I'm gonna have to call bullshit. I've used OSX and Linux, and both have warts. Anyone who says a computer "just works" is a person who's learned to work around the warts of their system without having to actually think about the workarounds as workarounds. A site called "MacFixIt" would not exist if OSX "just worked" as you say it does.
There's a difference between having warts and being the tree man.
Because we already have significant evidence that crabs can experience suffering: the fact that they act the way that we do when we're experiencing pain.
The point is that they don't.
Lobsters, for example, are either completely still when boiled, or thrash exactly in the same way as they would in cold water. That's what I meant by "behavior that is too alien for us to analyze on an intuitive level".
Exactly. Given that, it seems appropriate to assume that they are suffering until there is good scientific evidence to suggest otherwise.
Why? Should we apply the same standard to, say, vegetables? On a purely logical level, your suggestion doesn't make sense.
Your assumption that crabs can feel pain (as opposed to, say, vegetables or minerals) relies mostly on your rare ability to feel empathy towards arthropods.
With that said, I would still feel bad about torturing a crab, even though I know that it has more to do with me than with the crab's actual suffering.
The idea that animals "don't feel pain" sounds about as convincing as the idea that "slaves don't have souls/can't read/don't love their children/whatever". Totally self-serving.
The question wasn't "can animals feel pain?", but "can crabs, a relatively simple organism, feel pain?". It's not incredibly self-serving either. Most people agree that cows and chickens feel pain, and yet nobody cares.
Anyway, you can empathize with arthropods, congrats. You're certainly more compassionate than many people, myself included. But that compassion alone doesn't make you right
Crabs are certainly simple creatures, with simple nervous systems. Their behavior is too alien for us to analyze on an intuitive level. The question of whether they can feel pain is not a simple "man vs. animal" argument, but an actual biological mystery.
It's far easier for most people to be empathic about a furry warm blooded cow or cute little chick than a slimy fish blankly-staring fish or what is essentially a tasty ocean spider.
There will never be any protection for some animals equivalent to the cruelty laws for cats and dogs simply because most people draw a mental line between animals they like and don't. Reptiles, fish, and invertebrates will generally be on the "don't give a shit" side of that line regardless of what science has to say about whether they feel pain.
Seconded. I'd also add that when it comes to assessing the suffering of others, empathy is our main (if not only) tool. Scientific definitions of "feeling pain" mean jack shit in this case.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when some idiot says something about vegetables feeling pain. It's one of the most idiotic things you can say. There is no mechanism for it. No nerves, nor any nervous system (such as a brain) to interpret anything as "painful". It's not like they are there somewhere and we just haven't noticed them under the microscope. You can get metaphysical about it, but I'll just believe you are even more stupid.
Obviously there is an order to things. It's more cruel to rip the legs off your pet dog (or eat a dog... China...) than it is to rip the legs off of a spider. It's more cruel to kill a cow than it is to kill a chicken. When you get down to things like ants, it's hard to view it as cruel. When you get up to things like octopuses, elephants, dolphins, cats, dogs, primates, or even ravens which all show complex thought... it's hard not to call it cruel. The question is where do you personally draw the line...? What level of cruelty are you comfortable with? Do you draw the line at insects, or do you draw the line at pigs?
In general, you may disagree that meat is murder... but it's hard to disagree that meat is animal cruelty. You either support that or you don't. How much do you need to eat a burger, anyway? Is your meal so important that it supercedes an animal's right to life? Who are *you* anyway? To me, it's arrogance and ego as well as a lack of empathy, thought, and logic.
But don't go around trying to claim plants feel pain. It's unscientific. It's stupid.
It's all up to your ability to empathize with what you're harming. That's the reason why, in your opinion, killing cows is worse than killing chickens, which is worse than killing ants.
If somebody can honestly feel empathy towards vegetables, I guess he can claim that vegetables feel pain. But it's fucking weird, and it probably doesn't apply to most people who use that argument.
If we're discussing the ethics of inflicting pain, I think it would actually be on yourself to prove that concious thought makes pain worse, rather than others to prove that crabs have concious thought.
I think what is being argued is that crabs "feel" pain like my thermostat "feels" temperature. They both react to their environments and respond to external stimuli. But, without a consciousness to experience that pain or change in temperature, it is unwarranted to assume a crab "feels" anything at all.
I think you've (or, rather, the OP) wandered into a difficult philosophical territory. How do you know that more complex animals can "really" feel pain? Do you have to prove their "consciousness"? How?
Hell, how do you know if other people can feel pain? Unless you make some unprovable assumptions, there's no way to know that other people have "experiences" in the same way you perceive them.
I think that we can only judge on this subject with a very subjective tool: our capacity for empathy. We can make up criteria, and use objective tools to test those, but in the end, it's up to emotion.
Acting 'as if its in terrible pain' is not the same thing as being in terrible pain.
I'll have to remember that if I ever come across you acting as if you're in terrible pain.
Bah, lame demagoguery.
If you see the vux984 acting as if s/he's in terrible pain, you'll act because:
S/He's a human being, and we know that humans can feel pain
S/He's presumably a normal human being, that acts in a predictable way. Insane people, for example, often act as if they're in horrible pain, and yet, they're not.
Of course, these are not the only criteria: maybe vux984 is an actor, and playing a character that's in horrible pain? Maybe you just misinterpreted the signs (screaming could also indicate rage, etc)?
Troll some more... Linus wrote the kernel with the GNU tools and licensed it under the GNU GPL. No GNU, No Linux
If he compiled it with Borland's C compiler (running on MS-DOS 5), and released it under Borland's EULA, he should have called it "Borland/Linux"? Or maybe Microsoft/Borland/Linux?
No software on Earth uses that naming scheme. "Stallmanix" or not, GNU/Linux is all about RMS's pathetic megalomania.
I saw a version of that on _Veronica Mars_. But it only worked because the guards were a bunch of sadists to begin with and needed only permission to act on their whims.
Cool. But in the actual experiment, subjects weren't told if they were going to be guards or prisoners. Even if you assume selection bias, it's a bias towards sadomasochism at most. No pure sadist, or aggressive narcissist (e.g. a high-school bully) would sign up to be humiliated and tortured as a prisoner.
You want to know the reason nobody trusts those with power, and why power seemingly corrupts? Easy. Power doesn't corrupt, the corrupt seek power, and society hands that power to those who brag the best (ie: are the least stable).
I think both are true. There was an experiment where they randomly divided the test subjects into "prisoners" and "guards", and those who became "guards" quickly started acting in a sadistic manner towards the "prisoners".
Themes and modules don't magically appear from the void
Uhm... Hottie Parms wrote:
Unless you want to stick to the default Drupal (or insert CMS here) themes, you'll probably want to design your own CMS template so people get a unique feel for your website. You'll still need to fall back on your classic static web-design skills using programs like Dreamweaver (or notepad).
Btw, if you're talking about modules, Dreamweaver is a shitty PHP IDE. Use phpDesigner, use the free Eclipse plugin, whatever. For pure PHP, Dreamweaver is just a half-decent text editor.
There are a zillion "brochure" web sites out there, and not one of those web sites requires knowledge of CSS/HTML, OOP, MVC, DB, or design patterns.
Unless you're making table-based designs or flash brochures (bleh), knowing CSS is essential for making any real brochure site. There's simply no tool (including Dreamweaver) for creating non-trivial CSS-based designs without actually knowing some CSS and HTML.
As for OOP, MVC, design patterns, etc, etc - I agree with you, that's complete bullshit.
I have to admit that ironically, I *have* been using vim for my HTML and CSS design and have recently been considering using a higher-level tool (specifically, Dreamweaver(!)) at least for the layout.
I'll tell you from my experience as a Dreamweaver user - Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG mode is certainly better than Frontpage's, or any other antiquated "WYSIWYG" HTML editor, but it's not that great. The HTML it produces is OK, but it still inserts random shit, so you have to clean it up a bit.
As for CSS... unless you're really into absolute-positioned elements, it doesn't really help in that regard. I mean, it has a CSS dialog, and a CSS-tree view... but it's not really better than good 'ole text-editor + Firebug.
And while what you say is true, and I'd be happier using high-level tools to complement vim, I get the impression that Dreamweaver isn't that tool and that it's based around yesterday's web architecture.
Nah, it's a very nice HTML/CSS IDE, really. As long as you stay clear from its WYSIWYG mode, it's pretty handy. But if you ask me, unless you're getting it for free with one of Adobe's suites, it's not worth the money.
The purpose of tools is to allow the user to concentrate on the higher level tasks and not have to recreate the wheel every single time. If you think web developers should code HTML by hand, you think the web server should be written in assembler?
Come on, KevinIsOwn's comment is arrogant and stupid (for example, he seems to think that Dreamweaver is only a WYSIWYG HTML editor), but HTML is not that hard. I've taught graphic design students how to write passable HTML in one semester. And that's including technophobic middle-aged women who didn't know how to email me the final HTML project.
And how much slower is it to write <em> instead of clicking on the little "i" button, especially if have decent wpm?
3) Which ties into my last point, your ignorance of high level tools, in this case at least. Dreamweaver has long produced decent quality HTML. It's not Frontpage. The code it outputs does not include unnecessary markup, is concise and simple. I would trust Dreamweaver more to produce decent code, than I would some average code monkey (especially one who uses a plain text editor). At least I know the code is going to be consistant and maintainable.
I've used Dreamweaver, up to CS3, and that was not my experience. The HTML is not insanely bad, like Frontpage's, but it's not incredibly reliable or consistent. When my students use Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG mode, it's incredibly easy to spot (if only because it's littered with.style1,.style2 etc), and they're writing really trivial pages.
Also, as I've said in another comment - if you were using any version before CS4, you simply couldn't expect the "WYSIWYG editor" version to look anything like the final result. It choked on anything but trivial CSS. Honestly, it made IE6 look good in comparison. So, at least for me, it was completely useless in that regard.
Now, I haven't tried CS4 yet, and it might produce perfect HTML, and its rendering engine is certainly much better, but even so... who cares? HTML is not what takes most of the time anyway. In any modern CSS-based design, CSS is >90% of the work, and Dreamweaver doesn't have a real time-saving solution for it.
If you're using vim and writing html by hand, then as a web developer you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what tools you could use that up your productivity a great deal.
Well... I use Dreamweaver myself, but I think you're exaggerating a bit. Dreamweaver is a nice HTML IDE. I like the way it auto-closes the tags, and the CSS code completion is also handy. But I sometimes don't feel like waiting for it to load, and just use Notepad++. To be honest, I don't feel like I'm missing a lot.
I really hope though that you aren't suggesting that anyone who doesn't use its WYSIWYG mode is a dinosaur. Before CS4 it had an incredibly shitty, non-standard-compliant rendering engine that was completely useless for anything but the simplest of sites. Anyone who was only using the WYSIWYG mode before CS4 was either a complete newbie or an idiot savant.
But even now... I haven't tried CS4, but in my experience, WYSIWYG HTML editors tend to produce really bad HTML. Bad HTML is really annoying - it's hard to CSS correctly, it's hard to make it into template (if you're working like me - making a dummy page and then replacing the dynamic parts with the real thing). And as for their CSS editing features... to be honest, it's much faster for me to write the code by hand.
And btw, I'm not saying all of this because I'm such a hardcore geek. I'm not even a real programmer. My degree is in graphic design, and I still consider myself mainly a designer.
Thing is, there are a lot of circumstances where "Web 2.0", in the limited sense the author seems to understand (that is, end-users providing added content), doesn't do much for you.
Actually, the author seems to think that very idea of creating pages dynamically is a Web 2.0 concept:
In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today's sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.
Somebody should tell him that all of today's sites are already dynamically-generated, and that CGI is a Web 1.0 concept.
I've seen some of the HTML these tools (Frontweaver, Dreampage, HotMetal, etc) produce, and I Do Not Want It.
Nobody's forcing you to use their WYSIWYG view - if I see any WYSIWYG HTML editor, I know that it's going to produce spaghetti HTML.
However, Dreamweaver is also a very nice HTML/CSS IDE, with code-completion, one-button validation/cross-browser issue reporting, etc etc.
Now, you might ask, why do you need a $400 HTML IDE, when there are many available for free? Well, the simple answer is if you want Photshop, Illustrator and Flash, you have to buy an Adobe suite, and it comes bundled with Dreamweaver.
In terms of keeping all the pages on a site updated with side-wide changes, I mostly use a combination of keyboard macros, custom elisp, Perl, regular expressions, chewing gum, and bailing wire. But it works, and it works the way I *want* it to work.
It's only human (or rather, Geek), to try and build everything on your own. And I agree, web sites are not inherently a complex task. But it's a boring, repetitive task, with lots of security/performance gotchas.
If you make a lot of web sites (even >1 per year), you should really try Drupal. It saves lots of time, and it's really extensible/customizable - it's kinda like the Emacs of the CMS world.
As far as Drupal, though, I thought that was a CMS. Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor? Ugh.
Of course not. It's not "Ugh", it's just impossible. Drupal doesn't come with any WYSIWYG HTML editors.
The point of the article is that since pages are generated using server side technologies (which is, they claim, a revolutionary Web 2.0 idea), you don't need to write your own HTML evar again!!!11one
Usually, I would've said RTFA, but in this case, the FA is clueless horseshit with a trollish title.
First of all, you have a point, at least in #2 (to #1 one could say "so when you declare an array variable it's equivalent to pointer+malloc" etc etc).
But you also agree that:
It doesn't have arrays in the sense that you can assign arrays or pass them, rather than pointers to them, or pointers to non-array elements of them, to functions, or return them from functions.
That is, in some pedantic sense, it doesn't have "real arrays", and that's basically my point (actually my point was the RetroGeek's post was pointless pedantry, but you get what I mean).
All implementations of C use or used null-terminated strings, as that's part of the language; it's not a characteristic of the implementation.
I only said "modern C implementation" to give RetroGeek some slack - maybe he knows some obscure early implementation that uses 7 instead of 0 to terminate strings? Then he might have had some point.
Yes, it does have real arrays. In expressions, "array-valued" expressions are converted to "pointer-valued" expressions that point to the first element of the array
So, basically, it only has arrays in the sense the standard calls them "arrays", even though it also admits that they're actually pointers. Great.
Obviously, C has arrays. And it also has null-terminated strings. But RetroGeek said that C's null-terminated strings are actually not "strings" because they're array of chars, and they aren't "null-terminated" because they could have chosen any character instead of NULL, and in that sense, C's arrays aren't "real arrays" either.
Something that's not just syntax sugar for pointer arithmetic.
I'm not even talking about bounds checking or anything fancy like that. I'm talking about stuff like 1[array] being synonymous with array[1], because 1+array == array + 1.
Slashdot Mirror
Comic Sans itself isn't a bad font. It is easily readable, and more than anything else, that is the best measure of a font
There are many readable (more readable, in fact) fonts that aren't as ugly
Just because it is so popular people hate it
Where are the Times New Roman haters?
On the contrary, it means it fits the needs of many people.
Actually I agree. It's the only informal font that comes with Windows. But, dear God, there are so many good, free fonts on the Internet...
I'm gonna have to call bullshit. I've used OSX and Linux, and both have warts. Anyone who says a computer "just works" is a person who's learned to work around the warts of their system without having to actually think about the workarounds as workarounds. A site called "MacFixIt" would not exist if OSX "just worked" as you say it does.
There's a difference between having warts and being the tree man.
Requiring users to read the README file is not acceptable.
Then don't accept it! Demand your money back!
Or, more likely, conclude that "you get what you pay for" and move to non-free applications and OS.
I think that most people finally learned to type and find it easier than trying to remember obscure pictographs.
So secretaries should have become the staunchest supporters of CLIs, right?
Btw, "obscure pictographs"? As opposed to self-explanatory commands such as "ls -la |grep -v '^d' "?
Because we already have significant evidence that crabs can experience suffering: the fact that they act the way that we do when we're experiencing pain.
The point is that they don't.
Lobsters, for example, are either completely still when boiled, or thrash exactly in the same way as they would in cold water. That's what I meant by "behavior that is too alien for us to analyze on an intuitive level".
Exactly. Given that, it seems appropriate to assume that they are suffering until there is good scientific evidence to suggest otherwise.
Why? Should we apply the same standard to, say, vegetables? On a purely logical level, your suggestion doesn't make sense.
Your assumption that crabs can feel pain (as opposed to, say, vegetables or minerals) relies mostly on your rare ability to feel empathy towards arthropods.
With that said, I would still feel bad about torturing a crab, even though I know that it has more to do with me than with the crab's actual suffering.
The idea that animals "don't feel pain" sounds about as convincing as the idea that "slaves don't have souls/can't read/don't love their children/whatever". Totally self-serving.
The question wasn't "can animals feel pain?", but "can crabs, a relatively simple organism, feel pain?". It's not incredibly self-serving either. Most people agree that cows and chickens feel pain, and yet nobody cares.
Anyway, you can empathize with arthropods, congrats. You're certainly more compassionate than many people, myself included. But that compassion alone doesn't make you right
Crabs are certainly simple creatures, with simple nervous systems. Their behavior is too alien for us to analyze on an intuitive level. The question of whether they can feel pain is not a simple "man vs. animal" argument, but an actual biological mystery.
It's far easier for most people to be empathic about a furry warm blooded cow or cute little chick than a slimy fish blankly-staring fish or what is essentially a tasty ocean spider.
There will never be any protection for some animals equivalent to the cruelty laws for cats and dogs simply because most people draw a mental line between animals they like and don't. Reptiles, fish, and invertebrates will generally be on the "don't give a shit" side of that line regardless of what science has to say about whether they feel pain.
Seconded. I'd also add that when it comes to assessing the suffering of others, empathy is our main (if not only) tool. Scientific definitions of "feeling pain" mean jack shit in this case.
A huge pet peeve of mine is when some idiot says something about vegetables feeling pain. It's one of the most idiotic things you can say. There is no mechanism for it. No nerves, nor any nervous system (such as a brain) to interpret anything as "painful". It's not like they are there somewhere and we just haven't noticed them under the microscope. You can get metaphysical about it, but I'll just believe you are even more stupid.
Obviously there is an order to things. It's more cruel to rip the legs off your pet dog (or eat a dog... China...) than it is to rip the legs off of a spider. It's more cruel to kill a cow than it is to kill a chicken. When you get down to things like ants, it's hard to view it as cruel. When you get up to things like octopuses, elephants, dolphins, cats, dogs, primates, or even ravens which all show complex thought... it's hard not to call it cruel. The question is where do you personally draw the line...? What level of cruelty are you comfortable with? Do you draw the line at insects, or do you draw the line at pigs?
In general, you may disagree that meat is murder... but it's hard to disagree that meat is animal cruelty. You either support that or you don't. How much do you need to eat a burger, anyway? Is your meal so important that it supercedes an animal's right to life? Who are *you* anyway? To me, it's arrogance and ego as well as a lack of empathy, thought, and logic.
But don't go around trying to claim plants feel pain. It's unscientific. It's stupid.
It's all up to your ability to empathize with what you're harming. That's the reason why, in your opinion, killing cows is worse than killing chickens, which is worse than killing ants.
If somebody can honestly feel empathy towards vegetables, I guess he can claim that vegetables feel pain. But it's fucking weird, and it probably doesn't apply to most people who use that argument.
If we're discussing the ethics of inflicting pain, I think it would actually be on yourself to prove that concious thought makes pain worse, rather than others to prove that crabs have concious thought.
I think what is being argued is that crabs "feel" pain like my thermostat "feels" temperature. They both react to their environments and respond to external stimuli. But, without a consciousness to experience that pain or change in temperature, it is unwarranted to assume a crab "feels" anything at all.
I think you've (or, rather, the OP) wandered into a difficult philosophical territory. How do you know that more complex animals can "really" feel pain? Do you have to prove their "consciousness"? How?
Hell, how do you know if other people can feel pain? Unless you make some unprovable assumptions, there's no way to know that other people have "experiences" in the same way you perceive them.
I think that we can only judge on this subject with a very subjective tool: our capacity for empathy. We can make up criteria, and use objective tools to test those, but in the end, it's up to emotion.
Acting 'as if its in terrible pain' is not the same thing as being in terrible pain.
I'll have to remember that if I ever come across you acting as if you're in terrible pain.
Bah, lame demagoguery.
If you see the vux984 acting as if s/he's in terrible pain, you'll act because:
Of course, these are not the only criteria: maybe vux984 is an actor, and playing a character that's in horrible pain? Maybe you just misinterpreted the signs (screaming could also indicate rage, etc)?
Troll some more... Linus wrote the kernel with the GNU tools and licensed it under the GNU GPL. No GNU, No Linux
If he compiled it with Borland's C compiler (running on MS-DOS 5), and released it under Borland's EULA, he should have called it "Borland/Linux"? Or maybe Microsoft/Borland/Linux?
No software on Earth uses that naming scheme. "Stallmanix" or not, GNU/Linux is all about RMS's pathetic megalomania.
I saw a version of that on _Veronica Mars_. But it only worked because the guards were a bunch of sadists to begin with and needed only permission to act on their whims.
Cool. But in the actual experiment, subjects weren't told if they were going to be guards or prisoners. Even if you assume selection bias, it's a bias towards sadomasochism at most. No pure sadist, or aggressive narcissist (e.g. a high-school bully) would sign up to be humiliated and tortured as a prisoner.
You want to know the reason nobody trusts those with power, and why power seemingly corrupts? Easy. Power doesn't corrupt, the corrupt seek power, and society hands that power to those who brag the best (ie: are the least stable).
I think both are true. There was an experiment where they randomly divided the test subjects into "prisoners" and "guards", and those who became "guards" quickly started acting in a sadistic manner towards the "prisoners".
Themes and modules don't magically appear from the void
Uhm... Hottie Parms wrote:
Unless you want to stick to the default Drupal (or insert CMS here) themes, you'll probably want to design your own CMS template so people get a unique feel for your website. You'll still need to fall back on your classic static web-design skills using programs like Dreamweaver (or notepad).
Btw, if you're talking about modules, Dreamweaver is a shitty PHP IDE. Use phpDesigner, use the free Eclipse plugin, whatever. For pure PHP, Dreamweaver is just a half-decent text editor.
There are a zillion "brochure" web sites out there, and not one of those web sites requires knowledge of CSS/HTML, OOP, MVC, DB, or design patterns.
Unless you're making table-based designs or flash brochures (bleh), knowing CSS is essential for making any real brochure site. There's simply no tool (including Dreamweaver) for creating non-trivial CSS-based designs without actually knowing some CSS and HTML.
As for OOP, MVC, design patterns, etc, etc - I agree with you, that's complete bullshit.
I have to admit that ironically, I *have* been using vim for my HTML and CSS design and have recently been considering using a higher-level tool (specifically, Dreamweaver(!)) at least for the layout.
I'll tell you from my experience as a Dreamweaver user - Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG mode is certainly better than Frontpage's, or any other antiquated "WYSIWYG" HTML editor, but it's not that great. The HTML it produces is OK, but it still inserts random shit, so you have to clean it up a bit.
As for CSS... unless you're really into absolute-positioned elements, it doesn't really help in that regard. I mean, it has a CSS dialog, and a CSS-tree view... but it's not really better than good 'ole text-editor + Firebug.
And while what you say is true, and I'd be happier using high-level tools to complement vim, I get the impression that Dreamweaver isn't that tool and that it's based around yesterday's web architecture.
Nah, it's a very nice HTML/CSS IDE, really. As long as you stay clear from its WYSIWYG mode, it's pretty handy. But if you ask me, unless you're getting it for free with one of Adobe's suites, it's not worth the money.
The purpose of tools is to allow the user to concentrate on the higher level tasks and not have to recreate the wheel every single time. If you think web developers should code HTML by hand, you think the web server should be written in assembler?
Come on, KevinIsOwn's comment is arrogant and stupid (for example, he seems to think that Dreamweaver is only a WYSIWYG HTML editor), but HTML is not that hard. I've taught graphic design students how to write passable HTML in one semester. And that's including technophobic middle-aged women who didn't know how to email me the final HTML project.
And how much slower is it to write <em> instead of clicking on the little "i" button, especially if have decent wpm?
3) Which ties into my last point, your ignorance of high level tools, in this case at least. Dreamweaver has long produced decent quality HTML. It's not Frontpage. The code it outputs does not include unnecessary markup, is concise and simple. I would trust Dreamweaver more to produce decent code, than I would some average code monkey (especially one who uses a plain text editor). At least I know the code is going to be consistant and maintainable.
I've used Dreamweaver, up to CS3, and that was not my experience. The HTML is not insanely bad, like Frontpage's, but it's not incredibly reliable or consistent. When my students use Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG mode, it's incredibly easy to spot (if only because it's littered with .style1, .style2 etc), and they're writing really trivial pages.
Also, as I've said in another comment - if you were using any version before CS4, you simply couldn't expect the "WYSIWYG editor" version to look anything like the final result. It choked on anything but trivial CSS. Honestly, it made IE6 look good in comparison. So, at least for me, it was completely useless in that regard.
Now, I haven't tried CS4 yet, and it might produce perfect HTML, and its rendering engine is certainly much better, but even so... who cares? HTML is not what takes most of the time anyway. In any modern CSS-based design, CSS is >90% of the work, and Dreamweaver doesn't have a real time-saving solution for it.
If you're using vim and writing html by hand, then as a web developer you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what tools you could use that up your productivity a great deal.
Well... I use Dreamweaver myself, but I think you're exaggerating a bit. Dreamweaver is a nice HTML IDE. I like the way it auto-closes the tags, and the CSS code completion is also handy. But I sometimes don't feel like waiting for it to load, and just use Notepad++. To be honest, I don't feel like I'm missing a lot.
I really hope though that you aren't suggesting that anyone who doesn't use its WYSIWYG mode is a dinosaur. Before CS4 it had an incredibly shitty, non-standard-compliant rendering engine that was completely useless for anything but the simplest of sites. Anyone who was only using the WYSIWYG mode before CS4 was either a complete newbie or an idiot savant.
But even now... I haven't tried CS4, but in my experience, WYSIWYG HTML editors tend to produce really bad HTML. Bad HTML is really annoying - it's hard to CSS correctly, it's hard to make it into template (if you're working like me - making a dummy page and then replacing the dynamic parts with the real thing). And as for their CSS editing features... to be honest, it's much faster for me to write the code by hand.
And btw, I'm not saying all of this because I'm such a hardcore geek. I'm not even a real programmer. My degree is in graphic design, and I still consider myself mainly a designer.
Thing is, there are a lot of circumstances where "Web 2.0", in the limited sense the author seems to understand (that is, end-users providing added content), doesn't do much for you.
Actually, the author seems to think that very idea of creating pages dynamically is a Web 2.0 concept:
In the relatively near future every website will be a dynamically-generated web application and all of today's sites built on multiple static pages will be ripped out and replaced.
Somebody should tell him that all of today's sites are already dynamically-generated, and that CGI is a Web 1.0 concept.
I've seen some of the HTML these tools (Frontweaver, Dreampage, HotMetal, etc) produce, and I Do Not Want It.
Nobody's forcing you to use their WYSIWYG view - if I see any WYSIWYG HTML editor, I know that it's going to produce spaghetti HTML.
However, Dreamweaver is also a very nice HTML/CSS IDE, with code-completion, one-button validation/cross-browser issue reporting, etc etc.
Now, you might ask, why do you need a $400 HTML IDE, when there are many available for free? Well, the simple answer is if you want Photshop, Illustrator and Flash, you have to buy an Adobe suite, and it comes bundled with Dreamweaver.
In terms of keeping all the pages on a site updated with side-wide changes, I mostly use a combination of keyboard macros, custom elisp, Perl, regular expressions, chewing gum, and bailing wire. But it works, and it works the way I *want* it to work.
It's only human (or rather, Geek), to try and build everything on your own. And I agree, web sites are not inherently a complex task. But it's a boring, repetitive task, with lots of security/performance gotchas.
If you make a lot of web sites (even >1 per year), you should really try Drupal. It saves lots of time, and it's really extensible/customizable - it's kinda like the Emacs of the CMS world.
As far as Drupal, though, I thought that was a CMS. Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor? Ugh.
Of course not. It's not "Ugh", it's just impossible. Drupal doesn't come with any WYSIWYG HTML editors.
The point of the article is that since pages are generated using server side technologies (which is, they claim, a revolutionary Web 2.0 idea), you don't need to write your own HTML evar again!!!11one
Usually, I would've said RTFA, but in this case, the FA is clueless horseshit with a trollish title.
First of all, you have a point, at least in #2 (to #1 one could say "so when you declare an array variable it's equivalent to pointer+malloc" etc etc).
But you also agree that:
It doesn't have arrays in the sense that you can assign arrays or pass them, rather than pointers to them, or pointers to non-array elements of them, to functions, or return them from functions.
That is, in some pedantic sense, it doesn't have "real arrays", and that's basically my point (actually my point was the RetroGeek's post was pointless pedantry, but you get what I mean).
Pointer addition, yes.
array[index] is just syntax sugar for *(array + index). And since array + index == index + array, index[array] works just like array[index].
All implementations of C use or used null-terminated strings, as that's part of the language; it's not a characteristic of the implementation.
I only said "modern C implementation" to give RetroGeek some slack - maybe he knows some obscure early implementation that uses 7 instead of 0 to terminate strings? Then he might have had some point.
Yes, it does have real arrays. In expressions, "array-valued" expressions are converted to "pointer-valued" expressions that point to the first element of the array
So, basically, it only has arrays in the sense the standard calls them "arrays", even though it also admits that they're actually pointers. Great.
Obviously, C has arrays. And it also has null-terminated strings. But RetroGeek said that C's null-terminated strings are actually not "strings" because they're array of chars, and they aren't "null-terminated" because they could have chosen any character instead of NULL, and in that sense, C's arrays aren't "real arrays" either.
Something that's not just syntax sugar for pointer arithmetic.
I'm not even talking about bounds checking or anything fancy like that. I'm talking about stuff like 1[array] being synonymous with array[1], because 1+array == array + 1.