Wow, you're right. With the Linux HP tablet market being about the same size as the Windows desktop + laptop market I'm surprised it didn't get more press.
Just like PHP 4 was supported for a very long time with security updates, so will PHP 5. Your clients won't be obligated to upgrade for many years.
One major issue with PHP is old cruft, such as magic quotes, that were terrible feature additions in the first place. These are so bad it's really in everyone's best interest to remove them. I think features like POSIX regex, however, should remain because they don't do any harm.
Especially since most of the "new" features are either already available or will be included in v5.3. There's literally nothing new here except better Unicode support.
I thought this was/., not Wikipedia. As someone who worked in the IT department of a large financial company founded in the 60's, I can tell you it's true, at least at one company. At one point I was responsible for reporting out of a "data warehouse", whose data was fed from very old mainframes. All of your credit/debit card transactions eventually go through a mainframe still running their original code. Even the person responsible for the mainframes at the company I worked at never changed a line of code because it just worked and it was too risky to break it.
Back when Microsoft was publicly beta testing.NET they claimed that it was the future of application development on Windows. They claimed that all of their applications would be rewritten in.NET. Yet as years went by and new versions of their apps were released, none were rewritten. Miguel de Icaza, one of.NET's big advocates, wrote, "Frankly, I'm as confused as you probably are." Even Microsoft's own hosting service, bCentral, didn't offer.NET.
I don't know how many 3rd party developers they lost with.NET, other than myself, but they certainly didn't market it well. I think they're making the exact same mistake now. We'll have to wait another couple of years to see.
Jules: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa... stop right there. Javascript and Java ain't even the same fsckin' thing. Vincent: It's not. It's the same ballpark. Jules: Ain't no fsckin' ballpark neither. Now look, maybe your method of programming differs from mine, but, you know, writing a web page, and coding for the JVM, ain't the same fsckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fsckin' sport. Look, Javascript don't mean shit.
Flash itself uses a dialect of ECMAScript (the common parent language of Javascript and ActionScript). So your assertion that Javascript engines were not written to do this is flat out wrong. A language and it's implementation are two different things. Just because a language has a feature doesn't mean an engine is written well to use it.
Ballmer took over after (or around) the US DOJ ruling on MSFT. Under Ballmer, MS has been functioning under very heavy regulatory oversight, running scared from lawsuits (alcatel-lucent, the big antivirus vendors, adobe, google, just about everyone has sued or threatened to sue), been treated like an ATM machine by the EU, and much more. I watched Microsoft pretty closely for 10 years and I have to disagree with all of these points.
- Very heavy regulatory oversight? If you mean the SEC, true. If you mean the court ordered oversight committee in the US, wrong. Many complaints have been filed with the committee and they've done almost nothing. They take each complaint, go to Microsoft with it, and come back with a response that Microsoft's not doing anything wrong. FTC oversight? Nil. DOJ oversight? Nil since Bush removed all of the experienced anti-trust lawyers from the case.
- Running scared from lawsuits? They simply pay off most of them before they go to trial. There was a two year span when they paid off around 100 lawsuits to finally be done with them. All of the lawsuits together have added up to a very tiny drop in Microsoft's financial bucket. They aren't even close to running scared because it's cost them almost nothing.
- Treated like an ATM machine by the EU? The EU fined them for breaking the law. Even if you disagree with the result it still puts no burden on Microsoft. It cost them less than one month's profit.
- Much more? What other atrocities has Microsoft endured because of Ballmer's great leadership? I can't think of any.
On narrow tables they don't make a difference. But on wide tables they're almost a necessity. Without any table cell borders, like a spreadsheet, or striping, the eye easily wanders up or down into another row when reading across. I can say anecdotally that I'm far more accurate and faster when reading a table with stripes.
Either way, they certainly can't hurt, especially if they're a pale color. So why are we even having this discussion?
Your theories might be nice for hobbyists, but serious big businesses buy professional commercial tools. Back when I was a developer on Windows the MSDN license my company had was over $5,000 per seat per year. That sounds like a bargain to you when you only need 1 or 2 things out of it per year (besides the locally installable documentation, which should be free anyway)? Big business mostly buys Visual Studio.NET for its developers, which comes in various expensive flavors to get the even the most basic features. Then there's training for the constantly changing APIs, which easily costs businesses > $1000 per person per year.
Expensive commercial options are often not the best choice. But big business typically assumes the best choice for Windows development is Microsoft tools, which logically should be the case.
Iran's "whack-job" President isn't in charge of his country's army or nuclear weapons, so I feel the same.
According to the Iranian Constitution, adopted in 1979 and amended in 1989, the president nomimates members of the Cabinet or Council of Minister, ambassadors, and governors of the provinces, but the Supreme Guide holds control over foreign policy, the armed forces, nuclear policy, and the main economic policies of the Iranian state. Ayatollah Khamenei took office as Supreme Guide on 4 June 1989.
My coworkers and I spend all day in Safari and Firefox and I've never seen anything like that. You have to be visiting some seriously shady web sites. Even with over a dozen tabs open I can't get Safari to use much more than 100MB of physical ram. And I have one site with pages over 600K, open in multiple tabs, and still never use much ram.
The only issue I've ever seen is too many flash animations running simultaneously. But that only drained CPU, not RAM, and is very rarely a problem since flash's CPU usage drops when it's offscreen. Adobe doesn't feel like improving flash performance on the Mac.
A text editor, web browsers, Parallels with XP for IE testing, Photoshop or other image editors, apache/mysql/php/python/perl running locally, OpenOffice, OmniGraffle, and a few other apps. Professional web developers don't "only need a notepad and web browser."
In our case Macs are very much the right tool for the job. Those in the company who used linux desktops and laptops spent far more time dealing with application and configuration issues. They've all switched and they're far more productive and complain a lot less.
If Ubuntu is a better choice for you then it's obviously a better tool for your job. In our case we run into few situations where Macs are a problem. Obviously YMMV.
You are completely full of it. My entire office is full of web developers working full time on Macs. We use Safari, Firefox, and Flash all day and never run into such issues. Even our Mac Minis with just 512MB ram get along just fine. My 3 year old PowerBook also never has a problem.
20 to 30 years ago there were a lot less options. And all were expensive. Today price differences are huge and there's a little more diversity. But your point is still taken.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is Microsoft software's entrenchment. It's partly that the customers are hooked on it (the devil you know?), but it's also the expected difficulties in switching. It's becoming a lot less of a problem these days, but it's still a major concern. So while they may consider open source to be superior, they still may not be switching any time too soon.
I recently did a performance analysis of a complex site I've worked on for over a year. My primary tool was Firebug. While the size of the HTML + CSS + JS per page is pretty large, it turns out compressing them and setting header cache only saw a small performance improvement. The execution of JS like Scriptaculous actually accounts for more than 50% of the time it takes to render the pages. Since we only use Scriptaculous for drag-and-drop we're considering alternatives, like mootools or custom code. Loading as much JS as possible from the bottom of the page instead of the head can help, but isn't always an option. Focusing on CSS and JS performance has now made a huge improvement in perceived site performance.
During the initial development we never considered that simply loading one JS library (even when it's not used for inserting HTML) could slow down page rendering that much. On JS or CSS heavy sites, client-side loading, rendering, and runtime execution can easily account for 50% to 90% of the time it takes to see a final page. So while I've usually focused entirely on server side performance, I now know to pay more attention to the speed of client side rendering. Lesson learned.
These edits were most likely done by one person acting independently. The federal government has more than 1.8 million civilian employees, so you can imagine a few may do questionable things on their own. This one act doesn't prove "the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history." Have a drink and relax.
It's not so bad that they ask. What's worse is our representatives usually give them what they want. Or when they take what they want illegally our representatives don't do anything about it. I blame Congress as much as anyone for our constitutional crisis.
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Wow, you're right. With the Linux HP tablet market being about the same size as the Windows desktop + laptop market I'm surprised it didn't get more press.
Just like PHP 4 was supported for a very long time with security updates, so will PHP 5. Your clients won't be obligated to upgrade for many years.
One major issue with PHP is old cruft, such as magic quotes, that were terrible feature additions in the first place. These are so bad it's really in everyone's best interest to remove them. I think features like POSIX regex, however, should remain because they don't do any harm.
XML is also designed for small amounts of hierarchical data, e.g. OpenOffice documents.
On /. Netcraft can only be used to confirm that things are dead, not alive.
Especially since most of the "new" features are either already available or will be included in v5.3. There's literally nothing new here except better Unicode support.
I thought this was /., not Wikipedia. As someone who worked in the IT department of a large financial company founded in the 60's, I can tell you it's true, at least at one company. At one point I was responsible for reporting out of a "data warehouse", whose data was fed from very old mainframes. All of your credit/debit card transactions eventually go through a mainframe still running their original code. Even the person responsible for the mainframes at the company I worked at never changed a line of code because it just worked and it was too risky to break it.
Back when Microsoft was publicly beta testing .NET they claimed that it was the future of application development on Windows. They claimed that all of their applications would be rewritten in .NET. Yet as years went by and new versions of their apps were released, none were rewritten. Miguel de Icaza, one of .NET's big advocates, wrote, "Frankly, I'm as confused as you probably are." Even Microsoft's own hosting service, bCentral, didn't offer .NET.
.NET, other than myself, but they certainly didn't market it well. I think they're making the exact same mistake now. We'll have to wait another couple of years to see.
I don't know how many 3rd party developers they lost with
Jules: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa... stop right there. Javascript and Java ain't even the same fsckin' thing.
Vincent: It's not. It's the same ballpark.
Jules: Ain't no fsckin' ballpark neither. Now look, maybe your method of programming differs from mine, but, you know, writing a web page, and coding for the JVM, ain't the same fsckin' ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same fsckin' sport. Look, Javascript don't mean shit.
- Very heavy regulatory oversight? If you mean the SEC, true. If you mean the court ordered oversight committee in the US, wrong. Many complaints have been filed with the committee and they've done almost nothing. They take each complaint, go to Microsoft with it, and come back with a response that Microsoft's not doing anything wrong. FTC oversight? Nil. DOJ oversight? Nil since Bush removed all of the experienced anti-trust lawyers from the case.
- Running scared from lawsuits? They simply pay off most of them before they go to trial. There was a two year span when they paid off around 100 lawsuits to finally be done with them. All of the lawsuits together have added up to a very tiny drop in Microsoft's financial bucket. They aren't even close to running scared because it's cost them almost nothing.
- Treated like an ATM machine by the EU? The EU fined them for breaking the law. Even if you disagree with the result it still puts no burden on Microsoft. It cost them less than one month's profit.
- Much more? What other atrocities has Microsoft endured because of Ballmer's great leadership? I can't think of any.
On narrow tables they don't make a difference. But on wide tables they're almost a necessity. Without any table cell borders, like a spreadsheet, or striping, the eye easily wanders up or down into another row when reading across. I can say anecdotally that I'm far more accurate and faster when reading a table with stripes.
Either way, they certainly can't hurt, especially if they're a pale color. So why are we even having this discussion?
Your theories might be nice for hobbyists, but serious big businesses buy professional commercial tools. Back when I was a developer on Windows the MSDN license my company had was over $5,000 per seat per year. That sounds like a bargain to you when you only need 1 or 2 things out of it per year (besides the locally installable documentation, which should be free anyway)? Big business mostly buys Visual Studio.NET for its developers, which comes in various expensive flavors to get the even the most basic features. Then there's training for the constantly changing APIs, which easily costs businesses > $1000 per person per year.
Expensive commercial options are often not the best choice. But big business typically assumes the best choice for Windows development is Microsoft tools, which logically should be the case.
My coworkers and I spend all day in Safari and Firefox and I've never seen anything like that. You have to be visiting some seriously shady web sites. Even with over a dozen tabs open I can't get Safari to use much more than 100MB of physical ram. And I have one site with pages over 600K, open in multiple tabs, and still never use much ram.
The only issue I've ever seen is too many flash animations running simultaneously. But that only drained CPU, not RAM, and is very rarely a problem since flash's CPU usage drops when it's offscreen. Adobe doesn't feel like improving flash performance on the Mac.
A text editor, web browsers, Parallels with XP for IE testing, Photoshop or other image editors, apache/mysql/php/python/perl running locally, OpenOffice, OmniGraffle, and a few other apps. Professional web developers don't "only need a notepad and web browser."
In our case Macs are very much the right tool for the job. Those in the company who used linux desktops and laptops spent far more time dealing with application and configuration issues. They've all switched and they're far more productive and complain a lot less.
If Ubuntu is a better choice for you then it's obviously a better tool for your job. In our case we run into few situations where Macs are a problem. Obviously YMMV.
You are completely full of it. My entire office is full of web developers working full time on Macs. We use Safari, Firefox, and Flash all day and never run into such issues. Even our Mac Minis with just 512MB ram get along just fine. My 3 year old PowerBook also never has a problem.
20 to 30 years ago there were a lot less options. And all were expensive. Today price differences are huge and there's a little more diversity. But your point is still taken.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is Microsoft software's entrenchment. It's partly that the customers are hooked on it (the devil you know?), but it's also the expected difficulties in switching. It's becoming a lot less of a problem these days, but it's still a major concern. So while they may consider open source to be superior, they still may not be switching any time too soon.
I recently did a performance analysis of a complex site I've worked on for over a year. My primary tool was Firebug. While the size of the HTML + CSS + JS per page is pretty large, it turns out compressing them and setting header cache only saw a small performance improvement. The execution of JS like Scriptaculous actually accounts for more than 50% of the time it takes to render the pages. Since we only use Scriptaculous for drag-and-drop we're considering alternatives, like mootools or custom code. Loading as much JS as possible from the bottom of the page instead of the head can help, but isn't always an option. Focusing on CSS and JS performance has now made a huge improvement in perceived site performance.
During the initial development we never considered that simply loading one JS library (even when it's not used for inserting HTML) could slow down page rendering that much. On JS or CSS heavy sites, client-side loading, rendering, and runtime execution can easily account for 50% to 90% of the time it takes to see a final page. So while I've usually focused entirely on server side performance, I now know to pay more attention to the speed of client side rendering. Lesson learned.
You're right. I always celebrate the anniversary of when you first heard of it. ;)
These edits were most likely done by one person acting independently. The federal government has more than 1.8 million civilian employees, so you can imagine a few may do questionable things on their own. This one act doesn't prove "the DOJ has demonstrably been involved in a systematic effort to rewrite history." Have a drink and relax.
So buy a replacement battery online, unscrew the 6 screws in the bottom of the laptop, and pull out the old battery, and plug in the new one.
I'm going to be modded funny! I'm going to be modded funny! I'm going to be modded funny!
*crosses fingers*
It's not so bad that they ask. What's worse is our representatives usually give them what they want. Or when they take what they want illegally our representatives don't do anything about it. I blame Congress as much as anyone for our constitutional crisis.