Why is it that so many PHP programs only work with MySQL? Is it because PHP lacks a decent equivalent of DBI?
Nope, there are a number of database abstraction layers (PDO comes to mind).
PHP programmers (at least the kind who code directly with mysql-statements) tend to do things as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort. The amount of tutorials and snippets that also do so simply keeps the average PHP programmer coding against MySQL, and only MySQL.
There is a lot of people with Symbian 60 phones out there, more than Android and iPhone together(not sure about Windows though).
The difference is mainly that of hype. Apple and Google both were new to the whole mobile phone market, while Nokia is the incumbent. It's not sexy to develop something for a phone everyone and his dog has.
PyS60 was out there long ago, and the S60 as a development platform isn't that bad. I've written a few scripts for my N95, but I use my phone for calling people and reading email, not for fooling around. I think that's a large difference between both groups of users.
Another large difference is that, when you develop a S60 application you'll have to distribute it yourself. Both Apple and Google provide a near effortless way to sell your application to a lot of users (and that's the only way to get new applications). Nokia has set up Symbian Signed to help make.sis an effortless install and is trying to catch up in this aspect, but there isn't a single S60 marketplace that's easy for developers to enter and has a lot of users.
Perhaps with opening Symbian and the Symbian Foundation Nokia can get back some of the hype and developer mindshare, who knows. I know I wouldn't mind overhauling the menu structure.
I use a TomTom myself and find it a great little Linux device but I'm less than impressed with the way they treat the Linux community, for example you can only update via a Windows application that doesn't even run in wine.
Even more as their TomTom Home Windows application was built using xulrunner (mozilla).
Having so many Linux developers, yet not wanting to put in any effort to help Linux users. It's a shame, but not uncommon with companies using Linux for embedded devices and appliances.
The site will be almost entirely content. It will need to be updated by non-technical staff, specifically uploading PDFs, creating new pages, and applying tags from multiple fixed taxonomies. It will need to handle user accounts and control editing permissions down to the page level. We do our own design so theming should be too hard, and the more flexible in content placement the better.
I'd go for either Drupal or MODx. Personally I find the latter is much better at large sites (I've done deployments with 10000+ pages and it's still very usable, both speed-wise and usability).
For small sites, Wordpress is fine. For large sites, MODx is great (given you need to invest some time to set it all up). For web apps or sites that have requirements beyond your typical CMS, I tend to go with Django.
Even with addon that tries to resemble the old behavior(Old Location Bar), I hate the way firefox 3 handles it. I much liked the way I could type part of the url and I'd see ordered list in my search history of matching places - ORDERED by number of visits.
Same here. I'm all for improvements, but the not-so-awesome bar should have been an extension/plugin/addon.
Eventually, Thunderbird will simply become a part of Firefox and we'll be back to square one. I for one am looking forward to Phoenix 2.0.
His whiny, pathetic, groveling demeanor over a $20 difference in price, and his futile attempts to explain to her why 2G is better than 1G, made me absolutely want to vomit. I'm not married, but I vowed that day to either divorce or kill myself if I ever find myself to be such a pathetic, spineless loser.
Hear hear!
Listen spineless losers: only grovel for 4GB. 2GB isn't enough. If you grovel, do it for something worthwhile.
Unfortunately it can also make it impossible to login if you are trying to login remotely from a foreign computer, for instance to check mail while traveling.
I had this same problem when I was in France. The solution? Search for 'qwerty' on google images:)
So she got the free trial version, played with it for 30 days and loved it. I asked her to give gimp the same 30 days, and she did. We never did make that Photoshop purchase
Same experience here with The Gimp. As long as SO hasn't become entrenched in using a particular non-free application, she grasps new free apps easily. I hadn't expected her to get used to the gimp (as every gimp article on/. might have you think) as quickly as she did. Perhaps not being English helps in this case:)
Getting her switched from Microsoft Office however is a different story. Having used it for years, she was wary about OOo and balked about not being able to find various options easily.
It goes to show that moving users from what they are comfortable with is a difficult process. If the new app doesn't have a clear win (Firefox + AdBlock for instance) users won't switch easily. But if the user is new to the domain, they will try it with an open mind and learn quickly.
Stop making fun at Belgium and follow in their food steps.
*puts mayonnaise on his fries*
Joking aside, it seems like the Belgians have done this right: You need a code to access the information from the passport, similar to your bank/creditcard. Not perfect, but at least it isn't readable by everyone.
Personally, I really like MODx (did a big deployment some time ago, very flexible and efficient framework) and for very small sites Wordpress still is a good choice. Drupal is nice. If you can't find a CMS that fits the problem, don't be afraid to turn to a framework like Django or CakePHP and roll your own.
A CMS or web framework is useful as long as it doesn't get in the way of the users and developers. IMHO, Joomla gets in your way very easily. Kudos on wanting to do the job properly.
OO 3.0 actually can import PDFs. It's the only reason I have it installed on my machine.
Same here, the only current drawback of the OOo import PDF plugin is that you end up with an openoffice draw file (so you can't convert it into a odt AFAIK).
It does allow you to make minor changes, but not being able to open PDFs in Writer does limit the usefulness of this feature. Does anyone know if you can side-step this limitation?
The fact that method calls (assert, print and del) are included in the language syntax, means that Python is not (yet) fully OO.
This line of reasoning is moot. Kernel is automatically required in Ruby, so the Kernel method calls are similarly included in the language syntax. Not to mention that a lot of methods Kernel has are put in separate modules in Python (exec, system, sleep, rand) or are methods of objects (split, chomp), so you could argue that Ruby is less OO than Python.
But either way, as I said, this argument is moot. Even if Python has automatically included methods instead of a single Ruby class of which all methods are included, so what? In Python you can override the few included methods (import my_pretty_print as print), in Ruby you can override your Kernel object and the methods you want to replace. In both languages it is (rightfully) bad form to do so and discussing the OO-ness of a language on such a level is as pointless as comparing dick-lengths.
I will tell you that Google tries* to do the right thing, including act as an advocate for user privacy.
Good stuff! So this means Google will try to do the right thing if I ask them to delete my search records after half a year? Or stop profiting from domain squatters? Or not take photos of my house and neighborhood? Or not bend over backwards for China?
All hail Google! Google is good! We've also always been at war with Eurasia!
Interesting you mention Zarafa. I'll be seeing a client next week who uses Zarafa for his mid-sized business, and is not satisfied at all with it. It wasn't my install as I'm primarily a developer, but it doesn't look good...
Might have to migrate to something else, they're already considering Gmail / Google Apps or MS Exchange, but this might be a good testbed for OpenChange / Samba4. Unfortunately, I suspect the Zarafa install to also have been a 'testbed' of sorts.
[...] we've actually been spending a lot of time looking at other cities that have already have better urban planning. Amsterdam, Paris [...]
You, sir, have obviously never lived or worked anywhere near Amsterdam.
I don't know the expert opinion on Amsterdam urban planning, but tell the average man on the street that their city has been planned properly and they'll laugh in your face. The only means of transportation here that doesn't suck is cycling, roads and public transportation in the city are either overfull or in a state of disrepair.
Give me London's or NY's planners over Amsterdam's planners anyday. Paris is very nice though.
how did Poland end up democratic and prosperous while Russia is autocratic and at the whim of oil/gas prices?
Naomi Klein answers (among others) this question in The Shock Doctrine. The Poles are where they are despite the 'foreign consultants' and have had a very rough time.
Even the shock of 9/11, she said in an interview, was "harnessed by leaders to end the discussion of global justice."
Nor are democratic governments exempt. Solidarity in Poland in 1989, she writes, was forced to reverse positions on which it was elected -- i.e., backing worker cooperatives -- and impose a state of emergency after being strong-armed by the I.M.F. and other lenders that refused to extend aid and credit unless Poland adopted a radical free-market program.
"We did not lose the battle of ideas," Ms. Klein likes to say. Alternatives to the free market were "crushed by army tanks and think tanks."
I highly recommend Shock Doctrine, a good antidote against Friedmannism. She makes some comparisons I feel uneasy about, but overall a worthwhile read.
Due to not having any sort of non-compete, myself, my brother (who was also working there), the VP, and the sales guy jumped ship and now we have exactly the same company minus the original founder and we've made more sales and more progress in 3 months than we did in 1.5 years with the original startup.
Good call! I've seen this technique been used in these types of nasty situations before, it's a fire-against-fire tactic but sometimes you have no other choice.
Just watch out for the original founder and the IRS. Both can bite you if you haven't covered your backs properly (legally and tax-wise) and bog both companies down in years of court battles.
You should read Koster's book, rather than responding with scorn to a poor one-sentence summary of it.
Dear all-knowing AC: You should respond with an informed rebuke to GP's post, rather than responding with scorn with a poor one-sentence mention of a book only very few have read.
In response to GP, quantifying "fun" (which is required for any automated learning algorithm) indeed isn't easy, but evolving game rules using an expected learning curve isn't a bad idea. Games with a too steep or too shallow learning curve can be less fun than because of the learning curve, but "fun" naturally comprises much more than the learning curve alone.
Re:time to port gnome!
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
When QT4 became available under the GPL on all 4 major platforms- Windows/BSD/Linux/OSX the argument for GTK was weak. Now, I'd argue its virtually non-existent.
The argument was primarily a licensing one: LGPL versus GPL. Going for GTK+ because it was LGPL wasn't a weak argument.
With both QT and GTK+ being LGPL, the argument will be about toolkit quality, third-party support and language experience (C++ versus C). This is a much more useful comparison, and as a developer well-versed in GTK+ I'm looking forward to using both.
From QT4.5 onwards, the best tool for the job wins. Thanks Nokia!
IME, it's fairly typical for decent employers to set a cap of, say, 5 days rolling over: this avoids long-term employees building up a huge vacation allowance, but allows some flexibility and avoids everyone taking off half of December and leaving the office near-empty just to use up all their remaining leave.
Over here in the Netherlands (EUSSR) it's forbidden by companies to take back vacation days (because that is what happens when you limit or cap them). So employees are allowed to build up a large vacation allowance, which lets them take a few months off on paid leave (or you can opt to have them payed out, but only if you quit your job).
I've done the latter once, I had built up quite a few vacation days over a couple of years in a part-time job. I switched jobs, and got the rest of my vacation days paid out.
A cap really isn't a good solution. A good manager should keep an eye on the vacation days of his crew, and suggest they take more time off if employees are building up too many days.
Just a tip: ask multiple companies to do the first audit. You'll likely get very different results, go from there.
<shameless plug> I do pen tests for clients (both government and banking) via my company. I wouldn't call myself the best, but there's always something that can be found. </shameless plug>
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Nope, there are a number of database abstraction layers (PDO comes to mind).
PHP programmers (at least the kind who code directly with mysql-statements) tend to do things as quickly as possible with the least amount of effort. The amount of tutorials and snippets that also do so simply keeps the average PHP programmer coding against MySQL, and only MySQL.
The difference is mainly that of hype. Apple and Google both were new to the whole mobile phone market, while Nokia is the incumbent. It's not sexy to develop something for a phone everyone and his dog has.
PyS60 was out there long ago, and the S60 as a development platform isn't that bad. I've written a few scripts for my N95, but I use my phone for calling people and reading email, not for fooling around. I think that's a large difference between both groups of users.
Another large difference is that, when you develop a S60 application you'll have to distribute it yourself. Both Apple and Google provide a near effortless way to sell your application to a lot of users (and that's the only way to get new applications). Nokia has set up Symbian Signed to help make .sis an effortless install and is trying to catch up in this aspect, but there isn't a single S60 marketplace that's easy for developers to enter and has a lot of users.
Perhaps with opening Symbian and the Symbian Foundation Nokia can get back some of the hype and developer mindshare, who knows. I know I wouldn't mind overhauling the menu structure.
Even more as their TomTom Home Windows application was built using xulrunner (mozilla).
Having so many Linux developers, yet not wanting to put in any effort to help Linux users. It's a shame, but not uncommon with companies using Linux for embedded devices and appliances.
I'd go for either Drupal or MODx. Personally I find the latter is much better at large sites (I've done deployments with 10000+ pages and it's still very usable, both speed-wise and usability).
For small sites, Wordpress is fine. For large sites, MODx is great (given you need to invest some time to set it all up). For web apps or sites that have requirements beyond your typical CMS, I tend to go with Django.
Joomla? Not if I have anything to say about it.
Same here. I'm all for improvements, but the not-so-awesome bar should have been an extension/plugin/addon.
Eventually, Thunderbird will simply become a part of Firefox and we'll be back to square one. I for one am looking forward to Phoenix 2.0.
Hear hear!
Listen spineless losers: only grovel for 4GB. 2GB isn't enough. If you grovel, do it for something worthwhile.
I had this same problem when I was in France. The solution? Search for 'qwerty' on google images :)
Same experience here with The Gimp. As long as SO hasn't become entrenched in using a particular non-free application, she grasps new free apps easily. I hadn't expected her to get used to the gimp (as every gimp article on /. might have you think) as quickly as she did. Perhaps not being English helps in this case :)
Getting her switched from Microsoft Office however is a different story. Having used it for years, she was wary about OOo and balked about not being able to find various options easily.
It goes to show that moving users from what they are comfortable with is a difficult process. If the new app doesn't have a clear win (Firefox + AdBlock for instance) users won't switch easily. But if the user is new to the domain, they will try it with an open mind and learn quickly.
*puts mayonnaise on his fries*
Joking aside, it seems like the Belgians have done this right: You need a code to access the information from the passport, similar to your bank/creditcard. Not perfect, but at least it isn't readable by everyone.
Personally, I really like MODx (did a big deployment some time ago, very flexible and efficient framework) and for very small sites Wordpress still is a good choice. Drupal is nice. If you can't find a CMS that fits the problem, don't be afraid to turn to a framework like Django or CakePHP and roll your own.
A CMS or web framework is useful as long as it doesn't get in the way of the users and developers. IMHO, Joomla gets in your way very easily. Kudos on wanting to do the job properly.
Same here, the only current drawback of the OOo import PDF plugin is that you end up with an openoffice draw file (so you can't convert it into a odt AFAIK).
It does allow you to make minor changes, but not being able to open PDFs in Writer does limit the usefulness of this feature. Does anyone know if you can side-step this limitation?
Two birds, one stone: force all the spam-responders to eat dirt!
It might not solve the spam problem, but at least we could get a laugh out of it. Hell, you could make a TV show out of it.
Oh wait, a metaphor? Never mind...
This line of reasoning is moot. Kernel is automatically required in Ruby, so the Kernel method calls are similarly included in the language syntax. Not to mention that a lot of methods Kernel has are put in separate modules in Python (exec, system, sleep, rand) or are methods of objects (split, chomp), so you could argue that Ruby is less OO than Python.
But either way, as I said, this argument is moot. Even if Python has automatically included methods instead of a single Ruby class of which all methods are included, so what? In Python you can override the few included methods (import my_pretty_print as print), in Ruby you can override your Kernel object and the methods you want to replace. In both languages it is (rightfully) bad form to do so and discussing the OO-ness of a language on such a level is as pointless as comparing dick-lengths.
Remember, it's how you use it that counts.
Good stuff! So this means Google will try to do the right thing if I ask them to delete my search records after half a year? Or stop profiting from domain squatters? Or not take photos of my house and neighborhood? Or not bend over backwards for China?
All hail Google! Google is good! We've also always been at war with Eurasia!
Interesting you mention Zarafa. I'll be seeing a client next week who uses Zarafa for his mid-sized business, and is not satisfied at all with it. It wasn't my install as I'm primarily a developer, but it doesn't look good...
Might have to migrate to something else, they're already considering Gmail / Google Apps or MS Exchange, but this might be a good testbed for OpenChange / Samba4. Unfortunately, I suspect the Zarafa install to also have been a 'testbed' of sorts.
You, sir, have obviously never lived or worked anywhere near Amsterdam.
I don't know the expert opinion on Amsterdam urban planning, but tell the average man on the street that their city has been planned properly and they'll laugh in your face. The only means of transportation here that doesn't suck is cycling, roads and public transportation in the city are either overfull or in a state of disrepair.
Give me London's or NY's planners over Amsterdam's planners anyday. Paris is very nice though.
Naomi Klein answers (among others) this question in The Shock Doctrine. The Poles are where they are despite the 'foreign consultants' and have had a very rough time.
An excerpt from a NY Times review:
I highly recommend Shock Doctrine, a good antidote against Friedmannism. She makes some comparisons I feel uneasy about, but overall a worthwhile read.
Good call! I've seen this technique been used in these types of nasty situations before, it's a fire-against-fire tactic but sometimes you have no other choice.
Just watch out for the original founder and the IRS. Both can bite you if you haven't covered your backs properly (legally and tax-wise) and bog both companies down in years of court battles.
There, fixed that for you.
You might trust Google with your e-mail, but not everyone does.
If you were Armenian, I don't think you'd have found Ataturk to be that great.
Oh wait, you can't be Armenian as Ataturk slaughtered them all after the first world war. None survived.
There, fixed that for you.
Dear all-knowing AC: You should respond with an informed rebuke to GP's post, rather than responding with scorn with a poor one-sentence mention of a book only very few have read.
In response to GP, quantifying "fun" (which is required for any automated learning algorithm) indeed isn't easy, but evolving game rules using an expected learning curve isn't a bad idea. Games with a too steep or too shallow learning curve can be less fun than because of the learning curve, but "fun" naturally comprises much more than the learning curve alone.
The argument was primarily a licensing one: LGPL versus GPL. Going for GTK+ because it was LGPL wasn't a weak argument.
With both QT and GTK+ being LGPL, the argument will be about toolkit quality, third-party support and language experience (C++ versus C). This is a much more useful comparison, and as a developer well-versed in GTK+ I'm looking forward to using both.
From QT4.5 onwards, the best tool for the job wins. Thanks Nokia!
Over here in the Netherlands (EUSSR) it's forbidden by companies to take back vacation days (because that is what happens when you limit or cap them). So employees are allowed to build up a large vacation allowance, which lets them take a few months off on paid leave (or you can opt to have them payed out, but only if you quit your job).
I've done the latter once, I had built up quite a few vacation days over a couple of years in a part-time job. I switched jobs, and got the rest of my vacation days paid out.
A cap really isn't a good solution. A good manager should keep an eye on the vacation days of his crew, and suggest they take more time off if employees are building up too many days.
Just a tip: ask multiple companies to do the first audit. You'll likely get very different results, go from there.
<shameless plug>
I do pen tests for clients (both government and banking) via my company. I wouldn't call myself the best, but there's always something that can be found.
</shameless plug>