Let's just make it clear how much of a waste of money this actually is.
£33bn ($50bn USD), for a new train line between only two cities, that wont be ready for 12 years, and when it does, shaves only a mere 20minutes or so off the journey.
I assume a company like Capita is getting the contract? The same Capita that runs sizable portions of the rest of our train network along with the companies that run the remaining parts of it for 33% more than our European neighbours who have more reliable, more modern, and cheaper trains.
Well you can read that as: Rather than compensation for the full cost of the programme due to a failure caused by Lockheed's incompetence, we're trying to figure out the smallest possible figure we can get Lockheed to give us without the tax payers saying "Couldn't you have got more?"
So expect compensation of a few hundred thousand or couple of million for a programme that probably cost hundreds of millions.
"PC Gaming Zealots only surface when console fan boys can't admit technological inferiority."
That's probably because console gamers are too busy actually just getting on with playing games, for the most part they're people who have more fun playing games than engaging in verbal masturbation about how you've managed to sacrifice a few weeks of your video card's life for a whole extra 1fps.
Simply put they don't care about the technology, they just want to play games to unwind, and consoles are the easiest way to do that.
"No effort to show us how a $250 kinect will improve our desktop gameplay has been made."
If you haven't noticed what Kinect allows, be it the 360 based Kinect games, or the various Kinect tech demos put together by hackers, then maybe you're not the target market anyway?
Because Iran actually wants nuclear weapons, not nuclear power.
Russia has already been involved with helping develop their civilian nuclear plant (which was originally started by Germany), the problem is they wont let anyone else near their other underground nuclear facilities, hence why the IAEA has announced it's concerns that it hasn't been given access to check what it needs to check to confirm Iran is only interested in civilian nuclear power.
We could call their bluff and offer to sell them civilian tech, but then they'd simply use the excuse that America is sending unstable plants to them to try and blow them up, or alternatively accept the deal and still continue covert enrichment in secret facilities to build nuclear weapons anyway.
"Consensus is that DPRK/Iran may (!) have enough material to build a single nuclear bomb (if at all) in the near future."
You know North Korea has detonated 2 nukes in the last 6 years right? Whilst I agree the stockpiles NK has are low enough to not be too big a deal, we're well past the "may" stage with them, we know they can, and they likely wouldn't detonate the only two they have, or at least not without having the capability to trivially make more:
You're right that neither nation has ICBMs but North Korea's missile tests have demonstrated with mixed success at least some ability to launch something that could probably hit the US west coast and so of course Hawaii, or alternatively anywhere in Japan or South Korea.
Iran is a different story, you're right that it's much less of a threat right now, but it's definitely the biggest potential threat in some years to come. The problem is it's enrichment capacity is being increased on an industrial scale, and it's "space" programme is moving full steam ahead. The issue with Iran therefore is not so much whether it's dangerous in this respect right now, it's not, but that it's pouring so many resources into the technology that once it's built one, that building a stockpile of tens of the things wont be much of a stretch.
I agree with you that moving the doomsday clock is a sensible move though, and I think this is only a minor reason as to why - I think the civil unrest from New York, to London, to Tripoli, to Damascus caused by the financial crisis, the arab spring, and the potential for more frequent destructive weather patterns (droughts, hurricanes, etc.) are reasons enough that the inherent instability these issues cause increases risks. On a more positive note though, this turbulence caused by these events also has massive scope for positive improvement too - removal of brutal dictators, politicians being forced in general to listen more to the populace and so on.
I don't really understand what the problem is, they basically act as a measure of likelihood of doomsday occuring due to large scale, like nuclear, human conflict.
They seem quite warranted in this latest change, I mean, even if global warming is natural, not man made, and there's nothing we can do about it, the fact remains that things like increased drought leads to greater potential for conflict, that increased population means greater competition for resources which again, leads to greater potential for conflict. There's also greater political unrest than ever due to the financial crisis, which again can create turmoil - look how destabilised Syria is right now relative to the solid dictatorship it was only 5 years back.
There's also nuclear weapons in more countries than ever before now, and in regions with more complex politics than ever before. There's also more covert nuclear programmes than ever before (Syria's which Israel bombed, Iran's etc.).
As such, when there's a proliferation of WMDs, into regions with more complex politics where there's greater potential for conflict in general globally, what's wrong with recognising that? That's all they're doing.
It doesn't bother me, nor do I care, if it happens it happens and that's how I've always thought whatever the situation, I'm not one to worry about these things, but what's so wrong with people who want to provide a simple to understand measure of the stability of the human race in terms of potential for war doing so? It's a measure of the current world's political situation and the likelihood of war stemming from that, they're not saying you should bolt your doors and hide in your cellar or anything like that so what's the problem? The issues they pose are very real, and personally I think we'll get through them, but it doesn't mean these people should be slagged off for daring to remind us what they are, and inform those who aren't aware of what the state of play is right now.
"It is very hard to find skilled manufacturing managers, engineers, or even operators in the West because there are few places to build up those skills."
This is such utter bollocks and it's so tiresome to hear.
Whilst there's no doubt the proportion of Western economies consisting of manufacturing has decreased, it's to nowhere near the extent naysayers like you suggest where we hear proclaimations about how manufacturing is dead in the West, we don't have the skills anymore. Here's news for you, the countries with the largest manufacturing output in the world are:
1. China 2. US 3. Japan 4. Germany 5. Italy 6. Brazil 7. Korea 8. France 9. UK 10. India
As you can see the West has an extremely strong showing still, and the UK even still having a larger manufacturing output than India. If you're talking about manufacturing for export you can likely drop Brazil a good few notches too as it's massively disproportionately focussed on it's own internal market.
Even at 9th place for the UK, to have the 9th largest manufacturing output in the world means we have a massive amount of competent people in the manufacturing field to be able to do that.
But let's look at it in context, if countries like France and the UK with their populations of ~60million, and Germany with it's population of ~80million are displacing countries like Brazil (pop. 195million), India (pop. 1.1billion), Russia (pop. 171million) Mexico (pop. 113million), Indonesia (pop. 140million) in terms of manufacturing, then doesn't that actually imply that as things are in the world, we've got proportionaly more people skilled in manufacturing in countries like the UK, Germany, and France relative to our population than almost every other country in the world?
We can't even complain about how manufacturing as an industry is on a downward path in countries like the UK:
This seems to imply it's only the 2008 recession to blame for any decrease, and that up until 2008 it was still showing very healthy growth, just not as fast as industries like services such that it's only declining as a percentage of total industry, not declining in itself.
When people say the West, particularly countries like the UK are seeing a decline in manufacturing they're wrong beyond the current obvious effects of the global recession. When people say we don't have any people skilled in manufacturing anymore, they're even more wrong, as things go, we've got more than nearly every other country in the world relative to our population size - you'll find more people skilled in manufacturing amongst every hundred people or whatever here, than you will almost anywhere else.
The whole manufacturing whine is little more than a fantasy made up by the likes of right wing nationalists and such to stir up hatred for other countries and things they export.
Facebook was arguably rather late to the social networking thing. Friends Reunited and MySpace were around well before Facebook was, but it didn't stop Facebook stealing all their users and killing them off.
It's probably not worth your time. The people complaining will be the PC gaming zealots that hate this device because it originated from the console.
The same people who will gladly blow the best part of $1000 on the latest and greatest graphics card at release.
As you say, what you get for your money, particularly relative to the cost of many other PC gaming components, this is a steal regardless.
Really, this was one of the most impressive things about Kinect from the outset, not that the technology itself was pretty impressive, but that Microsoft had managed to do such impressive tech cheaply, when previously such technology would've cost over 4x as much to put together yourself.
"Nokia already said that they won't sell their smartphone division"
Yet.
Come on, the whole Nokia thing has been a done deal since Elop as their new CEO was announced.
It's clearly been planned all along, that if the major shareholders let Elop become head of Nokia as a Microsoft puppet, and turn it into a Microsoft only shop, and make a success of it, that Microsoft will then at some later date when Nokia is fully turned around as a Windows Phone producer buy the shares.
The whole Elop thing didn't make sense whatsoever, when he was taken on it was obvious Android was the best bet for Nokia, yet they took someone on with disturbingly close ties to Microsoft, they let him choose Windows Phone when there was no evidence it was going to be a success despite the fact Android was already succeding and could've saved Nokia too. The only argument was that Nokia couldn't differentiate with Android, but it's bollocks - Samsung most certainly has managed to.
Really, the only explanation for the shareholders allowing such an insanely weird set of choices to go through is that they were going to get something out of it. Promises of an eventual Microsoft buyout would be the most obvious something - it's the only way many of them would ever see their money back on their investment after Nokia lost it's way and share values plummeted. Chances are they'll still get to keep their shares in Nokia's networks business when the sale is split on top.
Elop's takeover of Nokia was a coup by Microsoft, that much was obvious. Even at the time I assumed and said there's a high likelihood it would lead to eventual takeover. This leaking of the story and subsequent denial could just as well be a tactic by the two companies to test the water on public and business opinion and see if it's safe to go ahead and do it yet.
Sure there's a number of ways it may not happen - regulators saying no, opinion being far too negative to make it feasible, Nokia still failing to turn itself around and so on, but I'd wager the basic premise of the story has some truth to it - that there is intention by Microsoft to take it over, and will from the shareholders to let it be taken over by Microsoft. If there wasn't some degree of this they wouldn't have let it go so foolishly and riskily down the completely untested Windows Phone route in the first place when the slightly less risky option of investing in improving MeeGo was there, or perhaps more obviously, the perfectly safe Android was sat in waiting.
"The point being made there is a rebuttal to the claim that 3D "makes the characters and environments more believable"."
Yes, it's just a shame the GP was rebutting a claim I never even made.
My point was simply that 3D adds something to films, a minor increment that makes them nicer to watch, just as colour did to TV, just as surround sound does to games and films. It's not going to fix a bad plot, but it definitely makes the content more enjoyable.
Instead it seems I got responded to with a completely irrelevant +5 moderated comment about how Avatar was a shit story, and apparently someone thinking avatar is a shit story means 3D is crap? That conclusion is a completely and utterly illogical one based on the premise. Here's a real comparison though, watch Avatar in 2D, and 3D. I have, I've seen it in 2D 1080p and it was nowhere near as good as in 3D 1080p and that's the time of comparison by which you can judge the quality of 3D - like for like. Comparing classics like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars against a newer film like Avatar and then claiming 3D is shit because the Avatar plot isn't as good as some of the greatest stories of all time.
Just to reiterate how utterly dumb the argument is, let me make an equivalent:
I personally thought the last spiderman film was shit, worse than Avatar, as such, because spiderman was in 2D when I saw it and Avatar not, 2D must hence be inherently worse than 3D.
Again, personal feelings about a specific storyline are 100% irrelevant to the worthfulness of 3D as a technology.
"Interesting. Perhaps part of the reason you've watched Empire Strikes Back so many times is that you enjoyed the story?"
Or perhaps, if he lives in the UK or similar it's because it's such an old film it's been on TV literally hundreds of times and for years was on every single Christmas at prime time when you're sat with family with the TV on, whereas Avatar is yet to show once? I think personally if I count the number of times I've dug out my Star Wars DVDs and LotR DVDs in the same period against my Avatar DVD and discount watching it on TV just because it's there then it's actually no different whatsoever. This still doesn't have any bearing still on which film I think is better (Star Wars), or any bearing whatsoever on whether 3D is good or not.
Huh? so we should do away with colour TV and surround sound too because it doesn't make good memorable characters?
I'm struggling to see where I suggested 3D has anything to do with quality of story line, merely that it adds something to a film.
Oh I see, you're saying you didn't like the avatar plot, so everyone must have deemed it shit, and hence 3D is bad. Well done on that awesomely bad stretch of logic.
Also, the reason cases are so uncommon is because most companies know full well when they're in the wrong, and just settle the case.
People getting some kind of payout over a company accepting or being found guilty of constructive dismissal isn't as uncommon as the headline might make it seem with it's suggestion this is the first ever UK constructive dismissal case.
I thought the same, I bought my TV without really wanting 3D but it's pretty much standard now so it came with it anyway, I'd not really tried it much, I tried the BBC Wimbledon 3D test, I tried Street Dance 3D when it was on the other day but none of it was anything special.
Then I noticed Assassins Creed on the 360 supports it, and thought I'd give it a go. It really is pretty fucking good, I know a few other games like Crysis and Gears 3 support it but I've not tried them yet.
At the end of the day I guess it's just like at the cinema, Avatar was phenomenal in 3D but little else has been, likewise, it appears games are suited to 3D too.
I'll assume it's the difference between something genuinely built in 3D, and that shitty cardboard cut out version of 3D.
Still, it's early days, and Toshiba is already testing glasses-less 3D TVs so I think it'll only get better. All in all, I don't think it's a bad technology, in some cases it certainly adds something, when you're stood at the top of a massive tower in Assassins Creed looking down, you can really feel the height.
The difference is that with Israel there's really no risk of the weapons being proliferated to groups like Hezbollah, or, if you buy the idea that Ahmadinejad meant it when he was Israel should be whiped off the map, by Iran itself.
I agree Israel shouldn't have them, just as I don't think Pakistan is safe enough to be trusted with them, but ultimately the most pressing issue is Iran, because they're the least trustworthy nation likely to obtain them right now. At least even with North Korea the nation has the sense to use them to get what it wants, rather than to risk the consequences of their actual use. With Iran it's not so clear cut.
"It is a flight simulator. Doesn't exactly match up with the gameplay demographic of consoles"
To be fair, it doesn't match up with the gameplay demographic with PCs either, hence why the genre is all but dead relative to it's peak over a decade ago.
But for what it's worth consoles do have a few flight sims, they are all combat oriented, and some are more arcadey than others, but Apache Air Assault in realistic mode was pretty good.
I'm not sure why you think simulators are anymore CPU-bound than any other open world game, and consoles have had a far bigger selection of open world games than PCs in the last few years. I don't see what compromises you believe would be required, consoles are architected for the specific purpose of gaming, whilst PCs are a much more generic architecture where they're not so streamlined for gaming, hence why lower specced consoles churn out better visuals than equivalent PCs are better framerates by quite a margin. I do agree that the current generation of consoles are definitely beginning to show their age against modern PCs now however, but for 6 to 8 year old designs they're not doing bad at all still.
"Yes, they do. And when their standard of living has become unbearable because of something another country has done to them, they come together and rise up against that other country, not their own government."
Yes, if the populace is supportive of it's government in the first place. In Iran that's not the case, as previous demonstrations have shown.
There are strong sanctions against Syria too, but blaming those putting in place the sanctions clearly hasn't helped said leadership or emboldened the population against the external threat.
I know your point is a popular one, but there seems little evidence backing it, Castro hasn't managed to do a great job of deflecting blame on the US amongst his people, either for example. People generally know when their government is being punished by external forces simply because their government is carrying out an international penis measuring contest. Patriotism wanes pretty quickly in the face of the far more important basic will to avoid starvation and survive.
"...I mean, they should know that sanctions do not work, never have and more than probably never will."
Well, they have, and can. I agree sometimes they're a waste of time, but in this particular case there is some hope.
You see, citizens rise up when their standard of living becomes unbearable, we've seen more of this in recent years, and it's no coincidence that the arab spring et al has happened at a time of global turmoil - the decrease in quality of life and increase in unemployment caused by the current global financial crisis was a major driver in starting the arab spring, and even the Iranian protests a year or two before.
Iran has already seen mass protests in recent years, just not quite enough to reach a tipping point and cause an overthrow of Iran's leadership. Sanctions on Iran right now are potentially quite effective because the Iranian government is stuck between a rock and a hard place, if they keep spending on their nuclear programme they'll have less money to placate the general population and face protests from greater numbers and with greater intensity.
Iran already has an extremely large portion of unhappy citizens, lowering quality of life there by harming it's economy will force it to make cuts, including to it's military and nuclear budget, or will force it to make cuts that lower quality of life for the populace leading to mass protests again. WIth the backdrop of the arab spring this last year, and Syria (Iran's biggest support in suppressing it's people) already facing the same thing, such a protest movement will only be more emboldened than ever.
In this case, sanctions are surely a much more sensible approach than anything military when there's a chance that Iran can be sorted out by Iranians. Bringing new pumps online and increasing infrastructure for greater oil production is easy... if you have the money and support of companies like BP, Exxon, etc. to help you. Iran has neither.
"Why pretend not to have a nuclear program when nobody believes you?"
Because that's Iran's modus operandi.
Just like they claim to be a peaceful country, citing the fact they've not invaded a foreign country in their history, whilst funding entire proxy armies in countries like Lebanon that have ousted the legitimate government and military so that Iran can attack their arch foe Israel by proxy.
Iran doesn't do direct, because it knows it can't win in direct confrontation. It relies on doing things subversively, because that way it can claim to be a good international citizen, and it's allies like Venezuela and Syria can feign shock, and hate, and cry imperialism if anyone dares try and act over what we all know Iran is actually doing.
"For me it's easier to write complex broken code when you have dynamic typing."
FTFY.
Besides, with.NET 4 and the DLR you have the best of both worlds anyway. So if you really do think you know what you're doing and are competent enough to write good solid dynamic code you still can. Perhaps the best part is you can control the way dynamic typing works if you know your shit when it comes to expression trees and so forth.
"Don't be silly. Java's overzealous checked exceptions, for example, lead to *worse* code as lazy developers code to satisfy the compiler"
How is it worse than a problem outright occuring as it would under PHP because the developer would remain oblivious to the problem even existing? It may be a hack, but at least it means the developers been forced to recognise that there's a potential problem there, whilst in PHP the problem may remain unnoticed.
"Just trying to keep the code readable while still satisfying the compiler means that lazy developers will do remarkably stupid things just to keep their code short or easy to read (in an effort to combat the cruft and clutter). Using string where they should use stringbuilder, for example, is a common problem caused by the developer trying to save a few lines of code and avoid littering clean-looking lines by sprinkling toString() all over."
I agree these are problems, but fundamentally the code is still more efficient at execution time due to JIT compilation than what is simply interpreted PHP code.
"his bizarre belief that you can trust the compiler to spin your crap code in to gold needs to die."
Look, you're changing the nature of the discussion to suit your point now, the point was whether Java allows developers to write shit code, the point was that Java forces the developer into a situation where his code is at least more efficient.
"You've not see spaghetti-code until you've seen a large Java or C# project!"
Right, but I've seen plenty of good large Java and C# projects, but if we're sticking to the original discussion are you seriously suggesting large PHP projects are somehow always more organised?
Look, I don't disagree with your point that bad code can still exist in Java and C# but that wasn't the discussion, the discussion was that it's at least not as bad as with PHP where bad developers will often end up with half arsed object orientation resulting in hard to trace code, because of spurious use of global variables, as well as failing to follow any decent design principles because the frameworks, like CakePHP, encourage it, due to the fact the frameworks themselves can't even do simply things like implement MVC properly. At least C# and Java force some kind of sensible class hierarchy, force you to deal with some of the more braindead problems caught at compile time, and the frameworks tend to be written to best practices which absolutely isn't the case with PHP.
The point is that some of the most terribly fucked up code doesn't even compile and hence become semi-usable in C#/Java, but PHP does allow code with some of the most awful errors to execute, and that's fucking dangerous.
Be wary of the number of responses in favour of PHP and the moderations given to posts here, it's hard to have a sensible debate about PHP, because it is so easy to pick up, use, and hack something together it's used by people in greater numbers, coupled with the fact that Slashdot's moderation system is built on numerical consensus means that a popular opinion will get modded up, and an unpopular modded down, but popular does not mean correct.
So with that out the way, here's my view as a lead software developer at a firm who develops for large clients from BP, to Swiss Re, and from Britain's MoD to GE using a large array of languages from C# to Java, and C++ to Ruby and PHP. Fundamentally if you're a good programmer and know the ins and outs of programming, both generally, and in a language specific way you'll be able to write good PHP code, as the GP says - as good as any other framework to an extent. My only caveat with that would be that PHP just doesn't scale as well at the high end as other languages as the likes of Facebook have found out, hence why they wrote a PHP to C++ translator, and now a Java-esque VM to try and get their PHP to work at the same level of performance as these languages. The flip side of that is that most web applications will never need that kind of performance, and hence good developers can write code with PHP just fine without any real side effects at the end of the day.
But the reason many professional developers who have experience across many languages look down on PHP are many, the language itself has always been well behind the curve, it didn't properly support fundamental concepts like classes, namespaces, and closures until more reecent years, and that's pretty inexcusable, not in that these are expected features for a modern language, but that they're fundamental to the design of a language and adding them later will only result in headaches, and with PHP it certainly has. It also has many other quirks, associativity of the ternary operator for example is backwards in PHP compared to most other languages, variable scoping is fucked, namespaces use the escape character as the separator and these are the sorts of things that will trip new, and even many moderately experienced programmers up as to why things suddenly aren't working.
It's also the case that interpreted languages in general face the problem that code can appear to run fine until errors are encountered, whilst with compiled, or bytecode compiled languages like C# and Java more errors are detected, and hence must be corrected at compile time, preventing some nasty errors ever reaching the end user. This in itself is less of a problem if there is great testing supporting for an interpreted language, but even PHP's unit testing tools are way behind the equivalents in again, languages like C# and Java. On top of this, the rest of the tools for languages like C++, C# and Java are just that much more mature offering features that just let you write better code faster.
Of course, PHP is still used heavily, and this is because it does let you get things done quickly, in the real world there just isn't always time to properly write well architected, and well tested code, this is really sad, as it almost always inevitably leads to problems in the long run, but it's also an unescapable, no matter how unwanted reality. The fact is if you have a pushy client or boss then just may not even have time to write a beautifully architected, well tested C#/ASP.NET MVC, or Java/Spring application no matter how superior that option would be.
So fundamentally it comes down to how much freedom you have with your software development schedules, if you're being given time to do things right, then use something like C# and ASP.NET MVC, or Java and Spring if you can't use Windows Server to host. If however you're being forced to get things done quickly then you may well find it's best to stick to PHP, but if you do then please, do one thing - work your arse off learning PHP in depth, learn it's quirks, it's pitfalls
"No it won't. It's a nice myth, but it's not really true. Programmers will output crap at their level regardless of the environ. "
Perhaps he should have phrased it as "will help them write much better code", rather than "good code", if he had then it'd be absolutely right. Code written in C# or Java for example will be inherently better because more errors are checked at compile time (i.e. invalid type conversions), and hence can't result in issues at runtime.
"Your only argument is it doesn't 'shepherd' the programmer enough. That's not a negative from my perspective."
It shouldn't be. In an ideal world where all programmers are perfect and there are plenty of programmers you'd be right, but here in the real world truly good programmers are hard to come by and most fall into the middle ground where they simply don't have the skill to be trusted to avoid the pitfalls of a language like PHP day in day out. This is why PHP is far and away the language most responsible for the proliferation of SQL injection attacks on the web to this day- because it encourages use of direct SQL querying, rather than say, parameterised SQL and so forth to perform database tasks to name but one example of the problems it leads to.
Corruption only spreads to the civil service when you have a complacent enough government to allow it. It's no suprise that countries with the most healthy democracy have the lowest levels of corruption amongst public sector and the healthiest divide between public and private sector when it comes to money.
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Let's just make it clear how much of a waste of money this actually is.
£33bn ($50bn USD), for a new train line between only two cities, that wont be ready for 12 years, and when it does, shaves only a mere 20minutes or so off the journey.
I assume a company like Capita is getting the contract? The same Capita that runs sizable portions of the rest of our train network along with the companies that run the remaining parts of it for 33% more than our European neighbours who have more reliable, more modern, and cheaper trains.
Well you can read that as: Rather than compensation for the full cost of the programme due to a failure caused by Lockheed's incompetence, we're trying to figure out the smallest possible figure we can get Lockheed to give us without the tax payers saying "Couldn't you have got more?"
So expect compensation of a few hundred thousand or couple of million for a programme that probably cost hundreds of millions.
"PC Gaming Zealots only surface when console fan boys can't admit technological inferiority."
That's probably because console gamers are too busy actually just getting on with playing games, for the most part they're people who have more fun playing games than engaging in verbal masturbation about how you've managed to sacrifice a few weeks of your video card's life for a whole extra 1fps.
Simply put they don't care about the technology, they just want to play games to unwind, and consoles are the easiest way to do that.
"No effort to show us how a $250 kinect will improve our desktop gameplay has been made."
If you haven't noticed what Kinect allows, be it the 360 based Kinect games, or the various Kinect tech demos put together by hackers, then maybe you're not the target market anyway?
Because Iran actually wants nuclear weapons, not nuclear power.
Russia has already been involved with helping develop their civilian nuclear plant (which was originally started by Germany), the problem is they wont let anyone else near their other underground nuclear facilities, hence why the IAEA has announced it's concerns that it hasn't been given access to check what it needs to check to confirm Iran is only interested in civilian nuclear power.
We could call their bluff and offer to sell them civilian tech, but then they'd simply use the excuse that America is sending unstable plants to them to try and blow them up, or alternatively accept the deal and still continue covert enrichment in secret facilities to build nuclear weapons anyway.
"Consensus is that DPRK/Iran may (!) have enough material to build a single nuclear bomb (if at all) in the near future."
You know North Korea has detonated 2 nukes in the last 6 years right? Whilst I agree the stockpiles NK has are low enough to not be too big a deal, we're well past the "may" stage with them, we know they can, and they likely wouldn't detonate the only two they have, or at least not without having the capability to trivially make more:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_Korean_nuclear_test
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_North_Korean_nuclear_test
You're right that neither nation has ICBMs but North Korea's missile tests have demonstrated with mixed success at least some ability to launch something that could probably hit the US west coast and so of course Hawaii, or alternatively anywhere in Japan or South Korea.
Iran is a different story, you're right that it's much less of a threat right now, but it's definitely the biggest potential threat in some years to come. The problem is it's enrichment capacity is being increased on an industrial scale, and it's "space" programme is moving full steam ahead. The issue with Iran therefore is not so much whether it's dangerous in this respect right now, it's not, but that it's pouring so many resources into the technology that once it's built one, that building a stockpile of tens of the things wont be much of a stretch.
I agree with you that moving the doomsday clock is a sensible move though, and I think this is only a minor reason as to why - I think the civil unrest from New York, to London, to Tripoli, to Damascus caused by the financial crisis, the arab spring, and the potential for more frequent destructive weather patterns (droughts, hurricanes, etc.) are reasons enough that the inherent instability these issues cause increases risks. On a more positive note though, this turbulence caused by these events also has massive scope for positive improvement too - removal of brutal dictators, politicians being forced in general to listen more to the populace and so on.
I don't really understand what the problem is, they basically act as a measure of likelihood of doomsday occuring due to large scale, like nuclear, human conflict.
They seem quite warranted in this latest change, I mean, even if global warming is natural, not man made, and there's nothing we can do about it, the fact remains that things like increased drought leads to greater potential for conflict, that increased population means greater competition for resources which again, leads to greater potential for conflict. There's also greater political unrest than ever due to the financial crisis, which again can create turmoil - look how destabilised Syria is right now relative to the solid dictatorship it was only 5 years back.
There's also nuclear weapons in more countries than ever before now, and in regions with more complex politics than ever before. There's also more covert nuclear programmes than ever before (Syria's which Israel bombed, Iran's etc.).
As such, when there's a proliferation of WMDs, into regions with more complex politics where there's greater potential for conflict in general globally, what's wrong with recognising that? That's all they're doing.
It doesn't bother me, nor do I care, if it happens it happens and that's how I've always thought whatever the situation, I'm not one to worry about these things, but what's so wrong with people who want to provide a simple to understand measure of the stability of the human race in terms of potential for war doing so? It's a measure of the current world's political situation and the likelihood of war stemming from that, they're not saying you should bolt your doors and hide in your cellar or anything like that so what's the problem? The issues they pose are very real, and personally I think we'll get through them, but it doesn't mean these people should be slagged off for daring to remind us what they are, and inform those who aren't aware of what the state of play is right now.
"It is very hard to find skilled manufacturing managers, engineers, or even operators in the West because there are few places to build up those skills."
This is such utter bollocks and it's so tiresome to hear.
Whilst there's no doubt the proportion of Western economies consisting of manufacturing has decreased, it's to nowhere near the extent naysayers like you suggest where we hear proclaimations about how manufacturing is dead in the West, we don't have the skills anymore. Here's news for you, the countries with the largest manufacturing output in the world are:
1. China
2. US
3. Japan
4. Germany
5. Italy
6. Brazil
7. Korea
8. France
9. UK
10. India
As you can see the West has an extremely strong showing still, and the UK even still having a larger manufacturing output than India. If you're talking about manufacturing for export you can likely drop Brazil a good few notches too as it's massively disproportionately focussed on it's own internal market.
Even at 9th place for the UK, to have the 9th largest manufacturing output in the world means we have a massive amount of competent people in the manufacturing field to be able to do that.
But let's look at it in context, if countries like France and the UK with their populations of ~60million, and Germany with it's population of ~80million are displacing countries like Brazil (pop. 195million), India (pop. 1.1billion), Russia (pop. 171million) Mexico (pop. 113million), Indonesia (pop. 140million) in terms of manufacturing, then doesn't that actually imply that as things are in the world, we've got proportionaly more people skilled in manufacturing in countries like the UK, Germany, and France relative to our population than almost every other country in the world?
We can't even complain about how manufacturing as an industry is on a downward path in countries like the UK:
http://investing.curiouscatblog.net/2011/12/28/chart-of-manufacturing-output-from-2000-to-2010-by-country/
This seems to imply it's only the 2008 recession to blame for any decrease, and that up until 2008 it was still showing very healthy growth, just not as fast as industries like services such that it's only declining as a percentage of total industry, not declining in itself.
When people say the West, particularly countries like the UK are seeing a decline in manufacturing they're wrong beyond the current obvious effects of the global recession. When people say we don't have any people skilled in manufacturing anymore, they're even more wrong, as things go, we've got more than nearly every other country in the world relative to our population size - you'll find more people skilled in manufacturing amongst every hundred people or whatever here, than you will almost anywhere else.
The whole manufacturing whine is little more than a fantasy made up by the likes of right wing nationalists and such to stir up hatred for other countries and things they export.
Exactly.
Facebook was arguably rather late to the social networking thing. Friends Reunited and MySpace were around well before Facebook was, but it didn't stop Facebook stealing all their users and killing them off.
It's probably not worth your time. The people complaining will be the PC gaming zealots that hate this device because it originated from the console.
The same people who will gladly blow the best part of $1000 on the latest and greatest graphics card at release.
As you say, what you get for your money, particularly relative to the cost of many other PC gaming components, this is a steal regardless.
Really, this was one of the most impressive things about Kinect from the outset, not that the technology itself was pretty impressive, but that Microsoft had managed to do such impressive tech cheaply, when previously such technology would've cost over 4x as much to put together yourself.
"Nokia already said that they won't sell their smartphone division"
Yet.
Come on, the whole Nokia thing has been a done deal since Elop as their new CEO was announced.
It's clearly been planned all along, that if the major shareholders let Elop become head of Nokia as a Microsoft puppet, and turn it into a Microsoft only shop, and make a success of it, that Microsoft will then at some later date when Nokia is fully turned around as a Windows Phone producer buy the shares.
The whole Elop thing didn't make sense whatsoever, when he was taken on it was obvious Android was the best bet for Nokia, yet they took someone on with disturbingly close ties to Microsoft, they let him choose Windows Phone when there was no evidence it was going to be a success despite the fact Android was already succeding and could've saved Nokia too. The only argument was that Nokia couldn't differentiate with Android, but it's bollocks - Samsung most certainly has managed to.
Really, the only explanation for the shareholders allowing such an insanely weird set of choices to go through is that they were going to get something out of it. Promises of an eventual Microsoft buyout would be the most obvious something - it's the only way many of them would ever see their money back on their investment after Nokia lost it's way and share values plummeted. Chances are they'll still get to keep their shares in Nokia's networks business when the sale is split on top.
Elop's takeover of Nokia was a coup by Microsoft, that much was obvious. Even at the time I assumed and said there's a high likelihood it would lead to eventual takeover. This leaking of the story and subsequent denial could just as well be a tactic by the two companies to test the water on public and business opinion and see if it's safe to go ahead and do it yet.
Sure there's a number of ways it may not happen - regulators saying no, opinion being far too negative to make it feasible, Nokia still failing to turn itself around and so on, but I'd wager the basic premise of the story has some truth to it - that there is intention by Microsoft to take it over, and will from the shareholders to let it be taken over by Microsoft. If there wasn't some degree of this they wouldn't have let it go so foolishly and riskily down the completely untested Windows Phone route in the first place when the slightly less risky option of investing in improving MeeGo was there, or perhaps more obviously, the perfectly safe Android was sat in waiting.
"The point being made there is a rebuttal to the claim that 3D "makes the characters and environments more believable"."
Yes, it's just a shame the GP was rebutting a claim I never even made.
My point was simply that 3D adds something to films, a minor increment that makes them nicer to watch, just as colour did to TV, just as surround sound does to games and films. It's not going to fix a bad plot, but it definitely makes the content more enjoyable.
Instead it seems I got responded to with a completely irrelevant +5 moderated comment about how Avatar was a shit story, and apparently someone thinking avatar is a shit story means 3D is crap? That conclusion is a completely and utterly illogical one based on the premise. Here's a real comparison though, watch Avatar in 2D, and 3D. I have, I've seen it in 2D 1080p and it was nowhere near as good as in 3D 1080p and that's the time of comparison by which you can judge the quality of 3D - like for like. Comparing classics like Lord of the Rings and Star Wars against a newer film like Avatar and then claiming 3D is shit because the Avatar plot isn't as good as some of the greatest stories of all time.
Just to reiterate how utterly dumb the argument is, let me make an equivalent:
I personally thought the last spiderman film was shit, worse than Avatar, as such, because spiderman was in 2D when I saw it and Avatar not, 2D must hence be inherently worse than 3D.
Again, personal feelings about a specific storyline are 100% irrelevant to the worthfulness of 3D as a technology.
"Interesting. Perhaps part of the reason you've watched Empire Strikes Back so many times is that you enjoyed the story?"
Or perhaps, if he lives in the UK or similar it's because it's such an old film it's been on TV literally hundreds of times and for years was on every single Christmas at prime time when you're sat with family with the TV on, whereas Avatar is yet to show once? I think personally if I count the number of times I've dug out my Star Wars DVDs and LotR DVDs in the same period against my Avatar DVD and discount watching it on TV just because it's there then it's actually no different whatsoever. This still doesn't have any bearing still on which film I think is better (Star Wars), or any bearing whatsoever on whether 3D is good or not.
Huh? so we should do away with colour TV and surround sound too because it doesn't make good memorable characters?
I'm struggling to see where I suggested 3D has anything to do with quality of story line, merely that it adds something to a film.
Oh I see, you're saying you didn't like the avatar plot, so everyone must have deemed it shit, and hence 3D is bad. Well done on that awesomely bad stretch of logic.
Also, the reason cases are so uncommon is because most companies know full well when they're in the wrong, and just settle the case.
People getting some kind of payout over a company accepting or being found guilty of constructive dismissal isn't as uncommon as the headline might make it seem with it's suggestion this is the first ever UK constructive dismissal case.
I thought the same, I bought my TV without really wanting 3D but it's pretty much standard now so it came with it anyway, I'd not really tried it much, I tried the BBC Wimbledon 3D test, I tried Street Dance 3D when it was on the other day but none of it was anything special.
Then I noticed Assassins Creed on the 360 supports it, and thought I'd give it a go. It really is pretty fucking good, I know a few other games like Crysis and Gears 3 support it but I've not tried them yet.
At the end of the day I guess it's just like at the cinema, Avatar was phenomenal in 3D but little else has been, likewise, it appears games are suited to 3D too.
I'll assume it's the difference between something genuinely built in 3D, and that shitty cardboard cut out version of 3D.
Still, it's early days, and Toshiba is already testing glasses-less 3D TVs so I think it'll only get better. All in all, I don't think it's a bad technology, in some cases it certainly adds something, when you're stood at the top of a massive tower in Assassins Creed looking down, you can really feel the height.
No, they both can't ideally.
The difference is that with Israel there's really no risk of the weapons being proliferated to groups like Hezbollah, or, if you buy the idea that Ahmadinejad meant it when he was Israel should be whiped off the map, by Iran itself.
I agree Israel shouldn't have them, just as I don't think Pakistan is safe enough to be trusted with them, but ultimately the most pressing issue is Iran, because they're the least trustworthy nation likely to obtain them right now. At least even with North Korea the nation has the sense to use them to get what it wants, rather than to risk the consequences of their actual use. With Iran it's not so clear cut.
That's actually precisely it. Iran's playbook is almost an exact replica of the CIA's in this respect. That doesn't make it right however.
"It is a flight simulator. Doesn't exactly match up with the gameplay demographic of consoles"
To be fair, it doesn't match up with the gameplay demographic with PCs either, hence why the genre is all but dead relative to it's peak over a decade ago.
But for what it's worth consoles do have a few flight sims, they are all combat oriented, and some are more arcadey than others, but Apache Air Assault in realistic mode was pretty good.
I'm not sure why you think simulators are anymore CPU-bound than any other open world game, and consoles have had a far bigger selection of open world games than PCs in the last few years. I don't see what compromises you believe would be required, consoles are architected for the specific purpose of gaming, whilst PCs are a much more generic architecture where they're not so streamlined for gaming, hence why lower specced consoles churn out better visuals than equivalent PCs are better framerates by quite a margin. I do agree that the current generation of consoles are definitely beginning to show their age against modern PCs now however, but for 6 to 8 year old designs they're not doing bad at all still.
"Yes, they do. And when their standard of living has become unbearable because of something another country has done to them, they come together and rise up against that other country, not their own government."
Yes, if the populace is supportive of it's government in the first place. In Iran that's not the case, as previous demonstrations have shown.
There are strong sanctions against Syria too, but blaming those putting in place the sanctions clearly hasn't helped said leadership or emboldened the population against the external threat.
I know your point is a popular one, but there seems little evidence backing it, Castro hasn't managed to do a great job of deflecting blame on the US amongst his people, either for example. People generally know when their government is being punished by external forces simply because their government is carrying out an international penis measuring contest. Patriotism wanes pretty quickly in the face of the far more important basic will to avoid starvation and survive.
"...I mean, they should know that sanctions do not work, never have and more than probably never will."
Well, they have, and can. I agree sometimes they're a waste of time, but in this particular case there is some hope.
You see, citizens rise up when their standard of living becomes unbearable, we've seen more of this in recent years, and it's no coincidence that the arab spring et al has happened at a time of global turmoil - the decrease in quality of life and increase in unemployment caused by the current global financial crisis was a major driver in starting the arab spring, and even the Iranian protests a year or two before.
Iran has already seen mass protests in recent years, just not quite enough to reach a tipping point and cause an overthrow of Iran's leadership. Sanctions on Iran right now are potentially quite effective because the Iranian government is stuck between a rock and a hard place, if they keep spending on their nuclear programme they'll have less money to placate the general population and face protests from greater numbers and with greater intensity.
Iran already has an extremely large portion of unhappy citizens, lowering quality of life there by harming it's economy will force it to make cuts, including to it's military and nuclear budget, or will force it to make cuts that lower quality of life for the populace leading to mass protests again. WIth the backdrop of the arab spring this last year, and Syria (Iran's biggest support in suppressing it's people) already facing the same thing, such a protest movement will only be more emboldened than ever.
In this case, sanctions are surely a much more sensible approach than anything military when there's a chance that Iran can be sorted out by Iranians. Bringing new pumps online and increasing infrastructure for greater oil production is easy... if you have the money and support of companies like BP, Exxon, etc. to help you. Iran has neither.
"Why pretend not to have a nuclear program when nobody believes you?"
Because that's Iran's modus operandi.
Just like they claim to be a peaceful country, citing the fact they've not invaded a foreign country in their history, whilst funding entire proxy armies in countries like Lebanon that have ousted the legitimate government and military so that Iran can attack their arch foe Israel by proxy.
Iran doesn't do direct, because it knows it can't win in direct confrontation. It relies on doing things subversively, because that way it can claim to be a good international citizen, and it's allies like Venezuela and Syria can feign shock, and hate, and cry imperialism if anyone dares try and act over what we all know Iran is actually doing.
"For me it's easier to write complex broken code when you have dynamic typing."
FTFY.
Besides, with .NET 4 and the DLR you have the best of both worlds anyway. So if you really do think you know what you're doing and are competent enough to write good solid dynamic code you still can. Perhaps the best part is you can control the way dynamic typing works if you know your shit when it comes to expression trees and so forth.
"Don't be silly. Java's overzealous checked exceptions, for example, lead to *worse* code as lazy developers code to satisfy the compiler"
How is it worse than a problem outright occuring as it would under PHP because the developer would remain oblivious to the problem even existing? It may be a hack, but at least it means the developers been forced to recognise that there's a potential problem there, whilst in PHP the problem may remain unnoticed.
"Just trying to keep the code readable while still satisfying the compiler means that lazy developers will do remarkably stupid things just to keep their code short or easy to read (in an effort to combat the cruft and clutter). Using string where they should use stringbuilder, for example, is a common problem caused by the developer trying to save a few lines of code and avoid littering clean-looking lines by sprinkling toString() all over."
I agree these are problems, but fundamentally the code is still more efficient at execution time due to JIT compilation than what is simply interpreted PHP code.
"his bizarre belief that you can trust the compiler to spin your crap code in to gold needs to die."
Look, you're changing the nature of the discussion to suit your point now, the point was whether Java allows developers to write shit code, the point was that Java forces the developer into a situation where his code is at least more efficient.
"You've not see spaghetti-code until you've seen a large Java or C# project!"
Right, but I've seen plenty of good large Java and C# projects, but if we're sticking to the original discussion are you seriously suggesting large PHP projects are somehow always more organised?
Look, I don't disagree with your point that bad code can still exist in Java and C# but that wasn't the discussion, the discussion was that it's at least not as bad as with PHP where bad developers will often end up with half arsed object orientation resulting in hard to trace code, because of spurious use of global variables, as well as failing to follow any decent design principles because the frameworks, like CakePHP, encourage it, due to the fact the frameworks themselves can't even do simply things like implement MVC properly. At least C# and Java force some kind of sensible class hierarchy, force you to deal with some of the more braindead problems caught at compile time, and the frameworks tend to be written to best practices which absolutely isn't the case with PHP.
The point is that some of the most terribly fucked up code doesn't even compile and hence become semi-usable in C#/Java, but PHP does allow code with some of the most awful errors to execute, and that's fucking dangerous.
Be wary of the number of responses in favour of PHP and the moderations given to posts here, it's hard to have a sensible debate about PHP, because it is so easy to pick up, use, and hack something together it's used by people in greater numbers, coupled with the fact that Slashdot's moderation system is built on numerical consensus means that a popular opinion will get modded up, and an unpopular modded down, but popular does not mean correct.
So with that out the way, here's my view as a lead software developer at a firm who develops for large clients from BP, to Swiss Re, and from Britain's MoD to GE using a large array of languages from C# to Java, and C++ to Ruby and PHP. Fundamentally if you're a good programmer and know the ins and outs of programming, both generally, and in a language specific way you'll be able to write good PHP code, as the GP says - as good as any other framework to an extent. My only caveat with that would be that PHP just doesn't scale as well at the high end as other languages as the likes of Facebook have found out, hence why they wrote a PHP to C++ translator, and now a Java-esque VM to try and get their PHP to work at the same level of performance as these languages. The flip side of that is that most web applications will never need that kind of performance, and hence good developers can write code with PHP just fine without any real side effects at the end of the day.
But the reason many professional developers who have experience across many languages look down on PHP are many, the language itself has always been well behind the curve, it didn't properly support fundamental concepts like classes, namespaces, and closures until more reecent years, and that's pretty inexcusable, not in that these are expected features for a modern language, but that they're fundamental to the design of a language and adding them later will only result in headaches, and with PHP it certainly has. It also has many other quirks, associativity of the ternary operator for example is backwards in PHP compared to most other languages, variable scoping is fucked, namespaces use the escape character as the separator and these are the sorts of things that will trip new, and even many moderately experienced programmers up as to why things suddenly aren't working.
It's also the case that interpreted languages in general face the problem that code can appear to run fine until errors are encountered, whilst with compiled, or bytecode compiled languages like C# and Java more errors are detected, and hence must be corrected at compile time, preventing some nasty errors ever reaching the end user. This in itself is less of a problem if there is great testing supporting for an interpreted language, but even PHP's unit testing tools are way behind the equivalents in again, languages like C# and Java. On top of this, the rest of the tools for languages like C++, C# and Java are just that much more mature offering features that just let you write better code faster.
Of course, PHP is still used heavily, and this is because it does let you get things done quickly, in the real world there just isn't always time to properly write well architected, and well tested code, this is really sad, as it almost always inevitably leads to problems in the long run, but it's also an unescapable, no matter how unwanted reality. The fact is if you have a pushy client or boss then just may not even have time to write a beautifully architected, well tested C#/ASP.NET MVC, or Java/Spring application no matter how superior that option would be.
So fundamentally it comes down to how much freedom you have with your software development schedules, if you're being given time to do things right, then use something like C# and ASP.NET MVC, or Java and Spring if you can't use Windows Server to host. If however you're being forced to get things done quickly then you may well find it's best to stick to PHP, but if you do then please, do one thing - work your arse off learning PHP in depth, learn it's quirks, it's pitfalls
"No it won't. It's a nice myth, but it's not really true. Programmers will output crap at their level regardless of the environ. "
Perhaps he should have phrased it as "will help them write much better code", rather than "good code", if he had then it'd be absolutely right. Code written in C# or Java for example will be inherently better because more errors are checked at compile time (i.e. invalid type conversions), and hence can't result in issues at runtime.
"Your only argument is it doesn't 'shepherd' the programmer enough. That's not a negative from my perspective."
It shouldn't be. In an ideal world where all programmers are perfect and there are plenty of programmers you'd be right, but here in the real world truly good programmers are hard to come by and most fall into the middle ground where they simply don't have the skill to be trusted to avoid the pitfalls of a language like PHP day in day out. This is why PHP is far and away the language most responsible for the proliferation of SQL injection attacks on the web to this day- because it encourages use of direct SQL querying, rather than say, parameterised SQL and so forth to perform database tasks to name but one example of the problems it leads to.
Corruption only spreads to the civil service when you have a complacent enough government to allow it. It's no suprise that countries with the most healthy democracy have the lowest levels of corruption amongst public sector and the healthiest divide between public and private sector when it comes to money.