That's bullshit. No way in hell do you need to offset 40 billion dollars in options. Bill actually thinks he will need cold hard cash in the near future. He knows something that you and I don't. I can think of no other company in the world who keeps that much in liquid assets.
"The military does not get ballots filled in, nor were any of the claims that the cops were used to suppress the vote found to have any validity."
Wrong on both accounts. As a veteran I can personally attest to the fact that enlisted personell (especially the lower ranked ones) are indeed given pre-filled out absentee ballots by their superiors and are "encouraged" to vote. As for florida they were sued and settled out of court. And of course there is no question about the fact that thousands of blacks were literally erased from the lists by branding them as felons.
"I never said that Dems oppose legislation requiring ID checks."
Yes you did. Go back and re-read your own post.
"They also pushed heavily for the Motor Voter legislation which really opens the door to fraud."
Bullshit. How does registering people lead to fraud. Why should a citizen have to register in the first place? I am a citizen and it's my constitutional right to vote. All registration does is throw an obstacle in front me when I want to exercize my right. Why do republicans who oppose registering guns want to register voters?
"If the demographics are what you say they are, then they shouldn't have to worry and would want clean elections."
We live in a country full of corruption. We live in a country run by some of the scariest people who ever lived. People who don't believe in democracy, law or anything else except making more money for themselves and increasing their personal power. The Neo COnservative movement that is steering this country right has already weakened many of our personal freedoms and will in most likelyhood trun this country into a military state if given half a chance. They have already taken a page out of 1984 and started the eternal war. Given the level of corruption at all levels of govt and given the stakes involved in controlling that govt I expect all kinds of mayhem to take place during elections.
The stakes are literally life and death now. The losing party when the shit hits the fan is likely to occupy mass graves.
"And no, not every citizen has the right to vote. Convicted felons loose that right and must make a special appeal depending on their state laws to get it back. Of course, that's considered 'voter suppression' too."
Well in a sense it is. COnsider that most policeman are most AGs are republican it cetrainly is in their interest to arrest people who are likely to vote democratic (blacks and latinos) more frequently and once arrested to charge them with felonies. There is a reason the prison population is lopsidedly minority and this is one of them.
Well you and the rest of the world that uses MS software. That is however irrelevant. That money belongs to MS shareholders and in any other publicly held company having 40 billion in cash laying around is bad. Companies are supposed to either use the money for aquisitions or growth through other means or give it back to the shareholders via dividends.
MS instead is holding on to cash assets and I want to know why? I suspect that Bill Gates knows something about the world economy that we don't.
" If you think voting for Democrats versus Republicans is going to solve the Microsoft problem you are truly mistaken"
It may not solve the problem but it does send a strong message. If enough people vote democrat then this administration might get scared and change their attitude and policies.
"Horrible, those damn bastards might install patches to keep worms from spreading like Code Red and Nimda, because people who pirate their software typically aren't smart enough to secure it. Those bastards!"
On the other hand they might read your dard drive, extract your outlook email list and send it to MS so that the list could be used for spam. Or maybe they might disable all non MS products on your hard drive or they might change all your preferences to use MS products as default.
Why not? you gave them that right when you clicked OK. Would they abuse that right? Of course they would they are evil people who have done worse.
You seem to think that it's an outrage that people are using their right to vote. Maybe you are just upset that people are using that righ to vote for a democrat. After all you seem to have no problems with the military being given filled in absentee ballots to mail in and systemic efforts by the republican party to prevent people from voting including using the police to intimidate blacks and indians. I am glad to report to you that despite people like you every american citizen still has the right to vote and more of them will vote for democrats then republicans this election just like they did the last election. Given the trends in demographics and voting patterns (and to people like you who show the real and ugly face of republicans) I predict 2004 will be a very strong showing for democrats as well presuming George W does not delay the execution of iraquis till the next election and does not impose a military state.
BTW please provide some documentaion showing that democrats oppose legislation that requires ID checks or prevents residents of one state from voting in another state. If you can not show such an evidence then you are just another right wing ignorant dittohead whose entire news sources are Rush, Bill O'reilly,fox tv and other conservative media.
The outcome of the florida election had nothing to with butterfly ballots or hanging chads. The republicans won florida because they very successfully denied thousands of black the right to vote. It reamins to be seen if they are as succesful this time around.
I really don't think so. The right is better organized, better financed and more in lockstep then the left. Plus they view the left as their sworn enemy to be destroyed. The left are a bunch of wimps who don't want to fight. The right are pitbulls who will vicously attack anybody who gets in their way.
Ever hear of an abortion doctor who killed a born again christian? Ever hear of the reverse?
"unless you're either in public (maiking an ass of yourself), distributing, or get caught while buying, you're pretty much safe doing them in the confines of your own home."
This is an interesting point. Most young people do not do drugs at home for fear of being caught by their parents. Therefore they go outside and do drugs or drink.
Now if you are white suburburnite middle class kid you drive daddy's car into the "woods" with your friends and drink, do drugs and fuck your girlfriend pretty confident the you won't ever see a cop in the middle of the night way out there. Same situation if you live in rural farm country or in the west.
If on the other hand you are an inner city kid who is poor (ie black and hispanic) then all you can do is try to drink or do drugs in some alley. As an added bonus you live in well lighted areas that are heavily patrolled by cops especially at night. Your chances of getting caught are much much higher.
This is why there is a HUGE discrepency between the number of whites and black felons.
Buying education version when you are not a student is exactly like pirating it. Why not jut pirate it and call it a day? Does it really ease your conscience to buy education version illegally?
"but in java interfaces are a form of multiple inheritence."
Intterfaces are not the same thing as multiple inheritance. In multiple inheritance you write the methods and the inheriting class has access to them. In interfaces you promise the methods but don't implement them leaving that job to the inheriting class. C++ and some of the more "pure" object oriented languages like smalltalk support multiple inheritance but it is generally considered a dangerous thing. Java does not support it, the.NET framework does not support it, python, ruby, perl, and php don't support it either.
"And encapsulation as an OO term is data hiding."
Are you refering to the fact that PHP does not have private variables? IF so this is a minor thing IMHO. The variables have a "private enough" scope to avoid any namespace problems and you don't have to access them if you don't want to. I simply write my php objects as if the variables were all private and use my object by calling getters and setters just like java.
Personally I much prefer the php objects to java objects because I can change objects at runtime. PHP shares this dynamism with languages like objective-c and ruby. Until you experience it I can't really explain it to you but it's really cool.
" One thing may clear this up. Have you used any one of these languages Java,Pyhton or C++?"
Yes.
"If I understand you posts correctly you are suggesting that PHP OO can hold a stick to Java."
Are you sure you are replying to the same post? I said no such thing.
" If this is the case I wonder how much Java web development have you done?"
TONS.
"Have you used any of these Velocity,Jython, Taglibs, or EJB?"
Some.
"How many 100K objects do you pass around in you PHP applications? "
None.
"Passing by reference?"
Sometimes if I feel the need for it.
"Last time I tried PHP with lots of object I kept getting out of memory errors."
Perhaps you don't know php well enough.
"Well I guess I should have thought to myself it make complete sense that PHP would pass be value instead of by refrence."
Whether it makes sense to you or not is irrelevant. It's a published specification of the language and many things have been written about it. Some languages use copy on assign and some use references it's up to you to read the documentation and learn the language so that you can use it properly. PHP is not java and only an idiot would expect it to behave exactly like java.
"And I should use a _work_around_ to fix it."
No just learn the language you are trying to use.
"And I should build my own intelegent object caching. "
Or use a library written by someone else. Which language support automatic object caching natively? In java you have to rely on HUGE frameworks with extremely complicated setup and configuration to achieve such a thing. Did you write velocity? did you write your own EJB container? Java does not have built in object pools either.
"Oh one more thing how do you get connection pools form PHP or does every Apache proccess have to create a database connections?"
PHP frees me from having to think about database pooling because it takes care of all the dirty work for me. I simply write code as if my database connection was the only one was being opened fresh every time (even though it's being pulled from the pool). All database function in php have a "pconnect" function which goes into the php pool for the database connection. All I have to do is to set an ini entry specifying how many connections I want to maintain. I also use ADODB database abstraction layer which makes my code very easy to port to other databases. Add to this the ability to stream just about any object to string and cache them locally I can skip many trips to the database altogether. I frequently generate comboboxes and grids which are database generated (but not frequently changed) and cache them on the local drive which saves a round trip to the database server.
Coding data driven web sites in PHP is a downright joy compared to the insane headaches one has to go through to do the same thing in EJBs or even velocity. If I really want to use something like taglibs I can use the Krysalis framework which is a velocity look alike. If taglibs are not up my alley I can use smarty templates. If don't want either one I can use an application framework such as binarycloud. I have more choices then a java web developer.
PHP is also much faster then any solution coded with EJB. In fact any solution coded with EJBs is significantly slower then just about any other technology. If you don't believe me go visit theserverside.com and read some the their benchmarks. Java is also a downright annoying language if you ask me. Any language with forces me implement an interface just to define a filemask is too stupid to use.
"but it does not support multiple inheritance, virtual classes, or encapsulation. If you need to ask "how is php lacking in encapsulation" then you either A) know dick all about PHP, or B) do not know what the term encapsulation means."
A lot of OO languages don't support multiple inheritance including java, ruby, and C#.
PHP does not support virtual classes (nor interfaces) but then again it does not really need them because it has mix-in type facilities.
As for encapsulation I say that it does support encapsulation as defined here so once again tell me how php does not support encapsulation.
"I can't. All of my web sites are hosted through hosting services and I don't have control over the PHP config file."
Not really true. Many of the PHP settings can be set in code at run time see the ini_set() function. Also some of them can be set in apache using.htaccess or httpd.conf.
"That's not an easy fix, you still have to retrofit your code everytime a bug pops up in order to get the benefits."
No you don't. Just write a function called getPostVar or getParameter or something and only use that function to fetch submitted variables. That way you can do all kinds of sanity checks and you are shielded from relying on global variables.
"OK then, why don't constructors on PHP subclasses implicitly call the constructors of their superclasses?"
You can call them explicitly if you like no big deal just another line of code.
"And again, I cannot change my config file"
Once again you can change many if not most config directives either via apache or at run time. Some settings are not changeable but that is done to protect the ISP. In other words it's a feature not a bug. If those protections did not exist then you would not be able to find anybody who even offers php web hosting.
"promiscuous casting and lack of type checking (debugging can be a nightmare as a result)"
Easy work around. Look up functions like is_numeric() or the ctype functions. I for one wrote a very simple function to retrive the value of a variable and to check for it's "correctness" in a few minutes.
Having said all that a "strict" mode would be very nice.
"half baked OO support"
Nonsense. You obviously don't have a good understanding of how php objects work.
* Way too many functions do more than one thing or do different things depending on how your config file is set up"
Again nonsense. There are a lot of functions and that's a good thing but very few of them depend on some sort of a config setting.
"2. No standardized database API. Want to develop on DB a and later move to DB b? HA."
In this respect it's exactly like PERL, Python, ruby, java, VB, C++, C, c# and a thousand other languages.
Very few languages have a BUILT IN database abstraction feature. All the languages above use some sort of a LIBRARY to try and achieve database independence. PERL for example has the DBI library while the windows folks use ODBC or ADO.
PHP offers several LIBRARIES for your pleasure. There is metabase, PEAR, ADODB, and the phplib libraries just for start.
I am hoping that this post will once and for all clear up this stupid and ignorant critisim of PHP. Database access in PHP is as good or better then most languages.
Php supports writing of objects. It support inheritance. It's highly dynamic in that you can add to objects at runtime (like ruby). You can do mixin type things.
There is a lively discussion about how slow and cumbersome j2ee is on javalobby right here
These are advocates of Java complaining about how much j2ee sucks.
I for one think that you need to be a rocket scientists to write a large j2ee application that can perform realatively fast while anybody can write php applications that can run fast.
Slashdot Mirror
XUL look into it.
That's bullshit. No way in hell do you need to offset 40 billion dollars in options. Bill actually thinks he will need cold hard cash in the near future. He knows something that you and I don't. I can think of no other company in the world who keeps that much in liquid assets.
"The military does not get ballots filled in, nor were any of the claims that the cops were used to suppress the vote found to have any validity."
Wrong on both accounts. As a veteran I can personally attest to the fact that enlisted personell (especially the lower ranked ones) are indeed given pre-filled out absentee ballots by their superiors and are "encouraged" to vote. As for florida they were sued and settled out of court. And of course there is no question about the fact that thousands of blacks were literally erased from the lists by branding them as felons.
"I never said that Dems oppose legislation requiring ID checks."
Yes you did. Go back and re-read your own post.
"They also pushed heavily for the Motor Voter legislation which really opens the door to fraud."
Bullshit. How does registering people lead to fraud. Why should a citizen have to register in the first place? I am a citizen and it's my constitutional right to vote. All registration does is throw an obstacle in front me when I want to exercize my right. Why do republicans who oppose registering guns want to register voters?
"If the demographics are what you say they are, then they shouldn't have to worry and would want clean elections."
We live in a country full of corruption. We live in a country run by some of the scariest people who ever lived. People who don't believe in democracy, law or anything else except making more money for themselves and increasing their personal power. The Neo COnservative movement that is steering this country right has already weakened many of our personal freedoms and will in most likelyhood trun this country into a military state if given half a chance. They have already taken a page out of 1984 and started the eternal war. Given the level of corruption at all levels of govt and given the stakes involved in controlling that govt I expect all kinds of mayhem to take place during elections.
The stakes are literally life and death now. The losing party when the shit hits the fan is likely to occupy mass graves.
"And no, not every citizen has the right to vote. Convicted felons loose that right and must make a special appeal depending on their state laws to get it back. Of course, that's considered 'voter suppression' too."
Well in a sense it is. COnsider that most policeman are most AGs are republican it cetrainly is in their interest to arrest people who are likely to vote democratic (blacks and latinos) more frequently and once arrested to charge them with felonies. There is a reason the prison population is lopsidedly minority and this is one of them.
"Ummmm.... Where cash comes from?"
Well you and the rest of the world that uses MS software. That is however irrelevant. That money belongs to MS shareholders and in any other publicly held company having 40 billion in cash laying around is bad. Companies are supposed to either use the money for aquisitions or growth through other means or give it back to the shareholders via dividends.
MS instead is holding on to cash assets and I want to know why? I suspect that Bill Gates knows something about the world economy that we don't.
" If you think voting for Democrats versus Republicans is going to solve the Microsoft problem you are truly mistaken"
It may not solve the problem but it does send a strong message. If enough people vote democrat then this administration might get scared and change their attitude and policies.
Ascroft has got to go he totally caved in to MS.
"Horrible, those damn bastards might install patches to keep worms from spreading like Code Red and Nimda, because people who pirate their software typically aren't smart enough to secure it. Those bastards!"
On the other hand they might read your dard drive, extract your outlook email list and send it to MS so that the list could be used for spam. Or maybe they might disable all non MS products on your hard drive or they might change all your preferences to use MS products as default.
Why not? you gave them that right when you clicked OK. Would they abuse that right? Of course they would they are evil people who have done worse.
You seem to think that it's an outrage that people are using their right to vote. Maybe you are just upset that people are using that righ to vote for a democrat. After all you seem to have no problems with the military being given filled in absentee ballots to mail in and systemic efforts by the republican party to prevent people from voting including using the police to intimidate blacks and indians. I am glad to report to you that despite people like you every american citizen still has the right to vote and more of them will vote for democrats then republicans this election just like they did the last election. Given the trends in demographics and voting patterns (and to people like you who show the real and ugly face of republicans) I predict 2004 will be a very strong showing for democrats as well presuming George W does not delay the execution of iraquis till the next election and does not impose a military state.
BTW please provide some documentaion showing that democrats oppose legislation that requires ID checks or prevents residents of one state from voting in another state. If you can not show such an evidence then you are just another right wing ignorant dittohead whose entire news sources are Rush, Bill O'reilly,fox tv and other conservative media.
The outcome of the florida election had nothing to with butterfly ballots or hanging chads. The republicans won florida because they very successfully denied thousands of black the right to vote. It reamins to be seen if they are as succesful this time around.
" If you pass the test, you can vote."
We already had this in the US. You want to go back to Jim Crow?
"The 'right' is just as divided as the 'left'."
I really don't think so. The right is better organized, better financed and more in lockstep then the left. Plus they view the left as their sworn enemy to be destroyed. The left are a bunch of wimps who don't want to fight. The right are pitbulls who will vicously attack anybody who gets in their way.
Ever hear of an abortion doctor who killed a born again christian? Ever hear of the reverse?
Better yet move the voting day to July 4th. What better way to celebrate your independence then to vote.
"unless you're either in public (maiking an ass of yourself), distributing, or get caught while buying, you're pretty much safe doing them in the confines of your own home."
This is an interesting point. Most young people do not do drugs at home for fear of being caught by their parents. Therefore they go outside and do drugs or drink.
Now if you are white suburburnite middle class kid you drive daddy's car into the "woods" with your friends and drink, do drugs and fuck your girlfriend pretty confident the you won't ever see a cop in the middle of the night way out there. Same situation if you live in rural farm country or in the west.
If on the other hand you are an inner city kid who is poor (ie black and hispanic) then all you can do is try to drink or do drugs in some alley. As an added bonus you live in well lighted areas that are heavily patrolled by cops especially at night. Your chances of getting caught are much much higher.
This is why there is a HUGE discrepency between the number of whites and black felons.
And everybody who is dusgusted with this ruling should remember this when they go to vote.
It is a wrist slap and I hope everybody here remembers that when they go to vote soon.
Buying education version when you are not a student is exactly like pirating it. Why not jut pirate it and call it a day? Does it really ease your conscience to buy education version illegally?
"but in java interfaces are a form of multiple inheritence."
.NET framework does not support it, python, ruby, perl, and php don't support it either.
Intterfaces are not the same thing as multiple inheritance. In multiple inheritance you write the methods and the inheriting class has access to them. In interfaces you promise the methods but don't implement them leaving that job to the inheriting class. C++ and some of the more "pure" object oriented languages like smalltalk support multiple inheritance but it is generally considered a dangerous thing. Java does not support it, the
"And encapsulation as an OO term is data hiding."
Are you refering to the fact that PHP does not have private variables? IF so this is a minor thing IMHO. The variables have a "private enough" scope to avoid any namespace problems and you don't have to access them if you don't want to. I simply write my php objects as if the variables were all private and use my object by calling getters and setters just like java.
Personally I much prefer the php objects to java objects because I can change objects at runtime. PHP shares this dynamism with languages like objective-c and ruby. Until you experience it I can't really explain it to you but it's really cool.
" One thing may clear this up. Have you used any one of these languages Java,Pyhton or C++?"
Yes.
"If I understand you posts correctly you are suggesting that PHP OO can hold a stick to Java."
Are you sure you are replying to the same post? I said no such thing.
" If this is the case I wonder how much Java web development have you done?"
TONS.
"Have you used any of these Velocity,Jython, Taglibs, or EJB?"
Some.
"How many 100K objects do you pass around in you PHP applications? "
None.
"Passing by reference?"
Sometimes if I feel the need for it.
"Last time I tried PHP with lots of object I kept getting out of memory errors."
Perhaps you don't know php well enough.
"Well I guess I should have thought to myself it make complete sense that PHP would pass be value instead of by refrence."
Whether it makes sense to you or not is irrelevant. It's a published specification of the language and many things have been written about it. Some languages use copy on assign and some use references it's up to you to read the documentation and learn the language so that you can use it properly. PHP is not java and only an idiot would expect it to behave exactly like java.
"And I should use a _work_around_ to fix it."
No just learn the language you are trying to use.
"And I should build my own intelegent object caching. "
Or use a library written by someone else. Which language support automatic object caching natively? In java you have to rely on HUGE frameworks with extremely complicated setup and configuration to achieve such a thing. Did you write velocity? did you write your own EJB container? Java does not have built in object pools either.
"Oh one more thing how do you get connection pools form PHP or does every Apache proccess have to create a database connections?"
PHP frees me from having to think about database pooling because it takes care of all the dirty work for me. I simply write code as if my database connection was the only one was being opened fresh every time (even though it's being pulled from the pool). All database function in php have a "pconnect" function which goes into the php pool for the database connection. All I have to do is to set an ini entry specifying how many connections I want to maintain. I also use ADODB database abstraction layer which makes my code very easy to port to other databases. Add to this the ability to stream just about any object to string and cache them locally I can skip many trips to the database altogether. I frequently generate comboboxes and grids which are database generated (but not frequently changed) and cache them on the local drive which saves a round trip to the database server.
Coding data driven web sites in PHP is a downright joy compared to the insane headaches one has to go through to do the same thing in EJBs or even velocity. If I really want to use something like taglibs I can use the Krysalis framework which is a velocity look alike. If taglibs are not up my alley I can use smarty templates. If don't want either one I can use an application framework such as binarycloud. I have more choices then a java web developer.
PHP is also much faster then any solution coded with EJB. In fact any solution coded with EJBs is significantly slower then just about any other technology. If you don't believe me go visit theserverside.com and read some the their benchmarks. Java is also a downright annoying language if you ask me. Any language with forces me implement an interface just to define a filemask is too stupid to use.
"but it does not support multiple inheritance, virtual classes, or encapsulation. If you need to ask "how is php lacking in encapsulation" then you either A) know dick all about PHP, or B) do not know what the term encapsulation means."
A lot of OO languages don't support multiple inheritance including java, ruby, and C#.
PHP does not support virtual classes (nor interfaces) but then again it does not really need them because it has mix-in type facilities.
As for encapsulation I say that it does support encapsulation as defined here so once again tell me how php does not support encapsulation.
"I can't. All of my web sites are hosted through hosting services and I don't have control over the PHP config file."
.htaccess or httpd.conf.
Not really true. Many of the PHP settings can be set in code at run time see the ini_set() function. Also some of them can be set in apache using
"That's not an easy fix, you still have to retrofit your code everytime a bug pops up in order to get the benefits."
No you don't. Just write a function called getPostVar or getParameter or something and only use that function to fetch submitted variables. That way you can do all kinds of sanity checks and you are shielded from relying on global variables.
"OK then, why don't constructors on PHP subclasses implicitly call the constructors of their superclasses?"
You can call them explicitly if you like no big deal just another line of code.
"And again, I cannot change my config file"
Once again you can change many if not most config directives either via apache or at run time. Some settings are not changeable but that is done to protect the ISP. In other words it's a feature not a bug. If those protections did not exist then you would not be able to find anybody who even offers php web hosting.
Once again how is php lacking in polymorphism?
How is php lacking in encapsulation?
"magic quotes (a truly awful idea)"
If you don't like it turn it off.
"register_globals"
If you don't like it turn it off.
"promiscuous casting and lack of type checking (debugging can be a nightmare as a result)"
Easy work around. Look up functions like is_numeric() or the ctype functions. I for one wrote a very simple function to retrive the value of a variable and to check for it's "correctness" in a few minutes.
Having said all that a "strict" mode would be very nice.
"half baked OO support"
Nonsense. You obviously don't have a good understanding of how php objects work.
* Way too many functions do more than one thing or do different things depending on how your config file is set up"
Again nonsense. There are a lot of functions and that's a good thing but very few of them depend on some sort of a config setting.
"2. No standardized database API. Want to develop on DB a and later move to DB b? HA."
In this respect it's exactly like PERL, Python, ruby, java, VB, C++, C, c# and a thousand other languages.
Very few languages have a BUILT IN database abstraction feature. All the languages above use some sort of a LIBRARY to try and achieve database independence. PERL for example has the DBI library while the windows folks use ODBC or ADO.
PHP offers several LIBRARIES for your pleasure. There is metabase, PEAR, ADODB, and the phplib libraries just for start.
I am hoping that this post will once and for all clear up this stupid and ignorant critisim of PHP. Database access in PHP is as good or better then most languages.
"Can I write a transaction processing layer in PHP and have it maintain concurrency with a RDBMS?"
Why not? What exactly is preventing you from doing that?
Let's see now.
Php supports writing of objects. It support inheritance. It's highly dynamic in that you can add to objects at runtime (like ruby). You can do mixin type things.
So exactly what are you looking for?
There is a lively discussion about how slow and cumbersome j2ee is on javalobby right here
These are advocates of Java complaining about how much j2ee sucks.
I for one think that you need to be a rocket scientists to write a large j2ee application that can perform realatively fast while anybody can write php applications that can run fast.