pre-increment is usually slightly faster than post increment. I can't rememenber the details, I'm sorry, but it's something about not making an internal copy of the variable be incrementing. This can be material if you're trying to get every bit of performance out of a piece of code.
Which raises the point. I've noticed that quite a bit of "equal choices" in programming aren't really equivalent. There are cases where a "for" or a "while" loop can be used, but really one choice is much, much better in terms of performance. But the result is the same.
The thing is, you'll find that many Open Source CMSs don't always support LDAP or a host of other standards. Why? Because they don't need to. PHP Nuke, for example, is a fine project for producing small-to-medium community/corporate content-driven web sites. It isn't perfect, but it is modular, and a bit of work will allow you to produce some very nice, functional projects. It doesn't need to have to support another protocol, WebDAV throughout and then SlideML on top.
That's an interesting example you used. Because many people, including myself have tried to get an LDAP or pluggable authentication system into Post Nuke and failed. PHP Nuke situation is worse, the guy does not release development versions of PHP Nuke.
The problem was not that they did not need to. Those applications are modular, but not *that* modular. You still have to patch the source a it to abstract the authentication functions. I have, and others as well pleaded to be allowed to contribute pluggable authentication ( at the maintainers discretion ), but with no success. At one point there were 3 or 4 independent implementation of LDAP/pluggable auth modules for Post Nuke, but no feedback what so ever from the maintainers.
My take is. Many projects are very poorly managed. It's that simple. Just the act of reviewing code and providing feedback on code they don't really need themselves is too much for them.
VoIP is still not a complete solution, at least not for reliable service just yet, IMHO.
You're right in your case.
But for many, many organizations, VOIP makes perfect sense.
Many organizations have under utilized gig backbones. I know ours do. The Wan link is never enough, but the LAN backbone load never goes above 5 percent in our case.
VOIP works well in these situation; Saves a lot of money ( they're bypassing phone drops entirely in some locations ), and quality is fine.
VoIP on WiFi, seems like another story. I dunno about that:)
It's because you have no experience with DD that you thought it was good.
Told a few of my friends this.
Daredevil had probably the best plot I have ever seen in a comic book. The characters were very complex and interesting.
Daredevil was accessible, definately wasn't squeeky-clean, was very conflicted about a lot of things including his feelings for a known criminal.
Electra, as I remember, wasn't a one dimensional character either, she had sticky fingers:) ( or something like that ), and was *crazy* about the do-gooder ( source of conflict ).
Sure I forgot a lot of stuff ( it's been decades:), but of what I remember, I'm still impressed.
There's a field of economics that studies questions like: "why is $2 off a $5 item so much more appealing than $2 off a $100 item?"
We tend to buy less pricey items at more frequently than expensive items. Eg. I eat out every day, but I don't intend to buy a car for the next 5-6 years. $2 off the lunch special would be big news, but not a huge incentive in buying a car.
1) This isn't about XFree being fast for you. And if it performs as well as (say) Windows 2k or XP on modern hardware, then you've spent alot of time tweaking X, and probably your kernel. X should be decent out of the box, and it isn't. "Works good enough" isn't something that I personally like settling for.
But what do you consider "decent". This is entirely subjective. Look, there are platforms out there that kick Windows butt very, very badly when it comes to performance. Some carry a premium ( Irix/MIPS ) others didn't ( BeOS ). MS still has a 90% monopoly.
How do you even know it's X is the problem?
2) Standardization is absolutely a point of X. I don't know how you can think otherwise. One of the biggest objections to this port is the possible breaking of the X standards.
You couldn't be further from the truth.
Bro, It ain't a standard till you have multiple well tested implemenations that inter-operate. Granted X has had this for years, this fork does nothing to hurt the X standard either.
You're absolutely right. PHP's not an application server.
The problem is that's what many, many, people need when they decide to use PHP. That's not PHP's fault, but I believe it's such a big problem that maybe steps should be taken to address this. Either via application server features in PHP engine for through education.
Maybe in the future this would prevent people from writting CMS applications in PHP.
1 - Better variable scoping features. I'd like to be able to say something like...
session { $SessionVar1 = 1; $SessionVar2 = y; }
where 'session' is a keyword that executes a block of code or variable declarations in session scope, and have those variables persist throughout the session. Same for application scope, that is variables in that scope persist for the entire life of the PHP engine, and available in all scripts. ( was that the ACLs they were refering to? in the story summary? )
4 - Support for 'taglibs'. The same functionality can be done using functions, well sort of. But this is very usefull when separating the work between web programmers and non-technical designers/maintainers.
That's my list...
But yeah, you're right, I should shut-up and code them or stop complaining.
that thing was slashdotted with under 3 comments
on
Introduction to PHP5
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Serious, I checked.
Either most slashdot readers are now actually reading the articles before posting or that site is hosted on someones Zaurus.
it's not really the language that's the problem.
on
Too Cool For Secure Code?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's bad programming habits and the lack of tools that catch those program time errors.
Static analysis, the use of programs to analysis code that has not been compile completely to machine code, has historically been undeveloped in open source. I use to have a list, was my research focus for a while, but basically we have one decent static analyzer Splint, and it's not that hot compared to commercial offerings.
For instance the HANDS group from stanford has tracked down lots of kernel bugs using their in house analyzer, in lots of obscure places. MS has an in house program I hear they guard closer than the kernel itself! I have a friend that did kernel work for them that agreed with this, they give him the kernel source but not the ananlyzer binaries even. The guy who wrote it, known in pointer analysis circles often goes on about how he's found tons of bugs in open source projects ( bet you he's not filing bug reports )
There are lots of groups working on static analysis, but no one wants to open source their code.
I had a few other links, but the lameness filter is complaining about "too many junk characters". You'd think slashcode would have a better filter by now.
This was probably one of the best movies I've ever seen. Beautifully shot and acted.
One of those movies you don't have to be afraid of looking at too closely because you're afraid to find fine something that spoils the experience.
There are lots of really good movies in the sundance channels' collection. Those are largely independent so they don't have the advertising dollars and special effects, but they have amazing plots.
Somehow, for some reason, I expected better from slashdot. Maybe it was that thing about news for smart people.
The parent of this post is wrong about just about every fact he or she stated. But that's ok, cause we all hate H1Bs, right?
Paying a foreigner less than an American just because you can is immoral and racist.
It's illegal. That's enough to deter most corporations. Break the law for what? 5-10k savings/year? Plus also piss off the rest of your american staff? PS. How on earth is it racist? There are H1Bs of all races.
Make it mandatory to pay H1-B prevailing wages, and contribute to the tax pool, e.g. social security, etc. the same as you would an American.
All these things are already in place. Everyone that I know that work on an H1B visa gets paid the same as their co-workers. I have a quite bit of international friends, I have *never* heard anyone who gets paid less than prevailing wages. I only hear this on slashdot, on the web, etc. With no specific cases to boot.
H1Bs frequently pay *more* taxes than citizens but reap less from it. Why? Because they don't qualify for many tax breaks, which are often resident only affairs. Plus, they don't qualify for any government welfare programs. Why should they pay for social security if they don't qualify for social security?
H1Bs have been singled out as an excuse for the job situation. The fact is very *few* companies hire H1Bs. Most government contractors *don't* hire H1Bs as a matter of policy, and obviously government jobs are out as well. And I believe private companies will hire americans over H1Bs any day if all else is equal. But the fact is sometimes it's not; there is some very good foreign talent out there.
where have all the critic thinkers gone?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
What frustrates me are the people who believe Saddam is linked with Al Qaeda or a bigger threat to the US than North Korea only because Bush says so.
I hear you loud and clear, man. Where have all the critic thinkers gone?
I love a good argument. [ Maybe that's why I'm on slashdot everyday:) ]
But the level of conversation I've encountered both from private citizens and the press during this crisis is depressing. It's almost as if people on both sides of the argument are just parrotting what they've heard.
Common weak argument on the antiwar front...
War is never the answer.
Common weak argument from the pro-war front...
I trust that the government knows what it's doing
Meanwhile the media, especially CNN, is even adopting the "exact" phrases that the whitehouse briefings are using. And I'm not talking quotes.
I for one trust the government as much as I'd trust a camera welding R. Kelly at my teenage daughter's slumber party. Maybe a bit less even.
It's an adversarial system. Let distrust be the default stance, and work up from there.
a very sad day
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My thoughts on this entire episode...
There's always going to be war.
Peace is not a natural state for human beings. It has to be courted, it has to be persued. People easily grow complacent without strife, and thus the efforts for peace begin to seem unnecessary and burdensome.
Hopefully this doesn't cost us, and I mean all of us, as much as past conflicts.
You can at least fake function overloading in perl
You can with PHP as well. PHP has function pointers, makes this easy.
No attempt at typing, at all.
That's a feature of both languages. They're just loosely typed languages. I suspect the reasoning is that scripts aren't suppose to be doing anything large and complex, so the auto typing should screw up anything, just guessing.
No ability to compile to any form of byte-code or machine-code
I'll bite. Plus I'll throw another contender into the ring even.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl.
Same here, there are cases where PHP works better than JSP. Very small, quick and dirty web scripts come to mind.
Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
Power and ease of use, is very often at odds. This is not always the case, but very often that's the trade-off you get with languages. Deal with it. Perl, along with JSP and other application servers give you many ways to do what is *apparently* the same thing. For example in many cases you may be able to get away with using "|", "||", or "or" in exactly the same statement and get what is to you the same effect ( if you don't care about bitwise operation or presedence).
Nice to see you got your web application up and running so quickly. Now try to connection pooling ( php persistant connections are db specific, ldap and less popular dbs don't get it ), or any other optimizations where you optimize the generation or retrival of variables or other resources by limiting that operation to once per session.
Ever wonder why so many slashdoted sites say "max connections in mysql reached"? Because often every hit is creating and closing a connection to the database. It's difficult to do any session scope or application scope optimizations using PHP. Is there a variable you need once per user session? Tough, you have to get it from the DB each hit, or store it in the URL, eg.
The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
Java vs. PHP's OO. Hmmm.... Grap a design pattern textbook and try implementing any non trivial pattern in PHP. PHP OO is an afterthought, and it shows.
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.)
ODBC
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used.
Hah! Try a real web application. There standard PHP engine does not have an opcode optimizer. Every hit to your site is compile. While most application servers come with opcode optimizations by default. Your site is compiled on startup or on the first hit only. Afterwards the in memory code is executed. Even if you use a PHP opcode optimizer, it would be interesting to see PHP vs Tomcat. My money's on Tomcat.
Portability.
JAVA. Nuff said. There's isn't 20 different dependent libraries at compile time, or realizing that you need to recompile PHP because you don't have PDF lib support built in. That's suppose to change soon, I hear, but until then.
Graphics
Java2D
Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc.
Check out java.util .
PHP alright, but isn't all that hot. I still use PHP for small scripts that few people use ( eg. scripts to add/del IMAP or LDAP users for instance which only a small number of admins use), but the truth is most application servers would eat its lunch.
Slashdot Mirror
pre-increment is usually slightly faster than post increment. I can't rememenber the details, I'm sorry, but it's something about not making an internal copy of the variable be incrementing. This can be material if you're trying to get every bit of performance out of a piece of code.
Which raises the point. I've noticed that quite a bit of "equal choices" in programming aren't really equivalent. There are cases where a "for" or a "while" loop can be used, but really one choice is much, much better in terms of performance. But the result is the same.
Yeah, like opposing campaign finance reform bills.
The ACLU is one of the biggest opponents to many of the finance reforms that limit the amount of money campaign doners can contribute.
I'd say that powerful lobbies with lots of money to give is the root of this entire mess, and they're not helping fix it.
The thing is, you'll find that many Open Source CMSs don't always support LDAP or a host of other standards. Why? Because they don't need to. PHP Nuke, for example, is a fine project for producing small-to-medium community/corporate content-driven web sites. It isn't perfect, but it is modular, and a bit of work will allow you to produce some very nice, functional projects. It doesn't need to have to support another protocol, WebDAV throughout and then SlideML on top.
That's an interesting example you used. Because many people, including myself have tried to get an LDAP or pluggable authentication system into Post Nuke and failed. PHP Nuke situation is worse, the guy does not release development versions of PHP Nuke.
The problem was not that they did not need to. Those applications are modular, but not *that* modular. You still have to patch the source a it to abstract the authentication functions. I have, and others as well pleaded to be allowed to contribute pluggable authentication ( at the maintainers discretion ), but with no success. At one point there were 3 or 4 independent implementation of LDAP/pluggable auth modules for Post Nuke, but no feedback what so ever from the maintainers.
My take is. Many projects are very poorly managed. It's that simple. Just the act of reviewing code and providing feedback on code they don't really need themselves is too much for them.
Unlike Compiere, doesn't require Oracle.
You're right in your case.
But for many, many organizations, VOIP makes perfect sense.
Many organizations have under utilized gig backbones. I know ours do. The Wan link is never enough, but the LAN backbone load never goes above 5 percent in our case.
VOIP works well in these situation; Saves a lot of money ( they're bypassing phone drops entirely in some locations ), and quality is fine.
VoIP on WiFi, seems like another story. I dunno about that :)
Told a few of my friends this.
Daredevil had probably the best plot I have ever seen in a comic book. The characters were very complex and interesting.
Daredevil was accessible, definately wasn't squeeky-clean, was very conflicted about a lot of things including his feelings for a known criminal.
Electra, as I remember, wasn't a one dimensional character either, she had sticky fingers :) ( or something like that ), and was *crazy* about the do-gooder ( source of conflict ).
Sure I forgot a lot of stuff ( it's been decades :), but of what I remember, I'm still impressed.
You bring up an important point.
The Internet is also a great way to spread bad or biased information.
How do you know CNN is to be trusted? That the conclusions from the poll are corrected?
Personally I don't trust CNN's content. They very often don't have a clue about what they're talking about, and often push an agenda outright.
We tend to buy less pricey items at more frequently than expensive items. Eg. I eat out every day, but I don't intend to buy a car for the next 5-6 years. $2 off the lunch special would be big news, but not a huge incentive in buying a car.
But what do you consider "decent". This is entirely subjective. Look, there are platforms out there that kick Windows butt very, very badly when it comes to performance. Some carry a premium ( Irix/MIPS ) others didn't ( BeOS ). MS still has a 90% monopoly.
How do you even know it's X is the problem?
2) Standardization is absolutely a point of X. I don't know how you can think otherwise. One of the biggest objections to this port is the possible breaking of the X standards.
You couldn't be further from the truth.
Bro, It ain't a standard till you have multiple well tested implemenations that inter-operate. Granted X has had this for years, this fork does nothing to hurt the X standard either.
part 3 went over my head. sorry.
It was a typo.
Compiere
Compiere needs an Oracle database for now.
Seems very fast and actively developed.
You're absolutely right. PHP's not an application server.
The problem is that's what many, many, people need when they decide to use PHP. That's not PHP's fault, but I believe it's such a big problem that maybe steps should be taken to address this. Either via application server features in PHP engine for through education.
Maybe in the future this would prevent people from writting CMS applications in PHP.
1 - Better variable scoping features. I'd like to be able to say something like...
where 'session' is a keyword that executes a block of code or variable declarations in session scope, and have those variables persist throughout the session. Same for application scope, that is variables in that scope persist for the entire life of the PHP engine, and available in all scripts. ( was that the ACLs they were refering to? in the story summary? )2 - Built in Opcode caching.
3 - More consistant library function naming.
4 - Support for 'taglibs'. The same functionality can be done using functions, well sort of. But this is very usefull when separating the work between web programmers and non-technical designers/maintainers.
That's my list...
But yeah, you're right, I should shut-up and code them or stop complaining.
Serious, I checked.
Either most slashdot readers are now actually reading the articles before posting or that site is hosted on someones Zaurus.
It's bad programming habits and the lack of tools that catch those program time errors.
Static analysis, the use of programs to analysis code that has not been compile completely to machine code, has historically been undeveloped in open source. I use to have a list, was my research focus for a while, but basically we have one decent static analyzer Splint, and it's not that hot compared to commercial offerings.
For instance the HANDS group from stanford has tracked down lots of kernel bugs using their in house analyzer, in lots of obscure places. MS has an in house program I hear they guard closer than the kernel itself! I have a friend that did kernel work for them that agreed with this, they give him the kernel source but not the ananlyzer binaries even. The guy who wrote it, known in pointer analysis circles often goes on about how he's found tons of bugs in open source projects ( bet you he's not filing bug reports )
There are lots of groups working on static analysis, but no one wants to open source their code.
Hind, Michael http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hind/
Hind has written amongst other things probably the best and most recent introductory papers on pointer analysis at http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hind/paste01. ps.
stanford checker
SUIF compiler suif
I had a few other links, but the lameness filter is complaining about "too many junk characters". You'd think slashcode would have a better filter by now.
This comparison is unfair.
He's comparing all the vunerabilities in open source programs that he found has been released in a period of time and calls them 'linux' bugs.
Those programs have nothing with the linux kernel. Other than they can be run on it.
Do you want to compare that list with every program from every vendor that codes for microsoft windows. On a hunch, I'd say it's a lot higher.
This was probably one of the best movies I've ever seen. Beautifully shot and acted.
One of those movies you don't have to be afraid of looking at too closely because you're afraid to find fine something that spoils the experience.
There are lots of really good movies in the sundance channels' collection. Those are largely independent so they don't have the advertising dollars and special effects, but they have amazing plots.
Somehow, for some reason, I expected better from slashdot. Maybe it was that thing about news for smart people.
The parent of this post is wrong about just about every fact he or she stated. But that's ok, cause we all hate H1Bs, right?
Paying a foreigner less than an American just because you can is immoral and racist.
It's illegal. That's enough to deter most corporations. Break the law for what? 5-10k savings/year? Plus also piss off the rest of your american staff? PS. How on earth is it racist? There are H1Bs of all races.
Make it mandatory to pay H1-B prevailing wages, and contribute to the tax pool, e.g. social security, etc. the same as you would an American.
All these things are already in place. Everyone that I know that work on an H1B visa gets paid the same as their co-workers. I have a quite bit of international friends, I have *never* heard anyone who gets paid less than prevailing wages. I only hear this on slashdot, on the web, etc. With no specific cases to boot.
H1Bs frequently pay *more* taxes than citizens but reap less from it. Why? Because they don't qualify for many tax breaks, which are often resident only affairs. Plus, they don't qualify for any government welfare programs. Why should they pay for social security if they don't qualify for social security?
H1Bs have been singled out as an excuse for the job situation. The fact is very *few* companies hire H1Bs. Most government contractors *don't* hire H1Bs as a matter of policy, and obviously government jobs are out as well. And I believe private companies will hire americans over H1Bs any day if all else is equal. But the fact is sometimes it's not; there is some very good foreign talent out there.
I'm curious...
How often have you used that particular phrase? When was the first time you used it? Was it recently?
I think the biggest byproduct of this war will be tired cliches and bush-isms.
CDMA's and CDMA hybrids are being used in favor of the others. Everyone's doing CDMA now.
Checkout http://www.astalavista.com/mobile/wct.shtml for a longer list.
What frustrates me are the people who believe Saddam is linked with Al Qaeda or a bigger threat to the US than North Korea only because Bush says so.
I hear you loud and clear, man. Where have all the critic thinkers gone?
I love a good argument. [ Maybe that's why I'm on slashdot everyday :) ]
But the level of conversation I've encountered both from private citizens and the press during this crisis is depressing. It's almost as if people on both sides of the argument are just parrotting what they've heard.
Common weak argument on the antiwar front...
War is never the answer.
Common weak argument from the pro-war front...
I trust that the government knows what it's doing
Meanwhile the media, especially CNN, is even adopting the "exact" phrases that the whitehouse briefings are using. And I'm not talking quotes.
I for one trust the government as much as I'd trust a camera welding R. Kelly at my teenage daughter's slumber party. Maybe a bit less even.
It's an adversarial system. Let distrust be the default stance, and work up from there.
My thoughts on this entire episode...
There's always going to be war.
Peace is not a natural state for human beings. It has to be courted, it has to be persued. People easily grow complacent without strife, and thus the efforts for peace begin to seem unnecessary and burdensome.
Hopefully this doesn't cost us, and I mean all of us, as much as past conflicts.
Has been fixed in PHP and is now the default.
You can at least fake function overloading in perl
You can with PHP as well. PHP has function pointers, makes this easy.
No attempt at typing, at all.
That's a feature of both languages. They're just loosely typed languages. I suspect the reasoning is that scripts aren't suppose to be doing anything large and complex, so the auto typing should screw up anything, just guessing.
No ability to compile to any form of byte-code or machine-code
There are several opcode caches for PHP http://www.turcksoft.com/en/e_mmc.htm
I'll bite. Plus I'll throw another contender into the ring even.
Before I begin, let me just clarify something. I'm not arguing that PHP is better than Perl in all cases. There is certainly still a use for Perl. Also, PHP isn't perfect but it does manage to fix many of the shortcomings I've had with Perl.
Same here, there are cases where PHP works better than JSP. Very small, quick and dirty web scripts come to mind.
Ease of use. After about a day I had an excellent understanding of both PHP and SQL. I was able to get a stable, useable and presentable website up within 24 hours of reading the basics of PHP. Learning Perl took me weeks and I'm still not even as good with it as I am with PHP. I would definitely not recommend anyone new to programming begin with Perl.
Power and ease of use, is very often at odds. This is not always the case, but very often that's the trade-off you get with languages. Deal with it. Perl, along with JSP and other application servers give you many ways to do what is *apparently* the same thing. For example in many cases you may be able to get away with using "|", "||", or "or" in exactly the same statement and get what is to you the same effect ( if you don't care about bitwise operation or presedence).
Nice to see you got your web application up and running so quickly. Now try to connection pooling ( php persistant connections are db specific, ldap and less popular dbs don't get it ), or any other optimizations where you optimize the generation or retrival of variables or other resources by limiting that operation to once per session.
Ever wonder why so many slashdoted sites say "max connections in mysql reached"? Because often every hit is creating and closing a connection to the database. It's difficult to do any session scope or application scope optimizations using PHP. Is there a variable you need once per user session? Tough, you have to get it from the DB each hit, or store it in the URL, eg.
The OO of PHP is excellent. In my experience, it rivals Smalltalk.
Java vs. PHP's OO. Hmmm.... Grap a design pattern textbook and try implementing any non trivial pattern in PHP. PHP OO is an afterthought, and it shows.
Outstanding database support. PHP supports virtually every DB under the sun (although Berkeley DB is missing, oddly enough.)
ODBC
Speed. PHP is one of the fastest languages I've ever used.
Hah! Try a real web application. There standard PHP engine does not have an opcode optimizer. Every hit to your site is compile. While most application servers come with opcode optimizations by default. Your site is compiled on startup or on the first hit only. Afterwards the in memory code is executed. Even if you use a PHP opcode optimizer, it would be interesting to see PHP vs Tomcat. My money's on Tomcat.
Portability.
JAVA. Nuff said. There's isn't 20 different dependent libraries at compile time, or realizing that you need to recompile PHP because you don't have PDF lib support built in. That's suppose to change soon, I hear, but until then.
Graphics
Java2D
Data Structures. Under PHP you can create any type of datastructure you need: Linked lists, binary trees, hash tables, queues, inverse Reiser-biased recursion trees, etc.
Check out java.util .
PHP alright, but isn't all that hot. I still use PHP for small scripts that few people use ( eg. scripts to add/del IMAP or LDAP users for instance which only a small number of admins use), but the truth is most application servers would eat its lunch.