The answer: absolutely nothing beyond the staff having some cleanup to do. Slashdot can be fun--but nothing of true import depends upon it. Some users would obviously get pissed off for a while, (hell, I would be one of them) but life would continue irrespective of Slashdot's existence and/or site health.
And thus the problem with poor analogies is revealed.
I presume you'd rather hire someone who didn't know what he was up against as an 'expert'?
And by the way, these people are not crackers. They are students being taught the things they will be expected to know. If someone hasn't the training to find the holes in your systems, why on Earth would you hire them to plug those holes?
By that logic we might conclude that amoebic dysentery shouldn't exist either.:)
A parasite is a parasite is a parasite. Spammers are ideally suited to the internet environment at the moment--that's why this entire discussion is about trying to alter that environment to make it less livable (hopefully, outright fatal) to them.
I am not taking issue with your spider expertise, just with the logic behind your assertion that the web can only be the work of multiple species. I haven't offered any evidence because I haven't made any assertions--just an observation that I thought it would be quite odd for spiders to share a web (although my actual wording was admittedly quite poor).
And I have no idea where the whole 'crossing to other webs to attack' thing you keep mentioning comes from--I neither implied nor stated that this was going on. The point is that it's not neighbouring webs--it's one web. Check out the pictures. There are zillions of the little critters all over the same chunks of web.
The major difference here is that you are stating that the web *must* be the work of multiple species. I am simply stating that there is insufficient evidence available (to us armchair types) to make this statement. I feel my credibility here is fine, as I'm not the one making unfounded statements. Given the available information, it is scientifically irresponsible to draw a conclusion without further research. Spiders are not my point. The scientific method is.
At any rate, I contacted Dr. Thair for his observations, so we can lay this to rest before it becomes any more of a pissing contest than it is. According to him, the population (of around 10^8 spiders) comprised 99.999% H. ksenius, of which 95% were mature males and females. He mentioned the presence of a "couple of bigger wolf spiders which were doing their best to get the hell out of there".
You think so? It's common for web-weavers to live in close proximity to one another. On a recent nature walk with my family, I found one bush that had no less than a dozen species of weavers living quite in harmony with one another. The whole "eating each other" business happens between hunter-types that don't weave webs and the web-weavers (or other hunter-types). It's a rare thing to hear of, say, two orb-weavers of the same species crossing over to another's web so as to attack and eat.
Granted. But would you suggest that it is common for spiders to share webs with spiders of other species? One might also note that it's quite rare to find a web of this size, too.
As for reports of Halorates ksenius, hell, I can only fine a single google result for that. Where are all these reports? Links, please.
The local news--the Vancouver Sun is one. The rest I haven't found links for. It's true that you won't find many links to that name on Google, but you'll have (slightly) more luck with Excite--if you (unlike me) read Russian. Otherwise the name only seems to show up on academic lists of known spiders, and the only reference given is a 1928 work.
Anyway, this is all beside the point. All I was trying to say was this: you noted that some spiders behave a certain way, and presumed to then conclude that these spiders necessarily behave the same way. That does not follow. Perhaps it's inconceivable to you that they all belong to the same species, but you gave no supporting evidence beyond supposition--and then chose the very weakest of my counterarguments with which to take issue (the fact that web weavers don't tend to eat each other).
Whenever somebody says something is inconceivable, I think of all the people who have used that word throughout history--not many of whom were proved right in the long run.
An additional question that everybody seems to have missed is the species involved. All the questions I've seen have discussed the matter along the lines of it being a single species. Anybody who's taken a look in their own back yard would recognize that there are a bunch of species living together in a very small area. Imagine, then, the number of species involved in the building of this web. It's inconceivable to me that there would be 2 spiders/sq. cm ALL OF THE SAME SPECIES covering 60 hectares.
The species involved is Halorates ksenius. All reports so far indicate only one species involved, which makes perfect sense when combined with the facts that the spiders, unable or unwilling to leave the area, just kept reproducing. Also, apparently the adults were living rather longer than expected, adding to the population. Since spiders don't reproduce across species lines, such a situation would lead to an increase in whatever species that population happened to consist of. There is no reason for it to be any more surprising that all involved spiders were of the same species--and in fact it would be pretty damn bizarre if several species of spider were able to coexist for so long without eating each other.
According to the professor who discovered the web, it was a 60-hectare field, making this web likely the largest ever discovered. It should be noted that although the print article at the CBC states acres, the radio interview http://cbc.ca/clips/ram-audio/aih_spiderweb_021121.ram [cbc.ca] clearly states hectares at the beginning. Either way, it's a bloody big web.
According to the Vancouver Sun, the field is 24 hectares (just under 60 acres).
No, that's not true at all--try it. The webserver does not even come into the equation, since PHP is the one including the file, not the server.
That said, if you have a policy like 'use.inc for library code', you'd *better* bloody well set a PHP handler for it in the web server config. I guess that would fall under the 'discipline' slide.
OK, essentially what you said here is what I
was trying to say. However, we can pretty much
assume that nobody keeps that kind of cash in a
sock under the pillow. So it's invested in
some way; it's working. That will likely create
as much work over the long term as a sudden
fluctuation would create in the short term. It's not guaranteed or even necessarily likely to change the world situation much either way.
At any rate, I again agree with most of your
second post. But so many people believe the
message given in your first--and stop there,
not thinking any further--and use that kind of
view to rationalize gross consumption. That's
what my problem is with; not you.
I see what you're getting at, but they're still
not losing money because of file sharing. If
they are losing money, and at the same time
other people are file sharing, then you can't just say that the one
occurred because of the other. In this case,
they appear to be only the natural results of
the way reality has changed.
For one thing, they're losing sales in some
areas because they really are producing
inferior product. Fewer people than ever are
prepared to cope with that, and are turning
to other sources for original music (indie,
foreign, etc).
For another, the fact is that music is no
longer a scarce resourse. Anybody with a
suitable machine and a decent ear can make,
copy, or whatever, anything they want. The
technology and ability to self-publish is new,
and so the RIAA et al. can't really hope to
maintain their traditional monopoly. There is
this feeling they have, that since they've been
able to maintain a chokehold on the market in
the past, that they have the right to do so in
perpetuity. Do they?
So yeah, they're losing money, and file sharing
is happening, but proving causality is pretty
difficult. And even if you can--is it a bad
thing? Think about it. If they're going down
because their product sucks and they can't
adapt, then shouldn't they go down?
From disagreement to Hardcore Socialism in
one step. I may have misjudged you.
I am quite comfortable with the workings of
a capitalist economy, thanks. However, I can't agree that trickle-down economics works
equally well in all cases regardless of the
situation, as you are implying.
That's why the money changed hands. Eventually
it will get there. It all takes time.
Eventually the money will pass into someone's
hands who will decide to pass it on to those
charities.
That may certainly be true for some of the
money--but a case could hardly be made that
this is to be expected for all, or even a
substantial percentage, of it. At least, not
based on the information at hand.
And that's what bothers
me about this sort of blanket apologism: the
message that "It all gets to the little guy
in the end, and that's why the big guys should
have and spend it". It may be true that
some fraction of the conspicuous consumption of the rich ends up
getting spent on research, housing, or other projects. That is not true for most of it.
"Decorate Expensively for the Poor!" doesn't
really work.
Samplitude is very cool, but it is hardly 'high-
end'. Cubase SX isn't 'high-end' either. iZ RADAR
is a lot closer to the high end of the market
and is very very cool indeed, but that runs BeOS
and requires a software and hardware
buy-in.
Pro-Tools is kinda high-end, but it's hideously
overpriced (for the Real Thing) and you need
to pump it with all kinds of DSP cards (which I
wish you could do with some of the others, BTW).
And more people think they can use Pro-Tools
effectively, than actually can.
Now that I've said all that, the fact is that
the high end of results is achievable by using
many of the above items, but there is much more
to it. Samplitude sucks unless your ears
don't. Same goes for the rest of it. And
chances are that Joe Prosumer is not going to
balance his entire basement studio and match
up everything (impedances, bit rates, clocks)
to the level that you'd find at a real pro
shop.
So what the hell is my point?
Given the above, I'd still be royally stoked to see
a *nix version of Cubase SX (or any of the others, really--hell, CoolEdit Pro would be great) because if pro audio is your game, Linux is
still lame. (Only because of lack of support, of
course.) Now that Linux with usable latencies for
audio work is available, how do we convince the
big names to write to it? Many of the audio apps
out there for Windows and Mac rely very heavily
on custom code for UI interaction, which pretty
much kills the Linux port unless it becomes
economically feasible for them to recode the entire
front end. Sucks, but that's what's happening.
And this from someone who's sworn by Linux since
1994. Drives me up the fucking wall that I still
need to boot to Win* or find a Mac to do any
real audio work.
I agree that it's a good idea to look at the
problem from outside the syntax of any one
language, but I don't understand how it follows
from the fact that PHP provides a commandline
processor that it assumes responsibility for
a programmer limiting h(is|er) view to PHP.
Many programmers doubtless do this, in any
language. But IMHO a programmer should be
thinking in terms of the problem and just use
the language as a tool to solve it.
In the PHPWiki example, if you want
interoperable serialization, you should
probably be using WDDX or something like it
anyway.;)
Hello. I mean no disrespect, but that does not seem to be
a terribly professional way to conduct an interview. This is simply my
opinion, and I do not mean any criticism.
Speaking as someone who has been involved in several interviews
over the past couple of years (for radio, newspaper, TV, and
webcasts), I think I can say that if you mean 'professional' as 'done
the way it normally is', then this interview pretty much illustrates
the quality of much of today's journalism. (No offense, chrisd--I
thought you did a lot better than many people do in your situation.)
Often when you get interviewed, it is over the phone or sitting in a
cafe or--god forbid--standing in front of a display in Miniature
World.:) Even if some form of recording is made at the time, what
ends up getting relayed to the public is usually chopped all to hell,
rearranged, and sometimes presented completely out of context. I like
to think that it's not malicious and is just due to time contraints,
but sometimes you wonder whether it was done to make something sound
better.
The usual Slashdot method of 'interviewing' doesn't really even
deserve the name--it's too honest. Whereas a newspaper or TV show will
present snippets of what the interviewee actually said. On Slashdot,
you get the actual words--all of them. You get that in very few other
venues.
So maybe we're just spoiled here, but I don't think that from a
journalistic integrity point of view that there is a problem with this
interview...it just isn't as different from what you get in a
newspaper than Slashdot interviews normally are.
Sure. And Win9x is still the de facto standard for desktop OSs. And Garth Brooks et al. are the de facto standard in what is being called 'country music' these days. Moo.
My point is that I would LOVE to get away from Windows and Macs for studio work, to something with the stability of, say, the RADAR 24 (BeOS-based hardware unit), except in a full editing workstation format (i.e. take my apps with me). I don't care whether it's BeOS, or Linux, or *BSD; all of these offer stability with which Macs and Windows just cannot compete.
Studio work is application-specific, as you note. But I will always gravitate toward the platform which can best keep those apps working. Unfortunately, in the world of Windows and Mac studio software, in most cases the studio software is of higher quality than the operating system. On *nix it's mostly the other way around.;)
It's only application-specific as far as the
applications go. If you can't trust the OS to
not drop out from underneath you, you feel edgy
every second you're in the studio.
This is *not* word-processing. When you're
charging $100 or more per hour, stability is
very important.
So, you go for the foundation which has the best
stability track record. Of course, this isn't
necessarily Linux, but Linux beats Windows all to
hell for stability--Macs too (never used OS X so
can't comment on that).
Until we get software with the same reliability
that the dedicated hardware units have--and I've
been programming too long to believe that this
will be soon;)--people will always want to trust
their work to the most stable system of which
they are aware. At the moment, this is neither
Windows nor Mac.
> In the end, I do feel rather foolish with my
> previous "sentence by sentence" comment. I was
> (still am) in the tub and the tone of your
> comment set me off.
Well, I feel like an ass for the brusqueness of tone I used....apologies again.:)
>> Then it's irresponsible of you to be spreading myths about something
>> you admittedly don't understand fully.
>
> Okay, I'll call you on that one. Where am I spreading any myths? I
> gave my opinion and several reasons behind why I have that
> opinion. But let's take my original post on a point per point basis
The original post I actually agreed with a bit more than the second.:)
Um...by the way, at no point did I say or imply that every statement
of your post was a myth;) so there's a bit of red herring in the
sentence-by-sentence deconstruction you provided.
> and you show me where I'm spreading myths. I don't even think you
> read the second comment after the first sentence.
I did; however, I responded carelessly--for which I apologize. Any
points you've made to which I don't respond here, I tend to agree
with.
> Why learn two languages when one does 99.9% of it without breaking a sweat?
>
> Why indeed? I don't see this as spreading myths; In fact I consider this a fact.
>
> PHP has umpteen number of DB interfaces.
>
> And it still does. Perhaps there are third-party classes which
> attempt to intgrate them (I even remember doing half of one myself)
> but no singular DB interface had become the main one when I was
> playing with PHP. This is a myth?
PHPlib has been the de facto standard for years; however, it was never
officially adopted by the PHP team. At the moment the PEAR::Db module
is the official standard for DBI-like database access. It is obviously
true that PHP has a zillion different database interfaces--but to take
that to mean that it doesn't have an abstraction layer would be
fallacious.
> Perl has DBI. No matter what you talk to it's all DBI and it's fast.
>
> I hope you don't consider this a myth.
>
> Yeah I know about the PHP interpreter but that's just plain old hokey.
>
> This you might construe as a myth but when I played with PHP it was hokey.
Well, for much longer than a year it's been an executable binary
interpreter with usage analogous to the perl interpreter.
> Regexps? OO? Parsing? PHP and Perl both have them
>
> More truth.
>
> But really when you think of it you have other things to do
> too... parsing logs, reformatting, search and replace... things
> that get done on a daily basis and are beyond the scope of
> "just the web". Write the module once, write it good and use it
> in all situations!
>
> I stand by that statement. From what I have read now PHP has a
> "regular" invocation to do CGI. However it is still not as common
> nor (IMO) as powerful as Perl. Myths? Disinformation?
> Hardly. Opinion? Definately.
The statement is fine, except for the 'just the web' bit--there is
nothing 'just the web' about PHP unless you compile it as a server
module. When I needed a quick script to search through a 6MB source
code tree and output XML documentation skeletons based on function
prototypes, I used PHP with absolutely no problems. I could as easily
have used perl, or even awk; that's immaterial. But PHP works just
fine for use as a general scripting tool. I also use it for logfile
management, and often for any quick little scripting tasks for which
I might formerly have used perl or sh. Hell, now it even has a GTK API
(immature but getting there quickly).
True, you do find more systems with perl preinstalled. When that
happens to me, I just stick a copy of the interpreter into $HOME/bin
and use that--much as one might have done in the days before perl was
standard equipment. Then I can use all of the same libraries in my
PHP commandline-oriented scripts just as easily as I can use them on
the web, and many of the scripts need not be changed at all in order
to be run equally well via a browser or the commandline.
You are also correct that I should have more carefully addressed
points from the second post:
> I can create a connection, run commands and get results generically
> with DBI. Yes there are vendor-specific extensions, but the base
> calls are the same. A year ago PHP did not have this.
Yes it did, just not officially sanctioned: PHPLib and Metabase, to
name two. Again, the current suggestion is PEAR::Db.
> So now... Show me where I'm spreading myths. If you can't, then
> please retract your statemnt that I'm spreading myths. After all,
> anything else would be irresponsible.
The brunt of my objection is against the propagation of the notions
that a) PHP doesn't make sense other than on the web, and b) that PHP
has no database abstraction layer. Of course, the fact that it works
fine as a general tool language and has database abstraction doesn't
mean that you should use it if you'd rather use something else, since
other tools will do it all fine too.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer: absolutely nothing beyond the staff having some cleanup to do. Slashdot can be fun--but nothing of true import depends upon it. Some users would obviously get pissed off for a while, (hell, I would be one of them) but life would continue irrespective of Slashdot's existence and/or site health.
And thus the problem with poor analogies is revealed.
I presume you'd rather hire someone who didn't know what he was up against as an 'expert'?
And by the way, these people are not crackers. They are students being taught the things they will be expected to know. If someone hasn't the training to find the holes in your systems, why on Earth would you hire them to plug those holes?
Sheesh. I guess I just imagined having known about it since last year. Huh. And I don't even really have a reason to have heard of it.
Guess I'll make sure to ask you whether I've really heard of the things I've heard of, just so I don't go getting all confused.
By that logic we might conclude that amoebic dysentery shouldn't exist either. :)
A parasite is a parasite is a parasite. Spammers are ideally suited to the internet environment at the moment--that's why this entire discussion is about trying to alter that environment to make it less livable (hopefully, outright fatal) to them.
Well, you've sure convinced me.
Don't confuse 'freedom' with 'getting to do anything I want'.
I am not taking issue with your spider expertise, just with the logic behind your assertion that the web can only be the work of multiple species. I haven't offered any evidence because I haven't made any assertions--just an observation that I thought it would be quite odd for spiders to share a web (although my actual wording was admittedly quite poor).
And I have no idea where the whole 'crossing to other webs to attack' thing you keep mentioning comes from--I neither implied nor stated that this was going on. The point is that it's not neighbouring webs--it's one web. Check out the pictures. There are zillions of the little critters all over the same chunks of web.
The major difference here is that you are stating that the web *must* be the work of multiple species. I am simply stating that there is insufficient evidence available (to us armchair types) to make this statement. I feel my credibility here is fine, as I'm not the one making unfounded statements. Given the available information, it is scientifically irresponsible to draw a conclusion without further research. Spiders are not my point. The scientific method is.
At any rate, I contacted Dr. Thair for his observations, so we can lay this to rest before it becomes any more of a pissing contest than it is. According to him, the population (of around 10^8 spiders) comprised 99.999% H. ksenius, of which 95% were mature males and females. He mentioned the presence of a "couple of bigger wolf spiders which were doing their best to get the hell out of there".
Whenever somebody says something is inconceivable, I think of all the people who have used that word throughout history--not many of whom were proved right in the long run.
The species involved is Halorates ksenius. All reports so far indicate only one species involved, which makes perfect sense when combined with the facts that the spiders, unable or unwilling to leave the area, just kept reproducing. Also, apparently the adults were living rather longer than expected, adding to the population. Since spiders don't reproduce across species lines, such a situation would lead to an increase in whatever species that population happened to consist of. There is no reason for it to be any more surprising that all involved spiders were of the same species--and in fact it would be pretty damn bizarre if several species of spider were able to coexist for so long without eating each other.
According to the Vancouver Sun, the field is 24 hectares (just under 60 acres).
So around 45 NFL football fields.
Where do you live, that you have caps on how much electicity you can use and how much mileage you can put on your car?
No, that's not true at all--try it. The webserver does not even come into the equation, since PHP is the one including the file, not the server.
.inc for library code', you'd *better* bloody well set a PHP handler for it in the web server config. I guess that would fall under the 'discipline' slide.
That said, if you have a policy like 'use
If you have enough money to have web access, but
not enough to learn another language, then money
isn't your problem, is it?
OK, essentially what you said here is what I
was trying to say. However, we can pretty much
assume that nobody keeps that kind of cash in a
sock under the pillow. So it's invested in
some way; it's working. That will likely create
as much work over the long term as a sudden
fluctuation would create in the short term. It's not guaranteed or even necessarily likely
to change the world situation much either way.
At any rate, I again agree with most of your
second post. But so many people believe the
message given in your first--and stop there,
not thinking any further--and use that kind of
view to rationalize gross consumption. That's
what my problem is with; not you.
I see what you're getting at, but they're still not losing money because of file sharing. If they are losing money, and at the same time other people are file sharing, then you can't just say that the one occurred because of the other. In this case, they appear to be only the natural results of the way reality has changed.
For one thing, they're losing sales in some areas because they really are producing inferior product. Fewer people than ever are prepared to cope with that, and are turning to other sources for original music (indie, foreign, etc).
For another, the fact is that music is no longer a scarce resourse. Anybody with a suitable machine and a decent ear can make, copy, or whatever, anything they want. The technology and ability to self-publish is new, and so the RIAA et al. can't really hope to maintain their traditional monopoly. There is this feeling they have, that since they've been able to maintain a chokehold on the market in the past, that they have the right to do so in perpetuity. Do they?
So yeah, they're losing money, and file sharing is happening, but proving causality is pretty difficult. And even if you can--is it a bad thing? Think about it. If they're going down because their product sucks and they can't adapt, then shouldn't they go down?
From disagreement to Hardcore Socialism in one step. I may have misjudged you.
I am quite comfortable with the workings of a capitalist economy, thanks. However, I can't agree that trickle-down economics works equally well in all cases regardless of the situation, as you are implying.
That may certainly be true for some of the money--but a case could hardly be made that this is to be expected for all, or even a substantial percentage, of it. At least, not based on the information at hand.
And that's what bothers me about this sort of blanket apologism: the message that "It all gets to the little guy in the end, and that's why the big guys should have and spend it". It may be true that some fraction of the conspicuous consumption of the rich ends up getting spent on research, housing, or other projects. That is not true for most of it.
"Decorate Expensively for the Poor!" doesn't really work.
Jesus. I thought Reaganomics died in the 80s. :(
Samplitude is very cool, but it is hardly 'high- end'. Cubase SX isn't 'high-end' either. iZ RADAR is a lot closer to the high end of the market and is very very cool indeed, but that runs BeOS and requires a software and hardware buy-in.
Pro-Tools is kinda high-end, but it's hideously overpriced (for the Real Thing) and you need to pump it with all kinds of DSP cards (which I wish you could do with some of the others, BTW). And more people think they can use Pro-Tools effectively, than actually can.
Now that I've said all that, the fact is that the high end of results is achievable by using many of the above items, but there is much more to it. Samplitude sucks unless your ears don't. Same goes for the rest of it. And chances are that Joe Prosumer is not going to balance his entire basement studio and match up everything (impedances, bit rates, clocks) to the level that you'd find at a real pro shop.
So what the hell is my point? Given the above, I'd still be royally stoked to see a *nix version of Cubase SX (or any of the others, really--hell, CoolEdit Pro would be great) because if pro audio is your game, Linux is still lame. (Only because of lack of support, of course.) Now that Linux with usable latencies for audio work is available, how do we convince the big names to write to it? Many of the audio apps out there for Windows and Mac rely very heavily on custom code for UI interaction, which pretty much kills the Linux port unless it becomes economically feasible for them to recode the entire front end. Sucks, but that's what's happening.
And this from someone who's sworn by Linux since 1994. Drives me up the fucking wall that I still need to boot to Win* or find a Mac to do any real audio work.
I agree that it's a good idea to look at the problem from outside the syntax of any one language, but I don't understand how it follows from the fact that PHP provides a commandline processor that it assumes responsibility for a programmer limiting h(is|er) view to PHP. Many programmers doubtless do this, in any language. But IMHO a programmer should be thinking in terms of the problem and just use the language as a tool to solve it.
In the PHPWiki example, if you want interoperable serialization, you should probably be using WDDX or something like it anyway. ;)
Speaking as someone who has been involved in several interviews over the past couple of years (for radio, newspaper, TV, and webcasts), I think I can say that if you mean 'professional' as 'done the way it normally is', then this interview pretty much illustrates the quality of much of today's journalism. (No offense, chrisd--I thought you did a lot better than many people do in your situation.)
Often when you get interviewed, it is over the phone or sitting in a cafe or--god forbid--standing in front of a display in Miniature World. :) Even if some form of recording is made at the time, what
ends up getting relayed to the public is usually chopped all to hell,
rearranged, and sometimes presented completely out of context. I like
to think that it's not malicious and is just due to time contraints,
but sometimes you wonder whether it was done to make something sound
better.
The usual Slashdot method of 'interviewing' doesn't really even deserve the name--it's too honest. Whereas a newspaper or TV show will present snippets of what the interviewee actually said. On Slashdot, you get the actual words--all of them. You get that in very few other venues.
So maybe we're just spoiled here, but I don't think that from a journalistic integrity point of view that there is a problem with this interview...it just isn't as different from what you get in a newspaper than Slashdot interviews normally are.
Sure. And Win9x is still the de facto standard for desktop OSs. And Garth Brooks et al. are the de facto standard in what is being called 'country music' these days. Moo.
My point is that I would LOVE to get away from Windows and Macs for studio work, to something with the stability of, say, the RADAR 24 (BeOS-based hardware unit), except in a full editing workstation format (i.e. take my apps with me). I don't care whether it's BeOS, or Linux, or *BSD; all of these offer stability with which Macs and Windows just cannot compete.
Studio work is application-specific, as you note. But I will always gravitate toward the platform which can best keep those apps working. Unfortunately, in the world of Windows and Mac studio software, in most cases the studio software is of higher quality than the operating system. On *nix it's mostly the other way around. ;)
It's only application-specific as far as the applications go. If you can't trust the OS to not drop out from underneath you, you feel edgy every second you're in the studio.
This is *not* word-processing. When you're charging $100 or more per hour, stability is very important.
So, you go for the foundation which has the best stability track record. Of course, this isn't necessarily Linux, but Linux beats Windows all to hell for stability--Macs too (never used OS X so can't comment on that).
Until we get software with the same reliability that the dedicated hardware units have--and I've been programming too long to believe that this will be soon ;)--people will always want to trust
their work to the most stable system of which
they are aware. At the moment, this is neither
Windows nor Mac.
> In the end, I do feel rather foolish with my
:)
> previous "sentence by sentence" comment. I was
> (still am) in the tub and the tone of your
> comment set me off.
Well, I feel like an ass for the brusqueness of tone I used....apologies again.
>> Then it's irresponsible of you to be spreading myths about something
:)
;) so there's a bit of red herring in the
>> you admittedly don't understand fully.
>
> Okay, I'll call you on that one. Where am I spreading any myths? I
> gave my opinion and several reasons behind why I have that
> opinion. But let's take my original post on a point per point basis
The original post I actually agreed with a bit more than the second.
Um...by the way, at no point did I say or imply that every statement
of your post was a myth
sentence-by-sentence deconstruction you provided.
> and you show me where I'm spreading myths. I don't even think you
> read the second comment after the first sentence.
I did; however, I responded carelessly--for which I apologize. Any
points you've made to which I don't respond here, I tend to agree
with.
> Why learn two languages when one does 99.9% of it without breaking a sweat?
>
> Why indeed? I don't see this as spreading myths; In fact I consider this a fact.
>
> PHP has umpteen number of DB interfaces.
>
> And it still does. Perhaps there are third-party classes which
> attempt to intgrate them (I even remember doing half of one myself)
> but no singular DB interface had become the main one when I was
> playing with PHP. This is a myth?
PHPlib has been the de facto standard for years; however, it was never
officially adopted by the PHP team. At the moment the PEAR::Db module
is the official standard for DBI-like database access. It is obviously
true that PHP has a zillion different database interfaces--but to take
that to mean that it doesn't have an abstraction layer would be
fallacious.
> Perl has DBI. No matter what you talk to it's all DBI and it's fast.
>
> I hope you don't consider this a myth.
>
> Yeah I know about the PHP interpreter but that's just plain old hokey.
>
> This you might construe as a myth but when I played with PHP it was hokey.
Well, for much longer than a year it's been an executable binary
interpreter with usage analogous to the perl interpreter.
> Regexps? OO? Parsing? PHP and Perl both have them
>
> More truth.
>
> But really when you think of it you have other things to do
> too... parsing logs, reformatting, search and replace... things
> that get done on a daily basis and are beyond the scope of
> "just the web". Write the module once, write it good and use it
> in all situations!
>
> I stand by that statement. From what I have read now PHP has a
> "regular" invocation to do CGI. However it is still not as common
> nor (IMO) as powerful as Perl. Myths? Disinformation?
> Hardly. Opinion? Definately.
The statement is fine, except for the 'just the web' bit--there is
nothing 'just the web' about PHP unless you compile it as a server
module. When I needed a quick script to search through a 6MB source
code tree and output XML documentation skeletons based on function
prototypes, I used PHP with absolutely no problems. I could as easily
have used perl, or even awk; that's immaterial. But PHP works just
fine for use as a general scripting tool. I also use it for logfile
management, and often for any quick little scripting tasks for which
I might formerly have used perl or sh. Hell, now it even has a GTK API
(immature but getting there quickly).
True, you do find more systems with perl preinstalled. When that
happens to me, I just stick a copy of the interpreter into $HOME/bin
and use that--much as one might have done in the days before perl was
standard equipment. Then I can use all of the same libraries in my
PHP commandline-oriented scripts just as easily as I can use them on
the web, and many of the scripts need not be changed at all in order
to be run equally well via a browser or the commandline.
You are also correct that I should have more carefully addressed
points from the second post:
> I can create a connection, run commands and get results generically
> with DBI. Yes there are vendor-specific extensions, but the base
> calls are the same. A year ago PHP did not have this.
Yes it did, just not officially sanctioned: PHPLib and Metabase, to
name two. Again, the current suggestion is PEAR::Db.
> So now... Show me where I'm spreading myths. If you can't, then
> please retract your statemnt that I'm spreading myths. After all,
> anything else would be irresponsible.
The brunt of my objection is against the propagation of the notions
that a) PHP doesn't make sense other than on the web, and b) that PHP
has no database abstraction layer. Of course, the fact that it works
fine as a general tool language and has database abstraction doesn't
mean that you should use it if you'd rather use something else, since
other tools will do it all fine too.
<p><i>This may be; I haven't seriously looked at the language in over a year now.</i></p>
<p>
Then it's irresponsible of you to be spreading
myths about something you admittedly don't
understand fully.
</p>