This isn't very different from C being compiled to Assembly
The difference is that in the case of a C program in a mainstream PC operating system on default settings, the user has the opportunity to make the choice to download and run the program or not. In the case of JavaScript in a mainstream web browser on default settings, the browser publisher and website operator have made this choice for the user.
Yes, on Windows the DLLs take quite a big amount of space, but only on disk
Is this true of macOS as well? This becomes doubly important as Macs switch to SSDs. And for developers who have a lot of users stuck behind satellite Internet or cellular tethering at $5 to $10 per GB, how well do Qt DLLs compress for distribution?
Besides, testing cross-compiled macOS binaries can still prove expensive for a micro-ISV.
For instance, mysql_real_escape_string() was always a hack. The actual solution was proper placeholder syntax [...] We got that (in I think PHP5) with PDO, which is also database-agnostic.
Even PDO doesn't support passing an array as a parameter for, say, the right side of SQL operator IN. Sometimes it can be easier to make a loop that does $db->quote() and then always use that loop for IN than to generate a string of question marks of the appropriate length and ensure that the parameters before the list, the parameters in the list, and the parameters after the list are always bound in the same order.
The lack of parallel programming is because it's designed as a web server scripting language. You extract parallelism by having multiple requests from multiple users
Which doesn't help if you happen to have only one user, or a small number of users one at a time, doing relatively heavyweight queries. You might end up doing cURL on localhost to spawn a bunch of subprocesses.
in weakly-typed languages, if you can convert it into an int, it *is* an int.
A numeric string in PHP behaves like an int in some contexts but not in others. This inconsistency leads people like her* to prefer languages that use strong dynamic typing, such as Python.
"using a variable as a function name". Which, if I understand what he's referring to right, is again a feature. You can use a variable to get a function name - "$foo()" will take the string value of $foo, and look for a function with that name. I've done pseudo-polymorphism this way.
As have I. But the messy part is that references to functions are stored as strings as opposed to being some other specialized type, as in C (function pointers), Python (callable objects), and C++ (both of the above). In addition, prior to PHP 7, it was impossible to catch a call to a missing function as an exception; programs had to use the look before you leap (LBYL) anti-pattern.
* Eevee's name is Evelyn according to her Twitter account. I know her from a Discord server about Game Boy development.
I tried to come up with a more balanced view on PHP, synthesizing Eevee's popular "fractal" essay, ManiacDan's "hardly" rebuttal, and Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts, to form coding standards and things that are still broken.
[Fax is common among] Lawyers, insurance companies, and others that have to interact with governments.
Doctors of all kinds, service workers of all kinds, lots of people still use faxes
Service workers interact with state assistance programs run by governments. Doctors interact with Medicare and Medicaid,* which are run by governments. Doctors also interact with insurers, who interact with governments in countries attempting universal availability of coverage.
If someone builds a battery for wind and solar power then expect that to be used by the utility for managing their coal, nuclear, and natural gas power as well.
and claim to conduct peer review, but don't actually do so.
Here's an exercise: Define what is and isn't adequate peer review.
I've heard allegations that those journals also may threaten legal action against people who accuse them of being predatory.
Once you have somewhat rigorously defined peer review, you can collect and present evidence that a particular publication acts as a vanity press. This evidence should make a defense in a defamation suit practical.
Say a particular article is the result of research funded by a particular country. Would it be acceptable if access to that article without charge were region locked to its sponsor country, where one would need to log in with a taxpayer ID and password to view it?
Academic publishers have every right to protect their intellectual property and charge for access.
By "intellectual property", do you refer to patents, trademarks, or trade secrets in addition to copyrights? If so, which? The appropriate policy reasoning is likely to depend on the significant differences among these areas of law. If not, why use the term "intellectual property" instead of "copyright" which is both shorter and more precise?
And why haven't we seen a price war among journals to attract subscribers from other journals?
In the scenario that you envision, would it be common for people to buy multiple machines in order to run applications exclusive to each platform? For example, would it be common to carry both a Windows or X11/Linux laptop and a MacBook, or both an iPhone and an Android phone?
The vast majority of editors out there are made to work with the storage being in the 'cloud'.
Good luck with the "cloud" once you have left your wired router's cable range or Wi-Fi router's signal range and/or run out of cellular hotspot data for the month.
First, you can't install a Chrome extension from a web page unless that web page is Chrome Web Store, and Google has been known to "curate" (i.e. censor) Chrome Web Store to remove extensions that hurt Google's business model.
Second, any platform integration functionality available in an extension has to be implemented in the browser through APIs that it exposes to extensions. What's the meaningful difference between making an API available to a website and making the same API available to a website-specific extension?
Actually, third party scripts can't trigger a redirect. It's part of the standard.
If your claim is true, then most web browsers that I've used violate the standard, as I've seen third-party advertisement scripts on Slashdot redirect the browser to a fraudulent "Urgent Firefox Update" page.
We're sorry! $APPNAME is not yet available for $PLATFORM. We apologize for the convenience.
In what way would a return to OS-specific applications be superior to what we have now? Even if you build your application using Qt or another multi-platform framework, and you cross-compile it, you can't cross-test the application on a machine that you don't have. And even if you can rent a remote desktop of a given platform through the Internet, responsiveness of a remote desktop through the Internet is not indicative of responsiveness when used locally.
Is there a Kinder Surprise Toy Ministry in the US?
I forget whether it's the Food and Drug Administration, but the USA bans Kinder Surprise because food and toy are enclosed together, posing a choking hazard. It allows Kinder Joy because the food and toy are separately sealed.
When you're passing the time in a grocery store waiting for your carpooling roommate to finish her shopping, it's easier to carry a phone than a laptop.
By incremental improvement, each of which is worthy of a fresh patent on the new parts. Drug companies have been using this sort of evergreening for decades: introduce an improvement and convince regulators to withdraw the previous product form the market as less safe, so that would-be generic manufacturers cannot compete by producing the previous-generation product.
Let me take a guess: Perhaps the forces, abrasions, etc. on the landing gear are greater during landing at a given weight than during takeoff at the same weight. In particular, the contact with the ground is more sudden during landing than during takeoff, and more sudden generally means greater force.
I believe some dentists are in same-sex relationships, and I accept historical records that the historical inspiration for Santa Claus died in AD 343. I have also seen evidence of mermaids, or children born with a lower limb difference that improves swimming at the expense of walking. Does that count?
Then should we blame Adobe? Its Flash Player and its CDM for HTML5 EME (that is, the digital restrictions management stuff) are the biggest differences that I'm aware of between Google Chrome and Chromium.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't very different from C being compiled to Assembly
The difference is that in the case of a C program in a mainstream PC operating system on default settings, the user has the opportunity to make the choice to download and run the program or not. In the case of JavaScript in a mainstream web browser on default settings, the browser publisher and website operator have made this choice for the user.
Yes, on Windows the DLLs take quite a big amount of space, but only on disk
Is this true of macOS as well? This becomes doubly important as Macs switch to SSDs. And for developers who have a lot of users stuck behind satellite Internet or cellular tethering at $5 to $10 per GB, how well do Qt DLLs compress for distribution?
Besides, testing cross-compiled macOS binaries can still prove expensive for a micro-ISV.
For instance, mysql_real_escape_string() was always a hack. The actual solution was proper placeholder syntax [...] We got that (in I think PHP5) with PDO, which is also database-agnostic.
Even PDO doesn't support passing an array as a parameter for, say, the right side of SQL operator IN. Sometimes it can be easier to make a loop that does $db->quote() and then always use that loop for IN than to generate a string of question marks of the appropriate length and ensure that the parameters before the list, the parameters in the list, and the parameters after the list are always bound in the same order.
The lack of parallel programming is because it's designed as a web server scripting language. You extract parallelism by having multiple requests from multiple users
Which doesn't help if you happen to have only one user, or a small number of users one at a time, doing relatively heavyweight queries. You might end up doing cURL on localhost to spawn a bunch of subprocesses.
in weakly-typed languages, if you can convert it into an int, it *is* an int.
A numeric string in PHP behaves like an int in some contexts but not in others. This inconsistency leads people like her* to prefer languages that use strong dynamic typing, such as Python.
"using a variable as a function name". Which, if I understand what he's referring to right, is again a feature. You can use a variable to get a function name - "$foo()" will take the string value of $foo, and look for a function with that name. I've done pseudo-polymorphism this way.
As have I. But the messy part is that references to functions are stored as strings as opposed to being some other specialized type, as in C (function pointers), Python (callable objects), and C++ (both of the above). In addition, prior to PHP 7, it was impossible to catch a call to a missing function as an exception; programs had to use the look before you leap (LBYL) anti-pattern.
* Eevee's name is Evelyn according to her Twitter account. I know her from a Discord server about Game Boy development.
I tried to come up with a more balanced view on PHP, synthesizing Eevee's popular "fractal" essay, ManiacDan's "hardly" rebuttal, and Douglas Crockford's JavaScript: The Good Parts, to form coding standards and things that are still broken.
[Fax is common among] Lawyers, insurance companies, and others that have to interact with governments.
Doctors of all kinds, service workers of all kinds, lots of people still use faxes
Service workers interact with state assistance programs run by governments. Doctors interact with Medicare and Medicaid,* which are run by governments. Doctors also interact with insurers, who interact with governments in countries attempting universal availability of coverage.
* And foreign counterparts
If someone builds a battery for wind and solar power then expect that to be used by the utility for managing their coal, nuclear, and natural gas power as well.
Tesla's battery at Hornsdale has proven that battery storage is good enough not only for grid frequency stabilization but also for arbitrage.
The push toward open access publishing has led to the creation of [...] journals that charge publication fees of the authors
So far, you've described a vanity press.
and claim to conduct peer review, but don't actually do so.
Here's an exercise: Define what is and isn't adequate peer review.
I've heard allegations that those journals also may threaten legal action against people who accuse them of being predatory.
Once you have somewhat rigorously defined peer review, you can collect and present evidence that a particular publication acts as a vanity press. This evidence should make a defense in a defamation suit practical.
Say a particular article is the result of research funded by a particular country. Would it be acceptable if access to that article without charge were region locked to its sponsor country, where one would need to log in with a taxpayer ID and password to view it?
Academic publishers have every right to protect their intellectual property and charge for access.
By "intellectual property", do you refer to patents, trademarks, or trade secrets in addition to copyrights? If so, which? The appropriate policy reasoning is likely to depend on the significant differences among these areas of law. If not, why use the term "intellectual property" instead of "copyright" which is both shorter and more precise?
And why haven't we seen a price war among journals to attract subscribers from other journals?
Lootboxes contain random, often duplicated items.
So do blind box vending machines, which are often seen at a store's exit next to the gumball machine.
In the scenario that you envision, would it be common for people to buy multiple machines in order to run applications exclusive to each platform? For example, would it be common to carry both a Windows or X11/Linux laptop and a MacBook, or both an iPhone and an Android phone?
The vast majority of editors out there are made to work with the storage being in the 'cloud'.
Good luck with the "cloud" once you have left your wired router's cable range or Wi-Fi router's signal range and/or run out of cellular hotspot data for the month.
First, you can't install a Chrome extension from a web page unless that web page is Chrome Web Store, and Google has been known to "curate" (i.e. censor) Chrome Web Store to remove extensions that hurt Google's business model.
Second, any platform integration functionality available in an extension has to be implemented in the browser through APIs that it exposes to extensions. What's the meaningful difference between making an API available to a website and making the same API available to a website-specific extension?
Actually, third party scripts can't trigger a redirect. It's part of the standard.
If your claim is true, then most web browsers that I've used violate the standard, as I've seen third-party advertisement scripts on Slashdot redirect the browser to a fraudulent "Urgent Firefox Update" page.
Have the user download the app
We're sorry!
$APPNAME is not yet available for $PLATFORM. We apologize for the convenience.
In what way would a return to OS-specific applications be superior to what we have now? Even if you build your application using Qt or another multi-platform framework, and you cross-compile it, you can't cross-test the application on a machine that you don't have. And even if you can rent a remote desktop of a given platform through the Internet, responsiveness of a remote desktop through the Internet is not indicative of responsiveness when used locally.
Is there a Kinder Surprise Toy Ministry in the US?
I forget whether it's the Food and Drug Administration, but the USA bans Kinder Surprise because food and toy are enclosed together, posing a choking hazard. It allows Kinder Joy because the food and toy are separately sealed.
Then perhaps a better analogy is a blind-box trinket vending machine inside an amusement park that charges admission.
Would you prefer that arcade games never have existed? "INSERT COIN" is a repeatable microtransaction.
When you're passing the time in a grocery store waiting for your carpooling roommate to finish her shopping, it's easier to carry a phone than a laptop.
By incremental improvement, each of which is worthy of a fresh patent on the new parts. Drug companies have been using this sort of evergreening for decades: introduce an improvement and convince regulators to withdraw the previous product form the market as less safe, so that would-be generic manufacturers cannot compete by producing the previous-generation product.
Let me take a guess: Perhaps the forces, abrasions, etc. on the landing gear are greater during landing at a given weight than during takeoff at the same weight. In particular, the contact with the ground is more sudden during landing than during takeoff, and more sudden generally means greater force.
They tried that. It was called the Ionic Breeze purifier. It turned out to generate too much ground-level ozone.
Would it be practical to use hot air as the lifting gas?
I believe some dentists are in same-sex relationships, and I accept historical records that the historical inspiration for Santa Claus died in AD 343. I have also seen evidence of mermaids, or children born with a lower limb difference that improves swimming at the expense of walking. Does that count?
Then should we blame Adobe? Its Flash Player and its CDM for HTML5 EME (that is, the digital restrictions management stuff) are the biggest differences that I'm aware of between Google Chrome and Chromium.