"I have seen the left argue against teaching or discussing abstinence (as an alternative even mind you, in my old high school the word is not allowed to be used in health education classes)."
Who is "the left". Again I have never heard anybody argue that abstinance should never be taught only that it is not sufficient. Please back up your claims. If you provide a link please provide further links as to why you think this person represents "the left".
"My point was not that anyone was outright claiming that condoms are 100% safe,"
So why did you say it then? Should I quote your original post? here it is.
"I am equaly pissed at the right for pretending that teaching only abstinence is effective as I am at the left for pretending that condoms are completly safe."
I'll leave it to the readers as to what you actually meant when you said that.
"My point along is this: tell the truth. Sex is a risk even with condoms. We must teach that condoms reduce this risk but we must also not forget that there is still a risk, and kids need to know that as well."
Yes. We should educate our kids on risk management. whether that risk comes from unprotected sex or crossing the street the kids need all the information so that they can make better decisions. Here is the problem. If you really want to tell the kids the truth you are going to have to tell them the following.
1) The most risky thing is unprotected sex. The chances for getting pregrant are huge and the chances of getting diseases are huge.
2) If you use condoms your chances of getting pregrant or disease is 2 to 15%.
3) If you don't have sex then your chances of getting pregrant or disease is zero.
Now kids go and manage your risk. Do a risk benefit analysis. Decide what you stand to gain, what you stand to lose, what kind of risk you are willing to take on. Are you willing to risk a 2 to 15% chance of getting pregrant or diseased to have sex?
you see mommy it's perfectly OK for the republicans to be racist because the democrats have at least one member who is also racist.
"Depends on your definition of the word "is"."
And also it's OK for the republicans to be racist because Bill Clinton was a bad man who had sex with a woman who was not his wife (and believe me this is just as bad as being racist).
"Also, the "tolerant" Democrat party isn't tolerant to real (read: fewer voters) minorities. Montana Republican Quits Senate Race After Gay Smear by Democrats [newsmax.com]"
Well yet another stupid clueless ignorant republican. Even though you are a republican and therefore are unable to grasp facts I will present them to you anyway in the hopes that other people can learn from them. I realize that the following facts are incapable of penetrating your brain.
Mike Taylor was running against Max Baucus and losing badly in the polls. Despite heavy negative advertising by Taylor and the Republican party Max was comfortably ahead and looked to be a sure bet.
The Republican party cut off funds for the Taylor campaign figuring it was foolish to dump money into a sure loser.
The democratic party ran an ad accusing Mike Taylor of fraud and being a thief because he swindled the US govt when he ran a beauty school. They backed up their accusations with documents.
In the aformentioned ad they showed clips from a Mike Taylor TV appearance from the 70s. In that clip Mr. Taylor had a HUGE afro, disco clothes including flares, shirt unbuttoned to his navel and necklaces and was applying makeup or massaging a mans face (it was a makeover show or some sort).
Mr Taylor then said that the ad made him look gay and dropped out of the race. It's important to note here that he never protested the fact he was being called a fraud and a thief. He just was upset that a show he made, showing him, in the clothes that he chose, and the hairstyle that he chose, and the occupation that he chose made him look gay. In other words he accused himself of being gay while completely ignoring the accusations of theft.
Then he went to several high schools to tell kids how bad negative advertising was and got his ass kicked by 16 year olds who kept asking him tough questions that he could not answer.
Then he re-entered the race while but never did answer whether he was a thief or not.
Then as expected he got his ass kicked by Max Baucus.
I know that was a lot of information for your tiny little brain so please ignore the facts and tune in Bill O'Reilly he won't bother you with facts like me and just tell you what to think.
"Typically, the confusion with the.NET buzzword is because microsoft marketing department have named everything product.NET.. what a stupid idea. Speaking of stupid idea's, passport wa... ahh forget it."
What are you saying exactly here? Isn't the MS marketing dept a part of MS? Don't they speak for MS? You are talking as if it some outside alien enttity..NET is a buzzword. I know so because MS tells me that. Not even MS knows what it is and by the time we all figure it out they will have abandoned it. Just like they abandoned COM/DCOM/COM+ in favor of.NET. Two years from now there will be a new buzzword.
Nevertheless the fact that the democrats were pro civil rights and the republicans were anti civil rights resulted in a historic shifting of the vote in the south. Soon afther the 48 election the south started voting republican because they believed (rightly so) that the republicans would prevent or slow down the advancement of the nigger.
Sorry to say to this day the republican party continues to be a haven for white supremecists.
"No, "we" think the two drugs involved, mifepristone and misoprostol, both originated for other uses."
well yes but were they liberal uses. Are the drugs liberal and are they used to cure liberal diseases. More importantly were they developed by liberal doctors and were they funded by liberal governments and liberal administrations.
You see the most important thing about drugs is if they are liberal or not. Simply stating facts only clouds the matter. Please refrain from actually refering to facts in all future slashdot posts or I will be forced to call you "liberal".
"I am equaly pissed at the right for pretending that teaching only abstinence is effective as I am at the left for pretending that condoms are completly safe."
I have never ever heard anybody say that condoms were completely safe. Nor have I read that anywhere. Would you please provide me a link that states that condoms are completely safe? I would very much like to see which web site says this.
"A your link is from a web site by a long-time anti cell phone activist who insists that cell phones cause illness."
Is this person a spokesperson for the democratic party? Do you have his voting record and can you demostrate for us that he is a "liberal" and that what he says is the official position of the "liberals".
If you don't want to make it compulsary at least move the voting day.
I suggest the 4th of July. People are off from work, the weather is usually pretty nice, and what better way to celebrate your independence then to vote.
A simple idea which could make all the difference in the world.
"This sounds to me very much like Microsoft is having a good hard look at what Linux/open source does well, and copying it. "
Yes that's always been what MS means when they say "innovation" it means somebody else thought it up and we stole the idea.
"We could well find that Windows moves on a lot thanks to the competition offered by Linux:"
This more then anything else defines the most inmportant reason why open source is critical to the future of computing. Without open source MS would not improve their OS and without open source to copy they would not have the means to improve their OS.
"But the era of kicking Windows for being unstable is already over, insecure looks on its way out (I read coders can get fired now for writing insecure code at redmond), and soon traditional UNIX strongholds like good remote administration may no longer be unique either."
Windows still has stability and security problems (IE exploits are still coming out at at least once a month). Windows already has terminal server for remote mgmt. I really don't see what a shell gets them. Maybe as a result of all this though we can now start calling Microsoft communists and refer to them as cancer. That would be good outcome don't you think.
"Now Windows is moving to.NET they are tidying up a lot of these problems, while we're still playing catchup."
They'll abandon.NET in two years don't worry. MS does not keep new buzzwords very long. As soon as we know what.NET means they'll shelve it.
DOnut troll was wrong about a bunch of things but we'll let that go for now.
"but he's right in that there are all kinds of situations where a developer might not have control over the server itself. That could be determined by an employer or client -- or the hosting might be locked in by a long-term contract. The poor schlob's supposed to drop his job or the equivalent just to satisfy your worldview? Geeez."
There are some people with no control over their programming environment. Boo Hoo. I don't want my php bloated to satisfy the needs of the minority.
People who do not have root access to their machines can not install the vast majority of the software available to them. Why is this any different?
If your php host does not have the XML module installed then find somebody else. What if you wanted the CURL extension or the ming extensions and your provider did not install them? Should those be in the default too? How about the ovrimos database functions let's roll them up as default too who knows somebody might want to write an application using them. Yes roll up everything anybody might want to use and deliver a bloated slow php to everybody.
Oh and by the way you do not have to recompile php to load modules. You can load them dynamically. If your host is not willing to put in the function you want either by compiling or loading dynamically then by all means drop them like a rock and find a host that is more responsive to your needs. Why would you want to host your website with somebody who was "incompetent, impatient, and lazy" anyway?
"When Redhat includes GLIBC by default, years ago, programmers could finally use it. It's not a problem downloading and configuring software on my box, it's the social situation of releasing software. Your beliefs go against PHP's programmers who decide what should be included by default."
Oh come on now that's a ridiculus argument to make. If you are delivering your application to somebody make the xml module a.dso and have them load it. It's like delivering any other software, if your software a library dependencies then you either ship the library or ask them to download and install it themselves.
" Who the hell cares what is "default" and what is not.
PHP programmers, me, and apparently a few others."
Man you keep bitching about this. Let me get this straight now. You are bitching and moaning about the fact that you have to type --with-xml when you build it. Is that right? Here let me quote your original post to let the world know exactly how stupid you are.
" One of the problems I'm having is that there's no way in the standard PHP build to deal with XML. I either have to treat it as a string and write regular expressions (which, as anyone who knows the regexp xml problem, isn't reliable) or build my own with some external xml library, meaning that as I want to allow others to use my code I have to get each user to recompile too (which is like asking people to recompile their kernel, some will do it, some won't, and there's _usually_ no good reason why it had to happen in the first place)."
So because you are too dumb to know to type --with-xml and because you are too lazy to actually read the manual and because you are too blind, high and retarded to follow the instructions when you type./configure you have to actually write XML parsers using the built in regular expression functions.
Yes that's exactly what you said!. Hey people look at me I am too stupid to type --with-xml so I bitch and moan about parsing XML with regular expressions.
That was voluntary on their part. The attorney general could have accepted a rational plea and it would have cost them nothing. They wanted to make an example of him so they stuck the taxpayers for a six year trial.
Yea sure the govt estimated that why wouldn't they. If the companies actually lost 50 million dollars they would have gone out of business. Saying "hey he transfered those pile of bits from our computer to his and it cost me 50 million" means nothing. How much money did the company actually lose? $0.00 that's what.
"The PHP programmers obviously recognise the distinction between being included in the standard build and being an optional extra."
Once again go and actually install the thing before you make ignorant comments like this. You have to configure the thing before you make and install it. Have you ever compiled a unix app before? Who the hell cares what is "default" and what is not. You always have to include at least one thing or another or you are going to get a pretty useless php build.
If you are really too stupid and lazy use the debian system. They have separately compiled each and every php option into loadable modules so you can do things like apt-get install php-XML. Or you can use freebsd which gives you the popular options in a menu.
"So PHP adds a feature over and above perl's Error.pm which insn't quite as good as checked exceptions but enought to make it better?"
It's not just that. There is a lot to php error handling. You just have to learn about it and use it to your advantage. I personally think try catch is not that great and in some ways would prefer the existing php error system. A stack trace would be cool thought.
Anything. Is the documentation so complete that it could not use a few words from you? Document how to shade, how to install, how to load and save files. Anything at all.
"I'm all for people sharing their ideas on techniques, but basic functionality of a product MUST be documented. "
No it MUST not. What is this some law of physics? It will get documented when people get off their asses and contribute and not one minute before that. Go ahead, learn something the hard way, experiment, cry, curse, spit and when you figure it out DOCUMENT and SHARE.
"it doesn't matter if the price tag is 'free' or not."
What nonsense of course it matters. If it did not matter you would have paid $700.00 for photoshop and would not be bitching about the crappy documentation.
"How can you possibly expect free software to succeed if people can't use it?"
People can use it. You can't but other people can and do.
"That problem alone could kill open source."
What nonsense. Nothing will will open source. As long as there is one programmer writing code there is open source. Do you see the usage of open source products declining from year to year? Is the linux market getting smaller, are less people using gimp every day? Give me a break and think about what you are saying before you speak.
He is a serial criminal in the same way that a cleptomaniac is a serial criminal, with one difference. The things he "stole" caused no economic damage whereas a cleptomaniac may actually steal some goods.
please educate yourself further. When you post obviously ignorant remarks like this you make yourself look extremely dumb.
You can compile SAX or DOMXML function into php or you can load them as modules. Same with mysql and postgres. As a rule PHP can load any set of functions dynamically or it can compile them statically.
Having external libraries is no different then PERL having modules, or VB having dlls, or java loading classes.
All the libraries you need are included in the distribution. Get the source code and do a./configure and choose the modules you want loaded statically. What is this nonsense you are sprouting off about them not "being included by default".
Please do yourself a favor and actually install the thing before you start rambling about things you know nothing about.
Re:consider running an opcode cache
on
PHP 4.3.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Ok, lets see, in the same thread there is a post about PHP not having an XML parser of any kind (the author mentions having to use regexp, insane as that sounds), I am assuming that means there is no HTML parser (or an equivalent of HTML::TreeBuilder at that) either.'
PHP has both SAX and DOM based XML parsers. It also has an xmltree function to instantly build you an object hierarchy from an XML document. There is also the most excellent phpxpath object available here
"What does PHP use in terms of a browser agent (a la LWP)?"
It supports fetching from URLs the same way as opening and fetching from files. The new version also has streams. Also it has hooks into CURL for more sophisticated stuff. There is also the excellent snoopy object.
"Is there really no support simple filebased db persistence? (by which I mean something along the lines of tieing a hash to BerkleyDB)"
There are hooks into berkley db if you want to sink to that level. If you want to sink even lower then any php variable, array or object can be turned into a string and saved to files or sent to other URLs or what have you.
"How well does it hook into the other stages of the Apache request handling pipeline?"
You don't have that much control over the pipeline but you can hook into auth and such. I never needed anything it did not provide.
"Oh and something I'm curious about (too lazy to look it up, I guess) what sort of exception handling does PHP have (ie it's equivalent of 'try {} catch {} finally {}')?"
PEAR has a pretty good error handling library. Otherwise you basically just test for errors manually. You call a function with @function which surpresses error messages but sets global error indicators which you can test for. Not great but gets the job done. Version five will have try catch. All in all error handling in php is better then perl and worse then java.
"What sort of logging modules are available? (log4PHP?)"
PEAR has a logging class. I know that there are others out there as well. PHP also hooks into syslog if you want that.
" I'd also be curious to know about how PHP's templating systems measure up, from someone who's had experience with this sort of thing..."
smarty is an outstanding templating engine with caching. I don't see how you could possibly do better. There are numerous others.
I hope this prevents you from further trolling. Now that you are armed with actual knowledge (which you could have gotten by simple searching) you no longer need to troll here.
Slashdot Mirror
" It is implied."
In other words you were lying.
"I have seen the left argue against teaching or discussing abstinence (as an alternative even mind you, in my old high school the word is not allowed to be used in health education classes)."
Who is "the left". Again I have never heard anybody argue that abstinance should never be taught only that it is not sufficient. Please back up your claims. If you provide a link please provide further links as to why you think this person represents "the left".
"My point was not that anyone was outright claiming that condoms are 100% safe,"
So why did you say it then? Should I quote your original post? here it is.
"I am equaly pissed at the right for pretending that teaching only abstinence is effective as I am at the left for pretending that condoms are completly safe."
I'll leave it to the readers as to what you actually meant when you said that.
"My point along is this: tell the truth. Sex is a risk even with condoms. We must teach that condoms reduce this risk but we must also not forget that there is still a risk, and kids need to know that as well."
Yes. We should educate our kids on risk management. whether that risk comes from unprotected sex or crossing the street the kids need all the information so that they can make better decisions. Here is the problem. If you really want to tell the kids the truth you are going to have to tell them the following.
1) The most risky thing is unprotected sex. The chances for getting pregrant are huge and the chances of getting diseases are huge.
2) If you use condoms your chances of getting pregrant or disease is 2 to 15%.
3) If you don't have sex then your chances of getting pregrant or disease is zero.
Now kids go and manage your risk. Do a risk benefit analysis. Decide what you stand to gain, what you stand to lose, what kind of risk you are willing to take on. Are you willing to risk a 2 to 15% chance of getting pregrant or diseased to have sex?
You know what the kids will choose don't you?
" I refer you to ex-KKK member Sen. Byrd."
you see mommy it's perfectly OK for the republicans to be racist because the democrats have at least one member who is also racist.
"Depends on your definition of the word "is"."
And also it's OK for the republicans to be racist because Bill Clinton was a bad man who had sex with a woman who was not his wife (and believe me this is just as bad as being racist).
"Also, the "tolerant" Democrat party isn't tolerant to real (read: fewer voters) minorities.
Montana Republican Quits Senate Race After Gay Smear by Democrats [newsmax.com]"
Well yet another stupid clueless ignorant republican. Even though you are a republican and therefore are unable to grasp facts I will present them to you anyway in the hopes that other people can learn from them. I realize that the following facts are incapable of penetrating your brain.
Mike Taylor was running against Max Baucus and losing badly in the polls. Despite heavy negative advertising by Taylor and the Republican party Max was comfortably ahead and looked to be a sure bet.
The Republican party cut off funds for the Taylor campaign figuring it was foolish to dump money into a sure loser.
The democratic party ran an ad accusing Mike Taylor of fraud and being a thief because he swindled the US govt when he ran a beauty school. They backed up their accusations with documents.
In the aformentioned ad they showed clips from a Mike Taylor TV appearance from the 70s. In that clip Mr. Taylor had a HUGE afro, disco clothes including flares, shirt unbuttoned to his navel and necklaces and was applying makeup or massaging a mans face (it was a makeover show or some sort).
Mr Taylor then said that the ad made him look gay and dropped out of the race. It's important to note here that he never protested the fact he was being called a fraud and a thief. He just was upset that a show he made, showing him, in the clothes that he chose, and the hairstyle that he chose, and the occupation that he chose made him look gay. In other words he accused himself of being gay while completely ignoring the accusations of theft.
Then he went to several high schools to tell kids how bad negative advertising was and got his ass kicked by 16 year olds who kept asking him tough questions that he could not answer.
Then he re-entered the race while but never did answer whether he was a thief or not.
Then as expected he got his ass kicked by Max Baucus.
I know that was a lot of information for your tiny little brain so please ignore the facts and tune in Bill O'Reilly he won't bother you with facts like me and just tell you what to think.
"Typically, the confusion with the .NET buzzword is because microsoft marketing department have named everything product.NET.. what a stupid idea. Speaking of stupid idea's, passport wa... ahh forget it."
.NET is a buzzword. I know so because MS tells me that. Not even MS knows what it is and by the time we all figure it out they will have abandoned it. Just like they abandoned COM/DCOM/COM+ in favor of .NET. Two years from now there will be a new buzzword.
What are you saying exactly here? Isn't the MS marketing dept a part of MS? Don't they speak for MS? You are talking as if it some outside alien enttity.
Nevertheless the fact that the democrats were pro civil rights and the republicans were anti civil rights resulted in a historic shifting of the vote in the south. Soon afther the 48 election the south started voting republican because they believed (rightly so) that the republicans would prevent or slow down the advancement of the nigger.
Sorry to say to this day the republican party continues to be a haven for white supremecists.
"No, "we" think the two drugs involved, mifepristone and misoprostol, both originated for other uses."
well yes but were they liberal uses. Are the drugs liberal and are they used to cure liberal diseases. More importantly were they developed by liberal doctors and were they funded by liberal governments and liberal administrations.
You see the most important thing about drugs is if they are liberal or not. Simply stating facts only clouds the matter. Please refrain from actually refering to facts in all future slashdot posts or I will be forced to call you "liberal".
"I am equaly pissed at the right for pretending that teaching only abstinence is effective as I am at the left for pretending that condoms are completly safe."
I have never ever heard anybody say that condoms were completely safe. Nor have I read that anywhere. Would you please provide me a link that states that condoms are completely safe? I would very much like to see which web site says this.
Thanks.
"A your link is from a web site by a long-time anti cell phone activist who insists that cell phones cause illness."
Is this person a spokesperson for the democratic party? Do you have his voting record and can you demostrate for us that he is a "liberal" and that what he says is the official position of the "liberals".
Thank you for clearing this matter up for me.
If you don't want to make it compulsary at least move the voting day.
I suggest the 4th of July. People are off from work, the weather is usually pretty nice, and what better way to celebrate your independence then to vote.
A simple idea which could make all the difference in the world.
"This sounds to me very much like Microsoft is having a good hard look at what Linux/open source does well, and copying it. "
.NET they are tidying up a lot of these problems, while we're still playing catchup."
.NET in two years don't worry. MS does not keep new buzzwords very long. As soon as we know what .NET means they'll shelve it.
Yes that's always been what MS means when they say "innovation" it means somebody else thought it up and we stole the idea.
"We could well find that Windows moves on a lot thanks to the competition offered by Linux:"
This more then anything else defines the most inmportant reason why open source is critical to the future of computing. Without open source MS would not improve their OS and without open source to copy they would not have the means to improve their OS.
"But the era of kicking Windows for being unstable is already over, insecure looks on its way out (I read coders can get fired now for writing insecure code at redmond), and soon traditional UNIX strongholds like good remote administration may no longer be unique either."
Windows still has stability and security problems (IE exploits are still coming out at at least once a month). Windows already has terminal server for remote mgmt. I really don't see what a shell gets them. Maybe as a result of all this though we can now start calling Microsoft communists and refer to them as cancer. That would be good outcome don't you think.
"Now Windows is moving to
They'll abandon
"UFOs to only appear to drunken cowboys "
You think UFOs are only witnessed by drunken cowboys? Why oh why do ignorant, clueless fools keep insisting on posting here.
DOnut troll was wrong about a bunch of things but we'll let that go for now.
"but he's right in that there are all kinds of situations where a developer might not have control over the server itself. That could be determined by an employer or client -- or the hosting might be locked in by a long-term contract. The poor schlob's supposed to drop his job or the equivalent just to satisfy your worldview? Geeez."
There are some people with no control over their programming environment. Boo Hoo. I don't want my php bloated to satisfy the needs of the minority.
And if I do may I never ever have stupid, lazy whining people as employees.
People who do not have root access to their machines can not install the vast majority of the software available to them. Why is this any different?
If your php host does not have the XML module installed then find somebody else. What if you wanted the CURL extension or the ming extensions and your provider did not install them? Should those be in the default too? How about the ovrimos database functions let's roll them up as default too who knows somebody might want to write an application using them. Yes roll up everything anybody might want to use and deliver a bloated slow php to everybody.
Oh and by the way you do not have to recompile php to load modules. You can load them dynamically. If your host is not willing to put in the function you want either by compiling or loading dynamically then by all means drop them like a rock and find a host that is more responsive to your needs. Why would you want to host your website with somebody who was "incompetent, impatient, and lazy" anyway?
"When Redhat includes GLIBC by default, years ago, programmers could finally use it. It's not a problem downloading and configuring software on my box, it's the social situation of releasing software. Your beliefs go against PHP's programmers who decide what should be included by default."
.dso and have them load it. It's like delivering any other software, if your software a library dependencies then you either ship the library or ask them to download and install it themselves.
Oh come on now that's a ridiculus argument to make. If you are delivering your application to somebody make the xml module a
" Who the hell cares what is "default" and what is not.
./configure you have to actually write XML parsers using the built in regular expression functions.
PHP programmers, me, and apparently a few others."
Man you keep bitching about this. Let me get this straight now. You are bitching and moaning about the fact that you have to type --with-xml when you build it. Is that right? Here let me quote your original post to let the world know exactly how stupid you are.
" One of the problems I'm having is that there's no way in the standard PHP build to deal with XML. I either have to treat it as a string and write regular expressions (which, as anyone who knows the regexp xml problem, isn't reliable) or build my own with some external xml library, meaning that as I want to allow others to use my code I have to get each user to recompile too (which is like asking people to recompile their kernel, some will do it, some won't, and there's _usually_ no good reason why it had to happen in the first place)."
So because you are too dumb to know to type --with-xml and because you are too lazy to actually read the manual and because you are too blind, high and retarded to follow the instructions when you type
Yes that's exactly what you said!. Hey people look at me I am too stupid to type --with-xml so I bitch and moan about parsing XML with regular expressions.
MORON.
That was voluntary on their part. The attorney general could have accepted a rational plea and it would have cost them nothing. They wanted to make an example of him so they stuck the taxpayers for a six year trial.
Yea sure the govt estimated that why wouldn't they. If the companies actually lost 50 million dollars they would have gone out of business. Saying "hey he transfered those pile of bits from our computer to his and it cost me 50 million" means nothing. How much money did the company actually lose? $0.00 that's what.
"The PHP programmers obviously recognise the distinction between being included in the standard build and being an optional extra."
Once again go and actually install the thing before you make ignorant comments like this. You have to configure the thing before you make and install it. Have you ever compiled a unix app before? Who the hell cares what is "default" and what is not. You always have to include at least one thing or another or you are going to get a pretty useless php build.
If you are really too stupid and lazy use the debian system. They have separately compiled each and every php option into loadable modules so you can do things like apt-get install php-XML. Or you can use freebsd which gives you the popular options in a menu.
Moron.
"So PHP adds a feature over and above perl's Error.pm which insn't quite as good as checked exceptions but enought to make it better?"
It's not just that. There is a lot to php error handling. You just have to learn about it and use it to your advantage. I personally think try catch is not that great and in some ways would prefer the existing php error system. A stack trace would be cool thought.
So what? How does this harm anybody? Who the fuck cares?
"And what am I supposed to document?"
Anything. Is the documentation so complete that it could not use a few words from you? Document how to shade, how to install, how to load and save files. Anything at all.
"I'm all for people sharing their ideas on techniques, but basic functionality of a product MUST be documented. "
No it MUST not. What is this some law of physics? It will get documented when people get off their asses and contribute and not one minute before that. Go ahead, learn something the hard way, experiment, cry, curse, spit and when you figure it out DOCUMENT and SHARE.
"it doesn't matter if the price tag is 'free' or not."
What nonsense of course it matters. If it did not matter you would have paid $700.00 for photoshop and would not be bitching about the crappy documentation.
"How can you possibly expect free software to succeed if people can't use it?"
People can use it. You can't but other people can and do.
"That problem alone could kill open source."
What nonsense. Nothing will will open source. As long as there is one programmer writing code there is open source. Do you see the usage of open source products declining from year to year? Is the linux market getting smaller, are less people using gimp every day? Give me a break and think about what you are saying before you speak.
He is a serial criminal in the same way that a cleptomaniac is a serial criminal, with one difference. The things he "stole" caused no economic damage whereas a cleptomaniac may actually steal some goods.
Please go to sourceforge and type the following words into the search engine.
php apache windows install
Make sure you have "must contain all words" checked. There you will find some installers which will set it up for you with no problems.
please educate yourself further. When you post obviously ignorant remarks like this you make yourself look extremely dumb.
./configure and choose the modules you want loaded statically. What is this nonsense you are sprouting off about them not "being included by default".
You can compile SAX or DOMXML function into php or you can load them as modules. Same with mysql and postgres. As a rule PHP can load any set of functions dynamically or it can compile them statically.
Having external libraries is no different then PERL having modules, or VB having dlls, or java loading classes.
All the libraries you need are included in the distribution. Get the source code and do a
Please do yourself a favor and actually install the thing before you start rambling about things you know nothing about.
"Ok, lets see, in the same thread there is a post about PHP not having an XML parser of any kind (the author mentions having to use regexp, insane as that sounds), I am assuming that means there is no HTML parser (or an equivalent of HTML::TreeBuilder at that) either.'
PHP has both SAX and DOM based XML parsers. It also has an xmltree function to instantly build you an object hierarchy from an XML document. There is also the most excellent phpxpath object available here
"What does PHP use in terms of a browser agent (a la LWP)?"
It supports fetching from URLs the same way as opening and fetching from files. The new version also has streams. Also it has hooks into CURL for more sophisticated stuff. There is also the excellent snoopy object.
"Is there really no support simple filebased db persistence? (by which I mean something along the lines of tieing a hash to BerkleyDB)"
There are hooks into berkley db if you want to sink to that level. If you want to sink even lower then any php variable, array or object can be turned into a string and saved to files or sent to other URLs or what have you.
"How well does it hook into the other stages of the Apache request handling pipeline?"
You don't have that much control over the pipeline but you can hook into auth and such. I never needed anything it did not provide.
"Oh and something I'm curious about (too lazy to look it up, I guess) what sort of exception handling does PHP have (ie it's equivalent of 'try {} catch {} finally {}')?"
PEAR has a pretty good error handling library. Otherwise you basically just test for errors manually. You call a function with @function which surpresses error messages but sets global error indicators which you can test for. Not great but gets the job done. Version five will have try catch. All in all error handling in php is better then perl and worse then java.
"What sort of logging modules are available? (log4PHP?)"
PEAR has a logging class. I know that there are others out there as well. PHP also hooks into syslog if you want that.
" I'd also be curious to know about how PHP's templating systems measure up, from someone who's had experience with this sort of thing..."
smarty is an outstanding templating engine with caching. I don't see how you could possibly do better. There are numerous others.
I hope this prevents you from further trolling. Now that you are armed with actual knowledge (which you could have gotten by simple searching) you no longer need to troll here.