Yes, but the last company to slash their drives from 3 years, to 1 year warranty was Maxtor about 6 or 7 years ago, and they did so at the same time that I had 6 Maxtor drives fail personally in a 3 month period and all of different models, and I haven't bought a Crapstor drive ever since.
In contrast the 5 year warranty Seagates and Western Digitals have always done be well, I know it's just an anecdote but I firmly believe a warranty most definitely is an indication of the quality of a company's product, and if a company is dropping warranty from 5 years to 1 year it implies they no longer have faith in the majority of their products being realistically able to last 5 years.
Agreed, but is there any reason they'd use the peace corps to commit espionage here, rather than professional spies?
Paranoid countries tend to be highly paranoid about NGOs, not least Russia itself, if you're going to spy on a paranoid country then an NGO is perhaps the least sensible place to stick your spy.
So a peace corps member has claimed he's been setup for espionage by the KNB who aren't meant to be in Kazakhstan, but really he was actually committing espionage stealing information about the KNB in Kazakhstan?
"I don't care if he has a cellphone. Other news sources are reporting allegations of espionage from the Peace Corp."
Not a comment on your point or the rest of your post, but just out of intrigue, what the fuck kind of information could Kazakhstan actually have that's worth a Peace Corps member stealing?
"Well, no wonder news reporting is in such a sorry pathetic state these days."
Let's not be too hard on the guy, at least he's trying. What he's done is still far better than what most journalists do nowadays, and that's just outright make shit up without even bothering with the whole investigative bit, citing quotes from their "source who wished to remain anonymous".
I'm not overly familiar with the NY Times, but even some of the UK's better publications like The Guardian have run the odd article that was based on far less evidence than this.
What you say is true of how journalism should work, but it's absolutely not true of how journalism does work. If anything's come out of the Leveson enquiry in the UK it's how much shit really is actually just outright fabricated by journalists, there was no worry of journalists being blacklisted and losing their jobs there.
Of course, you could say that perhaps it's just the UK media where things are this bad, but on the contrary, I think the reason this has come out about the UK media is precisely because there are at least a few journalists here still capable of investigative journalism that exposes this sort of shit. Certainly Murdoch's US media seems to be allowed to get away with even more FUD than it has over here for example.
Try e-mailing BT's chief exec, Ian Livingston directly and ask him:
ian.livingston@bt.com
Perhaps he'll just fob you off to the PR or legal department, but he's responded to me before when I've had issues with his company and has actually been really good in helping me out. I e-mailed him on a Saturday morning when I wanted a second phone line reenabling and their sales Team told me there'd be no engineer cost, and then they sent me a £120 engineer bill and their support folks insisted I'd have to pay it. Within an hour, despite it being a Saturday he'd replied personally via his Blackberry and CC'd his PA telling her to get someone to sort it for me and they did. He also got things moving when their engineers were dicking around unable to fix a line at my old house for months.
I can't promise anything, but of all the CEOs I've attempted to contact he's been the most helpful and willing to respond personally which is more than can be said for the likes of Amazon's UK boss such that I had to get the office of fair trading to rule against them on a complaint to sort out the problems I had with them (Guaranteed next day deliveries turning up 2 weeks later, twice, and not willing to refund delivery). Might be worth a go to express your concerns, but be polite, be reasonable in expressing your concerns and write your e-mail well.
"True. Firefox is now a rock-solid, stable and mature browser."
Hahaha, wait, you were serious weren't you?
More memory leaks than Windows ME, less security than IE? and the performance of Vista?
Firefox WAS a rock solid browser around version 2.0 - 3.0, but has got progressively worse since then, now it's anything but.
The guy above talking about Firefox's market share being based on it's quality has a good point though. Certainly it grew it's market share based on being a high quality browser, but it's also seeing declining market share because it is now a low quality browser.
I've primarily been using Firefox for years, and still do, but I'm getting increasingly tired of it, and each new release doesn't make things better because the devs are too interested adding in really tacky themes like it's the 1990s again rather than focussing on keeping it the secure, solid, high performance browser that it was when it was gaining market share. I have most major browser installed on my computers because I do a fair bit of web dev, so I tend to use whatever browser I had open last, but I'll find myself intentionally loading another browser, rather than continuing to use Firefox now.
Firefox's popularity really is based on it's quality, but again, that's why it's popularity is now declining. It's no coincidence that when Firefox was good it's marketshare was increasing, but now it's bad, it's decreasing.
Of course, another factor worth pointing out is how dire Firefox is at supporting new HTML5/CSS3 features. Chrome, Opera, Safari are light years ahead of Firefox here, and even IE9 seems better in most cases. I dare say when people have been sent links to fancy new HTML5/CSS3 demos that they've been given an incentive to download Chrome or whatever and start using it because Firefox failed spectacularly to display the page properly, which, as an aside, wouldn't be so tragic if it weren't for the fact that Mozilla has been one of the biggest proponents behind the hijacking of web standards by WHATWG.
"We want the new standards to have all these shiny fancy things! Oh, that means we have to actually implement them in our own browser? Well shit, we thought we were just dictating what everyone else was expected to do!"
I'm not sure why people pursue this myth that the netbook market is even dead.
It's a market that grew rapidly, to far higher numbers than tablets have even with the iPads success.
Whilst there's no doubt sales growth has slowed, possibly declined this doesn't change the amount of netbooks out there, but fundamentally the slowing of netbook sales is explainable because:
1) Most people have no reason to replace their existing netbooks. Many bought in the last 3 years are still good enough today, why replace it? You don't need the latest and greatest in computing power to browse the web and send e-mails.
2) We're still in global financial turmoil, so even those inclined to have the latest and greatest have been drastically cutting back.
Apple failed to hit it's iPad 2 sales target last quarter shifting only 4.19 million units instead of it's predicted 5 million, and Dell has also stopped selling tablets. Applying the same logic being applied to netbooks you can thus equally say that the tablet market is dead, so if tablets killed the netbook market what's killed the tablet market?
Alternatively, you could simply recognise that the more logical explanation is simply that Dell is still pursuing the same failing business model that's been causing it to decline for the best part of a decade now taking it from computing behemoth, to also ran.
No one cares what Dell is doing nowadays, because you can guarantee that whatever Dell is doing is almost certainly going to fail.
Militarily, not politically. The GP I was responding to was trying to sell Iran as a nation that has not launched any aggressive actions against anyone since the 18th century, clearly that is completely and utterly false.
I've got an iPad 2 and I'm not even sure what use it is to be honest.
It's basically just used as a really expensive portable web browser, and not much else, because whilst the apps look great on the Apple advert, when you actually download some of those that are showcased like the NASA app and the spreadsheet app, you find that the few screens you see on TV are actually basically the entire app because the apps have about the depth of a small spoon. You can't actually do anything useful with the apps because they really are that shallow and completely devoid of 99.99% their desktop equivalents would have.
It makes a nice catalog for my girlfriend who can at pictures of the latest fashion items too I suppose, but as a device it's not terribly useful.
Most people I see with them on the trains tend to be using them as very bad eReaders - larger, heavier, less battery life, harder to read.
They get use without a doubt, but I agree that I think they're most likely a fad amongst the general public. We have use for them in some areas, at work we use them as a basis for some eLearning projects, so certainly there are niche areas they're suited, but without a doubt I can't see the idea that they're going to replace general computing has any merit, at least without a major transformation as to how we interact with them because the current touch UIs don't do it. Typing an e-mail on the iPad is a million times more of a pain than just walking upstairs to my study and typing it out on my computer, or, if I've bothered to bring it downstairs or charge it, to use my laptop, or netbook. Swype on my phone makes things much better, and it'd be less hassle with that, but Apple wont let us have nice things like that so it's not like that's even an option to make the tablet slightly more worthwhile.
"That's why Vegas is the way it is. It can afford to be shiny and solicitious, because there are always people who think they can beat the odds."
Yes, and those who genuinely can, because they're capable of doing things like card counting and so forth get kicked out.
To me there's something basically wrong about that, casinos bill themselves as a place to play games for money, they make use of statistics to give themselves an advantage in those games, and yet, if someone also uses statistics to even the playing field, they can be kicked out. I guess it goes against my sense of fair play.
Casinos are like the kid at school that had to cheat at games, but threw the worlds biggest tantrum when someone cheated equally and beat him.
"(Also keeping in mind that iran hasn't engaged in any aggressive actions or invasions against her neighbors since the 18th century or so, while Israel has bombed and invaded all of its neighbors at some pont, and its most recent war happened in only 2006."
You were doing pretty well until this point.
Iran has been carrying out proxy wars funding, training, and arming groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and parts of the Iraqi and Afghan insurgency for years now.
The whole reason Lebanon has been so close to being a thriving secular democracy but then repeatedly fallen into chaos and civil war is because Iran and Syria love to have a puppet army on Israel's doorstep and recognise they need to destabilise the legitimate military and government of that nation to achieve their goals, because Lebanon's secular, legitimate government and military has never been interested in carrying out Iran's war for it.
Don't try and pretend they're innocent, they're a major destabilising force in the middle east, because whilst they don't directly invade foreign nations, they play the game of proxy war as well as the CIA ever has. You've got to be pretty naive to think otherwise.
Whilst I completely disagree with Israel's actions relating to the Palestinians, it betrays your real agenda when you complain of Israel invading it's neighbours. Let's not forget that more often than not this is because it's neighbours have tried to invade it, but unfortunately for them Israel pushed back and won. Here's a thought experiment for you - if Egypt, Syria, et. al. had succesfully invaded Israel, would you still be sat here calling it the bad guy? I'm not convinced invading a foreign nation to stop it invading you is necessarily a bad thing. Certainly things are much more stable between the likes of Egypt, Jordan, Israel etc. than they were back then.
Look, hate Israel for what they've done to the Palestinians all you want - I'd agree with you there, but to then go to the extreme of pretending Iran is some magical, innocent, ultra-friendly nation, and it's Israel's fault entirely? That's just dumb, ignorant, and naive.
But why, what could possibly be so urgent in your life that it can't wait a minute or two until you can safely pull over to take the call?
This is the problem, it's simply down to laziness, you're simply too lazy to pull over and effectively you're saying "I've had no accidents yet so I think it's safe" - you don't know for sure, because it may well still cause you to crash, but you're saying rather than play it on the safe side, you'd rather continue to be lazy.
The point is there's no valid argument for even needing to use a phone whilst driving bar simple outright laziness.
So can I just ask, what exactly is so urgent that you feel the need to use your phone in any way, shape, or form whilst driving anyway?
Personally I'm quite happy to stick my phone on silent and ignore it until I get to my destination, or, if I need to make a call, I pull into a layby somewhere and do it.
I can't believe people are more busy than me either, I've studied full time whilst working full time, whilst having family commitments too whilst still managing to pursue my hobbies, I became a master whilst doing full time study and full time work of making use of every minute of the day, yet despite this, I've still never felt the need to use my phone whilst driving.
So why don't we play it safe, and assume the evidence that suggests using a phone whilst driving is a distration and a risk is correct, and just not use our cell phones whilst driving?
If you have a good excuse as to why it's more important for everyone and anyone to be able to use their phones whilst driving and sod any possibility of increased risk to safety, then I'd absolutely love to hear it. But being too busy, or being incapable of pulling over, or waiting to take, make, or return calls most definitely aren't valid excuses.
You seem to be going down some pretty odd paths to try and justify your argument, it's a little odd.
I'm not really sure what tweaks you think the likes of eBay would do, it's not like they need to completely rewrite the JVM and replace it, at most it'll be down to configuration options, but configuring the JVM is hardly the same as completely replacing the PHP interpreter with a VM written from scratch. Yes on these sorts of systems there's a lot of custom configuration you'll have to do, but it's not really the same as having to modify the entire underlying platform.
Regarding development time it's often a bit of a fallacy on a large project, PHP is great for getting something up and running quickly, so great for prototyping, or small projects, but if you want anything bigger then large PHP codebases become so horrible to maintain that at that end of the scale you'll likely find development more costly - particularly when you start having to deal with greater performance issues meaning you'll need to resort to optimisations which grossly reduce maintainability to get performance to a level where other languages and platforms are without needing such hacks. Of course, you can do those optimisation hacks in those languages too, but then you get even greater performance again. The problem is an even bigger issue if you're talking about a codebase from before PHP properly supported OOP, Namespaces and the likes, and even now unit testing in PHP isn't that great so things like regression testing is infinitely more difficult than it is with say, C#.NET MVC and Visual Studio's MSTest suite, or Java and JUNit and related tools.
If there's any chance that your site is going to grow massively then PHP is a bad choice, if you're just talking about your own personal home page, or an internal site, or a site with a known amount of users and so forth then yes it's an excellent choice, but we're seeing the same with Facebook as we did with Twitter - they chose tools best suited for small scale development and have suffered scalability issues. In contrast, companies like Google, eBay, and so forth used the right tools from the outset and have not had these kinds of problems where the whole underlying codebase and execution environment was in question.
I agree to some extent, PHP is great for rapid prototyping or rapidly getting something to market, but honestly it's not as if Java is so slow to develop with that it would've added any delay in getting the project to market that would've stunted it's success as the success was largely on the business side of things anyway - the idea of Facebook wasn't new, MySpace had been doing the same sort of thing before, and friends reunited before that. He'd have got the business side right regardless of technology used. C++ is slower to develop with and getting that in a usable state for an initial release may well have been a bit more problematic, and led to potentially more and more serious security flaws that could've been enough to kill the project in it's tracks in it's early days, but even there if you use some of the great libraries available it shouldn't be too big an issue.
Reading the comments from Facebook devs themselves about their new tools it sounds very much like they wish they were working with something like C++ or Java, but recognise now it's too late or too big an investment to now switch and so for them, this is the next best thing.
"We don't have the humidity so our -3C is like +10 in a place like London England."
I'd just like to add how true this is, I live in the UK but have been to Canada many times, and frankly I feel much colder in the UK when it's 3C here than I did when it was -35C in Canada because the humidity of the UK really fucking cuts right through you.
The coldest I've ever felt was on a boat inside the arctic circle in Northern Norway, it was only -12c but my god did the cold sea air fucking bite into you, far more painful than the coldest I've ever felt, -42C, again, in Canada.
I hate British winters, even though it rarely strays below -5C for maybe one or two days of the year overnight or so on all but the most exceptional years (the last 2 winters we got to -17C, but that's an extremely rare event).
"How did you went from "php is probably not the better choice" for "C++ or Java probably will do it"? Because they made a C++ translator, or because you think what they implemented is a Java concept?"
Well it's pretty simple really, both C++ and Java (and to a lesser extent,.NET) have a proven track record of scaling succesfully to the sort of degree Facebook requires - Google's search back end, eBay etc. but also that what they have implemented, whilst not explicitly a Java concept, is a case of going down the route Java has to succesfully scale - because they can't afford to ditch their existing code base for Java, they're doing the next best thing, and making PHP run in a Java-esque manner.
"Facebook did the PHP/C++ translator because of economic reasons, not because PHP couldn't scale."
Well yeah, if you have unlimited funds I'm sure you can get anything to work. You could probably get even the most inefficient of interpreted languages to scale if you're willing to buy a custom supercomputer, or cluster of, and pay for your own power plant to run and cool it all. In this respect you can say anything scales.
But if even Facebook can't afford to make PHP scale, then that's equivalent to saying it just doesn't scale well enough, as money is a major limiting factor in getting something to scale. If the standard PHP engine is too low performance to scale affordably then that in itself is enough reason to say it doesn't scale. Unless you're one of those people who spends their life missing the point and would've preferred I spelt it out explicitly and said "PHP doesn't scale in an affordable manner" then I'm not sure what your point is.
"There is a network that infiltrates communities like Slashdot..."
Well that's pretty cool, seeing as the content of his posts is infinitely more useful and intelligent than the usual fanboy tosh that gets posted here nowadays.
If Slashdot is being infiltrated by a network of people who actually know what the fuck they're on about then that's pretty awesome.
Of course, it doesn't help that in the article some of the same complaints are true of the supposedly superior iPad.
No privacy, people can pick it up and see what you've been doing for example? On the iPad this is a feature - it means you can instantly resume what you were doing! On the Fire it's a nasty fault that makes the device worth returning to Amazon. Apparently.
But look at this very fucking article, they've basically just turned it into Java. That is of course, after they wrote something to turn it into C++ previously.
Which proves the point, that for something large scale and scalable to this degree, then something like C++ or Java from the outset is the best tool for the job. PHP as is has clearly failed to meet Facebook's needs, hence why they've spent the whole year bastardising it into something else by replacing the translator altogether.
If they didn't have so much existing PHP code or could simply throw their existing codebase away, you could guarantee this story would've instead been "Facebook ditches PHP".
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the last company to slash their drives from 3 years, to 1 year warranty was Maxtor about 6 or 7 years ago, and they did so at the same time that I had 6 Maxtor drives fail personally in a 3 month period and all of different models, and I haven't bought a Crapstor drive ever since.
In contrast the 5 year warranty Seagates and Western Digitals have always done be well, I know it's just an anecdote but I firmly believe a warranty most definitely is an indication of the quality of a company's product, and if a company is dropping warranty from 5 years to 1 year it implies they no longer have faith in the majority of their products being realistically able to last 5 years.
Agreed, but is there any reason they'd use the peace corps to commit espionage here, rather than professional spies?
Paranoid countries tend to be highly paranoid about NGOs, not least Russia itself, if you're going to spy on a paranoid country then an NGO is perhaps the least sensible place to stick your spy.
That would turn it into quite the mindfuck.
So a peace corps member has claimed he's been setup for espionage by the KNB who aren't meant to be in Kazakhstan, but really he was actually committing espionage stealing information about the KNB in Kazakhstan?
"I don't care if he has a cellphone. Other news sources are reporting allegations of espionage from the Peace Corp."
Not a comment on your point or the rest of your post, but just out of intrigue, what the fuck kind of information could Kazakhstan actually have that's worth a Peace Corps member stealing?
"Well, no wonder news reporting is in such a sorry pathetic state these days."
Let's not be too hard on the guy, at least he's trying. What he's done is still far better than what most journalists do nowadays, and that's just outright make shit up without even bothering with the whole investigative bit, citing quotes from their "source who wished to remain anonymous".
I'm not overly familiar with the NY Times, but even some of the UK's better publications like The Guardian have run the odd article that was based on far less evidence than this.
What you say is true of how journalism should work, but it's absolutely not true of how journalism does work. If anything's come out of the Leveson enquiry in the UK it's how much shit really is actually just outright fabricated by journalists, there was no worry of journalists being blacklisted and losing their jobs there.
Of course, you could say that perhaps it's just the UK media where things are this bad, but on the contrary, I think the reason this has come out about the UK media is precisely because there are at least a few journalists here still capable of investigative journalism that exposes this sort of shit. Certainly Murdoch's US media seems to be allowed to get away with even more FUD than it has over here for example.
Try e-mailing BT's chief exec, Ian Livingston directly and ask him:
ian.livingston@bt.com
Perhaps he'll just fob you off to the PR or legal department, but he's responded to me before when I've had issues with his company and has actually been really good in helping me out. I e-mailed him on a Saturday morning when I wanted a second phone line reenabling and their sales Team told me there'd be no engineer cost, and then they sent me a £120 engineer bill and their support folks insisted I'd have to pay it. Within an hour, despite it being a Saturday he'd replied personally via his Blackberry and CC'd his PA telling her to get someone to sort it for me and they did. He also got things moving when their engineers were dicking around unable to fix a line at my old house for months.
I can't promise anything, but of all the CEOs I've attempted to contact he's been the most helpful and willing to respond personally which is more than can be said for the likes of Amazon's UK boss such that I had to get the office of fair trading to rule against them on a complaint to sort out the problems I had with them (Guaranteed next day deliveries turning up 2 weeks later, twice, and not willing to refund delivery). Might be worth a go to express your concerns, but be polite, be reasonable in expressing your concerns and write your e-mail well.
My grandfather was 70 years old and in ill health.
He eventually died 26 years later.
"True. Firefox is now a rock-solid, stable and mature browser."
Hahaha, wait, you were serious weren't you?
More memory leaks than Windows ME, less security than IE? and the performance of Vista?
Firefox WAS a rock solid browser around version 2.0 - 3.0, but has got progressively worse since then, now it's anything but.
The guy above talking about Firefox's market share being based on it's quality has a good point though. Certainly it grew it's market share based on being a high quality browser, but it's also seeing declining market share because it is now a low quality browser.
I've primarily been using Firefox for years, and still do, but I'm getting increasingly tired of it, and each new release doesn't make things better because the devs are too interested adding in really tacky themes like it's the 1990s again rather than focussing on keeping it the secure, solid, high performance browser that it was when it was gaining market share. I have most major browser installed on my computers because I do a fair bit of web dev, so I tend to use whatever browser I had open last, but I'll find myself intentionally loading another browser, rather than continuing to use Firefox now.
Firefox's popularity really is based on it's quality, but again, that's why it's popularity is now declining. It's no coincidence that when Firefox was good it's marketshare was increasing, but now it's bad, it's decreasing.
Of course, another factor worth pointing out is how dire Firefox is at supporting new HTML5/CSS3 features. Chrome, Opera, Safari are light years ahead of Firefox here, and even IE9 seems better in most cases. I dare say when people have been sent links to fancy new HTML5/CSS3 demos that they've been given an incentive to download Chrome or whatever and start using it because Firefox failed spectacularly to display the page properly, which, as an aside, wouldn't be so tragic if it weren't for the fact that Mozilla has been one of the biggest proponents behind the hijacking of web standards by WHATWG.
"We want the new standards to have all these shiny fancy things! Oh, that means we have to actually implement them in our own browser? Well shit, we thought we were just dictating what everyone else was expected to do!"
I'm not sure why people pursue this myth that the netbook market is even dead.
It's a market that grew rapidly, to far higher numbers than tablets have even with the iPads success.
Whilst there's no doubt sales growth has slowed, possibly declined this doesn't change the amount of netbooks out there, but fundamentally the slowing of netbook sales is explainable because:
1) Most people have no reason to replace their existing netbooks. Many bought in the last 3 years are still good enough today, why replace it? You don't need the latest and greatest in computing power to browse the web and send e-mails.
2) We're still in global financial turmoil, so even those inclined to have the latest and greatest have been drastically cutting back.
Apple failed to hit it's iPad 2 sales target last quarter shifting only 4.19 million units instead of it's predicted 5 million, and Dell has also stopped selling tablets. Applying the same logic being applied to netbooks you can thus equally say that the tablet market is dead, so if tablets killed the netbook market what's killed the tablet market?
Alternatively, you could simply recognise that the more logical explanation is simply that Dell is still pursuing the same failing business model that's been causing it to decline for the best part of a decade now taking it from computing behemoth, to also ran.
No one cares what Dell is doing nowadays, because you can guarantee that whatever Dell is doing is almost certainly going to fail.
Militarily, not politically. The GP I was responding to was trying to sell Iran as a nation that has not launched any aggressive actions against anyone since the 18th century, clearly that is completely and utterly false.
I've got an iPad 2 and I'm not even sure what use it is to be honest.
It's basically just used as a really expensive portable web browser, and not much else, because whilst the apps look great on the Apple advert, when you actually download some of those that are showcased like the NASA app and the spreadsheet app, you find that the few screens you see on TV are actually basically the entire app because the apps have about the depth of a small spoon. You can't actually do anything useful with the apps because they really are that shallow and completely devoid of 99.99% their desktop equivalents would have.
It makes a nice catalog for my girlfriend who can at pictures of the latest fashion items too I suppose, but as a device it's not terribly useful.
Most people I see with them on the trains tend to be using them as very bad eReaders - larger, heavier, less battery life, harder to read.
They get use without a doubt, but I agree that I think they're most likely a fad amongst the general public. We have use for them in some areas, at work we use them as a basis for some eLearning projects, so certainly there are niche areas they're suited, but without a doubt I can't see the idea that they're going to replace general computing has any merit, at least without a major transformation as to how we interact with them because the current touch UIs don't do it. Typing an e-mail on the iPad is a million times more of a pain than just walking upstairs to my study and typing it out on my computer, or, if I've bothered to bring it downstairs or charge it, to use my laptop, or netbook. Swype on my phone makes things much better, and it'd be less hassle with that, but Apple wont let us have nice things like that so it's not like that's even an option to make the tablet slightly more worthwhile.
"That's why Vegas is the way it is. It can afford to be shiny and solicitious, because there are always people who think they can beat the odds."
Yes, and those who genuinely can, because they're capable of doing things like card counting and so forth get kicked out.
To me there's something basically wrong about that, casinos bill themselves as a place to play games for money, they make use of statistics to give themselves an advantage in those games, and yet, if someone also uses statistics to even the playing field, they can be kicked out. I guess it goes against my sense of fair play.
Casinos are like the kid at school that had to cheat at games, but threw the worlds biggest tantrum when someone cheated equally and beat him.
"(Also keeping in mind that iran hasn't engaged in any aggressive actions or invasions against her neighbors since the 18th century or so, while Israel has bombed and invaded all of its neighbors at some pont, and its most recent war happened in only 2006."
You were doing pretty well until this point.
Iran has been carrying out proxy wars funding, training, and arming groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, and parts of the Iraqi and Afghan insurgency for years now.
The whole reason Lebanon has been so close to being a thriving secular democracy but then repeatedly fallen into chaos and civil war is because Iran and Syria love to have a puppet army on Israel's doorstep and recognise they need to destabilise the legitimate military and government of that nation to achieve their goals, because Lebanon's secular, legitimate government and military has never been interested in carrying out Iran's war for it.
Don't try and pretend they're innocent, they're a major destabilising force in the middle east, because whilst they don't directly invade foreign nations, they play the game of proxy war as well as the CIA ever has. You've got to be pretty naive to think otherwise.
Whilst I completely disagree with Israel's actions relating to the Palestinians, it betrays your real agenda when you complain of Israel invading it's neighbours. Let's not forget that more often than not this is because it's neighbours have tried to invade it, but unfortunately for them Israel pushed back and won. Here's a thought experiment for you - if Egypt, Syria, et. al. had succesfully invaded Israel, would you still be sat here calling it the bad guy? I'm not convinced invading a foreign nation to stop it invading you is necessarily a bad thing. Certainly things are much more stable between the likes of Egypt, Jordan, Israel etc. than they were back then.
Look, hate Israel for what they've done to the Palestinians all you want - I'd agree with you there, but to then go to the extreme of pretending Iran is some magical, innocent, ultra-friendly nation, and it's Israel's fault entirely? That's just dumb, ignorant, and naive.
"Personally, I'm not."
But why, what could possibly be so urgent in your life that it can't wait a minute or two until you can safely pull over to take the call?
This is the problem, it's simply down to laziness, you're simply too lazy to pull over and effectively you're saying "I've had no accidents yet so I think it's safe" - you don't know for sure, because it may well still cause you to crash, but you're saying rather than play it on the safe side, you'd rather continue to be lazy.
The point is there's no valid argument for even needing to use a phone whilst driving bar simple outright laziness.
So can I just ask, what exactly is so urgent that you feel the need to use your phone in any way, shape, or form whilst driving anyway?
Personally I'm quite happy to stick my phone on silent and ignore it until I get to my destination, or, if I need to make a call, I pull into a layby somewhere and do it.
I can't believe people are more busy than me either, I've studied full time whilst working full time, whilst having family commitments too whilst still managing to pursue my hobbies, I became a master whilst doing full time study and full time work of making use of every minute of the day, yet despite this, I've still never felt the need to use my phone whilst driving.
So why don't we play it safe, and assume the evidence that suggests using a phone whilst driving is a distration and a risk is correct, and just not use our cell phones whilst driving?
If you have a good excuse as to why it's more important for everyone and anyone to be able to use their phones whilst driving and sod any possibility of increased risk to safety, then I'd absolutely love to hear it. But being too busy, or being incapable of pulling over, or waiting to take, make, or return calls most definitely aren't valid excuses.
You seem to be going down some pretty odd paths to try and justify your argument, it's a little odd.
I'm not really sure what tweaks you think the likes of eBay would do, it's not like they need to completely rewrite the JVM and replace it, at most it'll be down to configuration options, but configuring the JVM is hardly the same as completely replacing the PHP interpreter with a VM written from scratch. Yes on these sorts of systems there's a lot of custom configuration you'll have to do, but it's not really the same as having to modify the entire underlying platform.
Regarding development time it's often a bit of a fallacy on a large project, PHP is great for getting something up and running quickly, so great for prototyping, or small projects, but if you want anything bigger then large PHP codebases become so horrible to maintain that at that end of the scale you'll likely find development more costly - particularly when you start having to deal with greater performance issues meaning you'll need to resort to optimisations which grossly reduce maintainability to get performance to a level where other languages and platforms are without needing such hacks. Of course, you can do those optimisation hacks in those languages too, but then you get even greater performance again. The problem is an even bigger issue if you're talking about a codebase from before PHP properly supported OOP, Namespaces and the likes, and even now unit testing in PHP isn't that great so things like regression testing is infinitely more difficult than it is with say, C# .NET MVC and Visual Studio's MSTest suite, or Java and JUNit and related tools.
If there's any chance that your site is going to grow massively then PHP is a bad choice, if you're just talking about your own personal home page, or an internal site, or a site with a known amount of users and so forth then yes it's an excellent choice, but we're seeing the same with Facebook as we did with Twitter - they chose tools best suited for small scale development and have suffered scalability issues. In contrast, companies like Google, eBay, and so forth used the right tools from the outset and have not had these kinds of problems where the whole underlying codebase and execution environment was in question.
I agree to some extent, PHP is great for rapid prototyping or rapidly getting something to market, but honestly it's not as if Java is so slow to develop with that it would've added any delay in getting the project to market that would've stunted it's success as the success was largely on the business side of things anyway - the idea of Facebook wasn't new, MySpace had been doing the same sort of thing before, and friends reunited before that. He'd have got the business side right regardless of technology used. C++ is slower to develop with and getting that in a usable state for an initial release may well have been a bit more problematic, and led to potentially more and more serious security flaws that could've been enough to kill the project in it's tracks in it's early days, but even there if you use some of the great libraries available it shouldn't be too big an issue.
Reading the comments from Facebook devs themselves about their new tools it sounds very much like they wish they were working with something like C++ or Java, but recognise now it's too late or too big an investment to now switch and so for them, this is the next best thing.
"Where? The closest I can remember was blowing up a pharma factory in some African nation which couldn't fight back. Sudan?"
Not sure about the US, but Israel has, most likely with US backing and intelligence support at minimum.
Israel first did it with the Osirak reactor, in Iraq, in 1981.
The second time they did it was with a secret reactor, in Syria, in 2007.
I know you were talking about the US specifically, but it seems likely these weren't entirely unilateral actions by Israel.
"We don't have the humidity so our -3C is like +10 in a place like London England."
I'd just like to add how true this is, I live in the UK but have been to Canada many times, and frankly I feel much colder in the UK when it's 3C here than I did when it was -35C in Canada because the humidity of the UK really fucking cuts right through you.
The coldest I've ever felt was on a boat inside the arctic circle in Northern Norway, it was only -12c but my god did the cold sea air fucking bite into you, far more painful than the coldest I've ever felt, -42C, again, in Canada.
I hate British winters, even though it rarely strays below -5C for maybe one or two days of the year overnight or so on all but the most exceptional years (the last 2 winters we got to -17C, but that's an extremely rare event).
"How did you went from "php is probably not the better choice" for "C++ or Java probably will do it"? Because they made a C++ translator, or because you think what they implemented is a Java concept?"
Well it's pretty simple really, both C++ and Java (and to a lesser extent, .NET) have a proven track record of scaling succesfully to the sort of degree Facebook requires - Google's search back end, eBay etc. but also that what they have implemented, whilst not explicitly a Java concept, is a case of going down the route Java has to succesfully scale - because they can't afford to ditch their existing code base for Java, they're doing the next best thing, and making PHP run in a Java-esque manner.
"Facebook did the PHP/C++ translator because of economic reasons, not because PHP couldn't scale."
Well yeah, if you have unlimited funds I'm sure you can get anything to work. You could probably get even the most inefficient of interpreted languages to scale if you're willing to buy a custom supercomputer, or cluster of, and pay for your own power plant to run and cool it all. In this respect you can say anything scales.
But if even Facebook can't afford to make PHP scale, then that's equivalent to saying it just doesn't scale well enough, as money is a major limiting factor in getting something to scale. If the standard PHP engine is too low performance to scale affordably then that in itself is enough reason to say it doesn't scale. Unless you're one of those people who spends their life missing the point and would've preferred I spelt it out explicitly and said "PHP doesn't scale in an affordable manner" then I'm not sure what your point is.
No they haven't:
http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358/
They've been converting PHP to C++ and compiling it with GCC.
They haven't been using straight PHP for at least 3 years now for precisely the reason that it hasn't scaled for them as they've needed it to.
"There is a network that infiltrates communities like Slashdot..."
Well that's pretty cool, seeing as the content of his posts is infinitely more useful and intelligent than the usual fanboy tosh that gets posted here nowadays.
If Slashdot is being infiltrated by a network of people who actually know what the fuck they're on about then that's pretty awesome.
Of course, it doesn't help that in the article some of the same complaints are true of the supposedly superior iPad.
No privacy, people can pick it up and see what you've been doing for example? On the iPad this is a feature - it means you can instantly resume what you were doing! On the Fire it's a nasty fault that makes the device worth returning to Amazon. Apparently.
"The only problem for them is that Apple has already moved on to dinner."
Yes, unfortunately, as Apple just found out from Motorola in Germany though, lawsuits aren't always particularly filling.
"Yeah cause PHP is so bad Facebook use it..."
Yes, for historic reasons.
But look at this very fucking article, they've basically just turned it into Java. That is of course, after they wrote something to turn it into C++ previously.
Which proves the point, that for something large scale and scalable to this degree, then something like C++ or Java from the outset is the best tool for the job. PHP as is has clearly failed to meet Facebook's needs, hence why they've spent the whole year bastardising it into something else by replacing the translator altogether.
If they didn't have so much existing PHP code or could simply throw their existing codebase away, you could guarantee this story would've instead been "Facebook ditches PHP".