This is why I think we shouldn't count MSFT out. They've had it so easy for 10 - 15 years that they have turned to competing among themselves for something to do. Once a real sense of fear and external competition sets in we may see a very different beast.
No necessarily. These people are always 'confident' that they will get their way, but I'm sure all but a very few of them are pragmatic behind closed doors. It's just playing to the media circus; creating an image for the general public.
This is a point I always have trouble impressing on people. They do a simple benchmarks on a tiny code base that pulls some data from the database, spits out some data, and they compare and PHP seems to be lightning fast.
The problem is that because it's interpreted at some point PHP slows down in proportion to the size of your code base. A small app runs really fast, a big app with 100,000 lines of code will kill your server unless you modularize it really really well - which harder than it seems, because the more modularized you make it the more separate "includes" you end up with in different files and then you come to realize that including a lot of files itself is a problem. And the nature of PHP's very loose coupling tends to lead to code that is nearly impossible to do large scale refactoring on once you have gone too far down the path.
I work on an application that has a very thin PHP layer that performs some simple web services that are the back end for a pure Java web app. Amazingly, when we load test it, the PHP part is the bottleneck, burning CPU like crazy just parsing all our files ... over ... and over ... and over. The java code meanwhile, while theoretically doing far more "work", is completely bored. We will probably look at using an accelerator of some kind or maybe just rewriting all the PHP in another language.
If your problem is parsing time, just use an accelerator. APC is the standard and best integrated.
On the other hand, if you have an opportunity to switch out PHP for something better (read: nearly anything), you should. Otherwise it might grow to a point that you can't remove it.
I reckon there's a whole bunch pushing non-unicode and not knowing it, but declaring UTF-8 anyway. Since the current versions of PHP don't even support unicode (at least, without going to very special pains) I suspect there are an awful lot of web sites just shoving out content in non-unicode formats, calling it UTF-8 and wondering why every now and then they see a funny question mark in someone's name etc.
I don't know exactly what mortgage contracts look like in the US, but the ones I have seen in my country don't say you can walk away. They say you can not walk away. The bank getting the house is just one consequence that happens if you violate the contract and do walk away.
America severely limited the recourse of creditors when they abolished indentured servitude and wrote the bankruptcy laws. It was common principal that America would not be a debtors nation after that event Some of those laws where changed when, after heavy lobbying by the credit industry at the dawn of housing collapse (2005), a means test was created, to verify that a debtor could not pay back the debt. If he can, no matter what ramifications it has on their personal life, the debtor is required to submit to a 5 year restructuring program in which any disposable income is seized by the court and paid to ones creditors. An individual can no longer declare amnesty from debt no matter what personal reason for doing so, and no matter what hardship is experienced. Corporations are not subjected to the same measure to qualify for a chapter 7 bankruptcy.
In saying that, in some states, bankruptcy is the only way to cleanly walk away from your home.
Before the crash, I was getting calls from lenders trying to get me to do a cash-out refi "so I'd have money to invest in the stock market". I assume that some went for that pitch.
> Disney removes all other copies, but allows access to the original.
But they don't have to - they could banish Mickey from the world if they chose to. Copyright allows them to do it. Is that wrong?
I think it's more about who created the information - copyright is about controlling things you yourself create. Censorship is about controlling access to things other people created.
Be the way, can the company be the creator?
The work of art is created by people. So why the current Disney's directors or shareholders do control the creation of the company's founder who has passed decades ago?
I think arguing against all censorship is doomed because people will always come up with examples that are very hard to argue with. For example, "what if someone puts detailed plans to make a nuclear bomb on the internet"? Would you really argue nothing should be done to prevent that?
What is really the problem here is the method. We can usually all agree that censorship must be an exception, not the rule. In fact, we can usually agree that in a democracy we have a set of important principles without which the pillars that support the democracy itself and the freedom of people within it will break down:
a) We try as hard not to censor as we can.
b) We try everything except censorship before we try censorship
c) Even then, we censor only when such censorship has a provable chance of preventing the serious harm that we have identified must be prevented
> While you can’t get code into your templates, it’s easy to get UI into your code, which is (almost) just as bad.
I looked at Lift a year or two ago and this was the showstopper for me. While there's a cleanliness and purity to rigidly enforced templating I have never developed a web app where I didn't need some kind of creative "UI" logic somewhere. If you can't put it in the templates then it doesn't go away ... it goes into your core code where the poor schmuck looking at the template has no hope of doing anything with it. For me, putting what is otherwise pure UI logic in the UI layer is a lesser evil than having it permeate back to the middle tier or "view" code layer.
