Well, then probably they're going to follow in Lucas's footsteps by waiting several years and releasing a new edition with the untouched and retouched versions side by side. Suckers.
Yeah, having been in this same situation this sounds about right. I wouldn't say they were "too scared" though. It sounds like they knew that were getting paid regardless of the outcome of the project, and it was a lot less work to simply cash in while they gave the agency enough rope to hang themselves. What reason did they have for doing the real work of execution when they could simply milk the cow?
I think this will be better for Trillian, GAIM, Adium and the like. Right now, MSN periodically changes their protocol... just to be contrary or for whatever reason.
Trillian is up to patch "g" or something, mostly because of MSN messenger or Y! compatibility changes. Now, since they have to share a protocol, I'm willing to bet they'll be more stable.
Someone said it DID work with PHP4, but the FAQ says differently:
What version of PHP is required to run the Zend Framework?
The Zend Framework is compatible with PHP 5.0.4 and above. PHP 5.1 can be used but is not a requirement. Zend Framework is also tested against the current version of Zend Core. Sorry, PHP 4 will not be supported.
It's too bad. I wish there were a killer MVC framework for PHP4 with it's massive install base.
Pretty impressive that you actually spent those few months constantly stabilizing and improving the program instead of surfing porn on the internet and saying you were doing same.
Drupal is a lot of things, but it isn't exactly a web framework. It does a great job of supplying a basic toolset for building a certain kind of web applications, but it doesn't make it ANY easier for you to do things that are outside its scope. Great for a blog, pretty good for a BBS, not so good for any kind of sophisticated reporting.
More generic frameworks, however, just let you take a dataset and turn it to a table, or quickly bind a database row to an object and a submit form for that object. Etc.
Web Application Structure for PHP - A powerful multi-tier MVC web application framework built on Object Oriented PHP5. Uses PEAR DB_DataObjects and Html_Template_Flexy.
I teach a basic web development class, and my students often have a spotty understanding of computers in general.
The one foundational skill that I think cripples computers users, is the understanding of the filesystem. I think the most common source of confusion with computers is "where did it go? it was just here!".
People download and save files to the default location, and then hope it's in "My Documents" somewhere. But they don't know how to navigate to "My Documents" (C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents). When people understand it's a tree and how to find it's trunk, their eyes light up with sheer user power.
Seems like a pretty good strategy for dealing with an idealistic developer who is letting his idealism get in the way of making kabillions of dollars.
"Well, you don't have to be involved, but left to our own devices it will happen at DisneyLand and play the It's a Small World After All theme constantly. Of course...if you DID decide you wanted to come on board and inject your special brand of creativity into the project...it might go better."
I'm no gambler myself, but I do understand that part of what actually makes gambling "fun" for people is the risk and potential reward. For many people it is a mixed professional and entertainment pursuit.
Granted, I'm not very good, and so I just have NEVER found enjoyment from pitting my wits against people in this way. It always just seems like luck whether I get a good hand or not. But for people WITH this skill, it's very enjoyable and exciting. As I understand it, the strategy of some poker variants like T#xas H#ld Em is pretty deep.
But as models of real money get pushed to the online universe (MMORPG's, pagerank, etc.) people are going to try and use them as automated moneymaking avenues. It just goes hand in hand with putting ANY kind of real value online. If people can find an algorythm to exploit the particular system, then they're going to.
REALLY good humans have advantages over bots in poker (and perhaps still in chess as well), but it's the above average casual players who are going to get raked.
So it's just time for the online gambling industry to mature a little, just like the MMORPG market, blogging, or any online universe that's had to combat bots and keep them from raping all the possible value from those systems.
Either they can find viable ways to combat bots and make play work for human players, or they will not be able to remain competitive.
You know, the problem is that ratings like AO and M just aren't strong enough. Parents see it and it just doesn't look that threatening.
They need to have large icons that show the detrimental effect that the game is likely to have on children.
Like:
TRENCH! (displays picture of a kid in a black trenchcoat with a shotgun in each hand)
This game will cause your child to blow holes you could drive a truck through in their classmates!
ANAL! (displays picture of child dragging another child by cute pigtails)
This game will cause your child to anally rape their younger sister on a daily basis!
SENATOR! (displays picture of legislation)
This game will cause your child to run for office in the legislative branch!
See, warnings like that will really speak to the actual fears parents have about video games, and then they'll pay more attention.
When I learned programming, it was painful to get past the strange things I didn't understand in C, C++ and Java's "Hello World" program.
Header files, main(), etc. It was intimidating to me, and I am far from the most intimidated by new concepts person I can imaging.
The reason I like PHP for a programming teaching language:
It uses basically the syntax that is common to C, C++, Java and Javascript. It's an introduction to curly braced code blocks, parentheses as a grouper for boolean evaluation, etc.
Feedback is instant. You make a change, you refresh the page.
It operates in a web paradigm, so it looks useful to people. I took 2 semesters of C++, and could write a shell application, but knew how far I was from being able to write a real application that would be useful to me. Being able to get a form variable in a web page and write it to a text file already feels pretty damn useful.
You can teach the basics of procedural programming before you start to gently introduce objects.
Array handling is friendly and non-threatening...you can populate and output arrays, hashes, etc very easily without worrying about too many implementation details to start with.
You can teach the very idea of objects in a simplified way. Instantiating them, writing a constructor, restricting access (in PHP5), simple inheritance, polymorphism...
Lots of people are saying, TEACH THEM C! IT'S GOOD FOR THE LITTLE BLIGHTERS!
But really, as someone who has taught a lot of programming informally, the biggest obstacle is people: a) seeing that programming is useful and b) seeing that programming is something THEY could actually DO.
At the beginning it's SO easy to feel like it's just a whirlwind of details you'll never be able to keep straight. If you can just teach selection (if...else) and iteration (foreach) and get it to stick that problems can be solved this way, yes, even by ordinary humans, then it's really not that hard to graduate people to Java or some such.
At that point you're just adding the concepts of namespaces, data typing, OO as a deeper part of the language....and the syntax and basic concepts are already there and familiar.
I hear people worried about generating bad habits, but I just don't think this is the primary concern when FIRST introducing people to programming.
Weird, I submitted this story to Slashdot a week ago when Simon first posted. I'm new to Slashdot and still not quite understanding the mysteries of the editors.
But hell, I really wanted to see what Slashdotters had to say about Django and glad to see the thread started.
I'm a web developer and Django looked pretty slick to me for building quick, cheap CLED (create, list, edit, delete) applications to edit simple datasets. We build a lot of these and I'd love to see a tool that allowed us to build them for clients for less than a grand.
We tried installing Django on our dev. FreeBSD box. It installed okay, once it was installed, the paths in the demo apps were not mapped correctly, and the styles were not in a place that apache and mod_python could find it. I'm sure with a few more hours we could have smacked it up, but for a rapid development platform, we just couldn't afford the non-bill hours to spend on it this early in the game.
I wanted to be an early adopter because it looked so cool, but I guess I'll have to wait until it's a little more mature. Plus, to my knowledge, it doesn't have an AJAX library like Ruby.
Perhaps we'll try Ruby on Rails after all. I know how to code in Python, but Ruby seems to be cake.
I've been reading Simon Willison's weblog for awhile, and he's a smart guy. I bet he'll help whip this thing into shape and Django will turn out to be something pretty damn cool.
I think Commander Keen deserves an honorable mention, but for my money, Super Mario World for the SNES is the defining platformer. Every single level introduced some new idea or challenge.
Although, something has to be said about my new favorite platformer of all time, Doukutsu Monogatari (Cave Story), a freeware Japanese game that fans liked enough to make an English Language translation patch for it. Like Zelda crossed with Megaman or something.
I write PHP for a living, and started out as a basically 100% incompetent scripter who just knew HTML. I took a couple of programming classes at a community college (including a Java class) and then leveraged my minimal programming training to use PHP to do useful things with my weblog.
I went from being able to hardly even be able to put together a minimal Java program, to being able to do a huge amount in PHP. It was great, I got to write little referrer aggregators and blog quizzes, I even used register_globals! Ahhhh, those were the days.
Now I write some fairly robust applications in PHP, and sometimes it's useful for me to take a portion of the most complex business logic and have a more feature-rich object model to create it in. No options have been taken away from me, however, and there's not a single thing I can't do in PHP5 that I used to be able to do in PHP4.
Only now I have some things I always wanted: a better XML handling library, file and directory iterators, try/catch if I want it...
In a way, PHP was ALWAYS modeled after a C/Java-like syntax, and for me it felt very natural for it to move a little more in this direction. I can't understand what direction people would be hoping it went in? Perl?
Didn't slashdot ask a bunch of questions of Shuttleworth a good long while back? Did that interview get posted and I just missed it? They were good questions. I like Ubuntu and really wanted to see the answers.
Also, I requested they ship me a bunch of CD's (for free) and just got 10 copies in a neat little sleeve with the liveCD in one folder and the installation CD in another folder. Popped in the live CD...looks very nice. No cleavage on the desktop though.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then probably they're going to follow in Lucas's footsteps by waiting several years and releasing a new edition with the untouched and retouched versions side by side. Suckers.
Yeah, having been in this same situation this sounds about right. I wouldn't say they were "too scared" though. It sounds like they knew that were getting paid regardless of the outcome of the project, and it was a lot less work to simply cash in while they gave the agency enough rope to hang themselves. What reason did they have for doing the real work of execution when they could simply milk the cow?
I think this will be better for Trillian, GAIM, Adium and the like. Right now, MSN periodically changes their protocol... just to be contrary or for whatever reason.
Trillian is up to patch "g" or something, mostly because of MSN messenger or Y! compatibility changes. Now, since they have to share a protocol, I'm willing to bet they'll be more stable.
Someone said it DID work with PHP4, but the FAQ says differently:
It's too bad. I wish there were a killer MVC framework for PHP4 with it's massive install base.
Actually I think we could make it work with the inclusion of some ugly pants!
...will turn your computer into a zombie mail relay, but also use keyloggers to steal your credit card number to automatically pay AOL the spam fee.
Pretty impressive that you actually spent those few months constantly stabilizing and improving the program instead of surfing porn on the internet and saying you were doing same.
Drupal is a lot of things, but it isn't exactly a web framework. It does a great job of supplying a basic toolset for building a certain kind of web applications, but it doesn't make it ANY easier for you to do things that are outside its scope. Great for a blog, pretty good for a BBS, not so good for any kind of sophisticated reporting.
More generic frameworks, however, just let you take a dataset and turn it to a table, or quickly bind a database row to an object and a submit form for that object. Etc.
And I don't see the magic numbers for Cake or Sympfony...which is 1.0, at least.
Besides, from the front page of the WASP sourceforge site:
I teach a basic web development class, and my students often have a spotty understanding of computers in general.
The one foundational skill that I think cripples computers users, is the understanding of the filesystem. I think the most common source of confusion with computers is "where did it go? it was just here!".
People download and save files to the default location, and then hope it's in "My Documents" somewhere. But they don't know how to navigate to "My Documents" (C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Documents). When people understand it's a tree and how to find it's trunk, their eyes light up with sheer user power.
Seems like a pretty good strategy for dealing with an idealistic developer who is letting his idealism get in the way of making kabillions of dollars.
"Well, you don't have to be involved, but left to our own devices it will happen at DisneyLand and play the It's a Small World After All theme constantly. Of course...if you DID decide you wanted to come on board and inject your special brand of creativity into the project...it might go better."
I'm no gambler myself, but I do understand that part of what actually makes gambling "fun" for people is the risk and potential reward. For many people it is a mixed professional and entertainment pursuit.
Granted, I'm not very good, and so I just have NEVER found enjoyment from pitting my wits against people in this way. It always just seems like luck whether I get a good hand or not. But for people WITH this skill, it's very enjoyable and exciting. As I understand it, the strategy of some poker variants like T#xas H#ld Em is pretty deep.
But as models of real money get pushed to the online universe (MMORPG's, pagerank, etc.) people are going to try and use them as automated moneymaking avenues. It just goes hand in hand with putting ANY kind of real value online. If people can find an algorythm to exploit the particular system, then they're going to.
REALLY good humans have advantages over bots in poker (and perhaps still in chess as well), but it's the above average casual players who are going to get raked.
So it's just time for the online gambling industry to mature a little, just like the MMORPG market, blogging, or any online universe that's had to combat bots and keep them from raping all the possible value from those systems.
Either they can find viable ways to combat bots and make play work for human players, or they will not be able to remain competitive.
Which sounds a little painful to my ears. For instance, to use it in a sentence: "Can we re-viiv our ailing business model?"
You know, the problem is that ratings like AO and M just aren't strong enough. Parents see it and it just doesn't look that threatening. They need to have large icons that show the detrimental effect that the game is likely to have on children. Like: TRENCH! (displays picture of a kid in a black trenchcoat with a shotgun in each hand) This game will cause your child to blow holes you could drive a truck through in their classmates! ANAL! (displays picture of child dragging another child by cute pigtails) This game will cause your child to anally rape their younger sister on a daily basis! SENATOR! (displays picture of legislation) This game will cause your child to run for office in the legislative branch! See, warnings like that will really speak to the actual fears parents have about video games, and then they'll pay more attention.
You remember back in the day when processors had only one core?
When I learned programming, it was painful to get past the strange things I didn't understand in C, C++ and Java's "Hello World" program.
Header files, main(), etc. It was intimidating to me, and I am far from the most intimidated by new concepts person I can imaging.
The reason I like PHP for a programming teaching language:
Lots of people are saying, TEACH THEM C! IT'S GOOD FOR THE LITTLE BLIGHTERS!
But really, as someone who has taught a lot of programming informally, the biggest obstacle is people: a) seeing that programming is useful and b) seeing that programming is something THEY could actually DO.
At the beginning it's SO easy to feel like it's just a whirlwind of details you'll never be able to keep straight. If you can just teach selection (if...else) and iteration (foreach) and get it to stick that problems can be solved this way, yes, even by ordinary humans, then it's really not that hard to graduate people to Java or some such.
At that point you're just adding the concepts of namespaces, data typing, OO as a deeper part of the language....and the syntax and basic concepts are already there and familiar.
I hear people worried about generating bad habits, but I just don't think this is the primary concern when FIRST introducing people to programming.
Weird, I submitted this story to Slashdot a week ago when Simon first posted. I'm new to Slashdot and still not quite understanding the mysteries of the editors.
But hell, I really wanted to see what Slashdotters had to say about Django and glad to see the thread started.
I'm a web developer and Django looked pretty slick to me for building quick, cheap CLED (create, list, edit, delete) applications to edit simple datasets. We build a lot of these and I'd love to see a tool that allowed us to build them for clients for less than a grand.
We tried installing Django on our dev. FreeBSD box. It installed okay, once it was installed, the paths in the demo apps were not mapped correctly, and the styles were not in a place that apache and mod_python could find it. I'm sure with a few more hours we could have smacked it up, but for a rapid development platform, we just couldn't afford the non-bill hours to spend on it this early in the game.
I wanted to be an early adopter because it looked so cool, but I guess I'll have to wait until it's a little more mature. Plus, to my knowledge, it doesn't have an AJAX library like Ruby.
Perhaps we'll try Ruby on Rails after all. I know how to code in Python, but Ruby seems to be cake.
I've been reading Simon Willison's weblog for awhile, and he's a smart guy. I bet he'll help whip this thing into shape and Django will turn out to be something pretty damn cool.
Am I chat or not?
I'm trademarking the word "Word", too.
Oh wait, it's been done. I guess all that's left is to trademark the words "Letter", "Character", "Input", and "Trademarked".
I think Commander Keen deserves an honorable mention, but for my money, Super Mario World for the SNES is the defining platformer. Every single level introduced some new idea or challenge. Although, something has to be said about my new favorite platformer of all time, Doukutsu Monogatari (Cave Story), a freeware Japanese game that fans liked enough to make an English Language translation patch for it. Like Zelda crossed with Megaman or something.
I hear Link starts out as a one-celled organism, and gradually moves on to designing cryptic old men who dispense badly translated advice.
Eventually Link is ruler of the universe on a quest to save the GameCube from becoming completely irrelevant.
Oh yeah, and he can totally turn into a wolf, but the wolf has a really funny hat which is actually a petrie dish.
fuggit! I'm holding out for smell-o-vision!
I write PHP for a living, and started out as a basically 100% incompetent scripter who just knew HTML. I took a couple of programming classes at a community college (including a Java class) and then leveraged my minimal programming training to use PHP to do useful things with my weblog.
I went from being able to hardly even be able to put together a minimal Java program, to being able to do a huge amount in PHP. It was great, I got to write little referrer aggregators and blog quizzes, I even used register_globals! Ahhhh, those were the days.
Now I write some fairly robust applications in PHP, and sometimes it's useful for me to take a portion of the most complex business logic and have a more feature-rich object model to create it in. No options have been taken away from me, however, and there's not a single thing I can't do in PHP5 that I used to be able to do in PHP4.
Only now I have some things I always wanted: a better XML handling library, file and directory iterators, try/catch if I want it...
In a way, PHP was ALWAYS modeled after a C/Java-like syntax, and for me it felt very natural for it to move a little more in this direction. I can't understand what direction people would be hoping it went in? Perl?
Didn't slashdot ask a bunch of questions of Shuttleworth a good long while back? Did that interview get posted and I just missed it? They were good questions. I like Ubuntu and really wanted to see the answers. Also, I requested they ship me a bunch of CD's (for free) and just got 10 copies in a neat little sleeve with the liveCD in one folder and the installation CD in another folder. Popped in the live CD...looks very nice. No cleavage on the desktop though.