Actually, I find the iBook (and the MacBook, once the first-version bugs are ironed out) to be a very reasonable entry-level product, at least in the not-confined-to-Windows market. A bit over a year ago I got a 1.2 GHz G4 iBook with an 80G HDD for 1,200 EUR; the cheapest comparable laptop with guaranteed *nix compatibility I could find was a ThinkPad with a similar price and slightly lower specs (and the added disadvantage of not having the sexiest GUI around).
True, Apple can't compete in the bargain basement sector, but if you want a notebook you can actually get some work done on (and/or just one that runs some flavor of *nix) Apple's low-end laptops are pretty competitive.
Speaking of the PS3, is it affected? (I don't have time to RTFA to see for myself.) If yes, it'd be hilarious as the PS3 is supposed to drive Blu-Ray adoption...
The inbox should be used for NEW, UNREAD MESSAGES ONLY!
No, obviously the inbox root folder should be used as storage for mails that don't belong anywhere else. Unread messages should be auto-filed into subfolders according to topic. That's how I do it so it's obviously the Right Way(TM).
It depends on the mail. While as a student I don't have any real work related mails yet I do keep all important mails (study related stuff, mailed invoices etc.) in case I need them later. However, if someone asks me about a link to that webcomic we talked about that's hardly worth being archived (although I do it anyway because I'm too lazy to delete such mails). Some other mails are deleted right away because there is no value in keeping them around - for example mails with subject lines like "Wonderf.ul Dea.l Fo.r Inex.pensive Drug.s", oh-so-urgent messages from banks or test mails I wrote to find out whether the account works.
Keeping your correspondence is a good idea, but keeping all of it isn't. Your spam folder isn't more valuable because it holds advertisements from 1998 (unless you plan on archiving the stuff in a stable format so future historians can analyze the spam).
Gentoo users can soon share the Windows users' feeling of, well, whatever Windows Genuine Advantage provides. Just enter USE="-working" emerge genuineadvantage and watch in marvel as ninety percent of all ebuilds become hard-masked. Gentoo Genuine Advantage, coming soon to an overlay near you.
(Note: The Microntoo Corporation does not advise usage of the "cracked" USE flag. If you install the pre-cracked version of GGA the terrorists have already won.)
On the contrary, all you have to do is implement the next generation of leverage by using a synergistic polychronistic time system to wield the golden hammer in order to...
But if we did that the main reactor could lose containment! I tell you, we're better off with reversing the main deflector's polarity and running a level five diagnosis.
PHP, for example, does add something new - ease of use. While it is certainly possible to generate webpages using CGI/C++ etc. PHP makes it easier, thus enabling the programmer to produce usable code in less time. It's also easy to learn and quite readable, which does not apply to LISP derivatives; in an internet where people want to create dynamic websites without being programmers ease of use is much more important for a server-side scripting language than flexibility, conceptual cleanness or execution speed.
From the point of view of a LAMP web developer Scheme is wasting resources that could go into improving PHP, which makes far more sense. For an AI researcher the opposite might be true and a hardware developer might wonder why people are getting so riled up over high level languages like C when VHDL and Verilog are definitely more important.
Most languages are created for a reason. PHP was created to make the creation of dynamic webpages easier, Ruby was created because there was no fully object oriented scripting language and Java was created to be compiled and binary-compatible across platforms. Those are all requirements not fulfilled by the languages you mentioned, which is why someone sat down and created a new one. If people wouldn't create new languages to suit their needs we wouldn't have, for example, C++ (because C already existed).
By the way, there won't any further replies from me as I'll be internet-less for the next week.
Ferrari, Porsche, DaimlerChrysler and BMW don't provide capabilities bayond Ford, so nobody should buy their cars. Cherries, apples, potatoes and bananas don't provide capabilities beyond strawberries, so we shouldn't divert effort that could go into strawberry monocultures.
There are things like competition and biodiversity that you might want to read up on.
In that regard, I did come across a discussion on some mailing list from someone talking about writing shell-type code using PHP. I found the idea too strange to fathom, so maybe someone can clue me in if people are actually in the habit of doing this, and living to tell about it.
I do. PHP is nice for quick scripts that have to go beyond what bash can comfortably provide (note the word "comfortably". I know that functionality XYZ can be done by combining awk, bc and recode, but that doesn't mean it's comfortable) and I do use it for some batch processing stuff.
Probably the most involved PHP shell script I'm using (~350 LOC) is used to generate name tags for the attendees of a mini-convention centered around a certain web board. It fetches informations about all attendees from the database used by the registration script, downloads the avatar pictures specified therein, resizes and copies them into a background image and adds some text (username etc.), choosing the font size so that the text lies within specified boundaries. PHP/gd is fairly well-suited for the job and while a C program could do it faster (the script needs about three minutes to generate fifty 1080x648 PNG images, including running the user names through recode to fix an obscure charset incompatiblity my system has lately developed) it would be less flexible and I'd first have to hunt down all kinds of libraries to do things PHP already has built in, like downloading files via HTTP. Since I only need the script twice a year the performance gain would be irrelevant and so I stick with the language that allows me the highest development speed, which happens to be PHP.
I did take a look at other languages because people keep insisting that PHP is evil (mostly because it does not use objects in namespaces for everything beyond arithmetic and I/O), but so far I haven't found anything more comfortable than PHP yet. Ruby is nice but has a weird feeling to it and Python would be nice if most of the design decisions weren't contrary to how I'd prefer them. Lisp is just too cryptic for my taste. I haven't looked at Perl yet, though.
I use PHP because it's very easy to quickly develop something and because the language has lots of syntactic sugar (such as the way arrays are handled. Sure, it's easy to shoot yourself in the knee with PHP variables, but if you're careful you can do some rather nifty things). Also, PHP has an extremely useful documentation; I found those of Ruby and Python to be lacking.
By the way, if asked about how to improve PHP I'd firstly put everything into namespaces (in order to shut the "omg everything in one namespace" people up), add objects as alternative functionality for everything (in order to shut the "everyone should do everything in OOP" people up) and remove the ability to mix PHP with HTML code (which only leads to unmaintainable pap not even deserving the name "spaghetti code"). Also, maybe a working GTK/wxW/$toolkit implementation and a compiler (for when you really don't want the interpreter to use up resources). And maybe operator overloading. Apart from that I already like th language. Maybe not the cleanest language around but one with high code throughput.
True. Lack of balls on a project lead can make the entire project nonfunctional. About a year ago I started working on a little program that was supposed to be a specializd IRC client for playing pen-and-paper RPGs online. The thing was supposed to support one system with a specific set of house rules. My fellow players joined in and we went about determining the modalities. Half a year later we were discussing whether or not we should use a custom scripting language that people could use to define their own rulesets for using the client with random RPG systems. Concurrently we discussed a modular scripting framework that would allow people to define scripts in any language they could write a plugin for, including Java classfiles.
After the project has been dead for a couple months I'm currently busy working on a small subset of it, without the involvement of any other people. I'm making far better progress. The original project went down the drain because I let everyone else have a voice in the major structural decisions - if I had, from the very beginning, said that we do things how I like them and stuff like support for different systems might make it in, but only into the second version, there would probably be a working program now. I twould not be ideal (as we have since started occasionally playing a different system), but we would have a mostly-okay result instad of none at all.
I think lack of balls is an even worse property for a project leader to have than lack of brain. Without a brain you'll go in a bad direction, but without balls you will go nowhere.
However, in 2006, in the Age of Moral Equivalence and Intellectual Bankruptcy, expressing a preference for one country, philosophy, religion, or just about anything else, over another is considered the Worst Thing Imaginable: a Hate Crime.
Maybe where you live. Over here in Germany we're just starting to rediscover not being completely caught up in self-loathing. It's a fairly refreshing feeling.
I declare that the United States of America to be the best country in the world and has been a huge net positive influence in world history.
As a moral relativist I have to relativize your judgement here: From the POV of today's western world that is more or less true, from other POVs it might not be. You certainly were a better influence than we were in the Fourties (except on those two Japanese towns, of course;).
I furthermore claim that Jesus Christ is Lord, abortion is murder and marriage is between one man and one woman.
I claim that he may or may not be (I'm not religious), it depends and it's not really that important. I also claim that atheism is a religion.
I will go on to say it doesn't matter if emacs is better than vi because Multi-edit is better than both;
You obviously never have used nano.;) However, even without using it I can attest that Multi-edit is superior to both vi and emacs.
Microsoft may be evil, but Windows really isn't that bad; MST3K is the greatest TV show ever, and "The Simpsons" is a great, but "Family Guy" is a sorry and unfunny rip-off; and everyone should listen to the Flower Kings and Spock's Beard, because unlike most contemporary rock groups, they don't suck.
It is evil, it is nice in concept but aggravating in practice, of course it is (even though only the movie got released in Germany), it is, it mostly is and I never heard of those bands but swear by Machinae Supremacy.
The European root server network is already in place. Usually it's synchronized with the ICANN one, but it can go independent (and does so). I used the ORSN servers for a while but have switched back to my ISP's servers, as they respong faster (gee, whyever could that be).
Even better, make it so that the problems are intermittent (maybe by calling mogrify from a script which is replaced by cron on an eccentric schedule). For extra nonsense randomly add cryptic phrases to HTML documents (for example short excerpts from the Principia Discordia). Confusion galore!
How exactly are XML Schemas something bad that grows on top of web services? A Schema is a way of defining the structure of an XML document in another XML document. And IMO it's easier to use than DTDs.
Also, XML is easier to reverse engineer than flat files. I'm currently in the process of reverse enginnering a rather simple format used in an RPG character management software, but even though it's just a plain ASCII file it's still annoying because the format does nothing to distinguish between the actual data, internal metadata and obsolete values (let alone signifying which value is which). When I'm done I will write a translator that turns the stuff into an XML document for use with my own software. Even without documentation this*...
While XML can't replace writing a good documentation it does make life easier when you have to interpret the data and don't have access to the documentation. It provides context.
* The examples don't reflect the actual formats, but they are similar, especially the flat file. The XML format is a rather hairy thing with internal non-XML namespaces which I don't want to inflict upon you.
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Actually, I find the iBook (and the MacBook, once the first-version bugs are ironed out) to be a very reasonable entry-level product, at least in the not-confined-to-Windows market. A bit over a year ago I got a 1.2 GHz G4 iBook with an 80G HDD for 1,200 EUR; the cheapest comparable laptop with guaranteed *nix compatibility I could find was a ThinkPad with a similar price and slightly lower specs (and the added disadvantage of not having the sexiest GUI around).
True, Apple can't compete in the bargain basement sector, but if you want a notebook you can actually get some work done on (and/or just one that runs some flavor of *nix) Apple's low-end laptops are pretty competitive.
Speaking of the PS3, is it affected? (I don't have time to RTFA to see for myself.) If yes, it'd be hilarious as the PS3 is supposed to drive Blu-Ray adoption...
The inbox should be used for NEW, UNREAD MESSAGES ONLY!
No, obviously the inbox root folder should be used as storage for mails that don't belong anywhere else. Unread messages should be auto-filed into subfolders according to topic. That's how I do it so it's obviously the Right Way(TM).
It depends on the mail. While as a student I don't have any real work related mails yet I do keep all important mails (study related stuff, mailed invoices etc.) in case I need them later. However, if someone asks me about a link to that webcomic we talked about that's hardly worth being archived (although I do it anyway because I'm too lazy to delete such mails). Some other mails are deleted right away because there is no value in keeping them around - for example mails with subject lines like "Wonderf.ul Dea.l Fo.r Inex.pensive Drug.s", oh-so-urgent messages from banks or test mails I wrote to find out whether the account works.
Keeping your correspondence is a good idea, but keeping all of it isn't. Your spam folder isn't more valuable because it holds advertisements from 1998 (unless you plan on archiving the stuff in a stable format so future historians can analyze the spam).
Why? I think it's Swede. In my opinion this Congo on for ever.
Gentoo users can soon share the Windows users' feeling of, well, whatever Windows Genuine Advantage provides. Just enter USE="-working" emerge genuineadvantage and watch in marvel as ninety percent of all ebuilds become hard-masked. Gentoo Genuine Advantage, coming soon to an overlay near you.
(Note: The Microntoo Corporation does not advise usage of the "cracked" USE flag. If you install the pre-cracked version of GGA the terrorists have already won.)
Inside Mac Games, an online publication, has such a love affair with Aspyr that I rarely read it anymore.
OTOH, Inside Mac Games was where I found out about Escape Velocity Nova (which I bought) and the Mac port of Jets'n'Guns (which is next on my list).
On the contrary, all you have to do is implement the next generation of leverage by using a synergistic polychronistic time system to wield the golden hammer in order to...
But if we did that the main reactor could lose containment! I tell you, we're better off with reversing the main deflector's polarity and running a level five diagnosis.
PHP, for example, does add something new - ease of use. While it is certainly possible to generate webpages using CGI/C++ etc. PHP makes it easier, thus enabling the programmer to produce usable code in less time. It's also easy to learn and quite readable, which does not apply to LISP derivatives; in an internet where people want to create dynamic websites without being programmers ease of use is much more important for a server-side scripting language than flexibility, conceptual cleanness or execution speed.
From the point of view of a LAMP web developer Scheme is wasting resources that could go into improving PHP, which makes far more sense. For an AI researcher the opposite might be true and a hardware developer might wonder why people are getting so riled up over high level languages like C when VHDL and Verilog are definitely more important.
Most languages are created for a reason. PHP was created to make the creation of dynamic webpages easier, Ruby was created because there was no fully object oriented scripting language and Java was created to be compiled and binary-compatible across platforms. Those are all requirements not fulfilled by the languages you mentioned, which is why someone sat down and created a new one. If people wouldn't create new languages to suit their needs we wouldn't have, for example, C++ (because C already existed).
By the way, there won't any further replies from me as I'll be internet-less for the next week.
Ferrari, Porsche, DaimlerChrysler and BMW don't provide capabilities bayond Ford, so nobody should buy their cars. Cherries, apples, potatoes and bananas don't provide capabilities beyond strawberries, so we shouldn't divert effort that could go into strawberry monocultures.
There are things like competition and biodiversity that you might want to read up on.
In that regard, I did come across a discussion on some mailing list from someone talking about writing shell-type code using PHP. I found the idea too strange to fathom, so maybe someone can clue me in if people are actually in the habit of doing this, and living to tell about it.
I do. PHP is nice for quick scripts that have to go beyond what bash can comfortably provide (note the word "comfortably". I know that functionality XYZ can be done by combining awk, bc and recode, but that doesn't mean it's comfortable) and I do use it for some batch processing stuff.
Probably the most involved PHP shell script I'm using (~350 LOC) is used to generate name tags for the attendees of a mini-convention centered around a certain web board. It fetches informations about all attendees from the database used by the registration script, downloads the avatar pictures specified therein, resizes and copies them into a background image and adds some text (username etc.), choosing the font size so that the text lies within specified boundaries. PHP/gd is fairly well-suited for the job and while a C program could do it faster (the script needs about three minutes to generate fifty 1080x648 PNG images, including running the user names through recode to fix an obscure charset incompatiblity my system has lately developed) it would be less flexible and I'd first have to hunt down all kinds of libraries to do things PHP already has built in, like downloading files via HTTP. Since I only need the script twice a year the performance gain would be irrelevant and so I stick with the language that allows me the highest development speed, which happens to be PHP.
I did take a look at other languages because people keep insisting that PHP is evil (mostly because it does not use objects in namespaces for everything beyond arithmetic and I/O), but so far I haven't found anything more comfortable than PHP yet. Ruby is nice but has a weird feeling to it and Python would be nice if most of the design decisions weren't contrary to how I'd prefer them. Lisp is just too cryptic for my taste. I haven't looked at Perl yet, though.
I use PHP because it's very easy to quickly develop something and because the language has lots of syntactic sugar (such as the way arrays are handled. Sure, it's easy to shoot yourself in the knee with PHP variables, but if you're careful you can do some rather nifty things). Also, PHP has an extremely useful documentation; I found those of Ruby and Python to be lacking.
By the way, if asked about how to improve PHP I'd firstly put everything into namespaces (in order to shut the "omg everything in one namespace" people up), add objects as alternative functionality for everything (in order to shut the "everyone should do everything in OOP" people up) and remove the ability to mix PHP with HTML code (which only leads to unmaintainable pap not even deserving the name "spaghetti code"). Also, maybe a working GTK/wxW/$toolkit implementation and a compiler (for when you really don't want the interpreter to use up resources). And maybe operator overloading. Apart from that I already like th language. Maybe not the cleanest language around but one with high code throughput.
...but somehow I think that his build of PHP probably didn't come from an RPM.
True. Lack of balls on a project lead can make the entire project nonfunctional. About a year ago I started working on a little program that was supposed to be a specializd IRC client for playing pen-and-paper RPGs online. The thing was supposed to support one system with a specific set of house rules. My fellow players joined in and we went about determining the modalities. Half a year later we were discussing whether or not we should use a custom scripting language that people could use to define their own rulesets for using the client with random RPG systems. Concurrently we discussed a modular scripting framework that would allow people to define scripts in any language they could write a plugin for, including Java classfiles.
After the project has been dead for a couple months I'm currently busy working on a small subset of it, without the involvement of any other people. I'm making far better progress. The original project went down the drain because I let everyone else have a voice in the major structural decisions - if I had, from the very beginning, said that we do things how I like them and stuff like support for different systems might make it in, but only into the second version, there would probably be a working program now. I twould not be ideal (as we have since started occasionally playing a different system), but we would have a mostly-okay result instad of none at all.
I think lack of balls is an even worse property for a project leader to have than lack of brain. Without a brain you'll go in a bad direction, but without balls you will go nowhere.
Yeah, but from what I've heard they're just gonna put him into an array and strtr him.
That's why everyone should run screenshots through aalib before putting them up.
Take a look and feel free: http://www.piemenu.com/
I just did not feel free from taking a look. Am I doing something wrong?
"No." - Immanuel Kant
echo "" | php -Cq
Yet another example on how PHP is the superior shell scripting language.
However, in 2006, in the Age of Moral Equivalence and Intellectual Bankruptcy, expressing a preference for one country, philosophy, religion, or just about anything else, over another is considered the Worst Thing Imaginable: a Hate Crime.
;).
;) However, even without using it I can attest that Multi-edit is superior to both vi and emacs.
Maybe where you live. Over here in Germany we're just starting to rediscover not being completely caught up in self-loathing. It's a fairly refreshing feeling.
I declare that the United States of America to be the best country in the world and has been a huge net positive influence in world history.
As a moral relativist I have to relativize your judgement here: From the POV of today's western world that is more or less true, from other POVs it might not be. You certainly were a better influence than we were in the Fourties (except on those two Japanese towns, of course
I furthermore claim that Jesus Christ is Lord, abortion is murder and marriage is between one man and one woman.
I claim that he may or may not be (I'm not religious), it depends and it's not really that important. I also claim that atheism is a religion.
I will go on to say it doesn't matter if emacs is better than vi because Multi-edit is better than both;
You obviously never have used nano.
Microsoft may be evil, but Windows really isn't that bad; MST3K is the greatest TV show ever, and "The Simpsons" is a great, but "Family Guy" is a sorry and unfunny rip-off; and everyone should listen to the Flower Kings and Spock's Beard, because unlike most contemporary rock groups, they don't suck.
It is evil, it is nice in concept but aggravating in practice, of course it is (even though only the movie got released in Germany), it is, it mostly is and I never heard of those bands but swear by Machinae Supremacy.
I await the fatwahs.
I await something even worse, the -1, Offtopic.
The European root server network is already in place. Usually it's synchronized with the ICANN one, but it can go independent (and does so). I used the ORSN servers for a while but have switched back to my ISP's servers, as they respong faster (gee, whyever could that be).
Even better, make it so that the problems are intermittent (maybe by calling mogrify from a script which is replaced by cron on an eccentric schedule). For extra nonsense randomly add cryptic phrases to HTML documents (for example short excerpts from the Principia Discordia). Confusion galore!
Yeah! Why him and not me-- I mean, what a sick person!
we are reinventing things that had been figured out in Lisp with OO, UML, Design Patterns, and all of the crazy things we do with objects.
;)
We are even reinventing the design principles behind the Lisp syntax.
How exactly are XML Schemas something bad that grows on top of web services? A Schema is a way of defining the structure of an XML document in another XML document. And IMO it's easier to use than DTDs.
...is much more readabe than this:While XML can't replace writing a good documentation it does make life easier when you have to interpret the data and don't have access to the documentation. It provides context.
* The examples don't reflect the actual formats, but they are similar, especially the flat file. The XML format is a rather hairy thing with internal non-XML namespaces which I don't want to inflict upon you.