C will be faster than either C++ or Java, but C++ and Java are on par for most things.
Don't know where you are getting this, but Java is slower than C++ because all object-oriented niceties are always on. In C++ you only pay for what you explicitly need. The whole point of C++ is if you need the performance, otherwise you are much better off using Java.
Only 2 of the many CSS bugs have been resolved, no improvement in CSS implementation/support, no good debug tools.
Maybe try a IE Blog 'standards' search... even though they are pretty quiet about it, when they do say something it's pretty encouraging. Especially the fact that they link Quirksmode and Position Is Everything. If the IE Team fixes the bugs outlined there, a huge weight of debugging will be lifted from web designers (well, in like 7 years when everyone is finally upgraded:)
So here's a guy writing an article related to copyright who doesn't know the law, criticizing Creative Commons under the assumption everyone already knows the copyright laws.
Not to mention the relative likelihood that Dvorak would ever need to enforce his own copyrights.
No, I believe the key phrase was 'flattens time' which is indeed the type of gratuitous geekery that induces mob beatings in grade school, and polite yet uncomfortable chuckles in the working world.
I think your name recognition is a huge foot in the door for your target audience. I'm not much of a Star Trek fan, and I'm not sure where I first heard your name, but I think the confluence of your hard promotion along with the Star Trek and Stand By Me thing was enough for me to pay attention, even though I don't really read blogs (or much non-technical material for that matter). The thing is, you are a decent writer, and I am actually interested enough by your writing style to stick around. I just don't think the obsessive fanboy crowd is big enough for anyone to claim that you could be a successful writer with significantly less work than any other writer.
So, what I would say to the grandparent is this:
Who cares how he got his foot in the door? He's not selling out or cashing in, and we have no idea what he would have done if he hadn't been an actor first. It's just pointless speculation. I think Wil's message (and one I agree with) is that anyone with a fair amount of talent and a lot of motivation should be able to eek out a living in the creative world. You might not get rich, but if you really love the work then you should be able to find a way to get by. Maybe you fancy yourself a realist and don't want to take the risk... that's your choice, but contrary to the false promise of modern society, life is risky. Make the most of it, don't live your life in fear.
Maybe if you're the first one on the service, but the top10 will be bought up pretty quick and your share of the credits will rapidly approach 0.
On the other hand, if you could figure out the musical tastes of specific demographics such as modem users and people who are paranoid about leaving their P2P client up then maybe you'd be onto something...
I doubt that it's anywhere near as much as 10% of sites that don't work with Firefox.
Being that I use Safari 99% of the time, and only switch to Firefox for compatibility I would have to agree. But perhaps they mean 10% of sites have some isolated feature or layout element that doesn't work in Firefox.
Fair enough, but let me just point out that being bitter and cynical gives you exactly no chance of starting a successful business. I, on the other hand, may only have a small statistical chance of succeeding in my business but I'll take my chances.
Anything you can think of that doesn't take a giant wad of cash is probably being attempted right now in your particular market by at east a dozen other slobs. You can't start a business doing what you did before.
So do it better than them. Mediocrity is rampant. I've seen it everywhere I look, and I've found opportunity because of it.
There are lots of engineers and other white-collar workers out there who will never see the same standard of living again in their lives. Telling them that they just need a good idea is insulting.
Well boo-fucking-hoo. If they want to sit and feel sorry for themselves than more power to them, it just means less competition for me. Tell the billions of people in poverty around the world that America has no entrepreneurial opportunity and I think they would find that pretty insulting.
You don't just need a good idea, you need a lot of drive and a good chunk of business sense. I'm sorry if that insults you, but I see no reason to adopt a cynical worldview, even if I fail. I don't feel that the world owes me anything, I'll succeed or fail on my own merits, not because of some proven statistical reality.
No, you don't need huge wads of cash to start a business. By starting small and building up you learn and confront problems as you go rather than overinvesting in a flawed concept.
You should not look at some statistic on how many businesses fail and think "the odds are against me". Instead you should ask why they failed and how can you avoid those pitfalls. Then go look at successful startups and find out why they succeeded. It's not a crap shoot, you are in control.
I understand if you have a family to feed and are unmotivated or risk-averse that starting a business is not for you. Fair enough. But this country is the best place in the world for small businesses, so to suggest that starting a business is a bad idea for intelligent, motivated people is FUD. At no other time or place in history has there been so much opportunity for the average individual, take advantage of it!
Free markets? I have yet to discover such an animal.
Fair enough, but it amounts to a minor nitpick. Governments would be foolish to not exert some control over trade when it's in their best interest (generating tax revenue for instance), but attempting to protect jobs from being outsourced is a losing battle. You can protect them in the short-term, but in the long-term your entire economy suffers. On the other hand, there's no need to let free trade gut your economic production overnight by opening the flood gates. The key is recognizing certain inevitabilities and shaping the process rather than attempting to force an outcome.
American workers are very expensive to hire, often too expensive to justify. A decent chunk of it is caused by politically correct bullshit like pushing for diversity over qualification
I'm sorry, I'm all for Libertarian ideals, but the reason Americans are so expensive to hire is because our lifestyle is way out of proportion with most of the world. This all worked great in the past where there were significant barriers to international trade (language, economic, cultural, distance, etc), but as travel and communications technology improves, globalization becomes inevitable. It has nothing to do with politicians at all, everything is run by business, and that's not going to change any time soon.
The fact of the matter is that Americans are better off by slowly venting jobs to 3rd world countries than attempting to hold off the inevitable through isolationist policies which would eventually lead to some forcible revolt against us. Rich people live in fear of losing what they have, but what they (and we) need to realize that global stability requires some basic economic balance. I'm not talking socialism, just let the free markets sort things out.
Meanwhile, for those of us getting laid off, quit bitching and recognize your advantage! In most places, starting a business is impossible because there isn't enough money around for a sustained customer base. In America all you need is a salesperson and a half-decent idea.
All you have to know is how to play petty office politics and sell people on useless shit.
Anyone with this attitude should expect to be rapidly outsourced, because it's much better to have such people working at least 7 or 8 time zones away from you.
No, for those programmers willing to pull their head out of their ass to realize that anywhere you have human interest you will have politics, they might find there is a lot of opportunity for programmers who actually care about the business side of things. If you just can't stomach that then go work for a non-profit or the government and stop whining that businesses don't appreciate your genius.
Just knowing HTML and CSS does not result in web pages that are easy to use and accessible.
Of course not, it takes a professional to know all that stuff. This book is not for a professional, in fact the reviewer mentions that right off the top.
Anyways, does this book cover XHTML at all? And what about CSS 2.0?
That said, I remember Molly's articles in Web Design Techniques back in the day, and found them to be very fluffy and a bit self-important. Hopefully she doesn't come off that way in a how-to book such as this.
You gotta admit though, that the article has more than a touch of flamebait itself. I'm as worried about possible repercussions of the Intel switch as any other Mac user, but the author seems to take a lot of negatives as foregone conclusions.
Apple is well known for abandoning old hardware and software... that's one of the reasons its so much cleaner than Windows. A processor change now doesn't seem to raise the risk much higher than it's ever been. If XCode seamlessly compiles to both as well as Jobs claims, then the shift should be a lot less painless than OS 9 -> 10 or even 68k -> PPC.
Also, why is the possibility of no classic support a reason not to buy a Mac now? If you need classic then you damn well better buy a new Mac while they can still run what you need...
Bottom line is, I buy a new machine when I need it. I might shift by 3-6 months according to perceived value, but really I can't be bothered to guess what's going to be happening a year from now in the computer industry. Sure, there are lots of reasons to wait for Intel Macs if you can, but nothing is really a sure bet anyway, so why hold your breath?
Re:Congratulations are in order!
on
A Decade of PHP
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· Score: 1
Coding for one database rather than creating an abstraction layer is a horrible, horrible idea, unless you agree from the outset that you will never change the database backend.
I agree that database calls should not be sprinkled throughout code for anything over 500 lines of code. But I don't particularly like the idea of full on DB abstraction such as PEAR_DB. Why? Because unless you are expecting to go cross-platform, you can waste a lot of time to support portability that will rarely be necessary. And of course it's never fully portable anyway due to non-standard SQL, etc.
With most web applications I always have some kind of canonical internal data structure (generally object-based, or possibly just hashes), and then create interfaces off of that to edit the structure via HTML forms, and to save / edit / restore from a database. Within the database maintenance code I give only minimal consideration to DB portability issues. If I want to port to another DB then there may be some work to do in that small portion of the application. In return I get a better performing application with shorter development times.
Of course my opinion reflects working on largely internal systems. If you are writing a commercial product or open-source project for wide distribution, then database portability can be a deciding factor for adoption of your product.
Wait a minute, you're assuming that Macs have to be as cheap as Windows to succeed in the marketplace. But when has that ever been true?
The major effect here is mostly just a speed bump. I'm sure there will be some transitional problems for certain software, but that should be offset by an increase in the speed and quality of ported software.
Sure it's a risky move, but nowhere near suicidal.
Well I gotta hand it to you for a what amounts to an absolutely brilliant troll. You had me nodding my head the whole way through, but actually your response is just as hyperbolic as the story title. I really don't care to get into all the details... but one thing you said,
I can't see this as anything more than a much belated, empty gesture on Microsoft's part.
is true from the MS perspective, but that doesn't mean nothing good can come of it. Having a documented XML format could do wonders for OpenOffice compatibility, which wouldn't necessarily put a dent in Microsoft's monopoly, but it would make life a lot easier for those of us who don't want to participate in it. I'm not saying it'll pan out, just that there are possible real benefits.
I'll buy the os any day of the week but I refuse to buy a pricey, not as easy to upgrade mac machine with it.
The limited Mac hardware may be a turn off to hobbyist types, but it provides a certain level of reliability and support that you just can't get when you start throwing together random commodity hardware. Every time I've had a problem with my Mac there's always 100 other people who've had the same problem. My Windows box on the other hand puked on me one day when installing IE6, and I couldn't dig up anything on Google remotely related to the symptoms I was having.
I don't begrudge people the opportunity the widest choice of hardware/software, but personally I couldn't give two shits about which of 30 motherboards I'm going to buy. I bought a Mac in 2000 and haven't spent a single moment thinking about hardware since, instead I've gotten a lot of work done. Maybe in another couple years I'll need to get a new Mac, but in the meantime my productivity is still as high as ever.
No, it runs entirely from a simple driver sript that you include from the top of any file, and it's controlled via standards HTML meta tags. There is very little front-end to speak of (although I'm adding some visual tools to help with debugging and optimization), as it's more of a tool for the hardcore web designer/developer who may already have a ton of web application and is very exacting about their code.
Why would you invent "Yet Another Templating System" when there are about 3 dozen good ones out there for a variety of languages?
It's somewhere between a templating system and a content-management system, but it's core idea has very little to do with either. I just posted the announcement as a reply to the original reply, and that page explains the system better than I can in a brief response. The best analogy I can make is that the system is like database normalization for HTML sites, although the system leverages the natural site hierarchy more than set theory, so the parallel is not exact.
You're just attempting to lock your customers in to something for which no one else may even have the source or documentation.?
Although changes are most efficient to make when the system is run live, it produces static HTML or PHP files in its cache which can actually be deployed statically. The whole system is designed with the core goal of no lock-in, no new languages to learn, and no administrative tools necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with talking to women is that so few of them have anything interesting to say about whether or not C++ is better than Perl... ;^)
I'd be surprised if any geeks have anything interesting to say on the subject either.
C will be faster than either C++ or Java, but C++ and Java are on par for most things.
Don't know where you are getting this, but Java is slower than C++ because all object-oriented niceties are always on. In C++ you only pay for what you explicitly need. The whole point of C++ is if you need the performance, otherwise you are much better off using Java.
Only 2 of the many CSS bugs have been resolved, no improvement in CSS implementation/support, no good debug tools.
:)
Maybe try a IE Blog 'standards' search... even though they are pretty quiet about it, when they do say something it's pretty encouraging. Especially the fact that they link Quirksmode and Position Is Everything. If the IE Team fixes the bugs outlined there, a huge weight of debugging will be lifted from web designers (well, in like 7 years when everyone is finally upgraded
So here's a guy writing an article related to copyright who doesn't know the law, criticizing Creative Commons under the assumption everyone already knows the copyright laws.
Not to mention the relative likelihood that Dvorak would ever need to enforce his own copyrights.
No, I believe the key phrase was 'flattens time' which is indeed the type of gratuitous geekery that induces mob beatings in grade school, and polite yet uncomfortable chuckles in the working world.
I think your name recognition is a huge foot in the door for your target audience. I'm not much of a Star Trek fan, and I'm not sure where I first heard your name, but I think the confluence of your hard promotion along with the Star Trek and Stand By Me thing was enough for me to pay attention, even though I don't really read blogs (or much non-technical material for that matter). The thing is, you are a decent writer, and I am actually interested enough by your writing style to stick around. I just don't think the obsessive fanboy crowd is big enough for anyone to claim that you could be a successful writer with significantly less work than any other writer.
So, what I would say to the grandparent is this:
Who cares how he got his foot in the door? He's not selling out or cashing in, and we have no idea what he would have done if he hadn't been an actor first. It's just pointless speculation. I think Wil's message (and one I agree with) is that anyone with a fair amount of talent and a lot of motivation should be able to eek out a living in the creative world. You might not get rich, but if you really love the work then you should be able to find a way to get by. Maybe you fancy yourself a realist and don't want to take the risk... that's your choice, but contrary to the false promise of modern society, life is risky. Make the most of it, don't live your life in fear.
Maybe if you're the first one on the service, but the top10 will be bought up pretty quick and your share of the credits will rapidly approach 0.
On the other hand, if you could figure out the musical tastes of specific demographics such as modem users and people who are paranoid about leaving their P2P client up then maybe you'd be onto something...
I doubt that it's anywhere near as much as 10% of sites that don't work with Firefox.
Being that I use Safari 99% of the time, and only switch to Firefox for compatibility I would have to agree. But perhaps they mean 10% of sites have some isolated feature or layout element that doesn't work in Firefox.
Shouldn't that be 'or'?
Fair enough. I didn't want to suggest that having a family alone would be a reason not to start a business, but perhaps it would read better that way.
Fair enough, but let me just point out that being bitter and cynical gives you exactly no chance of starting a successful business. I, on the other hand, may only have a small statistical chance of succeeding in my business but I'll take my chances.
Anything you can think of that doesn't take a giant wad of cash is probably being attempted right now in your particular market by at east a dozen other slobs. You can't start a business doing what you did before.
So do it better than them. Mediocrity is rampant. I've seen it everywhere I look, and I've found opportunity because of it.
There are lots of engineers and other white-collar workers out there who will never see the same standard of living again in their lives. Telling them that they just need a good idea is insulting.
Well boo-fucking-hoo. If they want to sit and feel sorry for themselves than more power to them, it just means less competition for me. Tell the billions of people in poverty around the world that America has no entrepreneurial opportunity and I think they would find that pretty insulting.
You don't just need a good idea, you need a lot of drive and a good chunk of business sense. I'm sorry if that insults you, but I see no reason to adopt a cynical worldview, even if I fail. I don't feel that the world owes me anything, I'll succeed or fail on my own merits, not because of some proven statistical reality.
And a huge wad of cash you expect to lose.
No, you don't need huge wads of cash to start a business. By starting small and building up you learn and confront problems as you go rather than overinvesting in a flawed concept.
You should not look at some statistic on how many businesses fail and think "the odds are against me". Instead you should ask why they failed and how can you avoid those pitfalls. Then go look at successful startups and find out why they succeeded. It's not a crap shoot, you are in control.
I understand if you have a family to feed and are unmotivated or risk-averse that starting a business is not for you. Fair enough. But this country is the best place in the world for small businesses, so to suggest that starting a business is a bad idea for intelligent, motivated people is FUD. At no other time or place in history has there been so much opportunity for the average individual, take advantage of it!
Free markets? I have yet to discover such an animal.
Fair enough, but it amounts to a minor nitpick. Governments would be foolish to not exert some control over trade when it's in their best interest (generating tax revenue for instance), but attempting to protect jobs from being outsourced is a losing battle. You can protect them in the short-term, but in the long-term your entire economy suffers. On the other hand, there's no need to let free trade gut your economic production overnight by opening the flood gates. The key is recognizing certain inevitabilities and shaping the process rather than attempting to force an outcome.
American workers are very expensive to hire, often too expensive to justify. A decent chunk of it is caused by politically correct bullshit like pushing for diversity over qualification
I'm sorry, I'm all for Libertarian ideals, but the reason Americans are so expensive to hire is because our lifestyle is way out of proportion with most of the world. This all worked great in the past where there were significant barriers to international trade (language, economic, cultural, distance, etc), but as travel and communications technology improves, globalization becomes inevitable. It has nothing to do with politicians at all, everything is run by business, and that's not going to change any time soon.
The fact of the matter is that Americans are better off by slowly venting jobs to 3rd world countries than attempting to hold off the inevitable through isolationist policies which would eventually lead to some forcible revolt against us. Rich people live in fear of losing what they have, but what they (and we) need to realize that global stability requires some basic economic balance. I'm not talking socialism, just let the free markets sort things out.
Meanwhile, for those of us getting laid off, quit bitching and recognize your advantage! In most places, starting a business is impossible because there isn't enough money around for a sustained customer base. In America all you need is a salesperson and a half-decent idea.
All you have to know is how to play petty office politics and sell people on useless shit.
Anyone with this attitude should expect to be rapidly outsourced, because it's much better to have such people working at least 7 or 8 time zones away from you.
No, for those programmers willing to pull their head out of their ass to realize that anywhere you have human interest you will have politics, they might find there is a lot of opportunity for programmers who actually care about the business side of things. If you just can't stomach that then go work for a non-profit or the government and stop whining that businesses don't appreciate your genius.
Just knowing HTML and CSS does not result in web pages that are easy to use and accessible.
Of course not, it takes a professional to know all that stuff. This book is not for a professional, in fact the reviewer mentions that right off the top.
Anyways, does this book cover XHTML at all? And what about CSS 2.0?
Seeing as how Molly Holzschlag is a member of the Web Standards Project, I'd assume she's presenting up-to-date information.
That said, I remember Molly's articles in Web Design Techniques back in the day, and found them to be very fluffy and a bit self-important. Hopefully she doesn't come off that way in a how-to book such as this.
You gotta admit though, that the article has more than a touch of flamebait itself. I'm as worried about possible repercussions of the Intel switch as any other Mac user, but the author seems to take a lot of negatives as foregone conclusions.
Apple is well known for abandoning old hardware and software... that's one of the reasons its so much cleaner than Windows. A processor change now doesn't seem to raise the risk much higher than it's ever been. If XCode seamlessly compiles to both as well as Jobs claims, then the shift should be a lot less painless than OS 9 -> 10 or even 68k -> PPC.
Also, why is the possibility of no classic support a reason not to buy a Mac now? If you need classic then you damn well better buy a new Mac while they can still run what you need...
Bottom line is, I buy a new machine when I need it. I might shift by 3-6 months according to perceived value, but really I can't be bothered to guess what's going to be happening a year from now in the computer industry. Sure, there are lots of reasons to wait for Intel Macs if you can, but nothing is really a sure bet anyway, so why hold your breath?
Coding for one database rather than creating an abstraction layer is a horrible, horrible idea, unless you agree from the outset that you will never change the database backend.
I agree that database calls should not be sprinkled throughout code for anything over 500 lines of code. But I don't particularly like the idea of full on DB abstraction such as PEAR_DB. Why? Because unless you are expecting to go cross-platform, you can waste a lot of time to support portability that will rarely be necessary. And of course it's never fully portable anyway due to non-standard SQL, etc.
With most web applications I always have some kind of canonical internal data structure (generally object-based, or possibly just hashes), and then create interfaces off of that to edit the structure via HTML forms, and to save / edit / restore from a database. Within the database maintenance code I give only minimal consideration to DB portability issues. If I want to port to another DB then there may be some work to do in that small portion of the application. In return I get a better performing application with shorter development times.
Of course my opinion reflects working on largely internal systems. If you are writing a commercial product or open-source project for wide distribution, then database portability can be a deciding factor for adoption of your product.
Wait a minute, you're assuming that Macs have to be as cheap as Windows to succeed in the marketplace. But when has that ever been true?
The major effect here is mostly just a speed bump. I'm sure there will be some transitional problems for certain software, but that should be offset by an increase in the speed and quality of ported software.
Sure it's a risky move, but nowhere near suicidal.
Well I gotta hand it to you for a what amounts to an absolutely brilliant troll. You had me nodding my head the whole way through, but actually your response is just as hyperbolic as the story title. I really don't care to get into all the details... but one thing you said,
I can't see this as anything more than a much belated, empty gesture on Microsoft's part.
is true from the MS perspective, but that doesn't mean nothing good can come of it. Having a documented XML format could do wonders for OpenOffice compatibility, which wouldn't necessarily put a dent in Microsoft's monopoly, but it would make life a lot easier for those of us who don't want to participate in it. I'm not saying it'll pan out, just that there are possible real benefits.
I'll buy the os any day of the week but I refuse to buy a pricey, not as easy to upgrade mac machine with it.
The limited Mac hardware may be a turn off to hobbyist types, but it provides a certain level of reliability and support that you just can't get when you start throwing together random commodity hardware. Every time I've had a problem with my Mac there's always 100 other people who've had the same problem. My Windows box on the other hand puked on me one day when installing IE6, and I couldn't dig up anything on Google remotely related to the symptoms I was having.
I don't begrudge people the opportunity the widest choice of hardware/software, but personally I couldn't give two shits about which of 30 motherboards I'm going to buy. I bought a Mac in 2000 and haven't spent a single moment thinking about hardware since, instead I've gotten a lot of work done. Maybe in another couple years I'll need to get a new Mac, but in the meantime my productivity is still as high as ever.
Oh PLEASE if you honestly think genocide=not wanting your opinion please do mankind a favor.
Just matching your hyperbole. At least I have the credibility to stand behind my statements.
No, it runs entirely from a simple driver sript that you include from the top of any file, and it's controlled via standards HTML meta tags. There is very little front-end to speak of (although I'm adding some visual tools to help with debugging and optimization), as it's more of a tool for the hardcore web designer/developer who may already have a ton of web application and is very exacting about their code.
Why would you invent "Yet Another Templating System" when there are about 3 dozen good ones out there for a variety of languages?
It's somewhere between a templating system and a content-management system, but it's core idea has very little to do with either. I just posted the announcement as a reply to the original reply, and that page explains the system better than I can in a brief response. The best analogy I can make is that the system is like database normalization for HTML sites, although the system leverages the natural site hierarchy more than set theory, so the parallel is not exact.
You're just attempting to lock your customers in to something for which no one else may even have the source or documentation.?
Although changes are most efficient to make when the system is run live, it produces static HTML or PHP files in its cache which can actually be deployed statically. The whole system is designed with the core goal of no lock-in, no new languages to learn, and no administrative tools necessary.
Alright, I just created the official announcement:
http://www.websaviour.com/templation/
Good lord, I don't need to launch a Space Shuttle--I just want to write a letter!
MMmmmm, giant red launch button! So satisfying to press...