"Just that the British authorities are so worried about losing control over the serf's abilities to defend themselves that they have taken to making propaganda vids to scare them into remaining helpless."
Yes, that's right, it's all about government control. That's why the citizens of Syria, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were completely unable to rise up against their governments, because they didn't have firearms.
Oh wait. You're completely wrong.
Ever consider the real reason we don't have widespread gun ownership of any kind of gun in the UK is because we just don't want to live in a society that's plagued by gun crime like the US? Ever consider that we're not paranoid about our government trying to keep us down because we're not a bunch of whining pussies like Americans are and know full well that if it ever came to that, that we needed violent resistance against government that we could rise up anyway? Just like the people of Libya, Syria, Egypt, etc. did?
Maybe you'll now go down the usual line of telling me how it's not true because our government is already doing bad things and we're not rising up right? I've heard it all before we're not rising up because we still have at least some degree of faith in the ballot box - in contrast how's it working out for you? your government is doing far worse things, you have your guns yet you too are in the same position as us.
That's not actually true, in fact gun ownership in the UK is around 9% so just short of 1 in 10. Shotguns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal.
It's just easily concealed weapons like handguns and also military grade assault rifles and the like that aren't legal. You can acquire.22 ammunition and rifles easily and legally.
Why wouldn't he be more insightful? It's not like these people always get it right.
Each time you get a new bit of automation you lose control in a fringe case. I learnt this the hard way with ABS breaks that automatically pump the break to try and give you more control when breaking hard. Problem is, on ice, that's fucking useless, so I ended up sliding long after I'd have stopped without ABS right out into a junction on a slight downhill and had my car written off. ABS was the whole reason this happened - the pumping motion meant the wheels were still turning periodically when all I wanted to do was stop.
I now make sure any car I buy lets me turn ABS off, so I can do so in icey conditions, because it'd be great if I ever needed it (I can't say I ever have because I drive such that I never need to break that hard) but when I didn't need it, and in fact, needed it to not exist in my car at all, it resulted in a nasty crash.
So no automation is not always a good thing. Besides, if you've ever seen a BMW trying to drive in snowy/icy conditions you'd also see the stupidity of your comment there too. Last time we had a really bad winter in the UK back in 2010 the craze of having BMW's became quite humorous as at the bottom of every hill was about 5 BMW One series, because they just couldn't get up the hills unlike just about every other cheaper car.
Fact is whilst automation often makes driving in normal conditions much better, it always results in loss of control is non-normal conditions, when you really need that control the most. You're effectively gaining easier driving 99.9% of the time, for the risk of being in an accident or stranded the remaining 1% of the time. I'm not convinced it's worth it, the driving isn't so much more easy that the increased risk of being put in a life threatening situation the 0.1% of the time the weather is really bad is worth it. I'd rather my car just get me home safely when the weather is bad even if it is just only ever so slightly less pleasureful to drive it the rest of the time.
All BMW and Mercedes know how to do is sell cars. That doesn't mean the cars are any good - BMW and Mercedes are also right at the bottom of the pile in terms of reliability and cost of repairs only ever so slightly above Jaguars. It's easy to sell a car in the summer when everyone's looking for one by giving people a pleasure to drive, but most are kicking themselves when they get the repair bill when it breaks down and spend their entire winters repeatedly getting stranded.
It's at the point where I can only assume you're just incapable of reading. It's the only explanation for your inability to see what is repeatedly placed right in front of your face.
Have you considered literacy classes? I think you're in dire need.
What benefits does it offer you at work? What type of work do you do on it?
Honestly, I'll probably end up getting one myself at some point too, largely because I find 1920x1080 a step backwards from my 1920x1200 monitors so the only way I can prevent my resolution taking a regressive backwards step is to go that way, but I'm not sure what benefit I'll see from it when mostly all I do is play games, browse the web, and write code. I don't do any graphics design or watch movies for example on my PC but I'm interested to hear other people's experience and where they've found real benefit.
Well I was stood about 2 feet from the Costco 55" one on display the other day.
I wonder perhaps if the problem is that the benefit of 4k HD really needs a reference 1080p alongside it to make the difference clear. It's just not like 480p SD to 1080p HD - that was obvious even without an SD TV alongside the 1080p HD (though 720p to 1080p is less obvious I suppose). In this respect I think it's not necessarily that it's better, but that to a casual observer it's not obviously and immediately recognisable as better.
As you say content probably has a lot to do with it too I guess, Attenborough's Planet Earth and similar really stood out on 1080p whereas not all content did.
No I actually attacked your argument and ripped it to shreds too, but you obviously missed that, probably because as you prove time and time again - not just to me, but to the so many others who trivially tear your incorrect arguments to shred - you're just not smart enough to understand this topic.
I've seen Costco's demos too and it's a great picture but I don't get the feeling it's any better than 1080p on the 55" demo. I guess coming from 720p you probably see a bigger difference, but I can't see the value in jumping from 1080p.
I can see it being worthwhile if you buy one of those badass 90" motherfuckers they have for sale there, but not at anything in the 60" or lower range.
Watching narcc trying to argue that PHP isn't a bad language is like watching a 3 year old repeatedly trying to ram a square peg into a round hole.
It's funny at first, but then you feel bad and try and help him, but the problem is this kid's just too dumb to be helped and so he just sits screaming and crying at people instead.
He's openly admitted previously he has little or no experience using PHP though, and also clearly has no experience with any other languages. In fact, it's hard to tell if he's even a programmer full stop. His inability to recognise bad things in PHP (and Javascript, he's the same with that for what it's worth - he doesn't even understand why variables that haven't been declared with var defaulting to global scope is a bad thing for example) that anyone who has worked with C, C++, C#, Java, or many other languages would spot immediately implies he really has no worthwhile programming experience.
You don't even have a basic grasp of the discussion at hand. The right to be forgotten is a clause in a law that has not even been passed yet, it's still under development. The Gonzales case is a simple application of existing data protection law to Google in the same way it applies to absolutely every other company and as it has been applied for near 2 decades now.
What the court case did was made it clear that Google is not a special case, and that like all other companies must abide by data protection legislation. That means that by law it cannot arbitrarily farm personal data. This data protection legislation stems back to the 1995 European directive on the issue, that means it's been about nearly 20 years - this isn't some new law, or some right to be forgotten, but well tried and tested data protection law.
For example, credit reference agencies cannot make use of public data in response to credit searches by their clients after 7 years because it's deemed no longer relevant by that point. Such data might be for example, court rulings against someone who has gone bankrupt. There's a belief in Europe that people can change and should be given a second chance, hence why one failed business 20 years ago is deemed not to be worth ruining the entire rest of your life over. This is extremely sensible and seems to work as it's one reason why Europe has lower crime than say the US - by not condemning people to a life of crime because they've had every other option permanently removed and giving them chance to change and try again we limit the problems that stem from the American way.
"What this can mean is that if you're about to enter politics, you can clean up your record before there is a public interest defence and then enter politics with a shiny clean record."
That's a bad thing why exactly? Unless you're the sort of retard who thinks it's great to screw people forever then that's not a bad thing. Given the time limits involved it means there'd be at least 5 years since the wrong doing occurred assuming it's nothing serious, that's not an unreasonable amount of time to give someone a second chance after. If it is something serious (like, say, murder, or fraud rather than something like bankruptcy due to a failed business attempt) then it can't be removed due to public interest. Even then there's nothing to stop journalists rifling through archives as they do currently anyway to dig out information - it just has to be worth their time, rather than just mud slinging for the sake of it. Again, a good thing.
You're literally arguing against something that you have not the slightest clue about. It's absolute nonsense. Why would you even bother engaging in discussion you're completely out of your depth in? Are you enjoying making a fool of yourself or something? It even looks like you're even in IT in the UK so you can't even feign ignorance of European culture, or British data protection law - you've no excuse for spouting the nonsense you are.
Scotland? You mean the country whose first minister forced the selling off of a Scotsman's land to Donald Trump counter to a vote of a local Scottish council and against the will of the majority of Scotts according to polls all so Trump could build a golf course on otherwise protected sand dunes? The same Salmond who has been desperately courting Rupert Murdoch for the past few years?
If you think King Salmond wouldn't sell out Scotland to America within 10 seconds of becoming independent then you haven't been paying attention. Even more so if Spain blocks EU entry to discourage the idea of an independent Catalonia leaving it somewhat isolated from the EU.
Salmond is an Atlanticist as much as any British Prime Minister has been. Strong relations with America including treaties to hand over people like Snowden and such will be his first port of call.
To be fair most companies pay bonuses based on financial performance of the business. Whatever other mistakes Ballmer made at Microsoft aside he did still successfully grow the company financially year on year during his time as CEO at the end of the day. As such it makes sense that he got bonus payments if like pretty much everywhere else financial targets were the metric on which he was judged.
Re:If PHP was a horse in the prog language race
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"It would be easier to point on the bits it gets right! As I've said before, just about everywhere. You have a link which points out a few problems with the article, but refuse to accept reality."
So the issue then is you have a distorted view of what reality is it would seem. What exactly makes the "rebuttals" correct, but not the original authors response to those "rebuttals"? You've still got the same problem, you need to elaborate why the original author is wrong. This is still a thing you seem completely unable to do.
"While it is a fact that + is not overloaded and . is always used for concatenation, that this is a bad design choice is purely opinion. I don't mind opinion so much, as this is a subjective sort of thing, but unsubstantiated opinion is worthless. Why does he think this is a problem? I'll never know. "It's bad design 'cause I don't like it!" isn't very convincing."
That would be a good start if you didn't quote out of context, full quote:
"Despite the craziness above, and the explicit rejection of Perlâ(TM)s pairs of string and numeric operators, PHP does not overload +. + is always addition, and . is always concatenation."
So he's not saying it's bad in itself, he's saying it's inconsistent, because in some cases the language designers have opted to avoid explicit operators and go for operators that work in multiple contexts, then in others they've chosen not too. It's like they couldn't decide what their policy on that was - are they going to have unique explicit operators or not? The language design is too ad-hoc.
But despite the fact you clearly got this one wrong and tried to hide it by quoting out of context, I don't want to discourage you now you're finally at least trying to justify your point, so go ahead find a few more. You don't need me to pick a section for you, I'm offering you better than that - I'm letting you choose from the entire article, and given that you feel it's almost all wrong it'll be easy for you to find a whole bunch of other things to argue against wont it?
"Not a big thinker, are you? Useless, as in "offers no practical benefit". I'll take it a step further and say that most "real-world" development trends are worse than useless."
Okay I can see you're getting flustered now at being called out on your unjustifiable arguments by the amount of insults you've started resorting to spewing, but given that you seem to have no worthwhile real world development experience why do you feel justified to make these comments? How can you make a claim when you have no grounding to base it on?
You talk about objectivity, but I've done a lot of academic study, and have a lot of professional real world experience, as does the guy who wrote the fractal article I believe. Why are you so certain in your academic bubble that your view is somehow objective when it by definition, due to lack of broader experience cannot be? You cannot preach objectivity from a position of complete ignorance about the other side of the argument. Even then your academic background is clearly not rigorous given the level of inconsistency and poor design you defend in PHP. PHP certainly doesn't fit the mathematically grounded academic rigour that would please any of the greatest academics in the field of computer science either.
Re:If PHP was a horse in the prog language race
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"When you run across an article like the fractal article, which is absolutely abysmal, you feel like you've hit on something akin to real research. It's not. (You'll find many of his facts are flat-out wrong, and the bulk of the article is completely unsubstantiated opinion.) Even worse, it actively discourages you from using your critical thinking skills to make an objective evaluation."
We don't seem to be getting anywhere. You're still parroting the same old thing whilst evading backing it up by explaining where exactly it is wrong. I've been asking you for an objective evaluation all along, that's been the very point of every one of my posts - to get an objective evaluation from you, but you just cannot provide one can you?
"I honestly don't see anything wrong with that. I'll also note that most (if not all) of the "real-world" development stuff you run across is worse than useless"
That doesn't make any sense. How can real world stuff be useless? By definition real world stuff is stuff that's used in the real world, and hence, not useless. I don't have any inherent problem with the academic view of the world, as long as there's recognition that it doesn't necessarily play out in practice. Case in point I had a grouchy old comp. sci. professor who declared his distaste for the fact that proof by induction wasn't carried out on every bit of code on earth to make better more secure software - that's a great theory but if we did that then we'd never actually get anything done. Theory isn't fact, and fact can diverge from theory in practice, that's something academics can sometimes get wrong. Even your signature highlights this- as awful as OO might be, it's still been better than anything else for actually getting most software built in practice over the last 20 years so someone like Djiksta can rally against it all he wants (though I hear that quote actually never came from him anyway) but it doesn't change the fact that there's been no better alternatives for practical large scale development until recently.
"consider that PHP powers >80% of websites (a link for you) not just small sites"
I'm glad you finally tried to justify at least one of your points, but by way of objectivity one has to consider why that's so massively contradicted by for example this site which puts it at only 18.6% marketshare:
We need something more transparent with it's data, neither of these sites are. Putting that aside and giving your link the benefit of doubt for now, even your link highlights the fact that PHP is mostly powering small sites - it's bottom of the list by measurement of how much it's used in high traffic sites. This reiterates the point that it's mostly just used for unimportant stuff, more often than not PHP's growth comes from installations of things like Drupal or Wordpress for personal sites that just end up getting left to rot, which is fine, but it means much of it's usage has nothing to do with how much it's being used as a language for software development. Installation of a copy of Drupal is not the same as writing any actual PHP code.
"Keep in mind that I'm a fan of Baen books. Prior to Amazon Baen sold eBooks for $6. Since Amazon they're all $10. So please don't imply that Amazon would actually cut prices if they got a bigger chunk of the revenue from Hachette. Maybe before last quarter's results, when they were appeasing Wall Street by crushing everyone else's market share, but right now they're trying appease Wall Street by making money."
Once again, I'm not defending Amazon, I'm not saying they'd cut prices. God only knows it was obvious enough when they ran Borders out of business in the UK by way of their tax dodging and loss making undercutting the subsequent price increase of books was obvious. I'm talking about the general case if we also solve the problem of better competition (i.e. dealing with the Amazon problem).
"More importantly an author's pay is a fraction of the price his publisher receives. In eBooks it's 25% of what the publisher gets. Since that's 70%, authors receive 17.5% of the list price of their books. If Amazon cuts Hachette's fraction to 50%, author's income goes down to 25% of that, which would be 12.5%."
Which is exactly the point - publishers take a far bigger share than the amount of work they actually put in. The primary value in a book is it's author, so it's nonsense that they receive a minority of income from it. This is entirely because publishers are leeches.
"As for "parasite," I just don't agree with your use of the word. Yes publishers can't function without authors, and are making money off the author's work; but that doesn't make them parasites. They do all kinds of things authors clearly don't want to do (ie: arrange book tours, editing, etc.), and most authors pretty clearly don't mind letting them take their 75-80%. If they did they would self-publish as soon as they got enough fans."
All these things can be done anyway. Bands that limit their exposure to publishers use managers. Managers do all this for them but without the massive increase in overhead that publishers add which is purely profiteering based on their cartel style historical control of the distribution channel.
"and most authors pretty clearly don't mind letting them take their 75-80%. If they did they would self-publish as soon as they got enough fans."
Most authors can't because the publishers still control the distribution channels. Break that stranglehold (which is what Amazon is trying to do to an extent) and you solve the problem.
The issue is that Amazon is squeezing the publishers because they want to break the stranglehold they have, not for altruistic purposes but because they want to take over for themselves. I disagree with why Amazon is doing this, but I agree what it's doing is in itself, in isolation of Amazon's motives a good thing. Amazon is squeezing the publishers who are in turn squeezing the authors.
The authors are blaming Amazon when what they should be doing is turning to the publishers and saying "Look, you guys make enough profit even when Amazon is squeezing you without reducing my share, don't reduce my chunk - reduce yours, the fact is, you're less relevant and add less value in the digital age - it's you, the publishers that need to see their fortunes shrink".
The problem, as with all businesses, is that they are pressured to increase profits year on year. For many businesses that's unsustainable. So when a market changing event occurs, they refuse to accept the inevitable fact that it's their business that needs to shrink it's expectations and profit reports and start doing things like screwing the author, or in the case of the music industry, suing customers. That's the fundamental problem - the digital age has shrunken the value and necessity of publishers, but publishers are desperately trying to stay equally large businesses when that's unsustainable, and to do so they're fucking the authors and pursuing anti-competitive practices (as they did in the Apple eBook price fixing case).
Re:If PHP was a horse in the prog language race
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PHP Next Generation
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You don't have to pretend you're not the AC, I couldn't really care less, especially as you've taken the opportunity to come out of hiding anyway now.
"In the past, I've commented on various parts of the fractal article. I'm sorry you missed them. it may have saved you a long pointless rant."
Please link to this, I'd love to see it.
"It's a huge rant, and I'm not going to go through it line-by-line on a forum post."
So why not create your own page to summarise your arguments like the guy who wrote the fractal article did? Then you can just link to it.
" It would be a waste of time as I'm sure you'd simply find one debatable point and use that to dismiss the entire thing. That's how such things on slashdot always go."
So you mean kind of like the exact debating tactic you've been using all along that I've been railing against you for using? Don't you think that's a bit hypocritical? It sounds just like an excuse to me.
"That's why I invite you to fact-check the article yourself."
I have and I can't really find much wrong with it, maybe a handful of errors out of hundreds of points. By and large it's exactly right.
"You can hunt down my criticisms if you want, but it's much easier for you to put those critical thinking skills to work and evaluate the article on objective terms."
Yep, that's what I've done and it turns out you're wrong. You tell us you're not, but you still evade justifying the argument that you're not wrong, you just say you're not and leave it at that. In fact, that's exactly what you've done yet again here right now. Why am I not surprised? You still seem more interested in arguing why you shouldn't have to justify a point when you could just as easily justify a point, why is that? why such desperate attempts at evading the issue?
The problem is you've made it clear before you haven't even used PHP much, well, here's the thing, I have. I've used it in large professional projects, I've also used other languages like Java, C++, and C# in large professional projects too. I've got something you don't - first hand experience of PHP's problems, yet you still seem to think they don't exist. How can you even make that argument when you've admitted yourself previously you don't have any degree of worthwhile experience with it? Do you just like arguing in defence of a language for no other reason than to play devil's advocate even though you don't have a basis on which to do so or what? Is it just because you hate other OO languages like C++, Java, and C# with such a passion that you feel the need to defend anything that isn't them? I'd just love to know given your lack of experience with something why you go out your way to so vehemently defend it regardless using the most dishonest methods of discussion in the book.
I get the impression you're very academically oriented, rather than real-world development oriented. I suspect that's as much where you fail to grasp the problems with PHP in the real world. You say they don't exist, but I assure you they're very real, which is not to say PHP doesn't have a place - as Gaygirlie mentioned in this discussion it works fine for her personal hacks and stuff, and that's fine. But for professional projects that require any degree of scale? Hell, even there it can work. It just doesn't work anywhere near as well as the alternatives, and it brings much more risk and cost to a project, and that's the problem.
I see three types of PHP developers here:
1) Those who use it in small scale personal projects and don't do anything big enough or important enough to run into any of it's issues
2) Those who realise it's shit but suck it up and enjoy the fact there's still money to be made in shitty plugins for shitty CMS' with it and so on. They'll put up with it for the decent contracting rates and will defend it on that basis, not on the basis of technical excellence or any such thing.
3) People who are in high end roles such as senior or lead development positions that have experience o
Re:If PHP was a horse in the prog language race
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PHP Next Generation
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Oh hi narcc.
How do I know it's you? Simple, because that's exactly what you'd say. That's also exactly the point I was making, rather than ever being able to justify your point you just come back with "I'm right your wrong".
Responding the same way to the same person on multiple posts was a bit of a giveaway too FWIW because that's also something you do. Then there was your use of hyphenation in terms where it's relatively uncommon to hyphenate.
I'd say nice try, but it really wasn't, even that was a rather pathetic attempt at avoiding the fact that you just cannot explain why the fractal article is wrong in any way whatsoever. You still just say it is and declare that your declaration is enough to make it so. It's really not and that's why far more people take that article seriously than take you seriously. Hiding behind AC doesn't change the fact that you have to date still never actually managed to provide any justification for your argument that the fractal article is wrong.
Incorrect. Runtime and frameworks have a large impact on security. The implication of your argument is that every runtime and framework is completely secure such that the only place security vulnerabilities can exist is in bespoke code. Obviously this is false, so leave security to professionals who actually know what they're on about please. There's enough PHP developers out there causing most of the world's web facing security risks, we don't need more of you exacerbating the problem with such demonstrable cluelessness.
I'm not advocating Amazon reviews as the only method of judging books - I was just using them as an example. I agree Amazon's strength in the market is unacceptable, especially here in the UK where they sent the competition out of business for no reason other than the fact they don't pay tax giving themselves a massive competitive advantage over those not big enough to engage in those kinds of practices. I wholeheartedly agree Amazon's grip on the book business is a bad thing.
But what I am arguing is that publishers are still parasites that are unnecessary. You can still offer services you describe to potential authors without having to have a full blown publisher.
Not being able to afford services like an editor is a nonsense, it's no different to any other business - as an indie developer you may not be able to afford a professional test team, but that doesn't stop you getting the opinion of friends or family, or even a public demo. If you really want professionally though you'll get a loan, take a grant, or save up. This is how it works everywhere else.
So if authors want to keep the publishers that's fine, but they can't also then complain when their publisher is milking cash off the back of their work and Amazon wants to force them to be more competitive - that's the choice they make when they let a parasite take full control of business decisions of their work - the parasite is more interested in how much profit it can milk than whether the author's work sees the light of day or the readers are given fair book prices. The only thing the parasite cares about is itself, so if you enter into that relationship then that's the choice you consciously make. Don't go blaming others for disputes that arise.
"No but let us say that said newspaper is electronic in form and those archives are electronically searchable, they're screwed by this made up right."
No they're not. You're making things up:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."
It's a problem of optimisation. I've delivered a large successful PHP project, I took over after 9 months into a 2 year project once the technology and so forth was already set in stone and it was too late to change. It was already 2 months behind schedule at this point but I managed to pull it back and deliver it on time and with a 69% gross profit margin.
I was actually praised for this by the client, and by my employer. They were all happy, and you're absolutely right that this then means they don't care how shit it was.
But here's the thing that bugged me. I knew without a doubt that had that project been done in.NET or Java that it would've been delivered with an 80%+ gross profit margin because of the increased productivity. The issue was a combination of the fact that yes PHP gets you off the ground quickly but in the long run all that advantage is long lost compared to compiled languages in terms of debugging. We also had scalability issues because of the fact PHP didn't at the time (and still barely does) have any proper support for concurrency so we had to implement all sorts of hackish workarounds when.NET and Java support that out the box and would've just worked.
But worse than that, I know for a fact that whilst we delivered to spec they're going to want to grow that system in the long run and without the resources of a behemoth like Facebook that can just throw ever more money at it that solution is only going to scale so far and they're only going to have to re-write the whole thing anyway. On the topic of Facebook it's fascinating how many resources Facebook has plowed into just keeping it running compared to the amount other large tech companies have to plow in - they have according to figures they released previously around 8gb of RAM per user across their data centres which seems grossly excessive. They've invested a fortune on research trying to first translate PHP into C, and now in inventing a JVM for it.
So yes you're right, you're absolutely right, people get shit done with it, stuff gets delivered, end users are happy with the results. But it's still not a good thing, it's a massive inefficiency and the hidden costs of greater development time, more strenuous maintenance requirements and shorter potential product lifespan of a decent sized PHP system.
The problem is not that PHP doesn't, or can't work. It's how much money is being thrown away on PHP projects. It's the fact that in a world without PHP software could be being written that costs less, performs better, is more flexible and more secure.
Re:If PHP was a horse in the prog language race
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You have a perfectly valid point about the fact that you should probably never write code like that anyway (I say probably because if I've learn anything in the world of programming it's that someone will always surprise you with a valid use case for something that otherwise seems unusable) but at the end of the day programming languages are tools of logic and so I would argue a key measure of a language is how logical it is - it's harder to manipulate logic, with illogical tools. Thus, an illogical component of a programming language must surely result in reduced marks for that language, no?
Slashdot Mirror
"Just that the British authorities are so worried about losing control over the serf's abilities to defend themselves that they have taken to making propaganda vids to scare them into remaining helpless."
Yes, that's right, it's all about government control. That's why the citizens of Syria, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were completely unable to rise up against their governments, because they didn't have firearms.
Oh wait. You're completely wrong.
Ever consider the real reason we don't have widespread gun ownership of any kind of gun in the UK is because we just don't want to live in a society that's plagued by gun crime like the US? Ever consider that we're not paranoid about our government trying to keep us down because we're not a bunch of whining pussies like Americans are and know full well that if it ever came to that, that we needed violent resistance against government that we could rise up anyway? Just like the people of Libya, Syria, Egypt, etc. did?
Maybe you'll now go down the usual line of telling me how it's not true because our government is already doing bad things and we're not rising up right? I've heard it all before we're not rising up because we still have at least some degree of faith in the ballot box - in contrast how's it working out for you? your government is doing far worse things, you have your guns yet you too are in the same position as us.
Long story short. Stop talking nonsense.
That's not actually true, in fact gun ownership in the UK is around 9% so just short of 1 in 10. Shotguns and hunting rifles are perfectly legal.
It's just easily concealed weapons like handguns and also military grade assault rifles and the like that aren't legal. You can acquire .22 ammunition and rifles easily and legally.
Why wouldn't he be more insightful? It's not like these people always get it right.
Each time you get a new bit of automation you lose control in a fringe case. I learnt this the hard way with ABS breaks that automatically pump the break to try and give you more control when breaking hard. Problem is, on ice, that's fucking useless, so I ended up sliding long after I'd have stopped without ABS right out into a junction on a slight downhill and had my car written off. ABS was the whole reason this happened - the pumping motion meant the wheels were still turning periodically when all I wanted to do was stop.
I now make sure any car I buy lets me turn ABS off, so I can do so in icey conditions, because it'd be great if I ever needed it (I can't say I ever have because I drive such that I never need to break that hard) but when I didn't need it, and in fact, needed it to not exist in my car at all, it resulted in a nasty crash.
So no automation is not always a good thing. Besides, if you've ever seen a BMW trying to drive in snowy/icy conditions you'd also see the stupidity of your comment there too. Last time we had a really bad winter in the UK back in 2010 the craze of having BMW's became quite humorous as at the bottom of every hill was about 5 BMW One series, because they just couldn't get up the hills unlike just about every other cheaper car.
Fact is whilst automation often makes driving in normal conditions much better, it always results in loss of control is non-normal conditions, when you really need that control the most. You're effectively gaining easier driving 99.9% of the time, for the risk of being in an accident or stranded the remaining 1% of the time. I'm not convinced it's worth it, the driving isn't so much more easy that the increased risk of being put in a life threatening situation the 0.1% of the time the weather is really bad is worth it. I'd rather my car just get me home safely when the weather is bad even if it is just only ever so slightly less pleasureful to drive it the rest of the time.
All BMW and Mercedes know how to do is sell cars. That doesn't mean the cars are any good - BMW and Mercedes are also right at the bottom of the pile in terms of reliability and cost of repairs only ever so slightly above Jaguars. It's easy to sell a car in the summer when everyone's looking for one by giving people a pleasure to drive, but most are kicking themselves when they get the repair bill when it breaks down and spend their entire winters repeatedly getting stranded.
It's at the point where I can only assume you're just incapable of reading. It's the only explanation for your inability to see what is repeatedly placed right in front of your face.
Have you considered literacy classes? I think you're in dire need.
What benefits does it offer you at work? What type of work do you do on it?
Honestly, I'll probably end up getting one myself at some point too, largely because I find 1920x1080 a step backwards from my 1920x1200 monitors so the only way I can prevent my resolution taking a regressive backwards step is to go that way, but I'm not sure what benefit I'll see from it when mostly all I do is play games, browse the web, and write code. I don't do any graphics design or watch movies for example on my PC but I'm interested to hear other people's experience and where they've found real benefit.
Well I was stood about 2 feet from the Costco 55" one on display the other day.
I wonder perhaps if the problem is that the benefit of 4k HD really needs a reference 1080p alongside it to make the difference clear. It's just not like 480p SD to 1080p HD - that was obvious even without an SD TV alongside the 1080p HD (though 720p to 1080p is less obvious I suppose). In this respect I think it's not necessarily that it's better, but that to a casual observer it's not obviously and immediately recognisable as better.
As you say content probably has a lot to do with it too I guess, Attenborough's Planet Earth and similar really stood out on 1080p whereas not all content did.
No I actually attacked your argument and ripped it to shreds too, but you obviously missed that, probably because as you prove time and time again - not just to me, but to the so many others who trivially tear your incorrect arguments to shred - you're just not smart enough to understand this topic.
I've seen Costco's demos too and it's a great picture but I don't get the feeling it's any better than 1080p on the 55" demo. I guess coming from 720p you probably see a bigger difference, but I can't see the value in jumping from 1080p.
I can see it being worthwhile if you buy one of those badass 90" motherfuckers they have for sale there, but not at anything in the 60" or lower range.
Certainly I can't see the value on a 28" screen.
Watching narcc trying to argue that PHP isn't a bad language is like watching a 3 year old repeatedly trying to ram a square peg into a round hole.
It's funny at first, but then you feel bad and try and help him, but the problem is this kid's just too dumb to be helped and so he just sits screaming and crying at people instead.
He's openly admitted previously he has little or no experience using PHP though, and also clearly has no experience with any other languages. In fact, it's hard to tell if he's even a programmer full stop. His inability to recognise bad things in PHP (and Javascript, he's the same with that for what it's worth - he doesn't even understand why variables that haven't been declared with var defaulting to global scope is a bad thing for example) that anyone who has worked with C, C++, C#, Java, or many other languages would spot immediately implies he really has no worthwhile programming experience.
You don't even have a basic grasp of the discussion at hand. The right to be forgotten is a clause in a law that has not even been passed yet, it's still under development. The Gonzales case is a simple application of existing data protection law to Google in the same way it applies to absolutely every other company and as it has been applied for near 2 decades now.
What the court case did was made it clear that Google is not a special case, and that like all other companies must abide by data protection legislation. That means that by law it cannot arbitrarily farm personal data. This data protection legislation stems back to the 1995 European directive on the issue, that means it's been about nearly 20 years - this isn't some new law, or some right to be forgotten, but well tried and tested data protection law.
For example, credit reference agencies cannot make use of public data in response to credit searches by their clients after 7 years because it's deemed no longer relevant by that point. Such data might be for example, court rulings against someone who has gone bankrupt. There's a belief in Europe that people can change and should be given a second chance, hence why one failed business 20 years ago is deemed not to be worth ruining the entire rest of your life over. This is extremely sensible and seems to work as it's one reason why Europe has lower crime than say the US - by not condemning people to a life of crime because they've had every other option permanently removed and giving them chance to change and try again we limit the problems that stem from the American way.
"What this can mean is that if you're about to enter politics, you can clean up your record before there is a public interest defence and then enter politics with a shiny clean record."
That's a bad thing why exactly? Unless you're the sort of retard who thinks it's great to screw people forever then that's not a bad thing. Given the time limits involved it means there'd be at least 5 years since the wrong doing occurred assuming it's nothing serious, that's not an unreasonable amount of time to give someone a second chance after. If it is something serious (like, say, murder, or fraud rather than something like bankruptcy due to a failed business attempt) then it can't be removed due to public interest. Even then there's nothing to stop journalists rifling through archives as they do currently anyway to dig out information - it just has to be worth their time, rather than just mud slinging for the sake of it. Again, a good thing.
You're literally arguing against something that you have not the slightest clue about. It's absolute nonsense. Why would you even bother engaging in discussion you're completely out of your depth in? Are you enjoying making a fool of yourself or something? It even looks like you're even in IT in the UK so you can't even feign ignorance of European culture, or British data protection law - you've no excuse for spouting the nonsense you are.
Scotland? You mean the country whose first minister forced the selling off of a Scotsman's land to Donald Trump counter to a vote of a local Scottish council and against the will of the majority of Scotts according to polls all so Trump could build a golf course on otherwise protected sand dunes? The same Salmond who has been desperately courting Rupert Murdoch for the past few years?
If you think King Salmond wouldn't sell out Scotland to America within 10 seconds of becoming independent then you haven't been paying attention. Even more so if Spain blocks EU entry to discourage the idea of an independent Catalonia leaving it somewhat isolated from the EU.
Salmond is an Atlanticist as much as any British Prime Minister has been. Strong relations with America including treaties to hand over people like Snowden and such will be his first port of call.
Who needs cheerleaders when you can have the comedy of dancing Ballmer?
To be fair most companies pay bonuses based on financial performance of the business. Whatever other mistakes Ballmer made at Microsoft aside he did still successfully grow the company financially year on year during his time as CEO at the end of the day. As such it makes sense that he got bonus payments if like pretty much everywhere else financial targets were the metric on which he was judged.
"It would be easier to point on the bits it gets right! As I've said before, just about everywhere. You have a link which points out a few problems with the article, but refuse to accept reality."
So the issue then is you have a distorted view of what reality is it would seem. What exactly makes the "rebuttals" correct, but not the original authors response to those "rebuttals"? You've still got the same problem, you need to elaborate why the original author is wrong. This is still a thing you seem completely unable to do.
"While it is a fact that + is not overloaded and . is always used for concatenation, that this is a bad design choice is purely opinion. I don't mind opinion so much, as this is a subjective sort of thing, but unsubstantiated opinion is worthless. Why does he think this is a problem? I'll never know. "It's bad design 'cause I don't like it!" isn't very convincing."
That would be a good start if you didn't quote out of context, full quote:
"Despite the craziness above, and the explicit rejection of Perlâ(TM)s pairs of string and numeric operators, PHP does not overload +. + is always addition, and . is always concatenation."
So he's not saying it's bad in itself, he's saying it's inconsistent, because in some cases the language designers have opted to avoid explicit operators and go for operators that work in multiple contexts, then in others they've chosen not too. It's like they couldn't decide what their policy on that was - are they going to have unique explicit operators or not? The language design is too ad-hoc.
But despite the fact you clearly got this one wrong and tried to hide it by quoting out of context, I don't want to discourage you now you're finally at least trying to justify your point, so go ahead find a few more. You don't need me to pick a section for you, I'm offering you better than that - I'm letting you choose from the entire article, and given that you feel it's almost all wrong it'll be easy for you to find a whole bunch of other things to argue against wont it?
"Not a big thinker, are you? Useless, as in "offers no practical benefit". I'll take it a step further and say that most "real-world" development trends are worse than useless."
Okay I can see you're getting flustered now at being called out on your unjustifiable arguments by the amount of insults you've started resorting to spewing, but given that you seem to have no worthwhile real world development experience why do you feel justified to make these comments? How can you make a claim when you have no grounding to base it on?
You talk about objectivity, but I've done a lot of academic study, and have a lot of professional real world experience, as does the guy who wrote the fractal article I believe. Why are you so certain in your academic bubble that your view is somehow objective when it by definition, due to lack of broader experience cannot be? You cannot preach objectivity from a position of complete ignorance about the other side of the argument. Even then your academic background is clearly not rigorous given the level of inconsistency and poor design you defend in PHP. PHP certainly doesn't fit the mathematically grounded academic rigour that would please any of the greatest academics in the field of computer science either.
"When you run across an article like the fractal article, which is absolutely abysmal, you feel like you've hit on something akin to real research. It's not. (You'll find many of his facts are flat-out wrong, and the bulk of the article is completely unsubstantiated opinion.) Even worse, it actively discourages you from using your critical thinking skills to make an objective evaluation."
We don't seem to be getting anywhere. You're still parroting the same old thing whilst evading backing it up by explaining where exactly it is wrong. I've been asking you for an objective evaluation all along, that's been the very point of every one of my posts - to get an objective evaluation from you, but you just cannot provide one can you?
"I honestly don't see anything wrong with that. I'll also note that most (if not all) of the "real-world" development stuff you run across is worse than useless"
That doesn't make any sense. How can real world stuff be useless? By definition real world stuff is stuff that's used in the real world, and hence, not useless. I don't have any inherent problem with the academic view of the world, as long as there's recognition that it doesn't necessarily play out in practice. Case in point I had a grouchy old comp. sci. professor who declared his distaste for the fact that proof by induction wasn't carried out on every bit of code on earth to make better more secure software - that's a great theory but if we did that then we'd never actually get anything done. Theory isn't fact, and fact can diverge from theory in practice, that's something academics can sometimes get wrong. Even your signature highlights this- as awful as OO might be, it's still been better than anything else for actually getting most software built in practice over the last 20 years so someone like Djiksta can rally against it all he wants (though I hear that quote actually never came from him anyway) but it doesn't change the fact that there's been no better alternatives for practical large scale development until recently.
"consider that PHP powers >80% of websites (a link for you) not just small sites"
I'm glad you finally tried to justify at least one of your points, but by way of objectivity one has to consider why that's so massively contradicted by for example this site which puts it at only 18.6% marketshare:
http://trends.builtwith.com/fr...
We need something more transparent with it's data, neither of these sites are. Putting that aside and giving your link the benefit of doubt for now, even your link highlights the fact that PHP is mostly powering small sites - it's bottom of the list by measurement of how much it's used in high traffic sites. This reiterates the point that it's mostly just used for unimportant stuff, more often than not PHP's growth comes from installations of things like Drupal or Wordpress for personal sites that just end up getting left to rot, which is fine, but it means much of it's usage has nothing to do with how much it's being used as a language for software development. Installation of a copy of Drupal is not the same as writing any actual PHP code.
"Keep in mind that I'm a fan of Baen books. Prior to Amazon Baen sold eBooks for $6. Since Amazon they're all $10. So please don't imply that Amazon would actually cut prices if they got a bigger chunk of the revenue from Hachette. Maybe before last quarter's results, when they were appeasing Wall Street by crushing everyone else's market share, but right now they're trying appease Wall Street by making money."
Once again, I'm not defending Amazon, I'm not saying they'd cut prices. God only knows it was obvious enough when they ran Borders out of business in the UK by way of their tax dodging and loss making undercutting the subsequent price increase of books was obvious. I'm talking about the general case if we also solve the problem of better competition (i.e. dealing with the Amazon problem).
"More importantly an author's pay is a fraction of the price his publisher receives. In eBooks it's 25% of what the publisher gets. Since that's 70%, authors receive 17.5% of the list price of their books. If Amazon cuts Hachette's fraction to 50%, author's income goes down to 25% of that, which would be 12.5%."
Which is exactly the point - publishers take a far bigger share than the amount of work they actually put in. The primary value in a book is it's author, so it's nonsense that they receive a minority of income from it. This is entirely because publishers are leeches.
"As for "parasite," I just don't agree with your use of the word. Yes publishers can't function without authors, and are making money off the author's work; but that doesn't make them parasites. They do all kinds of things authors clearly don't want to do (ie: arrange book tours, editing, etc.), and most authors pretty clearly don't mind letting them take their 75-80%. If they did they would self-publish as soon as they got enough fans."
All these things can be done anyway. Bands that limit their exposure to publishers use managers. Managers do all this for them but without the massive increase in overhead that publishers add which is purely profiteering based on their cartel style historical control of the distribution channel.
"and most authors pretty clearly don't mind letting them take their 75-80%. If they did they would self-publish as soon as they got enough fans."
Most authors can't because the publishers still control the distribution channels. Break that stranglehold (which is what Amazon is trying to do to an extent) and you solve the problem.
The issue is that Amazon is squeezing the publishers because they want to break the stranglehold they have, not for altruistic purposes but because they want to take over for themselves. I disagree with why Amazon is doing this, but I agree what it's doing is in itself, in isolation of Amazon's motives a good thing. Amazon is squeezing the publishers who are in turn squeezing the authors.
The authors are blaming Amazon when what they should be doing is turning to the publishers and saying "Look, you guys make enough profit even when Amazon is squeezing you without reducing my share, don't reduce my chunk - reduce yours, the fact is, you're less relevant and add less value in the digital age - it's you, the publishers that need to see their fortunes shrink".
The problem, as with all businesses, is that they are pressured to increase profits year on year. For many businesses that's unsustainable. So when a market changing event occurs, they refuse to accept the inevitable fact that it's their business that needs to shrink it's expectations and profit reports and start doing things like screwing the author, or in the case of the music industry, suing customers. That's the fundamental problem - the digital age has shrunken the value and necessity of publishers, but publishers are desperately trying to stay equally large businesses when that's unsustainable, and to do so they're fucking the authors and pursuing anti-competitive practices (as they did in the Apple eBook price fixing case).
You don't have to pretend you're not the AC, I couldn't really care less, especially as you've taken the opportunity to come out of hiding anyway now.
"In the past, I've commented on various parts of the fractal article. I'm sorry you missed them. it may have saved you a long pointless rant."
Please link to this, I'd love to see it.
"It's a huge rant, and I'm not going to go through it line-by-line on a forum post."
So why not create your own page to summarise your arguments like the guy who wrote the fractal article did? Then you can just link to it.
" It would be a waste of time as I'm sure you'd simply find one debatable point and use that to dismiss the entire thing. That's how such things on slashdot always go."
So you mean kind of like the exact debating tactic you've been using all along that I've been railing against you for using? Don't you think that's a bit hypocritical? It sounds just like an excuse to me.
"That's why I invite you to fact-check the article yourself."
I have and I can't really find much wrong with it, maybe a handful of errors out of hundreds of points. By and large it's exactly right.
"You can hunt down my criticisms if you want, but it's much easier for you to put those critical thinking skills to work and evaluate the article on objective terms."
Yep, that's what I've done and it turns out you're wrong. You tell us you're not, but you still evade justifying the argument that you're not wrong, you just say you're not and leave it at that. In fact, that's exactly what you've done yet again here right now. Why am I not surprised? You still seem more interested in arguing why you shouldn't have to justify a point when you could just as easily justify a point, why is that? why such desperate attempts at evading the issue?
The problem is you've made it clear before you haven't even used PHP much, well, here's the thing, I have. I've used it in large professional projects, I've also used other languages like Java, C++, and C# in large professional projects too. I've got something you don't - first hand experience of PHP's problems, yet you still seem to think they don't exist. How can you even make that argument when you've admitted yourself previously you don't have any degree of worthwhile experience with it? Do you just like arguing in defence of a language for no other reason than to play devil's advocate even though you don't have a basis on which to do so or what? Is it just because you hate other OO languages like C++, Java, and C# with such a passion that you feel the need to defend anything that isn't them? I'd just love to know given your lack of experience with something why you go out your way to so vehemently defend it regardless using the most dishonest methods of discussion in the book.
I get the impression you're very academically oriented, rather than real-world development oriented. I suspect that's as much where you fail to grasp the problems with PHP in the real world. You say they don't exist, but I assure you they're very real, which is not to say PHP doesn't have a place - as Gaygirlie mentioned in this discussion it works fine for her personal hacks and stuff, and that's fine. But for professional projects that require any degree of scale? Hell, even there it can work. It just doesn't work anywhere near as well as the alternatives, and it brings much more risk and cost to a project, and that's the problem.
I see three types of PHP developers here:
1) Those who use it in small scale personal projects and don't do anything big enough or important enough to run into any of it's issues
2) Those who realise it's shit but suck it up and enjoy the fact there's still money to be made in shitty plugins for shitty CMS' with it and so on. They'll put up with it for the decent contracting rates and will defend it on that basis, not on the basis of technical excellence or any such thing.
3) People who are in high end roles such as senior or lead development positions that have experience o
Oh hi narcc.
How do I know it's you? Simple, because that's exactly what you'd say. That's also exactly the point I was making, rather than ever being able to justify your point you just come back with "I'm right your wrong".
Responding the same way to the same person on multiple posts was a bit of a giveaway too FWIW because that's also something you do. Then there was your use of hyphenation in terms where it's relatively uncommon to hyphenate.
I'd say nice try, but it really wasn't, even that was a rather pathetic attempt at avoiding the fact that you just cannot explain why the fractal article is wrong in any way whatsoever. You still just say it is and declare that your declaration is enough to make it so. It's really not and that's why far more people take that article seriously than take you seriously. Hiding behind AC doesn't change the fact that you have to date still never actually managed to provide any justification for your argument that the fractal article is wrong.
Incorrect. Runtime and frameworks have a large impact on security. The implication of your argument is that every runtime and framework is completely secure such that the only place security vulnerabilities can exist is in bespoke code. Obviously this is false, so leave security to professionals who actually know what they're on about please. There's enough PHP developers out there causing most of the world's web facing security risks, we don't need more of you exacerbating the problem with such demonstrable cluelessness.
I'm not advocating Amazon reviews as the only method of judging books - I was just using them as an example. I agree Amazon's strength in the market is unacceptable, especially here in the UK where they sent the competition out of business for no reason other than the fact they don't pay tax giving themselves a massive competitive advantage over those not big enough to engage in those kinds of practices. I wholeheartedly agree Amazon's grip on the book business is a bad thing.
But what I am arguing is that publishers are still parasites that are unnecessary. You can still offer services you describe to potential authors without having to have a full blown publisher.
Not being able to afford services like an editor is a nonsense, it's no different to any other business - as an indie developer you may not be able to afford a professional test team, but that doesn't stop you getting the opinion of friends or family, or even a public demo. If you really want professionally though you'll get a loan, take a grant, or save up. This is how it works everywhere else.
So if authors want to keep the publishers that's fine, but they can't also then complain when their publisher is milking cash off the back of their work and Amazon wants to force them to be more competitive - that's the choice they make when they let a parasite take full control of business decisions of their work - the parasite is more interested in how much profit it can milk than whether the author's work sees the light of day or the readers are given fair book prices. The only thing the parasite cares about is itself, so if you enter into that relationship then that's the choice you consciously make. Don't go blaming others for disputes that arise.
"No but let us say that said newspaper is electronic in form and those archives are electronically searchable, they're screwed by this made up right."
No they're not. You're making things up:
"The right to be forgotten is of course not an absolute right. There are cases where there is a legitimate reason to keep data in a data base. The archives of a newspaper are a good example. It is clear that the right to be forgotten cannot amount to a right to re-write or erase history. Neither must the right to be forgotten take precedence over freedom of expression or freedom of the media. The right to be forgotten includes an explicit provision that ensures it does not encroach on the freedom of expression and information."
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-r...
Stop talking shit and making things up.
I wouldn't call 15 minutes a very large chunk, and even then a number of videos shorter than this have also been hit.
^ Should've been GP of 60%, not 69%. Typo.
It's a problem of optimisation. I've delivered a large successful PHP project, I took over after 9 months into a 2 year project once the technology and so forth was already set in stone and it was too late to change. It was already 2 months behind schedule at this point but I managed to pull it back and deliver it on time and with a 69% gross profit margin.
I was actually praised for this by the client, and by my employer. They were all happy, and you're absolutely right that this then means they don't care how shit it was.
But here's the thing that bugged me. I knew without a doubt that had that project been done in .NET or Java that it would've been delivered with an 80%+ gross profit margin because of the increased productivity. The issue was a combination of the fact that yes PHP gets you off the ground quickly but in the long run all that advantage is long lost compared to compiled languages in terms of debugging. We also had scalability issues because of the fact PHP didn't at the time (and still barely does) have any proper support for concurrency so we had to implement all sorts of hackish workarounds when .NET and Java support that out the box and would've just worked.
But worse than that, I know for a fact that whilst we delivered to spec they're going to want to grow that system in the long run and without the resources of a behemoth like Facebook that can just throw ever more money at it that solution is only going to scale so far and they're only going to have to re-write the whole thing anyway. On the topic of Facebook it's fascinating how many resources Facebook has plowed into just keeping it running compared to the amount other large tech companies have to plow in - they have according to figures they released previously around 8gb of RAM per user across their data centres which seems grossly excessive. They've invested a fortune on research trying to first translate PHP into C, and now in inventing a JVM for it.
So yes you're right, you're absolutely right, people get shit done with it, stuff gets delivered, end users are happy with the results. But it's still not a good thing, it's a massive inefficiency and the hidden costs of greater development time, more strenuous maintenance requirements and shorter potential product lifespan of a decent sized PHP system.
The problem is not that PHP doesn't, or can't work. It's how much money is being thrown away on PHP projects. It's the fact that in a world without PHP software could be being written that costs less, performs better, is more flexible and more secure.
You have a perfectly valid point about the fact that you should probably never write code like that anyway (I say probably because if I've learn anything in the world of programming it's that someone will always surprise you with a valid use case for something that otherwise seems unusable) but at the end of the day programming languages are tools of logic and so I would argue a key measure of a language is how logical it is - it's harder to manipulate logic, with illogical tools. Thus, an illogical component of a programming language must surely result in reduced marks for that language, no?