And the French revolutionaries came up with a superior calendar, except that its adoption was disruptive, confusing, expensive and without any other great power willing to adopt it, it lasted barely a decade. Five thousand years of inertia backed the older Western systems of.timekeeping, and whatever advantage of the revolutionary calendars, it could not be sustained. And honestly, the leap year problem itself was never resolved by the decimal calendar, and such an issue would come back with any attempt at calendar reform.
That may be, but there are still a lot of lurking compatibility problems which means when you're collaborating with people and organizations that use MS-Office, it can quickly turn into a nightmare. Formatting gets screwed, file corruption can happen. LibreOffice is a ways away from a level of interoperability that could make it a solid choice for us. For my personal use, it does everything I need. Heck, Google Docs is close enough that I can do most of my work in that if I want. But unfortunately, when it comes to document collaboration and exchange, neither product is at a point where it can be reliably used. And it's not necessarily the alternatives' fault. Office is a moving target, and it takes a couple of years to bake in the necessary level of compatibility, by which point a new version of Office is out and the clock resets.
And VHS was inferior to betamax, and still won. Sometimes a standard, no matter how inferior, is so entrenched that no, there are no good arguments for changing it.
As to interplanetary colonization, I expect when the time comes, we'll do what we've done already; a local time and a universal time (sort of like the Star Trek star dates).
It's a standard that a large portion of the world agrees upon. It's relevance is that a lot of people use it. To change it would be monumentally expensive, disruptive, and really would replace it with something else just as arbitrary. In other words, at least until we start colonizing other worlds with other chronological cycles, it will persist.
After the French Revolution, the Paris Commune created a revolutionary calendar that was certainly more internally coherent and logical, but it did not last long. Whether or not 7 days a week is arbitrary or not, the fact is that it has very deep roots. Much of our Western timekeeping dates back at least to the Sumerians, so it's probably one of the most long-lasting conventions ever made.
What I meant was that he's likely to be sued and will likely have to pay money. But one's thing for sure, as outrageous as the accusation was, he didn't make it anonymously. So not the same thing at all.
He's a troll because he hid both his identity and the fundamental conflict of his own position. Maybe he has some decent criticism of Musk and Tesla (though from what I can tell, a big proportion was pure BS), but abusing anonymity and not disclosing his own business interests pretty much makes him a textbook troll. That, and the SEC may have some interest in his activities.
And Musk will pay for that stupid outburst. That's accountability. Hiding behind an anonymous account, not revealing the conflict that arises from your business interests when attacking another company, that is the opposite of accountability.
My understanding is that fixes will be rolled out. What Oracle is selling is the support model, so fixes getting downstream to OpenJDK won't likely be as prompt, but Oracle's new extort... er commercial license compliance rules is driving a lot of shops to OpenJDK, so I think it's future is reasonably secure.
Frameworks have their place, but some are so damned top heavy because they evolve from something relatively light like a basic MVC templating system to a nightmarish beast that's really one part framework and three parts library functions. And most of them are notorious for shit documentation.
That's pretty much my position. Slowly the language is evolving into something that isn't a rat's nest of madness. Obviously the to-do list is long, but using decent frameworks and newer libraries one can escape some of the worst aspects of the stock libraries. The language itself isn't really any worse than any of the other C-type languages, and with discipline you can write solid and maintainable code. As far as runtime performance, it that's my primary concern I'm not going to be using an interpeted language at all, and will not other move to something with a JIT or to something outright compiled
Fortunately I don't do a lot of front end work. Most of my work is in analytics and data processing these days, so I've been liberated from web development. I always hated it. This way I have a lot more freedom in the languages I use, and so long as everything is well documented, I'm enjoying my liberty!
There's no such thing as "totally secure", and imagining that My runtime environment can save you from your own poor practices is at the heart of every security breach.
Microsoft never shipped the best JVM. It shipped the most accessible one, but most of the folks I knew immediately installed Sun's JVM and configured IE to run with it because MS's JVM was not very good at all. It was a happy day for me when Redmond dropped their JVM due to legal wrangling with Sun.
You can do background processing. It just takes a bit of work. That's what cron, flags and triggers were designed for. Admittedly some tools make it more seamless, but really under the hood it's all done the same way. And there are certainly frameworks out there that give you that level of abstraction even in PHP. Mostly it's down to the framework and picking the right IDE. These problems have been solved.
That is true, but it's also true that some languages and some core libraries better facilitate good coding. Those languages also tend to have a higher learning curve, simply because they impose at least some degree of discipline. That's why languages like VisualBasic and PHP have always been so popular, because they have a much lower barrier to entry. Languages like C++, Java and C# really are harder for beginners to just open a text editor or basic IDE and have a running application in an hour or two.
You know, the one thing I've ever been able to do is tolerate a framework building SQL queries for me. I get that it makes sense if you're using a number of databases, like nosql and the like, so a level of abstraction allows higher code portability, but in general I simply do not trust any framework's ability to generate a SQL query as optimized as the one I can build by hand. Of course this makes for less portable code, but honestly, I'd rather just do whatever variant of #IFDEF any language has and rewrite the query for whatever database the application is hooking in to (yes, I know, lots of reinventing of the wheel) than to trust nameless and faceless framework developers. I know at that point that the SQL is secure, rather than having faith that someone out there knows what they're doing. Besides, I do kind of think in SQL, due to 20+ years of writing SQL code, and it actually helps me at the prototyping stage to get a sense of data flow. I usually work from the database up, because that's just how my brain seems to work.
I once got hired to fix a PHP-based website that had been done by a couple of fly by nighters. It was a fucking nightmare. Because they were lazy and/or stupid, they had enabled every bad directive from the bad old days. They didn't even use functions, it looked more like BASIC spaghetti code. In the end I refused to do any more work until the contract was rewritten so that I was billing out time. At the end of the day I essentially threw out what these idiots had written and rewrote the whole thing from the ground up. But I vowed after that that I would never take on a job where I had to fix someone else's spaghetti code. Hire me to rewrite, that's fine, but not to repair.
What PHP needs more than anything is a major library overall. I find the inconsistencies in library function calls and naming conventions drive me nuts. I get that there's an argument for backwards compatibility, but it's the standard library that irritates me so much. The language itself isn't really any worse than any other.
That's the core of PHP's problems. Backwards compatibility is the overarching theme of its developers, and it's not even a philosophy they ardently stick to, which sadly makes it even worse.
It's the reason I liked the later seasons of DS9, when Sisko had to wrestle with weighing is high Federation ideals against the reality of fighting an enemy that really had no moral or ethical considerations whatsoever. And you know what, he did what leaders of principle have done in existential wars have always done. The principles had to be dumped to save the principles. It was that simple. The Federation and its allies were fighting a war that, if lost, meant those civilizations' ways of life would be over, where they would be tributary states. Obviously there was heavy allegory there, the Kardassians were basically the Poles, who had little problem when Nazi Germany was dismembering Czechoslovakia of taking their bite out of the pie, but then found themselves invaded and subjugated in their turn.
The first three ST series; TOS, TNG and DS9, really did very well at balancing the moral ambiguity that comes along with being a military superpower that advertises itself as a peaceful and economically successful state. TOS laid the groundwork by introducing the essential principles, TNG fleshed that out, and probably is the purest adaptation of Roddenberry's view of the future, and then DS9 took the whole thing and baked it on to the crucible of a total war. The episode where Sisko helps Garak basically engineer fake evidence of an imminent attack on the Romulans, and Garak takes it to its natural conclusion by actually blowing up the Romulan Ambassador, is probably one of the finest in the whole canon. Those scenes where Sisko debates with himself, and then admits that he'd do it again, that's what made him my favorite ST captain, because it felt real in a way that Kirk (the principled swashbuckler) and Picard (the renaissance man) never did.
Is it any different than every other TNG-era episode invoking "phase converters" and "tachyon beams"? Or really, the whole "send a star ship into high warp around the sun to go back in time" introduced in TOS and invoked a number of times, including one of the movies. Yes, it was a bit jarring, but I think they dealt with it by the end of the season a lot better than Star Wars did with midichlorians in its prequels.
All in all I enjoyed it. I thought the overall pacing and storylines were rather good, and once I got used to the updated Klingons, I was able to get comfortable with it. The lead characters had a good chemistry, which is critical, and is largely why Voyager failed so badly. There are so many ways Discovery could have gone bad, like Enterprise did, but all in all it really isn't that bad.
Slashdot Mirror
And the French revolutionaries came up with a superior calendar, except that its adoption was disruptive, confusing, expensive and without any other great power willing to adopt it, it lasted barely a decade. Five thousand years of inertia backed the older Western systems of.timekeeping, and whatever advantage of the revolutionary calendars, it could not be sustained. And honestly, the leap year problem itself was never resolved by the decimal calendar, and such an issue would come back with any attempt at calendar reform.
That may be, but there are still a lot of lurking compatibility problems which means when you're collaborating with people and organizations that use MS-Office, it can quickly turn into a nightmare. Formatting gets screwed, file corruption can happen. LibreOffice is a ways away from a level of interoperability that could make it a solid choice for us. For my personal use, it does everything I need. Heck, Google Docs is close enough that I can do most of my work in that if I want. But unfortunately, when it comes to document collaboration and exchange, neither product is at a point where it can be reliably used. And it's not necessarily the alternatives' fault. Office is a moving target, and it takes a couple of years to bake in the necessary level of compatibility, by which point a new version of Office is out and the clock resets.
And VHS was inferior to betamax, and still won. Sometimes a standard, no matter how inferior, is so entrenched that no, there are no good arguments for changing it.
As to interplanetary colonization, I expect when the time comes, we'll do what we've done already; a local time and a universal time (sort of like the Star Trek star dates).
It's a standard that a large portion of the world agrees upon. It's relevance is that a lot of people use it. To change it would be monumentally expensive, disruptive, and really would replace it with something else just as arbitrary. In other words, at least until we start colonizing other worlds with other chronological cycles, it will persist.
After the French Revolution, the Paris Commune created a revolutionary calendar that was certainly more internally coherent and logical, but it did not last long. Whether or not 7 days a week is arbitrary or not, the fact is that it has very deep roots. Much of our Western timekeeping dates back at least to the Sumerians, so it's probably one of the most long-lasting conventions ever made.
What I meant was that he's likely to be sued and will likely have to pay money. But one's thing for sure, as outrageous as the accusation was, he didn't make it anonymously. So not the same thing at all.
He's a troll because he hid both his identity and the fundamental conflict of his own position. Maybe he has some decent criticism of Musk and Tesla (though from what I can tell, a big proportion was pure BS), but abusing anonymity and not disclosing his own business interests pretty much makes him a textbook troll. That, and the SEC may have some interest in his activities.
And Musk will pay for that stupid outburst. That's accountability. Hiding behind an anonymous account, not revealing the conflict that arises from your business interests when attacking another company, that is the opposite of accountability.
My understanding is that fixes will be rolled out. What Oracle is selling is the support model, so fixes getting downstream to OpenJDK won't likely be as prompt, but Oracle's new extort... er commercial license compliance rules is driving a lot of shops to OpenJDK, so I think it's future is reasonably secure.
Frameworks have their place, but some are so damned top heavy because they evolve from something relatively light like a basic MVC templating system to a nightmarish beast that's really one part framework and three parts library functions. And most of them are notorious for shit documentation.
That's pretty much my position. Slowly the language is evolving into something that isn't a rat's nest of madness. Obviously the to-do list is long, but using decent frameworks and newer libraries one can escape some of the worst aspects of the stock libraries. The language itself isn't really any worse than any of the other C-type languages, and with discipline you can write solid and maintainable code. As far as runtime performance, it that's my primary concern I'm not going to be using an interpeted language at all, and will not other move to something with a JIT or to something outright compiled
Fortunately I don't do a lot of front end work. Most of my work is in analytics and data processing these days, so I've been liberated from web development. I always hated it. This way I have a lot more freedom in the languages I use, and so long as everything is well documented, I'm enjoying my liberty!
Where did I say I didn't use parameters?
There's no such thing as "totally secure", and imagining that My runtime environment can save you from your own poor practices is at the heart of every security breach.
Microsoft never shipped the best JVM. It shipped the most accessible one, but most of the folks I knew immediately installed Sun's JVM and configured IE to run with it because MS's JVM was not very good at all. It was a happy day for me when Redmond dropped their JVM due to legal wrangling with Sun.
You can do background processing. It just takes a bit of work. That's what cron, flags and triggers were designed for. Admittedly some tools make it more seamless, but really under the hood it's all done the same way. And there are certainly frameworks out there that give you that level of abstraction even in PHP. Mostly it's down to the framework and picking the right IDE. These problems have been solved.
That is true, but it's also true that some languages and some core libraries better facilitate good coding. Those languages also tend to have a higher learning curve, simply because they impose at least some degree of discipline. That's why languages like VisualBasic and PHP have always been so popular, because they have a much lower barrier to entry. Languages like C++, Java and C# really are harder for beginners to just open a text editor or basic IDE and have a running application in an hour or two.
You know, the one thing I've ever been able to do is tolerate a framework building SQL queries for me. I get that it makes sense if you're using a number of databases, like nosql and the like, so a level of abstraction allows higher code portability, but in general I simply do not trust any framework's ability to generate a SQL query as optimized as the one I can build by hand. Of course this makes for less portable code, but honestly, I'd rather just do whatever variant of #IFDEF any language has and rewrite the query for whatever database the application is hooking in to (yes, I know, lots of reinventing of the wheel) than to trust nameless and faceless framework developers. I know at that point that the SQL is secure, rather than having faith that someone out there knows what they're doing. Besides, I do kind of think in SQL, due to 20+ years of writing SQL code, and it actually helps me at the prototyping stage to get a sense of data flow. I usually work from the database up, because that's just how my brain seems to work.
We already have. Oracle can go fuck themselves.
I once got hired to fix a PHP-based website that had been done by a couple of fly by nighters. It was a fucking nightmare. Because they were lazy and/or stupid, they had enabled every bad directive from the bad old days. They didn't even use functions, it looked more like BASIC spaghetti code. In the end I refused to do any more work until the contract was rewritten so that I was billing out time. At the end of the day I essentially threw out what these idiots had written and rewrote the whole thing from the ground up. But I vowed after that that I would never take on a job where I had to fix someone else's spaghetti code. Hire me to rewrite, that's fine, but not to repair.
What PHP needs more than anything is a major library overall. I find the inconsistencies in library function calls and naming conventions drive me nuts. I get that there's an argument for backwards compatibility, but it's the standard library that irritates me so much. The language itself isn't really any worse than any other.
That's the core of PHP's problems. Backwards compatibility is the overarching theme of its developers, and it's not even a philosophy they ardently stick to, which sadly makes it even worse.
What do objects have to do with automation?
Mind you, you can do anything in Brainfuck too.
It's the reason I liked the later seasons of DS9, when Sisko had to wrestle with weighing is high Federation ideals against the reality of fighting an enemy that really had no moral or ethical considerations whatsoever. And you know what, he did what leaders of principle have done in existential wars have always done. The principles had to be dumped to save the principles. It was that simple. The Federation and its allies were fighting a war that, if lost, meant those civilizations' ways of life would be over, where they would be tributary states. Obviously there was heavy allegory there, the Kardassians were basically the Poles, who had little problem when Nazi Germany was dismembering Czechoslovakia of taking their bite out of the pie, but then found themselves invaded and subjugated in their turn.
The first three ST series; TOS, TNG and DS9, really did very well at balancing the moral ambiguity that comes along with being a military superpower that advertises itself as a peaceful and economically successful state. TOS laid the groundwork by introducing the essential principles, TNG fleshed that out, and probably is the purest adaptation of Roddenberry's view of the future, and then DS9 took the whole thing and baked it on to the crucible of a total war. The episode where Sisko helps Garak basically engineer fake evidence of an imminent attack on the Romulans, and Garak takes it to its natural conclusion by actually blowing up the Romulan Ambassador, is probably one of the finest in the whole canon. Those scenes where Sisko debates with himself, and then admits that he'd do it again, that's what made him my favorite ST captain, because it felt real in a way that Kirk (the principled swashbuckler) and Picard (the renaissance man) never did.
Is it any different than every other TNG-era episode invoking "phase converters" and "tachyon beams"? Or really, the whole "send a star ship into high warp around the sun to go back in time" introduced in TOS and invoked a number of times, including one of the movies. Yes, it was a bit jarring, but I think they dealt with it by the end of the season a lot better than Star Wars did with midichlorians in its prequels.
All in all I enjoyed it. I thought the overall pacing and storylines were rather good, and once I got used to the updated Klingons, I was able to get comfortable with it. The lead characters had a good chemistry, which is critical, and is largely why Voyager failed so badly. There are so many ways Discovery could have gone bad, like Enterprise did, but all in all it really isn't that bad.