Price. Here, we must consider not simply the price tag of the initial investment, which, in the case of PHP, is obviously free, but also the implementation, maintenance, and debugging costs. In the case of PHP, you may invest in the Zend optimization engine. With ASP, however, you're investing from the very beginning, and you're spending for add-on technologies--libraries for doing graphics manipulations, for instance. But, in the long term, PHP isn't going to press you to upgrade and collect more licensing fees. Everyone who has dealt with complex licensing also knows that companies spend time and money just ensuring they are compliant. Furthermore, you have a difference in response when getting bugs fixed. This, of course, translates to time, which translates to cost for overall development.
Yep, anyone who's had to deal with oracle's licensing knows this one very well.:)
I work at a primarily Oracle/mod_perl shop, and one of the biggest hurdles we've had as a team is making sure we don't step on oracle's toes.
It had just come out, and my stepfather bought it. Eager to try it out on my computer, I installed it, and looking to maximize my HDD space, I installed DoubleSpace.
DoubleSpace was a disk compression tool, as many will remember had a lot of problems. Of course, I didn't know this at the time.
There was an option to change the compression ratio. I believe the default was 2:1. I set it to 16:1 (I was probably 13 or 14 at the time).
A couple of months of use and poof. One dead MFM controller. I'm still trying to figure out if it was EOL for the controller or if doublespace simply gave it more of a work out than it could handle.
Games based on movies SUCK. The inverse is also true.
(Repeat until you stop buying them.)
This gross generalization was brought to you by someone who thinks gameplay is more important than story. Movies have story going for them, not gameplay (for what I think are pretty obvious reasons).
Pong is highly addictive and didn't have a ton of cut and paste FMV and rendered versions of Keanu and John Rhys-Davies. Why do you need this?
Hang on a sec guys, windows just blue-screened because my DX9 install went bad. Sargeant, can you hold the monitor a little higher and away from the sun?
If you want something kept private, use encryption. If you want something kept as private as the person you're encrypting to, send it to that person. Plain and simple as that. If it can be decrypted it can be spread.
But frankly, emailing my wife saying "hey can you pick up a pizza on the way home" is not going to bother me. Even if I got a stupid ad for domino's when I sent it.
Of course, that won't happen because I don't use web mail that I don't run myself. Problem solved.:)
I can tell you that I had never used iTunes before, and frankly, it's a nice mp3 player and organizer, but I never use the store and I wouldn't be all that interested in using iTunes if I were to switch back.
The reason I switched? Mac OS X + hardware is just sexy. It's got a uniform UI that the linux camp can't get near and windows will never achieve.
Combine it with fink and the Cocoa EMACS port and I wiped all my linux desktop machines, put FreeBSD on them and they are now servers.
If you know of a reason that some other language is better, I would be interested in hearing it. Personally, I am getting really interested in PDF export, and Ming creation, which are both offered in PHP. Do other languages (such as python) support these functions?
I didn't say any other language was "better", anyone who tells you that one language is better than another unilaterally is a fool and should have their keyboard ripped out of their hands.:)
Anyhow, I'm not a big fan of lots of bundled special-case library functions, especially the way that PHP delivers them. That's one of it's biggest drawbacks IMNSHO. Too large of a standard library that might exist or might not - very hacky and hard to predict without a lot of extra code. Other languages tend to minimize or completely eliminate this, and it's generally because of cross-platform issues.
However, you can get hte functionality that you want for PDF's at least by using texi2pdf for TeXinfo on the command line - although it depends on what you mean by "export". If you're talking about HTML you might have to use another program or library. I really don't know what you would use in that situation. As for TeXinfo, If you don't already know, TeXinfo is a powerful yet simple markup language made for making documentation - it exports to tons of formats including PDF and info files.
Ming, again, not sure what you're talking about, but I'm going to assume MNG since you probably aren't talking about mingw32, the win32 compiler. ImageMagick could probably do what you wanted it to do. Perl has PerlMagick which is fairly good and I believe Python and PHP have interfaces as well. Worst case you can always use the command line.
So, no solid answers, but a lot of places to look. Of course, I think if you were that interested in finding out what else is out there you would be looking yourself. Not a jab, just a reasonable observation.
Founded on Ingres (not Ingre). Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine... I've known people for years that call it that, and it drives me nuts.
On your other comment.... It'll hurt MySQL more to abandon the OSS community than the opposite.
Take a look at all the PHP apps that are tied to MySQL. I know there's (I think it's called) ADODB for PHP now, which for the uninformed is like perl's DBI for PHP, but it's PEAR and not everyone has it. DBI is pretty much the de-facto way to access databases in perl, and there's an easy way to write simple SQL that works for the 3 most popular UNIX databases (Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL), save sequence manipulation. OF course, when you start getting into more advanced SQL you're looking at a further abstraction. And forget stored procedures.
The reason that this could have hurt PHP is that MySQL and PHP are both fast, easy to use and have little learning curve allowing junior programmer-types to get a lot done in little time.
So call your Sound Card vendor and tell them to support linux better, or buy a commercial linux distribution that can support it natively. Or return your card for one that works automagically under linux.
I speak with my wallet when it comes to hardware compatibility. I have a gut feeling that you'd just rather it work and blow another $200 on winders so it works when it's not between virus scans or reboots.:)
I'm using SuSE 9.0 on my workstation and haven't had to configure hardware yet. Same goes for my friends using Fedora and RedHat 9.
On my FreeBSD and Debian boxes, I do configure everything manually, because they are server hardware and I like to tweak it. Thank god I can actually do that.
Nothing in this world is free, my friend. I honestly have a gut feeling that you haven't checked out Linux in at least a year.
If you want to take antoher stab, take a look at the latest SuSE, my fav, or Fedora, which is looking promising. These are both ideal systems for the desktop.
Yeah, once I left the immediate area of both my parents and my in-laws, I pretty much did the same thing.
"What's that, your mahjongg/casino/bingo game doesn't work? I'm not there, so I don't really know...."
Of course, I get these questions and have to debug a few things everytime I get close to either my parents or the in-laws, but I don't mind that much, it's few and far between and I only fix the things they ask me for any more.
it's just too frustrating of an exercise to tell them "don't use outlook", because they constantly ask "why", and I tell them why, and they still don't understand. I give them eudora to use, and they stop using it because of the advertisements. Next time I am going to give them thunderbird (which dates the last time I was up there, heh).
I no longer work in I.T., so I have totally lost the patience to work with non-technical people. It's not like I get mad, but I just find a way to get out of it now.
I am so stunned at the idiocy in this post. *NOTHING* requires an OOP language. And plenty of (large) sites use hand-rolled development processes and work great with them. Web Services are SLOW.
Requiring a specific tool for the job should be determined after architecturing, not before.
This is the most disgusting thread I have ever read.
Do you realize what kind of programmer effort this requires? Do you realize what a total waste of time this is? The sad thing is, that people are doing it! It's pathetic.
If OSS has done one thing wrong, it's teaching people to expect more than talent can produce. We're wasting our time integrating apps between two different desktops when we should be working harder to integrate the two desktops themselves.
Doing the job yourself is a lot more work than having middleware that does it for you. End of story. These people should be putting the effort towards (hey freedesktop.org, listening?) a unified theme interface.
Personally, just a common default theme amongst the two would be a nice thing. I could care less about the shiny widgets. SuSE does a pretty nice job of that.
GTK and GTK2 can already share themes, IIRC. Mozilla, who cares? It's just an app (one that a lot of us don't use because it's too frigging slow:).
Besides, as many people have pointed out, there are apps with skins and there will be more to come - both on windows and the various unix desktops.
Then buy a GameCube. The under-13s in your family will thank you.
That's a horrible assessment.
If nintendo drove the gamecube alone, then it would still be successful (and I know, they mostly do).
Reason?
Nintendo knows gameplay. Very, very well.
I could care less about FMV, how many polygons are in the model that I push around with my controller, or any of that.
Perfect example: Mario Kart: Double Dash. I bought this last night, and both myself and my wife (who doesn't play much anything but Counter-Strike and The Sims) have been playing it non-stop.
This game has great physics, a smart controller interface, and is a lot of fun. Whether or not the content is 'G-Rated' bothers me not - Grand Theft Auto was a great game for the same reasons (well, all 4 of them actually).
The new school of gamers disgusts me - Graphics, Sound, Graphics and Sound. Shitty platformers that are the same, regurgitated version of Mega Man in 3d and with puzzles that I saw when I was 6 years old on my NES. Movie Titles still haven't figured out that a good game takes longer to make than the movie you're signed for. And who the fuck buys madden every year anyways? Is there really that thing you have to have every year that's worth shelling $40-$50 for? Do you really need another First Person Shooter on your console for crying out loud? Are people still actually intrigued by the vapid, monotonous stories that are contained in them?
Favorite Game of the Year: Zelda: The WindWaker (this might have been released last year, but I just bought a cube as my second working console in the house - and this game was awesome.)
Biggest Disappointment: Final Fantasy X-2. (No, charlie's angels should NEVER cross over with the fantasy genre - unfortunately for square, I am not japanese and I do not find goofy near-hentai drama and japanese pop music entertaining)
Worst Game: Xenosaga (I want to play a game, not watch one play itself. There are these things called movies, I watch those instead.)
These are my picks.
On the topic of franchises -- if something is good, people are going to roll with it. The bonus to a video game vs. a movie is that you can always upgrade or change the story to fit the game (well, with the exception of MGS2, that was just stupid Hideo Kojima) and it normally works out. Metroid Prime is the perfect example of a game that was executed well and will probably see a sequel, even though the original creator of the Metroid series is dead, AND the game has changed from a side scroller to FPS. It was executed very, very well and should be a model to other game designers and what to do RIGHT.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, they get free advertising on slashdot every time they do it.
What a great deal!
Wow, reflecting intolerance of lifestyle choices because someone is trying to take your kazaa away.
Where are your priorities?
Disclaimer: I am not a mormon, nor do I care to be one. I just hate hypocrites.
J.C. is an excellent programmer, but IMO the games they've been creating since Quake I normally are technology expositions than anything else.
... err... obtained the E3 Alpha Demo.
I really hope DooM ]I[ surprises me, but I'm going to wait to hear rave reviews from friends before I actually buy the game.
However, I normally buy one or two games based on iD's engines, so that's normally how they make money off of me.
P.S. Yes, I
Price. Here, we must consider not simply the price tag of the initial investment, which, in the case of PHP, is obviously free, but also the implementation, maintenance, and debugging costs. In the case of PHP, you may invest in the Zend optimization engine. With ASP, however, you're investing from the very beginning, and you're spending for add-on technologies--libraries for doing graphics manipulations, for instance. But, in the long term, PHP isn't going to press you to upgrade and collect more licensing fees. Everyone who has dealt with complex licensing also knows that companies spend time and money just ensuring they are compliant. Furthermore, you have a difference in response when getting bugs fixed. This, of course, translates to time, which translates to cost for overall development.
:)
Yep, anyone who's had to deal with oracle's licensing knows this one very well.
I work at a primarily Oracle/mod_perl shop, and one of the biggest hurdles we've had as a team is making sure we don't step on oracle's toes.
You should send them to v4.windowsupdate.microsoft.com :)
It had just come out, and my stepfather bought it. Eager to try it out on my computer, I installed it, and looking to maximize my HDD space, I installed DoubleSpace.
DoubleSpace was a disk compression tool, as many will remember had a lot of problems. Of course, I didn't know this at the time.
There was an option to change the compression ratio. I believe the default was 2:1. I set it to 16:1 (I was probably 13 or 14 at the time).
A couple of months of use and poof. One dead MFM controller. I'm still trying to figure out if it was EOL for the controller or if doublespace simply gave it more of a work out than it could handle.
Repeat after me:
Games based on movies SUCK. The inverse is also true.
(Repeat until you stop buying them.)
This gross generalization was brought to you by someone who thinks gameplay is more important than story. Movies have story going for them, not gameplay (for what I think are pretty obvious reasons).
Pong is highly addictive and didn't have a ton of cut and paste FMV and rendered versions of Keanu and John Rhys-Davies. Why do you need this?
Anyways,
</rant>
Hang on a sec guys, windows just blue-screened because my DX9 install went bad. Sargeant, can you hold the monitor a little higher and away from the sun?
Judging from all your posts in this article, you might want to take some of your own advice.
Yay!
:)
Someone gets it.
If you want something kept private, use encryption. If you want something kept as private as the person you're encrypting to, send it to that person. Plain and simple as that. If it can be decrypted it can be spread.
But frankly, emailing my wife saying "hey can you pick up a pizza on the way home" is not going to bother me. Even if I got a stupid ad for domino's when I sent it.
Of course, that won't happen because I don't use web mail that I don't run myself. Problem solved.
I'm one of those people.
:)
I can tell you that I had never used iTunes before, and frankly, it's a nice mp3 player and organizer, but I never use the store and I wouldn't be all that interested in using iTunes if I were to switch back.
The reason I switched? Mac OS X + hardware is just sexy. It's got a uniform UI that the linux camp can't get near and windows will never achieve.
Combine it with fink and the Cocoa EMACS port and I wiped all my linux desktop machines, put FreeBSD on them and they are now servers.
HAND.
They redirect and try to trap you from backing out. How refreshing. One of the web page practices I most despise.
:)
Nice pun.
Gutenberg.
:)
one t.
Guttenberg sounds like the name of a society for fishers or hunters.
(Your local spelling correction fairy has struck)
If you know of a reason that some other language is better, I would be interested in hearing it. Personally, I am getting really interested in PDF export, and Ming creation, which are both offered in PHP. Do other languages (such as python) support these functions?
:)
I didn't say any other language was "better", anyone who tells you that one language is better than another unilaterally is a fool and should have their keyboard ripped out of their hands.
Anyhow, I'm not a big fan of lots of bundled special-case library functions, especially the way that PHP delivers them. That's one of it's biggest drawbacks IMNSHO. Too large of a standard library that might exist or might not - very hacky and hard to predict without a lot of extra code. Other languages tend to minimize or completely eliminate this, and it's generally because of cross-platform issues.
However, you can get hte functionality that you want for PDF's at least by using texi2pdf for TeXinfo on the command line - although it depends on what you mean by "export". If you're talking about HTML you might have to use another program or library. I really don't know what you would use in that situation. As for TeXinfo, If you don't already know, TeXinfo is a powerful yet simple markup language made for making documentation - it exports to tons of formats including PDF and info files.
Ming, again, not sure what you're talking about, but I'm going to assume MNG since you probably aren't talking about mingw32, the win32 compiler. ImageMagick could probably do what you wanted it to do. Perl has PerlMagick which is fairly good and I believe Python and PHP have interfaces as well. Worst case you can always use the command line.
So, no solid answers, but a lot of places to look. Of course, I think if you were that interested in finding out what else is out there you would be looking yourself. Not a jab, just a reasonable observation.
POSTGRES
Founded on Ingres (not Ingre). Sorry, it's a pet peeve of mine... I've known people for years that call it that, and it drives me nuts.
On your other comment.... It'll hurt MySQL more to abandon the OSS community than the opposite.
Take a look at all the PHP apps that are tied to MySQL. I know there's (I think it's called) ADODB for PHP now, which for the uninformed is like perl's DBI for PHP, but it's PEAR and not everyone has it. DBI is pretty much the de-facto way to access databases in perl, and there's an easy way to write simple SQL that works for the 3 most popular UNIX databases (Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL), save sequence manipulation. OF course, when you start getting into more advanced SQL you're looking at a further abstraction. And forget stored procedures.
The reason that this could have hurt PHP is that MySQL and PHP are both fast, easy to use and have little learning curve allowing junior programmer-types to get a lot done in little time.
Someone needs to go to a harvey's or a improv. You obviously aren't getting enough humor in your life. :)
(or harder or, yes, even better! eg: Scorched Earth vs Worms)
Play GunBound. Almost any winders box can play it and it's an online derivative of these games with stats and rankings.
It's a heck of a blast. And it's free. (as in beer.)
So call your Sound Card vendor and tell them to support linux better, or buy a commercial linux distribution that can support it natively. Or return your card for one that works automagically under linux.
:)
I speak with my wallet when it comes to hardware compatibility. I have a gut feeling that you'd just rather it work and blow another $200 on winders so it works when it's not between virus scans or reboots.
I'm using SuSE 9.0 on my workstation and haven't had to configure hardware yet. Same goes for my friends using Fedora and RedHat 9.
On my FreeBSD and Debian boxes, I do configure everything manually, because they are server hardware and I like to tweak it. Thank god I can actually do that.
Nothing in this world is free, my friend. I honestly have a gut feeling that you haven't checked out Linux in at least a year.
If you want to take antoher stab, take a look at the latest SuSE, my fav, or Fedora, which is looking promising. These are both ideal systems for the desktop.
Yeah, once I left the immediate area of both my parents and my in-laws, I pretty much did the same thing.
"What's that, your mahjongg/casino/bingo game doesn't work? I'm not there, so I don't really know...."
Of course, I get these questions and have to debug a few things everytime I get close to either my parents or the in-laws, but I don't mind that much, it's few and far between and I only fix the things they ask me for any more.
it's just too frustrating of an exercise to tell them "don't use outlook", because they constantly ask "why", and I tell them why, and they still don't understand. I give them eudora to use, and they stop using it because of the advertisements. Next time I am going to give them thunderbird (which dates the last time I was up there, heh).
I no longer work in I.T., so I have totally lost the patience to work with non-technical people. It's not like I get mad, but I just find a way to get out of it now.
You've got to be joking.
I am so stunned at the idiocy in this post. *NOTHING* requires an OOP language. And plenty of (large) sites use hand-rolled development processes and work great with them. Web Services are SLOW.
Requiring a specific tool for the job should be determined after architecturing, not before.
You just opened up a can of worms. :)
Regardless, most of the *good* news connections are pay-for anyways, which leaves most of the college kiddies with virus-laden P2P tools.
We're just all using the newsgroups now.
Arg.....
This is the most disgusting thread I have ever read.
Do you realize what kind of programmer effort this requires? Do you realize what a total waste of time this is? The sad thing is, that people are doing it! It's pathetic.
If OSS has done one thing wrong, it's teaching people to expect more than talent can produce. We're wasting our time integrating apps between two different desktops when we should be working harder to integrate the two desktops themselves.
Doing the job yourself is a lot more work than having middleware that does it for you. End of story. These people should be putting the effort towards (hey freedesktop.org, listening?) a unified theme interface.
:).
Personally, just a common default theme amongst the two would be a nice thing. I could care less about the shiny widgets. SuSE does a pretty nice job of that.
GTK and GTK2 can already share themes, IIRC. Mozilla, who cares? It's just an app (one that a lot of us don't use because it's too frigging slow
Besides, as many people have pointed out, there are apps with skins and there will be more to come - both on windows and the various unix desktops.
Then buy a GameCube. The under-13s in your family will thank you.
That's a horrible assessment.
If nintendo drove the gamecube alone, then it would still be successful (and I know, they mostly do).
Reason?
Nintendo knows gameplay. Very, very well.
I could care less about FMV, how many polygons are in the model that I push around with my controller, or any of that.
Perfect example: Mario Kart: Double Dash. I bought this last night, and both myself and my wife (who doesn't play much anything but Counter-Strike and The Sims) have been playing it non-stop.
This game has great physics, a smart controller interface, and is a lot of fun. Whether or not the content is 'G-Rated' bothers me not - Grand Theft Auto was a great game for the same reasons (well, all 4 of them actually).
The new school of gamers disgusts me - Graphics, Sound, Graphics and Sound. Shitty platformers that are the same, regurgitated version of Mega Man in 3d and with puzzles that I saw when I was 6 years old on my NES. Movie Titles still haven't figured out that a good game takes longer to make than the movie you're signed for. And who the fuck buys madden every year anyways? Is there really that thing you have to have every year that's worth shelling $40-$50 for? Do you really need another First Person Shooter on your console for crying out loud? Are people still actually intrigued by the vapid, monotonous stories that are contained in them?
Favorite Game of the Year: Zelda: The WindWaker (this might have been released last year, but I just bought a cube as my second working console in the house - and this game was awesome.)
Biggest Disappointment: Final Fantasy X-2. (No, charlie's angels should NEVER cross over with the fantasy genre - unfortunately for square, I am not japanese and I do not find goofy near-hentai drama and japanese pop music entertaining)
Worst Game: Xenosaga (I want to play a game, not watch one play itself. There are these things called movies, I watch those instead.)
These are my picks.
On the topic of franchises -- if something is good, people are going to roll with it. The bonus to a video game vs. a movie is that you can always upgrade or change the story to fit the game (well, with the exception of MGS2, that was just stupid Hideo Kojima) and it normally works out. Metroid Prime is the perfect example of a game that was executed well and will probably see a sequel, even though the original creator of the Metroid series is dead, AND the game has changed from a side scroller to FPS. It was executed very, very well and should be a model to other game designers and what to do RIGHT.