The correction that needs to happen is that companies need to learn to filter and find qualified, inexperienced applicants.
This will be difficult to do by the nature of a lot of IT or CS guys. You get a young Turk coming in, and is interviewed by the head programmer, or team leader, or whatever. He'll ask about his projects, and as soon as he hears Perl, or Python, or Java, or whatever, he drops the kid like a rock because he has an innate religious dislike of the tool.
"I use VisualStudio to program."
"BILL-LOVER! Out of my cubicle!"
I don't mean to be one-sided, either. The head programmer has been burned before, when they did take a flyer on some young Turk who immediately came in and demanded that they re-write the whole thing in C++, because that's what he knew well.
This kind of problem will not go away until "software engineering" isn't a ridiculous notion. Analogies are dangerous, but you can compare the current situation to building tradesmen in the far past. The stone masons thought everything should be made out of stone, the carpenters suggested wood, and the brick masons offered bricks. Architects did what they did based on what came before, so the profession developed based on prior work.
Then steel came along, and architects discovered you could just build a big steel frame and glue whatever damn thing you wanted on the ouside of the box. Once we have that framework--which is part hardware that is fast enough and cheap enough, and part software design concepts that are ubiquitous--we can glue any damn thing we want on the outside of an application, and do it cheaply.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is, of course, endlessly debateable.
are we willing to start paying entry level guys 30K and that super-star 300K?
No, because the first time somebody implements that, the 30K employees (which are most of them) will unionize and enforce wage controls where their salary isn't tied to productivity but seniority.
I doubt MS could break their price much more on Dell. If anybody can dictate to MS what they want to spend on OS licenses, it's Dell.
Dell has, however, put itself in the unenviable position of trying to sell cheap computers. This is a long-term losing strategy--there's always a guy able to build it cheaper. I'd hazzard a guess that most of Dell's profits come from their decidedly non-cheap server and corporate markets. Offering a high-end media machine with good margins would be a good deal for Dell.
But I don't think Apple will go for this. Apple doesn't have much trouble filling the channel with hardware now, and the move to x86 won't change that. I think it's also a bit naive to think that simply because Apple will run on x86 that their prices will change all that much, and there's no reason for Apple to share that profit margin.
Well, he'd probably still be with SGI, except they silently imploded 4-5 years ago, which is why he went to Linux. Also, he was a big proponent of the whole "open source" thing through his work with Mozilla, and chose to eat his own dog food.
Honestly, he should get credit for sticking with it for this long. He's a guy who has work he needs to have done, and Linux wasn't cutting it. More importantly, it wasn't cutting it and the "linux community" refused to accept that it had any failures at all. Well, maybe some token words of acknowledgement, before going off and reinventing the desktop or package manager again.
I like Linux just fine as a server. I wouldn't bother with the desktop at all, and haven't for more than 6 years.
I wouldn't bet on it. jwz used to like to use SGI for the same reason--you pays your money, your shit just works. Fiddling with your desktop has some value, but not much.
Re:Congratulations PHP
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A Decade of PHP
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· Score: 3, Insightful
n the not-so-distant future, developers will think it crazy not to use an MVC web framework for their web applications.
You know, I heard the same thing about Java back in 1996 or so.
Don't get me wrong, Rails looks decent enough, but neither is it a panacea. You can put together a really fast RSS reader, or a DB-backed recipe application, but these are trivial applications. Solving trivial problems elegantly isn't worthless, but thus far I haven't seen any Rails projects that compare in scope to something like Zope, or Drupal or even PHPBB.
Going through the various How-Tos for Rails, I keep saying to myself, "...or, I could just download foo, which is written in Perl/PHP/Python/AWK, but already works and is proven and does the same thing." PHP hasn't seen the need for copying Rails because they have a robust and featureful set of applications already. Dropping everything and chasing the next sexy thing might be entertaining, but it doesn't do much to help me, the working Webmaster.
I guess I'm just suspicious of using MVC (or OOP, or some other trendy buzzword) as a talisman. It smacks of cheerleading, and accusing people of "not getting it" doesn't prove the point.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
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A Decade of PHP
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Good points in your reply. Thanks for that.
If I was interviewing someone and they presented me with sample code riddled with "pg_connect()" calls rather than abstracting that into its own library, my first question would be "tell me why it is bad to do this."
Well, it all depends, doesn't it?
First, there's a difference between coding an abstraction layer that facilitates interaction with your database, and coding an abstraction layer that handwaves away the peculiarities of any particular database. For example, if you have a function called "get_data_from_postgres_and_format_table()", that's an example of the first situation. Another way to do it that follows the second would be "format_table(get_data())", where the gathering of data from a database is generalized across databases, and the formatting of tables is done as a function of the application.
In other words, putting all those "pg_connect()" calls behind something that helps you develop your application faster is a good thing. However, it does not neccessarily follow that then formalizing a set of database calls that dissolves the differences between PGSql and MySql and Interbase is also a good thing.
I can use Drupal as an example, since I know it fairly well. The "Node" is the basic structure of the framework, and modules that extend the basic node must have the same ID as the node base. When presented, the node is a JOIN of the primary node and the extended node's tables. In Drupal, the work coordinating these is done by having, conceptually, a "get_me_the_next_node_id_number()" function and preventing future calls from grabbing that same number. This is all done in PHP, rather than simply saying, "Inser this and that in table 1 and table 2, and make table 2's ID equal table 1's ID."
My arguments also do not apply to a good 75-80% of Web-based applications, most of which simply use the database as a less-dangerous way of accessing and storing data in the filesystem. They would be equally well-served by flatfiles, but don't because of the security issues inherent in allowing a Web server process to write to the filesystem. I'm not terribly familiar with PHPBB, but I imagine that there are multiple workarounds hand-hacked in PHP to accomodate those folks whose MySQL wouldn't know a foreign key from a stored procedure. All of these things introduce bugs, performance issues, and maintainability issues just as severe as any dependance on a single database vendor does--they're just different.
I recognize that there are problems inherent in dealing with, say, PostgreSQL, but those do not go away with database abstraction. All database engines will have some level of maintenance issues--the benefit from depending on a single database is that you can codify the procedures in your documentation and maybe even your code--a cron-run script that automatically VACUUMs the database at 2:30AM--rather than weaseling out with a "The care and feeding of your database is beyond the scope of this document" disclaimer.
Finally, this really only applies to larger PHP projects. I've found that when PHP is used to do something quick-and-dirty, it's almost always hard-coded to whatever database the programmer happens to have. It's only when that quick-and-dirty program starts to become popular does everybody clamor for "database independence", and then the author will comply. So, as an application grows in features and complexity, rather than leaning on the database to do it's job, the programmer doubles his work by re-inventing ideas, and re-learning mistakes, that database vendors dealt with 10 years ago, such as concurrency and performance issues. So, ironically, the best design decisions are made when it was just a little hack, and "creeping CS-isms" strike it as it gets more widely used, crippling the speed at which development can take place.
Yeah, this sounds like what the PHP folks were saying about Perl something like 6 years ago. I know you were tongue in cheek, but really--isn't language bigotry a pretty old joke by now? Perl is still around; PHP will still be around; and Ruby-on-rails will still be around when SexCodeSuperFunNerds arrives to "displace" it.
Re:Congratulations are in order!
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I've never understood the fanaticism of database abstraction. There's good reason to hardcode to a specific database, especially if you hardcode to a Free database like PostgreSQL.
For example, if you use a database abstraction, you have to make a lot of performace- or feature-robbing choices. There are still hosting situations where MySQL is still on 3.23, so you can't use the better parts of the InnoDB storage engine. So no foreign key constraints, no stored procedures.
On the other hand, if you do hardcode for PostgreSQL, you put a burden on the end user, sure--but in return, you're giving them a more robust, more featureful application that is easier to support and maintain. I personally like PostgreSQL because it seems less haphazard than MySQL, but you could very easily do this with MySQL, so long as you restrict yourself to the later, non-crippled versions.
The Arsdigita folks did this with Oracle. Leaning on a $tens-of-thousands database application may put you out of the realm of everyday developers, but it's far from insane.
This is "all the time I've spent dealing with other people's code that doesn't have a foreign key to be found and all integrity checking is done in the PHP code" talking. It's infuriating.
Re: What Is Porn? Ask Potter Stewart, "I know it when I see it."
Seriously, are you going to make the argument that you can't identify porn as porn? Your site, with topless women? Porn.
Realdoll? Porn. They sell a sex toy. A site that sells dildos and Spanish Fly is the same. If it would come to you in the mail inside a plain brown wrapper, it's porn.
If you have a site that caters to adult prurient interests, it's porn. Well, not porn, which is a specific section of adult prurient interest items, but it would go under the XXX domain.
I think this is a better solution than the old, "no naughty pictures, unless they have a health- or scientific-interest angle to them" tack. Just be right out in the open--"My company is looking to give you a hard-on!"--and allow people to see, or not see it, as they choose. If the adult industry fights this, you'll know that they aren't really interested in letting people choose to or choose not to view their products. If they fight, it's a good bet that they almost depend on people getting hooked on their product, slowly and imperceptibly.
Donations are their source of revenue. If they did not show a profit, LiveJournal would be shut down in microseconds. That bandwidth and those servers aren't free, you know.
They may not be a publicly traded company, but if they didn't at least break even, they wouldn't exist.
Yeah, thugs armed with machine guns taking down a bunch of 12-18 year old kids and some silly 20 year olds sure makes me feel great about the patriot act. The reality is that most of the people they arrested did not commit crimes and weren't even capable of committing crimes-- they were just kids who wanted to be hackers who read these forums.
You would feel differently if they had managed to hijack your identity and sent your credit rating into the toilet. I'm glad you know so much about these kids and what their intentions were. A member of ShadowCrew, are you? Jack-booted thugs, please take note.
"Because some members were known to have firearms". Hmmmm...well we should arrest all teh cops too because not only do they have firearms, many of them have machine guns!
Fascinating non sequitur. You're not winning any logic points here.
Government extends its power by making everyone subject to laws-- it doesn't matter whether a moral crime has been committed or not, the more they make the populace criminals the more they can use violence to control the populace without a revolt. That's all this is.
Sleep with the Anarchist's Cookbook under your pillow?
First, government--at least a representative government like ours--does make everybody subject to laws. Contrary to your thinking, this is a good thing. If only a few people are subject to laws, then you have something other than a democracy, and you certainly don't have the rule of law.
But, I think I know what you intended to say, before the potsmoke interfered with your thinking. You mean to say that government extends its power by making more people criminals. This is true, for a government with unlimited funds to keep everybody in jail, but that isn't terribly effective in actual practice. In fact, by making a law that makes too many people criminals, you end up with unenforceable situations such as Prohibition.
IF someone leaves tehir computer unprotected, and some kid logs into it and looks around and copies some pictures-- that kid has not committed a crime, but he has broken a law. The law is immoral, and thus criminal... but when they justify busting these kids for this stuff, they make it just that much easier to bust anyone who uses encrpytion or who uses spoofing services for anonymity, etc.
He has committed a crime. It is no more lawful for him to wander into your computer than it is to wander into your house. Even if he doesn't fiddle, touch, or steal anything.
These punks are lucky. In Texas, they could probably get shot.
Accepting this immoral harassment makes it easier for them to add more immoral harassment-- such as an iron curtain of firewalls to keep track of every packet, and filter out "bad" websites, etc.
Let's apply your logic the other direction: If we don't track down and arrest people who phish for information, before you know it, there will be criminals in the street who will be allowed to take your wallet! POLICE STATE NOW!
ITs time to throw out EVERY politican that supported the PATRIOT act-- whether democrat or republican, they have all shown themselves to be criminals who deserve prison sentences, not political careers.
I'm no fan of the Patriot Act, but it is not as odious as the paranoids make it out to be. Stupid, pointless reactionary talk like yours only serves to cheapen the efforts of people who are smarter and more influential than you are--which is nearly everybody, to be honest--who are actually doing something about the Patriot Act other than smoke dope and bitch about it.
Disney is also connected to the Smalltalk-derived Squeak.
I used to wonder about a Newton/Squeak combo from Disney--kid game machine, edutainment device, Disneyworld guide, etc. This was like 6 years ago, though.
The "oil companies" aren't in the oil business. They are in the energy business. Oil dries up tomorrow, and we're all burning Wesson oil in our mopeds? You'll be buying your veggie oil from an Exxon station.
Everything's electric? Exxon charging stations. They'll love dumping oil, too, because oil transporting and refining are huge costs to the company.
So, to put the complaint in more accurate terms, the trucking and oil refining unions will do everything in their power to spike energy-efficient cars. But that doesn't have the same impact, saying blue-collar working stiffs will kill your lefty dream, so you turn to the ominous nameless, faceless "big oil corporation" to create your boogeyman.
Sounds like classic discriminatory pricing to me. Of course, there's nothing wrong with that. I'll wager good money that you're also in favor of a progressive income tax. This is Slashdot, after all...
Porn sites are ALL for-profit ventures. A lot of.com sites (and.net and.org) are financed out of the pocket of regular folks for numerous reasons. Moving adult sites into a "ghetto" would solve one of the Slashdot crowds' pet peeves--Internet filters that filter breast cancer sites. (Why Slashdot is so fascinated with breast cancer is a fat-geek joke just waiting to happen.)
Put all the adult sites in.xxx! If you don't want porn, you block all.xxx sites! Simple! Effective! And no breast cancer sites will be harmed in the process! And now Slashdot is all up in arms about an adult "ghetto". Not that the adult sites would agree to do this to begin with--the industry is built on slowly whittling away the public's resistance to adult entertainment, and that's hard to do when you're relegated to an easily avoidable TLD.
If moving to.xxx would shut up some of those parents, I'm sure the porn site operators would be all for that, so they can get back to their business.
Some porn sites would be all for that. The very small minority of adult sites run by largely ethical people. Danni.com comes to mind.
But I think most adult sites aren't really interested in providing mostly harmless adult titillation to consenting over-18 people. It's more along the line of the stereotypical evil corporate profit-seeker. Lie, cheat, steal to get one more monthly subscription, and then sell that name to every adult catalog proprietor in the world.
It's an industry built on the objectivation of women as cum-catchers. Do you think that they care so much about the ethics of domain names?
Ahh, it's not for critics? Or do you mean to say, "It is a space opera so long as you ignore the things that make it not a space opera"? This space opera crap is bogus. It is demonstrably NOT a space opera, but just another movie, and poorly done at that.
If it's a space opera, you can point out how it follows a space opera's structure. Since you can't without skating over the parts that disprove that, yours and Ebert's statements are junk. Also, WTF is a "space opera" anyway? That's not a genre.
They've all founded their own effects houses, and what you see is just as much the product of their creative output as any other part of the movie.
I.e., they bought the effects. I can respect the work that they've done as being quite good, but Lucas leans so heavily on that one aspect of the movie that it ruins the rest of it.
Put another way, it's very easy to make a million bucks if you have a million bucks to start with. It's not shocking that Lucas's movie has good effects--all he had to do was write a check. Contrast Star Wars with Doctor Who. One has great effects, one doesn't; one has great characters, one doesn't; one is painful to watch even though the production values are high, one is fun to watch even though the production value is painfully low.
Lucas is considered to be a great film maker by whom? He's rightly considered to be a very successful film maker, but that is not the same thing. His one "good" movie is American Graffiti, which along with Empire Strikes Back he does not have sole writing credit for. Lucas is a heck of a producer, but otherwise he should leave the actual film making to other people.
It's about sense of wonder, action, visual prestidigitation and the use of the awe-inspiring scale of space as a cinematic tool.
Where do bad jokes, ex post facto justifications, surreal physics (battle cruiser gravity changing according to position of a spacecraft, in space; the nefarious spacewind; others), and juevenile theater dialog fit into that?
The only thing awe-inspiring is the special effects, and let's be honest with ourselves--Lucas simply bought those. You can get porn stars with great tits for a dime a dozen because they can buy their tits in a store, sometimes on credit against future earnings. One thing you might notice about opera--real opera, not "space" opera--is that there isn't much in the way of scenery. It's all about the performance, and Lucas gave us none of that. He tried to give us the Ring Cycle by building the best sets in the world and then hiring the Olsen twins to do the singing, saying he'll "fix it in post".
I don't think it had anything to do with knee-jerk anti-pop bashing. Especially around here--recall that Slashdot practically wet itself on the release of Episode I. The people here are core fans of Star Wars.
That they were treated so shabbily by Lucas is very telling.
Let me put it another way. After Episode I, everybody hated Jar-Jar Binks with a white-hot fury, and they thought parts of the movie was kind of stupid and Natalie Portman was wooden. But they said to themselves and each other, "Wait for the next movie!"
After Episode II, everybody still hated Jar-Jar, they weren't very impressed with the portrayal of Anakin, and although the Jango Fett thing was kind of neat, the plot overall was tortuous and the dialog kind of amateurish. But, they said to themselves, "This is just act two--wait for the next movie!"
Now we've received Episode III from the creative loins of George Lucas, and it does kind of have a bukkake feeling to it. The acting was, if possible, worse, and the dialog was impossibly worse, creating a vortex of suck right there in the theatre. People literally had their corneas punctured by the badness on the screen, and the hell of it is--this is it. There are no more movies coming. We've followed this painful path all the way through nearly 30 years, and we got a faceful of Lucas's cock for our troubles.
To add injury to insult, Lucas goes around and changes the first three movies in fundamental ways that only harm them. Andrew Sarris may have fallen back and punted, but I'm not ashamed to say what I think many people here and elsewhere would agree with--George Lucas does not have the right to go back and tinker with his movies in fundamental ways. He cannot add a pre-emptive shot from Greedo simply because he doesn't want Han Solo to be thought of "in that way". Just as a reanimated Leonardo can't wander into the Louvre and edit the Mona Lisa to give her a bionic eyeball... no, wait. My analogy is poor, because I don't want anybody to think that I'm equating Lucas with Leonardo.
What I mean is that Lucas has a responsibility to the people who watch and enjoy his movies. He doesn't have to accept that responsibility, of course--he can be an cornholing asshole if he chooses--but there is a price to be paid, such as being out-performed at last Friday's box office by a remake of a not-very-good Burt Reynolds movie staring Chris Rock and Adam Sandler. People are panning the movie because it's not very good.
Don't forget the buzzdroid that R2-D2 zaps in the face. After it dies, it gets swept off the wing of the spaceship by the ever-present, always treacherous spacewind.
I'm still on my IIIxe, but I'm going to move to the Tungsten E2 pretty soon.
It does have a battery-eating color screen, but they put a pretty big battery in there to compensate. I've seen numbers at about 8ish hours of normal use, and more than 11 playing MP3s constantly with the screen off. It has Bluetooth, which is important because syncing with my Mac via IRDA is pretty slow, and it means I can use it with my phone as a portable Internet terminal for email, ssh and the like.
Maybe if we're lucky, Palm will re-introduce support for Macs, and add real support for Unix. Why Palm doesn't recognize that it needs those markets to compete with PocketPC beats the hell outta me.
A Palm and a Mac should go hand-in-hand together. Instead we have to depend on a third party (Mark/Space) for real sync support. And since Missing Sync supports PocketPC, Palm is rapidly losing even this meager support.
A friend of mine got the folding Palm keyboard and he took that and his IIIxe to Chiapas for an archeological dig. He used it to input data and take notes, rather than bring a big, heavy laptop.
For all its limitations, you could still take the Palm 3.5 OS, put it in a box with a screen and have a real computer. Nothing blazingly fast, but it would do word processing, spreadsheet, database type work well enough. Email, even.
I agree with you that people who want the Palm to be a desktop replacement are usually misguided, but the Palm is a very robust and quite powerful platform.
My thoughts exactly. 3 hour battery puts this into the "toy" range. You can't even pretend it'll work through a business day--it's for having something to surf porn with while on the john.
Exceedingly useless. Great idea, but the battery kills it.
Read an article once by P.J. O'Rourke where he was in the Soviet Union while Gorby and Reagan were having a confab. He wandered off the beaten path chosen by the Soviet diplomats and noticed that they simply cleaned up the areas that the visiting dignitaries were likely to see. The rest of the city was a shithole.
So, no, I'm not convinced that the Cuban solution to healthcare is worth a plugged nickel.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be difficult to do by the nature of a lot of IT or CS guys. You get a young Turk coming in, and is interviewed by the head programmer, or team leader, or whatever. He'll ask about his projects, and as soon as he hears Perl, or Python, or Java, or whatever, he drops the kid like a rock because he has an innate religious dislike of the tool.
"I use VisualStudio to program."
"BILL-LOVER! Out of my cubicle!"
I don't mean to be one-sided, either. The head programmer has been burned before, when they did take a flyer on some young Turk who immediately came in and demanded that they re-write the whole thing in C++, because that's what he knew well.
This kind of problem will not go away until "software engineering" isn't a ridiculous notion. Analogies are dangerous, but you can compare the current situation to building tradesmen in the far past. The stone masons thought everything should be made out of stone, the carpenters suggested wood, and the brick masons offered bricks. Architects did what they did based on what came before, so the profession developed based on prior work.
Then steel came along, and architects discovered you could just build a big steel frame and glue whatever damn thing you wanted on the ouside of the box. Once we have that framework--which is part hardware that is fast enough and cheap enough, and part software design concepts that are ubiquitous--we can glue any damn thing we want on the outside of an application, and do it cheaply.
Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is, of course, endlessly debateable.
No, because the first time somebody implements that, the 30K employees (which are most of them) will unionize and enforce wage controls where their salary isn't tied to productivity but seniority.
Dell has, however, put itself in the unenviable position of trying to sell cheap computers. This is a long-term losing strategy--there's always a guy able to build it cheaper. I'd hazzard a guess that most of Dell's profits come from their decidedly non-cheap server and corporate markets. Offering a high-end media machine with good margins would be a good deal for Dell.
But I don't think Apple will go for this. Apple doesn't have much trouble filling the channel with hardware now, and the move to x86 won't change that. I think it's also a bit naive to think that simply because Apple will run on x86 that their prices will change all that much, and there's no reason for Apple to share that profit margin.
Honestly, he should get credit for sticking with it for this long. He's a guy who has work he needs to have done, and Linux wasn't cutting it. More importantly, it wasn't cutting it and the "linux community" refused to accept that it had any failures at all. Well, maybe some token words of acknowledgement, before going off and reinventing the desktop or package manager again.
I like Linux just fine as a server. I wouldn't bother with the desktop at all, and haven't for more than 6 years.
I wouldn't bet on it. jwz used to like to use SGI for the same reason--you pays your money, your shit just works. Fiddling with your desktop has some value, but not much.
You know, I heard the same thing about Java back in 1996 or so.
Don't get me wrong, Rails looks decent enough, but neither is it a panacea. You can put together a really fast RSS reader, or a DB-backed recipe application, but these are trivial applications. Solving trivial problems elegantly isn't worthless, but thus far I haven't seen any Rails projects that compare in scope to something like Zope, or Drupal or even PHPBB.
Going through the various How-Tos for Rails, I keep saying to myself, "...or, I could just download foo, which is written in Perl/PHP/Python/AWK, but already works and is proven and does the same thing." PHP hasn't seen the need for copying Rails because they have a robust and featureful set of applications already. Dropping everything and chasing the next sexy thing might be entertaining, but it doesn't do much to help me, the working Webmaster.
I guess I'm just suspicious of using MVC (or OOP, or some other trendy buzzword) as a talisman. It smacks of cheerleading, and accusing people of "not getting it" doesn't prove the point.
Good points in your reply. Thanks for that.
If I was interviewing someone and they presented me with sample code riddled with "pg_connect()" calls rather than abstracting that into its own library, my first question would be "tell me why it is bad to do this."
Well, it all depends, doesn't it?
First, there's a difference between coding an abstraction layer that facilitates interaction with your database, and coding an abstraction layer that handwaves away the peculiarities of any particular database. For example, if you have a function called "get_data_from_postgres_and_format_table()", that's an example of the first situation. Another way to do it that follows the second would be "format_table(get_data())", where the gathering of data from a database is generalized across databases, and the formatting of tables is done as a function of the application.
In other words, putting all those "pg_connect()" calls behind something that helps you develop your application faster is a good thing. However, it does not neccessarily follow that then formalizing a set of database calls that dissolves the differences between PGSql and MySql and Interbase is also a good thing.
I can use Drupal as an example, since I know it fairly well. The "Node" is the basic structure of the framework, and modules that extend the basic node must have the same ID as the node base. When presented, the node is a JOIN of the primary node and the extended node's tables. In Drupal, the work coordinating these is done by having, conceptually, a "get_me_the_next_node_id_number()" function and preventing future calls from grabbing that same number. This is all done in PHP, rather than simply saying, "Inser this and that in table 1 and table 2, and make table 2's ID equal table 1's ID."
My arguments also do not apply to a good 75-80% of Web-based applications, most of which simply use the database as a less-dangerous way of accessing and storing data in the filesystem. They would be equally well-served by flatfiles, but don't because of the security issues inherent in allowing a Web server process to write to the filesystem. I'm not terribly familiar with PHPBB, but I imagine that there are multiple workarounds hand-hacked in PHP to accomodate those folks whose MySQL wouldn't know a foreign key from a stored procedure. All of these things introduce bugs, performance issues, and maintainability issues just as severe as any dependance on a single database vendor does--they're just different.
I recognize that there are problems inherent in dealing with, say, PostgreSQL, but those do not go away with database abstraction. All database engines will have some level of maintenance issues--the benefit from depending on a single database is that you can codify the procedures in your documentation and maybe even your code--a cron-run script that automatically VACUUMs the database at 2:30AM--rather than weaseling out with a "The care and feeding of your database is beyond the scope of this document" disclaimer.
Finally, this really only applies to larger PHP projects. I've found that when PHP is used to do something quick-and-dirty, it's almost always hard-coded to whatever database the programmer happens to have. It's only when that quick-and-dirty program starts to become popular does everybody clamor for "database independence", and then the author will comply. So, as an application grows in features and complexity, rather than leaning on the database to do it's job, the programmer doubles his work by re-inventing ideas, and re-learning mistakes, that database vendors dealt with 10 years ago, such as concurrency and performance issues. So, ironically, the best design decisions are made when it was just a little hack, and "creeping CS-isms" strike it as it gets more widely used, crippling the speed at which development can take place.
Yeah, this sounds like what the PHP folks were saying about Perl something like 6 years ago. I know you were tongue in cheek, but really--isn't language bigotry a pretty old joke by now? Perl is still around; PHP will still be around; and Ruby-on-rails will still be around when SexCodeSuperFunNerds arrives to "displace" it.
For example, if you use a database abstraction, you have to make a lot of performace- or feature-robbing choices. There are still hosting situations where MySQL is still on 3.23, so you can't use the better parts of the InnoDB storage engine. So no foreign key constraints, no stored procedures.
On the other hand, if you do hardcode for PostgreSQL, you put a burden on the end user, sure--but in return, you're giving them a more robust, more featureful application that is easier to support and maintain. I personally like PostgreSQL because it seems less haphazard than MySQL, but you could very easily do this with MySQL, so long as you restrict yourself to the later, non-crippled versions.
The Arsdigita folks did this with Oracle. Leaning on a $tens-of-thousands database application may put you out of the realm of everyday developers, but it's far from insane.
This is "all the time I've spent dealing with other people's code that doesn't have a foreign key to be found and all integrity checking is done in the PHP code" talking. It's infuriating.
Seriously, are you going to make the argument that you can't identify porn as porn? Your site, with topless women? Porn.
Realdoll? Porn. They sell a sex toy. A site that sells dildos and Spanish Fly is the same. If it would come to you in the mail inside a plain brown wrapper, it's porn.
If you have a site that caters to adult prurient interests, it's porn. Well, not porn, which is a specific section of adult prurient interest items, but it would go under the XXX domain.
I think this is a better solution than the old, "no naughty pictures, unless they have a health- or scientific-interest angle to them" tack. Just be right out in the open--"My company is looking to give you a hard-on!"--and allow people to see, or not see it, as they choose. If the adult industry fights this, you'll know that they aren't really interested in letting people choose to or choose not to view their products. If they fight, it's a good bet that they almost depend on people getting hooked on their product, slowly and imperceptibly.
They may not be a publicly traded company, but if they didn't at least break even, they wouldn't exist.
Yeah, thugs armed with machine guns taking down a bunch of 12-18 year old kids and some silly 20 year olds sure makes me feel great about the patriot act. The reality is that most of the people they arrested did not commit crimes and weren't even capable of committing crimes-- they were just kids who wanted to be hackers who read these forums.
You would feel differently if they had managed to hijack your identity and sent your credit rating into the toilet. I'm glad you know so much about these kids and what their intentions were. A member of ShadowCrew, are you? Jack-booted thugs, please take note.
"Because some members were known to have firearms". Hmmmm...well we should arrest all teh cops too because not only do they have firearms, many of them have machine guns!
Fascinating non sequitur. You're not winning any logic points here.
Government extends its power by making everyone subject to laws-- it doesn't matter whether a moral crime has been committed or not, the more they make the populace criminals the more they can use violence to control the populace without a revolt. That's all this is.
Sleep with the Anarchist's Cookbook under your pillow?
First, government--at least a representative government like ours--does make everybody subject to laws. Contrary to your thinking, this is a good thing. If only a few people are subject to laws, then you have something other than a democracy, and you certainly don't have the rule of law.
But, I think I know what you intended to say, before the potsmoke interfered with your thinking. You mean to say that government extends its power by making more people criminals. This is true, for a government with unlimited funds to keep everybody in jail, but that isn't terribly effective in actual practice. In fact, by making a law that makes too many people criminals, you end up with unenforceable situations such as Prohibition.
IF someone leaves tehir computer unprotected, and some kid logs into it and looks around and copies some pictures-- that kid has not committed a crime, but he has broken a law. The law is immoral, and thus criminal... but when they justify busting these kids for this stuff, they make it just that much easier to bust anyone who uses encrpytion or who uses spoofing services for anonymity, etc.
He has committed a crime. It is no more lawful for him to wander into your computer than it is to wander into your house. Even if he doesn't fiddle, touch, or steal anything.
These punks are lucky. In Texas, they could probably get shot.
Accepting this immoral harassment makes it easier for them to add more immoral harassment-- such as an iron curtain of firewalls to keep track of every packet, and filter out "bad" websites, etc.
Let's apply your logic the other direction:
If we don't track down and arrest people who phish for information, before you know it, there will be criminals in the street who will be allowed to take your wallet! POLICE STATE NOW!
ITs time to throw out EVERY politican that supported the PATRIOT act-- whether democrat or republican, they have all shown themselves to be criminals who deserve prison sentences, not political careers.
I'm no fan of the Patriot Act, but it is not as odious as the paranoids make it out to be. Stupid, pointless reactionary talk like yours only serves to cheapen the efforts of people who are smarter and more influential than you are--which is nearly everybody, to be honest--who are actually doing something about the Patriot Act other than smoke dope and bitch about it.
I used to wonder about a Newton/Squeak combo from Disney--kid game machine, edutainment device, Disneyworld guide, etc. This was like 6 years ago, though.
Everything's electric? Exxon charging stations. They'll love dumping oil, too, because oil transporting and refining are huge costs to the company.
So, to put the complaint in more accurate terms, the trucking and oil refining unions will do everything in their power to spike energy-efficient cars. But that doesn't have the same impact, saying blue-collar working stiffs will kill your lefty dream, so you turn to the ominous nameless, faceless "big oil corporation" to create your boogeyman.
Porn sites are ALL for-profit ventures. A lot of .com sites (and .net and .org) are financed out of the pocket of regular folks for numerous reasons. Moving adult sites into a "ghetto" would solve one of the Slashdot crowds' pet peeves--Internet filters that filter breast cancer sites. (Why Slashdot is so fascinated with breast cancer is a fat-geek joke just waiting to happen.)
Put all the adult sites in .xxx! If you don't want porn, you block all .xxx sites! Simple! Effective! And no breast cancer sites will be harmed in the process! And now Slashdot is all up in arms about an adult "ghetto". Not that the adult sites would agree to do this to begin with--the industry is built on slowly whittling away the public's resistance to adult entertainment, and that's hard to do when you're relegated to an easily avoidable TLD.
Some porn sites would be all for that. The very small minority of adult sites run by largely ethical people. Danni.com comes to mind.
But I think most adult sites aren't really interested in providing mostly harmless adult titillation to consenting over-18 people. It's more along the line of the stereotypical evil corporate profit-seeker. Lie, cheat, steal to get one more monthly subscription, and then sell that name to every adult catalog proprietor in the world.
It's an industry built on the objectivation of women as cum-catchers. Do you think that they care so much about the ethics of domain names?
Ahh, it's not for critics? Or do you mean to say, "It is a space opera so long as you ignore the things that make it not a space opera"? This space opera crap is bogus. It is demonstrably NOT a space opera, but just another movie, and poorly done at that.
If it's a space opera, you can point out how it follows a space opera's structure. Since you can't without skating over the parts that disprove that, yours and Ebert's statements are junk. Also, WTF is a "space opera" anyway? That's not a genre.
They've all founded their own effects houses, and what you see is just as much the product of their creative output as any other part of the movie.
I.e., they bought the effects. I can respect the work that they've done as being quite good, but Lucas leans so heavily on that one aspect of the movie that it ruins the rest of it.
Put another way, it's very easy to make a million bucks if you have a million bucks to start with. It's not shocking that Lucas's movie has good effects--all he had to do was write a check. Contrast Star Wars with Doctor Who. One has great effects, one doesn't; one has great characters, one doesn't; one is painful to watch even though the production values are high, one is fun to watch even though the production value is painfully low.
Lucas is considered to be a great film maker by whom? He's rightly considered to be a very successful film maker, but that is not the same thing. His one "good" movie is American Graffiti, which along with Empire Strikes Back he does not have sole writing credit for. Lucas is a heck of a producer, but otherwise he should leave the actual film making to other people.
Where do bad jokes, ex post facto justifications, surreal physics (battle cruiser gravity changing according to position of a spacecraft, in space; the nefarious spacewind; others), and juevenile theater dialog fit into that?
The only thing awe-inspiring is the special effects, and let's be honest with ourselves--Lucas simply bought those. You can get porn stars with great tits for a dime a dozen because they can buy their tits in a store, sometimes on credit against future earnings. One thing you might notice about opera--real opera, not "space" opera--is that there isn't much in the way of scenery. It's all about the performance, and Lucas gave us none of that. He tried to give us the Ring Cycle by building the best sets in the world and then hiring the Olsen twins to do the singing, saying he'll "fix it in post".
That they were treated so shabbily by Lucas is very telling.
Let me put it another way. After Episode I, everybody hated Jar-Jar Binks with a white-hot fury, and they thought parts of the movie was kind of stupid and Natalie Portman was wooden. But they said to themselves and each other, "Wait for the next movie!"
After Episode II, everybody still hated Jar-Jar, they weren't very impressed with the portrayal of Anakin, and although the Jango Fett thing was kind of neat, the plot overall was tortuous and the dialog kind of amateurish. But, they said to themselves, "This is just act two--wait for the next movie!"
Now we've received Episode III from the creative loins of George Lucas, and it does kind of have a bukkake feeling to it. The acting was, if possible, worse, and the dialog was impossibly worse, creating a vortex of suck right there in the theatre. People literally had their corneas punctured by the badness on the screen, and the hell of it is--this is it. There are no more movies coming. We've followed this painful path all the way through nearly 30 years, and we got a faceful of Lucas's cock for our troubles.
To add injury to insult, Lucas goes around and changes the first three movies in fundamental ways that only harm them. Andrew Sarris may have fallen back and punted, but I'm not ashamed to say what I think many people here and elsewhere would agree with--George Lucas does not have the right to go back and tinker with his movies in fundamental ways. He cannot add a pre-emptive shot from Greedo simply because he doesn't want Han Solo to be thought of "in that way". Just as a reanimated Leonardo can't wander into the Louvre and edit the Mona Lisa to give her a bionic eyeball... no, wait. My analogy is poor, because I don't want anybody to think that I'm equating Lucas with Leonardo.
What I mean is that Lucas has a responsibility to the people who watch and enjoy his movies. He doesn't have to accept that responsibility, of course--he can be an cornholing asshole if he chooses--but there is a price to be paid, such as being out-performed at last Friday's box office by a remake of a not-very-good Burt Reynolds movie staring Chris Rock and Adam Sandler. People are panning the movie because it's not very good.
It is spectacular in its ignorance.
It does have a battery-eating color screen, but they put a pretty big battery in there to compensate. I've seen numbers at about 8ish hours of normal use, and more than 11 playing MP3s constantly with the screen off. It has Bluetooth, which is important because syncing with my Mac via IRDA is pretty slow, and it means I can use it with my phone as a portable Internet terminal for email, ssh and the like.
A Palm and a Mac should go hand-in-hand together. Instead we have to depend on a third party (Mark/Space) for real sync support. And since Missing Sync supports PocketPC, Palm is rapidly losing even this meager support.
For all its limitations, you could still take the Palm 3.5 OS, put it in a box with a screen and have a real computer. Nothing blazingly fast, but it would do word processing, spreadsheet, database type work well enough. Email, even.
I agree with you that people who want the Palm to be a desktop replacement are usually misguided, but the Palm is a very robust and quite powerful platform.
Exceedingly useless. Great idea, but the battery kills it.
Read an article once by P.J. O'Rourke where he was in the Soviet Union while Gorby and Reagan were having a confab. He wandered off the beaten path chosen by the Soviet diplomats and noticed that they simply cleaned up the areas that the visiting dignitaries were likely to see. The rest of the city was a shithole.
So, no, I'm not convinced that the Cuban solution to healthcare is worth a plugged nickel.