Oh, and how could I forget: Imoen. I really wanted there to be a plot option to let Irenicus keep her so I could be rid of her whiny brat voice for good.
Then again, compared to the dialog in most JRPG's, she'd get a goddam Tony award.
Aribeth's voice to me almost seemed like comic relief. I pictured the actress doing the whole "milking the giant cow" routine as she dramatically eee-NUN-ci-at-ed each of her pompous lines. NWN in general was kind of a train wreck in terms of production values though, and Bioware wasn't responsible for NWN2.
The voice acting in Jade Empire and KOTOR often felt kind of wooden too, but I think that's exactly what they're trying to avoid in Mass Effect. I tend to wait for games to go down in price, so there will be plenty of reviews for me to go on, and now that the orgiastic lovefest for Bioshock is done (it's a good game, but it ain't a 100), they might actually be realistic.
The problem is that kdawson posts a good chunk of the content of slashdot in general.
Does that mean that he posts occasionally good stories? Sure. Would I go to a restaurant that employed a waiter that shit on only every 10th plate? No. So while I might not go back to that restaurant even if they gave that waiter the boot, if Slashdot gets rid of kdawson, they might actually get an editor that could do their job.
Pardon me, I just had a laughing fit for a moment.
It has everything you would expect from a language thrown together by people who were either ignorant of software engineering or aware of it, but aggressively hostile to it.
Having spent a good deal of time on IRC with the PHP devs themselves, I think you summed it up as succinctly as I've ever heard: they're a mix of both.
For some real entertainment, check out the semantics of the === operator. I was there for its birth, educating Zeev on what the concept of "object identity" was, and saw as they got the semantics of the operator so completely opposite to what I was actually asking for (something like lisp's 'eq' or javascript's own triple-equals operator). And it lives on in PHP to this day.
The web itself is procedural. Unless you're a sadist, web applications are broken out into different URIs that handle different part of the applications.
Sounds functional to me. Throw the inherent statelessness of the protocol on top for a bonus.
Good god, the only thing I can think of that I would want to use less than PHP is JSP. Java is fine, give me Tapestry, Seam, Wicket, Struts, Stripes, Aranea, RIFE, Echo2, GWT, the list just goes on and on. JSP itself is a monstrosity and only good for variable substution, if that, and JSF is frankly little better unless you have great taglibs that go beyond the craptastic ones that ship with the reference implementation.
> Does such a concept protect against SQL injection or not?
DROP TABLE Customers;
You also forgot to enumerate every stored procedure that might be callable, or guard against injecting unauthorized columns in those really dynamic queries that specify columns as parameters.
Bound parameters protect against SQL injection without having to interrogate every bit of SQL and praying that you covered every attack. With bound parameters, something that real DB APIs have supported from day 1, you don't need goofy hacks like this. Even PHP supports them for a few databases now, I think.
They're also faster and actually easier in the long run. Really, it's only PHP and the early-90's VB folks that even have to be told this sort of thing. Everything else got with the program long ago.
I think the only languages you can really call "shared-nothing" would be ones like Erlang or Occam -- otherwise, it's an attribute of an architecture, not a language. PHP has built-in support for sessions, which have a larger scope than the interpreter itself. That's shared-something all right, and it kills scalability real good if you don't invent your own session management stuff on top of PHP's built in nonsense.
I hate PHP with the power of a thousand suns, but scalability isn't one of the reasons. It's just a not very good language (to put my opinion mildly) but it has the library support for enough things from memcached to mqseries in order to build decent and very scalable architectures on. The execution speed of the language is usually adequate, at least for most apps that fit in its domain. It's other pieces of an out of the box LAMP architecture that usually fail: running apache in prefork mode is, for example, not one of the wiser scaling decisions to make.
> Jack Thompson is the crazy guy who's on a personal crusade against video games.
And before that, it was gangsta rap. Remember 2 Live Crew? He's the one that led the charge against them. And before that, it was pornography. He got into some rather interesting exchanges with the then-AG of Florida, Janet Reno over that, while he was running for the same job. His big mouth killed his political aspirations then, and it doesn't look like he's learned now.
He's always been a mean, vindictive, self-righteous foul-tempered loud-mouthed crank. Even his own son can't stand him, and has more than once made that publicly known.
His subpoena to depose the Bushes (if it's even proper -- Jack is notorious for making deficient filings) is only to get their testimony in support of him, i.e. as a friendly witness. Apparently he's written letters to them (no sign that they were actually ever answered) and he thinks they'll come out and say what a great upstanding morally upright dude Jack is. Mmm hmm. Even construing this in a sane light, which is giving Whack Jack *way* too much latitude, it's a dilatory motion meant to confuse and slow proceedings, the Referee in his disciplinary proceedings (whom he has also filed suit against -- real smart Jack!) is going to see it for what it is, and lay the appropriate degree of smack down against it.
Despite my uid, I've been on slashdot since it was running on Taco's laptop. Truth is, the quality wasn't really any better then, but for it to not have improved at all is still a larger indictment now than it would be then.
I've twice thrown out my identity on slashdot and gotten myself a new one. Once it was because I didn't like my old nick, once it's because I got disgusted and changed my email and password to random keyboard-banging strings. I actually did it to this one, but by some weird quirk, firefox remembered my password and kept me logged in. I might fix this one someday, but truth is, I don't much like this nick either, so I'll probably drop it too.
I remember when Half-Empty started up -- I had high hopes for that. Alas, it probably just would have become Digg with extra icons... it eventually comes down to the people, I guess.
> He had almost no formal education, little experience politically, and was basically voted in because he was famous.
Probably right about why he was voted in. In his defense, he was President of the Screen Actors Guild. Anyone who can manage that bunch of prima donnas has some political acumen. No, I didn't vote for him.
That's not spooky, bizarre, or even strange. It's not counterintuitive. So how is it different than quantum entanglement? I do not know, but I would like to.
Entanglement means the ball wasn't either color until you looked (actually it was in the state of being both colors), and looking at it made the ball the other color.
I've got no idea how they actually proved that, but I don't even get regular physics most of the time.
ACID2 detects the robustness of a CSS implementation in the face of multiple errors, and I'm pretty sure it's all CSS2 and lower. It'd be nice if there was a CSS test suite for testing the completeness of CSS, that people could use as bragging rights. In fact, I'm rather peeved that the W3C continually puts out specs with no test suites or even reference implementations.
IE on the other hand continues to lower the bar. It has somewhat better CSS now, but Javascript is now just deathly slow. I guess we have to give 'em a break, they're obviously just not competent enough to handle something as complex as a Javascript implementation.
I love the hell out of that page... but speaking of pages, it's too bad that anything you load is going to take at least two pages (at 4K each) anyway. Maybe one, if you can convince it to all run in one section. So all that effort to create a 45-byte file, which will still require the same 8K that the original C file would take up.
Miranda is a awful confusing hodgepodge of plug-ins that generally have poor documentation and even worse configuration UIs. It's a perfect example of the plug-in mentality run amok. I do use it myself -- it's actually a better Yahoo IM client than Yahoo's own craptastic client -- but I hesitate to inflict it in its raw form on the uninitiated.
I always combine PuTTY with PSHotLaunch, and put my most commonly-used connections on a single hotkey each (as well as add a few other hotkeys). Very nice launchpad app -- not sure if it supports running off a thumb drive though.
If by "efficiency" you mean performance, the surrogate keys are a physical implementation detail and should be hidden from the application, in which case you don't have any surrogate keys at all.
Sure. In an ideal world, I might indeed sling tuples of address data around, but we're often dealing with languages that don't even have a concept of tuples. It's only fancy ORMs that let me treat data without always having to refer to its "handle", and even then it's not guaranteed.
An employee ID is necessary because names aren't unique enough (I've worked at two companies that have had people with the same first and last name as me), or they may vary (especially in the case of marriage. A driver's license number is actually serving its purpose as a unique ID, and while in some instances it may be a surrogate key for your very identity as a person, we're not at any point where a database can quite encode your ineffable "you-ness":)
It's my understanding that you have surrogate keys whenever a row would otherwise be perfectly unique but you use an extra column for the unique id anyway. Purely from a theory angle, that id is superfluous, and isn't really part of the tuple, hence a surrogate. I guess it's only a Bad Thing when you expose them to the application, but I still cringe a little every time I find myself having to explicitly join 'id' columns, especially when I've already established foreign key relationships.
The interpretation of the second amendment was that "well regulated" was an inevitable outcome of, not a necessary precondition to, the right to keep and bear arms. It's justification, not condition.
Unfortunately, I think the founders were wrong about the outcome, because the folks most vociferous about arms-bearing seem to be some of the greatest enemies to all liberty, at least the ones they consider "liberal". And no, I don't think the answer is really a domestic arms race. Be that as it may, I don't support the "national guard = militia" argument, much less substituting "standing army" for the first term.
Oh what utter absolute hysterical raving bullshit. Show me one fucking country that has that. Preventative care is being able to go to a doctor for a checkup and signing up for an exercise and diet program if you want it.
But hey, you *are* paying for it one way or the other, but keep waving your free market flag anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and how could I forget: Imoen. I really wanted there to be a plot option to let Irenicus keep her so I could be rid of her whiny brat voice for good.
Then again, compared to the dialog in most JRPG's, she'd get a goddam Tony award.
Aribeth's voice to me almost seemed like comic relief. I pictured the actress doing the whole "milking the giant cow" routine as she dramatically eee-NUN-ci-at-ed each of her pompous lines. NWN in general was kind of a train wreck in terms of production values though, and Bioware wasn't responsible for NWN2.
The voice acting in Jade Empire and KOTOR often felt kind of wooden too, but I think that's exactly what they're trying to avoid in Mass Effect. I tend to wait for games to go down in price, so there will be plenty of reviews for me to go on, and now that the orgiastic lovefest for Bioshock is done (it's a good game, but it ain't a 100), they might actually be realistic.
> Mass Effect has players choosing from among short sentences that hit at the emotion of a response, rather than the specifics.
Players will be able to choose from generalized topics like NAME, JOB, JOIN, and BYE?
I wondered why I didn't see this on the front page of GP. Then I looked at the URL:
http://gamepolitics.com/2007/07/03/jack-thompson-claims-bar-official-demanded-psych-test-suspension/
So it's a story from july, and even the slug says it was his claim, not an order (the suspension, in fact, has not yet happened).
I guess I'm overqualified to be a slashdot editor.
The problem is that kdawson posts a good chunk of the content of slashdot in general.
Does that mean that he posts occasionally good stories? Sure. Would I go to a restaurant that employed a waiter that shit on only every 10th plate? No. So while I might not go back to that restaurant even if they gave that waiter the boot, if Slashdot gets rid of kdawson, they might actually get an editor that could do their job.
Pardon me, I just had a laughing fit for a moment.
It has everything you would expect from a language thrown together by people who were either ignorant of software engineering or aware of it, but aggressively hostile to it.
Having spent a good deal of time on IRC with the PHP devs themselves, I think you summed it up as succinctly as I've ever heard: they're a mix of both.
For some real entertainment, check out the semantics of the === operator. I was there for its birth, educating Zeev on what the concept of "object identity" was, and saw as they got the semantics of the operator so completely opposite to what I was actually asking for (something like lisp's 'eq' or javascript's own triple-equals operator). And it lives on in PHP to this day.
The web itself is procedural. Unless you're a sadist, web applications are broken out into different URIs that handle different part of the applications.
Sounds functional to me. Throw the inherent statelessness of the protocol on top for a bonus.
Good god, the only thing I can think of that I would want to use less than PHP is JSP. Java is fine, give me Tapestry, Seam, Wicket, Struts, Stripes, Aranea, RIFE, Echo2, GWT, the list just goes on and on. JSP itself is a monstrosity and only good for variable substution, if that, and JSF is frankly little better unless you have great taglibs that go beyond the craptastic ones that ship with the reference implementation.
> Does such a concept protect against SQL injection or not?
DROP TABLE Customers;
You also forgot to enumerate every stored procedure that might be callable, or guard against injecting unauthorized columns in those really dynamic queries that specify columns as parameters.
Bound parameters protect against SQL injection without having to interrogate every bit of SQL and praying that you covered every attack. With bound parameters, something that real DB APIs have supported from day 1, you don't need goofy hacks like this. Even PHP supports them for a few databases now, I think.
They're also faster and actually easier in the long run. Really, it's only PHP and the early-90's VB folks that even have to be told this sort of thing. Everything else got with the program long ago.
I think the only languages you can really call "shared-nothing" would be ones like Erlang or Occam -- otherwise, it's an attribute of an architecture, not a language. PHP has built-in support for sessions, which have a larger scope than the interpreter itself. That's shared-something all right, and it kills scalability real good if you don't invent your own session management stuff on top of PHP's built in nonsense.
I hate PHP with the power of a thousand suns, but scalability isn't one of the reasons. It's just a not very good language (to put my opinion mildly) but it has the library support for enough things from memcached to mqseries in order to build decent and very scalable architectures on. The execution speed of the language is usually adequate, at least for most apps that fit in its domain. It's other pieces of an out of the box LAMP architecture that usually fail: running apache in prefork mode is, for example, not one of the wiser scaling decisions to make.
> Jack Thompson is the crazy guy who's on a personal crusade against video games.
And before that, it was gangsta rap. Remember 2 Live Crew? He's the one that led the charge against them. And before that, it was pornography. He got into some rather interesting exchanges with the then-AG of Florida, Janet Reno over that, while he was running for the same job. His big mouth killed his political aspirations then, and it doesn't look like he's learned now.
He's always been a mean, vindictive, self-righteous foul-tempered loud-mouthed crank. Even his own son can't stand him, and has more than once made that publicly known.
His subpoena to depose the Bushes (if it's even proper -- Jack is notorious for making deficient filings) is only to get their testimony in support of him, i.e. as a friendly witness. Apparently he's written letters to them (no sign that they were actually ever answered) and he thinks they'll come out and say what a great upstanding morally upright dude Jack is. Mmm hmm. Even construing this in a sane light, which is giving Whack Jack *way* too much latitude, it's a dilatory motion meant to confuse and slow proceedings, the Referee in his disciplinary proceedings (whom he has also filed suit against -- real smart Jack!) is going to see it for what it is, and lay the appropriate degree of smack down against it.
Despite my uid, I've been on slashdot since it was running on Taco's laptop. Truth is, the quality wasn't really any better then, but for it to not have improved at all is still a larger indictment now than it would be then.
I've twice thrown out my identity on slashdot and gotten myself a new one. Once it was because I didn't like my old nick, once it's because I got disgusted and changed my email and password to random keyboard-banging strings. I actually did it to this one, but by some weird quirk, firefox remembered my password and kept me logged in. I might fix this one someday, but truth is, I don't much like this nick either, so I'll probably drop it too.
I remember when Half-Empty started up -- I had high hopes for that. Alas, it probably just would have become Digg with extra icons... it eventually comes down to the people, I guess.
> He had almost no formal education, little experience politically, and was basically voted in because he was famous.
Probably right about why he was voted in. In his defense, he was President of the Screen Actors Guild. Anyone who can manage that bunch of prima donnas has some political acumen. No, I didn't vote for him.
That's not spooky, bizarre, or even strange. It's not counterintuitive. So how is it different than quantum entanglement? I do not know, but I would like to.
Entanglement means the ball wasn't either color until you looked (actually it was in the state of being both colors), and looking at it made the ball the other color.
I've got no idea how they actually proved that, but I don't even get regular physics most of the time.
ACID2 detects the robustness of a CSS implementation in the face of multiple errors, and I'm pretty sure it's all CSS2 and lower. It'd be nice if there was a CSS test suite for testing the completeness of CSS, that people could use as bragging rights. In fact, I'm rather peeved that the W3C continually puts out specs with no test suites or even reference implementations.
IE on the other hand continues to lower the bar. It has somewhat better CSS now, but Javascript is now just deathly slow. I guess we have to give 'em a break, they're obviously just not competent enough to handle something as complex as a Javascript implementation.
> I guess he has officially become the phantom of the opera.
Not even buried and he's already spinning.
Why don't you associate him with Britney Spears while you're at it? ALW, gah, what an awful hack.
I love the hell out of that page ... but speaking of pages, it's too bad that anything you load is going to take at least two pages (at 4K each) anyway. Maybe one, if you can convince it to all run in one section. So all that effort to create a 45-byte file, which will still require the same 8K that the original C file would take up.
Of course that wasn't really the point.
Miranda is a awful confusing hodgepodge of plug-ins that generally have poor documentation and even worse configuration UIs. It's a perfect example of the plug-in mentality run amok. I do use it myself -- it's actually a better Yahoo IM client than Yahoo's own craptastic client -- but I hesitate to inflict it in its raw form on the uninitiated.
I always combine PuTTY with PSHotLaunch, and put my most commonly-used connections on a single hotkey each (as well as add a few other hotkeys). Very nice launchpad app -- not sure if it supports running off a thumb drive though.
If by "efficiency" you mean performance, the surrogate keys are a physical implementation detail and should be hidden from the application, in which case you don't have any surrogate keys at all.
:)
Sure. In an ideal world, I might indeed sling tuples of address data around, but we're often dealing with languages that don't even have a concept of tuples. It's only fancy ORMs that let me treat data without always having to refer to its "handle", and even then it's not guaranteed.
An employee ID is necessary because names aren't unique enough (I've worked at two companies that have had people with the same first and last name as me), or they may vary (especially in the case of marriage. A driver's license number is actually serving its purpose as a unique ID, and while in some instances it may be a surrogate key for your very identity as a person, we're not at any point where a database can quite encode your ineffable "you-ness"
It's my understanding that you have surrogate keys whenever a row would otherwise be perfectly unique but you use an extra column for the unique id anyway. Purely from a theory angle, that id is superfluous, and isn't really part of the tuple, hence a surrogate. I guess it's only a Bad Thing when you expose them to the application, but I still cringe a little every time I find myself having to explicitly join 'id' columns, especially when I've already established foreign key relationships.
> At what point are OIDs required for normal interoperation with a Postgres database?
Never. Postgres 8.x defaults to not even creating them.
> IMHO, databases would be much, much different today if IBM had extended the VSAM file type from the mainframe to the PC
They did, it's called OS/2. The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong...
> Actually it does stand to reason, but the federal government doesn't stick to reason in situations like this.
The government's reasoning is more direct: "I have a gun. You will do what I say."
The interpretation of the second amendment was that "well regulated" was an inevitable outcome of, not a necessary precondition to, the right to keep and bear arms. It's justification, not condition.
Unfortunately, I think the founders were wrong about the outcome, because the folks most vociferous about arms-bearing seem to be some of the greatest enemies to all liberty, at least the ones they consider "liberal". And no, I don't think the answer is really a domestic arms race. Be that as it may, I don't support the "national guard = militia" argument, much less substituting "standing army" for the first term.
Oh what utter absolute hysterical raving bullshit. Show me one fucking country that has that. Preventative care is being able to go to a doctor for a checkup and signing up for an exercise and diet program if you want it.
But hey, you *are* paying for it one way or the other, but keep waving your free market flag anyway.