashion, though. For instance, sms.google.com sends you to google.com/sms, and similarly for many of their other tools. I'll wait for a real announcement before I assume anything.
Slashdot Mirror
I use Google to search for Slashdot stories I've seen in the past - very useful. Also, it's a great way for catching dupes. *grin*
What is this nonsense? When I first started reading /., it was about Linux, damn it! If you brought up Windows, it was solely for the point of ridicule ("look at that Swiss cheese of an OS!"), never to put it above Linux. Windows support? Excuse me why I go laugh myself silly. I cannot be the only person disappointed with the trend /. is making in stories like these, can I?
My user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050517 Firefox/1.0.4 (Debian package 1.0.4-2)
Thank you, and good night.
Why, oh why, are you creating a function and not actually mandating that anyone pass in functions? You're obviously changing the original code to *call* the new function - why not actually pass in what variables you need rather than rely on 'global'?
What I didn't elaborate on was that this code was being included. I was trying to gently coax the code into a sane place. It was a log function - originally, each file referenced the file pointer declared in the include file, and wrote to that location. I was transitioning the code to a function, log_action($foo), that would use that existing file pointer, and write to it. Once done, I moved the pointer and file name inside the function, and simply did include foo; log_action($foo);. Until I had edited all the files, I wanted the existing code to work, and there was simply no reason to pass the file name (always the same) as an attribute. Now, I believe I'm going to change the include to a 'require_once.' *This* is why you read the fine manual, and learn what the 'language' offers / how to use it.
The best part of all this? 2 SQL queries were being done to fetch the date and time. Those were replaced with simply date/time calls.
Unlike some of the other replies, I agree wholeheartedly. I am a Perl programmer, who actually has a clue about programming. (And I write legible Perl, thank you very much. [most of the time ;)])
I've just 'inherited' a PHP project, and I want to scream. I've finally had to 'learn my enemy.' So, wanting to know what the heck I was getting into, I bought a ton of O'Reilly books, and I read through a bunch of "Programming PHP" before beginning, so I wouldn't make the mistake of just slapping together whatever worked. Getting right into it, I was appalled at how poor the 'design' of the language is. It's a poor ripoff of many decent languages, slapped together in whatever Q&D way would 'make it work.' Why are phonetic string comparison functions part of the core language?! Those should be in a library! Why, oh why, was the scoping done so utterly backwards?! I was cleaning up some code, moving it into a function, and suddenly it stopped working. I had realized the answer the first time I tweaked it, but summarily forgot the second time around. What was it? Why, naturally, I had forgotten to do 'global $foo' inside my function - how stupid could I be to think code inside a function wouldn't pick up the contents of the variable as declared outside it?
*sigh* I've gotten a project with 15,600 lines of 'code,' and already gotten rid of 1200 lines of repetitive junk by applying some common sense to it. I have another 120 lines lined up to be shot today. (A diff -uw of 2 files turned up exactly 5 differences.)
PHP makes it way to easy for people without a clue to 'write code' that 'works.' Thank you all the same, but I prefer to keep my brain engaged in 'drive,' rather than 'park.'
Amen! I've been wanting that for quite some time now. I think this could also be done online - fill in your contact/contract information, and get placed in the queue for a callback. It could even call you sporadically to confirm you're there if they want that assurance. Heck, maybe it could tell you to call in n minutes, and enter code 1234. I can dream, can't I?
Indeed. I remember many a time when I'd download an Ogg from my server to my laptop and start playing it. While playing, I'd `rm` it, the song would stay playing, and as soon as `ogg123` was done, it was completely gone. I found that to be a very nice thing.
That pleases me to no end...
Indeed. Neither of the above have access to my office. Floor a bit dusty? That's why I have a key to the broom closet...
You will get run over if you do the speed limit in many places in Westchester. Why else do you think the speed limit on 684 was raised to 65 MPH. There would be serious accidents if a cop tried to pull someone over for speeding during rush hour. OTOH, it's ill-advised to speed at night or during other off-peak hours -- they're just sitting there waiting. (And no...I don't speed /much/ on there, nor have I ever gotten ticketed.)
Same here - I love Netflix - the turnaround time is fine for me, and I've been with them practically since their inception (and so am grandfathered in at 4/mo.). If I mail a disc back over the weekend, such that makes the Monday 6 AM pickup (leave it in the post office box Sat-Sun night), I'll have a new disc Wednesday night.
This lawsuit is nonsense, and the settlement is bunk.
Most people have no clue how to set the time. OTOH, I do, and I have one such clock, just like you. ;) The DVD industry is protecting people from stupidity. :) Also, modern VCRs can set themselves from time signals broadcast in some station's blanking interval, but DVD players are far less likely to be hooked up to such a network.
MTA vending machines give them as change. Oh, [deity], do they ever...
/some/ use for them - I mean, they are worth something, but well...we just don't use change like that over here. The best use I've found for them is NYC parking meters - some of them are damnably expensive, and a dollar coin is far more convenient than 4 quarters. (Some meters charge $0.50/15 mins)
Buy a $12 roundtrip ticket with a $20, and get 8 fscking dollar coins back!
Mind you, I've started to find
And that's why they're illegal in new construction in the US (or at least where I am). I was staying with a friend in London, and I was trying to go out one afternoon, and I could open the door, but I couldn't get the bloody key out of the lock! I couldn't leave his flat unlocked, so I tried, and tried, and tried, and maybe 15 minutes later, I twisted it just right and it worked. I then went through the effort of getting it to lock and unlock from the outside, and was met with similar difficulties - but I made sure that the door would *open.* I'd feel dreadful if he came home, and couldn't open his own door - what kind of house guest would that make me?! I think I was rather glad to get home to my nice, well working Medeco lock. :P
Granted, most people would now pronounce it like "H-T-T-P colon forward-slash forward-slash slash dot dot org", which loses some of the cleverness.
Yes, that's because there are lots of people who feel they're 'clever' about computers, and assume that "because it has to do with a computer, it must be a backslash." Those peole really irritate me - when I overhear someone say, "Go to h-t-t-p-colon-BACKslash-BACKslash-w-w-w-dot-yahoo- dot-com," I would like to strangle them with Cat-5. Then, when you try to explain to such a person over the phone which key you should be using, I sometimes have to say, "It's the slash - a forward slash - the one you use in dates!" (Mind you, I had a former cow-orker who was such a moron he used backslashes when writing dates...) Really...it's not so hard to figure out - I think we do need one of those "Internet driver's license" programs after all. *sigh*
Re (GP): It's supposed to be /., but many people type it incorrectly. Either it's because they don't 'get it,' or because it's far more common for users of a *nix shell to type things like `./configure`.
UPS. $210. 10:00AM next morning.
UPS?! UPS?!!
There's no way I would every trust something that important to UPS - I'd expect to find the thing with a switchblade in it, as someone had to use the package in 'self-defense' or the box would otherwise be bashed and beaten. If I absolutely had to ship it, I'd use DHL (formerly Airborne Express).
Actually, I read a bunch of the YoSucker(..sf.net) source code awhile ago, and as far as I could tell, Yahoo! apparently did Javascript hashing (~MD5) of your password before sending it over HTTP, with some kind of session negotiation/salt done before the form submission page. I thought that was pretty damn cool. Personally, I always hit "Shift-tab, 'sec [enter]" in Firefox before ever logging into Yahoo! mail, but I think you stand a bit more of a chance with security on their site than others.
But yes, the distinction of "flash" memory is that it is non-volitile, meaning it requires no power to keep the data once written, so it's exactly what is used for these kind of memory sticks/keydrives.
Actually, I'm pretty sure GP is talking about the fact that older keys don't require bus powered USB ports. My Lexar Jumpdrive (1.0) 128 MB key can be plugged into an Apple Pro keyboard, or just about anything and "just works." My Sandisk Cruzer Mini (512 MB), much as I love the storage, profile, and everything, does not work on nearly as many machines/ports - balking about "needs a powered port," nevermind the fact that it works best on USB 2.0.Damn...whoops...I'm wrong. Many other posts are right. I'd consider blaming TFA, which appears to be poorly put together (it is CNN, after all), but I didn't pull all the facts together correctly myself. *shrug*
They said it takes a little under 4 minutes to print War & Peace. @330ppm, that's a bit short of 1320 pages, which is about right for War & Peace.
Well, for the zip example, I bet the newer version of Winzip, with it's context menu: "Extract to ____" (where ____ is the name of the archive...or 'extract to here'), would extract the stuff and preserve structure. I do have a paid version of Winzip at work, and it is worth it, even though XP has Zip stuff built in, as it is simply more efficient.
:D Oh, and for the .doc example, you might want to give Win32::OLE (http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/04/21/win32ole.htm l) a try. I bet that could be used to script M$ Word. It'd be an evil hack to end all evil hacks, but would probably be quite cool. Needless to say, if it was on Linux, and you were using OOo, the file format would likely be manageable by sed. :D (Or LaTeX, or just about anything on *nix)
;) I can't imagine how much time I'd waste without Perl, cygwin, vim, Firefox, PuTTY, WinSCP, & co.
However, needless to say, for the examples you provide, I'd certainly hit the Start menu, and choose 'rxvt,' and use Cygwin bash.
I may not like Windows a whole lot, but I do make it my business to use it as efficiently as I can. Naturally, this means that I spend a good >=3/4 of my time using FL/OSS on it.
Actually, you can do that in Windows. If you do search for files, you can select the files in the results page, and do any sort of action you would do to typical files. I use this to remove entries from lists of e-mail addresses when they change - I do a search on a given location (recursively) for a certain pattern, and when the results appear, I select the search results, and drag it onto the vim icon. I then do a little bit of editing magic in vim, and it's all done. If I was doing it on my own workstation, I'd probably just do it with perl/awk/sed via cygwin, but the machine I'm working on doesn't have very many goodies on it. :-/
:D
There's no doubt in my mind that a shell is the fastest way to get most things done, but unfortunately, the majority of people refuse to learn how to do things efficiently, and want a dumbed down interface for everything. The trick is to learn the best way to use the available tools, and hope to get somewhere near the efficiency of a CLI.
*sigh* Only ~>2 hours before I can return to my *nix boxen at home.
Death. Death brings serious legal and media attention on the company in a very bad way. If a client of theirs loses money because of their shabby product, the company probably doesn't care much at all - it's "not their problem." It becomes their problem when the client decides not to buy from them again, but depending on what kind of hold they have on the market, that might not even be enough to lose a significant number of clients. How many companies have lost a significant amount of money due to downtime on Windows systems? How many of those companies have actually tried to get some of that money back from Microsoft, or even considered leaving the Windows platform?
Why not run it like this:
Slashdot | IBM Using iPod to boot Linux on PCs
That would *rock*. I think you'd find people clamoring for them, to be able to take a very usable system all around with them (if Apple made a serious go of it, I have a feeling it'd be great). IT managers would be pulling their hair out trying to prevent workers from bypassing the cool blue of 2k from running on their nice hardware. :P (Yes, I know you can prevent USB/CD/floppy booting from the BIOS, but depending on the IT shop, how much of that is done can vary quite a bit.)
"Everyone has a clock."
/. is a more reliable test for that, as stories all have times associated with them, however, they aren't updated nearly as often as Google News. For serious stuff, I'm sure I can get better answers, like time.gov, but Google is just quick and handy.
Yes, this is true, but there's one teensy glitch in this model - I do want to know what time the server is sending out some times.
A big pet peeve of mine with Google News is that it doesn't actually show the current time. It tells you how recent news is "n minutes ago" for lots of stuff, but if I don't know all the news events going on in the world, I might not know if it's really current.
Why should I care so much, you ask?
Easy - network testing... I want to be sure I'm not getting a cached copy. Hell,
Nearly all Google's services work in such a fashion, though. For instance, sms.google.com sends you to google.com/sms, and similarly for many of their other tools. I'll wait for a real announcement before I assume anything.