"But its always good to learn a new language. ASP.Net is also nice if you don't want to go dynamic."
Microsoft implemented the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) in.NET 4 that allows you to have dynamic objects. The best part is you can even do your own dynamic implementation quite trivially (it's just a case of implementing certain interfaces, inheriting certain objects). This means you have the best of both worlds, you can go dynamic where it makes sense, whilst stick to the benefits of type safety and better performance where it matters. It's really a pretty cool piece of technology.
"Because it is so easy to get started with it and actually get something working relatively quickly, do consider PHP, it has a quick learning curve and really does provides ample flexibility and power."
None of this is true, the speed of getting something up and running with PHP is a false economy, because you'll inevitably lose hours down the run chasing bugs that result from poor language and library design, and trying to get it to do things it's just not built to handle.
It doesn't provide anywhere near enough flexibility and power for anything that goes beyond the most basic of websites, for example, it has no real multi-threading support which is an absolute necessity for anything non-trivial and you have to use horrible flawed and hackish workarounds like curl. The end result is that you might as well have just used something like ASP.NET MVC, or Spring, or RoR in the first place, because even if they did take a bit longer to get hello world running, the fact they have far better IDEs and tools backing them, coupled with far better designed languages for writing them in, better libraries supporting them - and important, fundamentally important features like proper multi-threading support from the outset, and that they perform better to boot, means that any time saved getting your hello world app going at the start is long lost in the long run.
PHP is fine for the most trivial sites, where you don't need anything fancy, and aren't fussed about performance, security, maintainability and that sort of thing, but for anything else? It's just not the right choice at all.
How is it well developed? a number of it's features have been developed in such a way that it's clear the developers don't even have a basic understanding of undergraduate level language design material and the libraries can't even get naming conventions consistent.
I agree it's ubiquitous, and quick and easy to get up and running, but PHP is probably the least well developed mainstream language around. It's largely just been hacked together.
Personally I'd use ASP.NET MVC or something like Java and Spring if you don't want to go the Microsoft route.
I know others mentioned things like Grails which sit on top of things like Spring, but honestly my experience has always been that if you add yet another layer of abstraction, you're just creating more places for things to go wrong, and putting something else in your way when you start creating something that goes slightly beyond non-trivial such that you'll end up having to put forth ugly hacks to work round it. I haven't worked with Grails, so I can't say if this is the case for it, maybe it's the rare (unique?) exception, but to me the frameworks by themselves usually do the trick just fine, then you can also mix and match - chuck in jQuery and nHibernate if you want, or don't if you don't.
But honestly, if you're working in a Microsoft shop doing internal web apps, or self-hosted web apps where you have Microsoft hosting, then ASP.NET MVC is a breeze to work with, it's so painless, so easy to extend, and makes it so easy to make sure your site is secure, well tested etc. The more advanced language features of C# just add to this, so if you're comfortable with the contents of a book like C# in Depth, then you'll really be able to do some great stuff really quickly with it.
"I read the nice rant in your sig and it's incorrect in a lot of places. I could spend the time to write several paragraphs explaining in detail several areas you got blatantly wrong, but it's apparent you wouldn't listen."
Please do, I'd like to hear where else it's wrong so that I'm not just getting one side of the story. There's an awful lot of bad things in that article, are you saying they're all wrong? or that just because one or two out of hundreds of points are wrong the whole article is invalid?
I'm still wondering where this money is even going. When you consider all the corporations that will have to buy one of these, and all the similar and related TLDs to their name and proudcts this is going to net ICANN literally many billions of dollars in profit yet ICANN is meant to be non-profit. Where is that money going? Is each member of staff at ICANN just going to get billion dollar paychecks or what?
The UN doesn't make laws, so I'm not really sure how they could've make it a crime. The human rights council adopted a resolution by a mere margin of 3 out of about 50 votes back in 2010 which is what you're presumably referring to, but this holds no weight on UN constituent countries laws.
The resolution effectively just says "The UN should do something more to support this idea", but it's ultimately failed because then it has to get through the general assembly where guess what? It never gets enough support each time it's brought up there. This example, somewhat ironically, kind of completely disproves your point.
The internet is already being tarnished by US censorship.
It's the same here in the UK, you only have to look at the minutes from Jeremy Hunt as the Leveson enquiry into Murdoch's regime of corruption yesterday.
Jeremy Hunt said in an e-mail or two something along the lines of "The public mood seems to be against Murdoch's empire right now, so we have to look at how we can approve this deal without that being a problem".
It's like he outright believes, in his mind, that he has to do what his corporate masters said, and despite being completely and utterly 100% aware of what the people he represented wanted, his focus was entirely about how he could avoid doing what they wanted (i.e. blocking the deal in question) and instead see how he could do what they wanted (letting the deal go through).
The politicians are fully aware of what the populace want, the problem is they neither care, nor feel obliged to fulfil that. They sincerely believe their job is about doing what they or their corporate masters want with the only reference to the people they're meant to represent being about how they "manage" their breaking of the news they don't want to hear to them.
Why were they being arrogant? Pretty much the entire rest of the country seems to have had no problem with them including many old villages around here that even have specially designed streetlights in place by the local council to maintain the historic look of the place.
I don't see why these two councils felt they deserved special treatment, deserved BT to spend even more money designing/buying/testing/installing specially designed cabinets just for them leaving BT with even less money in it's fibre rollout pot to spend on people elsewhere in the country who can currently only dream of getting fibre.
It more seems like the councils were being a bit arrogant, believing they were special - perhaps if said councils want special treatment they should fucking fund it. Our local council had to pay BT to even make the usual fibre cabinets viable to install around here, so these ultra-rich councils can certainly find cash if they want specially designed cabinets installing instead. Why should BT foot the bill against it's will? Why should other people not get fibre at all because BT had to put more money into these people feeling they're owed special treatment?
They can already get Virgin's fibre service and already have Virgin cabinets and the older BT cabinets around the place, if BT has deemed that meeting their demands isn't cost effective them good on BT for basically just telling them to go screw themselves. Now BT can go and invest that money and use that equipment elsewhere, where people will actually appreciate it.
Judging by the language used by BT, it sounds like they suspect someone on the council is trying to protect Virgin's monopoly in the area more than anything anyway and if that's the case then it really is the council's problem.
Yep, this is merely scaremongering at it's greatest.
America can quote the names of countries it believes instills fear in it's populace all it wants, but those countries can't do jack shit when the rest of the world would oppose it.
The fact is, if a proposal couldn't get the EU and US on board, then it wouldn't stand a chance in hell of passing anyway, so the only reason this fear mongering would ever hold true is if America sided with Iran, China, Russia, North Korea or whatever other country names it's trying to cause fear with.
But then, maybe that's the problem? maybe the US is afraid it would side with them given the fact it's to date the only country that has enforced it's national principles on the global internet with ICE domain seizures of international domains, owned by international businesses.
This article is a perfect example of the term FUD, it is 100% FUD, an attempt to retain control of the internet by the US so it can enforce it's ridiculous IP policies on the rest of the internet against the will of the rest of the world.
UN control of the internet would never be dictated by a minority in the way some special interest UN committees and groupings are like the WTO, which is a puppet of US trade policy, historically setup because WIPO was previously too democratic for the US and didn't let the US push it's self-interest globally due to numerous democratic defeats by countries like Africa disagreeing with the lengths of America's patent and copyright terms for example.
Really, the solution is simple - tenatively support transfer of control to the UN, and see what's proposed, if the proposal is that any one country can do something nasty, then refuse to participate in the process and hence prevent it going ahead. If however a proposal is put forward that protects neutrality of the internet, prevents arbitrary censorship by any one nation, etc. then we're in a far far better situation than we are now. The US doesn't want that though, because it wants to enforce it's own arbitrary censorship on the globe, and THAT is why it's spreading this FUD, rather than offering to engage in the process of making the internet safer from government meddling and censorship by forcing it into an organisation that requires consensus.
Really, between ICE seizures, and the whole custom TLD thing which seems merely designed to make ICANN billions of dollars in revenue whilst completely fucking up the hierachial structure of the DNS I don't know how the US can claim either moral, or technical superiority as an excuse to continue controlling the internet. With the US becoming ever more right wing, and ever more religiously zealous it's becoming ever less trustworthy as a guardian of the internet. Things are only going to continue to get worse under US stewardship of the internet, PIPA, SOPA, ACTA et. al. have only been a preview of that, Obama said he'd have vetoed the bills had they made it to him, would Romney? would the next Bush?
So to take the parents point about "could allow", "might allow", "tries to", I'd like to point out that these statements also apply to the US though personally I'd replace these with "probably will within the next couple of decades".
"It even gives me hope that my government (Canada) might make the same realization before their next attempt to ram some US-written legislation through!"
That wont happen until you kick out George Harper. Wait, no, that's not right, Stephen Bush? nope, er, yeah, Stephen Harper, that's the one. Sorry, the two are indistinguishable in all but smugness, whereas Mr Harper looks extremely smug about how he managed to get away with electoral fiddling, Bush always looked a bit gormless instead.
Your last government would indeed almost certainly have done this, but Canada gave up it's independence from America when they voted the current overly smug looking god bothering chimp in.
"Why are corporations people? Because otherwise, they couldn't own property, and could not be sued."
Why's that?
"Derick is upset, and goes to sue ACME in court, however, since ACME is not a person, he cannot sue ACME."
Nope, still wrong.
The entire premise of your argument is that there's some mystical brick wall blocking companies from being sued if they are not people, this is perhaps one of the most obscure arguments I've ever heard and is right up there with "god exists, because he does".
Elsewhere in the world we have absolutely no problems allowing people to sue companies, the world doesn't end for us when it happens or anything like that, the company just gets sued. If there is a case of negligence within the company by an individual, or group of individuals that can be investigated also.
Perhaps America has some thing in their silly constitution (I wont go into why it's silly in detail, that's an argument for another day, but needless to say thinking a few hundred year old document can remain indefinitely relevant is dumb whilst all sections of the political spectrum breach it when it suits, whilst claiming only the other guy's breach of it is really a breach) which they refer to for just about everything in much the same way as religious nutcases grasp onto the bible for answers when things get a bit confusing for them, but if it does have some clause, which I highly doubt it does, that says "Corporations cannot be sued unless they are deemed to be people", then the solution is not to make corporations people, it is to remove that kind of absurd clause.
"Look, I'm sorry but you have it all wrong IMO. The whole point of HTML (and later JavaScript and CSS) was that it should not matter what browser you have, the stuff just works. The whole "works in my browsers" argument should have never happened, and was avoided so easily that it's scary. To argue that you must at this point in time is a rather retarded way of thinking."
Wait what? accepting the reality of the situation for what it is is a retarded way of thinking? Look, accepting reality for what it is does not mean it's how I'd like things to be, I agree the situation should never have happened, but it did. If you actually deal with these things though day to day you have to be realistic and accept it the way it is and hope for improvement moving forward.
"Why do most sites work in Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, Konquerer, etc... etc... with identical code? OMFG, they support "STANDARDS"."
They don't any more so than IE does really since the post-IE6 world - versions of Firefox as old as IE7 were just as flawed, but comparing like for like modern browsers like IE9 and they all do just as good a job now.
"Microsoft has a history of bastardizing standards to suite their needs and create lock in to their products."
Agreed, but please also realise that the whole WHATWG hijacking of web standards from the W3C was absolutely a case of Mozilla/Apple also deciding to hijack the web. What they've come up with with HTML5 is a pretty weak spec for desktop browsers, but in it's push away from XML it completely rapes other user agents such as screen readers, or text only readers hopes of having a more compatible, more parsable web that the XHTML route offered. It's also worth noting that just about all browsers failed for a long time to implement proper XML parsing option, or in other words like XML parsing path or not, just about every browser vendor failed to fully implement that standard also. You must realise that the W3C is slow because it is represenative of a wide range of companies - you only have to look at the companies involved to see how well it represented the technology world in trying to offer standards that would support everyone's needs. Compare that to WHATWG and you'll see that WHATWG was equally a coup - an attempt to wrestle away standards from the highly democratic, highly representative (even if slow) W3C and put them in the hands of just a few developers at only a couple of companies. Don't think for one minute that companies nowadays are no longer trying to control the web and push it their own way. HTML5's production was entirely totalitarian - if Ian Hickson didn't like what you had to say, even if the majority of the rest of the web agreed with you and you were objectively correct, the change didn't go in. Sure this method of standards development is quicker, but it's also not healthy. You only have to look at the failure to agree a video standard to see the problem - the handful of people involved just wanted to use the standard as an attempt to push their own preferred video format when realistically a generic market based approach as is how other content on the web (such as image formats for the image tag) was always the saner option anyway.
You're not wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you at all - Microsoft and Netscape both implemented some horrible proprietary extensions in their battle to control the web, Netscape lost and we were left with Microsoft's extensions and interpretations as a disease on the web for many many years until Firefox came along. Like you say, the situation should never have happened, but the reality is that it did happen, so if you work with the web, you simply do have to cater to it. Things are changing and improving but it has nothing whatsoever to do with changes to standards - it's simply about a now healthy browser market with increased competition. When IE6 was all that was left there was no incentive for Microsoft to improve standards support, now we have Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE all as viable options everyone is being forced to follow standards better.
It tails off towards newer versions of IE, with 6 of course requiring the most additional support, 7 requiring much less, 8 requiring a bit less, and 9 requiring basically none.
Your chance of encountering such an issue also decreases with the version increases too, so on 7 you're much less likely to need to do anything specific than you were with 6, 8 much less so again, and 9 pretty unlikely at all.
Nowadays I find that Firefox tends to be more divergent in terms of requiring special attention than Chrome/Safari/IE. The WebKit based browsers and IE seem to be far more closely aligned in terms of HTML/CSS/JS support now, than the WebKit based browsers and Firefox.
But specifically what sort of issues do you constantly run into that are so time consuming that you find IE that much more difficult to support? and in which versions? I can sympathise somewhat with supporting IE6, and IE7 can be awkward in the odd case now and again, but not particularly frequently and most definitely not anywhere near frequently enough to justify someone to spend 2 years at $50k a year fixing even the largest of sites for it.
Maybe Gary McKinnon should just switch to this defence.
"What? Sorry American military, I assumed because you had blank passwords that I had your implied consent I could login? Does this mean I don't have to be extradited"
Like you say, implied consent is basically a way of saying "You don't actually have to really give a shit about this law".
Yes, that's probably just because they fucked off to your competitor who made even more cash than you because they did support the 33% or whatever of the global population that is still using IE.
Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.
I don't like IE, but not supporting it is still just plain fucking stupid as you a) throw away a sizeable portion of potential customers, and b) It's not hard to support recent versions (which is the bulk of usage) now anyway. The $100,000 savings thing is either a big fat troll, or they have some either really really incompetent developers, or really really overpaid developers. If it costs you that to support most IE users when you already support say Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc. then your site and/or team is horribly broken.
We support all these browsers as well as Blackberry, Android, iOS, WP7, Symbian to boot, and I can't see how if you've been sensible about your use of templating/stylesheets/javascript libraries like jQuery etc. you could possibly spend this much on IE support unless you're trying to support as far back as like IE3 or something. It implies they're willing to pay the equivalent of say, a standard front end developer $50k a year to spend 2 years on IE support which is frankly fucking insane.
I suspect this story is just a rather long winded way of saying "We don't like Microsoft, down with IE" rather than something that has any basis in fact, which is also a shame really, because if they'd just come out and said that - i.e. exactly what they meant - then I'd have been able to just reply and say "Yep", instead.
The thing I took away from your post is that you're most likely a very bitter Christian American, who feels the world is out to get him, though I'm not sure what your point was other than that.
My working hours have tended to be more 8:30 - 4:30, with one place letting us do 8:30 - 4pm on Fridays with 30minute lunch.
But all except that job have offered flexi-time, so these are the kind of hours I tend to do, it's nice to be able to go home and actually have an evening, even if it means getting out of bed a bit earlier.
I've never worked anywhere that's asked for more than a 37 or 37.5 hour week, though I have often tended to do more off my own back it's always been optional, and I opted to do it because for the most part I've always liked my jobs though that might have something to do with the fact that if I ever get to the point where I don't like my job, I leave and go elsewhere rather than sit and whine about how I'm entitled to like my job and get paid more without having to put any effort into achieving exactly that like most of the working population seems to do.
Retail workers tend to work longer hours, my partner manages a number of stores and she would tend to do hours more like the GP implied as would her staff. The fact he mentioned retail is probably perhaps why he's been blinkered into this mindset - if he started out as a shop assistant or whatever then it's no suprise he thinks those hours are normal.
1) The queen didn't postpone or cancel the holiday, the government did
2) It is Microsoft's fault because no one else has both access to the source code and the ability to push out a correction other than Microsoft
3) Yes it would be mentioned if it was another country, I recall a number of stories on this sort of topic for countries as small as Samoa, and Tokelau. Here, have some:
There are plenty of books out there showing excitement for Hitler's rise to power too, even a number of British politicians were pro-Hitler for quite some time for example.
But that was by no means an overwhelming view. I'm not sure you can really judge from just the odd opinion that it wasn't morally obvious. Certainly the fact that Britain and it's Commonwealth allies, as well as Russia, and the US were able to justify supporting the Chinese financially and militarily against Japan implies there must've been some fairly strong global public support for precisely that.
Still, it's all so far away now anyway isn't it? China, Russia, the UK and the US fighting as allies against Japan? Given todays global political tension between those nations people could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a work of fiction.
I'm not really sure you can call embargos against hostile action an act of war. This seems to imply, from your point of view, that if North Korea or Iran were to nuke a US city because the US imposes sanctions and embargoes on them, then any counter-strike against that country would not be justified?
Political pressure and actions really cannot be deemed to be an act of war. War is a very much more serious step on from that, war is when you start rolling tanks, planes, or ships over the other guy's border, and that's exactly what Japan did.
"Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically."
Have you never heard of the rape of nanking? Japan was war mongering well before even the war in Europe had gotten underway, it was an imperialist nation no different to the Western nations you criticise for provoking them, it's whole purpose for war against China starting primarily in 1937 was because it wanted to take it over.
That's why Japan was under embargo - because it had rolled into China, before Hitler had even rolled into Poland.
Christ, I'm probably one of the least pro-American people you'll meet but Pearl Harbour WAS rational for doing something to Japan, because it was a further extension of Japan's military aggression in the Pacific.
They weren't some innocent country who we just embargoed because we thought it'd be a bit of a laugh, we did so because they were a major destabilising force in the region, we attempted political pressure through embargos and it didn't work. From that point on the only option was full out war against Japan - they started the war in the Pacific long before the west really got involved. The West gave them 4 years to give up their imperialist ambitions and during that time they committed countless massacres, mass-rapes, and general destruction of Chinese cities and infrastructure, when they finally hit Pearl Harbour it was no fucking wonder the West decided enough was enough. No rationale? seriously? You think Japan should've just been allowed to go on destroying, raping, and pillaging the whole Pacific, extending it's war it started in 1937?
"Not a fan of his personality but since Gates has left: XBox,.Net, Windows server ~3X gain in market share, dido database solutions."
This isn't because of some magical action, but because Ballmer left them alone to go down the path Gates had already set them on. Effectively all Ballmer had to do was recognise these segments were growing and leave the teams the fuck alone to keep growing them - even a CEO as shit as him can manage that.
The key issue is that under Ballmer no new product lines have arisen and been succesful. Just about every succesful product line Microsoft has now, stems from the Gates era. There have been a number of new high growth markets - portable media players, tablets, cell phones, and in every case, Ballmer has failed to grasp them and form a cohesive and succesful strategy around them. Even the web he's struggled with, I've never heard of anyone using Office 365, but I know plenty of people that use Google Apps for example. Their closest thing to success there has been Bing which basically just had an absolute fuckton of money thrown at it in terms of getting it as a default browser, and shit loads of advertising until it actually got to a slightly better than negligible market share.
I don't disagree that Microsoft is still doing well as a business, but the point is it's basically on cruise control and that only works until you run out of gas. The world of computing is changing, it's become, and becoming more and more web and mobile based, but Microsoft isn't managing to follow - it's profits still come almost entirely from the desktop and server markets.
This is why Ballmer is an abysmal failure of a CEO, because all he's achieved at Microsoft is to keep it on the same path it's been for the last 10 years, which sure, means that it's growing whilst that path remains viable, but what about when that path stops being viable? what if something comes along and eats into that path? What if say, Apple decides it is willing to start shipping and supporting Mac OS X for PCs and an office suite now that they have more than enough money to pursue that kind of venture? We know Jobs wouldn't have allowed it, but the new Apple, where Cook gives shareholders more of a say? What then for Microsoft? Their bottom line is under threat and they have nowhere else to run to.
The fact is that Gates built a company so big, strong, and powerful that even the worst CEO in the world would take a few decades to really kill it off. You only have to look at Sony for another example of this - it's only just now really beginning to start having to explain it's failings, despite having been run fairly incompetently for at least a decade, getting on for two. Sony's looking right now like it may well end up fading into the history books with it's continued decline, but it's taken along time, and it'll probably take at least another decade yet to truly falter, that's assuming they don't get their act together and bring in competent management in the meantime.
I do have an Android phone, I made a mistake in my original post in saying iOS, I meant MacOSX as I was intending to refer to my desktop/laptop replacements. I do have an iPad already, but that's because my partner won it in a competition. I'm not the biggest fan of it, it just kind of sits there and I've not found any use for it beyond looking up the odd website, but even there I find it more of a pain to navigate the web than if I just go to my desktop and do it from there - same goes with things like typing e-mails. Touch is nice when you have a Swype-like keyboard but otherwise I really can't help but feel touch is still a gimmick which works great for things like playing games, or are just reading information on an app like a newsreader, or Facebook, but is utterly useless if you actually want to get stuff done.
Linux is an alternative I guess, but I've never got on too well with it - always seem to spend more time pratting about fixing it and setting things up on it than actually being able to use it the many hundreds of times I've installed it on desktops.
As I said in a post elsewhere, whilst I agree Apple spreads a lot of FUD, to give them some credit, I do think they tend to stick to over-hyping their products, rather than attacking competitors when it comes to the PR side of things, whilst Microsoft, Facebook, and Oracle are outright nasty in that their entire PR campaigns seem built around attacking the competition, rather than showing off what they have to offer which frankly fucking stinks. The patent trolling by Apple is a different story of course though, and there's really little excuse for them triggering that off originally on the scale it's at now.
I'm glad to see your post, as yours, and the comments on Groklaw the other day where PJ asked journalists to consider, in light of the verdict, who had given the information to them that led to them writing stories very much in favour of Oracle's position, and very much against Google - i.e. those that always cited Florian Mueller as a "source". It's become my opinion too in recent months, and it's nice to see the corporate shilling backfiring. It's nice to see that the blatant shills with their high UID, never posted before, first posts are now getting voted to -1 where they belong, and posts pointing out the fact that such stories and events are the result of lobbying are finally getting outed as such.
Perhaps companies now seeing the exact opposite of what they were paying for becoming more prominent on articles and forums means they'll give the fuck up and we can go back to tech companies competing on their merits, tech news can go back to focussing on actual news rather than FUD, and politicians can go back to focussing on things that matter rather than lining their pockets with dirty tech company money. Yeah yeah, I know, that'll be too much to ask for, especially the last one, but one can dream right?
I've always felt Apple could be a bit annoying getting blatant PR stories with no real substance in the news, but to be fair on Apple, and very much to their credit - at least such stories were always focussed on selling a good and positive image of Apple and it's products, rather than trolling competitors.
Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, are all just being plain fucking nasty, and I don't like nasty companies. If I did, I'd probably also buy News Corp. newspapers. Companies like Google absolutely do do wrong, but at least they're not plain and outright nasty in the way Microsoft, Facebook, and Oracle are.
Slashdot Mirror
"But its always good to learn a new language. ASP.Net is also nice if you don't want to go dynamic."
Microsoft implemented the DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime) in .NET 4 that allows you to have dynamic objects. The best part is you can even do your own dynamic implementation quite trivially (it's just a case of implementing certain interfaces, inheriting certain objects). This means you have the best of both worlds, you can go dynamic where it makes sense, whilst stick to the benefits of type safety and better performance where it matters. It's really a pretty cool piece of technology.
"Because it is so easy to get started with it and actually get something working relatively quickly, do consider PHP, it has a quick learning curve and really does provides ample flexibility and power."
None of this is true, the speed of getting something up and running with PHP is a false economy, because you'll inevitably lose hours down the run chasing bugs that result from poor language and library design, and trying to get it to do things it's just not built to handle.
It doesn't provide anywhere near enough flexibility and power for anything that goes beyond the most basic of websites, for example, it has no real multi-threading support which is an absolute necessity for anything non-trivial and you have to use horrible flawed and hackish workarounds like curl. The end result is that you might as well have just used something like ASP.NET MVC, or Spring, or RoR in the first place, because even if they did take a bit longer to get hello world running, the fact they have far better IDEs and tools backing them, coupled with far better designed languages for writing them in, better libraries supporting them - and important, fundamentally important features like proper multi-threading support from the outset, and that they perform better to boot, means that any time saved getting your hello world app going at the start is long lost in the long run.
PHP is fine for the most trivial sites, where you don't need anything fancy, and aren't fussed about performance, security, maintainability and that sort of thing, but for anything else? It's just not the right choice at all.
"It's also ubiquitous and well developed."
How is it well developed? a number of it's features have been developed in such a way that it's clear the developers don't even have a basic understanding of undergraduate level language design material and the libraries can't even get naming conventions consistent.
I agree it's ubiquitous, and quick and easy to get up and running, but PHP is probably the least well developed mainstream language around. It's largely just been hacked together.
Personally I'd use ASP.NET MVC or something like Java and Spring if you don't want to go the Microsoft route.
I know others mentioned things like Grails which sit on top of things like Spring, but honestly my experience has always been that if you add yet another layer of abstraction, you're just creating more places for things to go wrong, and putting something else in your way when you start creating something that goes slightly beyond non-trivial such that you'll end up having to put forth ugly hacks to work round it. I haven't worked with Grails, so I can't say if this is the case for it, maybe it's the rare (unique?) exception, but to me the frameworks by themselves usually do the trick just fine, then you can also mix and match - chuck in jQuery and nHibernate if you want, or don't if you don't.
But honestly, if you're working in a Microsoft shop doing internal web apps, or self-hosted web apps where you have Microsoft hosting, then ASP.NET MVC is a breeze to work with, it's so painless, so easy to extend, and makes it so easy to make sure your site is secure, well tested etc. The more advanced language features of C# just add to this, so if you're comfortable with the contents of a book like C# in Depth, then you'll really be able to do some great stuff really quickly with it.
"I read the nice rant in your sig and it's incorrect in a lot of places. I could spend the time to write several paragraphs explaining in detail several areas you got blatantly wrong, but it's apparent you wouldn't listen."
Please do, I'd like to hear where else it's wrong so that I'm not just getting one side of the story. There's an awful lot of bad things in that article, are you saying they're all wrong? or that just because one or two out of hundreds of points are wrong the whole article is invalid?
I'm still wondering where this money is even going. When you consider all the corporations that will have to buy one of these, and all the similar and related TLDs to their name and proudcts this is going to net ICANN literally many billions of dollars in profit yet ICANN is meant to be non-profit. Where is that money going? Is each member of staff at ICANN just going to get billion dollar paychecks or what?
The UN doesn't make laws, so I'm not really sure how they could've make it a crime. The human rights council adopted a resolution by a mere margin of 3 out of about 50 votes back in 2010 which is what you're presumably referring to, but this holds no weight on UN constituent countries laws.
The resolution effectively just says "The UN should do something more to support this idea", but it's ultimately failed because then it has to get through the general assembly where guess what? It never gets enough support each time it's brought up there. This example, somewhat ironically, kind of completely disproves your point.
The internet is already being tarnished by US censorship.
It's the same here in the UK, you only have to look at the minutes from Jeremy Hunt as the Leveson enquiry into Murdoch's regime of corruption yesterday.
Jeremy Hunt said in an e-mail or two something along the lines of "The public mood seems to be against Murdoch's empire right now, so we have to look at how we can approve this deal without that being a problem".
It's like he outright believes, in his mind, that he has to do what his corporate masters said, and despite being completely and utterly 100% aware of what the people he represented wanted, his focus was entirely about how he could avoid doing what they wanted (i.e. blocking the deal in question) and instead see how he could do what they wanted (letting the deal go through).
The politicians are fully aware of what the populace want, the problem is they neither care, nor feel obliged to fulfil that. They sincerely believe their job is about doing what they or their corporate masters want with the only reference to the people they're meant to represent being about how they "manage" their breaking of the news they don't want to hear to them.
Why were they being arrogant? Pretty much the entire rest of the country seems to have had no problem with them including many old villages around here that even have specially designed streetlights in place by the local council to maintain the historic look of the place.
I don't see why these two councils felt they deserved special treatment, deserved BT to spend even more money designing/buying/testing/installing specially designed cabinets just for them leaving BT with even less money in it's fibre rollout pot to spend on people elsewhere in the country who can currently only dream of getting fibre.
It more seems like the councils were being a bit arrogant, believing they were special - perhaps if said councils want special treatment they should fucking fund it. Our local council had to pay BT to even make the usual fibre cabinets viable to install around here, so these ultra-rich councils can certainly find cash if they want specially designed cabinets installing instead. Why should BT foot the bill against it's will? Why should other people not get fibre at all because BT had to put more money into these people feeling they're owed special treatment?
They can already get Virgin's fibre service and already have Virgin cabinets and the older BT cabinets around the place, if BT has deemed that meeting their demands isn't cost effective them good on BT for basically just telling them to go screw themselves. Now BT can go and invest that money and use that equipment elsewhere, where people will actually appreciate it.
Judging by the language used by BT, it sounds like they suspect someone on the council is trying to protect Virgin's monopoly in the area more than anything anyway and if that's the case then it really is the council's problem.
Yep, this is merely scaremongering at it's greatest.
America can quote the names of countries it believes instills fear in it's populace all it wants, but those countries can't do jack shit when the rest of the world would oppose it.
The fact is, if a proposal couldn't get the EU and US on board, then it wouldn't stand a chance in hell of passing anyway, so the only reason this fear mongering would ever hold true is if America sided with Iran, China, Russia, North Korea or whatever other country names it's trying to cause fear with.
But then, maybe that's the problem? maybe the US is afraid it would side with them given the fact it's to date the only country that has enforced it's national principles on the global internet with ICE domain seizures of international domains, owned by international businesses.
This article is a perfect example of the term FUD, it is 100% FUD, an attempt to retain control of the internet by the US so it can enforce it's ridiculous IP policies on the rest of the internet against the will of the rest of the world.
UN control of the internet would never be dictated by a minority in the way some special interest UN committees and groupings are like the WTO, which is a puppet of US trade policy, historically setup because WIPO was previously too democratic for the US and didn't let the US push it's self-interest globally due to numerous democratic defeats by countries like Africa disagreeing with the lengths of America's patent and copyright terms for example.
Really, the solution is simple - tenatively support transfer of control to the UN, and see what's proposed, if the proposal is that any one country can do something nasty, then refuse to participate in the process and hence prevent it going ahead. If however a proposal is put forward that protects neutrality of the internet, prevents arbitrary censorship by any one nation, etc. then we're in a far far better situation than we are now. The US doesn't want that though, because it wants to enforce it's own arbitrary censorship on the globe, and THAT is why it's spreading this FUD, rather than offering to engage in the process of making the internet safer from government meddling and censorship by forcing it into an organisation that requires consensus.
Really, between ICE seizures, and the whole custom TLD thing which seems merely designed to make ICANN billions of dollars in revenue whilst completely fucking up the hierachial structure of the DNS I don't know how the US can claim either moral, or technical superiority as an excuse to continue controlling the internet. With the US becoming ever more right wing, and ever more religiously zealous it's becoming ever less trustworthy as a guardian of the internet. Things are only going to continue to get worse under US stewardship of the internet, PIPA, SOPA, ACTA et. al. have only been a preview of that, Obama said he'd have vetoed the bills had they made it to him, would Romney? would the next Bush?
So to take the parents point about "could allow", "might allow", "tries to", I'd like to point out that these statements also apply to the US though personally I'd replace these with "probably will within the next couple of decades".
"It even gives me hope that my government (Canada) might make the same realization before their next attempt to ram some US-written legislation through!"
That wont happen until you kick out George Harper. Wait, no, that's not right, Stephen Bush? nope, er, yeah, Stephen Harper, that's the one. Sorry, the two are indistinguishable in all but smugness, whereas Mr Harper looks extremely smug about how he managed to get away with electoral fiddling, Bush always looked a bit gormless instead.
Your last government would indeed almost certainly have done this, but Canada gave up it's independence from America when they voted the current overly smug looking god bothering chimp in.
"Why are corporations people? Because otherwise, they couldn't own property, and could not be sued."
Why's that?
"Derick is upset, and goes to sue ACME in court, however, since ACME is not a person, he cannot sue ACME."
Nope, still wrong.
The entire premise of your argument is that there's some mystical brick wall blocking companies from being sued if they are not people, this is perhaps one of the most obscure arguments I've ever heard and is right up there with "god exists, because he does".
Elsewhere in the world we have absolutely no problems allowing people to sue companies, the world doesn't end for us when it happens or anything like that, the company just gets sued. If there is a case of negligence within the company by an individual, or group of individuals that can be investigated also.
Perhaps America has some thing in their silly constitution (I wont go into why it's silly in detail, that's an argument for another day, but needless to say thinking a few hundred year old document can remain indefinitely relevant is dumb whilst all sections of the political spectrum breach it when it suits, whilst claiming only the other guy's breach of it is really a breach) which they refer to for just about everything in much the same way as religious nutcases grasp onto the bible for answers when things get a bit confusing for them, but if it does have some clause, which I highly doubt it does, that says "Corporations cannot be sued unless they are deemed to be people", then the solution is not to make corporations people, it is to remove that kind of absurd clause.
"Look, I'm sorry but you have it all wrong IMO. The whole point of HTML (and later JavaScript and CSS) was that it should not matter what browser you have, the stuff just works. The whole "works in my browsers" argument should have never happened, and was avoided so easily that it's scary. To argue that you must at this point in time is a rather retarded way of thinking."
Wait what? accepting the reality of the situation for what it is is a retarded way of thinking? Look, accepting reality for what it is does not mean it's how I'd like things to be, I agree the situation should never have happened, but it did. If you actually deal with these things though day to day you have to be realistic and accept it the way it is and hope for improvement moving forward.
"Why do most sites work in Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, Konquerer, etc... etc... with identical code? OMFG, they support "STANDARDS"."
They don't any more so than IE does really since the post-IE6 world - versions of Firefox as old as IE7 were just as flawed, but comparing like for like modern browsers like IE9 and they all do just as good a job now.
"Microsoft has a history of bastardizing standards to suite their needs and create lock in to their products."
Agreed, but please also realise that the whole WHATWG hijacking of web standards from the W3C was absolutely a case of Mozilla/Apple also deciding to hijack the web. What they've come up with with HTML5 is a pretty weak spec for desktop browsers, but in it's push away from XML it completely rapes other user agents such as screen readers, or text only readers hopes of having a more compatible, more parsable web that the XHTML route offered. It's also worth noting that just about all browsers failed for a long time to implement proper XML parsing option, or in other words like XML parsing path or not, just about every browser vendor failed to fully implement that standard also. You must realise that the W3C is slow because it is represenative of a wide range of companies - you only have to look at the companies involved to see how well it represented the technology world in trying to offer standards that would support everyone's needs. Compare that to WHATWG and you'll see that WHATWG was equally a coup - an attempt to wrestle away standards from the highly democratic, highly representative (even if slow) W3C and put them in the hands of just a few developers at only a couple of companies. Don't think for one minute that companies nowadays are no longer trying to control the web and push it their own way. HTML5's production was entirely totalitarian - if Ian Hickson didn't like what you had to say, even if the majority of the rest of the web agreed with you and you were objectively correct, the change didn't go in. Sure this method of standards development is quicker, but it's also not healthy. You only have to look at the failure to agree a video standard to see the problem - the handful of people involved just wanted to use the standard as an attempt to push their own preferred video format when realistically a generic market based approach as is how other content on the web (such as image formats for the image tag) was always the saner option anyway.
You're not wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you at all - Microsoft and Netscape both implemented some horrible proprietary extensions in their battle to control the web, Netscape lost and we were left with Microsoft's extensions and interpretations as a disease on the web for many many years until Firefox came along. Like you say, the situation should never have happened, but the reality is that it did happen, so if you work with the web, you simply do have to cater to it. Things are changing and improving but it has nothing whatsoever to do with changes to standards - it's simply about a now healthy browser market with increased competition. When IE6 was all that was left there was no incentive for Microsoft to improve standards support, now we have Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE all as viable options everyone is being forced to follow standards better.
It tails off towards newer versions of IE, with 6 of course requiring the most additional support, 7 requiring much less, 8 requiring a bit less, and 9 requiring basically none.
Your chance of encountering such an issue also decreases with the version increases too, so on 7 you're much less likely to need to do anything specific than you were with 6, 8 much less so again, and 9 pretty unlikely at all.
Nowadays I find that Firefox tends to be more divergent in terms of requiring special attention than Chrome/Safari/IE. The WebKit based browsers and IE seem to be far more closely aligned in terms of HTML/CSS/JS support now, than the WebKit based browsers and Firefox.
But specifically what sort of issues do you constantly run into that are so time consuming that you find IE that much more difficult to support? and in which versions? I can sympathise somewhat with supporting IE6, and IE7 can be awkward in the odd case now and again, but not particularly frequently and most definitely not anywhere near frequently enough to justify someone to spend 2 years at $50k a year fixing even the largest of sites for it.
Maybe Gary McKinnon should just switch to this defence.
"What? Sorry American military, I assumed because you had blank passwords that I had your implied consent I could login? Does this mean I don't have to be extradited"
Like you say, implied consent is basically a way of saying "You don't actually have to really give a shit about this law".
It sounds fucking stupid anyway.
"No one complained about lack of IE support"
Yes, that's probably just because they fucked off to your competitor who made even more cash than you because they did support the 33% or whatever of the global population that is still using IE.
Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.
I don't like IE, but not supporting it is still just plain fucking stupid as you a) throw away a sizeable portion of potential customers, and b) It's not hard to support recent versions (which is the bulk of usage) now anyway. The $100,000 savings thing is either a big fat troll, or they have some either really really incompetent developers, or really really overpaid developers. If it costs you that to support most IE users when you already support say Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc. then your site and/or team is horribly broken.
We support all these browsers as well as Blackberry, Android, iOS, WP7, Symbian to boot, and I can't see how if you've been sensible about your use of templating/stylesheets/javascript libraries like jQuery etc. you could possibly spend this much on IE support unless you're trying to support as far back as like IE3 or something. It implies they're willing to pay the equivalent of say, a standard front end developer $50k a year to spend 2 years on IE support which is frankly fucking insane.
I suspect this story is just a rather long winded way of saying "We don't like Microsoft, down with IE" rather than something that has any basis in fact, which is also a shame really, because if they'd just come out and said that - i.e. exactly what they meant - then I'd have been able to just reply and say "Yep", instead.
The thing I took away from your post is that you're most likely a very bitter Christian American, who feels the world is out to get him, though I'm not sure what your point was other than that.
My working hours have tended to be more 8:30 - 4:30, with one place letting us do 8:30 - 4pm on Fridays with 30minute lunch.
But all except that job have offered flexi-time, so these are the kind of hours I tend to do, it's nice to be able to go home and actually have an evening, even if it means getting out of bed a bit earlier.
I've never worked anywhere that's asked for more than a 37 or 37.5 hour week, though I have often tended to do more off my own back it's always been optional, and I opted to do it because for the most part I've always liked my jobs though that might have something to do with the fact that if I ever get to the point where I don't like my job, I leave and go elsewhere rather than sit and whine about how I'm entitled to like my job and get paid more without having to put any effort into achieving exactly that like most of the working population seems to do.
Retail workers tend to work longer hours, my partner manages a number of stores and she would tend to do hours more like the GP implied as would her staff. The fact he mentioned retail is probably perhaps why he's been blinkered into this mindset - if he started out as a shop assistant or whatever then it's no suprise he thinks those hours are normal.
Your post is 100% full of fail because:
1) The queen didn't postpone or cancel the holiday, the government did
2) It is Microsoft's fault because no one else has both access to the source code and the ability to push out a correction other than Microsoft
3) Yes it would be mentioned if it was another country, I recall a number of stories on this sort of topic for countries as small as Samoa, and Tokelau. Here, have some:
http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/12/30/1810227/samoa-and-tokelau-are-skipping-december-30th
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/01/03/1312209/2016-bug-hits-text-messages-payment-processing
http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/11/01/136235/iphone-alarm-bug-leads-to-mass-european-sleep-in
4) There's no such country as the United Kingdom Kingdom
There are plenty of books out there showing excitement for Hitler's rise to power too, even a number of British politicians were pro-Hitler for quite some time for example.
But that was by no means an overwhelming view. I'm not sure you can really judge from just the odd opinion that it wasn't morally obvious. Certainly the fact that Britain and it's Commonwealth allies, as well as Russia, and the US were able to justify supporting the Chinese financially and militarily against Japan implies there must've been some fairly strong global public support for precisely that.
Still, it's all so far away now anyway isn't it? China, Russia, the UK and the US fighting as allies against Japan? Given todays global political tension between those nations people could be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a work of fiction.
I'm not really sure you can call embargos against hostile action an act of war. This seems to imply, from your point of view, that if North Korea or Iran were to nuke a US city because the US imposes sanctions and embargoes on them, then any counter-strike against that country would not be justified?
Political pressure and actions really cannot be deemed to be an act of war. War is a very much more serious step on from that, war is when you start rolling tanks, planes, or ships over the other guy's border, and that's exactly what Japan did.
Erm, talk about half the story?
"Pearl Habor was no rationale at all for doing anything to Japan. The U.S., Britain and the Dutch had embargoed Japan's oil supplies in July 1941. Japan made it quite clear then that they considered that an act of war since it was going to completely strangle Japan militarily and economically."
Have you never heard of the rape of nanking? Japan was war mongering well before even the war in Europe had gotten underway, it was an imperialist nation no different to the Western nations you criticise for provoking them, it's whole purpose for war against China starting primarily in 1937 was because it wanted to take it over.
That's why Japan was under embargo - because it had rolled into China, before Hitler had even rolled into Poland.
Christ, I'm probably one of the least pro-American people you'll meet but Pearl Harbour WAS rational for doing something to Japan, because it was a further extension of Japan's military aggression in the Pacific.
They weren't some innocent country who we just embargoed because we thought it'd be a bit of a laugh, we did so because they were a major destabilising force in the region, we attempted political pressure through embargos and it didn't work. From that point on the only option was full out war against Japan - they started the war in the Pacific long before the west really got involved. The West gave them 4 years to give up their imperialist ambitions and during that time they committed countless massacres, mass-rapes, and general destruction of Chinese cities and infrastructure, when they finally hit Pearl Harbour it was no fucking wonder the West decided enough was enough. No rationale? seriously? You think Japan should've just been allowed to go on destroying, raping, and pillaging the whole Pacific, extending it's war it started in 1937?
"Not a fan of his personality but since Gates has left: XBox, .Net, Windows server ~3X gain in market share, dido database solutions."
This isn't because of some magical action, but because Ballmer left them alone to go down the path Gates had already set them on. Effectively all Ballmer had to do was recognise these segments were growing and leave the teams the fuck alone to keep growing them - even a CEO as shit as him can manage that.
The key issue is that under Ballmer no new product lines have arisen and been succesful. Just about every succesful product line Microsoft has now, stems from the Gates era. There have been a number of new high growth markets - portable media players, tablets, cell phones, and in every case, Ballmer has failed to grasp them and form a cohesive and succesful strategy around them. Even the web he's struggled with, I've never heard of anyone using Office 365, but I know plenty of people that use Google Apps for example. Their closest thing to success there has been Bing which basically just had an absolute fuckton of money thrown at it in terms of getting it as a default browser, and shit loads of advertising until it actually got to a slightly better than negligible market share.
I don't disagree that Microsoft is still doing well as a business, but the point is it's basically on cruise control and that only works until you run out of gas. The world of computing is changing, it's become, and becoming more and more web and mobile based, but Microsoft isn't managing to follow - it's profits still come almost entirely from the desktop and server markets.
This is why Ballmer is an abysmal failure of a CEO, because all he's achieved at Microsoft is to keep it on the same path it's been for the last 10 years, which sure, means that it's growing whilst that path remains viable, but what about when that path stops being viable? what if something comes along and eats into that path? What if say, Apple decides it is willing to start shipping and supporting Mac OS X for PCs and an office suite now that they have more than enough money to pursue that kind of venture? We know Jobs wouldn't have allowed it, but the new Apple, where Cook gives shareholders more of a say? What then for Microsoft? Their bottom line is under threat and they have nowhere else to run to.
The fact is that Gates built a company so big, strong, and powerful that even the worst CEO in the world would take a few decades to really kill it off. You only have to look at Sony for another example of this - it's only just now really beginning to start having to explain it's failings, despite having been run fairly incompetently for at least a decade, getting on for two. Sony's looking right now like it may well end up fading into the history books with it's continued decline, but it's taken along time, and it'll probably take at least another decade yet to truly falter, that's assuming they don't get their act together and bring in competent management in the meantime.
I do have an Android phone, I made a mistake in my original post in saying iOS, I meant MacOSX as I was intending to refer to my desktop/laptop replacements. I do have an iPad already, but that's because my partner won it in a competition. I'm not the biggest fan of it, it just kind of sits there and I've not found any use for it beyond looking up the odd website, but even there I find it more of a pain to navigate the web than if I just go to my desktop and do it from there - same goes with things like typing e-mails. Touch is nice when you have a Swype-like keyboard but otherwise I really can't help but feel touch is still a gimmick which works great for things like playing games, or are just reading information on an app like a newsreader, or Facebook, but is utterly useless if you actually want to get stuff done.
Linux is an alternative I guess, but I've never got on too well with it - always seem to spend more time pratting about fixing it and setting things up on it than actually being able to use it the many hundreds of times I've installed it on desktops.
As I said in a post elsewhere, whilst I agree Apple spreads a lot of FUD, to give them some credit, I do think they tend to stick to over-hyping their products, rather than attacking competitors when it comes to the PR side of things, whilst Microsoft, Facebook, and Oracle are outright nasty in that their entire PR campaigns seem built around attacking the competition, rather than showing off what they have to offer which frankly fucking stinks. The patent trolling by Apple is a different story of course though, and there's really little excuse for them triggering that off originally on the scale it's at now.
I'm glad to see your post, as yours, and the comments on Groklaw the other day where PJ asked journalists to consider, in light of the verdict, who had given the information to them that led to them writing stories very much in favour of Oracle's position, and very much against Google - i.e. those that always cited Florian Mueller as a "source". It's become my opinion too in recent months, and it's nice to see the corporate shilling backfiring. It's nice to see that the blatant shills with their high UID, never posted before, first posts are now getting voted to -1 where they belong, and posts pointing out the fact that such stories and events are the result of lobbying are finally getting outed as such.
Perhaps companies now seeing the exact opposite of what they were paying for becoming more prominent on articles and forums means they'll give the fuck up and we can go back to tech companies competing on their merits, tech news can go back to focussing on actual news rather than FUD, and politicians can go back to focussing on things that matter rather than lining their pockets with dirty tech company money. Yeah yeah, I know, that'll be too much to ask for, especially the last one, but one can dream right?
I've always felt Apple could be a bit annoying getting blatant PR stories with no real substance in the news, but to be fair on Apple, and very much to their credit - at least such stories were always focussed on selling a good and positive image of Apple and it's products, rather than trolling competitors.
Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, are all just being plain fucking nasty, and I don't like nasty companies. If I did, I'd probably also buy News Corp. newspapers. Companies like Google absolutely do do wrong, but at least they're not plain and outright nasty in the way Microsoft, Facebook, and Oracle are.