> Spammers are not thieves. Under your logic, the weekly coupons your supermarket sends out snail mail would make your supermarket thieves. When in reality, it is those "junk mail" advertisements that are keeping the postal service alive.
But you miss a very important difference: people who send junk snailmail must pay for the privilege on a per-piece basis -- people who send junk email don't have to pay for the volume --> bandwidth that they send out. Spammers can afford to operate precisely because everyone else winds up paying for the bandwidth that the spammers use.
> Look, maybe some people need to get mail from Asia...
Such as yours truly. My livelihood depends upon it, in fact. Your right not to receive email from India shouldn't interfere with my right to receive it. Nor the reverse.
Spammers suck, not only due to the annoyance factor and the bandwidth they waste, but the dissention they provoke among legitimate users. Hang the bastards.
(Um, hang the spammers, I mean -- not legitimate users.)
I remember when HTML email first came out, I was thrilled... for about two weeks. Now I use Moz in text-only/images-disabled mode and bitch at friends who insist on sending me anything but ASCII.
My first contact with the Net (or anything like) came in 1980 or '81 when I had an account on the DELPHI sytem. Then I did other stuff for about 15 years, and by the time I came back to computing, the WWW was there.
> Why would you want to host your website with somebody who was "incompetent, impatient, and lazy" anyway?
Well, _Donut_Troll was wrong about both PG and needing to recompile, but he's right in that there are all kinds of situations where a developer might not have control over the server itself. That could be determined by an employer or client -- or the hosting might be locked in by a long-term contract. The poor schlob's supposed to drop his job or the equivalent just to satisfy your worldview? Geeez.
(Another scenario: The developer's obligated to work on IIS, which IIRC doesn't support dl() in ISAPI mode.)
Why do you persist in being such a hard case, anyway? If you don't use MySQL or GD or whatever, that's fine, it's not like somebody's forcing you to, so if it's helpful to (some) other PHP developers, how does this hurt you? Do you also oppose the inclusion of PEAR by default, which most would probably agree is a good thing?
>> FYI, Java's object model is very close to that of SmallTalk.
> I'd say it's closer to C++, which uses a Simula 67-style OO.
Java, like C++, Java and PHP use class-based inheritance.
JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), on the other hand, uses prototype-based inheritance, which is more like that of Smalltalk. Perhaps this is what the first poster was thinking of...?
Expat/SAX in PHP rocks. XSLT is pretty good. The PEAR XML parser isn't bad, either.
However, XML-DOM (DOMXML, whatever) sucks because, well, can you say, "Shifting APIs"? On the one hand, I appreciate the fact that it's getting fairly close to W3 specs now, and that's a Very Good Thing(tm); on the other, the function names and definitions (along with some of the interfaces themselves) have changed in very non-trivial ways with nearly every single bloody point release since 4.0.0 and it's a royal pain in the arse. I'm working on a project right now that would be much better done if we could depend on consistent DOM support.
My pet peeve aside, the new release looks pretty good.:)
(Before you flame, please consider the possibility that there might be other uses for the Document Object Model besides making stuff fly around in browser windows. Thank you.)
Re:Most needed feature for newbies......
on
PHP 4.3.0 Released
·
· Score: 2
The docs work pretty well for me.
Tip: To get the most out of the documentation, you really need to use the online version. You can query it quite easily from your browser simply by typing php.net/ThingYouWantToKnowAbout into your location window. It'll pull up a function name, list of function names that closely match your search term, or a list of pages containing the search term. Try something like php.net/integers (returns a list of 52 documents, most of which relate to integers in one way or another) or php.net/file (returns the manual page for the file() function) and you'll see what I mean. Also check the user-contributed notes. I've found a lot of good tips and hacks in those.
I'm not saying that DW's the be-all and end-all, but it can produce quality, standards-compliant markup and CSS that's well-formatted when it's being used by someone who knows and cares about such things (as which any "serious" developer ought to qualify). FrontPage, on the other hand, produces true spaghetti HTML -- which I believe makes it unique among "visual" Web page design tools. As for the JavaScript, ASP and PHP code DW generates (I don't do JSP or ColdFusion, myself, so you'd have to ask someone who does how it stacks up with regard to those, but I suspect it does about the same) -- well, I tend to agree with the guy who said that all programming code generators tend to suck somewhat because someone who knows what they're doing can optimise in ways that DW can't. But -- for a code generator -- it doesn't do too bad.
I've been in Web design since '96 and I've been using Dreamweaver on and off ever since the first public beta became available in '97 or '98, and my experience is that DW in the hands of an amateur won't produce high-quality pages any more than a copy of Photoshop will instantly turn you into a graphic artist if you don't have some knowledge and training as one.
Don't blame the typewriter when the real culprit is more likely to be the monkey who's pounding the leys.
... this whole police-state thing I see happening really has me wanting to be just about
anywhere but here...
I've seen this coming ever since Bush got in by getting his friends and relatives to throw him the election. I'm now in Australia, myself (having left the US of A in June), and am planning to stay here if I can arrange it.
Even though John Howard seems to delight in licking GB's boots, it's still a somewhat saner country than what the US seems to be turning into.
No matter how poor Europeans have been, they knew better than to shit in their drinking/bath water. They're poor because they can't produce anything of value on their own.
This shouldn't be dignified with a response, but it needs to be pointed out that AC obviously hasn't read his history. European (and American) history is rife with instances of plagues caused by... guess what?
In India (and numerous other countries), they're poor because foreigners took over their country and siphoned off their wealth for 2 or 3 hundred years.
That's odd, out of my dozen or so IM contacts in India, all use ICQ or Y!IM (or something that's compatible with one or the other) except one who uses MSN. And he's the only one who isn't a developer. He's employed as a manager by a UK firm that's "standardised" on MS, and isn't allowed to use anything else on the job.
I have done a great deal of work over the last year or two with people in India. In fact, it's thanks on large part to them that I'm able to support myself at the moment, since I'm currently a nonresident alien in the country where I now reside and thus not permitted to have a job as such. (Nebing an American who finds oneself in that situation is a bit ironic, I must admit, given that in the States we're always hearing about foreigners trying to enter the country to take our jobs.)
Without boring you with the details, let me just say that many of the programming books you're buying these days are written and edited there, at least in part. (And some of the "polishing up" work gets outsourced to me.)
Their enthusiasm for doing useful, meaningful work is genuine, as is their desire not to be lisence-taxed to death while trying to do it. They simply can't afford it. So Linux and other Open Source technologies are a natural for them.
I also wonder if it'd have done Microsoft much good to make a pitch in any case. According to Microsoft's own "Attitudes Towards Shared Source and Open Source Research Study", as quoted in the Halloween Documents,
Ratings for messages that were meant to be negative actually had a positive response among the respondents. For example, when read what was supposed to be a negative OSS message about OSS and proprietary software having a similar TCO, nearly half (49%) of all respondents said that having heard this message they were now MORE FAVORABLE towards OSS.
In other words, the very things that MS keep trying to tell people are "evil" about OSS are in fact what people actually like about it! Especially those people concerned with the bottom line because they can't afford not to be.
>...any negative comment towards linux is modded down (as this one will be), while any anti-MS comment is modded up.
Not so: This was modded down as a troll (apparently because the moderator construed it as Critical of an MS product's behaviour = Anti-MS = Bad) when I was simply stating my own observations.
What's interesting (and a bit amusing, even) is that I implied in the same post that I use a Win2k desktop (which I do).
As for.NET -- Doesn't look to me like MS has innovated anything that's not already been done by Sun in this regard.
A "troll" is defined as a post that serves no useful purpose, makes an ad hominem or similar attack, or attempts to disrupt the flow of conversation.
All I did was report my experience and my opinion. Just because it doesn't match yours does NOT make my post a troll.
Perhaps when someone tries to mod down a post, they should get a message saying, "Does this post really fit the definition of 'troll'? Or am I just steamed because the poster doesn't agree with me?"
Hopefully when this is meta-moderated, others won't be so hasty to mislabel.
> No doubt the 'Pagans'... did not have their religion influenced by people living around them, or the people who had come before them.
My point was that each religious New Wave *cough* borrows *cough* from those preceding it.
> You never learned anything about the peoples that predated the Celts?
Who said anything about the Celts?
> Your post reminds me of someone who constantly tells other people how profound 'The Matrix' is -- 3 years after they saw it.
I must admit that I enjoyed The Matrix, but -- "profound"? I don't think so. It was just a movie, after all.
I must confess that I find it amusing when I (very occasionally) point out someone else's preachy revisionism and get accused of it myself for daring to do so. Particularly by those who presume to pigeonhole me so they can make More Enlightened Than Thou attacks on some stereotype, whether or not it actually has anything to do with me or my belief system.
The pot thinks it sees a kettle and wants to call it black.
No, XP just grinds to a slow, numbing halt. Stuff just quits working.
And the UI itself blows. Not even changing it to "Classic Windows" negates the fact that MS has just made it that much more difficult to accomplish basic system tasks.
Win2K tries to do the same thing, but at least the Task Manager works halfway decently. I only have to reboot once or twice a week now.
(I'll probably get modded into oblivion for this, but what the heck...)
While we're on the subject of subverting holidays: How about the fact that "Christmas" is the result the early Christian Church rebranding Yule (a.k.a Sunreturn)? They even changed the birthdate of Jesus (which was actually in March so far as anyone can tell for sure). Pine trees -- also co-opted from the Pagans. Santa Claus/Father Christmas -- ditto. Midwinter feasting -- etc., etc. All co-opted by (what was then) the New Order.
My take on the whole business from a Pagan perspective is that the Christians stole our holiday, now they're having it stolen from them in turn by the acolytes of Mammon. As you give, so shall you get. So don't preach at me about "the reason for the season" -- my reasons to celebrate are liable to predate yours by a millenium or more.
That being said, I hope everybody had a nice holiday, whatever you might call it. Here in Brisbane, we tossed a couple of chickens on the barbie, pigged out, and were blessed by some rain late in the afternoon that checked the heat nicely, thanks.
And, yes, the Courts have the ultimate say over the law, but that is itself a sensitive balance. It amazes me how people will blame the judicial process...
Nobody's "blaming the judicial process". What's being pointed out is that the courts have the duty of tossing out laws that violate the Constititution -- in other words,
where Congress has completely abdicated its duty
by passing insanely bad laws like DMCA.
DMCA clearly violates both the letter and spirit of the Constitution in this regard; therefore, when it's brought up before the courts, they're obligated to invalidate it.
Of course, that's not to say we shouldn't let our Congresspeople know they've done a Very Bad Thing(tm), but just in case they or their successors don't get the message, we have other recourse and we should avail ourselves of it. Our obligation as US citizens is to take every possible measure to see that unconstitutional and unjust laws are shown the door, and this includes making sure that DMCA comes up before the courts ASAP.
In addition, acting through the courts will not only invalidate the law itself, but make it clear what aspects of it are unconstitutional. Otherwise, the Congress could very easily repeal DMCA, then turn right around and pass something else that does the same thing. There are times when the legislature needs to instructed in unambiguous terms: "You can't make laws that do X because laws that do so violate the Constitution, and here's why...".
Slashdot Mirror
> Spammers are not thieves. Under your logic, the weekly coupons your supermarket sends out snail mail would make your supermarket thieves. When in reality, it is those "junk mail" advertisements that are keeping the postal service alive.
But you miss a very important difference: people who send junk snailmail must pay for the privilege on a per-piece basis -- people who send junk email don't have to pay for the volume --> bandwidth that they send out. Spammers can afford to operate precisely because everyone else winds up paying for the bandwidth that the spammers use.
> Look, maybe some people need to get mail from Asia...
Such as yours truly. My livelihood depends upon it, in fact. Your right not to receive email from India shouldn't interfere with my right to receive it. Nor the reverse.
Spammers suck, not only due to the annoyance factor and the bandwidth they waste, but the dissention they provoke among legitimate users. Hang the bastards.
(Um, hang the spammers, I mean -- not legitimate users.)
I remember when HTML email first came out, I was thrilled... for about two weeks. Now I use Moz in text-only/images-disabled mode and bitch at friends who insist on sending me anything but ASCII.
My first contact with the Net (or anything like) came in 1980 or '81 when I had an account on the DELPHI sytem. Then I did other stuff for about 15 years, and by the time I came back to computing, the WWW was there.
See here, Doc.
Um, that's somewhat off-topic... but if it's original, it's freakin' brilliant.
You should have saved Greenspan for last -- that was the best bit IMO.
Man, this has just got SO out of hand... Time to line up all those marketers against the wall.
Kill, kill. Kill, kill, kill the marketers.
Actually, many astronomers consider the Earth-Moon system to be a double planet.
> Why would you want to host your website with somebody who was "incompetent, impatient, and lazy" anyway?
Well, _Donut_Troll was wrong about both PG and needing to recompile, but he's right in that there are all kinds of situations where a developer might not have control over the server itself. That could be determined by an employer or client -- or the hosting might be locked in by a long-term contract. The poor schlob's supposed to drop his job or the equivalent just to satisfy your worldview? Geeez.
(Another scenario: The developer's obligated to work on IIS, which IIRC doesn't support dl() in ISAPI mode.)
Why do you persist in being such a hard case, anyway? If you don't use MySQL or GD or whatever, that's fine, it's not like somebody's forcing you to, so if it's helpful to (some) other PHP developers, how does this hurt you? Do you also oppose the inclusion of PEAR by default, which most would probably agree is a good thing?
>> FYI, Java's object model is very close to that of SmallTalk.
> I'd say it's closer to C++, which uses a Simula 67-style OO.
Java, like C++, Java and PHP use class-based inheritance.
JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), on the other hand, uses prototype-based inheritance, which is more like that of Smalltalk. Perhaps this is what the first poster was thinking of...?
> I see nothing lacking with PHPs XML support.
:)
Expat/SAX in PHP rocks. XSLT is pretty good. The PEAR XML parser isn't bad, either.
However, XML-DOM (DOMXML, whatever) sucks because, well, can you say, "Shifting APIs"? On the one hand, I appreciate the fact that it's getting fairly close to W3 specs now, and that's a Very Good Thing(tm); on the other, the function names and definitions (along with some of the interfaces themselves) have changed in very non-trivial ways with nearly every single bloody point release since 4.0.0 and it's a royal pain in the arse. I'm working on a project right now that would be much better done if we could depend on consistent DOM support.
My pet peeve aside, the new release looks pretty good.
(Before you flame, please consider the possibility that there might be other uses for the Document Object Model besides making stuff fly around in browser windows. Thank you.)
The docs work pretty well for me.
Tip: To get the most out of the documentation, you really need to use the online version. You can query it quite easily from your browser simply by typing php.net/ThingYouWantToKnowAbout into your location window. It'll pull up a function name, list of function names that closely match your search term, or a list of pages containing the search term. Try something like php.net/integers (returns a list of 52 documents, most of which relate to integers in one way or another) or php.net/file (returns the manual page for the file() function) and you'll see what I mean. Also check the user-contributed notes. I've found a lot of good tips and hacks in those.
I'm not saying that DW's the be-all and end-all, but it can produce quality, standards-compliant markup and CSS that's well-formatted when it's being used by someone who knows and cares about such things (as which any "serious" developer ought to qualify). FrontPage, on the other hand, produces true spaghetti HTML -- which I believe makes it unique among "visual" Web page design tools. As for the JavaScript, ASP and PHP code DW generates (I don't do JSP or ColdFusion, myself, so you'd have to ask someone who does how it stacks up with regard to those, but I suspect it does about the same) -- well, I tend to agree with the guy who said that all programming code generators tend to suck somewhat because someone who knows what they're doing can optimise in ways that DW can't. But -- for a code generator -- it doesn't do too bad.
I've been in Web design since '96 and I've been using Dreamweaver on and off ever since the first public beta became available in '97 or '98, and my experience is that DW in the hands of an amateur won't produce high-quality pages any more than a copy of Photoshop will instantly turn you into a graphic artist if you don't have some knowledge and training as one.
Don't blame the typewriter when the real culprit is more likely to be the monkey who's pounding the leys.
I've seen this coming ever since Bush got in by getting his friends and relatives to throw him the election. I'm now in Australia, myself (having left the US of A in June), and am planning to stay here if I can arrange it.
Even though John Howard seems to delight in licking GB's boots, it's still a somewhat saner country than what the US seems to be turning into.
In India (and numerous other countries), they're poor because foreigners took over their country and siphoned off their wealth for 2 or 3 hundred years.
That's odd, out of my dozen or so IM contacts in India, all use ICQ or Y!IM (or something that's compatible with one or the other) except one who uses MSN. And he's the only one who isn't a developer. He's employed as a manager by a UK firm that's "standardised" on MS, and isn't allowed to use anything else on the job.
Without boring you with the details, let me just say that many of the programming books you're buying these days are written and edited there, at least in part. (And some of the "polishing up" work gets outsourced to me.)
Their enthusiasm for doing useful, meaningful work is genuine, as is their desire not to be lisence-taxed to death while trying to do it. They simply can't afford it. So Linux and other Open Source technologies are a natural for them.
I also wonder if it'd have done Microsoft much good to make a pitch in any case. According to Microsoft's own "Attitudes Towards Shared Source and Open Source Research Study", as quoted in the Halloween Documents,
In other words, the very things that MS keep trying to tell people are "evil" about OSS are in fact what people actually like about it! Especially those people concerned with the bottom line because they can't afford not to be.
The Bell Labs site is still down. [Not terribly hopefully:] Anybody got a mirror?
> ...any negative comment towards linux is modded down (as this one will be), while any anti-MS comment is modded up.
.NET -- Doesn't look to me like MS has innovated anything that's not already been done by Sun in this regard.
Not so: This was modded down as a troll (apparently because the moderator construed it as Critical of an MS product's behaviour = Anti-MS = Bad) when I was simply stating my own observations.
What's interesting (and a bit amusing, even) is that I implied in the same post that I use a Win2k desktop (which I do).
As for
To whomever modded down my post:
A "troll" is defined as a post that serves no useful purpose, makes an ad hominem or similar attack, or attempts to disrupt the flow of conversation.
All I did was report my experience and my opinion. Just because it doesn't match yours does NOT make my post a troll.
Perhaps when someone tries to mod down a post, they should get a message saying, "Does this post really fit the definition of 'troll'? Or am I just steamed because the poster doesn't agree with me?"
Hopefully when this is meta-moderated, others won't be so hasty to mislabel.
> No doubt the 'Pagans' ... did not have their religion influenced by people living around them, or the people who had come before them.
My point was that each religious New Wave *cough* borrows *cough* from those preceding it.
> You never learned anything about the peoples that predated the Celts?
Who said anything about the Celts?
> Your post reminds me of someone who constantly tells other people how profound 'The Matrix' is -- 3 years after they saw it.
I must admit that I enjoyed The Matrix, but -- "profound"? I don't think so. It was just a movie, after all.
I must confess that I find it amusing when I (very occasionally) point out someone else's preachy revisionism and get accused of it myself for daring to do so. Particularly by those who presume to pigeonhole me so they can make More Enlightened Than Thou attacks on some stereotype, whether or not it actually has anything to do with me or my belief system.
The pot thinks it sees a kettle and wants to call it black.
>Windows hasn't blue-screened since win2k.
No, XP just grinds to a slow, numbing halt. Stuff just quits working.
And the UI itself blows. Not even changing it to "Classic Windows" negates the fact that MS has just made it that much more difficult to accomplish basic system tasks.
Win2K tries to do the same thing, but at least the Task Manager works halfway decently. I only have to reboot once or twice a week now.
(I'll probably get modded into oblivion for this, but what the heck...)
While we're on the subject of subverting holidays: How about the fact that "Christmas" is the result the early Christian Church rebranding Yule (a.k.a Sunreturn)? They even changed the birthdate of Jesus (which was actually in March so far as anyone can tell for sure). Pine trees -- also co-opted from the Pagans. Santa Claus/Father Christmas -- ditto. Midwinter feasting -- etc., etc. All co-opted by (what was then) the New Order.
My take on the whole business from a Pagan perspective is that the Christians stole our holiday, now they're having it stolen from them in turn by the acolytes of Mammon. As you give, so shall you get. So don't preach at me about "the reason for the season" -- my reasons to celebrate are liable to predate yours by a millenium or more.
That being said, I hope everybody had a nice holiday, whatever you might call it. Here in Brisbane, we tossed a couple of chickens on the barbie, pigged out, and were blessed by some rain late in the afternoon that checked the heat nicely, thanks.
Jet on over to XUL Planet. You can create cross-platform GUI apps using markup, styles, and scripting. Not just menus, but the whole enchilada.
Right now it's only implemented in Gecko-based Web browsers (Mozilla, et al.) but it's a start.
DMCA clearly violates both the letter and spirit of the Constitution in this regard; therefore, when it's brought up before the courts, they're obligated to invalidate it.
Of course, that's not to say we shouldn't let our Congresspeople know they've done a Very Bad Thing(tm), but just in case they or their successors don't get the message, we have other recourse and we should avail ourselves of it. Our obligation as US citizens is to take every possible measure to see that unconstitutional and unjust laws are shown the door, and this includes making sure that DMCA comes up before the courts ASAP.
In addition, acting through the courts will not only invalidate the law itself, but make it clear what aspects of it are unconstitutional. Otherwise, the Congress could very easily repeal DMCA, then turn right around and pass something else that does the same thing. There are times when the legislature needs to instructed in unambiguous terms: "You can't make laws that do X because laws that do so violate the Constitution, and here's why...".