Unfortunately your premise presupposes a certain amount of discression on the part of the general public.
e.g. Shortly after the whole electric power debacle in California the geniouses in the Canadian province of Ontario decided that privitizing the power plants there would be a great idea. Some highly qualified people involved in the decision making process and subsequent fallout occuring in California were so kind as to fly to Ontario and speak to anyone who would listen. Some of these had been pro-privitization lobbyists before the whole Enron fallout.
Of course recent real life examples were of no consideration to the superior intellect of the constituents of Ontario. who after all are so much more aware than their American counterparts. Imagine the surprise when privitization resulted in immediate price hikes and supply/demand problems. There was a collective gut check but it was too late.
Let's face it, the majority of people in the western world are willfully incompetent, bumbling morons who long ago sacrificed their minds to the lordship of info-tainment television, in short, people who have no business making decisions of consequence.
Scout Leader: Boys I think it's safe to climb down from the trees now.
Boy Scout #1: But sir, the bear just ate the last kid to climb down, and he's still growling!
Boy Scout #2: Yeah, that's like the fifth kid he's eaten!
Did our stone weapons suffice for protecting us from such large aerial predators or was it not until bronze weapons that we were specialized enough to protect ourselves?
A good club would suffice as it is difficult to hit a flying eagle with a spear or arrow. Then again my archery skills were mediocre even after years of practice, but I have seen good archers and few could hit a flying bird of prey.
I am sometimes surprised that large birds seldom attack humans and other large animals today. Being an outdoorsman I have seen eagles close up and can tell you that there were a couple which were unbelievably huge. One had a head as large as a small dog's. At that moment you realize if an animal like that decided to hunt peple, it could.
On the flip side, a native friend once described to me how men in his tribe used to have themselves buried in dirt or sand with only their hands sticking out. Between their hands a friend would place fish remains to bait eagles. And then they waited, hours upon end, often unsuccessfully. As soon as one would alight the hunter would grab for its legs and if successful, burst up out of the ground and kill the animal with his bare hands.
Maybe the eyes of dead human corpses are merely a delicacy among scavenger birds or some other scavenger that left similar markings?
At some point extracting oil from shale and tar sands will become cost-effective.
Wooo! And at that point we tar-sand-rich Canucks will be joyfully gloating all your base are belong to us as we are ^H^H^H^H^H^H bombed by the U.S.A. whose sole desire is to finally bring us freedom and human rights!
This made me chuckle but I do have an objection to the level of school-yard labelling that goes on here. (on any number of issues - no doubt I have participated myself)
In its broadest form ID suggests that life was designed, which in itself does not necessitate any arguement against micro evolution. Of course many ID'ers are the literal 7-day creationists you are insinuating, but clearly not all.
Which is the same kind of intentional misrepresentation most parties are guilty of when our desire to be proven right overcomes our desire to show respect to our fellow (wo)man.
And just who is this "Linux" company which Microsoft seems to be competing so well against?
A: The one whose software is installed over all those servers which were sold pre-loaded with Windows. This is obvious shilling from one of Ballmer's many mistresses. We go over this all the time but there will always be some journalists who really do prefer to "sit, fetch, roll-over" and otherwise be the obedient lap dogs of the monopoly.
Seriously, I love Canada with all my heart but it sickens me that we've started feeling the need to flaunt. Canada and America deserve to be neighbours; we're both self-righteous. If we don't watch it we'll start losing friends too.
I live in Manitoba because I like fresh air and snow but it's certainly not for everyone. I'm not about to hold a gun to anyone's head and tell them they can't leave.
On topic, it's a good idea to hang on to some talent. High time for smaller countries to believe in themselves and become a little more self-reliant.
PHP, is it API or language?
on
PHP 5.1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Now that PHP is popular it is undergoing something of an identity crisis. Rasmus said it was an answer to "the web problem", a very simple answer. A "right to the point" approach, terse rather than elegant.
But as more "serious" developers pick it up, more "serious" features are requested.
The fact is, if you're flexible you can build whatever you need in PHP4. It may not always be the way you prefer to code, but you can do it.
PHP is what it is. And it won't appeal to everyone. Fortunately there are many other platforms for the unsatisfied. Take your pick.
If your primary gripe with PHP is that it isn't enough like Java, shut up and use Java. Same for - insert language here -
I am very interested to see the new framework being promised by Zend and IBM. (http://www.zend.com/php-collaboration/) Can they really deliver on their promises? If not, I do predict a mass exodus to ROR. PHP could wind up being relegated to individual scripts or 5 page websites.
I'll I know is that naming everything with a "K" helps makes Linux look like a joke to outsiders. At this point it is downright childish and it is high time to start renaming the applikations, I mean applications, grr!
"On the same hardware, Firefox on a Windows 2000 install runs much, MUCH faster then it does on an Ubuntu Linux (or for that matter any Linux I've tried) install. What's all that about?"
GTK for one. I haven't looked through the source so I will let someone with actual knowlege handle the rest.
As for fonts, while most distros continue to struggle I notice that recent Redhat variants all have superior font support. In fact when I boot back into Windows one of the first things I notice is that their fonts look worse than Fedora. Every distro should make it a priority to support that quality.
Konqueror is rocking more every day. On my system it's the only browser comparable to Opera in terms of speed.
I'm a web developer and will freely admit that I use it as my primary file transfer utility since it seamlessly integrates with ssh/sftp. (Kate also does this!) But I suppose that really isn't referring to it in its browser capacity...
Also enjoy the integrated spellcheck for text areas, very handy.
Cons:
Have experienced some crashes visiting some sites. (including sitepoint? you'd think they would check) Ahem, crashing is one thing that will need to stop. Sometimes Javascript objects also purport to be supported but turn out to be half-implementations. This makes object detection a bit of a nightmare if you are developing web apps.
I appreciate and agree with the parent post that this is not nearly the biggest concern right now, but it IS just one more slap in the face for everyone trying to file claims with anything other than Windows/IE6.
I work in this industry and can assure readers with no uncertainty that such users comprise well more than 1% of the computing population. Recent numbers put non-IE6 use for a number of popular sites anywhere between 12-26%. My read is that US government sites will currently attract a number at the low end of that range.
Whether or not site compatibility is a priority right now IS debatable so long as people have other means of contact but this should NEVER have happened in the first place.
Yes, I realize it is surprising, but I didn't just pull those numbers out of my hat;)
Some popular sites reported broad shifts during the last year, (can be verified in news posts right here on slashdot) a few popular nerd sites now reporting IE use below 50%.
But some major non-techie sites are also experiencing shifts. For an example the general public can appreciate check out the BBC where non-Windows/IE browsers comprise 23.6% of users:
I also hear Mac users complain about borked sites and when I look at the code you can see that it doesn't even check for IE/Mac as opposed to IE/Windows.
I know of cases where it has resulted in Mac users purchasing HOMES from sites which are compatible with Macintosh browsers. At that point 10-30% (don't forget firefox users on other platforms) is just too much market share to lose to lazy programmers designing your site.
How freakin' stupid/lazy do you have to be to insist on turning away 10-30% when you can reach ALL major browsers with a little more research?
I know from experience: I too used to create MS centric sites but a little bit of research and practice has allowed me to reach a far broader market.
At this point I'll build sites that work with IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Lynx, cell phones, speech readers... all without needing the old "navigator.appName" check. That's right - it is often possible to code once for everybody. If you have an ActiveX only site it is simply time to do a little research and re-tooling.
PHP's author never envisioned it becoming a mainstream language. It tied into Perl to do its processing and had some massive security holes. There is a surprising amount of hate filled FUD surrounding the language these days (???) but an objective look at the modern PHP language/platform will show it suitable for a broad range of web applications. Perfect? Hardly. But wonderfully pragmatic for most everyday tasks.
Good design and OO will only help those who have more serious needs. In that vein I would love to see future versions focus on scalability (yes, I do realize that Yahoo runs on it but not without some serious configuration) and perhaps persistance?
Fortunately there's lots of great development tools and when PHP fits, I say use it.
If you followed the scene through those last turbulent years you will recall that Netscape tried to pull a 'Microsoft' on the internet, introducing a waft of proprietary extensions to their popular browser. At that point it was Microsoft who suddenly took an interest in the W3C and standards based browsing.
Ironically it may be a fortunate thing for the internet and the global community that Netscape's monopoly was broken. Now it is imperative we do the same to Microsoft.
Longhorn Avalon looks great but unless my eyes deceive me I believe it is an attempt to make the browser irrelevant. Once web apps communicate directly with the OS instead of the browser the monopoly is complete, no?
This "insanity" will end when China is the new world super-power. A federated Europe will claim second spot in the economic pecking order. The US will have to settle for third with us poor Canadians trying to leach a meager existence doing trade with the former champ.
Not that I would think of trusting China or Europe to be our saviours in all things related to policy! But on this one point, I don't see China rushing to endorse the kind of patent madness ruling the western hemisphere at the moment. Do you?
Trust those freakin' Canadians to figure out a way to rip off honest, hard working people. I guess scammers like a country with fewer crime fighting resources than America and yet similar modern amenities.
Now if you don't mind I'll just finish topping my pancakes with maple syrop while watching amateur hockey and drinking beer. Oops, think I may have given something away there...
Hmm, I see I didn't relate part of my point that well...
Indeed none of the examples were originally open source inventions; my point is that although the computing public (and some tech editors) associate all of the above with MS, they are not MS inventions either.
I would challenge Coursey and his cohorts when they assert that only traditional software models used by big companies allow innovation. If the largest fish in the pool freely borrows from the ideas of others it would seem strange to challenge the fact that software "innovations" generally evolve.
There is no doubt that funding frees up the time and resources necessary to get some impressive projects off the ground. As far as this industry is concerned, open source is still the new kid on the block. An increase in corporate sponsorship will only increase the number of innovations coming from this sector as well.
Coursey is a familiar open-source basher and well used to distorting the picture. He has even been quoted as saying that commercial software firms do the innovation while open source mostly copies. This myth has been well debunked before but in case you missed it consider MS and tell me:
who "innovated" DOS, gui computing, windowed applications, mouse based ui, menus, word processor, spreadsheets, email client, address book, database... you get the picture. Such willful ignorance of the facts is quite staggering and makes for good reading/flaming.
Which causes me to wonder if Coursey really believes what he writes or if he's just there to create reaction. eWeek has more than a few OSS fans and Coursey knows he's kicking the nest. Maybe he's just having fun?
Slashdot Mirror
Crapp! Tehy not letting pogrammers partisipating no mroe?
Unfortunately your premise presupposes a certain amount of discression on the part of the general public.
e.g. Shortly after the whole electric power debacle in California the geniouses in the Canadian province of Ontario decided that privitizing the power plants there would be a great idea. Some highly qualified people involved in the decision making process and subsequent fallout occuring in California were so kind as to fly to Ontario and speak to anyone who would listen. Some of these had been pro-privitization lobbyists before the whole Enron fallout.
Of course recent real life examples were of no consideration to the superior intellect of the constituents of Ontario. who after all are so much more aware than their American counterparts. Imagine the surprise when privitization resulted in immediate price hikes and supply/demand problems. There was a collective gut check but it was too late.
Let's face it, the majority of people in the western world are willfully incompetent, bumbling morons who long ago sacrificed their minds to the lordship of info-tainment television, in short, people who have no business making decisions of consequence.
Scout Leader: Boys I think it's safe to climb down from the trees now.
Boy Scout #1: But sir, the bear just ate the last kid to climb down, and he's still growling!
Boy Scout #2: Yeah, that's like the fifth kid he's eaten!
Scout Leader: Then he's probably full!
Boy Scout #1: Good point sir, shall I climb down?
A good club would suffice as it is difficult to hit a flying eagle with a spear or arrow. Then again my archery skills were mediocre even after years of practice, but I have seen good archers and few could hit a flying bird of prey.
I am sometimes surprised that large birds seldom attack humans and other large animals today. Being an outdoorsman I have seen eagles close up and can tell you that there were a couple which were unbelievably huge. One had a head as large as a small dog's. At that moment you realize if an animal like that decided to hunt peple, it could.
On the flip side, a native friend once described to me how men in his tribe used to have themselves buried in dirt or sand with only their hands sticking out. Between their hands a friend would place fish remains to bait eagles. And then they waited, hours upon end, often unsuccessfully. As soon as one would alight the hunter would grab for its legs and if successful, burst up out of the ground and kill the animal with his bare hands.
Good call, many animals enjoy eating eyes.
At some point extracting oil from shale and tar sands will become cost-effective.
Wooo! And at that point we tar-sand-rich Canucks will be joyfully gloating all your base are belong to us as we are ^H^H^H^H^H^H bombed by the U.S.A. whose sole desire is to finally bring us freedom and human rights!
I for one welcome...
This made me chuckle but I do have an objection to the level of school-yard labelling that goes on here. (on any number of issues - no doubt I have participated myself)
In its broadest form ID suggests that life was designed, which in itself does not necessitate any arguement against micro evolution. Of course many ID'ers are the literal 7-day creationists you are insinuating, but clearly not all.
Which is the same kind of intentional misrepresentation most parties are guilty of when our desire to be proven right overcomes our desire to show respect to our fellow (wo)man.
A: The one whose software is installed over all those servers which were sold pre-loaded with Windows. This is obvious shilling from one of Ballmer's many mistresses. We go over this all the time but there will always be some journalists who really do prefer to "sit, fetch, roll-over" and otherwise be the obedient lap dogs of the monopoly.
Man, what is this utopia you speak of? :)
Seriously, I love Canada with all my heart but it sickens me that we've started feeling the need to flaunt. Canada and America deserve to be neighbours; we're both self-righteous. If we don't watch it we'll start losing friends too.
I live in Manitoba because I like fresh air and snow but it's certainly not for everyone. I'm not about to hold a gun to anyone's head and tell them they can't leave.
On topic, it's a good idea to hang on to some talent. High time for smaller countries to believe in themselves and become a little more self-reliant.
Now that PHP is popular it is undergoing something of an identity crisis. Rasmus said it was an answer to "the web problem", a very simple answer. A "right to the point" approach, terse rather than elegant.
But as more "serious" developers pick it up, more "serious" features are requested.
The fact is, if you're flexible you can build whatever you need in PHP4. It may not always be the way you prefer to code, but you can do it.
PHP is what it is. And it won't appeal to everyone. Fortunately there are many other platforms for the unsatisfied. Take your pick.
If your primary gripe with PHP is that it isn't enough like Java, shut up and use Java. Same for - insert language here -
I am very interested to see the new framework being promised by Zend and IBM. (http://www.zend.com/php-collaboration/) Can they really deliver on their promises? If not, I do predict a mass exodus to ROR. PHP could wind up being relegated to individual scripts or 5 page websites.
Funny, I just bumped into a trucker who's proudly crowing about how he's running machinery on soybean oil.
I'll I know is that naming everything with a "K" helps makes Linux look like a joke to outsiders. At this point it is downright childish and it is high time to start renaming the applikations, I mean applications, grr!
"On the same hardware, Firefox on a Windows 2000 install runs much, MUCH faster then it does on an Ubuntu Linux (or for that matter any Linux I've tried) install. What's all that about?"
GTK for one. I haven't looked through the source so I will let someone with actual knowlege handle the rest.
As for fonts, while most distros continue to struggle I notice that recent Redhat variants all have superior font support. In fact when I boot back into Windows one of the first things I notice is that their fonts look worse than Fedora. Every distro should make it a priority to support that quality.
Konqueror is rocking more every day. On my system it's the only browser comparable to Opera in terms of speed.
I'm a web developer and will freely admit that I use it as my primary file transfer utility since it seamlessly integrates with ssh/sftp. (Kate also does this!) But I suppose that really isn't referring to it in its browser capacity...
Also enjoy the integrated spellcheck for text areas, very handy.
Cons:
Have experienced some crashes visiting some sites. (including sitepoint? you'd think they would check) Ahem, crashing is one thing that will need to stop. Sometimes Javascript objects also purport to be supported but turn out to be half-implementations. This makes object detection a bit of a nightmare if you are developing web apps.
I appreciate and agree with the parent post that this is not nearly the biggest concern right now, but it IS just one more slap in the face for everyone trying to file claims with anything other than Windows/IE6.
I work in this industry and can assure readers with no uncertainty that such users comprise well more than 1% of the computing population. Recent numbers put non-IE6 use for a number of popular sites anywhere between 12-26%. My read is that US government sites will currently attract a number at the low end of that range.
Whether or not site compatibility is a priority right now IS debatable so long as people have other means of contact but this should NEVER have happened in the first place.
Sorry, make that 24.4% not 23.6%
Yes, I realize it is surprising, but I didn't just pull those numbers out of my hat ;)
l /browser_support.shtml
Some popular sites reported broad shifts during the last year, (can be verified in news posts right here on slashdot) a few popular nerd sites now reporting IE use below 50%.
But some major non-techie sites are also experiencing shifts. For an example the general public can appreciate check out the BBC where non-Windows/IE browsers comprise 23.6% of users:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/newmedia/technica
So yes, real!
I also hear Mac users complain about borked sites and when I look at the code you can see that it doesn't even check for IE/Mac as opposed to IE/Windows.
I know of cases where it has resulted in Mac users purchasing HOMES from sites which are compatible with Macintosh browsers. At that point 10-30% (don't forget firefox users on other platforms) is just too much market share to lose to lazy programmers designing your site.
How freakin' stupid/lazy do you have to be to insist on turning away 10-30% when you can reach ALL major browsers with a little more research?
I know from experience: I too used to create MS centric sites but a little bit of research and practice has allowed me to reach a far broader market.
At this point I'll build sites that work with IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Lynx, cell phones, speech readers... all without needing the old "navigator.appName" check. That's right - it is often possible to code once for everybody. If you have an ActiveX only site it is simply time to do a little research and re-tooling.
There are rumors that the Canadian Space Program is working on a way to transport passengers over the intarweb. Firewalls are a concern however...
PHP's author never envisioned it becoming a mainstream language. It tied into Perl to do its processing and had some massive security holes. There is a surprising amount of hate filled FUD surrounding the language these days (???) but an objective look at the modern PHP language/platform will show it suitable for a broad range of web applications. Perfect? Hardly. But wonderfully pragmatic for most everyday tasks.
Good design and OO will only help those who have more serious needs. In that vein I would love to see future versions focus on scalability (yes, I do realize that Yahoo runs on it but not without some serious configuration) and perhaps persistance?
Fortunately there's lots of great development tools and when PHP fits, I say use it.
.wmv's? And all this time I thought _Linux_ was supposed to be un-American. Seriously, prayers for your brother.
How's that for inviting flames?
If you followed the scene through those last turbulent years you will recall that Netscape tried to pull a 'Microsoft' on the internet, introducing a waft of proprietary extensions to their popular browser. At that point it was Microsoft who suddenly took an interest in the W3C and standards based browsing.
Ironically it may be a fortunate thing for the internet and the global community that Netscape's monopoly was broken. Now it is imperative we do the same to Microsoft.
Longhorn Avalon looks great but unless my eyes deceive me I believe it is an attempt to make the browser irrelevant. Once web apps communicate directly with the OS instead of the browser the monopoly is complete, no?
This "insanity" will end when China is the new world super-power. A federated Europe will claim second spot in the economic pecking order. The US will have to settle for third with us poor Canadians trying to leach a meager existence doing trade with the former champ.
Not that I would think of trusting China or Europe to be our saviours in all things related to policy! But on this one point, I don't see China rushing to endorse the kind of patent madness ruling the western hemisphere at the moment. Do you?
Trust those freakin' Canadians to figure out a way to rip off honest, hard working people. I guess scammers like a country with fewer crime fighting resources than America and yet similar modern amenities.
Now if you don't mind I'll just finish topping my pancakes with maple syrop while watching amateur hockey and drinking beer. Oops, think I may have given something away there...
How many of us have helped someone move into a new house or apartment for no more than a few beers or a good meal?
When you can't afford to pay someone what they're worth it can often be better to offer an enjoyable non-monetary gift.
Hmm, I see I didn't relate part of my point that well...
Indeed none of the examples were originally open source inventions; my point is that although the computing public (and some tech editors) associate all of the above with MS, they are not MS inventions either.
I would challenge Coursey and his cohorts when they assert that only traditional software models used by big companies allow innovation. If the largest fish in the pool freely borrows from the ideas of others it would seem strange to challenge the fact that software "innovations" generally evolve.
There is no doubt that funding frees up the time and resources necessary to get some impressive projects off the ground. As far as this industry is concerned, open source is still the new kid on the block. An increase in corporate sponsorship will only increase the number of innovations coming from this sector as well.
Coursey is a familiar open-source basher and well used to distorting the picture. He has even been quoted as saying that commercial software firms do the innovation while open source mostly copies. This myth has been well debunked before but in case you missed it consider MS and tell me:
who "innovated" DOS, gui computing, windowed applications, mouse based ui, menus, word processor, spreadsheets, email client, address book, database... you get the picture. Such willful ignorance of the facts is quite staggering and makes for good reading/flaming.
Which causes me to wonder if Coursey really believes what he writes or if he's just there to create reaction. eWeek has more than a few OSS fans and Coursey knows he's kicking the nest. Maybe he's just having fun?