Other issues with Linux for example is glibc ABI breakage - UT anyone? Seriously can you even run that game with current glibc (stable)? Among others. My point is there are still other issues besides performance and features.
NVidia showed uss how to get proprietary apps to work with Linux: You give the user a binary blob and some open-sourced glue in an easy to use installer. The user clicks "okay", the machine crunches numbers for a minute (preferably while the game data is copied onto the HDD) and afterwards you have a copy of the game that works with your system. If some ABI changes you just recompile the glue.
Actually, one could even take a two-tiered approach. A sticker saying "requires a Common Desktop Standard 2008 (or later)-compliant computer" would be the first approach; another way to deal with the masses of Linux configurations would be a common tool that assesses the computer's abilities and allows the user to compare them to a list of Linux software, generating a list of notices. If the software requires libpwnage-1.6.3 and the user has libpwnage-1.5.0 the tool notifies the user to upgrade that package in order to run the game (ie. it red-flags that line). Likewise, if the user has a GPU that only supports OpenGL 2.5 and the game uses some optional OpenGL 2.6 features that line gets yellow-flagged and the user is notified that the game would run, but miss some special effects.
Video game producers could just add their official requirements to the database before the game is released, allowing people to check their system before they go out and buy it - and later the community can refine the values if they're inaccurate.
Most of the hardware detection could be done via a table of known components; unknown components could be determindes via tests (ie. a little 3DMark clone). That way most people could check whether their system will run the game before they go to the store to pick it up.
By the way, thanks for the prize. I thank the Academy and everyone who made this possible, including CmdrTaco.
Also, there are many games for Windows that were originally developed with a console-style control in mind.
Including some that are thoroughly ruined by it. Prime example: Oblivion, which has an interface completely unsuited for PC gaming. There are mods, yes, but even with them the game suffers from its poor interface.
I don't know what "compatible to the X360 gamepad" means. It might mean "has joystick support" or it might mean "can be played entirely with the X360 controller", which means more awful console-like interfaces.
Well, hardware-wise Linux ports of games usually need about the same hardware as the Windows version. We could simply co-opt whatever Microsoft does to denote computers of a certain power.
The studio might use a package layout that is close enough to the "Games for Windows" layout that buyers might confuse it (and which, if adopted by more devs, undermines the entire brand) but different enough not to get them into legal trouble. Instead of the "Games for Windows" logo there's "Made for Mictosoft(R) Windows(R), Linux 2.6+, Mac OS 10.5+ and PDP-11".
If Microsoft dictates fees for commercial use of DirectX, devs will investigate OpenGL, especially as now there's a valid business case for it. OpenGL usage means simplified porting means a higher chance for a Linux port.
Not exactly a golden age, but it definitely increases the chance of a given game being ported.
What? That's one of the biggest crimes in today's IT world! Do you have any idea how much money is lost annually due to the sweet girl from procurements with the pink-laced keds getting caught selling toner cartridges on E-bay which she stole from someone's office printer and she tells the boss that she didn't know it was from there because he gave it to her and when they go to investigate they find some work documents on his personal USB key drive that he needed to move files to another computer in a department with a printer that still had toner along with a file full of MP3s and spreadsheet full of numbers he'd been toying with to see if it's feasible to start his own competing business?
Entire companies have gone bankrupt because the sweet girl from procurements with the pink-laced keds gets caught selling toner cartridges on E-bay which she stole from an important worker's office printer and she tells the boss that she didn't know it was from there because he gave it to her and when they go to investigate they find some work documents on his personal USB key drive that he needed to move files to another computer in a department with a printer that still had toner along with a file full of MP3s and spreadsheet full of numbers he'd been toying with to see if it's feasible to start his own competing business.
The sweet girl from procurements with the pink-laced keds gets caught selling toner cartridges on E-bay which she stole from your office printer and she tells the boss that she didn't know it was from there because you gave it to her and when they go to investigate they find some work documents on your personal USB key drive that you needed to move files to another computer in a department with a printer that still had toner along with a file full of MP3s and spreadsheet full of numbers you'd been toying with to see if it's feasible to start your own competing business is a serious crime!
The GP's right, I did. Man, those were the days where you could cure someone without getting arrested for performing improptu eye surgery without having any medical training...
And hey, we're a democracy, so if 51% of the people agree, that means the rest of us should all just bend over, right?
That's not an innate quirk of democracy, that's a quirk of badly implemented democracy. Virtually every other democracy on Earth uses proportional representation to counter that problem.
For example, in Germany we currently have five important parties (ie. parties that usually make it past the 5% hurdle and thus have seats in the Bundestag, can form coalitions etc.). Two of them are big (CDU/CSU and SPD) and the other three are small, usually getting between 4 and 7% (FDP, the Left Party and the Greens). After the election usually none of the big parties are strong enough to rule on their own. Usually the big party that won the election ends up forming a coalition with one or two of the small parties, which affects which part of the election programs will be followed and which decisions the government will make. On rare occasions the CDU/CSU and SPD form a Great Coalition (which happened twics, once in the sixties and currently since 2005).
We still have representation of the people's wishes - actually, even more so than in the USA where everyone who doesn't agree with at least one of the two big parties has no chance whatsoever to get represented by the government. Also, the more extreme parts of the election programs are smoothed out during the coalition talks. I'd also suspect voter turnout to be higher, since people who'd vote for a small party don't feel that their votes are irrelevant, but I don't have any numbers to back it up.
You're overlooking something. Crytek wasn't raided because someone found it funny. Crytek was raided because video games are this generation's Heavy Metal/television/Rock'n'Roll - ie. the universal scapegoat for every social ailment. Someone ran amok and it was found that, among other things like being depressive, this person played video games. The media immediately concluded that Counterstrike has turned a normal teenager into a killing machine and for one or two weeks 50% of all German politicians had their IQ halved. That's where nonsensical actions like that come from.
One of the biggest "OMG video games are teh evul!"-sayers in Germany is BILD, Europe's most-read tabloid. BILD is capable to cause badly informed politicians to make bad decisions by pretending that most Germans are outraged at their lack of action. Sadly there are quite a number of people (including politicians) who take their opinions from sensationalist press.
What happened here follows an easy scheme:
1.) Student X runs amok and commits suicide
2.) Some media are quick to point out that X had some kind of FPS (or some other kind of video game) installed
3.) Other media insist that Counterstrike caused X to run amok (even if he never played it)
4.) Some politicians demand that any kind of violent video games are banned
5.) While the discussion is taking place stupid people take stupid actions <---TFA IS HERE
6.) In the end the more intelligent politicians manage to silence the stupid demands and make plans to counter the problem by detecting and treating the psychical issue (usually depression) X is known to have had
7.) A couple months later a law is passed that saves money by reducing school staffs, severely impeding their ability to detect, much less help depressive students
8.) Wait one or two years until the next student breaks under the stress of being mobbed by his classmates, which went unnoticed because of step 7
a "the rest of you states suck, we're better; in fact, we're basically independent"-mentality
Bavaria even has the BP (Bavaria Party), which argues that Bavaria should secede from Germany. I think it's no wonder that the Bavarians and the North Germans think of each other as crackpots.
Bavaria is also the state leading the current initiative to make the laws regarding violent games more stringent, while other states are taking a much more sensible position.
What's making me ashamed is that my state, Lower Saxony, is also following this blatantly populistic initiative. I would have expected the politicians to be a bit more level-headed up here, but apparently no state is safe from politicians who would suck up to any fad to get a temporary boost in popularity.
Maybe to have heaps of cryptic-looking data scrolling across the terminal window to fool your boss into thinking that you're just playing Tetris because you're waiting for this incredigby important script to finish crunching all that data...
Who's the black private dick
that's a sex machine to all the chicks?
(Teal!)
You're damn right.
Who is the man
that would risk his neck for his brother man?
(Teal!)
Can ya dig it?
Who's the cat that won't cop out
when there's danger all about
(Teal!)
Right on.
You see this cat Teal is a bad mother--
(Shut your mouth!)
But I'm talkin' about Teal!
(Then we can dig it.)
He's a complicated man
but no one understands him but his woman
(Teal'c!)
I am forever indebted to you for your apt remark. I am sure that a common standard will emerge, which we can all use to install Free Pacman clones and video game ports with a single klik. After all a smart package manager is a recipe for success.
...I shouldn't post when tired. I tend to emulate Mookie, badly.
Note: I'm from Germany and we're just getting the ninth season, so for me the Ori are still pretty new and fresh. But I'm already getting tired of it. Gone are the daays of exploring the galaxy in order to find new technology to defend Earth - now we have huge-ass warships and pretty much everyone who can hold a gun is our friend. And the Ori are so ridiculously overpowered that suspension of disbelief is getting hard; after all they could easily win by sending priors with planet-devastating powers to Earth and a couple other important planets. It's essentially a battle between godmoders.
If the show keeps going on like this it's no wonder it didn't survive. As much as I like SG-1, it's too similar to Dragonball Z for comfort.
It's a library of functions that are considered the standard functions of every PHP install (even though a good chunk of them can be turned off at compile-time). That the library does not follow any standards only means that it's a pretty standard-less standard library.
Note to self: Talk PHP developers into calling the set of functions that come with PHP the "nonstandard library".
Well, PHP exists and I like it better than Python, even with the screwy standard library - for example, it doesn't try to impose a certain philosophy on its users. PHP puts ease of use over purity of philosophy, which is why it has this grown feel to it; functionality was added when deemed neccessary. Much of what the rewrite would do (and what ogoproject.com tries to do) would be the creation and application of consistent function signature standards, which alone would make the language more accessible.
The idea is to generate a language that feels like PHP but lacks some of its more problematic features and flaws. Just using a different language wouldn't recreate the feel and rewriting a different language to feel like PHP would probably be much more work than rewriting PHP to do some things differently.
I know that taking away HTML embedding would mean taking away PHP's foundation, but hey, it's not like nothing good has ever come from misappropriation.
As for the point... The point is that I rather like PHP and being able to quickly produce working code. PHP has the same advantage Java has: A large standard library that allow it to do everything from string manipulation to SQL to PDF generation.
I just happen to like working with PHP and I happen to hate what embedded PHP can do to HTML code. Sure, it defeats the purpose PHP was built for, but there are much cleaner ways of using PHP to dynamically generate web sites. Maybe one could even add a processTemplate($path, $variables) function that is essentially equivalent to strtr(file_get_contents($path), $variables) - a shorthand like that (preferably with added error checking) might turn off people less than "building a simple template engine is trivial, so do it yourself".
Sorry, but so are you! (Yeah, I know, IHBT, but whatever...)
Ruby cannot be used for dynamic websites because it's meant to be run on the command line. There's no way ever that a language can support both a CGI and a CLI, especially PHP, which has backends for Apache, generic CGI and a CLI. Nuh-uh. *sticks fingers in ears* LA LA LA!
And you're so damn right about a PHP fork needing completely new memory management - after all it'd have to do something PHP already does quite well. The need for a new garbage collector obviously follows. And the fork would lose all the advantages of PHP like dynamic typing, easy array management and a rich set of built-in functionality because, er, space pirates would steal it.
And yeah, multithreading is a real issue, because we all know that it's impossible to write a quick shell script without relying on dozens of threads. And we also know that nobody could ever add such functionality to a language, just like nobody would ever think of removing PHP's execution time limit when forking it.
By the way, why Python, Ruby or Perl? We already have LISP. There's no reason whatsoever to write a new language that follows a different approach when there already is a language that is roughly functionally equivalent! Also, the crude P* syntaxes can't compete with the power of LISP.
This post has been brought to you by the letters S, A, R, C, A, S and M.
That's why I said "general purpose scripting language". I use PHP for shell scripting and it's pretty useful (you can crank out a decent script for just about anything in no time and if you know what you're doing it's no less safe than a Python or Perl script would be). However, I have to agree that PHP is egregiously designed, from the inconsistent way of doing just about anything to the fact that even shell scripts invoking PHP via #! require the tags.
A sanitized (in the meaning of "made more sane") PHP offshot would be more useful in shell scripting as one doesn't have to spend as much time in the (thankfully excellent) documentation and it could easily be used for web scripting - in fact I'd consider it superior as in most cases there are no gains from using inline PHP.
If people complain that using templates is too hard, include a demo page that shows how to use the sanitized versions of get_file_contents(), str_replace() and echo to work with templates - really, PHP makes working with templates really easy; there's no excuse for not promoting them as the standard - or even only - way of handling HTML output. The less jumbled PHTML the world sees the better.
Slashdot Mirror
Other issues with Linux for example is glibc ABI breakage - UT anyone? Seriously can you even run that game with current glibc (stable)? Among others. My point is there are still other issues besides performance and features.
NVidia showed uss how to get proprietary apps to work with Linux: You give the user a binary blob and some open-sourced glue in an easy to use installer. The user clicks "okay", the machine crunches numbers for a minute (preferably while the game data is copied onto the HDD) and afterwards you have a copy of the game that works with your system. If some ABI changes you just recompile the glue.
Actually, one could even take a two-tiered approach. A sticker saying "requires a Common Desktop Standard 2008 (or later)-compliant computer" would be the first approach; another way to deal with the masses of Linux configurations would be a common tool that assesses the computer's abilities and allows the user to compare them to a list of Linux software, generating a list of notices. If the software requires libpwnage-1.6.3 and the user has libpwnage-1.5.0 the tool notifies the user to upgrade that package in order to run the game (ie. it red-flags that line). Likewise, if the user has a GPU that only supports OpenGL 2.5 and the game uses some optional OpenGL 2.6 features that line gets yellow-flagged and the user is notified that the game would run, but miss some special effects.
Video game producers could just add their official requirements to the database before the game is released, allowing people to check their system before they go out and buy it - and later the community can refine the values if they're inaccurate.
Most of the hardware detection could be done via a table of known components; unknown components could be determindes via tests (ie. a little 3DMark clone). That way most people could check whether their system will run the game before they go to the store to pick it up.
By the way, thanks for the prize. I thank the Academy and everyone who made this possible, including CmdrTaco.
They'll attribute all my hard work motivating major corporations to someone with less facial hair.
Is that you, RMS?
Also, there are many games for Windows that were originally developed with a console-style control in mind.
Including some that are thoroughly ruined by it. Prime example: Oblivion, which has an interface completely unsuited for PC gaming. There are mods, yes, but even with them the game suffers from its poor interface.
I don't know what "compatible to the X360 gamepad" means. It might mean "has joystick support" or it might mean "can be played entirely with the X360 controller", which means more awful console-like interfaces.
Well, hardware-wise Linux ports of games usually need about the same hardware as the Windows version. We could simply co-opt whatever Microsoft does to denote computers of a certain power.
The studio might use a package layout that is close enough to the "Games for Windows" layout that buyers might confuse it (and which, if adopted by more devs, undermines the entire brand) but different enough not to get them into legal trouble. Instead of the "Games for Windows" logo there's "Made for Mictosoft(R) Windows(R), Linux 2.6+, Mac OS 10.5+ and PDP-11".
If Microsoft dictates fees for commercial use of DirectX, devs will investigate OpenGL, especially as now there's a valid business case for it. OpenGL usage means simplified porting means a higher chance for a Linux port.
Not exactly a golden age, but it definitely increases the chance of a given game being ported.
Meh. I'll wait until they release a version of Windows that comes with Rez.
Also, consider "crime" #9: [...]
What? That's one of the biggest crimes in today's IT world! Do you have any idea how much money is lost annually due to the sweet girl from procurements with the pink-laced keds getting caught selling toner cartridges on E-bay which she stole from someone's office printer and she tells the boss that she didn't know it was from there because he gave it to her and when they go to investigate they find some work documents on his personal USB key drive that he needed to move files to another computer in a department with a printer that still had toner along with a file full of MP3s and spreadsheet full of numbers he'd been toying with to see if it's feasible to start his own competing business?
Entire companies have gone bankrupt because the sweet girl from procurements with the pink-laced keds gets caught selling toner cartridges on E-bay which she stole from an important worker's office printer and she tells the boss that she didn't know it was from there because he gave it to her and when they go to investigate they find some work documents on his personal USB key drive that he needed to move files to another computer in a department with a printer that still had toner along with a file full of MP3s and spreadsheet full of numbers he'd been toying with to see if it's feasible to start his own competing business.
The sweet girl from procurements with the pink-laced keds gets caught selling toner cartridges on E-bay which she stole from your office printer and she tells the boss that she didn't know it was from there because you gave it to her and when they go to investigate they find some work documents on your personal USB key drive that you needed to move files to another computer in a department with a printer that still had toner along with a file full of MP3s and spreadsheet full of numbers you'd been toying with to see if it's feasible to start your own competing business is a serious crime!
In 1938 Hitler was Man of the Year
So... Does that mean that Time has lost the argument (which argument anyway?) for comparing all internet users to Hitler?
The GP's right, I did. Man, those were the days where you could cure someone without getting arrested for performing improptu eye surgery without having any medical training...
And hey, we're a democracy, so if 51% of the people agree, that means the rest of us should all just bend over, right?
That's not an innate quirk of democracy, that's a quirk of badly implemented democracy. Virtually every other democracy on Earth uses proportional representation to counter that problem.
For example, in Germany we currently have five important parties (ie. parties that usually make it past the 5% hurdle and thus have seats in the Bundestag, can form coalitions etc.). Two of them are big (CDU/CSU and SPD) and the other three are small, usually getting between 4 and 7% (FDP, the Left Party and the Greens). After the election usually none of the big parties are strong enough to rule on their own. Usually the big party that won the election ends up forming a coalition with one or two of the small parties, which affects which part of the election programs will be followed and which decisions the government will make. On rare occasions the CDU/CSU and SPD form a Great Coalition (which happened twics, once in the sixties and currently since 2005).
We still have representation of the people's wishes - actually, even more so than in the USA where everyone who doesn't agree with at least one of the two big parties has no chance whatsoever to get represented by the government. Also, the more extreme parts of the election programs are smoothed out during the coalition talks. I'd also suspect voter turnout to be higher, since people who'd vote for a small party don't feel that their votes are irrelevant, but I don't have any numbers to back it up.
How fascistic could you possibly get?
You're overlooking something. Crytek wasn't raided because someone found it funny. Crytek was raided because video games are this generation's Heavy Metal/television/Rock'n'Roll - ie. the universal scapegoat for every social ailment. Someone ran amok and it was found that, among other things like being depressive, this person played video games. The media immediately concluded that Counterstrike has turned a normal teenager into a killing machine and for one or two weeks 50% of all German politicians had their IQ halved. That's where nonsensical actions like that come from.
One of the biggest "OMG video games are teh evul!"-sayers in Germany is BILD, Europe's most-read tabloid. BILD is capable to cause badly informed politicians to make bad decisions by pretending that most Germans are outraged at their lack of action. Sadly there are quite a number of people (including politicians) who take their opinions from sensationalist press.
What happened here follows an easy scheme:
1.) Student X runs amok and commits suicide
2.) Some media are quick to point out that X had some kind of FPS (or some other kind of video game) installed
3.) Other media insist that Counterstrike caused X to run amok (even if he never played it)
4.) Some politicians demand that any kind of violent video games are banned
5.) While the discussion is taking place stupid people take stupid actions <---TFA IS HERE
6.) In the end the more intelligent politicians manage to silence the stupid demands and make plans to counter the problem by detecting and treating the psychical issue (usually depression) X is known to have had
7.) A couple months later a law is passed that saves money by reducing school staffs, severely impeding their ability to detect, much less help depressive students
8.) Wait one or two years until the next student breaks under the stress of being mobbed by his classmates, which went unnoticed because of step 7
a "the rest of you states suck, we're better; in fact, we're basically independent"-mentality
Bavaria even has the BP (Bavaria Party), which argues that Bavaria should secede from Germany. I think it's no wonder that the Bavarians and the North Germans think of each other as crackpots.
Bavaria is also the state leading the current initiative to make the laws regarding violent games more stringent, while other states are taking a much more sensible position.
What's making me ashamed is that my state, Lower Saxony, is also following this blatantly populistic initiative. I would have expected the politicians to be a bit more level-headed up here, but apparently no state is safe from politicians who would suck up to any fad to get a temporary boost in popularity.
Maybe to have heaps of cryptic-looking data scrolling across the terminal window to fool your boss into thinking that you're just playing Tetris because you're waiting for this incredigby important script to finish crunching all that data...
Who's the black private dick
that's a sex machine to all the chicks?
(Teal!)
You're damn right.
Who is the man
that would risk his neck for his brother man?
(Teal!)
Can ya dig it?
Who's the cat that won't cop out
when there's danger all about
(Teal!)
Right on.
You see this cat Teal is a bad mother--
(Shut your mouth!)
But I'm talkin' about Teal!
(Then we can dig it.)
He's a complicated man
but no one understands him but his woman
(Teal'c!)
I am forever indebted to you for your apt remark. I am sure that a common standard will emerge, which we can all use to install Free Pacman clones and video game ports with a single klik. After all a smart package manager is a recipe for success.
...I shouldn't post when tired. I tend to emulate Mookie, badly.
How about a crossover? CSI: Chulak or Jaffa CIS? Or maybe Stargate: Impossible?
Note: I'm from Germany and we're just getting the ninth season, so for me the Ori are still pretty new and fresh. But I'm already getting tired of it. Gone are the daays of exploring the galaxy in order to find new technology to defend Earth - now we have huge-ass warships and pretty much everyone who can hold a gun is our friend. And the Ori are so ridiculously overpowered that suspension of disbelief is getting hard; after all they could easily win by sending priors with planet-devastating powers to Earth and a couple other important planets. It's essentially a battle between godmoders.
If the show keeps going on like this it's no wonder it didn't survive. As much as I like SG-1, it's too similar to Dragonball Z for comfort.
It's a library of functions that are considered the standard functions of every PHP install (even though a good chunk of them can be turned off at compile-time). That the library does not follow any standards only means that it's a pretty standard-less standard library.
Note to self: Talk PHP developers into calling the set of functions that come with PHP the "nonstandard library".
Well, PHP exists and I like it better than Python, even with the screwy standard library - for example, it doesn't try to impose a certain philosophy on its users. PHP puts ease of use over purity of philosophy, which is why it has this grown feel to it; functionality was added when deemed neccessary. Much of what the rewrite would do (and what ogoproject.com tries to do) would be the creation and application of consistent function signature standards, which alone would make the language more accessible.
The idea is to generate a language that feels like PHP but lacks some of its more problematic features and flaws. Just using a different language wouldn't recreate the feel and rewriting a different language to feel like PHP would probably be much more work than rewriting PHP to do some things differently.
I know that taking away HTML embedding would mean taking away PHP's foundation, but hey, it's not like nothing good has ever come from misappropriation.
As for the point... The point is that I rather like PHP and being able to quickly produce working code. PHP has the same advantage Java has: A large standard library that allow it to do everything from string manipulation to SQL to PDF generation.
I just happen to like working with PHP and I happen to hate what embedded PHP can do to HTML code. Sure, it defeats the purpose PHP was built for, but there are much cleaner ways of using PHP to dynamically generate web sites. Maybe one could even add a processTemplate($path, $variables) function that is essentially equivalent to strtr(file_get_contents($path), $variables) - a shorthand like that (preferably with added error checking) might turn off people less than "building a simple template engine is trivial, so do it yourself".
Sorry, but so are you! (Yeah, I know, IHBT, but whatever...)
Ruby cannot be used for dynamic websites because it's meant to be run on the command line. There's no way ever that a language can support both a CGI and a CLI, especially PHP, which has backends for Apache, generic CGI and a CLI. Nuh-uh. *sticks fingers in ears* LA LA LA!
And you're so damn right about a PHP fork needing completely new memory management - after all it'd have to do something PHP already does quite well. The need for a new garbage collector obviously follows. And the fork would lose all the advantages of PHP like dynamic typing, easy array management and a rich set of built-in functionality because, er, space pirates would steal it.
And yeah, multithreading is a real issue, because we all know that it's impossible to write a quick shell script without relying on dozens of threads. And we also know that nobody could ever add such functionality to a language, just like nobody would ever think of removing PHP's execution time limit when forking it.
By the way, why Python, Ruby or Perl? We already have LISP. There's no reason whatsoever to write a new language that follows a different approach when there already is a language that is roughly functionally equivalent! Also, the crude P* syntaxes can't compete with the power of LISP.
This post has been brought to you by the letters S, A, R, C, A, S and M.
That's why I said "general purpose scripting language". I use PHP for shell scripting and it's pretty useful (you can crank out a decent script for just about anything in no time and if you know what you're doing it's no less safe than a Python or Perl script would be). However, I have to agree that PHP is egregiously designed, from the inconsistent way of doing just about anything to the fact that even shell scripts invoking PHP via #! require the tags.
A sanitized (in the meaning of "made more sane") PHP offshot would be more useful in shell scripting as one doesn't have to spend as much time in the (thankfully excellent) documentation and it could easily be used for web scripting - in fact I'd consider it superior as in most cases there are no gains from using inline PHP.
If people complain that using templates is too hard, include a demo page that shows how to use the sanitized versions of get_file_contents(), str_replace() and echo to work with templates - really, PHP makes working with templates really easy; there's no excuse for not promoting them as the standard - or even only - way of handling HTML output. The less jumbled PHTML the world sees the better.