What makes phpBB superior to others is its mod community, similar to how Firefox's available extensions make it superior to IE. Yeah, phpBB out of the box is rather bland, but that's actually good... the code is generally well-structured and easy to extend. So, if you're a half-decent programmer, you've got a really good base product you can make into your own vision for a discussion board.
For those who don't have natural programming talent, you show them a rote way to approximate that talent (which usually doesn't work out, by the way). What goes for acting also goes for programming.
In my humble (well, not really) opinion, offshoring these types of jobs is the IT equivalent of eating your seed corn. In the long run you wind up starving due to your own stupidity and lack of foresight.
Not only that, but the offshoring has caused a major migration of angry American (and other Western) programmers into the open source realm. And guess what is increasingly eating the lunch of corporate-written software?
Also consider all the programmers who are writing these all these politically-driven websites (many of them actual web applications) that are increasingly propelling citizen movements against various criminal politicians and corporatists. These programmers had to come from somewhere.
Yes, students should know the basics: algorithms, optimizations, data structures, etc. And they should have several languages squarely under their belt upon graduation. And I posit that they should also come out with a well-rounded education, not just in computer science (after all, college is about becoming better citizens, not just perfect employees for the corporations).
But what a college cannot teach and will not ever be able to teach is how to apply these basic skills in a real job. That is because real jobs are all very different and very specific in their requirements. There's no way for a college to predict on-the-job requirements. And there's no way to teach advanced programming skills, as there multitudes of advanced techniques and technologies.
What a college must teach, somehow, is how a student can learned these advanced techniques and technologies on their own. In other words, teach the students how to learn more on their own.
And in that vein, I've found that this ability to learn on one's own depends a lot more on the specific student than what a college program can convey. Basically, it's the students that live/breathe programming that will end up as the best employees--the others are just hacks who need everything spoon-fed to them.
And sadly, no matter how college programs are enhanced, it will break down the same. There are really very few programmers who actually love programming and didn't get into it for other reasons, like money.
The bottom line is that the burden for completing the comp sci education process lies squarely on the hiring businesses. Don't like that? Well, suck it up, because it's REALITY.
'Despite the notion that hordes of U.S. IT jobs are being sent offshore, in reality, less than 5% of the 10 million people who make up the U.S. IT job market had been displaced by foreign workers through 2004, says Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice Inc.
THIS. IS. IMPOSSIBLY. LOW.
Those of us in the programming field know this is a lie merely on its face.
I rarely suggest such things, but Scot Melland is a LIAR, or at best, an IMBECILE.
I will second this advice. It's the best of what I've read, so far.
Version tracking is not a choice in professional software development, it is an absolute. Even if the programming team consists of one person. Anyone opposed to this notion needs to get out of the programming profession. The central rationale for version tracking is the ability to rollback parts of your work--and this is a very critical ability to have, as others have covered above.
Bug tracking is what I'd call a very valuable add-on development process. Since your manager doesn't want such a thing formally speaking, then keeping your own list of bugs/to-do's in documents will work (almost) as well. And over time, you may want to install a rudimentary bug tracking system (I personally highly recommend Mantis) on your own box as the number of items you're tracking becomes too unwieldy for flat documents to handle.
I'm using Konqueror 3.4.2 now and it still exhibits rendering issues.
Just because it passes the Acid2 test means very little to me if it can't render in a way similar to MSIE, Firefox and Opera (the three top browsers, as far as I can tell), all combined. I refuse to write a lot of special paths for Konqueror just because it passes the Acid2 test and the major browsers don't.
Re:KDE has superior apps, more energetic users &am
on
Torvalds Says 'Use KDE'
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I would add KOrganizer to the list. It's nice having good, complete calendar/scheduling software while waiting on Sunbird or whatever the Mozilla organization eventually craps out (and I mean that in a good sense).
Also, re: Konqueror, it's great as a Linux file manager, but I personally avoid it for web browsing and I don't support it on websites I develop. Why? The rendering engine sucks, and therefore I would have to write an inordinate number of workarounds. And writing those workarounds aren't worth it, as an extremely small percentage of hits to my sites come from Konqueror.
One: recognize experts. This should be common sense but wikipedia is composed of a bunch of anti-elitist prigs that fail to understand that a Doctorate of classical Greek Lit. will know more about the Illiad than the prigs do.
What defines an expert, and how does said expert present their credentials for the wikicracy to approve? Further, I would posit that those who possess doctorates will have a greater tendency to want to incorporate "original research", which of course, unless it is corroborated in other sources, cannot be placed into an encyclopedia.
The reality is that experts are already welcome into the encyclopedia, as long as these experts don't storm into an article and begin acting like they own it, to the exclusion of others. Of course, we've seen many "experts" who like to dwell on original research or just don't have the capacity to get along with others, and when they can't get their material into the Wikipedia, they go off and whine about the anti-elitism. I say "play nice" or "leave and whine".
Two: Have real editors that have authority. About the only way to do this is to lock down various articles and have editors approve any changes.
The Wikipedia already enjoys hundreds of very dedicated editors. Added authority for these people won't add any value. Besides, the Wikipedia already has "editors with authority". They're called admins. And they lock-down disputed articles all the freakin' time.
Three: Real accountability. Require real email and block anonymous ones such as Hotmail and Yahoo. Capture IP address, and ban abusers. Serious abusers get complaints to thier ISP. Very serious abusers get dealt with in appropriate civil and criminal courts.
IP addresses are already captured, and serious abusers are indeed banned. I know the Wikipedia is doing a lot of work to deal with these kinds of issues. I posit however that it would detract from the development of an open collective work if there were too many restrictions with regards to participation. In that sense, I'll take the few crybabies (like Siegenthaler) while wildly enjoying the fruits that the current Wikipedia system is providing.
I totally trust Wikipedia for what it is... a starting resource that almost always gives me a good introduction to a concept, while providing links to find more information. It's a great place to start in researching almost anything. The quality is downright amazing for the most part, and anyone who suggests otherwise really hasn't given it much of a chance, or bases their viewpoint on what they saw a year ago.
However, anyone who uses any encyclopedia for their actual research is a numbskull, or a third-grader.
Another unfair flatulent (i.e., full of gas) attack against a great resource. Crybaby Siegenthaler suffered no real damage from the momentary entry about him. The Wikipedia as a whole has high quality--that should be good enough for everybody. Attacks on it on most bases have no value as far as I'm concerned *because* I and many others get so much value out of it.
To assign "moral responsibility" to a collective authorship of a general reference is nonsensical. It's like assigning "moral responsibility" to every little thing we say or think--it's anti-freedom.
Why? Because I see privacy as a right, not a privilege. I refuse to spend one red cent on it. But I will defend it with whatever free techniques are available to me.
I think most individuals would be crazy to put their phone number or specific mailing address in their records (I would advise only the street name without the number). I personally don't want to receive strange calls from marketeers and other idiots who scooped up my number and want to place a crank call.
However, anyone who doesn't use a real email address is also crazy, as the owner needs to have some way of being contacted.
With the U.S. cantankerously and arrogantly imposing its control over the Internet, perhaps they should use some of that power to help domain owners maintain their privacy.
Yes, I know that domain registrars provide privacy services, but I'm sorry, I shouldn't have to *pay* for privacy!!!
Re:A lack of security-wise individuals.
on
PHP 5 Recipes
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ridiculous anti-PHP bullshit. There are numerous articles on achieving security with PHP and other similar server-side scripting platforms.
What's really going on here is that due to PHP's clear popularity, not only with newbies, but with many serious programmers, is a backlash from programmers trying to defend their current bloated 'kings', such as Java or.NET.
I've had enough of reading this crap.
All programs are as good as their programmers, no matter what platform they are utilizing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Or maybe drop support for those without [JavaScript]?
Not advisable. That's like dropping support for Opera and Safari users. A significant subset of your users will have scripting turned off. If you care about getting the widest possible audience for your site, in most cases, you will not want to shortchange functionality for anyone (perhaps except those using very old browser versions), but instead just present things differently for those with JS on and those with it off.
Even those of us who strive generally to achieve standards compliance will often put site features ahead of compliance, leaving compliance as a leftover task. Compliance is not a simple thing. Anyone who has been a web programmer for any length of time knows the difficulty of balancing features versus standards compliance, not to mention the ease of making little mistakes that fail the standards testing tools.
If you're suggesting that programmers just use Ajax "because they feel like it" without examining the 1) value and 2) repercussions, then this programmer will have to absolutely disagree with that approach. On the other hand, web programmers should certainly explore possibilities with Ajax and not reject it out of hand.
For example, if you're pulling site news or software changelog entries from a table, and those entries don't get updated very often (like less than twice a day), then it certainly makes sense to cache that data. As, even if the news/changelog that appears to the user is slightly out of date, the cache would update itself within a short period of time and any new info would then appear. Nobody loses anything just because new news doesn't immediately show up on a site. But your server does save a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes phpBB superior to others is its mod community, similar to how Firefox's available extensions make it superior to IE. Yeah, phpBB out of the box is rather bland, but that's actually good... the code is generally well-structured and easy to extend. So, if you're a half-decent programmer, you've got a really good base product you can make into your own vision for a discussion board.
For those who don't have natural programming talent, you show them a rote way to approximate that talent (which usually doesn't work out, by the way). What goes for acting also goes for programming.
You've either got it, or you don't.
In my humble (well, not really) opinion, offshoring these types of jobs is the IT equivalent of eating your seed corn. In the long run you wind up starving due to your own stupidity and lack of foresight.
:)
Not only that, but the offshoring has caused a major migration of angry American (and other Western) programmers into the open source realm. And guess what is increasingly eating the lunch of corporate-written software?
Also consider all the programmers who are writing these all these politically-driven websites (many of them actual web applications) that are increasingly propelling citizen movements against various criminal politicians and corporatists. These programmers had to come from somewhere.
I call it the "idle hands" theory.
Yes, students should know the basics: algorithms, optimizations, data structures, etc. And they should have several languages squarely under their belt upon graduation. And I posit that they should also come out with a well-rounded education, not just in computer science (after all, college is about becoming better citizens, not just perfect employees for the corporations).
But what a college cannot teach and will not ever be able to teach is how to apply these basic skills in a real job. That is because real jobs are all very different and very specific in their requirements. There's no way for a college to predict on-the-job requirements. And there's no way to teach advanced programming skills, as there multitudes of advanced techniques and technologies.
What a college must teach, somehow, is how a student can learned these advanced techniques and technologies on their own. In other words, teach the students how to learn more on their own.
And in that vein, I've found that this ability to learn on one's own depends a lot more on the specific student than what a college program can convey. Basically, it's the students that live/breathe programming that will end up as the best employees--the others are just hacks who need everything spoon-fed to them.
And sadly, no matter how college programs are enhanced, it will break down the same. There are really very few programmers who actually love programming and didn't get into it for other reasons, like money.
The bottom line is that the burden for completing the comp sci education process lies squarely on the hiring businesses. Don't like that? Well, suck it up, because it's REALITY.
I've frequently recommended the complete destruction of the Bush regime. Can I still receive a federal security clearance?
'Despite the notion that hordes of U.S. IT jobs are being sent offshore, in reality, less than 5% of the 10 million people who make up the U.S. IT job market had been displaced by foreign workers through 2004, says Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice Inc.
THIS. IS. IMPOSSIBLY. LOW.
Those of us in the programming field know this is a lie merely on its face.
I rarely suggest such things, but Scot Melland is a LIAR, or at best, an IMBECILE.
I will second this advice. It's the best of what I've read, so far.
Version tracking is not a choice in professional software development, it is an absolute. Even if the programming team consists of one person. Anyone opposed to this notion needs to get out of the programming profession. The central rationale for version tracking is the ability to rollback parts of your work--and this is a very critical ability to have, as others have covered above.
Bug tracking is what I'd call a very valuable add-on development process. Since your manager doesn't want such a thing formally speaking, then keeping your own list of bugs/to-do's in documents will work (almost) as well. And over time, you may want to install a rudimentary bug tracking system (I personally highly recommend Mantis) on your own box as the number of items you're tracking becomes too unwieldy for flat documents to handle.
That seems to me to be the best way of dealing with Bush's unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens.
service... StumbleUpon. Yahoo simply acquired the one that's currently more popular. Not for long.
The company with the slogan "We won't rest... until American democracy is destroyed" (my twist) needs to be destroyed itself.
The American people need to exclaim: "Paper trails, or we're shutting down the 2006 election". No more election theft!!!
I'm using Konqueror 3.4.2 now and it still exhibits rendering issues.
Just because it passes the Acid2 test means very little to me if it can't render in a way similar to MSIE, Firefox and Opera (the three top browsers, as far as I can tell), all combined. I refuse to write a lot of special paths for Konqueror just because it passes the Acid2 test and the major browsers don't.
I would add KOrganizer to the list. It's nice having good, complete calendar/scheduling software while waiting on Sunbird or whatever the Mozilla organization eventually craps out (and I mean that in a good sense).
Also, re: Konqueror, it's great as a Linux file manager, but I personally avoid it for web browsing and I don't support it on websites I develop. Why? The rendering engine sucks, and therefore I would have to write an inordinate number of workarounds. And writing those workarounds aren't worth it, as an extremely small percentage of hits to my sites come from Konqueror.
One: recognize experts. This should be common sense but wikipedia is composed of a bunch of anti-elitist prigs that fail to understand that a Doctorate of classical Greek Lit. will know more about the Illiad than the prigs do.
What defines an expert, and how does said expert present their credentials for the wikicracy to approve? Further, I would posit that those who possess doctorates will have a greater tendency to want to incorporate "original research", which of course, unless it is corroborated in other sources, cannot be placed into an encyclopedia.
The reality is that experts are already welcome into the encyclopedia, as long as these experts don't storm into an article and begin acting like they own it, to the exclusion of others. Of course, we've seen many "experts" who like to dwell on original research or just don't have the capacity to get along with others, and when they can't get their material into the Wikipedia, they go off and whine about the anti-elitism. I say "play nice" or "leave and whine".
Two: Have real editors that have authority. About the only way to do this is to lock down various articles and have editors approve any changes.
The Wikipedia already enjoys hundreds of very dedicated editors. Added authority for these people won't add any value. Besides, the Wikipedia already has "editors with authority". They're called admins. And they lock-down disputed articles all the freakin' time.
Three: Real accountability. Require real email and block anonymous ones such as Hotmail and Yahoo. Capture IP address, and ban abusers. Serious abusers get complaints to thier ISP. Very serious abusers get dealt with in appropriate civil and criminal courts.
IP addresses are already captured, and serious abusers are indeed banned. I know the Wikipedia is doing a lot of work to deal with these kinds of issues. I posit however that it would detract from the development of an open collective work if there were too many restrictions with regards to participation. In that sense, I'll take the few crybabies (like Siegenthaler) while wildly enjoying the fruits that the current Wikipedia system is providing.
I think it's obvious that it's not worth the paper.
It's apparently not obvious, because I and many other people wildly disagree with you.
I totally trust Wikipedia for what it is... a starting resource that almost always gives me a good introduction to a concept, while providing links to find more information. It's a great place to start in researching almost anything. The quality is downright amazing for the most part, and anyone who suggests otherwise really hasn't given it much of a chance, or bases their viewpoint on what they saw a year ago.
However, anyone who uses any encyclopedia for their actual research is a numbskull, or a third-grader.
Another unfair flatulent (i.e., full of gas) attack against a great resource. Crybaby Siegenthaler suffered no real damage from the momentary entry about him. The Wikipedia as a whole has high quality--that should be good enough for everybody. Attacks on it on most bases have no value as far as I'm concerned *because* I and many others get so much value out of it.
To assign "moral responsibility" to a collective authorship of a general reference is nonsensical. It's like assigning "moral responsibility" to every little thing we say or think--it's anti-freedom.
Once anything gets swallowed up by Yahoo, it goes to shit, like when eGroups became Yahoo! Groups.
Check out StumbleUpon. It really is a great service, and it's not corporatized. It's supported by donors.
Why? Because I see privacy as a right, not a privilege. I refuse to spend one red cent on it. But I will defend it with whatever free techniques are available to me.
I think most individuals would be crazy to put their phone number or specific mailing address in their records (I would advise only the street name without the number). I personally don't want to receive strange calls from marketeers and other idiots who scooped up my number and want to place a crank call.
However, anyone who doesn't use a real email address is also crazy, as the owner needs to have some way of being contacted.
With the U.S. cantankerously and arrogantly imposing its control over the Internet, perhaps they should use some of that power to help domain owners maintain their privacy.
Yes, I know that domain registrars provide privacy services, but I'm sorry, I shouldn't have to *pay* for privacy!!!
Ridiculous anti-PHP bullshit. There are numerous articles on achieving security with PHP and other similar server-side scripting platforms.
.NET.
What's really going on here is that due to PHP's clear popularity, not only with newbies, but with many serious programmers, is a backlash from programmers trying to defend their current bloated 'kings', such as Java or
I've had enough of reading this crap.
All programs are as good as their programmers, no matter what platform they are utilizing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They're not good for software, and they're not good for America.
Or maybe drop support for those without [JavaScript]?
Not advisable. That's like dropping support for Opera and Safari users. A significant subset of your users will have scripting turned off. If you care about getting the widest possible audience for your site, in most cases, you will not want to shortchange functionality for anyone (perhaps except those using very old browser versions), but instead just present things differently for those with JS on and those with it off.
Even those of us who strive generally to achieve standards compliance will often put site features ahead of compliance, leaving compliance as a leftover task. Compliance is not a simple thing. Anyone who has been a web programmer for any length of time knows the difficulty of balancing features versus standards compliance, not to mention the ease of making little mistakes that fail the standards testing tools.
If you're suggesting that programmers just use Ajax "because they feel like it" without examining the 1) value and 2) repercussions, then this programmer will have to absolutely disagree with that approach. On the other hand, web programmers should certainly explore possibilities with Ajax and not reject it out of hand.
For example, if you're pulling site news or software changelog entries from a table, and those entries don't get updated very often (like less than twice a day), then it certainly makes sense to cache that data. As, even if the news/changelog that appears to the user is slightly out of date, the cache would update itself within a short period of time and any new info would then appear. Nobody loses anything just because new news doesn't immediately show up on a site. But your server does save a lot.