No. We saw South Korea and Taiwan raise themselves to prosperity by the same method Europe and the US managed it. Good old fashioned protectionism. These days countries can't play ball unless they sign up to the WTO / IMF stuff wholesale, the supposed "Free trade" ethos, which is of course nothing of the sort, but rather more accurately described as a complex mess of old school tariffs, trading barriers and generally highly regulated trade: just tariffs and regulations that happen to be hugely weighted towards the currently dominant powers.
Yes, I've previously paraphrased the Churchill quote to capitalism/economics myself, too.
Equally, I think paraphrasing Ghandi's western civilsation quote for free trade capitalism is quite insightful: good idea, somebody should try it (because sure as s##t nobody is trying it now)
No not necessarily. It's only sketchy if you're freelance, pitching for projects, getting shafted by clients, etc. Just get a job as the in-house web officer / web editor / web manager etc at a company/governmental organisation/NGO, etc. Then it's stable, salaried, wont-get-fired-unless-you-really-f###-up, paycheck every month, reliable hours, paid holiday, etc. All gravy!
er, wtf? that's under their control. so results can come in a predetermined (safe) format, load can be scheduled to their wishes, etc, etc. Totally different kettle of fish to open user submission.
Google. Essentially "read only", users are not submitting the content/editing the pages, just receiving results/maps/whatever. Multibillion dollar market cap. More PhDs than you can shake a stick at.
BBC. Essentially "read only", albeit a few limited forum / post comment areas, but these are very straightforward (one user adds one comment). Vast majority, though, can be considered static. Large public sector funding.
Slashdot. Again, "read only", except for areas where each user is posting stories/comments, which happens completely independently of other users. Also no ability to edit old stories/comments. No ability to upload graphics or multimedia. Runs many ads, and has parent company who cashed in from dot com IPO nonsense.
Wikipedia. Completely read/write. Every page can be be viewed AND edited by multiple people simultaenously. All content is dynamic. Wide scope to upload graphics, multimedia and so on. Pretty much everything can be edited, however old, full revision history tracked as well. Runs no ads, has no government funding, no parent company.
Moral:
If you're going to do that sort of comparison at least VAGUELY TRY to look at the TWO MOST relevant factors, such as WHAT THE SITE DOES, and HOW MUCH MONEY AND STAFF THEY HAVE TO DO IT;)
I think you're missing the point. Obviously they can't quote tax-inclusive prices on, say, a national advertisment. But surely they should be able to run the post-tax prices on the shop floor.
$sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT a,b,c FROM foo WHERE bar=? and baz=?")
$sth->execute($bar, $baz);
Humour a DB neophyte. How is this secure by default? I still don't see any checking of the contents of $bar or $baz, or if $baz contains "; DELETE *", don't you still suffer the usual problems?
Or does the execute() routine automatically safety-fy the variables passed? In which case, how does it know what is and isn't safe in a particular context?
Computer Science has always been technology-neutral, teach-the-underlying-principles sorta stuff.
ICT has always been 'applied IT', ie, figure out how to use the dominant stuff.
You did CS, parent did ICT... 'nuf said.
(FWIW I did a CS A-level, and there was nothing microsoft specific. It was basically a big chunk on binary arithmetic, a big chunk on programming principles (Pascal in our case), a big chunk on RDBMS principles (normal forms, etc). No MS-specific stuff to be seen).
Basically the slashbot line is that "CDs have two good songs and 10 rubbish filler tracks on".
Which I can only assume basically translates to "I'm not really into music at all, I don't spend any time searching out quality artists whose style I genuinely love, and so I only buy rubbish CDs by rubbish major label artists", since every CD I buy has a couple of tracks I'm not madly keen on at the most, and the rest are all good.
All of MP3 may be "somewhat" legal in Russia but it is fully-non legal for Americans (or Canadians, Australians, and anybody else who is lives in a country that's signed on with international copyright laws)
Five C.I.S. nations -- the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Belarus -- have now adhered to the Berne Convention. The Russian Federation is the only member of the Geneva Phonograms Convention. Armenia and the Russian Federation have joined the Brussels Satellite Convention
You really wouldn't find it very interesting. It was just a "complete n00bs primer on what Wiki's are", really, which you obviously already know. Filled with more or less glib assertions like, "wiki software automatically provides a full edit history, allowing you to compare versions or rollback to previous versions; it should be readily obvious how useful this could be in the corporate environment."
Basically the current system is very tree-like (parent->child) in organisation: every document sits in one place and one place only. Which is a very poor reflection of knowledge management really. (Furthermore every document has one editor/owner and one only.) Some members of the team seemed under the impression that this sort of rigid structure was the only possible solution technology could provide, so I used Wiki(pedia) to show it's often actually better to have one enormous "namespace", and let the mass of editors do intra-article linking, redirects, disambigs and so on isntead of traditional heirachical navigation.
Anyway... yeah... a very basic doc and the emphasis was on "a LITTLE research" - I basically discussed Mediawiki throughout, then noted there was a wiki-for-plone product, and many others (linked to the sourceforge wiki category/search), and that was as far as I got.
The idea behind a wiki is that most people are well-intentioned (this is triply true when they're using company resources), and that it's good to have lots of people collaborate. Even if readers aren't directly related with your project, if someone is interested enough to read the content, they might briefly stop to contribute in a number of different ways (some people will wander by and fix spelling mistakes...
Very true, point taken.
In fact I did make that point in my doc. Something along the lines "although it may seem strange/scary to have everything freely editable, it does mean anybody can correct a silly typo or broken link on ANY page, which helps keep/make the quality higher, faster. Furthermore, since it is internal-users only, vandalism should be of no concern, and since it is logged-in users only, even if there is vandalism, the culprits are easily traced".
Nevertheless you know what managers are like. It would be nice to at least be able to offer such things.
Also, my other non-work project is for a public website where a degree of vandalism could be expected if we were not able to restrict permissions to some extent.
Finally I have to say, much as I love wikipedia, I do think there is some weight to the theory that pages don't always increase in quality - sometimes they get to a very high point of quality and then go downhill (I've seen it happen on the wikipedia pages I freqently edit in fact). So for my non-work project, it would be nice to be able to 'freeze' really top-notch articles from all but a cadre of trusted editors, and/or route newcomers' edits into a workflow system, or whatever.
In short: I totally see what you're saying, but for the sake of interest if nothing else, I'd still love to hear from people's experiences regarding Wiki's and permissions/workflow systems.
I'm involved in the team implementing a new intranet (or extranet I suppose, it's international) for my organisation. A few months ago I wrote quite a lengthy paper extolling the virtues of Wiki and it's possible applications in the corporate world, for which I did a little research into MediaWiki and it's many alternatives (see also: the WikiMatrix link posted above).
Now, I may be wrong, (and I welcome corrections if so), but from what I gathered, MediaWiki has poor-to-nonexistent support for advanced granularity of permissions. Essentially, everything is editable by everyone. Beyond that, there is a very simple level of control inasmuch as admins can lock a page and whatnot. But setting up a system whereby users come out of AD/LDAP and can edit (or not) different areas corresponding to their department/group, or setting up workflow systems where (for example) anyone can edit but it must be approved by a departmental admin (who can act as admin within their department's pages, but not elsewhere) before showing up... It didn't look as if any of this was possible.
Furthermore, I was told there's no point even asking for it. Because such things don't gel with the Wikipedia philosophy, the people spending their time coding MediaWiki simply aren't interested in implementing them. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not whinging about this - naturally they should devote their time to features which actually suit their demands, not somebody else's).
So it seems to me very odd to promote MediaWiki for the corporation, when other systems have much more sophisticated ACL-type features, granular permissions, and so on.
Comments welcome?
(PS. FWIW, we eventually settled on Plone. Plone does have a Wiki plugin so if we ever do use Wiki's I guess we'll use that. But I'm still evaluating which Wiki system to use for a separate project, outside work, but which still requires more advanced editing permission granularity. DokuWiki seemed the best fit, with the one problem that it uses flat files for storage, and our sysamin would prefer a db backend as they have a dedicated db box, so it'd be quicker. WikiMatrix narrowed it down to ErfurtWiki, Midgard Wiki, miniWiki, PhpWiki, TikiWiki, WackoWiki and Wiclear: out of these, I didn't like the look of phpWiki for some reason I can't remember right now, and I've never even heard of the others. If anyone has any experience with any of these systems, please do share:) )
Well I was changing one thing. In practice, I dont honestly feel a wiki page with one piece of functionality listed and the other 99 missing is really any more valuable than one saying "coming soon". And I don't think someone who hacked the software for two days and didn't really care about understand it, just knowing the bare minimum to do what was requested and collect my pay (not that the lousy bastard ever actually paid me anyway... won't work for them again!), and frankly doesn't even understand OOP PHP at all anyway, is really in any position to write the documentation.
However I do take your point as a point of principle.
Wow. No offense, but that's a totally weak attitude. The entire basis of your post seems to be that you can't be bothered to learn a new templating language. And you're a coder??
We're using Zope/Plone in my organisation to replace our current intranet system. So a couple of months ago I went over to India to get some training on the system. Had I ever used, seen or even heard of tal templating before? Nope. Guess how long it took me to pick it up? Uhm... about one afternoon. Seriously. It's a frickin' templating language, how hard can it be?
And in my organisation, I'm not the coder, I'm the designer, who according to your rather patronising post, couldn't possibly master a new templating language. Well guess what, I can, in about 3 hours. Happily. You're a professional coder who regularly deals with Java or C++ or C# or Python or Ruby or whatever, and you're going to sit there and whinge like a schoolgirl about "having to learn a new language"? Chrissakes. Just spend 2 or 3 hours learning it, everyone's happy and guess what, as a bonus you've got one more bullet point for your resume.
And yes, if your designer deletes code, then your designer sucks and needs replacing with a better one, don't just stereotype the entire designer role. We're not all like that. In fact, to be honest, I've barely met any web designers who don't dabble in at least a little bit of PHP/ASP/Perl/whatever.
And yes, tal will let you colour alternate rows easily.
One thing I've noticed is that whenever web programming comes up on slashdot, a ton of people rush in to boast about how they only ever use full-blown MVC, presumably in an effort to look uber-professional and dissociate themselves from this 'dirty php hacker' stereotype.
The thing is, sometimes dirty php hacks are fine.
What are you coding? If I went to ebay, or amazon, or something like that, and they didn't have a serious n-tier architecture, and all their logic code was scattered randomly throughout their html source, that would be a proper WTF.
On the other hand, when I knock up some sort of ultra-basic blog for myself, or a cheesy feedback form for my band's website, or something like that, then using full-on OOP and MVC is an equally big WTF. In that situation, please stop about impressing other people on slashdot with your architecture model professionalism, and write something shamelessly quick and easy. You're going to be the only person updating it, so who cares?
One further point on that subject... everyone praises a clean separation / MVC approach for being essential when you have multiple developers updating code. Well... true in a way... but there are qualifications to that. I remember doing some hacking on php blogging software Plog for a customer last year. That's completely OOP and MVC, using Smarty for templating, and the intellectual side of my brain was impressed with the cleanliness of the design patterns, but the practical side of my brain found it a pain in the arse. The client would say "you see this output of such-and-such a word on such-and-such a page, can we change it?" If it had been I'd go into the source for that page and it would be pretty much a single line of code...
model._request->("by_categories").view
or something ludricously cryptic like that. So I'd have to trying and "trace" things from the by_categories.php through the templates into all the object classes... of course the OOP was so fully-blown that you'd reach some initial completely generic class whcih told you nothing, you needed something which inherited off something which inherited off something.... etc, etc. It was an absolute nightmare, for the simple reason that the documentation, like so many OSS projects, was extremely lacking, verging on non-existent. I went to their wiki and found a page with the perfect title, something like "which functions are handled in which classes", but it just said "coming soon".
To their credit, when I asked on their forums I got a quick and friendly reply, but still, I think it illustrates my point. If you're going to put things into an elaborate architecture so that what-you-see-in-the-final-html-pages bears almost no direct relationship to organisation of the 'business logic' source files, then documentation is essential otherwise it's actually harder for multiple developers to hack than if you just stuff your html full of inline php.
In my experience, most developers are nothing like artists and more closely resemble petulant, undisciplined children.
Er.... so they're just like artists then?;)
FWIW, this is meant in the spirit of a friendly jest, so there's no need for flamebait mods. On the other hand, as someone in a band hence many musician friends, and also lots of thespian friends, there's an element of seriousness to it as well;)
the world is indeed imbalanced -- although I'm more tempted to say "grossly" than "weirdly".
just out of interest, where are you from?
you should remember though that the imbalance isn't just in wages, but also in costs. For example, I recently went to India. At the time, there was a scandal where government ministers were renting out their official properties -- ie, some of the nicest houses in the nicest areas of Delhi, complete with service staff and armed guard. Less than one day's wages for me represented three months worth of rent for those places. That's insane! Another example, one evening we rented a car plus driver for about 6 hours to drive us all over Delhi to see the tourist sites. Cost less than 10 UK pounds, which in a London taxi, would barely get you a mile down the road. So although wages are vastly lower, the cost of consumer goods, rent and so forth tend to be proportionately lower.
Of course this isn't to say the world isn't well out of whack, just that it's not like you have to buy stuff at the same prices as $40,000-earning Westerners with your $3500 annual wage.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they're bad ;]
No. We saw South Korea and Taiwan raise themselves to prosperity by the same method Europe and the US managed it. Good old fashioned protectionism. These days countries can't play ball unless they sign up to the WTO / IMF stuff wholesale, the supposed "Free trade" ethos, which is of course nothing of the sort, but rather more accurately described as a complex mess of old school tariffs, trading barriers and generally highly regulated trade: just tariffs and regulations that happen to be hugely weighted towards the currently dominant powers.
Equally, I think paraphrasing Ghandi's western civilsation quote for free trade capitalism is quite insightful: good idea, somebody should try it (because sure as s##t nobody is trying it now)
No not necessarily. It's only sketchy if you're freelance, pitching for projects, getting shafted by clients, etc. Just get a job as the in-house web officer / web editor / web manager etc at a company/governmental organisation/NGO, etc. Then it's stable, salaried, wont-get-fired-unless-you-really-f###-up, paycheck every month, reliable hours, paid holiday, etc. All gravy!
er, wtf? that's under their control. so results can come in a predetermined (safe) format, load can be scheduled to their wishes, etc, etc. Totally different kettle of fish to open user submission.
BBC. Essentially "read only", albeit a few limited forum / post comment areas, but these are very straightforward (one user adds one comment). Vast majority, though, can be considered static. Large public sector funding.
Slashdot. Again, "read only", except for areas where each user is posting stories/comments, which happens completely independently of other users. Also no ability to edit old stories/comments. No ability to upload graphics or multimedia. Runs many ads, and has parent company who cashed in from dot com IPO nonsense.
Wikipedia. Completely read/write. Every page can be be viewed AND edited by multiple people simultaenously. All content is dynamic. Wide scope to upload graphics, multimedia and so on. Pretty much everything can be edited, however old, full revision history tracked as well. Runs no ads, has no government funding, no parent company.
Moral:
If you're going to do that sort of comparison at least VAGUELY TRY to look at the TWO MOST relevant factors, such as WHAT THE SITE DOES, and HOW MUCH MONEY AND STAFF THEY HAVE TO DO IT ;)
I think you're missing the point. Obviously they can't quote tax-inclusive prices on, say, a national advertisment. But surely they should be able to run the post-tax prices on the shop floor.
That's his point. $x = £x happens on almost every other kind of electronic equipment, and yes, it is a rip off.
Or does the execute() routine automatically safety-fy the variables passed? In which case, how does it know what is and isn't safe in a particular context?
I just don't get it :(
Ooops, meant to say, "I did a CS A-level 7 years ago".
Computer Science has always been technology-neutral, teach-the-underlying-principles sorta stuff.
ICT has always been 'applied IT', ie, figure out how to use the dominant stuff.
You did CS, parent did ICT... 'nuf said.
(FWIW I did a CS A-level, and there was nothing microsoft specific. It was basically a big chunk on binary arithmetic, a big chunk on programming principles (Pascal in our case), a big chunk on RDBMS principles (normal forms, etc). No MS-specific stuff to be seen).
Er... right.
Apart from rape. Or AIDS transferance via blood transfusions. Or sharing needles.
That said, your point of education leading to behavioural change is very true and very important.
(Full disclosure: I work for an international development charity which has HIV/AIDS as one of it's highest priorities.)
Which I can only assume basically translates to "I'm not really into music at all, I don't spend any time searching out quality artists whose style I genuinely love, and so I only buy rubbish CDs by rubbish major label artists", since every CD I buy has a couple of tracks I'm not madly keen on at the most, and the rest are all good.
That is a bit disengenuous. Russia has signed on with international copyright laws too.
(To save you scanning the link:
Basically the current system is very tree-like (parent->child) in organisation: every document sits in one place and one place only. Which is a very poor reflection of knowledge management really. (Furthermore every document has one editor/owner and one only.) Some members of the team seemed under the impression that this sort of rigid structure was the only possible solution technology could provide, so I used Wiki(pedia) to show it's often actually better to have one enormous "namespace", and let the mass of editors do intra-article linking, redirects, disambigs and so on isntead of traditional heirachical navigation.
Anyway... yeah... a very basic doc and the emphasis was on "a LITTLE research" - I basically discussed Mediawiki throughout, then noted there was a wiki-for-plone product, and many others (linked to the sourceforge wiki category/search), and that was as far as I got.
Very true, point taken.
In fact I did make that point in my doc. Something along the lines "although it may seem strange/scary to have everything freely editable, it does mean anybody can correct a silly typo or broken link on ANY page, which helps keep/make the quality higher, faster. Furthermore, since it is internal-users only, vandalism should be of no concern, and since it is logged-in users only, even if there is vandalism, the culprits are easily traced".
Nevertheless you know what managers are like. It would be nice to at least be able to offer such things.
Also, my other non-work project is for a public website where a degree of vandalism could be expected if we were not able to restrict permissions to some extent.
Finally I have to say, much as I love wikipedia, I do think there is some weight to the theory that pages don't always increase in quality - sometimes they get to a very high point of quality and then go downhill (I've seen it happen on the wikipedia pages I freqently edit in fact). So for my non-work project, it would be nice to be able to 'freeze' really top-notch articles from all but a cadre of trusted editors, and/or route newcomers' edits into a workflow system, or whatever.
In short: I totally see what you're saying, but for the sake of interest if nothing else, I'd still love to hear from people's experiences regarding Wiki's and permissions/workflow systems.
Now, I may be wrong, (and I welcome corrections if so), but from what I gathered, MediaWiki has poor-to-nonexistent support for advanced granularity of permissions. Essentially, everything is editable by everyone. Beyond that, there is a very simple level of control inasmuch as admins can lock a page and whatnot. But setting up a system whereby users come out of AD/LDAP and can edit (or not) different areas corresponding to their department/group, or setting up workflow systems where (for example) anyone can edit but it must be approved by a departmental admin (who can act as admin within their department's pages, but not elsewhere) before showing up... It didn't look as if any of this was possible.
Furthermore, I was told there's no point even asking for it. Because such things don't gel with the Wikipedia philosophy, the people spending their time coding MediaWiki simply aren't interested in implementing them. (Don't get me wrong, I'm not whinging about this - naturally they should devote their time to features which actually suit their demands, not somebody else's).
So it seems to me very odd to promote MediaWiki for the corporation, when other systems have much more sophisticated ACL-type features, granular permissions, and so on.
Comments welcome?
(PS. FWIW, we eventually settled on Plone. Plone does have a Wiki plugin so if we ever do use Wiki's I guess we'll use that. But I'm still evaluating which Wiki system to use for a separate project, outside work, but which still requires more advanced editing permission granularity. DokuWiki seemed the best fit, with the one problem that it uses flat files for storage, and our sysamin would prefer a db backend as they have a dedicated db box, so it'd be quicker. WikiMatrix narrowed it down to ErfurtWiki, Midgard Wiki, miniWiki, PhpWiki, TikiWiki, WackoWiki and Wiclear: out of these, I didn't like the look of phpWiki for some reason I can't remember right now, and I've never even heard of the others. If anyone has any experience with any of these systems, please do share :) )
If ever a post deserved +6 it's this one.
LOL.
ROFL.
ROFLMAO.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Please come back when you leave your Mom's basement and join the real world.
HAHAHAHAHA.
LOLLERSKATES.
Sorry, I'm still laughing.
However I do take your point as a point of principle.
We're using Zope/Plone in my organisation to replace our current intranet system. So a couple of months ago I went over to India to get some training on the system. Had I ever used, seen or even heard of tal templating before? Nope. Guess how long it took me to pick it up? Uhm... about one afternoon. Seriously. It's a frickin' templating language, how hard can it be?
And in my organisation, I'm not the coder, I'm the designer, who according to your rather patronising post, couldn't possibly master a new templating language. Well guess what, I can, in about 3 hours. Happily. You're a professional coder who regularly deals with Java or C++ or C# or Python or Ruby or whatever, and you're going to sit there and whinge like a schoolgirl about "having to learn a new language"? Chrissakes. Just spend 2 or 3 hours learning it, everyone's happy and guess what, as a bonus you've got one more bullet point for your resume.
And yes, if your designer deletes code, then your designer sucks and needs replacing with a better one, don't just stereotype the entire designer role. We're not all like that. In fact, to be honest, I've barely met any web designers who don't dabble in at least a little bit of PHP/ASP/Perl/whatever.
And yes, tal will let you colour alternate rows easily.
The thing is, sometimes dirty php hacks are fine.
What are you coding? If I went to ebay, or amazon, or something like that, and they didn't have a serious n-tier architecture, and all their logic code was scattered randomly throughout their html source, that would be a proper WTF.
On the other hand, when I knock up some sort of ultra-basic blog for myself, or a cheesy feedback form for my band's website, or something like that, then using full-on OOP and MVC is an equally big WTF. In that situation, please stop about impressing other people on slashdot with your architecture model professionalism, and write something shamelessly quick and easy. You're going to be the only person updating it, so who cares?
One further point on that subject... everyone praises a clean separation / MVC approach for being essential when you have multiple developers updating code. Well... true in a way... but there are qualifications to that. I remember doing some hacking on php blogging software Plog for a customer last year. That's completely OOP and MVC, using Smarty for templating, and the intellectual side of my brain was impressed with the cleanliness of the design patterns, but the practical side of my brain found it a pain in the arse. The client would say "you see this output of such-and-such a word on such-and-such a page, can we change it?" If it had been I'd go into the source for that page and it would be pretty much a single line of code...
model._request->("by_categories").view
or something ludricously cryptic like that. So I'd have to trying and "trace" things from the by_categories.php through the templates into all the object classes... of course the OOP was so fully-blown that you'd reach some initial completely generic class whcih told you nothing, you needed something which inherited off something which inherited off something.... etc, etc. It was an absolute nightmare, for the simple reason that the documentation, like so many OSS projects, was extremely lacking, verging on non-existent. I went to their wiki and found a page with the perfect title, something like "which functions are handled in which classes", but it just said "coming soon".
To their credit, when I asked on their forums I got a quick and friendly reply, but still, I think it illustrates my point. If you're going to put things into an elaborate architecture so that what-you-see-in-the-final-html-pages bears almost no direct relationship to organisation of the 'business logic' source files, then documentation is essential otherwise it's actually harder for multiple developers to hack than if you just stuff your html full of inline php.
Er.... so they're just like artists then? ;)
FWIW, this is meant in the spirit of a friendly jest, so there's no need for flamebait mods. On the other hand, as someone in a band hence many musician friends, and also lots of thespian friends, there's an element of seriousness to it as well ;)
Annoyingly doesn't seem to give you a proper figure, but by reading off the graph, it seems to be about £26,000 in 2004/2005.
the world is indeed imbalanced -- although I'm more tempted to say "grossly" than "weirdly".
just out of interest, where are you from?
you should remember though that the imbalance isn't just in wages, but also in costs. For example, I recently went to India. At the time, there was a scandal where government ministers were renting out their official properties -- ie, some of the nicest houses in the nicest areas of Delhi, complete with service staff and armed guard. Less than one day's wages for me represented three months worth of rent for those places. That's insane! Another example, one evening we rented a car plus driver for about 6 hours to drive us all over Delhi to see the tourist sites. Cost less than 10 UK pounds, which in a London taxi, would barely get you a mile down the road. So although wages are vastly lower, the cost of consumer goods, rent and so forth tend to be proportionately lower.
Of course this isn't to say the world isn't well out of whack, just that it's not like you have to buy stuff at the same prices as $40,000-earning Westerners with your $3500 annual wage.