PHP is Turing complete, so it's technically possible to write anything in PHP that you could write in another language. That seems to be about the most it's got going for it. PHP does nothing to help programmers write sane, maintainable code. It's almost impossible to develop without having a browser tab open to php.net ("The online docs are great!" "Well, they'd have to be."). There is zero consistency with things like argument order. Dangerous legacy concepts like "mysql_real_escape_string" are only recently deprecated and don't have a set removal schedule. It's a one-trick pony that's nearly useless outside its niche as a web page generation language. It's just a mess - a dangerous, unmaintainable mess.
I won't refuse to use an app just because it's written in PHP, but I do heavily weight it when comparing alternatives. PHP is a powerhouse in much the same way as McDonald's. It may be ubiquitous, but it still sucks and you have to question the judgement of anyone who chooses it to start a new project.
Well, that and the fact that many of us build ludicrously over-specced machines whenever we actually upgrade. "Well, I'll be watching a lot of Youtube videos, so 32GB of RAM, 16 cores, 16TB of spinning storage, and 2TB of SSD should just about cover it. Oh, and toss in a couple of GPUs because I've deluded myself into thinking I'll write a protein folding simulator some weekend."
Sometimes it takes a while for your technology to become obsolete when you've installed ASCI Red in your garage.
The downside to larger screens is that 1080p isn't much when you are close to the screen
I'm not sure about that. My couch isn't all that far away from our 60" 1080p screen and don't notice individual pixels even in things like the on-screen channel guide. There's an enormous quality leap from 480 to 1080, but not as much of a visible difference after that. You'd hear a big difference between 22KHz audio and CD-quality 44.1KHz recordings, but few people except trained experts using special equipment could hear the difference between 44.1KHz and 96KHz. Well, same with video: the current standards are pretty close to the limits of most peoples' perception, and comes at a significant component price, storage, and bandwidth cost.
But the video quality looks like crap on my 2010 MacBook Pro.
That's because your MBP has a hard disk drive that adds a lot of harsh harmonics to the signal. People who actually care about their video viewing use SSDs, which have straighter 1's and rounder, more organic 0's that improve depth of field and staging.
Re:Apple Developer Program now all inclusive
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
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· Score: 1
Tell your ineffective boss to GFY and upgrade to a real job. I'm not even joking a little. A shop that won't give you the tools to effectively do your job is a special kind of hell that no one deserves. Get out of there before your skills fall so far out of date that you're stuck for life.
It isn't helpful to simply dismiss issues people raise
Agreed, and I'd never do that. I asked it OP was sure that they weren't hardware problems on his own computer and not something more widespread. I did that because I haven't seen any of those problems myself and hadn't heard of them before now.
Better for all of us if these issues are raised and fixed
Also agreed. I've filed plenty of bugs to Apple's tracker over the years so that they know someone's affected by them.
Re:Apple Developer Program now all inclusive
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
·
· Score: 2
Wait, you guys (Apple developers) have to pay *licenses* to Apple to write programs and apps on their platforms?
Of course not. Apple makes Xcode available for free and you can use it to your heart's content. The paid license is for distributing apps through Apple's store. That's almost a requirement for iOS development (although you can install home-written software on your own stuff, I think), but not at all needed for Mac development. Lots of software is available via the Mac app store; lots more is available through developers' own websites.
How are you guys OK with this?
They wouldn't be. Fortunately, they don't have to be.
Re:Does El Capitan Fix Major Problems?
on
WWDC 2015 Roundup
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I've experienced literally none of those things on any of the Macs or iOS devices that I come in contact with daily. Are you certain that those aren't particular to your own system?
Not implying that those are bug-free OSes, I say typing on "ComputerName (23)".
Why. It's not criminally PC to use either singular pronoun when referring to a hypothetical person. I think the fact that you felt it necessary to comment on it says more about you than the author.
In my hometown, Red Cross kept raising the rates they charged to local hospitals for donated blood. Eventually it became so expensive that a local coalition founded their own blood bank and began distributing blood products for much lower prices.
I don't begrudge the Red Cross selling donated blood. Supplies, equipment, refrigeration, etc. all cost a lot of money and even a 100% volunteer organization can't wave that stuff away. I begrudge them charging so much that another, much smaller group without the same national recognition or economies of scale can set up a parallel system offering the same services for far less money.
Why would anyone, ever, think that me not looking at their ad should be illegal?
It goes a lot deeper than that. I am running software on a device I own. That software requests a resource from a remote service. After receiving it, the same software manipulates that resource in ways I have specifically asked it to in order to meet my needs.
The plaintiff's case is that they have a legal right to tell me how to view a resource once it's on a machine I own. Copyright etc. isn't involved; I'm consuming a properly licensed copy of the resource that they sent to me. I'm not distributing it, either in original or modified form.
There are already a million other ways I might modify that content today. I can apply my own CSS so that font sizes and contrast are to my liking. My web browser may actually be a speech synthesizer or braille reader. I may be viewing it on a mobile device that simply can't render it in its original form. But according to the plaintiffs, none of that matters: either I view it as originally intended or not at all.
If they're going to assert insane things like that, I suggest they form a W3C working group to publicize a standard way of describing what uses are acceptable for that content. Then my web browser could parse it, see "ADS_MAY_BE_REMOVED: FALSE", and give me a popup saying "This page is published by sociopaths. Continue?".
No, I agree. If Feynmann can't follow their calculations, there's something largely amiss. Then again, that was a while ago and for all I know they might be making perfect sense now.
But I still contend that "it sounds like gibberish to laypeople" is a pretty low bar to set. It's almost impossible to describe something like QCD to non-phycisists without stopping twice a sentence - "well, not a literal color", "not 'up' like in 'gravity'", etc. - even at the high school textbook level.
"Please buy me! Won't someone please buy me?" How FUBAR is TWC that they're so ready to sell to someone, anyone? Either a) they had this in the pipeline before the Comcast deal fell through, in which case how many other deals are on standby?, or b) they brokered a major corporate sell deal entirely within the last month, presumably under immense pressure.
In my opinion, TWC is desperate to sell because there's an internal house of cards that's about to fall over. Someone needs to unload it quickly so that a pending spectacular failure will be on someone else's watch.
And since Android app crash rates are actually lower than iOS
You're wrong, unless you can provide equally large-scale, cross-platform metrics. Compare the iOS 8 (most popular iOS version with about 85% usage share) crash rates (most recently 2.05%) with KitKat 4.4 (60% share) at 2.53% crash rate.
Re:If I use an IDE, does it mean I'm a bad program
on
Choosing the Right IDE
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· Score: 1
Then why am I a vi/emacs hipster to you?
Re:If I use an IDE, does it mean I'm a bad program
on
Choosing the Right IDE
·
· Score: 1
Why do you assume that your IDE has features that Emacs doesn't? It's been in active development for 39 years to be a great, productive programming environment. Do you honestly believe that it's had 4 decades of worldwide contribution and not become reasonably good at helping people write software?
Without exception, everyone I've heard decry Emacs and Vim as "just text editors" has never used them beyond "open file / type / save" and has no idea what they were working with. It's like dismissing Linux because you've only used it as an AWS shell, and you feel sorry for people who won't upgrade to Windows so that they can use a web browser.
Longer answer: IDE? No thanks. At least, I've used Eclipse variants and various Visual Studios, but they map onto how I think about writing and managing software. I want a blank screen with lots of keyboard shortcuts, some basic autocompletion, perfect syntax highlighting, maybe some Git support, etc. I don't want code generation or any refactor-all-the-things functions; I won't be using them.
I used Emacs for years and years, only eventually switching to Sublime Text. ST was beautiful and fast but didn't have nearly the ecosystem of Emacs, plus its non-Freeness started showing when it went many months without an update. Life's too short for a proprietary editor, which is where I spent approximately 60% of my work life. I dependent on it more than any other tool and the prospect of my chosen tool dying on the vine wasn't appealing. I tried Atom for about a week, but it was slower than ST2, lacked a broad ecosystem, and, well... JavaScript.
So one day I decided to revisit Emacs. Hey! It grew a package manager! Since that afternoon, I've had zero desire to look back. Emacs will outlive me and my children, will support every new language and tool that comes along, and will always be Free. There's nothing out there good enough to make me consider switching.
PS, in concession: I could make the same cases for Vim and its grandchildren. Once you've learned them, if they do what you need then there's very little compelling reason to change.
Slashdot Mirror
PHP is Turing complete, so it's technically possible to write anything in PHP that you could write in another language. That seems to be about the most it's got going for it. PHP does nothing to help programmers write sane, maintainable code. It's almost impossible to develop without having a browser tab open to php.net ("The online docs are great!" "Well, they'd have to be."). There is zero consistency with things like argument order. Dangerous legacy concepts like "mysql_real_escape_string" are only recently deprecated and don't have a set removal schedule. It's a one-trick pony that's nearly useless outside its niche as a web page generation language. It's just a mess - a dangerous, unmaintainable mess.
I won't refuse to use an app just because it's written in PHP, but I do heavily weight it when comparing alternatives. PHP is a powerhouse in much the same way as McDonald's. It may be ubiquitous, but it still sucks and you have to question the judgement of anyone who chooses it to start a new project.
Well, that and the fact that many of us build ludicrously over-specced machines whenever we actually upgrade. "Well, I'll be watching a lot of Youtube videos, so 32GB of RAM, 16 cores, 16TB of spinning storage, and 2TB of SSD should just about cover it. Oh, and toss in a couple of GPUs because I've deluded myself into thinking I'll write a protein folding simulator some weekend."
Sometimes it takes a while for your technology to become obsolete when you've installed ASCI Red in your garage.
Surely not.
The downside to larger screens is that 1080p isn't much when you are close to the screen
I'm not sure about that. My couch isn't all that far away from our 60" 1080p screen and don't notice individual pixels even in things like the on-screen channel guide. There's an enormous quality leap from 480 to 1080, but not as much of a visible difference after that. You'd hear a big difference between 22KHz audio and CD-quality 44.1KHz recordings, but few people except trained experts using special equipment could hear the difference between 44.1KHz and 96KHz. Well, same with video: the current standards are pretty close to the limits of most peoples' perception, and comes at a significant component price, storage, and bandwidth cost.
But the video quality looks like crap on my 2010 MacBook Pro.
That's because your MBP has a hard disk drive that adds a lot of harsh harmonics to the signal. People who actually care about their video viewing use SSDs, which have straighter 1's and rounder, more organic 0's that improve depth of field and staging.
Tell your ineffective boss to GFY and upgrade to a real job. I'm not even joking a little. A shop that won't give you the tools to effectively do your job is a special kind of hell that no one deserves. Get out of there before your skills fall so far out of date that you're stuck for life.
It isn't helpful to simply dismiss issues people raise
Agreed, and I'd never do that. I asked it OP was sure that they weren't hardware problems on his own computer and not something more widespread. I did that because I haven't seen any of those problems myself and hadn't heard of them before now.
Better for all of us if these issues are raised and fixed
Also agreed. I've filed plenty of bugs to Apple's tracker over the years so that they know someone's affected by them.
Wait, you guys (Apple developers) have to pay *licenses* to Apple to write programs and apps on their platforms?
Of course not. Apple makes Xcode available for free and you can use it to your heart's content. The paid license is for distributing apps through Apple's store. That's almost a requirement for iOS development (although you can install home-written software on your own stuff, I think), but not at all needed for Mac development. Lots of software is available via the Mac app store; lots more is available through developers' own websites.
How are you guys OK with this?
They wouldn't be. Fortunately, they don't have to be.
What's the free equivalent?
I've experienced literally none of those things on any of the Macs or iOS devices that I come in contact with daily. Are you certain that those aren't particular to your own system?
Not implying that those are bug-free OSes, I say typing on "ComputerName (23)".
This is disgusting.
In what way?
*eye ball roll*
Why. It's not criminally PC to use either singular pronoun when referring to a hypothetical person. I think the fact that you felt it necessary to comment on it says more about you than the author.
In my hometown, Red Cross kept raising the rates they charged to local hospitals for donated blood. Eventually it became so expensive that a local coalition founded their own blood bank and began distributing blood products for much lower prices.
I don't begrudge the Red Cross selling donated blood. Supplies, equipment, refrigeration, etc. all cost a lot of money and even a 100% volunteer organization can't wave that stuff away. I begrudge them charging so much that another, much smaller group without the same national recognition or economies of scale can set up a parallel system offering the same services for far less money.
It would be hard to do it with just one, but scissor blades almost always come in pairs, hence "pair of scissors".
Similarly, open and close a pair of scissors. Notice that the point where the blades meet moves a lot faster than the blades themselves.
Works for me.
Why would anyone, ever, think that me not looking at their ad should be illegal?
It goes a lot deeper than that. I am running software on a device I own. That software requests a resource from a remote service. After receiving it, the same software manipulates that resource in ways I have specifically asked it to in order to meet my needs.
The plaintiff's case is that they have a legal right to tell me how to view a resource once it's on a machine I own. Copyright etc. isn't involved; I'm consuming a properly licensed copy of the resource that they sent to me. I'm not distributing it, either in original or modified form.
There are already a million other ways I might modify that content today. I can apply my own CSS so that font sizes and contrast are to my liking. My web browser may actually be a speech synthesizer or braille reader. I may be viewing it on a mobile device that simply can't render it in its original form. But according to the plaintiffs, none of that matters: either I view it as originally intended or not at all.
If they're going to assert insane things like that, I suggest they form a W3C working group to publicize a standard way of describing what uses are acceptable for that content. Then my web browser could parse it, see "ADS_MAY_BE_REMOVED: FALSE", and give me a popup saying "This page is published by sociopaths. Continue?".
No, I agree. If Feynmann can't follow their calculations, there's something largely amiss. Then again, that was a while ago and for all I know they might be making perfect sense now.
But I still contend that "it sounds like gibberish to laypeople" is a pretty low bar to set. It's almost impossible to describe something like QCD to non-phycisists without stopping twice a sentence - "well, not a literal color", "not 'up' like in 'gravity'", etc. - even at the high school textbook level.
Which means for the layperson, it mostly sounds like gibberish.
In fairness, almost everything from high-energy physics sounds like gibberish to everyone but the people running the experiments.
I immediately tried to crash every phone of every coworker who has an iPhone within earshot of me and it didn't work.
I too enjoy getting fired over stupid shit. Do you have any other suggestions I might try?
"Please buy me! Won't someone please buy me?" How FUBAR is TWC that they're so ready to sell to someone, anyone? Either a) they had this in the pipeline before the Comcast deal fell through, in which case how many other deals are on standby?, or b) they brokered a major corporate sell deal entirely within the last month, presumably under immense pressure.
In my opinion, TWC is desperate to sell because there's an internal house of cards that's about to fall over. Someone needs to unload it quickly so that a pending spectacular failure will be on someone else's watch.
And since Android app crash rates are actually lower than iOS
You're wrong, unless you can provide equally large-scale, cross-platform metrics. Compare the iOS 8 (most popular iOS version with about 85% usage share) crash rates (most recently 2.05%) with KitKat 4.4 (60% share) at 2.53% crash rate.
Then why am I a vi/emacs hipster to you?
Why do you assume that your IDE has features that Emacs doesn't? It's been in active development for 39 years to be a great, productive programming environment. Do you honestly believe that it's had 4 decades of worldwide contribution and not become reasonably good at helping people write software?
Without exception, everyone I've heard decry Emacs and Vim as "just text editors" has never used them beyond "open file / type / save" and has no idea what they were working with. It's like dismissing Linux because you've only used it as an AWS shell, and you feel sorry for people who won't upgrade to Windows so that they can use a web browser.
Longer answer: IDE? No thanks. At least, I've used Eclipse variants and various Visual Studios, but they map onto how I think about writing and managing software. I want a blank screen with lots of keyboard shortcuts, some basic autocompletion, perfect syntax highlighting, maybe some Git support, etc. I don't want code generation or any refactor-all-the-things functions; I won't be using them.
I used Emacs for years and years, only eventually switching to Sublime Text. ST was beautiful and fast but didn't have nearly the ecosystem of Emacs, plus its non-Freeness started showing when it went many months without an update. Life's too short for a proprietary editor, which is where I spent approximately 60% of my work life. I dependent on it more than any other tool and the prospect of my chosen tool dying on the vine wasn't appealing. I tried Atom for about a week, but it was slower than ST2, lacked a broad ecosystem, and, well... JavaScript.
So one day I decided to revisit Emacs. Hey! It grew a package manager! Since that afternoon, I've had zero desire to look back. Emacs will outlive me and my children, will support every new language and tool that comes along, and will always be Free. There's nothing out there good enough to make me consider switching.
PS, in concession: I could make the same cases for Vim and its grandchildren. Once you've learned them, if they do what you need then there's very little compelling reason to change.