The way I see it is this: languages like Ruby and Python benefit from good web frameworks, since they're non-web-specific languages, and these frameworks make their use a lot more convenient in web programming. PHP, on the other hand, is very much a web programming language at heart.
I heartily disagree.
First of all, can you explain what's a good "web-specific-language"? As both a web-programmer and a general-purpose programmer, I'd say there's nothing really "web-specific" about a core language. You do need some good library support for stuff like handling web protocols (HTTP, url parsing, etc.), and both Python and Ruby (and many more) have that.
What's important in a core language in order to be suitable for web-programming is good string handling facilities. Which, when you look at it, is what "web-programming" is really all about: generation, manipulation, and occassionally parsing of strings.
I'm not sure how you can imply that Python and Ruby are not as good as PHP for web programming. You indicated that you're "looking to broaden my horizons a bit". So I guess you do know PHP well, but you don't really know Python or Ruby yet.
I've been a PHP programmer for years too. I worked in positions where it was just too problematic to switch. But eventually, I did, although it meant rewriting a lot of legacy code in a new langauge.
Why did I switch? Because I finally understood what I wrote in the above paragraph: that webprogramming is really all about generation, manipulation, and occassionally parsing of strings.
I've used Python a lot for general purpose programming, and I found myself over and over again unfavorably comparing PHP to Python when developing in PHP.
I would say to myself "o.k., now I need to get this substring from the incoming string, manipulate it a bit and plant it in the response page." And immediately a very short, concise and elegant solution Python would pop to my mind. But then I'd need to translate that elegant solution to some awkward PHP translation, and my mind would ache
To get the substring, I couldn't just do "substr = str[3:24].lower()" like I would do in Python. I had to use some godawful substr(str, 3, 24) function, and then run another function on the output, since PHP doesn't support the slice notation and treating of strings as objects that modern languages like Python and Ruby support as core feature.
Also, PHP's handling of regex (another important tool in the web-programmers toolbox) is coarse and awkward. Python's regex support is incomparably better, and Ruby's - even more so.
To sum up, I switched to Python from PHP4 since Python is, hands off, an incomparably better language for web-programming. And Ruby is even better than Python, which is why my current tool of choice is Ruby on Rails.
And while we're on the subject, why didn't PHP manage to create a framework as good as Rails, with all its huge advantage in user-base size?
That's because PHP isn't just an inferior language to Ruby in the web department (supposedly its home court) - its also generally a clunky programming language.
Writing a good web development framework is a general programming task. You need a good object system. PHP didn't even have a half-decent object system until release 5.0, and most of the world still uses PHP4. PHP doesn't have closures. It doesn't have elegant flow control mechanisms like Ruby has. It doesn't have any meta-programming facilities I'm aware of, while Ruby is the best meta-programming language I've used (with the possible exception of Lisp with its uber-macros).
So not only is PHP inferior to Python and Ruby for the simple tasks; for complex tasks, such writing a web-development-framework, the gap only widens. The result is that developing with a better language like Ruby, and on a superior platform like the RoR framework, is incomparably easier, faster, and more maintainable, even for the simple stuff PHP used t
Well, it is possible to view the difference you pointed out, not as an inconsistency, but rather as an integral part of the plot.
The prequels, and especially "Clone Wars", make the point that the Jedi order deviated from its "correct" path. That's the "imbalance in the force" often mentioned, that caused the reactive "inverse imbalace" of the dark side and the Empire coming to power.
Anakin/Vader embodies that imbalance. Note for example his blunt, haughty disregard of all those "lower", non-Jedi people at the bar scene in the beginning of Ep. 2 ("Jedi business! go back to your drink.")
Of course, later this deviation becomes only too appearant when he slaughters and entire village. But it can be argued that the whole Jedi order has been deviating with him. That the whole order was drifting away from the original philosophies of peace, serenity, inaction - into egocentricism, arrogance, disdain, indifference. In short: into the dark side.
This deviation leads to the rise of the new Sith Lords out of the ranks of the Jedis, since they are in fact a logical conclusion of this process.
Anakin himself rather represents the original spirit of the Jedi, as it drifts back and forth, right on the border between the light and the dark sides.
At first, the haughty attitude he absorbs from his fellow Jedis is expressed, leading him eventually to cross over to the dark side, and become Vader. But after the order is crushed, humbled, and all but destroyed, there is a return to the original spirit of the Jedi, presented in the sequels by the scenes of Yoda training and teaching young Luke.
And so does the order of Jedi, after drifting away from "enlightment" and into ego-worship and the dark side - so does it return to it's source, and into the light. And Darth Vader becomes Anakin Skywalker once again.
Just a thought.
The problem you mentioned was already solved.
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 1
But seriously, with the specs that Blu-Ray has for the physical aspects of the disc this format would force drive makers to reinstitute the disc-caddy system to keep your fragile Blu-Ray discs from getting scratched or otherwise hosed up by the environment. Just imagie what hell it is going to be to rent Blu-Ray's if there are no caddys!
They already solved that problem, and it seems like they made a pretty good job of it, too.
Here's something rather important you might have, somehow, forgotten:
For Rudolf Hoess to say that was a blatant, conspicuous lie. For the Nazis, torture and mass murder were the rule, not the excpetion. The method, not the unfortunate incident. A Nazi officer or soldier would be trialed and punished, usually harshly, for refusing to participate in those horrible crimes.
Now, compare that to the Americans, and you'll notice the difference: for a Bush administration official would say something like that is pretty much telling the truth.
Your usage of this quote is demogogic. It's like a prosecutor quoting a denial of blame by someone, then saying: "After hearing the all the defendant's denials, you would think that he said this. Well, you'd be wrong. This was said by no other than Charles Manson, one of the worse serial-killers in history. Conclusion: the defendant is a serial killer. I rest my case."
Television isn't a communication network. Someone broatcasts to you whatever you desire. You can't broadcast back. You don't determine which information you get. You can't even choose not to receive the commercials. You can't be a server yourself, share your files, or setup your own broadcast on the television "network".
Telephone network access is a much better analogy for Internet access than television. Furthermore, television has never really been a network in the computer sense. And in the cases when it became something similar (e.g. webTV), lo and behold: it was based on a subscription model, ie non-free.
of governmental and commercial organization over private citizens is to pass laws that make _everyone_ a criminal upon close inspection.
"So, you aren't very fond of our actions, huh? Well let's just check you desktop computer... shouldn't be a problem for you, right? Your'e just a law abiding citizen...
"Oh, wait a minute. Look what I just found! Seems like your going down, buddy. You sure are sorry you messed with us now, huh, punk?!"
If you decided to move there, respect its laws; if you don't agree with its laws, go somewhere else. You always have a choice.
I find it bizare that the very same people who would go into convulsions if their local government banned even a single website, encourage others to "accept" and even "respect" a policy of a tyrannical foreign government whose only purpose is to stifle free speech, disrupt the natural flow of information to the masses and the power that comes with it.
You tell him "if you don't agree with its laws, go somewhere else. You always have a choice." Well, when your local government will prevent you from visiting sites it doesn't like, we would tell you the same thing: "go somewhere else. You always have a choice."
Except eventually, there won't be any choice. not if everyone "respects" laws that violate some of the most basic human rights.
Remember, the people in China (and everywhere else) basically want the same things as you: basic right, including the right to consume available information. Assuming that they don't is actually pretty condescending ("yeah, we civilized folks can't have our informative websites blocked, but those barbarians over at China are probably satisfied with having enough rice to fill their belly...")
People nowadays download large files over HTTP. Downloading such files even on a fast connection - not to mention all those dial-uppers out there - can take several hours. Hence hours are lost if the download is interrupted, for example because of connection problems, power outages or computer crash.
On MSIE it has become practically essential to use some kind of download-manager (e.g. GetRight, to name one of dozens), if only for its "resuming downloads" support. Mozilla would be therefore be wise to have resuming downloads as a core feature, especially for HTTP downloads and also (less important, rarely used by end-users) for FTP downloads.
The major reason we want Linux to become a popular OS is that more third-party software will be ported to Linux.
Windows, being the current popular OS, has thousands of independent yet commercial developers and companies investing time, effort and research making cool tools and apps for it.
As a developer, it's great to have tools like Emacs and Python for free. But let's face it: some top notch tools probably won't be replaced by OSS any time soon. It just requires too much effort, research, and knowledge (much of which is patented by Adobe) to create a graphic suite as powerful as Adobe CS.
So making Linux popular is the only way to lure all these powerful art and development tools to the Linux environment.
In order to preserve my strained eyesight, I browse with FireBird 0.7, and make the fonts pretty large. In the current version of slashdot, that is no problem: the whole page scales perfectly. The layout is preserved, it's practically the same page, only larger and much easier to read.
In the alternative version, however, the text column (div class="leftcolumn") invades the central content column (div class="centercolumn" id='content') when enlarged. For me, and others like me, that is certainly a disadvantage.
Windows users can download the extra cool Media Player Classic. This slim, effective, GPLed all-in-one player has extensions for playing Quicktime, Real, and many other formats. No need to install bloated proprietary players for each and every format out there.
I don't have either the
bandwidth or the level of interest among either big network
providers or law enforcement authorities that is clearly
necessary in order to fight this kind of concentrated onslaught
from thousands of separate zombie machines at a time.
The sad truth is that there is no equal protection of the law. A rich corporation can legally destroy your life for sharing a few files on Kazaa, but most of us won't get effective legal protection even from DDoS.
Just save the file from the supposedly `locked it` files as CSV or HTML or whatever.
Yeah, that would certainly be nice... if it worked:)
Recently I was assigned to put several Word documents on my employer's website. I used the latest Office version (XP) to convert those files to HTML. The result? Horribly broken set of HTML files, unfit for inner distribution - not to mention publishing online. The simplest parts of the documents were converted with acceptable success: the HTML code generated was awkward and terrifically bloated, but usually rendered OK on common browsers. But the more sophisticated stuff (tables, footnotes, bookmarks) was not only broken itself - it also broke the rendering and generally messed up the more simple parts of the document.
In the end we just converted them all to PDF with Adobe Acrobat 5. Went OK.
Get Mozilla/Firebird.
You can enlarge the display fonts as much as you like. Much better the IE, which only lets you enlarge them to an arbitrary extent, and even that works only on sites which hasn't specified exact font sizes in their CSS.
Yes, it certainly would be a good sign... if Adobe's own vector animation authoring tool would actually support SVG.
And helpful too, since there doesn't seem to be any major SVG authoring tool around (one that graphically oriented web designers might consider using.)
Reviewing the balance between work and school that I kept for the last three years, I came to the conclusion that my job almost always took higher priority. The following reasons for this situation are possible:
1) Tackling real problems on the real world is often more interesting than contemplating theoretical problems on the sphere of idealistic academic thought. Real problems are more complex, demanding, challenging, and much less clean, tidy and nicely-organized than academic material. The solution often surprises you, and of course there always is the immediate satisfaction of helping real people overcome a real obstacle, gaining the appreciation of you friends & colleagues, improving your material standing, etc.
2)When the coursed are particularly tedious, downright boring and utterly detached from any sort of reality, your job might become a handy excuse to neglect your studying. This is especially powerful in times of real (or perceived) crisis/emergency at work, but investing time in your work while neglecting school is an efficent way to avoid feelings of guilt and shame when failure follews inevitably at the footsteps of neglect.
I hope these insights will help you somewhat in your decision and the challenge you will face, should you decide to face it.
Slashdot Mirror
I heartily disagree.
First of all, can you explain what's a good "web-specific-language"? As both a web-programmer and a general-purpose programmer, I'd say there's nothing really "web-specific" about a core language. You do need some good library support for stuff like handling web protocols (HTTP, url parsing, etc.), and both Python and Ruby (and many more) have that.
What's important in a core language in order to be suitable for web-programming is good string handling facilities. Which, when you look at it, is what "web-programming" is really all about: generation, manipulation, and occassionally parsing of strings.
I'm not sure how you can imply that Python and Ruby are not as good as PHP for web programming. You indicated that you're "looking to broaden my horizons a bit". So I guess you do know PHP well, but you don't really know Python or Ruby yet.
I've been a PHP programmer for years too. I worked in positions where it was just too problematic to switch. But eventually, I did, although it meant rewriting a lot of legacy code in a new langauge.
Why did I switch? Because I finally understood what I wrote in the above paragraph: that webprogramming is really all about generation, manipulation, and occassionally parsing of strings.
I've used Python a lot for general purpose programming, and I found myself over and over again unfavorably comparing PHP to Python when developing in PHP.
I would say to myself "o.k., now I need to get this substring from the incoming string, manipulate it a bit and plant it in the response page." And immediately a very short, concise and elegant solution Python would pop to my mind. But then I'd need to translate that elegant solution to some awkward PHP translation, and my mind would ache
To get the substring, I couldn't just do "substr = str[3:24].lower()" like I would do in Python. I had to use some godawful substr(str, 3, 24) function, and then run another function on the output, since PHP doesn't support the slice notation and treating of strings as objects that modern languages like Python and Ruby support as core feature.
Also, PHP's handling of regex (another important tool in the web-programmers toolbox) is coarse and awkward. Python's regex support is incomparably better, and Ruby's - even more so.
To sum up, I switched to Python from PHP4 since Python is, hands off, an incomparably better language for web-programming. And Ruby is even better than Python, which is why my current tool of choice is Ruby on Rails.
And while we're on the subject, why didn't PHP manage to create a framework as good as Rails, with all its huge advantage in user-base size?
That's because PHP isn't just an inferior language to Ruby in the web department (supposedly its home court) - its also generally a clunky programming language.
Writing a good web development framework is a general programming task. You need a good object system. PHP didn't even have a half-decent object system until release 5.0, and most of the world still uses PHP4. PHP doesn't have closures. It doesn't have elegant flow control mechanisms like Ruby has. It doesn't have any meta-programming facilities I'm aware of, while Ruby is the best meta-programming language I've used (with the possible exception of Lisp with its uber-macros).
So not only is PHP inferior to Python and Ruby for the simple tasks; for complex tasks, such writing a web-development-framework, the gap only widens. The result is that developing with a better language like Ruby, and on a superior platform like the RoR framework, is incomparably easier, faster, and more maintainable, even for the simple stuff PHP used t
Well, it is possible to view the difference you pointed out, not as an inconsistency, but rather as an integral part of the plot.
The prequels, and especially "Clone Wars", make the point that the Jedi order deviated from its "correct" path. That's the "imbalance in the force" often mentioned, that caused the reactive "inverse imbalace" of the dark side and the Empire coming to power.
Anakin/Vader embodies that imbalance. Note for example his blunt, haughty disregard of all those "lower", non-Jedi people at the bar scene in the beginning of Ep. 2 ("Jedi business! go back to your drink.")
Of course, later this deviation becomes only too appearant when he slaughters and entire village. But it can be argued that the whole Jedi order has been deviating with him. That the whole order was drifting away from the original philosophies of peace, serenity, inaction - into egocentricism, arrogance, disdain, indifference. In short: into the dark side.
This deviation leads to the rise of the new Sith Lords out of the ranks of the Jedis, since they are in fact a logical conclusion of this process.
Anakin himself rather represents the original spirit of the Jedi, as it drifts back and forth, right on the border between the light and the dark sides.
At first, the haughty attitude he absorbs from his fellow Jedis is expressed, leading him eventually to cross over to the dark side, and become Vader. But after the order is crushed, humbled, and all but destroyed, there is a return to the original spirit of the Jedi, presented in the sequels by the scenes of Yoda training and teaching young Luke.
And so does the order of Jedi, after drifting away from "enlightment" and into ego-worship and the dark side - so does it return to it's source, and into the light. And Darth Vader becomes Anakin Skywalker once again.
Just a thought.
They already solved that problem, and it seems like they made a pretty good job of it, too.
Here's something rather important you might have, somehow, forgotten:
For Rudolf Hoess to say that was a blatant, conspicuous lie. For the Nazis, torture and mass murder were the rule, not the excpetion. The method, not the unfortunate incident. A Nazi officer or soldier would be trialed and punished, usually harshly, for refusing to participate in those horrible crimes.
Now, compare that to the Americans, and you'll notice the difference: for a Bush administration official would say something like that is pretty much telling the truth.
Your usage of this quote is demogogic. It's like a prosecutor quoting a denial of blame by someone, then saying: "After hearing the all the defendant's denials, you would think that he said this. Well, you'd be wrong. This was said by no other than Charles Manson, one of the worse serial-killers in history. Conclusion: the defendant is a serial killer. I rest my case."
Television isn't a communication network. Someone broatcasts to you whatever you desire. You can't broadcast back. You don't determine which information you get. You can't even choose not to receive the commercials. You can't be a server yourself, share your files, or setup your own broadcast on the television "network".
Telephone network access is a much better analogy for Internet access than television. Furthermore, television has never really been a network in the computer sense. And in the cases when it became something similar (e.g. webTV), lo and behold: it was based on a subscription model, ie non-free.
We have had telephone network access for about a centutry now.
It has never been free.
Why should Internet access be?
of governmental and commercial organization over private citizens is to pass laws that make _everyone_ a criminal upon close inspection.
"So, you aren't very fond of our actions, huh? Well let's just check you desktop computer... shouldn't be a problem for you, right? Your'e just a law abiding citizen...
"Oh, wait a minute. Look what I just found! Seems like your going down, buddy. You sure are sorry you messed with us now, huh, punk?!"
You meant PostScript, not PDF. Apart from that, you are correct.
I find it bizare that the very same people who would go into convulsions if their local government banned even a single website, encourage others to "accept" and even "respect" a policy of a tyrannical foreign government whose only purpose is to stifle free speech, disrupt the natural flow of information to the masses and the power that comes with it.
You tell him "if you don't agree with its laws, go somewhere else. You always have a choice." Well, when your local government will prevent you from visiting sites it doesn't like, we would tell you the same thing: "go somewhere else. You always have a choice."
Except eventually, there won't be any choice. not if everyone "respects" laws that violate some of the most basic human rights.
Remember, the people in China (and everywhere else) basically want the same things as you: basic right, including the right to consume available information. Assuming that they don't is actually pretty condescending ("yeah, we civilized folks can't have our informative websites blocked, but those barbarians over at China are probably satisfied with having enough rice to fill their belly...")
People nowadays download large files over HTTP. Downloading such files even on a fast connection - not to mention all those dial-uppers out there - can take several hours. Hence hours are lost if the download is interrupted, for example because of connection problems, power outages or computer crash.
On MSIE it has become practically essential to use some kind of download-manager (e.g. GetRight, to name one of dozens), if only for its "resuming downloads" support. Mozilla would be therefore be wise to have resuming downloads as a core feature, especially for HTTP downloads and also (less important, rarely used by end-users) for FTP downloads.
The major reason we want Linux to become a popular OS is that more third-party software will be ported to Linux.
Windows, being the current popular OS, has thousands of independent yet commercial developers and companies investing time, effort and research making cool tools and apps for it.
As a developer, it's great to have tools like Emacs and Python for free. But let's face it: some top notch tools probably won't be replaced by OSS any time soon. It just requires too much effort, research, and knowledge (much of which is patented by Adobe) to create a graphic suite as powerful as Adobe CS.
So making Linux popular is the only way to lure all these powerful art and development tools to the Linux environment.
ninjas kill people!
In order to preserve my strained eyesight, I browse with FireBird 0.7, and make the fonts pretty large. In the current version of slashdot, that is no problem: the whole page scales perfectly. The layout is preserved, it's practically the same page, only larger and much easier to read.
In the alternative version, however, the text column (div class="leftcolumn") invades the central content column (div class="centercolumn" id='content') when enlarged. For me, and others like me, that is certainly a disadvantage.
I've been listening to their "classical" channel (http://216.91.57.102:8000) for months now , and it's great. Try them!
The sad truth is that there is no equal protection of the law. A rich corporation can legally destroy your life for sharing a few files on Kazaa, but most of us won't get effective legal protection even from DDoS.
Recently I was assigned to put several Word documents on my employer's website. I used the latest Office version (XP) to convert those files to HTML. The result? Horribly broken set of HTML files, unfit for inner distribution - not to mention publishing online. The simplest parts of the documents were converted with acceptable success: the HTML code generated was awkward and terrifically bloated, but usually rendered OK on common browsers. But the more sophisticated stuff (tables, footnotes, bookmarks) was not only broken itself - it also broke the rendering and generally messed up the more simple parts of the document.
In the end we just converted them all to PDF with Adobe Acrobat 5. Went OK.
Get Mozilla/Firebird. You can enlarge the display fonts as much as you like. Much better the IE, which only lets you enlarge them to an arbitrary extent, and even that works only on sites which hasn't specified exact font sizes in their CSS.
Hi there.
Reviewing the balance between work and school that I kept for the last three years, I came to the conclusion that my job almost always took higher priority. The following reasons for this situation are possible:
1) Tackling real problems on the real world is often more interesting than contemplating theoretical problems on the sphere of idealistic academic thought. Real problems are more complex, demanding, challenging, and much less clean, tidy and nicely-organized than academic material. The solution often surprises you, and of course there always is the immediate satisfaction of helping real people overcome a real obstacle, gaining the appreciation of you friends & colleagues, improving your material standing, etc.
2)When the coursed are particularly tedious, downright boring and utterly detached from any sort of reality, your job might become a handy excuse to neglect your studying. This is especially powerful in times of real (or perceived) crisis/emergency at work, but investing time in your work while neglecting school is an efficent way to avoid feelings of guilt and shame when failure follews inevitably at the footsteps of neglect.
I hope these insights will help you somewhat in your decision and the challenge you will face, should you decide to face it.
The C Answer Book (2nd Edition)