Most people who I see claim Visual Studio is not that great, or not as good as Eclipse seem to have done little more than load it up, make a default project and close it down.
Those who don't like it seem blissfully unaware of the things that make it great like it's refactoring tools, extremely smart and efficient intellisense, excellent debugging tools and decent testing functionality etc.
If you're one of those who just wants something where they can edit code, hit compile and have an executable then absolutely Visual Studio wont offer you an awful lot more (other than the best intellisense there is) than other IDEs but if you're doing fairly complex development and need all the tools an IDE makes available then Visual Studio definitely comes out way above things like Eclipse and even NetBeans as much as I like it for non-MS development.
Stop confusing the two and just admit you were wrong to pretend Javascript performs as well as Java. Java is still far better performing than Javascript and whilst Javascript may be "fine" for your needs it doesn't change the fact it's still too slow for others needs relative to Java.
"Over the past several years, there has been something of a renaissance in PC gaming. Skyrim, Far Cry 3, Dishonored, etc. Big games that deliver plenty of value to the consumer."
But here's the problem, those were first and foremost (perhaps with the exception of Skyrim) developed as console titles.
Gaming in general now seems tied to the consoles, my hardware from 2008 is still capable of playing just about every PC game that comes out to 1920x1200 resolution on my monitor with high or highest detail. Back in the late 90s and early 00s I couldn't build a PC for the same equivalent money that would last 2 years and give me the same performance on the latest and greatest games.
Game sales for the PC have been in decline for many years now and it seems to be a viscious circle - PC game sales decline, so less developers develop primarily or exclusively for the PC.
This said I've been playing PC games this last couple of years more than I have for years with Diablo III, Starcraft II, Minecraft, Wargame and so forth so I think things have actually been getting better if anything - the low point for me with PC games was about 2006 - 2011 I'd say where not much caught my interest and I found myself largely playing console games.
The PC games industry needs something to give it a kick up the arse and Kickstarter is a new thing to try and do that, I think it's way too early to proclaim it's failed given it's only been popular for about a year and the average game takes 2 - 3 years to develop. I also think large publishers are a reason why PC gaming has declined so any break away from them is positive too.
One area of PC gaming that was doing well even during the low point for me that I mentioned was with indie games, though sadly a lot of that seems to have headed off to the world of tablets and smartphones now, but it's ultimately what gave us things like Minecraft.
I think with a new release of consoles we'll also start to see PC gaming hardware pushed forward again once more, and with that I hope we'll also see a new drive to invest in PC gaming too. Here's hoping at least.
Like The Daily Mail, Florian Mueller has so little credibility at this point that it's impossible to trust anything he says with any degree of confidence.
Much better to go elsewhere, to somewhere with a track record of genuinely being able to report factually with some consistency.
But isn't this just a question of developer competence?
I agree it seems to be more of a bane in the games industry somewhat because the games industry has been historically lagging in terms of good software engineering practices, but this is a problem that's well understood and exists in pretty much every software project ever conceived and even some non-software projects.
There's no reason for example that games should be more prone to feature creep and delays than the Pebble Smart Watch at the end of the day but I'm sure they too wanted to build the coolest watch possible in their eyes also.
I'm a lefty and I use my mouse with my left hand but to use the left hand shortcuts like ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v etc. whilst still holding the mouse, I do this groundbreaking thing.
I don't really understand why this comes up time and time again, it's just pedantic and meaningless.
The term comes from 70s pirate radio stations that used to broadcast to the UK from international waters in the North Sea when radio was heavily licensed and regulated. They were playing music unlicensed at sea. Pirate radio was a fair enough term for it and was worn with a badge of honour.
I don't really care that the term has extended where it is now, pirates are cool and I think the only people who think it sounds menacing are the handful of people who use it disparagingly. The rest of the population see it as a badge of honour, just as what happened with ASBOs.
Interesting historical aside, pirate radio eventually led to the liberalisation of the airwaves and opening up of them to additional broadcasters other than just the BBC giving us the much more vibrant radio scene we have today. Perhaps there's a lesson there for the MPs about how it ended up last time.
Dunno where you live but in the UK this is very well defined. There are different levels of severity of images and decision to prosecute is based on that.
If it's someone's family photos it'll be categorised no risk, someone who looks about 15 sleeping consensually with someone who looks about 17 will be classed as little risk, running all the way through to violent abuse of a baby which will get the most severe rating.
Categories are I believe defined by a combination of age of people involved and apparent level of consent.
I believe CEOP/the police maintain a database of images gathered from raids, arrests, and so forth too so existing images can simply be referenced against this automatically.
I believe this is how a lot of Google's blocking occurs - the likes of CEOP/IWF/Police get links reported to them, and they're automatically checked against the database and if it's a hit it's sent to Google to be blocked automatically which is why they can have such a fast response time on a lot of images. It's only new images that take a little longer and require a bit of detective work to determine the category/rating and I think even some of this is automated - i.e. if there is a face visible then facial recognition is performed against images in the database too to allow investigators to compare. I don't know how effective all this is, it's just what I've read but a lot of time seems to have been put into solving this exact problems.
This is also why the content industries have pushed for "legal content" databases, but I still don't know how that would work. If the database has a game as protected and the developer years later releases it for free and someone doesn't update the database then it's going to get blocked and as GP said that's really the problem here - abuse images are always illegal, access to digital content, not so much.
Or even better, just filter out just Labour, just the Conservatives or both and see how much they shit themselves then when the only news on the internet is about other parties.
That's definitely a developer issue. The various.NET framework versions sit alongside each other, and there is plenty of functionality for ensuring.NET assemblies don't clash (DLL hell was one of the key things they wanted to avoid with.NET). There's a thing called the Global Assembly Cache with.NET which is a place you can cache common libraries, because they foresaw the fact that people may want to cache different versions of the same library if you have apps that are dependent on different versions they explicitly made sure it was possible to have multiple versions alongside each other and to ensure applications would always access the correct version. Ironically it's C/C++ that has historically suffered DLL hell and dependency mismatches because native development didn't have the level of functionality.NET has to solve that sort of problem.
If you've got an issue with clashing dependencies in.NET then that's entirely an issue of developers without even the slightest clue what they're doing with.NET. It worries me that ATI is trusting people this unskilled and incompetent with software that interacts with hardware and sits on millions of computers.
Hey, even nerds have gardens and growing exotic pants you never see in UK gardens like my cold hardy cacti collection makes it all the more a geeky project as it's an engineering and biology feat to keep them alive in a British winter:)
Given that all you were able to do was spout shit and not offer a rational counter argument to my original post then how could I assume anything else? It's not like you had a point to make, you just didn't like the point I made backed up with solid evidence and reason.
I'm sorry you hate the reality, but that doesn't make it wrong. If you think it's not the reality then rebut my original points with a rational argument or stop fucking crying.
Is there any reason this couldn't have simply been a coincidence that someone speculatively traded at the right time and won big?
I don't know much about the way the US' financial system works but in the UK such announcements are pretty predictable in terms of timing, the meetings that decide such things are public knowledge, so if someone makes such a trade each surrounding hour then for each hour they get wrong they may lose a tiny amount because it'll be business as usual, but for the hour they get right they would win big.
I mean, is there something about the US system that makes this sort of thing rare and unpredictable given that it seems to have been done on the dot on the hour? Is there some reason to suspect this was even an inside job in the first place?
I've been to many countries around the globe and few have TV as great quality as we have in the UK and the BBC is the reason for that.
If it weren't for the BBC's advertising uninterrupted shows and so forth you'd rapidly see the race to the bottom you get in North American TV where you can't go 5 minutes without an advert interrupting your show.
In North America you have to have over a hundred channels just to have a chance of anything decent popping up amongst all the shit. I like the fact that in the UK you can find something worth watching nearly all the time by checking only a handful of channels because the quality bar is set high enough by the BBC that they all have to provide as good or better stuff to compete raising the bar in general.
The BBC is one thing the UK does absolutely right.
I didn't realise that as I haven't been able to watch it in many years because I go to bed for work well before it's on.
Didn't it used to be live? I always thought that was part of the charm of it.
Perhaps when I was a teen and did stay up that late the episodes I watched did just happen to be live (because I know at least some were), hence why I assumed they all were.
I didn't notice the GW change in format but possibly because I only watch it now and again. The problem I have with it is they seem to cover the same old plants over and over and over again when there's so much more variety people grow that they simply ignore.
It's more like Monty Don's favourite plants show and whilst I like the guy as a presenter I do wish he'd step outside his comfort zone and look at some slightly different things now and again.
Perhaps I've just missed the shows where he does that, but I see no worthwhile coverage of more exotic plants like palms, orchids, cacti, carnivorous, bonsai, bromeliads and so forth though this is a trait I see in general with the BBC - their coverage of Chelsea and Tatton Park and so forth seems to ignore these too, despite them being a fairly major part of said shows - they combined probably comprise about 30% of the stands, but only get about 1% of the coverage.
If you're not growing potatoes or roses, the BBC just doesn't seem to want to know, but they'll quite happily tell you time and time again how to grow these same sorts of things as if you hadn't heard it all before and hadn't come across it in a billion books selling for 50p at your local The Works.
The only mitigation to the problem has been Around the World in 80 Gardens, but that was a one-off series.
Because unlike most presenters he actually seems passionate about the subjects he presents on?
I see other presenters like Ben Fogle, but he comes across as a presenter presenting whatever he's been told to present on even if he's not interested in it, but with Cox you see a clear passion for the subject which is what IMO makes him great at putting across the ideas and concepts in his shows.
About the only other presenters for science based shows I can think of that have this level of passion and gives them the same level of excellence in presenting as a result of that genuine interest in what they are presenting are Attenborough and du Sautoy.
Some of the Horizon presenters do a similarly good job, but they're normally one-offs.
It's nice to have presenters that are interested and knowledgeable about the topics they present rather than presenters that are presenting a topic for the simple reason they're paid to do so.
FWIW I'm in my early 30s so no it's not just teenagers and I know lots of people who like him my age and older, whatever such anecdotes are worth.
I'm not necessarily saying the NSA hasn't broken SSL, but to be fair I think Snowden's comment (and that in related articles) is a little ambiguous.
"Bullrun has successfully foiled several of the worldâ(TM)s standard encryption methods, including SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), VPN (virtual private networks), and the encryption on 4G (fourth generation) smartphones."
This doesn't explicitly state that:
1) All SSL is broken 2) They can take a log of arbitrary SSL data and trivially and consistently decrypt it
The lack of specificity means it could equally be read as meaning it's been successful at acquiring plain text data through some man in the middle attacks, but not that SSL in general has been broken.
I had a look for more information on Bullrun but I can't find anything that really changes this fact.
But don't shoot the messenger here, I think if nothing else it's good to assume that SSL has been broken and take precautions based upon that. I'm just playing devil's advocate in pointing out that Snowden's comments are ambiguous and that the impression the NSA has definitely broken SSL stems only from one specific interpretation of those comments when there are in fact other valid interpretations that could suggest otherwise. It's quite possible (wouldn't be the first time) that the media have jumped to an extreme interpretation and made it out to be something it's not.
FWIW there was a news story just a couple of days ago on the BBC about how scientists now believe people are still adolescents until 25 - that the brain is still very much developing until at least this point, and the idea of 18 being the switching point to adulthood is completely false.
This implies that 18 ratings are utterly meaningless anyway. It means that even if violent media could have an effect on development of people that it could just as well do so between 18 - 25 and so unless those claiming so can provide some evidence of increased violence amongst 18 - 25 year olds at the advent of computer games then it's a complete lie.
Given that it seems to be confirmed now that brains are still just as much developing and maturing up until 25 the allowance of access to violent media at 18 would result in a sharp increase in violent people, but this isn't true. Whilst the peak ages for crime are 14 - 25, there isn't a sudden jump at 18 which the theory that access to violent media causes an increase in violence in developing brains would require to be true.
There's also no correlation between violent crime and the graphic quality of violent media. In fact, as computer game violence has become more graphic and more realistic, crime has actually dropped in the UK which further suggests no link as you would likely expect the change from pixelated NES Mario style violence and really poor quality barely believable late 80s/early 90s style blood in the movies to modern day GTA V torture, and human centipede/hostel levels of twistedness would also have an increasing impact.
"PHP is actually a pretty nice language. It's basically just C with dollar signs, classes, and better string and array handling, stuffed into a fairly straightforward HTML template language."
It's all relative, that's the problem. If you're viewing PHP as someone who doesn't code, hasn't worked with any/many other languages, or only writes small hackish programs rather than say larger scale applications then you're going to view it as okay, because it's still probably better than what you had before which may have simply been nothing.
But if you've had a reasonable amount of experience developing large applications in say Java, C#, C++ or the sort then coming to PHP you're going to quickly recognise severe deficiencies with it and find it makes things more awkward than they need be.
I worked on an 18 month PHP project and whilst all of us had the competence to understand the pitfalls of the language and end up producing something on time, under budget and of good quality the fact remains that if we had instead used C# or Java we could've developed it even quicker and to an even higher degree of quality.
I'll be honest, in part this is because PHP was the wrong tool for the job IMO (I unfortunately only took over as lead dev after the project was started and the damage was done), I think dynamically typed languages are inherently bad for large projects for the simple fact that compiled, statically typed languages catch more errors at compile time and hence create an inherently better level of software quality from the outset. The fact is that whilst PHP and interpreted languages in general let you get off the ground quicker, they also leave you spending way more time debugging, and trying to reproduce hard to reproduce errors such that the net effect is a loss in overall development time relative to the size of the project. The fact PHP has so many quirks exacerbates this problem.
I'm not necessarily saying this applies to you, but for the most part, people who think PHP is good only think so simply because they've never had the pleasure of working with anything better, and that's the problem. The vast majority of PHP developers defend the language simply because they don't realise how much better things can actually be. If you're equally skilled in C#, Java, and PHP, you'll always have a way easier time developing a decent sized project in the first two than you will in PHP.
Which is why the criticism of PHP - yes you can get stuff done with it, but you can get stuff done better in alternative languages and that's PHP's problem- apart from being widespread it simply does everything other languages do but not as well. I don't think there's a single area of software development now where you couldn't find something to do what PHP does but better.
Through my career I've noticed this sort of belief come and go.
At first, when I learnt my first language, I was impressed by people who knew multiple languages.
Then I learnt my second language and thought hey, languages are just syntax, and I learnt a few more languages.
But I wasn't really learning the languages per-se, I was simply learning some basics of each language - if-else, for, while, that sort of thing.
It turns out there's more to most languages than this, so then I learnt about C#'s advanced language features and how they're implemented like LINQ, lambda expressions, extension methods, and so forth.
But then I found other languages were also implementing or already had implemented similar things like lambdas in C++11, and that in some ways it was just syntax again.
Eventually I realised that some of it is just syntax, but more fundamentally it's about understanding certain theory and principles of maths and computer science that are prevalent throughout languages and software and that come up in various guises and ways and it's understanding that that allows truly great developers to hope languages successfully, coupled with knowing the quirks and pitfalls of each and every language. That every now and then you'll encounter a language that follows a completely different paradigm and that what you thought you knew to be correct across all languages or all languages of a certain type/class/paradigm isn't necessarily so.
If you're say, a Java or C# developer and you end up on a PHP project then it's not enough to just know how to write those basic and common programming constructs, you have to know that PHP has contradictory equality operators and so forth to be able to write good software in it.
Don't feel too sad for the GP, he's just not very far along in this path of realisation. If he's the sort of developer that is good at self-improving he'll get there eventually. More than anything the idea that's it's "just syntax" that makes you sad, is simple inexperience and, everyone's inexperienced at some point. The real test of competence and worth is whether they choose to stay inexperienced or not.
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Most people who I see claim Visual Studio is not that great, or not as good as Eclipse seem to have done little more than load it up, make a default project and close it down.
Those who don't like it seem blissfully unaware of the things that make it great like it's refactoring tools, extremely smart and efficient intellisense, excellent debugging tools and decent testing functionality etc.
If you're one of those who just wants something where they can edit code, hit compile and have an executable then absolutely Visual Studio wont offer you an awful lot more (other than the best intellisense there is) than other IDEs but if you're doing fairly complex development and need all the tools an IDE makes available then Visual Studio definitely comes out way above things like Eclipse and even NetBeans as much as I like it for non-MS development.
"WebGL is fine."
Fine != Better performing.
Stop confusing the two and just admit you were wrong to pretend Javascript performs as well as Java. Java is still far better performing than Javascript and whilst Javascript may be "fine" for your needs it doesn't change the fact it's still too slow for others needs relative to Java.
"Over the past several years, there has been something of a renaissance in PC gaming. Skyrim, Far Cry 3, Dishonored, etc. Big games that deliver plenty of value to the consumer."
But here's the problem, those were first and foremost (perhaps with the exception of Skyrim) developed as console titles.
Gaming in general now seems tied to the consoles, my hardware from 2008 is still capable of playing just about every PC game that comes out to 1920x1200 resolution on my monitor with high or highest detail. Back in the late 90s and early 00s I couldn't build a PC for the same equivalent money that would last 2 years and give me the same performance on the latest and greatest games.
Game sales for the PC have been in decline for many years now and it seems to be a viscious circle - PC game sales decline, so less developers develop primarily or exclusively for the PC.
This said I've been playing PC games this last couple of years more than I have for years with Diablo III, Starcraft II, Minecraft, Wargame and so forth so I think things have actually been getting better if anything - the low point for me with PC games was about 2006 - 2011 I'd say where not much caught my interest and I found myself largely playing console games.
The PC games industry needs something to give it a kick up the arse and Kickstarter is a new thing to try and do that, I think it's way too early to proclaim it's failed given it's only been popular for about a year and the average game takes 2 - 3 years to develop. I also think large publishers are a reason why PC gaming has declined so any break away from them is positive too.
One area of PC gaming that was doing well even during the low point for me that I mentioned was with indie games, though sadly a lot of that seems to have headed off to the world of tablets and smartphones now, but it's ultimately what gave us things like Minecraft.
I think with a new release of consoles we'll also start to see PC gaming hardware pushed forward again once more, and with that I hope we'll also see a new drive to invest in PC gaming too. Here's hoping at least.
But probably not, and that's the problem.
Like The Daily Mail, Florian Mueller has so little credibility at this point that it's impossible to trust anything he says with any degree of confidence.
Much better to go elsewhere, to somewhere with a track record of genuinely being able to report factually with some consistency.
But isn't this just a question of developer competence?
I agree it seems to be more of a bane in the games industry somewhat because the games industry has been historically lagging in terms of good software engineering practices, but this is a problem that's well understood and exists in pretty much every software project ever conceived and even some non-software projects.
There's no reason for example that games should be more prone to feature creep and delays than the Pebble Smart Watch at the end of the day but I'm sure they too wanted to build the coolest watch possible in their eyes also.
I'm a lefty and I use my mouse with my left hand but to use the left hand shortcuts like ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v etc. whilst still holding the mouse, I do this groundbreaking thing.
I move my arm.
I don't really understand why this comes up time and time again, it's just pedantic and meaningless.
The term comes from 70s pirate radio stations that used to broadcast to the UK from international waters in the North Sea when radio was heavily licensed and regulated. They were playing music unlicensed at sea. Pirate radio was a fair enough term for it and was worn with a badge of honour.
I don't really care that the term has extended where it is now, pirates are cool and I think the only people who think it sounds menacing are the handful of people who use it disparagingly. The rest of the population see it as a badge of honour, just as what happened with ASBOs.
Interesting historical aside, pirate radio eventually led to the liberalisation of the airwaves and opening up of them to additional broadcasters other than just the BBC giving us the much more vibrant radio scene we have today. Perhaps there's a lesson there for the MPs about how it ended up last time.
Well I'm afraid you thought wrong.
There's the IWF CP blocklist which is the closest we have, but not every provider implements that anyway.
Dunno where you live but in the UK this is very well defined. There are different levels of severity of images and decision to prosecute is based on that.
If it's someone's family photos it'll be categorised no risk, someone who looks about 15 sleeping consensually with someone who looks about 17 will be classed as little risk, running all the way through to violent abuse of a baby which will get the most severe rating.
Categories are I believe defined by a combination of age of people involved and apparent level of consent.
I believe CEOP/the police maintain a database of images gathered from raids, arrests, and so forth too so existing images can simply be referenced against this automatically.
I believe this is how a lot of Google's blocking occurs - the likes of CEOP/IWF/Police get links reported to them, and they're automatically checked against the database and if it's a hit it's sent to Google to be blocked automatically which is why they can have such a fast response time on a lot of images. It's only new images that take a little longer and require a bit of detective work to determine the category/rating and I think even some of this is automated - i.e. if there is a face visible then facial recognition is performed against images in the database too to allow investigators to compare. I don't know how effective all this is, it's just what I've read but a lot of time seems to have been put into solving this exact problems.
This is also why the content industries have pushed for "legal content" databases, but I still don't know how that would work. If the database has a game as protected and the developer years later releases it for free and someone doesn't update the database then it's going to get blocked and as GP said that's really the problem here - abuse images are always illegal, access to digital content, not so much.
Or even better, just filter out just Labour, just the Conservatives or both and see how much they shit themselves then when the only news on the internet is about other parties.
That's definitely a developer issue. The various .NET framework versions sit alongside each other, and there is plenty of functionality for ensuring .NET assemblies don't clash (DLL hell was one of the key things they wanted to avoid with .NET). There's a thing called the Global Assembly Cache with .NET which is a place you can cache common libraries, because they foresaw the fact that people may want to cache different versions of the same library if you have apps that are dependent on different versions they explicitly made sure it was possible to have multiple versions alongside each other and to ensure applications would always access the correct version. Ironically it's C/C++ that has historically suffered DLL hell and dependency mismatches because native development didn't have the level of functionality .NET has to solve that sort of problem.
If you've got an issue with clashing dependencies in .NET then that's entirely an issue of developers without even the slightest clue what they're doing with .NET. It worries me that ATI is trusting people this unskilled and incompetent with software that interacts with hardware and sits on millions of computers.
Sigh. Plants, not pants.
You'd think I'd have learnt my lesson not to type internet posts on a phone with stupid auto correct without quadruple proof reading by now.
Hey, even nerds have gardens and growing exotic pants you never see in UK gardens like my cold hardy cacti collection makes it all the more a geeky project as it's an engineering and biology feat to keep them alive in a British winter :)
Given that all you were able to do was spout shit and not offer a rational counter argument to my original post then how could I assume anything else? It's not like you had a point to make, you just didn't like the point I made backed up with solid evidence and reason.
I'm sorry you hate the reality, but that doesn't make it wrong. If you think it's not the reality then rebut my original points with a rational argument or stop fucking crying.
Is there any reason this couldn't have simply been a coincidence that someone speculatively traded at the right time and won big?
I don't know much about the way the US' financial system works but in the UK such announcements are pretty predictable in terms of timing, the meetings that decide such things are public knowledge, so if someone makes such a trade each surrounding hour then for each hour they get wrong they may lose a tiny amount because it'll be business as usual, but for the hour they get right they would win big.
I mean, is there something about the US system that makes this sort of thing rare and unpredictable given that it seems to have been done on the dot on the hour? Is there some reason to suspect this was even an inside job in the first place?
Agreed.
I've been to many countries around the globe and few have TV as great quality as we have in the UK and the BBC is the reason for that.
If it weren't for the BBC's advertising uninterrupted shows and so forth you'd rapidly see the race to the bottom you get in North American TV where you can't go 5 minutes without an advert interrupting your show.
In North America you have to have over a hundred channels just to have a chance of anything decent popping up amongst all the shit. I like the fact that in the UK you can find something worth watching nearly all the time by checking only a handful of channels because the quality bar is set high enough by the BBC that they all have to provide as good or better stuff to compete raising the bar in general.
The BBC is one thing the UK does absolutely right.
I didn't realise that as I haven't been able to watch it in many years because I go to bed for work well before it's on.
Didn't it used to be live? I always thought that was part of the charm of it.
Perhaps when I was a teen and did stay up that late the episodes I watched did just happen to be live (because I know at least some were), hence why I assumed they all were.
I didn't notice the GW change in format but possibly because I only watch it now and again. The problem I have with it is they seem to cover the same old plants over and over and over again when there's so much more variety people grow that they simply ignore.
It's more like Monty Don's favourite plants show and whilst I like the guy as a presenter I do wish he'd step outside his comfort zone and look at some slightly different things now and again.
Perhaps I've just missed the shows where he does that, but I see no worthwhile coverage of more exotic plants like palms, orchids, cacti, carnivorous, bonsai, bromeliads and so forth though this is a trait I see in general with the BBC - their coverage of Chelsea and Tatton Park and so forth seems to ignore these too, despite them being a fairly major part of said shows - they combined probably comprise about 30% of the stands, but only get about 1% of the coverage.
If you're not growing potatoes or roses, the BBC just doesn't seem to want to know, but they'll quite happily tell you time and time again how to grow these same sorts of things as if you hadn't heard it all before and hadn't come across it in a billion books selling for 50p at your local The Works.
The only mitigation to the problem has been Around the World in 80 Gardens, but that was a one-off series.
I guess it's a question as to whether he'd want to do such late night show bearing in mind he's a lecturer at Manchester Uni.
It could be quite a problem staying up that late only to have to give a lecture the next morning.
Because unlike most presenters he actually seems passionate about the subjects he presents on?
I see other presenters like Ben Fogle, but he comes across as a presenter presenting whatever he's been told to present on even if he's not interested in it, but with Cox you see a clear passion for the subject which is what IMO makes him great at putting across the ideas and concepts in his shows.
About the only other presenters for science based shows I can think of that have this level of passion and gives them the same level of excellence in presenting as a result of that genuine interest in what they are presenting are Attenborough and du Sautoy.
Some of the Horizon presenters do a similarly good job, but they're normally one-offs.
It's nice to have presenters that are interested and knowledgeable about the topics they present rather than presenters that are presenting a topic for the simple reason they're paid to do so.
FWIW I'm in my early 30s so no it's not just teenagers and I know lots of people who like him my age and older, whatever such anecdotes are worth.
I'm not necessarily saying the NSA hasn't broken SSL, but to be fair I think Snowden's comment (and that in related articles) is a little ambiguous.
"Bullrun has successfully foiled several of the worldâ(TM)s standard encryption methods, including SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), VPN (virtual private networks), and the encryption on 4G (fourth generation) smartphones."
This doesn't explicitly state that:
1) All SSL is broken
2) They can take a log of arbitrary SSL data and trivially and consistently decrypt it
The lack of specificity means it could equally be read as meaning it's been successful at acquiring plain text data through some man in the middle attacks, but not that SSL in general has been broken.
I had a look for more information on Bullrun but I can't find anything that really changes this fact.
But don't shoot the messenger here, I think if nothing else it's good to assume that SSL has been broken and take precautions based upon that. I'm just playing devil's advocate in pointing out that Snowden's comments are ambiguous and that the impression the NSA has definitely broken SSL stems only from one specific interpretation of those comments when there are in fact other valid interpretations that could suggest otherwise. It's quite possible (wouldn't be the first time) that the media have jumped to an extreme interpretation and made it out to be something it's not.
FWIW there was a news story just a couple of days ago on the BBC about how scientists now believe people are still adolescents until 25 - that the brain is still very much developing until at least this point, and the idea of 18 being the switching point to adulthood is completely false.
This implies that 18 ratings are utterly meaningless anyway. It means that even if violent media could have an effect on development of people that it could just as well do so between 18 - 25 and so unless those claiming so can provide some evidence of increased violence amongst 18 - 25 year olds at the advent of computer games then it's a complete lie.
Given that it seems to be confirmed now that brains are still just as much developing and maturing up until 25 the allowance of access to violent media at 18 would result in a sharp increase in violent people, but this isn't true. Whilst the peak ages for crime are 14 - 25, there isn't a sudden jump at 18 which the theory that access to violent media causes an increase in violence in developing brains would require to be true.
There's also no correlation between violent crime and the graphic quality of violent media. In fact, as computer game violence has become more graphic and more realistic, crime has actually dropped in the UK which further suggests no link as you would likely expect the change from pixelated NES Mario style violence and really poor quality barely believable late 80s/early 90s style blood in the movies to modern day GTA V torture, and human centipede/hostel levels of twistedness would also have an increasing impact.
"PHP is actually a pretty nice language. It's basically just C with dollar signs, classes, and better string and array handling, stuffed into a fairly straightforward HTML template language."
It's all relative, that's the problem. If you're viewing PHP as someone who doesn't code, hasn't worked with any/many other languages, or only writes small hackish programs rather than say larger scale applications then you're going to view it as okay, because it's still probably better than what you had before which may have simply been nothing.
But if you've had a reasonable amount of experience developing large applications in say Java, C#, C++ or the sort then coming to PHP you're going to quickly recognise severe deficiencies with it and find it makes things more awkward than they need be.
I worked on an 18 month PHP project and whilst all of us had the competence to understand the pitfalls of the language and end up producing something on time, under budget and of good quality the fact remains that if we had instead used C# or Java we could've developed it even quicker and to an even higher degree of quality.
I'll be honest, in part this is because PHP was the wrong tool for the job IMO (I unfortunately only took over as lead dev after the project was started and the damage was done), I think dynamically typed languages are inherently bad for large projects for the simple fact that compiled, statically typed languages catch more errors at compile time and hence create an inherently better level of software quality from the outset. The fact is that whilst PHP and interpreted languages in general let you get off the ground quicker, they also leave you spending way more time debugging, and trying to reproduce hard to reproduce errors such that the net effect is a loss in overall development time relative to the size of the project. The fact PHP has so many quirks exacerbates this problem.
I'm not necessarily saying this applies to you, but for the most part, people who think PHP is good only think so simply because they've never had the pleasure of working with anything better, and that's the problem. The vast majority of PHP developers defend the language simply because they don't realise how much better things can actually be. If you're equally skilled in C#, Java, and PHP, you'll always have a way easier time developing a decent sized project in the first two than you will in PHP.
Which is why the criticism of PHP - yes you can get stuff done with it, but you can get stuff done better in alternative languages and that's PHP's problem- apart from being widespread it simply does everything other languages do but not as well. I don't think there's a single area of software development now where you couldn't find something to do what PHP does but better.
Through my career I've noticed this sort of belief come and go.
At first, when I learnt my first language, I was impressed by people who knew multiple languages.
Then I learnt my second language and thought hey, languages are just syntax, and I learnt a few more languages.
But I wasn't really learning the languages per-se, I was simply learning some basics of each language - if-else, for, while, that sort of thing.
It turns out there's more to most languages than this, so then I learnt about C#'s advanced language features and how they're implemented like LINQ, lambda expressions, extension methods, and so forth.
But then I found other languages were also implementing or already had implemented similar things like lambdas in C++11, and that in some ways it was just syntax again.
Eventually I realised that some of it is just syntax, but more fundamentally it's about understanding certain theory and principles of maths and computer science that are prevalent throughout languages and software and that come up in various guises and ways and it's understanding that that allows truly great developers to hope languages successfully, coupled with knowing the quirks and pitfalls of each and every language. That every now and then you'll encounter a language that follows a completely different paradigm and that what you thought you knew to be correct across all languages or all languages of a certain type/class/paradigm isn't necessarily so.
If you're say, a Java or C# developer and you end up on a PHP project then it's not enough to just know how to write those basic and common programming constructs, you have to know that PHP has contradictory equality operators and so forth to be able to write good software in it.
Don't feel too sad for the GP, he's just not very far along in this path of realisation. If he's the sort of developer that is good at self-improving he'll get there eventually. More than anything the idea that's it's "just syntax" that makes you sad, is simple inexperience and, everyone's inexperienced at some point. The real test of competence and worth is whether they choose to stay inexperienced or not.
Declining profits, declining share price. It's not me that has to worry about being incorrect.
Cry more fanboy.