Abolishing patents is not a good idea. It's the only thing that protects a small inventor from having his inventions stolen by anyone who has more money.
What is badly needed is some sort of patent reform that prevents non-specific or non-original patents. You should be able to patent a thing. You shouldn't be able to patent the idea of doing whatever that thing does.
By the time the systems were shipping and there was an mainstream OS (read "Windows") to run applications on it, the AMD64 and multi-core x86 processors were already appearing.
Had HP invested more on HP-UX over the years (making it escape the narrow niche they carved for it), had Linux been more mainstream by that timeframe (read "a decent desktop OS", which it kind of wasn't), had Intel invested a lot of resources making GCC deliver the promised performance on the chips and had they been cheaper, AMD64 and P4HT would have had a heck of a more difficult time in the server market.
There is a lot of "had"s.
I run Linux most of the time. I really don't care what binary architecture my box uses as long as the package repositories support it. It would be really fun to have an s/390-based notebook or a 36-hour-battery multi-core ARM-11 subnotebook, BTW. I have a bunch of Unix workstations and only the trained eye can tell if someone is running CDE on Solaris, AIX or HP-UX. They look and largely feel the same. And they feel the same whether you are sitting on a single processor box or beside a 16 CPU behemoth (wish I had one of those - they sure are interesting). I run OSX and it feels like Unix, despite the Mach microkernel. And it looks the same whether it's on a PowerPC or an Intel Core.
Today, for anyone running Unix-like OSs, binary architecture is largely irrelevant.
"BTW, why are you so interested in impeaching Bush or making it easy to get rid of the American president when you don't agree with him or actions and circumstances ariving with his tenure in office? I mean your not even an American and have already showed more balls on this subject the the democrats in office, what binds your interests?"
I would say "Because the US has an overdeveloped military that has a tendency to act in foreign countries", but that would be an easy jab. I worry for the health of your democracy because it has long been held as the portrait of a country done right. I don't like when perfectly good countries go bad. Didn't like the post-Gorbachev Russia either.
"Nothing Bush has done would equate to what Hilter has done"
That "nothing" largely depends on which side of the bullets you are. Luckily I am on the side, where they don't fly. You are right in some aspects - Guantanamo is not a concentration camp nor an industrial installation for killing people. The war of aggression against Iraq (using flawed intelligence many experts pointed out as that, including the UN envoys, to further the interests of economic groups) is not, seemingly, the same as what Hitler waged in Europe.
But they are no shining beacon of civility either.
"everything he has done has been done in the past"
Not with this kind of consequences.
And, by the way, I don't need to justify my opinions. As you well point out, I am observing all this from the outside. You may take my opinion or disregard it. I don't really care. You are only one person who is reading this exchange.
But, yet again, for the good of your own country (and possibly mine), either don't vote or vote against whoever pledges to continue GWB's work.
"IBM's evil is was sustained it as long as it did. It was IBM's arrogance that brought them down."
Wrong. It was two disruptive technologies and two bad decisions that ended IBM's monopoly. The first technology was commodity computer components that enabled small-run computer outfits to compete. The other was the sale of OSs that were not tied exclusively to a specific micro-computer platform (that more or less started with the CP/M family) that created.
As for the bad decisions, had IBM either successfully launched the PC with a proprietary processor instead of commodity x86 or decided Microsoft should be exclusively tied to IBM on the PC-DOS deal and never sell the OS to third parties, two key events would play out differently - the clone industry would never exist (or would clone something else) and PC-DOS/MS-DOS would not end up being the de-facto standard CP/M never quite got to be.
Microsoft had MSX as sort of a plan B. It was 8-bit but every MSX made by a bunch of different Japanese and European companies shared the Microsoft built-in software and operating system. It seems MS did bet on two horses - if the PC clone industry failed to materialize, they would try to grow MSX into something to replace it.
But salt is not exactly self-replicating - the crystals are not really "doing" anything. They just happen to make easier for other molecules to arrange themselves in specific ways (and harder in other ways) around the already grown crystals. They are not transforming the molecules around them.
"if you didn't insist we were a democracy and are actually a republic"
You elect your representatives in a competitive election. That pretty much defines a democracy. The fact it is also a republic is largely irrelevant as they are not necessarily excluding (the UK is considered a democracy despite the monarchy). Brazil is, for instance, a democracy _and_ a republic.
Impeachable offenses are a vastly diverse bunch and the criteria depend on what country you are talking about. I am not familiar to the minutiae of American law, but pretty much #1 (lying to the people and violating the PRA to cover it), #2 (lying to legislative - wasn't that under oath?), #4 (plain corruption and failure of oversight) and #7 (misuse of national security provisions in order to prevent the investigation of crimes _against_ national security - namely the compromise of an undercover operative) should be impeachable offenses (#4 was used to impeach a president here). #1, #2 (both for profit, which also implies corruption) and #7 (plain and simple) border on treason. Compromising the operative is, AFAIK, treason. I am not implying the POTUS did all this by himself (he seems unable to conspire at any level of sophistication) but such misdeeds were committed by someone who must be named after an adequate investigation, for the own good of your (learn it) democracy.
BTW, the misuse of presidential pardons to "stop the bucket" should also be an impeachable offense.
#3, #4, #5 and #6 are so blatantly stupid actions that, if not impeachable by current law, should be considered strong reasons to revise such laws by the next legislature.
Let's Godwin this thread once and for all. Had Hitler been subjected to proper checks and balances, he would never be able to become the problem he became. While GWB is generally considered stupid, someone evil _and_ smart could be very disruptive unless more effective limitations to presidential power are enacted.
If you fail to understand that, please, don't vote.
"A complex self-reproducing process cannot exist unless some special conditions allow it."
That's a risky supposition.
So far, we have only one known environment where we are sure life evolved (and there are questions whether or not it did depend on chemical structures formed elsewhere), a couple others where we are not sure (like Mars, gas giants and icy moons) and a some (like Mercury) we are quite sure never harbored life.
But that vision implies both a very narrow definition of life ("life as we know it") and consequent extrapolations on the kind of circumstance life can appear.
Life - as in self-replicating ordered structures - can take so many different forms we may not be able to recognize it as that when we first encounter it.
Unlike previous witches, there are strong indications of guilt for these.
Just a few things that come to mind:
- Lying about the reasons to wage a war - the executive branch sure had intel that showed there were little reason to believe Iraq had acquired WMDs and sure they want it to be hidden, thus the violations of the PRA. - Asking the Congress to authorize a war based on presumably known faulty intelligence. - Destroying any good will the US had after the 9/11 attacks in a frivolous war. More people hate the US now than probably ever and it will be ages before you recover from it. - Assigning reconstruction contracts, according to shady criteria, to political allies. - Compromising positions in Afghanistan because resources are being spent on a war that worsens things even more. - Overthrowing the only non-theocratic regime in the region, giving way to a civil war that will eventually result in another theocracy. The US should have negotiated with Saddam. It's not that hard to negotiate when you can nuke someone. - Shielding themselves from prosecution behind a "national security" veil. Misuse of this veil compromises its credibility and is extremely erosive to civil rights.
The current office is a disgrace for the US. I used to have more faith in your democracy.
There will be a lot of rebuilding to do after they are gone.
"IBM could have ended it there with a purchase, which might have cost them less in the long run than paying their lawyers"
IBM didn't have to hire new lawyers - they already have a bunch of them. They don't have to pay more to fight this nuisance. In fact, they would pay them even if they had little to do (and I suspect that happens most of the time).
You are right in one thing. There would be no Microsoft.
We would be probably under an IBM or Univac monopoly.
Good patents help the little company to get compensation for something they invented. Bad patents hurt everybody but the big players that can cross-license.
I find this battery thing interesting. While I know a few people who uses more than one battery (mostly bigger, optional ones), I have never replaced a battery.
By the time they die, the gadget they powered is so obsolete I prefer to retire the old one and replace it with another. I have been through countless cell phones and laptops this way.
Re:Proper qbasic program?
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don't be so picky. You have to consider what languages were available at the time. Qbasic and its predecessors came free with every version of DOS and that is a significant competitive advantage over, say, Turbo Pascal. I know that, at the time QBasic was introduced, there were much more advanced languages on the market, but if we are to explore this avenue, Smalltalk/80 was already putting the Java (or C# or C++) we have today to shame.
But paper is not a bad thing by itself. It's carbon in the form of cellulose - it's not in the atmosphere contributing to the greenhouse effect and is much denser than CO2 or methane (at room temp).
As long as you don't burn it or allow bacteria to decompose it, paper is a perfectly safe carbon sink that can even be turned into fuel if, someday, we need more greenhouse gases.
Burning our current carbon reserves is probably enough to get us all killed in a huge greenhouse. I would be completely against the idea unless we could make the excess carbon to be fixated in, say, more trees.
Perhaps it could be shipped to the Moon or the asteroids to be used as fuel or propellant. I am not in a mood to calculate how good that would be.
What I like most about screen is the ability to detach from the screen session, log on from another location and summon back whatever I was doing in the terminal before.
Just do a screen -x and get back right where you were.
"Seems like they would do better if they focussed on making a great OS"
I would like to remind you they never quite excelled at making OSs. Even if we go back to the PC-DOS days, what they had was an OEM agreement where IBM bundled PC-DOS with the IBM PC. PC-DOS became a de-facto standard because IBM shipped lots of PCs and charged a lot to bundle it with CP/M-86 in a time when CP/M (which was quite yawn-inspiring) was _the_ office computer standard OS. Letting IBM impose PC-DOS as the corporate computer standard by creating a user base for software developers was instrumental. When clones arrived, it was a no brainer to sell MS-DOS to their users so they could take advantage of the library IBM's size helped create.
You may be referring at their Xenix offering. While it was a Unix-like, it was not a particularly good one. I distinctly remember it sucked when compared to real Unixes. It could run on 286s and drive a couple terminals, which made it a nice OS for small offices.
Windows 1, 2 and 3 were a sorry joke. They were very unstable and the people who welcomed them (me included) did so mainly because I didn't have the money to buy a Mac, which was the beacon of excellence on desktop OSs of the time.
There was a brief period, coinciding with the darkest days of Apple, during and after the transition from 68K to PowerPC when MacOS 7 and Windows 95 were more or less equally stable. OS/2 was good, but was never more than a niche player. When NT 4 arrived MS had, finally, an OS that were as stable as the MacOS of the day and not uncomfortable to use. It compared favorably not because NT was admirably stable but because OS7 and 8 sucked really bad. OS9 was not much of an improvement either.
When announced, OSX blew the socks off 2000 and has been doing so ever since with each and every Windows release. Vista sucks so bad OEMs offer XP instead, so, it would not qualify as an example of this "strenght".
In the meantime, Linux became a very robust, usable and quite full-featured Unix-like OS that, in sharp contrast with previous Unix-like OSs (mainly Unix itself), neither did cost more than the computer it ran on (like Unix for 386) nor required a computer costing more than a decent car (like, say, Solaris).
I switched from 2000 to XP and, shortly after, I switched to Linux never to look back.
It's been a long, long time since Microsoft did an OS that could really compete in the marketplace without OEM tie-ins or shady tricks (remember DR-DOS and Windows 3), but they did some good-enough stuff. MS-DOS 6 was good enough. Windows for Workgroups was good enough (and a clever realization people don't buy servers - they buy file and printer sharing). 95 was nice, NT 4 was nice. 2000 was in the sweet spot and XP is, more or less, 2000 with a nice skin. None of them was particularly excellent.
That simple realization - that people don't buy software: they buy useful capabilities - is at the core of MS's demise. Either they get it or they will suffer.
"It's easy to learn, if you're familiar with the C syntax..."
There is a trade-off. This ease of assimilation drags PHP's expressive power and level of abstraction closer to what you see in C. This is a very low standard.
About my stance on PHP and on most people who defend it, if all you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I strongly advise the most vocal PHP fans to try to learn other languages, as most of them seem to have a very limited background. It's good and I am happy they can solve any problem they have, from distributed web applications sharing JSON messages to shell scripting and GTK applications, but no tool fits all roles. It's also not about web frameworks. Let them learn Ruby and Python. Let them grok MVC. Throw in some Lisp, Smalltalk and, while they are at the job, let them give a look at how things are done in C and try to compare C++ to Objective-C. Download the SICP videos from MIT and watch them (if they don't get something, they can always hit "rewind").
And her response could indicate she is under some stress. Maybe a project that is not going right, maybe something completely outside the scope of the discussion (maybe even outside her professional life) made she give the emotional answer we saw to the unlucky anonymous coward who crossed her way.
It's incredibly rare to find someone who knows something else making a strong instance for PHP. Any language and platform deserves better than fanboys defending it.
The point is that the misperception that the OS is the monolithic thing that goes from the GUI down to the memory manager won't resist the observation I made. It could mean that IRIX, Solaris, AIX, Linux and BSD are, after all, the same OS.
Actually, I think that this misperception can be traced back to the Smalltalk folks that made the GUI plus OS plus programming language thing for the first time. And keep in mind I think Smalltalk/80 puts the 2008 versions of Java and.NET to shame.
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Abolishing patents is not a good idea. It's the only thing that protects a small inventor from having his inventions stolen by anyone who has more money.
What is badly needed is some sort of patent reform that prevents non-specific or non-original patents. You should be able to patent a thing. You shouldn't be able to patent the idea of doing whatever that thing does.
I think Itanic missed its window of opportunity.
By the time the systems were shipping and there was an mainstream OS (read "Windows") to run applications on it, the AMD64 and multi-core x86 processors were already appearing.
Had HP invested more on HP-UX over the years (making it escape the narrow niche they carved for it), had Linux been more mainstream by that timeframe (read "a decent desktop OS", which it kind of wasn't), had Intel invested a lot of resources making GCC deliver the promised performance on the chips and had they been cheaper, AMD64 and P4HT would have had a heck of a more difficult time in the server market.
There is a lot of "had"s.
I run Linux most of the time. I really don't care what binary architecture my box uses as long as the package repositories support it. It would be really fun to have an s/390-based notebook or a 36-hour-battery multi-core ARM-11 subnotebook, BTW. I have a bunch of Unix workstations and only the trained eye can tell if someone is running CDE on Solaris, AIX or HP-UX. They look and largely feel the same. And they feel the same whether you are sitting on a single processor box or beside a 16 CPU behemoth (wish I had one of those - they sure are interesting). I run OSX and it feels like Unix, despite the Mach microkernel. And it looks the same whether it's on a PowerPC or an Intel Core.
Today, for anyone running Unix-like OSs, binary architecture is largely irrelevant.
"BTW, why are you so interested in impeaching Bush or making it easy to get rid of the American president when you don't agree with him or actions and circumstances ariving with his tenure in office? I mean your not even an American and have already showed more balls on this subject the the democrats in office, what binds your interests?"
I would say "Because the US has an overdeveloped military that has a tendency to act in foreign countries", but that would be an easy jab. I worry for the health of your democracy because it has long been held as the portrait of a country done right. I don't like when perfectly good countries go bad. Didn't like the post-Gorbachev Russia either.
"Nothing Bush has done would equate to what Hilter has done"
That "nothing" largely depends on which side of the bullets you are. Luckily I am on the side, where they don't fly. You are right in some aspects - Guantanamo is not a concentration camp nor an industrial installation for killing people. The war of aggression against Iraq (using flawed intelligence many experts pointed out as that, including the UN envoys, to further the interests of economic groups) is not, seemingly, the same as what Hitler waged in Europe.
But they are no shining beacon of civility either.
"everything he has done has been done in the past"
Not with this kind of consequences.
And, by the way, I don't need to justify my opinions. As you well point out, I am observing all this from the outside. You may take my opinion or disregard it. I don't really care. You are only one person who is reading this exchange.
But, yet again, for the good of your own country (and possibly mine), either don't vote or vote against whoever pledges to continue GWB's work.
It will do a lot to make a better world.
"IBM's evil is was sustained it as long as it did. It was IBM's arrogance that brought them down."
Wrong. It was two disruptive technologies and two bad decisions that ended IBM's monopoly. The first technology was commodity computer components that enabled small-run computer outfits to compete. The other was the sale of OSs that were not tied exclusively to a specific micro-computer platform (that more or less started with the CP/M family) that created.
As for the bad decisions, had IBM either successfully launched the PC with a proprietary processor instead of commodity x86 or decided Microsoft should be exclusively tied to IBM on the PC-DOS deal and never sell the OS to third parties, two key events would play out differently - the clone industry would never exist (or would clone something else) and PC-DOS/MS-DOS would not end up being the de-facto standard CP/M never quite got to be.
Microsoft had MSX as sort of a plan B. It was 8-bit but every MSX made by a bunch of different Japanese and European companies shared the Microsoft built-in software and operating system. It seems MS did bet on two horses - if the PC clone industry failed to materialize, they would try to grow MSX into something to replace it.
How much do you want to bet that he will pull a Rick Belluzzo and get a nice high-paying job at Microsoft or one of its proxies?
OK. Your definition is pretty good.
But salt is not exactly self-replicating - the crystals are not really "doing" anything. They just happen to make easier for other molecules to arrange themselves in specific ways (and harder in other ways) around the already grown crystals. They are not transforming the molecules around them.
"if you didn't insist we were a democracy and are actually a republic"
You elect your representatives in a competitive election. That pretty much defines a democracy. The fact it is also a republic is largely irrelevant as they are not necessarily excluding (the UK is considered a democracy despite the monarchy). Brazil is, for instance, a democracy _and_ a republic.
Impeachable offenses are a vastly diverse bunch and the criteria depend on what country you are talking about. I am not familiar to the minutiae of American law, but pretty much #1 (lying to the people and violating the PRA to cover it), #2 (lying to legislative - wasn't that under oath?), #4 (plain corruption and failure of oversight) and #7 (misuse of national security provisions in order to prevent the investigation of crimes _against_ national security - namely the compromise of an undercover operative) should be impeachable offenses (#4 was used to impeach a president here). #1, #2 (both for profit, which also implies corruption) and #7 (plain and simple) border on treason. Compromising the operative is, AFAIK, treason. I am not implying the POTUS did all this by himself (he seems unable to conspire at any level of sophistication) but such misdeeds were committed by someone who must be named after an adequate investigation, for the own good of your (learn it) democracy.
BTW, the misuse of presidential pardons to "stop the bucket" should also be an impeachable offense.
#3, #4, #5 and #6 are so blatantly stupid actions that, if not impeachable by current law, should be considered strong reasons to revise such laws by the next legislature.
Let's Godwin this thread once and for all. Had Hitler been subjected to proper checks and balances, he would never be able to become the problem he became. While GWB is generally considered stupid, someone evil _and_ smart could be very disruptive unless more effective limitations to presidential power are enacted.
If you fail to understand that, please, don't vote.
"A complex self-reproducing process cannot exist unless some special conditions allow it."
That's a risky supposition.
So far, we have only one known environment where we are sure life evolved (and there are questions whether or not it did depend on chemical structures formed elsewhere), a couple others where we are not sure (like Mars, gas giants and icy moons) and a some (like Mercury) we are quite sure never harbored life.
But that vision implies both a very narrow definition of life ("life as we know it") and consequent extrapolations on the kind of circumstance life can appear.
Life - as in self-replicating ordered structures - can take so many different forms we may not be able to recognize it as that when we first encounter it.
And vice-versa.
"witch hunt."?!
Unlike previous witches, there are strong indications of guilt for these.
Just a few things that come to mind:
- Lying about the reasons to wage a war - the executive branch sure had intel that showed there were little reason to believe Iraq had acquired WMDs and sure they want it to be hidden, thus the violations of the PRA.
- Asking the Congress to authorize a war based on presumably known faulty intelligence.
- Destroying any good will the US had after the 9/11 attacks in a frivolous war. More people hate the US now than probably ever and it will be ages before you recover from it.
- Assigning reconstruction contracts, according to shady criteria, to political allies.
- Compromising positions in Afghanistan because resources are being spent on a war that worsens things even more.
- Overthrowing the only non-theocratic regime in the region, giving way to a civil war that will eventually result in another theocracy. The US should have negotiated with Saddam. It's not that hard to negotiate when you can nuke someone.
- Shielding themselves from prosecution behind a "national security" veil. Misuse of this veil compromises its credibility and is extremely erosive to civil rights.
The current office is a disgrace for the US. I used to have more faith in your democracy.
There will be a lot of rebuilding to do after they are gone.
"IBM could have ended it there with a purchase, which might have cost them less in the long run than paying their lawyers"
IBM didn't have to hire new lawyers - they already have a bunch of them. They don't have to pay more to fight this nuisance. In fact, they would pay them even if they had little to do (and I suspect that happens most of the time).
You are right in one thing. There would be no Microsoft.
We would be probably under an IBM or Univac monopoly.
Good patents help the little company to get compensation for something they invented. Bad patents hurt everybody but the big players that can cross-license.
I find this battery thing interesting. While I know a few people who uses more than one battery (mostly bigger, optional ones), I have never replaced a battery.
By the time they die, the gadget they powered is so obsolete I prefer to retire the old one and replace it with another. I have been through countless cell phones and laptops this way.
Granpa... What is a floppy disk?
don't be so picky. You have to consider what languages were available at the time. Qbasic and its predecessors came free with every version of DOS and that is a significant competitive advantage over, say, Turbo Pascal. I know that, at the time QBasic was introduced, there were much more advanced languages on the market, but if we are to explore this avenue, Smalltalk/80 was already putting the Java (or C# or C++) we have today to shame.
But paper is not a bad thing by itself. It's carbon in the form of cellulose - it's not in the atmosphere contributing to the greenhouse effect and is much denser than CO2 or methane (at room temp).
As long as you don't burn it or allow bacteria to decompose it, paper is a perfectly safe carbon sink that can even be turned into fuel if, someday, we need more greenhouse gases.
Burning our current carbon reserves is probably enough to get us all killed in a huge greenhouse. I would be completely against the idea unless we could make the excess carbon to be fixated in, say, more trees.
Perhaps it could be shipped to the Moon or the asteroids to be used as fuel or propellant. I am not in a mood to calculate how good that would be.
Aw... What do you have against our new methane farting overlords?
Oops... Sorry.
What I like most about screen is the ability to detach from the screen session, log on from another location and summon back whatever I was doing in the terminal before.
Just do a screen -x and get back right where you were.
Digg has Windows fanboys, /. has scientologists...
No place seems safe these days...
"Seems like they would do better if they focussed on making a great OS"
I would like to remind you they never quite excelled at making OSs. Even if we go back to the PC-DOS days, what they had was an OEM agreement where IBM bundled PC-DOS with the IBM PC. PC-DOS became a de-facto standard because IBM shipped lots of PCs and charged a lot to bundle it with CP/M-86 in a time when CP/M (which was quite yawn-inspiring) was _the_ office computer standard OS. Letting IBM impose PC-DOS as the corporate computer standard by creating a user base for software developers was instrumental. When clones arrived, it was a no brainer to sell MS-DOS to their users so they could take advantage of the library IBM's size helped create.
You may be referring at their Xenix offering. While it was a Unix-like, it was not a particularly good one. I distinctly remember it sucked when compared to real Unixes. It could run on 286s and drive a couple terminals, which made it a nice OS for small offices.
Windows 1, 2 and 3 were a sorry joke. They were very unstable and the people who welcomed them (me included) did so mainly because I didn't have the money to buy a Mac, which was the beacon of excellence on desktop OSs of the time.
There was a brief period, coinciding with the darkest days of Apple, during and after the transition from 68K to PowerPC when MacOS 7 and Windows 95 were more or less equally stable. OS/2 was good, but was never more than a niche player. When NT 4 arrived MS had, finally, an OS that were as stable as the MacOS of the day and not uncomfortable to use. It compared favorably not because NT was admirably stable but because OS7 and 8 sucked really bad. OS9 was not much of an improvement either.
When announced, OSX blew the socks off 2000 and has been doing so ever since with each and every Windows release. Vista sucks so bad OEMs offer XP instead, so, it would not qualify as an example of this "strenght".
In the meantime, Linux became a very robust, usable and quite full-featured Unix-like OS that, in sharp contrast with previous Unix-like OSs (mainly Unix itself), neither did cost more than the computer it ran on (like Unix for 386) nor required a computer costing more than a decent car (like, say, Solaris).
I switched from 2000 to XP and, shortly after, I switched to Linux never to look back.
It's been a long, long time since Microsoft did an OS that could really compete in the marketplace without OEM tie-ins or shady tricks (remember DR-DOS and Windows 3), but they did some good-enough stuff. MS-DOS 6 was good enough. Windows for Workgroups was good enough (and a clever realization people don't buy servers - they buy file and printer sharing). 95 was nice, NT 4 was nice. 2000 was in the sweet spot and XP is, more or less, 2000 with a nice skin. None of them was particularly excellent.
That simple realization - that people don't buy software: they buy useful capabilities - is at the core of MS's demise. Either they get it or they will suffer.
"It's easy to learn, if you're familiar with the C syntax ..."
There is a trade-off. This ease of assimilation drags PHP's expressive power and level of abstraction closer to what you see in C. This is a very low standard.
About my stance on PHP and on most people who defend it, if all you know is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
I strongly advise the most vocal PHP fans to try to learn other languages, as most of them seem to have a very limited background. It's good and I am happy they can solve any problem they have, from distributed web applications sharing JSON messages to shell scripting and GTK applications, but no tool fits all roles. It's also not about web frameworks. Let them learn Ruby and Python. Let them grok MVC. Throw in some Lisp, Smalltalk and, while they are at the job, let them give a look at how things are done in C and try to compare C++ to Objective-C. Download the SICP videos from MIT and watch them (if they don't get something, they can always hit "rewind").
And her response could indicate she is under some stress. Maybe a project that is not going right, maybe something completely outside the scope of the discussion (maybe even outside her professional life) made she give the emotional answer we saw to the unlucky anonymous coward who crossed her way.
It's incredibly rare to find someone who knows something else making a strong instance for PHP. Any language and platform deserves better than fanboys defending it.
If they ever open the name to public vote, it may end up being the Chuck Norris Telescope ;-)
The point is that the misperception that the OS is the monolithic thing that goes from the GUI down to the memory manager won't resist the observation I made. It could mean that IRIX, Solaris, AIX, Linux and BSD are, after all, the same OS.
.NET to shame.
Actually, I think that this misperception can be traced back to the Smalltalk folks that made the GUI plus OS plus programming language thing for the first time. And keep in mind I think Smalltalk/80 puts the 2008 versions of Java and
Whatever the questions are, we will have them answered in about a couple billion years, as soon as the planets are fully formed.