I know that most of the crowd around here will be thrilled.. BUT I do wonder how broad the market actually is for this..
The server market is a given, BUT linux is already doing well there..
I'm sure many of the responses were already fans and users.. BUT that might be counter-acted by people who would buy but didn't comment, or might not even be aware.
The lack of the MS tax will be great, BUT I have to wonder how many 'regular joes' and 'mom and pops' will try it out.
We all know the stories about people setting up their parents with it, BUT that comes with an implied, and personal support system.
I sure hope it catches on, even a little competition for MS is a good thing [...] I also wonder if they'll have the models available at brick and mortar retailers, and if they'll actually push them.
Sorry just couldn't stop myself reformatting your comment a little:D Emphasis and formatting mine up there, the text is left as in the original post.
I know that most of the crowd around here will be thrilled.. But I do wonder how broad the market actually is for this..
Can we please cut down on the "but I wonder" posts. Never mind what gets posted, there's always a bunch of folks there to "wonder" about the opposite happening, never mind what's the talk about. Just as some sorta hobby.
Why wonder, when you can wait and see? If Dell offers Linux computers, this is good. It can't possibly be bad, if nobody buys 'em Dell will stop offering them. Nothing more.
The images scream prototype. Check out the blue wires!
Of course, but you gotta admit that imagining wearing those in a club screams hilarity.
It'll be interesting to see what these turn to, but I've the feeling they'll introduce too much design limitations to make the concept practical. Can those screens bend in any shape? Are they as good protecting from UV?
And the most important of all... how plausible it is that you'll look totally uncool in the middle of a party, if your sunglasses's battery runs out of electricity?
You're totally missing the point about RAD. If you want performance and hardly any overhead, then go down a few layers of abstraction and code in assembly.
The thing is, I don't have to code in assembly, I simply have to not code in Delphi for PHP and opt for light PHP framework OR.NET OR Python OR Java etc etc..
You'll do yourself to acknowledge there's more out there than "assembly" and "Delphi for PHP" when discussing those things. The "code in assembly" argument is tired, cliche and plain wrong.
Let me tell you why Delphi RAD works on the Desktop:
1. You have the CPU of entire machine to run what you want. You absolutely need 200MB of RAM for that blinking LED effect on top? Big deal, take it, it's there. The important thing is it works, and the entire machine is at your disposal.
2. Delphi for Desktop compiles to Win32+machine code (hella fast) or.NET (also sufficiently fast), both platforms which are over 100x faster than comparable PHP code (yes 100x is not overestimation, chekc the language shootout benchmarks). This means there's lots of headway for Delphi to implement time-saving abstractions and components, as the code runs fast enough to make up for it.
Let me tell you why Delphi for PHP doesn't work:
1. Unlike the Desktop, you're operating under heavily reduced resources. Everyone that uses your app calls back the same server, the same server serves the app to many users. Compare this to a Windows box with say, 100-200 mice and 100-200 instances of the RAD tool opened, and being used simultaneously. Does it still look as if performance doesn't matter to you?
2. PHP is slow as hell. This is not Win32, it's not.NET. Put whole VCL-worth of abstraction on top of PHP, and it becomes slower than hell. Now run it on a busy web server. Does it look promising yet?
If you can't see my point, then I give up. But I'll have to tell you that as a PHP developer, a big chunk of my time is spent optimizing performance of PHP applications, and let me tell you I'd not touch Delphi for PHP with a 20 foot pole.
In the real world development time is often more expensive than hardware upgrades to compensate for non-optimized code.
I did some benchmarks. Delphi for PHP apps will be able to handle around 10-20 people at once on a moderately powerful server. Here's to hoping that your RAD apps don't ever become popular.
And let me put things in perspective for you. Upgrading a hardware is easy. Managing 20 times more servers due to poor web app performance isn't: 20 times more support staff isn't cheap, 20 times more administrators aren't cheap, 20 times more backup data isn't cheap.
Development time IS expensive, but when the result is mediocre, you've just wasted all this development time, and a ton of other resources in your company that could go for a better purpose.
There are RAD frameworks for PHP out there much more robust and performant, which will save you just as much development time as Delphi for PHP possibly could.
"Hey it's RAD so if it sucks, it doesn't suck" is a poor argument in defense for Delphi for PHP.
Here are the glasses
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Smart Sunglasses
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· Score: 4, Informative
What do you care what the javascript looks like? The whole idea of GWT is that the javascript,html, and CSS (somewhat) are an alternative form of bytecode to compile your java classes to.
And that's a great idea, unless you have account for the fact that HTML/CSS/JS *aren't* application bytecodes.
There are lots of concerns in a web app that aren't there in compiled bytecode app:
1. data/code sharing among pages (number of file read requests, repeated data in every page) 2. incompatibilities among browsers (you rely on GWT for browser compatibility, it's frequently not accounting for some rather unobvious details, then you're screwed). 3. GWT goes against MVC as it follows a more traditional "apps and forms" paradigm, which means you're severaly limited in code reuse and separation of concerns in your app. 4. They provide you with a nice Java debugger to debug your basic application logic, but in the real world you'll need to test your ACTUAL app on ACTUAL browsers and you'll find lots of problems. Good luck debugging those when the error show up in some random place in the midst of some random code bytecode-ish blob.
I've been this way, there are things you can abstract, and things you better not. I've went to abstract a template/component compiler working on the server side for me, it would compile an extended version of HTML (html with XML components, kinda like JSP) to HTML+PHP.
And although this is much easier as the produced code is browser agnostic, unlike client-side code, I still had to go to considerable lengths to make this debuggable and manageable (when ANY error occurs in the compiled file, it should point out where the error was in the SOURCE file(s) ).
On the client side however you can't do this. You can trap exceptions, you can trap some errors in some browsers in some proprietary way, but basically if you open your code to analyze in tools like FireBug or DOM Explorer, you see an unreadable mess that's impossible to tell apart.
GWT users laugh at people who use AJAX frameworks. I can't believe you laugh at a simpler and more direct, more manageable approach to a problem, and accept a few layers deeper abstraction for the sake of not having to "get dirty with JS".
I realize GWT is very cool if you're afraid of JS/CSS/HTML and want to pretend using Java when Java is not there seems very professional. But JS isn't a *bytecode* after all, it's a very readable, well-tooled for the purpose language, and you can write manageable code DIRECTLY in it.
Further more, if you prefer to work in a more Java/Desktop approach, you can always use Flex 2, which is basically a RAD application tool using JS 2 (classes, interfaces, namespaces, E4X, packages, closures.. all the goodies) that compiles to cross-platform compatible Flash 9 goodness, and doesn't have any underlying ugliness like GWT does. If you run it - and it works, it works everywhere.
My point is that at least in my case, this extra storage will be just wasted.
I wonder, when we're talking about unlimited and dynamic storage, can we ever talk about "extra storage being wasted". It kinda clashes with my logical units.
They don't pre-allocate infinite number of bytes for your account, which will go "wasted".
The only thing that changes is their marketing message, nothing really goes to waste, as the usage pattern of the majority of users won't change a zilch.
i just had to switch to gmail today,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access. assholes.
Very smart move, when gmail starts charging for POP3, will you move again? You always pay, one way or the other, if you honestly believe Google will forever let you use gmail without looking at their ads or paying them something, you're delusional.
It's simple: put your mailboxes on your own domain, and pay for hosting on that domain. You pay, but you have full control over the mailboxes, and you can put a site (or sites) up without extra cost.
The only thing I'm still missing is the option to go past 24p. If you've ever seen sports or anything else fast-moving high action in 720p60 progressive, you'll wonder how you ever survived with 24p/30i. They can quote whatever artistic reasons they want but 60p would improve a lot of movies IMO.
It would, but it'll obsolete all 24fps cinemas out there. Unlike higher definition sound and picture, framerate isn't so trivial to convert (and ending with good quality motion video).
Also not to forget that 60fps vs 24fps movies means x2.5 more frames in a movie. It's bad enough for normal editing, but imagine how it'll blow up the costs of action films and sci-fi (which has tons of digital editing and rendering done per frame).
I guess I could have been clearer. Controls on the page can be linked to datasets on the server. The mechanism is AJAX from the browser to the server; then the server deals with the database; and a return to the browser. But all you have to do is define a dataset, and set properties on the control (list box, table, etc.) to point to the dataset.
That sounds more like a security disaster. Freely linking stuff to the data source (including modification) is nice for a desktop app, but when the data is on your server, and the client (web page) falls into the wrong hands...
ASP.NET mitigates this my pushing the actual processing of data changes into the controller (they call it "code-behind"), but if Delphi for PHP blindly copies the data binding from Delphi... get ready for some hard-core hacking action.
You know you're pretty good at asking yourself tons of questions and answering right away. You're probably never lonely.
For the record, a dead language is never THAT dead that everyone suddenly drops it. Fortran, Lisp -> they are still used in lots of projects out there but they're pretty much all dead.
In fact, you can argue PHP is starting to die this year, but it still has a majority as a server side technology on the web - it's simply not as simple as saying "is it dead? I use it, but I'm ready to jump ship" and mean something concrete at all.
Well, this is what happens when you use an authoring package of any kind. It's a pretty much unavoidable consequence of using a tool to do a job for which it was not designed. That's the difference between a calligrapher and an idiot with a stencil.
Actually this is the difference between embracing the capabilities of the platform you're targeting, and blindly porting abstract concepts from one to another and expect good performance.
Guess which of those two examples Delphi for PHP is.
I mentioned in another post I also develop and support a similar framework (for personal project, I don't plan to/yet/ open source it, but who knows).
Did I just accept that using "an authoring package" should come with horrid performance and bloat? No. How do my components work? The component classes are *design-time* only, at runtime, they generate very light, and very specific procedural code to emulate the desired behavior at runtime.
What does this mean in practice. It means that my Label component may have 500 properties, but my framework won't render a 500 line XML and parse it through convoluted component classes at *runtime*. Instead the first time the page is loaded, the component class loads, reads the properties and compiles the "form" (called "view" as in part of MVC in my case). The final code from my framework in the above example?
<php echo "Hello World" ?>
Magic? No, just embracing the platform's strengths and weaknesses.
It's obvious when a web page was made using Dreamweaver, because you'll get things like [font] tags around spaces and sometimes nested tags rather than declaring the colour, size and typeface in one
Dreamweaver in fact doesn't do that for a few versions now. It has completely embraced CSS. It will aggregate your styles in a [style] block in [head], and with a single click (literally), Dreamweaver CS3 will move it to an external CSS file.
I installed the trial Delphi for PHP and created an app which prints "Hello World" on the screen.
For a reference, this is how this looks in plain PHP (granted no MVC and so on, but for the sake of example..):
<?php echo "Hello World" ?>
What does Delphi do?
Loads several thousand lines VCL code
Loads all the menu, form, container and "external" controls, although they're not used (thousands of lines of code)
The Hello World is a label (no simpler way) which has around 50 properties (color, bg color and what not) defined in an XML file. I left all at defaults, but never mind. The file is loaded, parsed.
The Label class inherits from CustomLabel, which inherits from Components which inherits from other stuff I didn't even bother check, it goes through all properties, and figures out after a lot of thinking that it should print the words "Hello World".
Keep in mind I simplified it so you stay with me. There's also a bunch of other stuff happening, application classes and what not.
And again, this is how it's done in plain PHP:
<?php echo "Hello World" ?>
This Delphi stuff is really promising I tell you. Or, rather, it's supposed to look promising when Borland pitches CodeGear for sale again. Don't forget, CodeGear was spun off so that it's income is more clearly defined, and it's a more lucrative sale. Borland doesn't care of CodeGear has a future, it only wants to make it LOOK as if it has a future, and this project is sadly nothing more than this.
Re:Let's hope you're evaluating REAL REAL fast
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Delphi For PHP Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
As one of the CodeGear people explained, it was intended to be part of some kind of 1-day on-line seminar. The seminar had to be cancelled, but they decided to make the demo available. They realize that a single day is "sub-optimal".
PR is hard. Basically if the CEO's About page needs a photo but lacks one, which do you think is the better option, PR-wise:
1. Use the only photo of the CEO available, where he has his pants down.
2. Wait a bit and make/provide a better photo.
Unless they plan to assign a CodeGear "guy" explaining the situation to every user visiting their site, they'll look like morons to people who go there to evaluate their software.
Not only is it 1 day, but the activation is ridiculously complicated (activation.. of my trial.. by basically putting files in my documents and settings/[user] folder)
... because CodeGear offer this trial on their web site:
"Free, fully functional 1 day trial"
Right, 1 day. Great.
Re:Nice (so-called) dot-net alternative
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Delphi For PHP Released
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· Score: 4, Informative
No kidding? Have you ever seen a quality application written in PHP- it can do all these things and more. I've written many quality PHP applications that use a modified MVC architecture and has all the PHP code separate from the output templates.On top of that it uses OO where it makes sense to do so, it's fast and secure.
As a PHP developer, I agree with everything you said, except "fast", unless:
1. we ignore the speed of all the other platforms out there (python, perl,.net, java).
2. your requirements of "fast" are modest.
Truth is with more complex architectures and lots of OOP, PHP is really slow, even bytecode caching helps only so much.
PHP shines speed-wise exactly with the kind of "html-and-php-code" soup most pro developers despise. When Yahoo claim they use PHP, they in fact use it as a templating language in exactly this kind of "soup", their actual backend is C and Java.
This is why I'm really surprised at what CodeGear is trying to pull off here. As a developer of an in-house component based template engine myself, I know how painfully slow PHP becomes when you try to abstract some of your logic away in classes and so on. Various "PHP OOP" efforts like Zend's own framework or EZ Components prove my point as well.
Delphi's visual approach with VLC is just a huge bunch of abstraction. I can only imagine the kind of speed these PHP apps will have.. In fact you can pretty much say this effort is doomed from the very moment "PHP" got involved.
We don't feel like the Wii customer and the Xbox customer are the same thing," he [Mr. Rodman] said. "We think that as soon as the Wii customer turns 14 they want something else.
At my college, last generation the ps2 and xbox were pretty much in a dead heat for the top spot. Now though, the Wii is clearly winning over the ps3 and 360. The will may not be, by and large, the system you play by yourself, but it's the best system if you have people over. Also, the retro gaming is a huge hit here (may have something to do with it being an engineering and science school, maybe).
There's a weird cognitive phenomenon called "wishful thinking". Somehow marketing departments think they if they just state out loud what they believe their customers are after, it'll magically manifestate into reality.
So sad, really. Even further, since most people I know like both Wii and XBox, for different reasons. And the XBox marketing telling them "hey, you ALSO like Wii, so you're immature jerk", isn't going to win them over in their camp.
So what you're really getting out of this product is a larger hard drive. Whether a bigger hard drive is worth an extra $80 to you is for you to decide. I fail, however, to understand how nothing more than a larger hard drive and a black paint job makes it elite.
I also wondered how *only* a black finish makes a MacBook $150 more expensive and "elite" but.. common sense isn't popular these days.
If enough companies do this, one morning I could wake up and really believe that black color is extremely expensive and worth the extra cost, who knows.
At first glance, this is supposed to impress us with the hardware:
By turning on and off its 'genes' it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 - 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 - 900,000 years.
In fact the simplest DNA based organisms/structures (bacteria, virii) have the shortest "life span". The number of generations per sec. isn't anything to brag about.
All complex organisms have some sort of lifespan longer than a microsecond. For a good reason: people pass on knowledge and adapt *during* their life span (not genetically of course, but our brain allows us to adapt a lot without such).
Hype aside, interesting development, but I wish those publications wouldn't use misleading statements in pale attempts to impress us.
That may fool a few idiots, but it's gonna piss off a bunch of people who actually know what's going on.
I can't believe you said that, and also called someone ELSE arrogant a sentence later.
It should be some sorta conspiracy you suspect where smoother animations slow-down all clocks in the room.
Vista can be slower, it's more responsive, those are two different qualities. But file copying being 10 times slower than normal isn't the NORM. The incident, otherwise put, is isolated to specific machines/setups.
You can't possibly think that Microsoft did this on purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry just couldn't stop myself reformatting your comment a little
Emphasis and formatting mine up there, the text is left as in the original post.
In a single post, you managed to give:
5 positive points
about the news and immediately refute them all.
You also wondered about:
3 things
Are we after some sort of record?
I know that most of the crowd around here will be thrilled.. But I do wonder how broad the market actually is for this..
Can we please cut down on the "but I wonder" posts. Never mind what gets posted, there's always a bunch of folks there to "wonder" about the opposite happening, never mind what's the talk about. Just as some sorta hobby.
Why wonder, when you can wait and see? If Dell offers Linux computers, this is good. It can't possibly be bad, if nobody buys 'em Dell will stop offering them. Nothing more.
The images scream prototype. Check out the blue wires!
Of course, but you gotta admit that imagining wearing those in a club screams hilarity.
It'll be interesting to see what these turn to, but I've the feeling they'll introduce too much design limitations to make the concept practical. Can those screens bend in any shape? Are they as good protecting from UV?
And the most important of all... how plausible it is that you'll look totally uncool in the middle of a party, if your sunglasses's battery runs out of electricity?
You're totally missing the point about RAD.
.NET OR Python OR Java etc etc..
.NET (also sufficiently fast), both platforms which are over 100x faster than comparable PHP code (yes 100x is not overestimation, chekc the language shootout benchmarks). This means there's lots of headway for Delphi to implement time-saving abstractions and components, as the code runs fast enough to make up for it.
.NET. Put whole VCL-worth of abstraction on top of PHP, and it becomes slower than hell. Now run it on a busy web server. Does it look promising yet?
If you want performance and hardly any overhead, then go down a few layers of abstraction and code in assembly.
The thing is, I don't have to code in assembly, I simply have to not code in Delphi for PHP and opt for light PHP framework OR
You'll do yourself to acknowledge there's more out there than "assembly" and "Delphi for PHP" when discussing those things. The "code in assembly" argument is tired, cliche and plain wrong.
Let me tell you why Delphi RAD works on the Desktop:
1. You have the CPU of entire machine to run what you want. You absolutely need 200MB of RAM for that blinking LED effect on top? Big deal, take it, it's there. The important thing is it works, and the entire machine is at your disposal.
2. Delphi for Desktop compiles to Win32+machine code (hella fast) or
Let me tell you why Delphi for PHP doesn't work:
1. Unlike the Desktop, you're operating under heavily reduced resources. Everyone that uses your app calls back the same server, the same server serves the app to many users. Compare this to a Windows box with say, 100-200 mice and 100-200 instances of the RAD tool opened, and being used simultaneously. Does it still look as if performance doesn't matter to you?
2. PHP is slow as hell. This is not Win32, it's not
If you can't see my point, then I give up. But I'll have to tell you that as a PHP developer, a big chunk of my time is spent optimizing performance of PHP applications, and let me tell you I'd not touch Delphi for PHP with a 20 foot pole.
In the real world development time is often more expensive than hardware upgrades to compensate for non-optimized code.
I did some benchmarks. Delphi for PHP apps will be able to handle around 10-20 people at once on a moderately powerful server. Here's to hoping that your RAD apps don't ever become popular.
And let me put things in perspective for you. Upgrading a hardware is easy. Managing 20 times more servers due to poor web app performance isn't: 20 times more support staff isn't cheap, 20 times more administrators aren't cheap, 20 times more backup data isn't cheap.
Development time IS expensive, but when the result is mediocre, you've just wasted all this development time, and a ton of other resources in your company that could go for a better purpose.
There are RAD frameworks for PHP out there much more robust and performant, which will save you just as much development time as Delphi for PHP possibly could.
"Hey it's RAD so if it sucks, it doesn't suck" is a poor argument in defense for Delphi for PHP.
There we go, on top.
With glasses like those, you can be the hit of every nerd party, I can hardly wait.
What do you care what the javascript looks like? The whole idea of GWT is that the javascript,html, and CSS (somewhat) are an alternative form of bytecode to compile your java classes to.
And that's a great idea, unless you have account for the fact that HTML/CSS/JS *aren't* application bytecodes.
There are lots of concerns in a web app that aren't there in compiled bytecode app:
1. data/code sharing among pages (number of file read requests, repeated data in every page)
2. incompatibilities among browsers (you rely on GWT for browser compatibility, it's frequently not accounting for some rather unobvious details, then you're screwed).
3. GWT goes against MVC as it follows a more traditional "apps and forms" paradigm, which means you're severaly limited in code reuse and separation of concerns in your app.
4. They provide you with a nice Java debugger to debug your basic application logic, but in the real world you'll need to test your ACTUAL app on ACTUAL browsers and you'll find lots of problems. Good luck debugging those when the error show up in some random place in the midst of some random code bytecode-ish blob.
I've been this way, there are things you can abstract, and things you better not. I've went to abstract a template/component compiler working on the server side for me, it would compile an extended version of HTML (html with XML components, kinda like JSP) to HTML+PHP.
And although this is much easier as the produced code is browser agnostic, unlike client-side code, I still had to go to considerable lengths to make this debuggable and manageable (when ANY error occurs in the compiled file, it should point out where the error was in the SOURCE file(s) ).
On the client side however you can't do this. You can trap exceptions, you can trap some errors in some browsers in some proprietary way, but basically if you open your code to analyze in tools like FireBug or DOM Explorer, you see an unreadable mess that's impossible to tell apart.
GWT users laugh at people who use AJAX frameworks. I can't believe you laugh at a simpler and more direct, more manageable approach to a problem, and accept a few layers deeper abstraction for the sake of not having to "get dirty with JS".
I realize GWT is very cool if you're afraid of JS/CSS/HTML and want to pretend using Java when Java is not there seems very professional. But JS isn't a *bytecode* after all, it's a very readable, well-tooled for the purpose language, and you can write manageable code DIRECTLY in it.
Further more, if you prefer to work in a more Java/Desktop approach, you can always use Flex 2, which is basically a RAD application tool using JS 2 (classes, interfaces, namespaces, E4X, packages, closures.. all the goodies) that compiles to cross-platform compatible Flash 9 goodness, and doesn't have any underlying ugliness like GWT does. If you run it - and it works, it works everywhere.
IANAL, but OMG FFS FSF, GPL3 can't work AB. AFAIUI, we need GPL3 AEAP, if Novell/MS's deal 2B AMF.
Within 10 years I hope to see all of these technologies combined into a geek fantasy device
I'm personally not acknowledging any future until suicide booths and underwear commercials beamed directly in my dreams.
My point is that at least in my case, this extra storage will be just wasted.
I wonder, when we're talking about unlimited and dynamic storage, can we ever talk about "extra storage being wasted". It kinda clashes with my logical units.
They don't pre-allocate infinite number of bytes for your account, which will go "wasted".
The only thing that changes is their marketing message, nothing really goes to waste, as the usage pattern of the majority of users won't change a zilch.
i just had to switch to gmail today ,as yahoo decided to start charging £12 a year for POP access.
assholes.
Very smart move, when gmail starts charging for POP3, will you move again? You always pay, one way or the other, if you honestly believe Google will forever let you use gmail without looking at their ads or paying them something, you're delusional.
It's simple: put your mailboxes on your own domain, and pay for hosting on that domain. You pay, but you have full control over the mailboxes, and you can put a site (or sites) up without extra cost.
The only thing I'm still missing is the option to go past 24p. If you've ever seen sports or anything else fast-moving high action in 720p60 progressive, you'll wonder how you ever survived with 24p/30i. They can quote whatever artistic reasons they want but 60p would improve a lot of movies IMO.
It would, but it'll obsolete all 24fps cinemas out there. Unlike higher definition sound and picture, framerate isn't so trivial to convert (and ending with good quality motion video).
Also not to forget that 60fps vs 24fps movies means x2.5 more frames in a movie. It's bad enough for normal editing, but imagine how it'll blow up the costs of action films and sci-fi (which has tons of digital editing and rendering done per frame).
(...) I wish those publications wouldn't use misleading statements in pale attempts to impress us.
Let me guess.. You're single, right?
Let me guess.. you're trying to insult me or something? I'm not sure, it's just too cliche and void of point at the same time.
I guess I could have been clearer. Controls on the page can be linked to datasets on the server. The mechanism is AJAX from the browser to the server; then the server deals with the database; and a return to the browser. But all you have to do is define a dataset, and set properties on the control (list box, table, etc.) to point to the dataset.
That sounds more like a security disaster. Freely linking stuff to the data source (including modification) is nice for a desktop app, but when the data is on your server, and the client (web page) falls into the wrong hands...
ASP.NET mitigates this my pushing the actual processing of data changes into the controller (they call it "code-behind"), but if Delphi for PHP blindly copies the data binding from Delphi... get ready for some hard-core hacking action.
You know you're pretty good at asking yourself tons of questions and answering right away. You're probably never lonely.
For the record, a dead language is never THAT dead that everyone suddenly drops it. Fortran, Lisp -> they are still used in lots of projects out there but they're pretty much all dead.
In fact, you can argue PHP is starting to die this year, but it still has a majority as a server side technology on the web - it's simply not as simple as saying "is it dead? I use it, but I'm ready to jump ship" and mean something concrete at all.
Well, this is what happens when you use an authoring package of any kind. It's a pretty much unavoidable consequence of using a tool to do a job for which it was not designed. That's the difference between a calligrapher and an idiot with a stencil.
/yet/ open source it, but who knows).
Actually this is the difference between embracing the capabilities of the platform you're targeting, and blindly porting abstract concepts from one to another and expect good performance.
Guess which of those two examples Delphi for PHP is.
I mentioned in another post I also develop and support a similar framework (for personal project, I don't plan to
Did I just accept that using "an authoring package" should come with horrid performance and bloat? No. How do my components work? The component classes are *design-time* only, at runtime, they generate very light, and very specific procedural code to emulate the desired behavior at runtime.
What does this mean in practice. It means that my Label component may have 500 properties, but my framework won't render a 500 line XML and parse it through convoluted component classes at *runtime*. Instead the first time the page is loaded, the component class loads, reads the properties and compiles the "form" (called "view" as in part of MVC in my case). The final code from my framework in the above example?
<php echo "Hello World" ?>
Magic? No, just embracing the platform's strengths and weaknesses.
It's obvious when a web page was made using Dreamweaver, because you'll get things like [font] tags around spaces and sometimes nested tags rather than declaring the colour, size and typeface in one
Dreamweaver in fact doesn't do that for a few versions now. It has completely embraced CSS. It will aggregate your styles in a [style] block in [head], and with a single click (literally), Dreamweaver CS3 will move it to an external CSS file.
This is why microsoft/vmware provide free virtual machine software.
That's like me ranting "BluRay's DRM sucks" and you telling me "this is why hackers provide hacks".
It doesn't make Sony/Toshiba any better for feeding us rogue DRM. Of course I installed it on VMWare, otherwise...
I installed the trial Delphi for PHP and created an app which prints "Hello World" on the screen.
For a reference, this is how this looks in plain PHP (granted no MVC and so on, but for the sake of example..):
<?php echo "Hello World" ?>
What does Delphi do?
Keep in mind I simplified it so you stay with me. There's also a bunch of other stuff happening, application classes and what not.
And again, this is how it's done in plain PHP:
<?php echo "Hello World" ?>
This Delphi stuff is really promising I tell you. Or, rather, it's supposed to look promising when Borland pitches CodeGear for sale again. Don't forget, CodeGear was spun off so that it's income is more clearly defined, and it's a more lucrative sale. Borland doesn't care of CodeGear has a future, it only wants to make it LOOK as if it has a future, and this project is sadly nothing more than this.
As one of the CodeGear people explained, it was intended to be part of some kind of 1-day on-line seminar. The seminar had to be cancelled, but they decided to make the demo available. They realize that a single day is "sub-optimal".
PR is hard. Basically if the CEO's About page needs a photo but lacks one, which do you think is the better option, PR-wise:
1. Use the only photo of the CEO available, where he has his pants down.
2. Wait a bit and make/provide a better photo.
Unless they plan to assign a CodeGear "guy" explaining the situation to every user visiting their site, they'll look like morons to people who go there to evaluate their software.
Not only is it 1 day, but the activation is ridiculously complicated (activation.. of my trial.. by basically putting files in my documents and settings/[user] folder)
... because CodeGear offer this trial on their web site:
"Free, fully functional 1 day trial"
Right, 1 day.
Great.
No kidding? Have you ever seen a quality application written in PHP- it can do all these things and more. I've written many quality PHP applications that use a modified MVC architecture and has all the PHP code separate from the output templates.On top of that it uses OO where it makes sense to do so, it's fast and secure.
.net, java).
As a PHP developer, I agree with everything you said, except "fast", unless:
1. we ignore the speed of all the other platforms out there (python, perl,
2. your requirements of "fast" are modest.
Truth is with more complex architectures and lots of OOP, PHP is really slow, even bytecode caching helps only so much.
PHP shines speed-wise exactly with the kind of "html-and-php-code" soup most pro developers despise. When Yahoo claim they use PHP, they in fact use it as a templating language in exactly this kind of "soup", their actual backend is C and Java.
This is why I'm really surprised at what CodeGear is trying to pull off here. As a developer of an in-house component based template engine myself, I know how painfully slow PHP becomes when you try to abstract some of your logic away in classes and so on. Various "PHP OOP" efforts like Zend's own framework or EZ Components prove my point as well.
Delphi's visual approach with VLC is just a huge bunch of abstraction. I can only imagine the kind of speed these PHP apps will have.. In fact you can pretty much say this effort is doomed from the very moment "PHP" got involved.
At my college, last generation the ps2 and xbox were pretty much in a dead heat for the top spot. Now though, the Wii is clearly winning over the ps3 and 360. The will may not be, by and large, the system you play by yourself, but it's the best system if you have people over. Also, the retro gaming is a huge hit here (may have something to do with it being an engineering and science school, maybe).
There's a weird cognitive phenomenon called "wishful thinking". Somehow marketing departments think they if they just state out loud what they believe their customers are after, it'll magically manifestate into reality.
So sad, really. Even further, since most people I know like both Wii and XBox, for different reasons. And the XBox marketing telling them "hey, you ALSO like Wii, so you're immature jerk", isn't going to win them over in their camp.
So what you're really getting out of this product is a larger hard drive. Whether a bigger hard drive is worth an extra $80 to you is for you to decide. I fail, however, to understand how nothing more than a larger hard drive and a black paint job makes it elite.
I also wondered how *only* a black finish makes a MacBook $150 more expensive and "elite" but.. common sense isn't popular these days.
If enough companies do this, one morning I could wake up and really believe that black color is extremely expensive and worth the extra cost, who knows.
At first glance, this is supposed to impress us with the hardware:
By turning on and off its 'genes' it can change the way it works, and it can go through 20,000 - 30,000 generations in just a few seconds. That same number of generations took humans 800,000 - 900,000 years.
In fact the simplest DNA based organisms/structures (bacteria, virii) have the shortest "life span". The number of generations per sec. isn't anything to brag about.
All complex organisms have some sort of lifespan longer than a microsecond. For a good reason: people pass on knowledge and adapt *during* their life span (not genetically of course, but our brain allows us to adapt a lot without such).
Hype aside, interesting development, but I wish those publications wouldn't use misleading statements in pale attempts to impress us.
That may fool a few idiots, but it's gonna piss off a bunch of people who actually know what's going on.
I can't believe you said that, and also called someone ELSE arrogant a sentence later.
It should be some sorta conspiracy you suspect where smoother animations slow-down all clocks in the room.
Vista can be slower, it's more responsive, those are two different qualities. But file copying being 10 times slower than normal isn't the NORM. The incident, otherwise put, is isolated to specific machines/setups.
You can't possibly think that Microsoft did this on purpose.
Aw come on! Its not like some evil corporation would embed them with rootkits. Oh wait... =)
I'm waiting but what am I waiting for? RIAA to go bankrupt?