Yeah, but PHP is one of the least productive environments there is, at least as far as web development goes. You could switch to.Net, and you would increase your productivity 10 fold. That is, if you stick to the.Net way of doing things. You're application might not scale that great, and you might not have any idea what's going on under the hood, and you might have a 20K viewstate submitted with every form, but you will be really productive in the sense that you can turn out a lot of features in a very small amount of time. Comparing raw PHP to rails isn't really something you should be comparing. Make your own custom framework in PHP, that fits the needs of whatever project you are working on, and you can probably turn out features extremely quickly. And your own framework will actually need what you need it to do, instead of you having to make compromises for the shortcomings of the framework.
See there you go generalizing about web applications. Here's a hint. Web applications could be just about any application in the world. There's nothing in particular about a web application that makes it web, Except the web interface. And that may be only one interface to the application. There may very well be other interfaces that connect to the same data. So if there is a need for compound primary keys in any application (which there is) then there are uses for compound primary keys in web applications.
And saying that you can still fall back to raw SQL queries in rails is like saying you can still write assembly and fortran in C. Once you start doing that, you're not using C anymore. Just like once you start using raw SQL in ruby, you've kind of gone off the rails.
Commission is a very rare thing in retail sales. I don't know why all salespeople think they should be working on commission. I think it leads to a bad customer experience. I know one place where the employees work on commission, and that's FutureShop. Yet I find that more often then not, the employees are trying to push the customers to buy something they don't need, like a more powerful computer, Monster cables, or the product warranty, because it brings them more commission. Just be happy you didn't work in clothing retail, where you don't get commission, and they expect you to buy their clothes too. Most people in the world don't work on commission, low end sales guys at Best Buy shouldn't be much different. If you actually know you're stuff, and are a good sales person, you should go work in a high end audio shop or something, because you'll probably get paid much better, and get treated much better as an employee.
You are right. But the number of people who know how to do so is severely limited. Supply and demand would say that it would cost many times more to the person who wanted the website built because the developer resources would be so much more scarce. It might take less time for a qualified developer to code up a page, but there would very few developers available, and still a lot of people who would want to have websites built.
How much longer would it take to develop dynamic websites that comform perfect to standards? What business would be willing to pay for that? If the going rate for a website is $X, you can't just start to tell businesses that it's now going to cost them $100X. And it would cost that much more. Because only about 5% (very high estimate) of web developers even know what would come close to constituting a properly formatted html/xhtml document.
I've never understood why people would want a 3 column layout on the web. The web isn't a newspaper. 3 Column layout doesn't work well. I seriously think someone went through the trouble of figuring out what CSS couldn't do (however useless or obscure) and started it as a meme or how weak CSS was. Firefox has x-rounded-corners because it's part of CSS3, and it's not officially supported yet, so they don't want everyone using the actual css rounded corners thinking that it's fully supported. For more information on rounded corners in CSS follow the link.
I hope you were joking about "Meet the standards and innovate on top of them". The browser war was terrible for developers. You obviously don't remember trying to program Javascript during the Netscape 4 days. Anybody who knows anything about web development knows that you don't do layout with "tags" you do layout with CSS. It's different than doing layout with HTML Tables and Tags, but it makes your website much more flexible. CSS3 is coming, and it will provide us with even more features.
If the browser started displaying warnings on every page that didn't pass w3c validation, then probably less than 1% of the pages on the internet would not display an error. The slashdot front page doesn't pass HTML validation. Very few pages on the internet have valid HTML+CSS. Something like that isn't feasible right now. Also, something like that would greatly annoy users, and push them to use browsers that don't have this "feature".
Seems like a better robot would be some kind of humanoid, or at least something with an arm you could manipulate. Have a remote control with an LCD screen so that you can see where it's going, and you could probably get it to go to the fridge for you to fetch a beer. I don't think it would be too hard with stereoscopic vision to make it so that it could pick up an item in it's field of view by you just selecting it, via touch screen. I did a 2D version for a robotics class in university, a full 3D version wouldn't be difficult. Much more useful than a dinosaur, which can't pick thing up.
I also think that if it is any good, then in 1 year it will only cost $200. So being an early adopter in this area would be very expensive. I remember when the large capacity iPods cost $CDN 700 with tax. Now they are down to $CDN 260 for the 80 Gig iPod, and $299 for the 8GB iPod Touch. I'm not really an early adopter, so I can't see buying a device like this. But give it a year, and if the price comes down, then I could see the usefullness of it.
It wouldn't be optimal, but it would be a nice alternative to paying $400 for the giant kindle device. As long as it could flip "pages" fast enough, it wouldn't really be a problem. When you read a paperback novel, you have to move your eyes back to the beginning of the line every time you finish the previous line, and your eyes have to move even more when switching pages. I've seen studies that say you can read much faster if your eyes don't have to move over the page. I think the iPod could actually offer and advantage in this aspect.
Maybe they could only allow internet access through the consoles in the back of the seats. With control of the programs on these consoles, they could completely control what kind of services you could access.
There is no way it should cost $400. You can get the 8 GB iPod Touch for $CDN 299. This thing only comes with 256 MB of memory (plenty for ebooks, but come on, it's 2007). It also looks like something out of the 80's.
I think that Apple should release a software update for their iPods that lets them be used as an eBook reader. I don't really want to carry around another device just to read a book. I'm already carrying around my iPod. Ny current iPod Nano 3G has enough battery power for me to watch 5 hours of video, I'm sure it could get a couple more hours when using it as an ebook reader. That's more than enough to cover my reading for the day, until I can charge it at night. I watch a lot of video on my iPod, and I only have to charge it once a week. The screen probably isn't the best for reading, but it's pretty good, and would suffice for the most part.
Well then the reviewer sucks, and isn't doing their job correctly. Maybe as part of the review process they should have to watch someone from the target age group play the game. That's what parenting magazines do when reviewing children's toys. I don't see why a game review magazine/site should be any different. Just for the record, my wife bought Cars, because she likes simple driving games. I found it to be quite a good game. It was well done, and actually much better than I expected from a game made from a children's movie.
By that logic, you could categorize the full version of the game as an advertisement for itself. If I go over to a friend's house, and he's playing Halo2, and I say, Hey, that looks cool, then the game has just acted as advertising for itself. Actually, every product is an advertisement for itself by this logic.
If you're unhappy with the price of games, switch to Wii. The most expensive games are $50, with many lower than that. There's a couple like DDR that cost more than $50, but that's because they come with extra hardware.
You're right. I'm pretty sure that the publishers pay quite a bit of money to get their game demo on XBL. MS doesn't do that for free. The publisher pays, the user pays, MS gets rich.
Yes, but Firefox updates it's browser (quickly) to account for the vulnerabilities. Also, like I said, I try to stay off sites I don't trust, so the odds of me encountering a site that has malicious code on it, between the time the vulnerability is discovered, and the time it is fixed is actually quite low. I'm probably not completely safe, but no amount of virus protection software will make you completely safe. So the best thing to do is just practice safe computing. I could run a fulltime virus scanner, but it just slows my computer down, and I've never seen it stop anything.
I stopped buying PC Gamer a long time ago. It use to be at least 1/2 inch thick. It used to give honest reviews. I remember some games getting ratings of 42% or something like that. If a game was bad, it got a bad rating. Lately, I haven't seen much reason to buy it. There's much less content then there used to be, more percentage is ads, and the reviews aren't as good as they used to be. PC Gamer has to remember that their main customer is the person buying the magazine. I think they have lost a lot of readers since their early days.
If you make games that don't suck, and that are innovative, then you have nothing to fear from game reviewers. Most of the time, they don't give bad reviews to good games. Sometimes a good game will get a bad review from a couple reviewers, but not often.
I don't have any virus scanner or malware blocker, or firewall or any kind of security software whatsoever installed on my computer. Actually, I have clamwin, but I only run it once a week. It never finds any viruses. Yet I would say that I'm adequately protected because I have a brain. I don't run software from sites I don't trust. I use Firefox, which doesn't have a history of letting websites run malicious code, and I try to stay on sites that I trust. I have a router, and no incoming ports are forwarded to my PC, so I'm safe in that way I guess. At work I have Norton installed, because it has to be. To date, it has blocked 0 spyware, 0 viruses, and 0 worms. Because it hasn't encountered any, because I practice safe computing. It hasn't actually done anything except slow my computer down. What a great waste of money that was.
Maybe they are recommending Vista, because although XP works better for now, what happens when MS doesn't support it, or what happens what happens when some new program comes out that only works under Vista. IBM could have any number of reasons for recommending Vista over XP. And saying that they "recommend Windows" isn't much better. Which version do they recommend? Windows 3.1? Now they have to say, "Recommends Windows XP or Vista". But then why recommend anything, because you're recommendations are just a list of the available options.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but PHP is one of the least productive environments there is, at least as far as web development goes. You could switch to .Net, and you would increase your productivity 10 fold. That is, if you stick to the .Net way of doing things. You're application might not scale that great, and you might not have any idea what's going on under the hood, and you might have a 20K viewstate submitted with every form, but you will be really productive in the sense that you can turn out a lot of features in a very small amount of time. Comparing raw PHP to rails isn't really something you should be comparing. Make your own custom framework in PHP, that fits the needs of whatever project you are working on, and you can probably turn out features extremely quickly. And your own framework will actually need what you need it to do, instead of you having to make compromises for the shortcomings of the framework.
See there you go generalizing about web applications. Here's a hint. Web applications could be just about any application in the world. There's nothing in particular about a web application that makes it web, Except the web interface. And that may be only one interface to the application. There may very well be other interfaces that connect to the same data. So if there is a need for compound primary keys in any application (which there is) then there are uses for compound primary keys in web applications.
And saying that you can still fall back to raw SQL queries in rails is like saying you can still write assembly and fortran in C. Once you start doing that, you're not using C anymore. Just like once you start using raw SQL in ruby, you've kind of gone off the rails.
Commission is a very rare thing in retail sales. I don't know why all salespeople think they should be working on commission. I think it leads to a bad customer experience. I know one place where the employees work on commission, and that's FutureShop. Yet I find that more often then not, the employees are trying to push the customers to buy something they don't need, like a more powerful computer, Monster cables, or the product warranty, because it brings them more commission. Just be happy you didn't work in clothing retail, where you don't get commission, and they expect you to buy their clothes too. Most people in the world don't work on commission, low end sales guys at Best Buy shouldn't be much different. If you actually know you're stuff, and are a good sales person, you should go work in a high end audio shop or something, because you'll probably get paid much better, and get treated much better as an employee.
He would notice the errors, but would he know how to fix it?
You are right. But the number of people who know how to do so is severely limited. Supply and demand would say that it would cost many times more to the person who wanted the website built because the developer resources would be so much more scarce. It might take less time for a qualified developer to code up a page, but there would very few developers available, and still a lot of people who would want to have websites built.
How much longer would it take to develop dynamic websites that comform perfect to standards? What business would be willing to pay for that? If the going rate for a website is $X, you can't just start to tell businesses that it's now going to cost them $100X. And it would cost that much more. Because only about 5% (very high estimate) of web developers even know what would come close to constituting a properly formatted html/xhtml document.
I've never understood why people would want a 3 column layout on the web. The web isn't a newspaper. 3 Column layout doesn't work well. I seriously think someone went through the trouble of figuring out what CSS couldn't do (however useless or obscure) and started it as a meme or how weak CSS was. Firefox has x-rounded-corners because it's part of CSS3, and it's not officially supported yet, so they don't want everyone using the actual css rounded corners thinking that it's fully supported. For more information on rounded corners in CSS follow the link.
I hope you were joking about "Meet the standards and innovate on top of them". The browser war was terrible for developers. You obviously don't remember trying to program Javascript during the Netscape 4 days. Anybody who knows anything about web development knows that you don't do layout with "tags" you do layout with CSS. It's different than doing layout with HTML Tables and Tags, but it makes your website much more flexible. CSS3 is coming, and it will provide us with even more features.
If the browser started displaying warnings on every page that didn't pass w3c validation, then probably less than 1% of the pages on the internet would not display an error. The slashdot front page doesn't pass HTML validation. Very few pages on the internet have valid HTML+CSS. Something like that isn't feasible right now. Also, something like that would greatly annoy users, and push them to use browsers that don't have this "feature".
Seems like a better robot would be some kind of humanoid, or at least something with an arm you could manipulate. Have a remote control with an LCD screen so that you can see where it's going, and you could probably get it to go to the fridge for you to fetch a beer. I don't think it would be too hard with stereoscopic vision to make it so that it could pick up an item in it's field of view by you just selecting it, via touch screen. I did a 2D version for a robotics class in university, a full 3D version wouldn't be difficult. Much more useful than a dinosaur, which can't pick thing up.
How long until somebody figures out how to hack it to get unlimited free wireless internet?
I also think that if it is any good, then in 1 year it will only cost $200. So being an early adopter in this area would be very expensive. I remember when the large capacity iPods cost $CDN 700 with tax. Now they are down to $CDN 260 for the 80 Gig iPod, and $299 for the 8GB iPod Touch. I'm not really an early adopter, so I can't see buying a device like this. But give it a year, and if the price comes down, then I could see the usefullness of it.
It wouldn't be optimal, but it would be a nice alternative to paying $400 for the giant kindle device. As long as it could flip "pages" fast enough, it wouldn't really be a problem. When you read a paperback novel, you have to move your eyes back to the beginning of the line every time you finish the previous line, and your eyes have to move even more when switching pages. I've seen studies that say you can read much faster if your eyes don't have to move over the page. I think the iPod could actually offer and advantage in this aspect.
Maybe they could only allow internet access through the consoles in the back of the seats. With control of the programs on these consoles, they could completely control what kind of services you could access.
There is no way it should cost $400. You can get the 8 GB iPod Touch for $CDN 299. This thing only comes with 256 MB of memory (plenty for ebooks, but come on, it's 2007). It also looks like something out of the 80's.
I think that Apple should release a software update for their iPods that lets them be used as an eBook reader. I don't really want to carry around another device just to read a book. I'm already carrying around my iPod. Ny current iPod Nano 3G has enough battery power for me to watch 5 hours of video, I'm sure it could get a couple more hours when using it as an ebook reader. That's more than enough to cover my reading for the day, until I can charge it at night. I watch a lot of video on my iPod, and I only have to charge it once a week. The screen probably isn't the best for reading, but it's pretty good, and would suffice for the most part.
Well then the reviewer sucks, and isn't doing their job correctly. Maybe as part of the review process they should have to watch someone from the target age group play the game. That's what parenting magazines do when reviewing children's toys. I don't see why a game review magazine/site should be any different. Just for the record, my wife bought Cars, because she likes simple driving games. I found it to be quite a good game. It was well done, and actually much better than I expected from a game made from a children's movie.
By that logic, you could categorize the full version of the game as an advertisement for itself. If I go over to a friend's house, and he's playing Halo2, and I say, Hey, that looks cool, then the game has just acted as advertising for itself. Actually, every product is an advertisement for itself by this logic.
If you're unhappy with the price of games, switch to Wii. The most expensive games are $50, with many lower than that. There's a couple like DDR that cost more than $50, but that's because they come with extra hardware.
You're right. I'm pretty sure that the publishers pay quite a bit of money to get their game demo on XBL. MS doesn't do that for free. The publisher pays, the user pays, MS gets rich.
Yes, but Firefox updates it's browser (quickly) to account for the vulnerabilities. Also, like I said, I try to stay off sites I don't trust, so the odds of me encountering a site that has malicious code on it, between the time the vulnerability is discovered, and the time it is fixed is actually quite low. I'm probably not completely safe, but no amount of virus protection software will make you completely safe. So the best thing to do is just practice safe computing. I could run a fulltime virus scanner, but it just slows my computer down, and I've never seen it stop anything.
I stopped buying PC Gamer a long time ago. It use to be at least 1/2 inch thick. It used to give honest reviews. I remember some games getting ratings of 42% or something like that. If a game was bad, it got a bad rating. Lately, I haven't seen much reason to buy it. There's much less content then there used to be, more percentage is ads, and the reviews aren't as good as they used to be. PC Gamer has to remember that their main customer is the person buying the magazine. I think they have lost a lot of readers since their early days.
If you make games that don't suck, and that are innovative, then you have nothing to fear from game reviewers. Most of the time, they don't give bad reviews to good games. Sometimes a good game will get a bad review from a couple reviewers, but not often.
I don't have any virus scanner or malware blocker, or firewall or any kind of security software whatsoever installed on my computer. Actually, I have clamwin, but I only run it once a week. It never finds any viruses. Yet I would say that I'm adequately protected because I have a brain. I don't run software from sites I don't trust. I use Firefox, which doesn't have a history of letting websites run malicious code, and I try to stay on sites that I trust. I have a router, and no incoming ports are forwarded to my PC, so I'm safe in that way I guess. At work I have Norton installed, because it has to be. To date, it has blocked 0 spyware, 0 viruses, and 0 worms. Because it hasn't encountered any, because I practice safe computing. It hasn't actually done anything except slow my computer down. What a great waste of money that was.
Maybe they are recommending Vista, because although XP works better for now, what happens when MS doesn't support it, or what happens what happens when some new program comes out that only works under Vista. IBM could have any number of reasons for recommending Vista over XP. And saying that they "recommend Windows" isn't much better. Which version do they recommend? Windows 3.1? Now they have to say, "Recommends Windows XP or Vista". But then why recommend anything, because you're recommendations are just a list of the available options.