I see what you've done there. You've taken the word "consumer" and inserted the word "sheep", inventing your own brand new word "consheepmer", in order to suggest that most people who buy things make their decisions based on the decisions of others, rather than carrying out their own in-depth research into all the options available. Well done, you should be proud of yourself.
Almost all of their potential customer base weren't even aware beforehand that there was an Apple product announcement due today. Of those that were, only a tiny fraction would have wanted to watch it live. No-one's hearing this 'message' you've invented. I believe they are planning to market this product via means other than just the keynote.
Older people have more money to spend on expensive smartphones.
But they have a lot less time in which to buy countless revisions of said smartphones. That younger market will grow up and have money of its own, and you must have noticed how Apple customers tend to be quite fanatical^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H loyal...
RSS piped through Google Reader onto the 'Reeder' app is a very nice reading experience. It's a PITA that I now have to View Source, CTRL+F, "rss" on sites that don't explicitly advertise their own feed, but that's the browser manufacturers' fault for removing the native RSS functionality - why they all chose to do that, I'm still trying to fathom.
Well, in both cases, you'd quote the word, making the case violation less of a problem, IMO, e.g. "'free' software is free as in beer, 'Free' software is free as in speech." But, of course, that doesn't solve the 'problem' in sentences such as "Free software is always my preferred option"; the only foolproof rendering would result from a rearrangement, e.g. "My preferred option is Free/free software". You can't 'legally' express certain strings in a grammar: that's the point, even if it makes things tricky sometimes.
Of course, the geek's solution would be to fix the broken rules of the language; the 'initial capital' rule is really a redundancy. We may well be following a trend in that direction, since languages evolve, albeit at a relatively slow rate.
I just considered rewriting this entire post with no initial capitals. But that would have been far too pretentious;) Oh, please moderate this 'off-topic'.
The thing about PHP seesions that has always annoyed me is the seeming inability to handle the 'session timeout' event. Am I missing something obvious?
You know, I don't understand this objection at all. If you're using a copy of Windows that you've paid for, then you're simply allowing Microsoft to validate that it *is*, in fact, a paid-for copy of Windows.
While I agree with the root point, requiring users to pay money (bandwidth isn't free) to do so, is a highly dubious practice. True, they can't really do it any other way, but why does every user have to comply? Random security checks are one thing, but this is more like enforced surveillance.
If you didn't pay for your copy of Windows, then maybe you should consider the fact that you've stolen the software... like it or not, Windows is NOT free, and Microsoft (as the owner & copyright holder) has chosen to say, "If you want our software, you must pay."
True, and I'm proud to believe that Windows is not worth stealing, let alone paying good money for. I certainly consider a product version that uses such draconian 'property enforcement' tactics to be less valuable than one that doesn't, whether paid for or not.
And they're well within their rights to make that demand. You may disagree on moral & philosophical grounds, but if that's the case, then you should be using one of the free alternatives to Windows, chock full of Linuxy goodness.
Agreed. But I think anyone still has a right to criticise a commercial product, even if they adopt an alternative.
Is this really that onerous? REALLY? I have trouble believing you'd choose to install IE7 BETA on a system you're doing important, long-running work on. If you've been calculating the meaning of life, the universe, and everything on your computer, maybe that's important enough to delay installing that unstable, buggy Beta software for a couple days? And if you're not doing anything that important, really, how much of an interruption is a single reboot? I've got an older system running Windows XP, and it takes me maybe a minute to reboot my system, and another 2 minutes until I'm signed in and ready to work again... yes, it's an inconvenience... but seriously -- is this reboot issue THAT much of a surprise or an inconvenience?
I don't consider it to be that onerous, but I think the point that this raises relates to the underlying architecture. If any software install (and I realise this is a beta; I'm not just referring to IE7, here), barring the extreme low-level, results in a required reboot, it is either lazily constructed, or indicitive of a global flaw that must affect installation of more 'complex' software, such as that running on servers (a web server, for example). This is less of a problem in home environments, true.
In a Microsoft browser, that *is* innovative... they're significant new features in the release. I don't personally care for the tabbed browsing implementation in IE7 -- but compared to IE6? Light years of difference. And do you really expect them to write in their marketing & promotional materials, "With these features, we're almost as good as Firefox and Opera now. Here at Microsoft, we strive to bring you the state of yesterday's art in browser technology!"?? Come on.
It will, at least, be a greater pleasure to use a tabbed version of IE, when one really has to. And, of course, a commercial enterprise has every right to speak the truth in promotional material. I'm quite glad that Microsoft are improving their browser. In a very rare type of market - one that spans economic models - continued improvement is a valuable thing, and we're still getting this software for free (re: beer). If they would only implement more of the CSS spec, I would be feeling really positive about this release.
I know, I know. This is Slashdot, everybody who's anybody bashes Microsoft. Rather than admit that Microsoft is doing something (*competing*) that will end up b
Totally agree - I hate reading code like that. If you can be disciplined enough to reverse the natural order of things, you can sure as hell be disciplined enough to remember to use ==.
So the slash db doesn't need to store an extra piece of data, 'sig', with every comment? Or keep an indefinitely-long 'sig history' for each user? Or limit the number of times you can change your sig? I've probably missed something...
Anyway, I don't think it's a 'must have' and, strictly speaking, the sig is not related to the comment it was posted against, it's related to the user making the comment. It did freak me out the first time I realised it, though:)
Off-topic, yeah...
P.S. Please don't change your sig now, or I'll look a right fool!
So how, when you come register on my website, do I know YOU are SolemnDragon and that troll back then wasn't? Some kind of super-secure scheme, maybe? Trouble is, the more importance you attach to a security mechanism, the greater the fallout if that security mechanism is breached. Would you really feel more comfortable if 'your' name was stolen in your scenario, or in the scenario that we have now? Maybe it's best to let it lie and accept that online names are, well, just like everything online - not 100% reliable.
It's arguable how much of that BRL validation is 'built-into' the language and how much is utilisation of 'library' functions. No matter; any PHP programmer worth their salt will use a standard, generic method of validating their input, whether using a library function or their own, just as any programmer should.
I'm not trying to diss BRL, though;) Languages encouraging secure programming is obviously a thing to be encouraged.
Re:Posting anon to protect the guilty
on
Spring Into PHP 5
·
· Score: 1
"It is simply not practical to drop through to the database to reload information each time when you have hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users."
It is. I've worked on a site (NB: NOT my URL!) that handles greater traffic than that, with a large number of DB requests on a large proportion of pages. NOT written in PHP. But not even running on a box of its own...
"As for stopping it in PHP - that is tricky, as PHP was designed for HTML + code mixing."
If you want a dynamic web site, you have to mix HTML with something at some point. It may be characters in a file, string delimiters, php delimiters, whatever. I don't see anything in the PHP language itself any different from any other language in this regard. HTML is just a bunch of strings; PHP can be written with nothing outside of the <?php... ?> at all.
"Filters allow specific ranges of URLs to have additional functionality wrapped around the requests. This is a highly useful feature, allowing things like post-processing of HTML, or checking authorisation (and diverting to error pages)." Forgive me if this sounds flippant, but isn't that something than can be achieved with an array, a regexp or two, and REQUEST_URI? Is this something actually within the language itself?
Re:Posting anon to protect the guilty
on
Spring Into PHP 5
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"First, it has no mechanisms to enforce any kind of good web application design practices."
Can you name me a language that DOES have "mechanisms to enforce any kind of good web application design practices"? I'm not sure I can think of anything built into a language (i.e. not just an add-on library which, of course, PHP could provide) that does do this.
"Almost invariably, PHP apps are initially designed by people who are newcomers to programming and the web."
I've seen many state this and have suspected it myself, but have never come across any good statistical proof. Can you post your reference?
"But PHP doesn't provide any structure to help them make the right decisions,"
Can you give an example of this? I'd be interested to see a language feature of [insert other language here] that "helps [newcomers] make the right decision".
"so you end up with no separation between HTML and code, and you end up with an unmaintainable mess."
But what's to stop this from happening in ANY language? And what's to stop it NOT happening in PHP?
"Second, it's not a full-featured object-oriented programming environment like Java."
I'll give the you benefit of the doubt, here, and assume you missed that oh-so-important comma. However, I'd argue that "not object oriented" is not a fundamental flaw of a language. Say we only had OO languages RIGHT NOW. Do you think everything would run quite as smoothly?
"In Java, I can create objects, store them in sessions, hand them to threads, and store them using persistence frameworks. PHP has only the most rudimentary versions of such features."
Good for you. What are the advantages of doing what you're doing that obsolete PHP in every instance?
"Within a Servlet environment I can also create filters, something which doesn't exist in PHP."
Please explain more - I don't know what filters are. I'd be very surprised if PHP could not support whatever-they-are.
"There is hope. There are some tools like Smarty Templates and PEAR which help a little bit. In fact if beginners would force themselves to use Smarty Templates from the beginning they would get much better results."
I'll have to get back to you on Smarty.
"PHP doesn't have strong typing on variables, something which should be a part of any system that needs to be reliable."
WHY? How strong is the typing in the language used to write the OS you're running right now?
"There's no complition of PHP systems, which means that the only bugs are run-time bugs."
Why is a smaller number of classes of bugs inherently a bad thing? Or is that just an objective statement?
"PHP just isn't a good choice."
For what? Why? I'm still not sure I quite understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I see what you've done there. You've taken the word "consumer" and inserted the word "sheep", inventing your own brand new word "consheepmer", in order to suggest that most people who buy things make their decisions based on the decisions of others, rather than carrying out their own in-depth research into all the options available. Well done, you should be proud of yourself.
Almost all of their potential customer base weren't even aware beforehand that there was an Apple product announcement due today. Of those that were, only a tiny fraction would have wanted to watch it live. No-one's hearing this 'message' you've invented. I believe they are planning to market this product via means other than just the keynote.
It sucks, but not for the reasons you give.
Older people have more money to spend on expensive smartphones.
But they have a lot less time in which to buy countless revisions of said smartphones. That younger market will grow up and have money of its own, and you must have noticed how Apple customers tend to be quite fanatical^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H loyal...
RSS piped through Google Reader onto the 'Reeder' app is a very nice reading experience. It's a PITA that I now have to View Source, CTRL+F, "rss" on sites that don't explicitly advertise their own feed, but that's the browser manufacturers' fault for removing the native RSS functionality - why they all chose to do that, I'm still trying to fathom.
http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-xml-20040204/#sec-w
Well, in both cases, you'd quote the word, making the case violation less of a problem, IMO, e.g. "'free' software is free as in beer, 'Free' software is free as in speech." But, of course, that doesn't solve the 'problem' in sentences such as "Free software is always my preferred option"; the only foolproof rendering would result from a rearrangement, e.g. "My preferred option is Free/free software". You can't 'legally' express certain strings in a grammar: that's the point, even if it makes things tricky sometimes.
;) Oh, please moderate this 'off-topic'.
Of course, the geek's solution would be to fix the broken rules of the language; the 'initial capital' rule is really a redundancy. We may well be following a trend in that direction, since languages evolve, albeit at a relatively slow rate.
I just considered rewriting this entire post with no initial capitals. But that would have been far too pretentious
More worrying is their proposed 'solution' to managing that complexity.
The thing about PHP seesions that has always annoyed me is the seeming inability to handle the 'session timeout' event. Am I missing something obvious?
While I agree with the root point, requiring users to pay money (bandwidth isn't free) to do so, is a highly dubious practice. True, they can't really do it any other way, but why does every user have to comply? Random security checks are one thing, but this is more like enforced surveillance.
True, and I'm proud to believe that Windows is not worth stealing, let alone paying good money for. I certainly consider a product version that uses such draconian 'property enforcement' tactics to be less valuable than one that doesn't, whether paid for or not.
Agreed. But I think anyone still has a right to criticise a commercial product, even if they adopt an alternative.
I don't consider it to be that onerous, but I think the point that this raises relates to the underlying architecture. If any software install (and I realise this is a beta; I'm not just referring to IE7, here), barring the extreme low-level, results in a required reboot, it is either lazily constructed, or indicitive of a global flaw that must affect installation of more 'complex' software, such as that running on servers (a web server, for example). This is less of a problem in home environments, true.
It will, at least, be a greater pleasure to use a tabbed version of IE, when one really has to. And, of course, a commercial enterprise has every right to speak the truth in promotional material. I'm quite glad that Microsoft are improving their browser. In a very rare type of market - one that spans economic models - continued improvement is a valuable thing, and we're still getting this software for free (re: beer). If they would only implement more of the CSS spec, I would be feeling really positive about this release.
http://www.example.com/
But isn't 'netspeak' caused by adaptation to the medium? Would users not adapt to the limitations of speech synthesis by, you know, talking right?
Totally agree - I hate reading code like that. If you can be disciplined enough to reverse the natural order of things, you can sure as hell be disciplined enough to remember to use ==.
Clippy.
"Why are sig changes retroactive?"
...
:)
...
So the slash db doesn't need to store an extra piece of data, 'sig', with every comment? Or keep an indefinitely-long 'sig history' for each user? Or limit the number of times you can change your sig? I've probably missed something
Anyway, I don't think it's a 'must have' and, strictly speaking, the sig is not related to the comment it was posted against, it's related to the user making the comment. It did freak me out the first time I realised it, though
Off-topic, yeah
P.S. Please don't change your sig now, or I'll look a right fool!
So how, when you come register on my website, do I know YOU are SolemnDragon and that troll back then wasn't? Some kind of super-secure scheme, maybe? Trouble is, the more importance you attach to a security mechanism, the greater the fallout if that security mechanism is breached. Would you really feel more comfortable if 'your' name was stolen in your scenario, or in the scenario that we have now? Maybe it's best to let it lie and accept that online names are, well, just like everything online - not 100% reliable.
They made him become an Austrian??
http://dictionary.reference.com/?q=ostracized
It's arguable how much of that BRL validation is 'built-into' the language and how much is utilisation of 'library' functions. No matter; any PHP programmer worth their salt will use a standard, generic method of validating their input, whether using a library function or their own, just as any programmer should.
;) Languages encouraging secure programming is obviously a thing to be encouraged.
I'm not trying to diss BRL, though
That's every one of the rules!
So you're the one all those spammers have finally won over! ;)
Fair point :)
I'm sure you could; what's the harm in continuously overwriting a file?
Why not just Ctrl-K?
There are *ads* on this page?
"It is simply not practical to drop through to the database to reload information each time when you have hundreds or thousands of simultaneous users."
...
... ?> at all.
It is. I've worked on a site (NB: NOT my URL!) that handles greater traffic than that, with a large number of DB requests on a large proportion of pages. NOT written in PHP. But not even running on a box of its own
"As for stopping it in PHP - that is tricky, as PHP was designed for HTML + code mixing."
If you want a dynamic web site, you have to mix HTML with something at some point. It may be characters in a file, string delimiters, php delimiters, whatever. I don't see anything in the PHP language itself any different from any other language in this regard. HTML is just a bunch of strings; PHP can be written with nothing outside of the <?php
"Filters allow specific ranges of URLs to have additional functionality wrapped around the requests. This is a highly useful feature, allowing things like post-processing of HTML, or checking authorisation (and diverting to error pages)."
Forgive me if this sounds flippant, but isn't that something than can be achieved with an array, a regexp or two, and REQUEST_URI? Is this something actually within the language itself?
"First, it has no mechanisms to enforce any kind of good web application design practices."
Can you name me a language that DOES have "mechanisms to enforce any kind of good web application design practices"? I'm not sure I can think of anything built into a language (i.e. not just an add-on library which, of course, PHP could provide) that does do this.
"Almost invariably, PHP apps are initially designed by people who are newcomers to programming and the web."
I've seen many state this and have suspected it myself, but have never come across any good statistical proof. Can you post your reference?
"But PHP doesn't provide any structure to help them make the right decisions,"
Can you give an example of this? I'd be interested to see a language feature of [insert other language here] that "helps [newcomers] make the right decision".
"so you end up with no separation between HTML and code, and you end up with an unmaintainable mess."
But what's to stop this from happening in ANY language? And what's to stop it NOT happening in PHP?
"Second, it's not a full-featured object-oriented programming environment like Java."
I'll give the you benefit of the doubt, here, and assume you missed that oh-so-important comma. However, I'd argue that "not object oriented" is not a fundamental flaw of a language. Say we only had OO languages RIGHT NOW. Do you think everything would run quite as smoothly?
"In Java, I can create objects, store them in sessions, hand them to threads, and store them using persistence frameworks. PHP has only the most rudimentary versions of such features."
Good for you. What are the advantages of doing what you're doing that obsolete PHP in every instance?
"Within a Servlet environment I can also create filters, something which doesn't exist in PHP."
Please explain more - I don't know what filters are. I'd be very surprised if PHP could not support whatever-they-are.
"There is hope. There are some tools like Smarty Templates and PEAR which help a little bit. In fact if beginners would force themselves to use Smarty Templates from the beginning they would get much better results."
I'll have to get back to you on Smarty.
"PHP doesn't have strong typing on variables, something which should be a part of any system that needs to be reliable."
WHY? How strong is the typing in the language used to write the OS you're running right now?
"There's no complition of PHP systems, which means that the only bugs are run-time bugs."
Why is a smaller number of classes of bugs inherently a bad thing? Or is that just an objective statement?
"PHP just isn't a good choice."
For what? Why? I'm still not sure I quite understand.