The droids' numbers are almost certainly not unique, it's the only way of explaining how come it would even be possible for 2 such low numbered droids to encounter each other in the first place. Probably these are designations given to them on commissioning, and are only supposed to be unique for the environment they were designed for working in.
I doubt this kid is particularly gifted, seeing as his father submitted a/. story starting with passive voice.
Passive voice is sometimes the most appropriate way of phrasing a sentence. That one, admittedly, could have been reworked into active fairly easily, but it works as passive and I'd say let it stand.
Also, I'd rather he have a chance to appreciate the series in order... I don't know if that means 4-5-6-1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4-5-6... haven't decided.
There's another post on this page that makes a good case for 4-1-2-5-3-6; I myself think 4-5-1-2-3-6 is possibly the best. You might want to consider these two options.
Actually, if I recall correctly, he did say before they started production of ep 1 (I think actually around about the time ROTJ was released, but I'm not sure, my memory's very hazy back that far) that he'd got outlines for 9 episodes, and that R2 and C3PO are the only characters that are in all of them...
An interesting question -- are there any edits available that restore the original version of the films based on a copy of the DVD (a la Phantom Edit) and possibly some downloaded material?
I personally believe 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6 would be a better way of watching them (although I haven't seen 2 or 3 yet, so it's hard to be certain). I think anakin's name along with the foreshadowing in ep 1 is enough to spoil the major plot point of ep 5 for a signigificant proportion of viewers. And ep 5 being the best in the series, I'd say the most important thing is not to spoil it...
That said, I hardly consider the Emperor's assumption of power to be a move in the forward direction. That would be akin to saying that Nazi Germany was a good step forward because the trains ran on time. Remember, we are led to believe in Ep. 4, 5, and 6 that the Empire is pretty naughty in implementing it's plans--one need look no further than the destruction of Alderaan for evidence of this. Not the sort of environment I'd look forward to living in.
How do we know that we've got the full story? All we have to go on are these "rebels" propoganda films. In fact, I don't think the Alderaan massacre actually happened. The only people who say it did are Alderanians, and their sympathisers.
I think you're just Aldy-loving trash. Why don't you go home, Aldy? Eh? Eh?;)
As does Paint Shop Pro, which has supported vector drawing primitives for many years now; I remember it had them back when I was evaluating GIMP 1.0.0 (on NT4 and SuSE 6.1 respectively). Would have been about 98 or so, I reckon.
Those are some pretty high end specs being reccomended,
Specs are:
consumers should preferably run the software on an Intel Pentium 4 machine, with Windows XP Service Pack 2, 512MB of memory, 500MB of disk space and a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet supporting the WinTab interface.
Specs for Adobe Photoshop CS2 are:
# Intel® Xeon(TM), Xeon Dual, Intel Centrino(TM), or Pentium® III or 4 processor # Microsoft® Windows® 2000 with Service Pack 4, or Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or 2 # 320MB of RAM (384MB recommended) # 650MB of available hard-disk space
OK, so Adobe aren't explicitly recommending a pressure sensitive graphics tablet, but if you've ever used one you'll know that they help a lot with some types of image editing.
Other than that, MS are recommending (using the word "preferably") a processor 1 generation more recent than Adobe's minimum spec, about 60% more RAM than Adobe's minimum, and less hard disk. It's a pig, but not that bad when compared to the competition -- bear in mind that it'll probably be going up against the next version of photoshop, not this one.
No, no, you miss the point. The article's writer had a phone number for a particular MS representative, called that number and got voicemail. Having done that, they figured that they could fob us off with that "not available to comment" line.
Well, yes. Unless there are valid technical reasons for it (which seems unlikely), then the only reason for doing it is to tie sales of Acrylic into additional XP sales. This is dubious behaviour, and if they do manage to gain a significant portion of the market share in image editors could open them up to further legal action under the EU anti-competitive business practices legislation.
IANAL, etc.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Apart from actually passing an appropriate Date type to the API (ODBC/ADO etc), there is a simple solution:
'yyyymmdd hh:mm:ss'
Ah, that explains it. I was using "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss", which is understood by every other DB server I've ever used, but which MSSQL failed to understand. Why doesn't it work with accepted standards?
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
My experience has been that such API conversions can usually be handled by regexps, whereas the SQL conversions required are much more complex. But I guess your mileage varied...
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Maybe I didn't make my point clear -- the question I intended to ask is why is a database independent API even useful if the code you're passing to it is DB specific anyway?
it doesn't seem to like "echo 000000000000 >/dev/{h,s}d{a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s, t,u,v,w,x,y,z}".
You're probably looking for:
for/l %a in (0,1,25) do @echo 000000000 > \Devices\Harddisk%a\Partition0
Re:Does PHP Have a Generic Database API Yet?
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
Yes, as part of the PEAR library (distributed as part of PHP, but not built in -- it's implemented in PHP code itself). That's been around for several years, but most people don't notice it because the documentation is separate.
Why would you care if your hosting provider is using safe mode? All it does (I believe) is disable some potentially dangerous functions, and restricts locations that files can be referenced from... you could just not use those functions and validate all your filenames before use.
Safe mode is not exactly the be-all-and-end-all of web security. It's more there to protect the host from you than to protect you from hackers.
Re:Actually I can argue with it
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 1
OK, I'll bite.
PHP is a horrible language. Even perl is a better programming language.
PERL is a better language for some purposes. However, for someone who is unfamiliar with it, code written in it is very difficult to interpret. PHP is easily read by people who understand C.
Java and Python blow it away in ability to create easy to maintain and efficient data structures.
True. Most PHP applications are simple front ends to database storage systems that don't need to do anything with data structures more complex than arrays or records.
I'm amazed and fearful of the monstrosities that have been cobbled together with PHP (I'm talking about you Mediawiki and Drupal).
I've never looked at the code for mediawiki (or any other wiki for that matter), but this is precisely the kind of application that PHP *is* good at. It's pure database manipulation and HTML presentation. I suspect it's pretty easy to read and fairly simple to maintain.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Drupal so couldn't comment.
PHP is to web programming as x86 is to microprocessor architecture. It's nasty and inefficient and I can't figure out why so many people use it.
Like processor architectures, web scripting languages benefit from network effect. When designing a web site, an important consideration is: "where am I going to get this hosted, and how much will it cost?". Because PHP and MySQL are so popular, you can usually find a host for sites that run on them very easily. Which is part of the reason they continue to be popular, despite any shortcomings they may have.
And like many other no-declaration scripting languages PHP is sorely lacking in warnings and errors. Forgot a dollarsign or typoed your variable name? Sorry, yer screwed!
For testing and debugging purposes, you should have 'error_reporting = E_ALL | E_NOTICE' in your php.ini file; if you do, it will display a warning message identifying lines on which you forgot a dollar sign (something along the lines of "undeclared constant '[identifier]' at [file], line [line]") or use the value of an uninitialised variable. This is perfectly adequate for finding this kind of error.
PHP is not a good teaching language, largely because its design encourages the use of global variables. It's nearly as bad as BASIC in that respect.
I'd say teach in a language designed for the purpose, or at least with the purpose in mind. Pascal, Smalltalk, Python or Java are all reasonable choices.
Indeed. As someone who's recently worked on a 3-tier application produced using PHP communicating with XML between the tiers and using a PHP-based templating engine to produce the pages at the web tier, I feel qualified to say that PHP certainly can be used for such applications.
Sure, we pushed the limit a little, running up against bugs in the database API extension (here's a suggestion: if you have a choice, don't use Informix for your PHP applications) and bizarre incompatibilities with existing applications (PHP doesn't integrate well; it likes everything to be done its way... for instance, it expects data in cookies to be URL encoded). But it worked, and didn't cost us too much time over another solution. It was probably faster and easier than doing the same thing using Java servlets, I reckon.
Re:PHP definitely does not follow the KISS princip
on
A Decade of PHP
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For a start, PHP functions seem to have no consistency at all. Sometimes you get verb/object, sometimes object/verb. Sometimes you get underscores, sometimes you don't. Consider.. is_object but isset. str_rot13 but strpos. php_uname but phpversion. There are hundreds of these. It's the reason I could never learn PHP, it's like learning Chinese, but I found Perl (and now Ruby) easy due to their relative consistency. Sometimes PHP uses "to", sometimes it uses "2".. huh what's that about?
Most of the functions in the PHP distribution are named after a function that does the same thing in the C library that PHP uses to implement the feature. PHP is designed so that if you're familiar with the C library that it is using, you can very easily get the hang of the PHP version.
This doesn't excuse some of the weirdnesses in the core library, though -- str_rot13 (and the other string functions with underscores in them) is clearly wrong, as the earliest string functions followed the standard C library naming conventions.
To address your other examples: isset() is an operator that looks syntactically like a function, and would have been named in this fashion to mirror the other such operators (sizeof(), unset()). is_object() et al are functions that were implemented independently of this, and at the time there was no conflict. I see no excuse for the php_uname/phpversion difference.
PHP has thousands of core functions.. nuts! And why does PHP have such a bizarre lack of abstraction? PHP often has about 10 functions compared to other languages' single function.. with each of the 10 doing a slightly different thing. When it comes to being overly wordy and inconsistent, I doubt anything can beat PHP, but, well, I'd like to see someone bring up a language that is!
I don't like to nitpick, but... those aren't all core functions. They're just functions that are distributed with the core, kind of like the applications that come with a Linux distribution. You can build a stripped down PHP without them, if you want.
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The droids' numbers are almost certainly not unique, it's the only way of explaining how come it would even be possible for 2 such low numbered droids to encounter each other in the first place. Probably these are designations given to them on commissioning, and are only supposed to be unique for the environment they were designed for working in.
I doubt this kid is particularly gifted, seeing as his father submitted a /. story starting with passive voice.
Passive voice is sometimes the most appropriate way of phrasing a sentence. That one, admittedly, could have been reworked into active fairly easily, but it works as passive and I'd say let it stand.
Also, I'd rather he have a chance to appreciate the series in order... I don't know if that means 4-5-6-1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4-5-6... haven't decided.
There's another post on this page that makes a good case for 4-1-2-5-3-6; I myself think 4-5-1-2-3-6 is possibly the best. You might want to consider these two options.
Actually, if I recall correctly, he did say before they started production of ep 1 (I think actually around about the time ROTJ was released, but I'm not sure, my memory's very hazy back that far) that he'd got outlines for 9 episodes, and that R2 and C3PO are the only characters that are in all of them...
An interesting question -- are there any edits available that restore the original version of the films based on a copy of the DVD (a la Phantom Edit) and possibly some downloaded material?
If not, who's going to make them?
I personally believe 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 6 would be a better way of watching them (although I haven't seen 2 or 3 yet, so it's hard to be certain). I think anakin's name along with the foreshadowing in ep 1 is enough to spoil the major plot point of ep 5 for a signigificant proportion of viewers. And ep 5 being the best in the series, I'd say the most important thing is not to spoil it...
That said, I hardly consider the Emperor's assumption of power to be a move in the forward direction. That would be akin to saying that Nazi Germany was a good step forward because the trains ran on time. Remember, we are led to believe in Ep. 4, 5, and 6 that the Empire is pretty naughty in implementing it's plans--one need look no further than the destruction of Alderaan for evidence of this. Not the sort of environment I'd look forward to living in.
;)
How do we know that we've got the full story? All we have to go on are these "rebels" propoganda films. In fact, I don't think the Alderaan massacre actually happened. The only people who say it did are Alderanians, and their sympathisers.
I think you're just Aldy-loving trash. Why don't you go home, Aldy? Eh? Eh?
I think "... senile too, you would be" works better.
As does Paint Shop Pro, which has supported vector drawing primitives for many years now; I remember it had them back when I was evaluating GIMP 1.0.0 (on NT4 and SuSE 6.1 respectively). Would have been about 98 or so, I reckon.
Those are some pretty high end specs being reccomended,
Specs are:
consumers should preferably run the software on an Intel Pentium 4 machine, with Windows XP Service Pack 2, 512MB of memory, 500MB of disk space and a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet supporting the WinTab interface.
Specs for Adobe Photoshop CS2 are:
# Intel® Xeon(TM), Xeon Dual, Intel Centrino(TM), or Pentium® III or 4 processor
# Microsoft® Windows® 2000 with Service Pack 4, or Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or 2
# 320MB of RAM (384MB recommended)
# 650MB of available hard-disk space
OK, so Adobe aren't explicitly recommending a pressure sensitive graphics tablet, but if you've ever used one you'll know that they help a lot with some types of image editing.
Other than that, MS are recommending (using the word "preferably") a processor 1 generation more recent than Adobe's minimum spec, about 60% more RAM than Adobe's minimum, and less hard disk. It's a pig, but not that bad when compared to the competition -- bear in mind that it'll probably be going up against the next version of photoshop, not this one.
...BETA!!
Yep. So the final release won't be unpolished. It'll still be a "poorly laid out graphics editor that acts [...] like a glorified (Microsoft) Paint".
No, no, you miss the point. The article's writer had a phone number for a particular MS representative, called that number and got voicemail. Having done that, they figured that they could fob us off with that "not available to comment" line.
Well, yes. Unless there are valid technical reasons for it (which seems unlikely), then the only reason for doing it is to tie sales of Acrylic into additional XP sales. This is dubious behaviour, and if they do manage to gain a significant portion of the market share in image editors could open them up to further legal action under the EU anti-competitive business practices legislation.
IANAL, etc.
Apart from actually passing an appropriate Date type to the API (ODBC/ADO etc), there is a simple solution:
'yyyymmdd hh:mm:ss'
Ah, that explains it. I was using "yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss", which is understood by every other DB server I've ever used, but which MSSQL failed to understand. Why doesn't it work with accepted standards?
My experience has been that such API conversions can usually be handled by regexps, whereas the SQL conversions required are much more complex. But I guess your mileage varied...
Maybe I didn't make my point clear -- the question I intended to ask is why is a database independent API even useful if the code you're passing to it is DB specific anyway?
the 'half' part of my 2 1/2 gripes is sometimes you have to fiddle with a registry setting to turn on tab completion
Tab completion is on by default in XP and up, it seems. I haven't had to fiddle with the registry for that since I upgraded from 2K.
Huh? When I press F7 nothing happens. What's it supposed to do?
it doesn't seem to like "echo 000000000000 > /dev/{h,s}d{a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s, t,u,v,w,x,y,z}".
/l %a in (0,1,25) do @echo 000000000 > \Devices\Harddisk%a\Partition0
You're probably looking for:
for
Yes, as part of the PEAR library (distributed as part of PHP, but not built in -- it's implemented in PHP code itself). That's been around for several years, but most people don't notice it because the documentation is separate.
Why would you care if your hosting provider is using safe mode? All it does (I believe) is disable some potentially dangerous functions, and restricts locations that files can be referenced from... you could just not use those functions and validate all your filenames before use.
Safe mode is not exactly the be-all-and-end-all of web security. It's more there to protect the host from you than to protect you from hackers.
OK, I'll bite.
PHP is a horrible language. Even perl is a better programming language.
PERL is a better language for some purposes. However, for someone who is unfamiliar with it, code written in it is very difficult to interpret. PHP is easily read by people who understand C.
Java and Python blow it away in ability to create easy to maintain and efficient data structures.
True. Most PHP applications are simple front ends to database storage systems that don't need to do anything with data structures more complex than arrays or records.
I'm amazed and fearful of the monstrosities that have been cobbled together with PHP (I'm talking about you Mediawiki and Drupal).
I've never looked at the code for mediawiki (or any other wiki for that matter), but this is precisely the kind of application that PHP *is* good at. It's pure database manipulation and HTML presentation. I suspect it's pretty easy to read and fairly simple to maintain.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with Drupal so couldn't comment.
PHP is to web programming as x86 is to microprocessor architecture. It's nasty and inefficient and I can't figure out why so many people use it.
Like processor architectures, web scripting languages benefit from network effect. When designing a web site, an important consideration is: "where am I going to get this hosted, and how much will it cost?". Because PHP and MySQL are so popular, you can usually find a host for sites that run on them very easily. Which is part of the reason they continue to be popular, despite any shortcomings they may have.
And like many other no-declaration scripting languages PHP is sorely lacking in warnings and errors. Forgot a dollarsign or typoed your variable name? Sorry, yer screwed!
For testing and debugging purposes, you should have 'error_reporting = E_ALL | E_NOTICE' in your php.ini file; if you do, it will display a warning message identifying lines on which you forgot a dollar sign (something along the lines of "undeclared constant '[identifier]' at [file], line [line]") or use the value of an uninitialised variable. This is perfectly adequate for finding this kind of error.
PHP is not a good teaching language, largely because its design encourages the use of global variables. It's nearly as bad as BASIC in that respect.
I'd say teach in a language designed for the purpose, or at least with the purpose in mind. Pascal, Smalltalk, Python or Java are all reasonable choices.
Indeed. As someone who's recently worked on a 3-tier application produced using PHP communicating with XML between the tiers and using a PHP-based templating engine to produce the pages at the web tier, I feel qualified to say that PHP certainly can be used for such applications.
Sure, we pushed the limit a little, running up against bugs in the database API extension (here's a suggestion: if you have a choice, don't use Informix for your PHP applications) and bizarre incompatibilities with existing applications (PHP doesn't integrate well; it likes everything to be done its way... for instance, it expects data in cookies to be URL encoded). But it worked, and didn't cost us too much time over another solution. It was probably faster and easier than doing the same thing using Java servlets, I reckon.
For a start, PHP functions seem to have no consistency at all. Sometimes you get verb/object, sometimes object/verb. Sometimes you get underscores, sometimes you don't. Consider.. is_object but isset. str_rot13 but strpos. php_uname but phpversion. There are hundreds of these. It's the reason I could never learn PHP, it's like learning Chinese, but I found Perl (and now Ruby) easy due to their relative consistency. Sometimes PHP uses "to", sometimes it uses "2".. huh what's that about?
Most of the functions in the PHP distribution are named after a function that does the same thing in the C library that PHP uses to implement the feature. PHP is designed so that if you're familiar with the C library that it is using, you can very easily get the hang of the PHP version.
This doesn't excuse some of the weirdnesses in the core library, though -- str_rot13 (and the other string functions with underscores in them) is clearly wrong, as the earliest string functions followed the standard C library naming conventions.
To address your other examples: isset() is an operator that looks syntactically like a function, and would have been named in this fashion to mirror the other such operators (sizeof(), unset()). is_object() et al are functions that were implemented independently of this, and at the time there was no conflict. I see no excuse for the php_uname/phpversion difference.
PHP has thousands of core functions.. nuts! And why does PHP have such a bizarre lack of abstraction? PHP often has about 10 functions compared to other languages' single function.. with each of the 10 doing a slightly different thing. When it comes to being overly wordy and inconsistent, I doubt anything can beat PHP, but, well, I'd like to see someone bring up a language that is!
I don't like to nitpick, but... those aren't all core functions. They're just functions that are distributed with the core, kind of like the applications that come with a Linux distribution. You can build a stripped down PHP without them, if you want.