Ruby is a scripting language.
PHP is a scripting language.
Rails is a MVC framework built on Ruby.
PHP is NOT a framework.
If you feel like comparing/extolling the virtues of RoR compared to PHP, then try to at least be logical enough to compare RoR to a MVC framework built on PHP. There are several (though none as popular as RoR at the moment). Some are trying to imitate Struts and others trying to mimic
RoR.
In fact, Zend is quite aware of RoR's popularity is in the process of creating its own framework to compete: the Zend Framework.
Let's see, according to imdb, here are the billed screenplay writers:
John Rogers (screenplay) and
Roberto Orci (screenplay)
Tom DeSanto story
Alex Kurtzman screenplay
Googling around, it seems like John Rogers will be the head writer. His creidts?
Catwoman and The Core.
(Budget/US Box Office) Catwoman: $100 million/$40 million The Core: $60 million/$30 million
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman? Episodes of Alias, the Island, MI3, Zorro sequel. I highly doubt the Island will be good, and sequels just for money usually don't have stellar stories, so not looking too great.
The only possible saving grace in the bunch is Tom DeSanto who is credited for the story in X-Men. Hollywood must seriously be about the connections. I just don't know how anyone would be willing to invest money in the guy who wrote Catwoman or The Core.
I personally don't like Best Buy very much, but this story seems a little too sensationalized for me. I mean, granted there were a bunch of huge and stupid mistakes all around, but the in the story they paint the guy as some sort of "innocent citizen" saint and Best Buy as the devil. For all we know, the guy might have been acting like a complete jerk.
I he's 6'5, and told the cashier (after she seemed refused to take the $2 bills): "If you don't, I'm leaving. I've tried to pay my bill twice. You don't want these bills, you can sue me." In my mind, there are several different ways this can come out. He could've stated this politely, in which case I would totally side with him. On the other hand, this could have come out angrily. Imagine you're an 18 year old part-time cashier and some 6'5 guy is angrily telling you to take his $2 bills or he won't pay (which neither you nor your co-workers have ever seen). I'd be scared.
But with only one source reporting, it's hard to tell what really happened. I'll side with the guy and his $2 bills, but I'll take this with a grain of salt. Regardless, still seems like a PR nightmare for Best Buy. And you would think the police officer would know better...
Just because they built the tool doesn't mean they're pros at using it. I've read that even after you build the steadycam, it'll take awhile to get used to and become good at. For a better idea of the usefulness of building the steadycam, check out the movies near the bottom of the page by the original creator (especially where he follows the walking subject):
Don't think there are any videos, but your best bet would be to grab the replay files (weird "seems to only work in IE" registration required) and load it into the games.
I attended the Starcraft, Warcraft and CS finals and they were pretty exciting to watch. Although, with only one screen on the starcraft and warcraft, the observers sometimes missed some action. Even on the CS finals, they had one screen devoted to the overhead map and one screen rotating between players, but they missed some really awesome kills when there was a lot of action going on. That's probably why the replay files would be better than video since you can control the camera. The only hitch is having all the games needed to watch the replays.
I think the saddest part is that even if it bombs, CEO Timothy Roberts will still end up with millions in his bank account.
I guess if you know how to milk the system....money isn't too hard to attain these days..
Not a big fan of Best Buy's service policy either, but seriously people, why are you trusting the temp Best Buy sale people on their knowledge? I always here how "Best Buy told me I could return if..blah blah blah..". Do you really think that high-turnover employees represent Best Buy, or really know what their talking about?
I've worked in a few sales positions for summer jobs when I was student, and sometimes to avoid looking stoopid and incompetent, you'll say stuff that doesn't really reflect the store policies.
And can you really blame Best Buy? It's a sales posistion, it's temporary. They can have strict hiring policies, but when you're hiring temps (and lots of 'em), there are only so many people out there who really care about their job. And training? They train 'em, but they don't really make them memorize the store policies and test them on it.
The store and its policies are clearly written for you. So read 'em. I'll trust a temp sales associate about as far as I can throw 'em, and that ain't far. Do like the parent poster said and ask full-time competent employees.
People have been giving good pros and cons to ray tracing, but I haven't seen a comment explain what it is. Now it's been awhile since my graphics course (so this may be terribly wrong), but from what I remember raytracing works something like this:
1. Imagine a ray shooting out of your eye through each pixel on your screen. So ray shoots into the 3D world and it might hit an object. The purpose of the ray is to collect light information.
2. If it hits an object, it will bounce off at a certain angle (depending on the object). After it bounces around a couple times, it might eventually hit a light source or you might set a limit to how many times it can bounce. Each time it bounces off an object, it might lose some intensity depending on the surface of the object.
3. After all the bouncing, it collects light information (depending on what it hits, the surface, the lighting) and now that pixel now has more accurate light info for rendering.
What this allows is much more realistic mirrors, reflections, lightings, shadows, etc. but as you can imagine, bouncing off all those rays takes lots and lots of computation. Radiosity was mentioned, and that's basically shooting millions of rays FROM the light sources first (instead of from the users eye to each pixel). But again, lots of calculations.
If you're wondering how current games look so good without raytracing, it's due to lots of clever hacks and simulations for lighting/shading. Raytracing is kind of a brute-force/realistic method. Hope that helps someone...
In short, its a re-sell and the original creator is getting no credit. In fact the person re-selling the car is using copyrighted images on ebay (which is why the auction was previously pulled).
I'm a PHP/Smarty user right now (and I haven't really dabbled in the other templating engines), but after separating business logic from presentation, you really can't go back. Regardelss of what template engine you choose to use, having flexibility in the presentation of data, as I've discovered, is a huge convenience. One of the most important uses for me is quickly pumping out RSS feeds, different styles for my users, etc. all from the same business logic. Personally, I really enjoy using Smarty and its been incredibly fast on my servers.
That being said, I'll dive into the pros and cons of Smarty and present an alternative that I really like.
Overhead
As for the argument about overhead, sure all templating engines do add some amount of overhead, but depending on your server load, power of webservers, etc., the significance of the load may either be infintesimal or enormous. I know that Smarty tries to reduce the load by caching the compiled template files to save some time. Basically, on the first page load, Smarty compiles and caches all the smarty files into PHP files, so in the end, you're basically running a bunch of PHP code.
Of course, with all business->presentation, there is the overhead of looping through your data set twice: once to retrieve and store the data, and once to display it. However, this is only a constant factor in complexity, so it should not be a significant overhead.
Flexibility
Smarty is an extremeley flexible templating language, since you can basically wrap any php function and pass it in as a plugin, thus opening up the entire PHP library through smarty functions. In fact, you can always cheat with Smarty and throw in the {php}{/php} tags, though may add confusion to the design process.
And this brings up the largest problems with Smarty though (from a PHP programmers perspective), is that you do have to spend time learning a new language. While several of the constructs are similar to PHP, it is different enough to warrant some amounts of frustration. I'm sure this applies to any templating engine as well.
Alternative to templating "engines" Like another poster pointed out, you don't really need a separate templating "engine" to use templates. Templating can be acheived using pure PHP itself, as long as you create the correct classes and strictly enforce keeping all design out of the business logic. (The link gives more details about that).
Smarty may be a good choice however, if the designers of the company does not have PHP knowledge. Teaching them the small amount of Smarty (the language is very small) may be faster than ramping them up on a PHP template. And Smarty was made for this purpose, a templating language with a SIMPLER function set than PHP. It was created (afiak) keeping in mind that not all those HTML/WYSIWYG designers have expert knowledge of PHP.
It "worked" for the snes emulators because the snes is obsolete. Nintendo really can't make quite as much profit off the older systems anymore. Things are different when they can lose out several million dollars and lose market share. I mean, imagine if there was a Gamecube emulator on PS2. Or worse yet: GBA emulator on PSP.
The GBA is Nintendo's current top selling unit, and in my opinion, the only thing keeping Nintendo in the hardware business. With the GCN not faring too well, Nintendo's got to push for every penny it can squeeze out of the GBA. And considering the funding that Microsoft/Sony can pump into their products, Nintendo needs every penny it can get to try to reclaim it's old market share.
Perhaps their patent won't hold up in court, but if my company's future was potentially at stake, you gotta try.
I seriously couldn't stop laughing after reading this for a good ten minutes. I didn't want to disturb my co-workers, so I had to go to the bathrooms stalls giggling like an idiot. Thanks for the good laugh.
Slashdot Mirror
PHP is a scripting language.
Rails is a MVC framework built on Ruby.
PHP is NOT a framework.
If you feel like comparing/extolling the virtues of RoR compared to PHP, then try to at least be logical enough to compare RoR to a MVC framework built on PHP. There are several (though none as popular as RoR at the moment). Some are trying to imitate Struts and others trying to mimic RoR.
In fact, Zend is quite aware of RoR's popularity is in the process of creating its own framework to compete: the Zend Framework.
Let's see, according to imdb, here are the billed screenplay writers:
John Rogers (screenplay) and
Roberto Orci (screenplay)
Tom DeSanto story
Alex Kurtzman screenplay
Googling around, it seems like John Rogers will be the head writer. His creidts? Catwoman and The Core.
(Budget/US Box Office)
Catwoman: $100 million/$40 million
The Core: $60 million/$30 million
Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman? Episodes of Alias, the Island, MI3, Zorro sequel. I highly doubt the Island will be good, and sequels just for money usually don't have stellar stories, so not looking too great.
The only possible saving grace in the bunch is Tom DeSanto who is credited for the story in X-Men. Hollywood must seriously be about the connections. I just don't know how anyone would be willing to invest money in the guy who wrote Catwoman or The Core.
I personally don't like Best Buy very much, but this story seems a little too sensationalized for me. I mean, granted there were a bunch of huge and stupid mistakes all around, but the in the story they paint the guy as some sort of "innocent citizen" saint and Best Buy as the devil. For all we know, the guy might have been acting like a complete jerk.
I he's 6'5, and told the cashier (after she seemed refused to take the $2 bills): "If you don't, I'm leaving. I've tried to pay my bill twice. You don't want these bills, you can sue me." In my mind, there are several different ways this can come out. He could've stated this politely, in which case I would totally side with him. On the other hand, this could have come out angrily. Imagine you're an 18 year old part-time cashier and some 6'5 guy is angrily telling you to take his $2 bills or he won't pay (which neither you nor your co-workers have ever seen). I'd be scared.
But with only one source reporting, it's hard to tell what really happened. I'll side with the guy and his $2 bills, but I'll take this with a grain of salt. Regardless, still seems like a PR nightmare for Best Buy. And you would think the police officer would know better...
Just because they built the tool doesn't mean they're pros at using it. I've read that even after you build the steadycam, it'll take awhile to get used to and become good at. For a better idea of the usefulness of building the steadycam, check out the movies near the bottom of the page by the original creator (especially where he follows the walking subject):
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/steadycam/
Don't think there are any videos, but your best bet would be to grab the replay files (weird "seems to only work in IE" registration required) and load it into the games.
I attended the Starcraft, Warcraft and CS finals and they were pretty exciting to watch. Although, with only one screen on the starcraft and warcraft, the observers sometimes missed some action. Even on the CS finals, they had one screen devoted to the overhead map and one screen rotating between players, but they missed some really awesome kills when there was a lot of action going on. That's probably why the replay files would be better than video since you can control the camera. The only hitch is having all the games needed to watch the replays.
I think the saddest part is that even if it bombs, CEO Timothy Roberts will still end up with millions in his bank account. I guess if you know how to milk the system....money isn't too hard to attain these days..
Not a big fan of Best Buy's service policy either, but seriously people, why are you trusting the temp Best Buy sale people on their knowledge? I always here how "Best Buy told me I could return if..blah blah blah..". Do you really think that high-turnover employees represent Best Buy, or really know what their talking about?
I've worked in a few sales positions for summer jobs when I was student, and sometimes to avoid looking stoopid and incompetent, you'll say stuff that doesn't really reflect the store policies.
And can you really blame Best Buy? It's a sales posistion, it's temporary. They can have strict hiring policies, but when you're hiring temps (and lots of 'em), there are only so many people out there who really care about their job. And training? They train 'em, but they don't really make them memorize the store policies and test them on it.
The store and its policies are clearly written for you. So read 'em. I'll trust a temp sales associate about as far as I can throw 'em, and that ain't far. Do like the parent poster said and ask full-time competent employees.
People have been giving good pros and cons to ray tracing, but I haven't seen a comment explain what it is. Now it's been awhile since my graphics course (so this may be terribly wrong), but from what I remember raytracing works something like this:
1. Imagine a ray shooting out of your eye through each pixel on your screen. So ray shoots into the 3D world and it might hit an object. The purpose of the ray is to collect light information.
2. If it hits an object, it will bounce off at a certain angle (depending on the object). After it bounces around a couple times, it might eventually hit a light source or you might set a limit to how many times it can bounce. Each time it bounces off an object, it might lose some intensity depending on the surface of the object.
3. After all the bouncing, it collects light information (depending on what it hits, the surface, the lighting) and now that pixel now has more accurate light info for rendering.
What this allows is much more realistic mirrors, reflections, lightings, shadows, etc. but as you can imagine, bouncing off all those rays takes lots and lots of computation. Radiosity was mentioned, and that's basically shooting millions of rays FROM the light sources first (instead of from the users eye to each pixel). But again, lots of calculations.
If you're wondering how current games look so good without raytracing, it's due to lots of clever hacks and simulations for lighting/shading. Raytracing is kind of a brute-force/realistic method. Hope that helps someone...
Any prospective buyers who might be interested on the history of the car being sold:
Should check out the discussion on the car by the original creator
And the creator and his timeline on building the car
In short, its a re-sell and the original creator is getting no credit. In fact the person re-selling the car is using copyrighted images on ebay (which is why the auction was previously pulled).
I'm a PHP/Smarty user right now (and I haven't really dabbled in the other templating engines), but after separating business logic from presentation, you really can't go back. Regardelss of what template engine you choose to use, having flexibility in the presentation of data, as I've discovered, is a huge convenience. One of the most important uses for me is quickly pumping out RSS feeds, different styles for my users, etc. all from the same business logic. Personally, I really enjoy using Smarty and its been incredibly fast on my servers. That being said, I'll dive into the pros and cons of Smarty and present an alternative that I really like.
Overhead
As for the argument about overhead, sure all templating engines do add some amount of overhead, but depending on your server load, power of webservers, etc., the significance of the load may either be infintesimal or enormous. I know that Smarty tries to reduce the load by caching the compiled template files to save some time. Basically, on the first page load, Smarty compiles and caches all the smarty files into PHP files, so in the end, you're basically running a bunch of PHP code.
Of course, with all business->presentation, there is the overhead of looping through your data set twice: once to retrieve and store the data, and once to display it. However, this is only a constant factor in complexity, so it should not be a significant overhead.
Flexibility
Smarty is an extremeley flexible templating language, since you can basically wrap any php function and pass it in as a plugin, thus opening up the entire PHP library through smarty functions. In fact, you can always cheat with Smarty and throw in the {php}{/php} tags, though may add confusion to the design process.
And this brings up the largest problems with Smarty though (from a PHP programmers perspective), is that you do have to spend time learning a new language. While several of the constructs are similar to PHP, it is different enough to warrant some amounts of frustration. I'm sure this applies to any templating engine as well.
Alternative to templating "engines"
Like another poster pointed out, you don't really need a separate templating "engine" to use templates. Templating can be acheived using pure PHP itself, as long as you create the correct classes and strictly enforce keeping all design out of the business logic. (The link gives more details about that).
Smarty may be a good choice however, if the designers of the company does not have PHP knowledge. Teaching them the small amount of Smarty (the language is very small) may be faster than ramping them up on a PHP template. And Smarty was made for this purpose, a templating language with a SIMPLER function set than PHP. It was created (afiak) keeping in mind that not all those HTML/WYSIWYG designers have expert knowledge of PHP.
or else meet certain death...
It "worked" for the snes emulators because the snes is obsolete. Nintendo really can't make quite as much profit off the older systems anymore. Things are different when they can lose out several million dollars and lose market share. I mean, imagine if there was a Gamecube emulator on PS2. Or worse yet: GBA emulator on PSP. The GBA is Nintendo's current top selling unit, and in my opinion, the only thing keeping Nintendo in the hardware business. With the GCN not faring too well, Nintendo's got to push for every penny it can squeeze out of the GBA. And considering the funding that Microsoft/Sony can pump into their products, Nintendo needs every penny it can get to try to reclaim it's old market share. Perhaps their patent won't hold up in court, but if my company's future was potentially at stake, you gotta try.
I seriously couldn't stop laughing after reading this for a good ten minutes. I didn't want to disturb my co-workers, so I had to go to the bathrooms stalls giggling like an idiot. Thanks for the good laugh.