Well.... you work with the situation you get. In the corporate environment, you have the whole server, and the sysadmin, and maybe a programmer who is someone is isn't also that sysadmin. In that situation, Java is viable.
On the web, you've got someone who wants to run a site on a share web host. The sysadmin for the web host wants to be hassled as little as possible by people deploying applications... therefore, PHP is better because it doesn't have any "software deployment" concept aside from "upload the file to the server." You have a programmer, who probably wants a few dozen people running his whizzy app. If the webmaster is the programmer, s/he may still want others to run the software. PHP apps are easy to deploy.
If you're talking strictly about developing rich applications, particularly large ones for a specific purpose that have a web face, Java is a better language, and a better environment. If you want to distribute small web applications that work for web sites to do "web site" things, though, PHP wins.
The competition, however, is still a false one. On the one hand, you have PHP for "short" projects of, say, 50,000 lines or so. You have Java for large projects. These aren't in competition with each other. The competion won't be really obvious until a proprietary PHP apps grows and needs to integrate with the Java codebase via a PHP/Java interface. Then, people will be choosing, within a project, between the PHP/C implementation of a feature, and the Java implementation of the feature. ( And, as in all competitive situation, the customer wins:-) )
Agreed. On a current project, we created a "template language" by restricting our use of PHP constructs. You have while loops, variable and object references, and the ? : (ternary) operator. We had to add htmlentities() to filter output (another post pointed this issue out too). All objects to be rendered to the page are either global values or objects that are like iterators; and these iterators may contain references to iterators, allowing for nested hierarchies of data. These templates are rendered by setting up the objects as globals, and then "including" the template.
With some discipline, you can have a somewhat readable separation of code from logic. The "templating language" consists of two powerful constructs with a somewhat steep learning curve (especially ? : ) but once learned, it covers 99% of your needs.
The code that does the heavy lifting is in classes. A normal looking PHP file includes these classes and instantiates objects, and passes user data into the classes. Then, the templates are loaded up and rendered. Most pages don't require much PHP-scripting logic, because you keep trying to push the logic into the classes (many of which implement the controller pattern) and push that logic further back into SQL statements.
Once you get into the corporate environment, the largest expenses is labor.
Even in this, FOSS is a winner. It's a self-educating culture, turning people into computer programmers... and often more FOSS programmers. This is good for people, because it raises their skill level.
Proprietary, low-knowledge, low-barrier computing isn't so good at producing programmers, because the development tools cost a lot. I don't know what the MS developer "tax" is these days, but when I was doing it, it cost around $2,000 a year to develop on MS.
In comparison, FOSS is nearly free. I spend around $100 to $200 a year on it. While the knowledge barrier is high, the cost barrier is very low. This does make a difference if you don't have $2,000 to spend, nor the opportunity to move somewhere to earn that money.
Thus, with FOSS, you can create an IT labor force for less cost, and save money on IT in the long run.
I apologize for missing the apostrophe-s on the final "Africa." I'm quite aware that Africa is not a country. In the second paragraph, I wrote "nations of Africa" indicating this.
The closer you are to the core, the more money you have and need, because you're more integrated into the economy. The more distant you are (spatially or politically) the more likely you are to face the old "beads for Manhattan" trade. Or more contemporarily, the more likely you are to be paid in chickens.
Before America bombed Afghanistan, the per capita income there was $800. That didn't mean everyone was starving for lack of cash to buy food. It meant that a lot of the economy wasn't integrated into the global economy. They had few goods or services to sell to the West, and therefore, had few dollars; the economy was bound to stay local.
When you measure wealth in dollars (or any convertible currency) you're able to count the dollars, but miss the wealth.
Free Software isn't a "free handout." It's software that allows all people to have access to tools and information to develop more software.
This is extremely relevant in the global South, because most software is developed for the North. A lot of that is relevant in the South, to be certain, but the South has specific needs related to things like agriculture, language retention, education, literacy, and so forth. At some point, African people will have to decide if the products from the North suit their needs, of if they want to develop their own. Then, if they decide the latter, they will make a cost/benefit analysis about developing their own software. Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world have faced this issue, and many have chosen to develop with Free Software.
Free Software encourages self-sufficiency.
Software, like drugs, are intellectual property, and the growing trend is to pressure companies with intellectual propert assets in the global North to give the IP to the global South for free, or at low prices. I believe the price of Windows in Africa will be dropped to reasonable local levels, and that is how they will compete with Free Software.
The challenge for Free Software is to help the people of Africa break out of the dependency relationship inherent in using closed, proprietary software.
I think one potential avenue is to help Africans get IT jobs in the West, on work visas, and let them return to Africa with skills and capital.
Wasn't Gnome started when he was in Mexico?
It's a global project. So, it's partly Mexican. Partly a bunch of other countries. What's special about that is that not many global software projects start in Mexico. They generally start in the USA or Western Europe, aka the capitalist core.
And this is training to push buttons in dialog boxes, I bet.
That is important, and will help, however, Free Software will make the impact there that it is making in Mexico, India, and other countries. Training only goes so far. At some point, when one is self sufficient, the best thing to do is abandon the school and seek knowledge among peers.
So true. You must start somewhere, and where better than a system that not only includes sufficient documentation to self-educate about the system, but also includes every tool necessary to produce the system.
Moreover, why shouldn't the nations of Africa tap into the human resources of Free Software, who, in all likelihood, are more interested in Africa's well being than your average software industry company? They may even have some awareness between the conflicts between, say, tribal right to information, and propertization of information, and be able to join the efforts to fight off the WIPO, WTO and IMF.
Around the world, nations that aren't the USA have started to adopt Free Software as a viable alternative to Microsoft and other expensive software. Why not Africa?
You're ignoring a couple centuries of imperialism, when Europe colonized Africa and stripped it of minerals and resources, as well as of self-governance. The mess in Africa today is just a continent on the post-imperialist rebound.
You can already voluntarily decouple your health insurance from your work. You can *always* buy your own insurance, and some people do it. You'll never get insurance at the price that a large company can, though.
The fact is, people will always need to aggregate their demand to get a better deal. Atomized consumers have little to no leverage -- trust me on this one, because I know from experience. The avenues to aggregating demands are simple: unions, cooperatives, and government intervention on behalf of people.
Look at who's making Sylvania and RCA products. I don't know, but it's some company that's using the brand. Who makes the computers for IBM, Dell, etc.? ASUS, Biostar, MSI, and other mobo companies. A lot of little yellow people are toiling, so the fat white people can talk it up like they actually did the work.
That's the new business model -- milk the past reputation for a decade, while you drive the entire company into the crapper. Keep lying to the consumers with the money, because, they are your meal ticket.
It's the US model for companies to offer health insurance as part of the compensation package. They're partly in competition with unions, who also offer healh insurance packages.
If you look at it as a class conflict, the battle is between the workers and the owners, with regard to who will have the power to control who coordinates health insurance. In the US, the owners are winning, and that's why companies offer health insurance: it's cheaper, overall, than having a single payer system that would insure not only the better paid workers, but the poorly paid ones who have no insurance at all.
You make a good point about externalizing R&D costs. I think they should simply be passed on to universities and research organizations, and funded the normal way -- competing for taxes and foundation money. Simple, and clean, because the ownership of innovation is dispersed more widely, so more companies starting up can get at them.
A couple years back, a ranting "capitalist" from the UK got into a small flamewar about health care. She insisted that socialist medicine was more capitalistic than private health insurance we have in the USA. She was off her rocker -- private insurance is capitalism's answer to public services -- but, as a small business owner, she understood that it was far more efficient to leave health insurance to the state, so she didn't have to go through the hassle of offering it as a business.
She'd probably change her tune if she was a large business, of course.
Oh bullshit. Someone working in a factory isn't making very much money per unit, and generally speaking, if they don't get legal rights, they're going to get screwed. They can't really waste time, because they're on the line, and they have to put up with crap like asking permission to take a piss.
People higher up on the food chain have jobs that are a little harder to quantify (hence, there's always a managerial effort to quantify their work). They waste time because they can, or because there's no pressure to work.
If you really do an accounting of it, these time-wasters are living off the hard work of the factory line workers! Think about it. It's a somewhat immoral relationship going on, but, it's no worse than the overall patterns of exploitation, I guess. You know damn sure the owners (aka, investors) aren't sweating on an assembly line somewhere. The take the longest vacations, and suffer the least bodily injury.
Personally, I clock around 6 billable hours a day. That's just reality -- it's hard for me to think intently for much longer, without burning out. I would do less if I could, but, I need the money.
The free market of education for poor people would closely resemble the "free market" for poor people generally. They would get the "dollar store" version of education.
They would not have any real access to quality education, for the same reason why the poor lack access to quality products via the free market. There's not enough slack in the system to maintain fat profit margins - everything is tight. Choice is reduced, and people are given cut-rate product.
This is not to praise public schools. The ones serving poor communities suck. I just *have* to shine some common sense on this issue.
One reason why so many datacenters are in exciting, disaster prone areas, is because the people who start the companies are there. They moved to these exciting places because they're the kind of people who like to be in these places.
I'm in Los Angeles doing internet and media work, and almost every person I've worked for, or with, has come from either another state, or a somewhat distant suburb of LA, but moved closer in to the city, and hang out in the city.
I am an LA native from the suburbs, and I find it's frikken weird! Normally, in LA, you go into an office to work, and it's a mix of races, with lots of Latinos. This is especially true with sales, accounting, tech, etc. But if you work in media (Hollywood) or some sectors of the internet, there's a lot more white people, and they're from the rest of America (and a few from Europe).
That's why there's all these data centers in high risk areas. It's the people who move here and start things.
People in cities loot. It's because there's a food shortage -- people tend to keep less food, and shop more often, so you need to get the food. If the owners have left, and there's nobody coming to work, someone will eventually break in to get at the goods.
I suspect Apple was aware of the patent, at least at some point, because they probably studied the Nomad.
Assuming they knew it was patented, they did the smart thing and developed it anyway. At worst, they would be kicked out of the market, or, by the time they had a position, they could probably create a better menuing system.
The patent itself is too general. Menu systems where you drill down from screen to screen, and back up to the previous menu, have existed ever since "glass TTYs". Most Apple 2 and other home computer apps used them exclusively. Apple's original Appleworks program used them.
I know they went after Microsoft, and worked out some kind of deal. What's stupid is that Apple licensed it's UI from Xerox, after copying it. How tacky is that. "The engineer is hoist by his own petard."
I predict that once automation and computerized terminals eliminate all service jobs, we'll start to pay companies to help us meet people. In fact, it'll be ironic, because even that will be automated and done via computerized terminals.
You'll have all these different ways to check out other people, like photos, "electronic mail", and even exchange phone numbers. I know this sounds cold and impersonal, but, for the average person who's in the class of people facing unemployment, and who cannot afford entre into the elite social clubs, this "ATM social space" will be a very affordable outlet.
The point is that increases in productivity lead to unemployment.
An idea to consider is that jobs are the way income is redistributed to people who don't own businesses. If you use 20% of your global labor pool to produce food, clothing, and shelter, what will the other 80% do for work, to get the money necessary to purchase those necessities?
Note that prices *do* drop, and productivity does increase, and this is a good thing.
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Well.... you work with the situation you get. In the corporate environment, you have the whole server, and the sysadmin, and maybe a programmer who is someone is isn't also that sysadmin. In that situation, Java is viable.
:-) )
On the web, you've got someone who wants to run a site on a share web host. The sysadmin for the web host wants to be hassled as little as possible by people deploying applications... therefore, PHP is better because it doesn't have any "software deployment" concept aside from "upload the file to the server." You have a programmer, who probably wants a few dozen people running his whizzy app. If the webmaster is the programmer, s/he may still want others to run the software. PHP apps are easy to deploy.
If you're talking strictly about developing rich applications, particularly large ones for a specific purpose that have a web face, Java is a better language, and a better environment. If you want to distribute small web applications that work for web sites to do "web site" things, though, PHP wins.
The competition, however, is still a false one. On the one hand, you have PHP for "short" projects of, say, 50,000 lines or so. You have Java for large projects. These aren't in competition with each other. The competion won't be really obvious until a proprietary PHP apps grows and needs to integrate with the Java codebase via a PHP/Java interface. Then, people will be choosing, within a project, between the PHP/C implementation of a feature, and the Java implementation of the feature. ( And, as in all competitive situation, the customer wins
Agreed. On a current project, we created a "template language" by restricting our use of PHP constructs. You have while loops, variable and object references, and the ? : (ternary) operator. We had to add htmlentities() to filter output (another post pointed this issue out too). All objects to be rendered to the page are either global values or objects that are like iterators; and these iterators may contain references to iterators, allowing for nested hierarchies of data. These templates are rendered by setting up the objects as globals, and then "including" the template.
With some discipline, you can have a somewhat readable separation of code from logic. The "templating language" consists of two powerful constructs with a somewhat steep learning curve (especially ? : ) but once learned, it covers 99% of your needs.
The code that does the heavy lifting is in classes. A normal looking PHP file includes these classes and instantiates objects, and passes user data into the classes. Then, the templates are loaded up and rendered. Most pages don't require much PHP-scripting logic, because you keep trying to push the logic into the classes (many of which implement the controller pattern) and push that logic further back into SQL statements.
Once you get into the corporate environment, the largest expenses is labor. Even in this, FOSS is a winner. It's a self-educating culture, turning people into computer programmers... and often more FOSS programmers. This is good for people, because it raises their skill level. Proprietary, low-knowledge, low-barrier computing isn't so good at producing programmers, because the development tools cost a lot. I don't know what the MS developer "tax" is these days, but when I was doing it, it cost around $2,000 a year to develop on MS. In comparison, FOSS is nearly free. I spend around $100 to $200 a year on it. While the knowledge barrier is high, the cost barrier is very low. This does make a difference if you don't have $2,000 to spend, nor the opportunity to move somewhere to earn that money. Thus, with FOSS, you can create an IT labor force for less cost, and save money on IT in the long run.
I apologize for missing the apostrophe-s on the final "Africa." I'm quite aware that Africa is not a country. In the second paragraph, I wrote "nations of Africa" indicating this.
That's not ironic. It's expected.
The closer you are to the core, the more money you have and need, because you're more integrated into the economy. The more distant you are (spatially or politically) the more likely you are to face the old "beads for Manhattan" trade. Or more contemporarily, the more likely you are to be paid in chickens.
Before America bombed Afghanistan, the per capita income there was $800. That didn't mean everyone was starving for lack of cash to buy food. It meant that a lot of the economy wasn't integrated into the global economy. They had few goods or services to sell to the West, and therefore, had few dollars; the economy was bound to stay local.
When you measure wealth in dollars (or any convertible currency) you're able to count the dollars, but miss the wealth.
Free Software isn't a "free handout." It's software that allows all people to have access to tools and information to develop more software. This is extremely relevant in the global South, because most software is developed for the North. A lot of that is relevant in the South, to be certain, but the South has specific needs related to things like agriculture, language retention, education, literacy, and so forth. At some point, African people will have to decide if the products from the North suit their needs, of if they want to develop their own. Then, if they decide the latter, they will make a cost/benefit analysis about developing their own software. Hundreds of thousands of programmers around the world have faced this issue, and many have chosen to develop with Free Software. Free Software encourages self-sufficiency.
Software, like drugs, are intellectual property, and the growing trend is to pressure companies with intellectual propert assets in the global North to give the IP to the global South for free, or at low prices. I believe the price of Windows in Africa will be dropped to reasonable local levels, and that is how they will compete with Free Software. The challenge for Free Software is to help the people of Africa break out of the dependency relationship inherent in using closed, proprietary software. I think one potential avenue is to help Africans get IT jobs in the West, on work visas, and let them return to Africa with skills and capital.
Wasn't Gnome started when he was in Mexico? It's a global project. So, it's partly Mexican. Partly a bunch of other countries. What's special about that is that not many global software projects start in Mexico. They generally start in the USA or Western Europe, aka the capitalist core.
And this is training to push buttons in dialog boxes, I bet.
That is important, and will help, however, Free Software will make the impact there that it is making in Mexico, India, and other countries. Training only goes so far. At some point, when one is self sufficient, the best thing to do is abandon the school and seek knowledge among peers.
So true. You must start somewhere, and where better than a system that not only includes sufficient documentation to self-educate about the system, but also includes every tool necessary to produce the system.
Moreover, why shouldn't the nations of Africa tap into the human resources of Free Software, who, in all likelihood, are more interested in Africa's well being than your average software industry company? They may even have some awareness between the conflicts between, say, tribal right to information, and propertization of information, and be able to join the efforts to fight off the WIPO, WTO and IMF.
Around the world, nations that aren't the USA have started to adopt Free Software as a viable alternative to Microsoft and other expensive software. Why not Africa?
You're ignoring a couple centuries of imperialism, when Europe colonized Africa and stripped it of minerals and resources, as well as of self-governance. The mess in Africa today is just a continent on the post-imperialist rebound.
You can already voluntarily decouple your health insurance from your work. You can *always* buy your own insurance, and some people do it. You'll never get insurance at the price that a large company can, though.
The fact is, people will always need to aggregate their demand to get a better deal. Atomized consumers have little to no leverage -- trust me on this one, because I know from experience. The avenues to aggregating demands are simple: unions, cooperatives, and government intervention on behalf of people.
By "contractor" the guy really means "a temp." You're describing someone who might call him or herself a "consultant."
You forgot the key to it all: exploit the brand.
Look at who's making Sylvania and RCA products. I don't know, but it's some company that's using the brand. Who makes the computers for IBM, Dell, etc.? ASUS, Biostar, MSI, and other mobo companies. A lot of little yellow people are toiling, so the fat white people can talk it up like they actually did the work.
That's the new business model -- milk the past reputation for a decade, while you drive the entire company into the crapper. Keep lying to the consumers with the money, because, they are your meal ticket.
It's the US model for companies to offer health insurance as part of the compensation package. They're partly in competition with unions, who also offer healh insurance packages.
If you look at it as a class conflict, the battle is between the workers and the owners, with regard to who will have the power to control who coordinates health insurance. In the US, the owners are winning, and that's why companies offer health insurance: it's cheaper, overall, than having a single payer system that would insure not only the better paid workers, but the poorly paid ones who have no insurance at all.
You make a good point about externalizing R&D costs. I think they should simply be passed on to universities and research organizations, and funded the normal way -- competing for taxes and foundation money. Simple, and clean, because the ownership of innovation is dispersed more widely, so more companies starting up can get at them.
A couple years back, a ranting "capitalist" from the UK got into a small flamewar about health care. She insisted that socialist medicine was more capitalistic than private health insurance we have in the USA. She was off her rocker -- private insurance is capitalism's answer to public services -- but, as a small business owner, she understood that it was far more efficient to leave health insurance to the state, so she didn't have to go through the hassle of offering it as a business.
She'd probably change her tune if she was a large business, of course.
Oh bullshit. Someone working in a factory isn't making very much money per unit, and generally speaking, if they don't get legal rights, they're going to get screwed. They can't really waste time, because they're on the line, and they have to put up with crap like asking permission to take a piss.
People higher up on the food chain have jobs that are a little harder to quantify (hence, there's always a managerial effort to quantify their work). They waste time because they can, or because there's no pressure to work.
If you really do an accounting of it, these time-wasters are living off the hard work of the factory line workers! Think about it. It's a somewhat immoral relationship going on, but, it's no worse than the overall patterns of exploitation, I guess. You know damn sure the owners (aka, investors) aren't sweating on an assembly line somewhere. The take the longest vacations, and suffer the least bodily injury.
Personally, I clock around 6 billable hours a day. That's just reality -- it's hard for me to think intently for much longer, without burning out. I would do less if I could, but, I need the money.
But I'll feed the trolls...
The free market of education for poor people would closely resemble the "free market" for poor people generally. They would get the "dollar store" version of education.
They would not have any real access to quality education, for the same reason why the poor lack access to quality products via the free market. There's not enough slack in the system to maintain fat profit margins - everything is tight. Choice is reduced, and people are given cut-rate product.
This is not to praise public schools. The ones serving poor communities suck. I just *have* to shine some common sense on this issue.
I hope they are not "too proud" to get assistance because the people paying the ultimate price for the pride are Black.
One reason why so many datacenters are in exciting, disaster prone areas, is because the people who start the companies are there. They moved to these exciting places because they're the kind of people who like to be in these places.
I'm in Los Angeles doing internet and media work, and almost every person I've worked for, or with, has come from either another state, or a somewhat distant suburb of LA, but moved closer in to the city, and hang out in the city.
I am an LA native from the suburbs, and I find it's frikken weird! Normally, in LA, you go into an office to work, and it's a mix of races, with lots of Latinos. This is especially true with sales, accounting, tech, etc. But if you work in media (Hollywood) or some sectors of the internet, there's a lot more white people, and they're from the rest of America (and a few from Europe).
That's why there's all these data centers in high risk areas. It's the people who move here and start things.
People in cities loot. It's because there's a food shortage -- people tend to keep less food, and shop more often, so you need to get the food. If the owners have left, and there's nobody coming to work, someone will eventually break in to get at the goods.
I suspect Apple was aware of the patent, at least at some point, because they probably studied the Nomad.
Assuming they knew it was patented, they did the smart thing and developed it anyway. At worst, they would be kicked out of the market, or, by the time they had a position, they could probably create a better menuing system.
The patent itself is too general. Menu systems where you drill down from screen to screen, and back up to the previous menu, have existed ever since "glass TTYs". Most Apple 2 and other home computer apps used them exclusively. Apple's original Appleworks program used them.
Did they go after GEOS?
I know they went after Microsoft, and worked out some kind of deal. What's stupid is that Apple licensed it's UI from Xerox, after copying it. How tacky is that. "The engineer is hoist by his own petard."
I predict that once automation and computerized terminals eliminate all service jobs, we'll start to pay companies to help us meet people. In fact, it'll be ironic, because even that will be automated and done via computerized terminals.
You'll have all these different ways to check out other people, like photos, "electronic mail", and even exchange phone numbers. I know this sounds cold and impersonal, but, for the average person who's in the class of people facing unemployment, and who cannot afford entre into the elite social clubs, this "ATM social space" will be a very affordable outlet.
The point is that increases in productivity lead to unemployment.
An idea to consider is that jobs are the way income is redistributed to people who don't own businesses. If you use 20% of your global labor pool to produce food, clothing, and shelter, what will the other 80% do for work, to get the money necessary to purchase those necessities?
Note that prices *do* drop, and productivity does increase, and this is a good thing.