st0p

So instead of having these machines in our serverroom inside our office, we'd have to pay for using them in a data center and register URL's, only because some ISP's use an insane way to handle NXDOMAIN? There are many valid reasons to "go into the cloud", but this is not one of them.

We use chrome for internal apps. Forcing you to use 8.8.8.8 means our users have to remember ip addresses instead of http://nameofapplication/

Not a problem for me, but I'm sure a lot of people would complain.

Forgive me my sarcasm, but the posterboy of crowdfunding will be a piece of hardware that is designed for people who are too lazy to use two hands to undock their smartphone?

But did it bring the organization more revenue? In the past I've done some things in PHP that were horrible hacks but did help the whole company forward. Doing them right in the existing code base would mean rewriting a lot. Especially one of those hacks has gotten it's revenge on me when making it more flexible later, but in the meantime it did bring us substantial rewards.

To this day i'm still not sure what would be better: telling my boss "sorry, but if we want feature y, it will take 2 months (but it will we done right)" or "yes we can do that in 2 days but don't expect the code to be pretty"

[dystopia]Imagine a starving person from Ethopia being sold on ebay and then destroyed because the buyer said the bought good actually had the Somalian nationality[/dystopia]

Well, the market successfully lobbied against regulation on CDO and CDS. It was the market that pushed the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. It was the market which gave AAA ratings to junk investments.

I see your point, but I think that if the whole deregulation (and thus free market) hadn't happened, a lot of the damage could have been avoided.

Ah, like what happened in 2008.

The situation for PHP is just as bad, try googling for php mysql tutorial... The first five results are all using oldskool mysql_connect like back in the day. This is deprecated in php 5.4 and much better alternatives exist nowadays. Definitly a bad situation for any language IMHO.

At the end of the day, making stuff work is all that matters. I would never have considered CFML or IIS or Windows as a webserver, but if it makes your stuff work and helps you make stuff work, why would I laugh at it?

The winning one is really impressive from an artistic point of view imho.

Logitech UltraX is still my weapon of choice. IMHO it's a shame Logitecht discontinued it.

I did this all the time when I was 13, 14 years old.

Kudos for spotting, that. I feel stupid now.

No, 11 numbers start with 1 in that range.

These corporations aren't paying for IE either (comes for free with Windows), but IE has some form of support with security patches.

You've got to be kidding. I see the usefulness of XSLT, but still XSLT is a synonym to pain. Definitely one of the most ugly syntaxes I've ever.

It has a place, it can be useful, but I thoroughly detest it.

I'm really not understanding all the hate against HTML email. To me it seems like saying: "Ascii text is enough, who needs nicely designed word documents or websites"

Also, all our communications (website, snail-mail letters) use our corporate branding. So why not use it in our emails?

Interesting article, but I did wonder what he means with this: Duck typing allows to reduce immensely the coupling between your classes

Can anybody explain?

Sometimes you should be skeptical of people who agree with you.

[edit] And your own reasoning ofcourse.

Yeah, but availability zones are not geographical zones. Amazons outages were only in one datacenter.

Didn't know what HIPAA meant, but apparently they are certified for storing medical stuff.

Well, first of all if they had used more geographical regions (I don't know what the official amazon buzzword), they shouldn't have real bad problems. I don't know about you, but I believe mission critical systems should be hosted in at least 2 physically different data centers. When it's life critical, this should be a no brainer.

Second of all, according to Amazon PR speak this failure should not be possible. Every person in IT worth their salt should know PR speak is not to be trusted. Being reliant on AWS for your average business app is completely okay though. However, hosting apps which might endanger peoples lives on black box technology over which you have little influence is moronic imo.

Last but not least I seriously question the privacy implications of this. Hosting parts of your medical app in the cloud is fine and I don't know the details of this app, but I wouldn't be happy to know that my medical history is stored by some third party I don't entirely trust with such sensitive data.

That's not even stupid, that is moronic.

Even though your vision is probably right, I'm not entirely happy with it. I love choice, I love being able to choose a certain processor and GPU and upgrading one of them after a year.

I'm probably the minority though, so business wise it makes sense.

Fact is that the Egyptian regime (and many others in the region) have been supported in many ways by the U.S. government.

Even though I agree with point 1, 2 and 4, I'm not with you on point 3. Why take OO to an extreme when there is no technical nor functional reason to do so? The best example is Math.Sin(x) vs. Sin(x)... There is no valid reason (IMHO) to go for the Math.Sin() approach in PHP. It doesn't add anything, except more keystrokes.

Of course if your language is entirely OO (like C# or Java), you can't avoid constructs like Math.Sin(). Even though I prefer C# and Java above PHP, it has always annoyed me that I needed to prefix those kind of functions with a class name. I understand that it is a trade off in language design and forcing you to think in objects is mostly a good thing (if you leave functional programming out of the equation). However, if your language supports functions outside of objects, why not use them?

[disclaimer]I didn't look at the actual code, so I'm not sure if there are functions that indeed should have been (static) members of a class.[/disclaimer]

I don't want to turn this into a philosophical debate, but if what you are saying is true (I hope not), the community is wrong IMHO.

Human languages defines what concepts we are able to think and reason about. I believe that George Orwell showed this perfectly in 1984. By taking away a lot of vocabulary, you are taking away a lot of ways of to express yourself. I think that the term "expression" in regards to programming languages explains why this is important.

I only know Dutch, English and Latin (plus just enough German and French to get around when I´m buying a bread or asking for directions) so in no way I've experienced how a language like Mandarin changes the way in which your thoughts take shape. However, I did have the experience of playing around with Haskell and Lisp (not saying I'm experienced or whatever, I've just toyed around with them in my free time) and they did change some things of how I percieve and think about code. I can´t write code in these languages where I work, but just learning them (and learning their different, but just as valid, viewpont on programming) has changed the way I think about some problems and how I should solve some problems.

Language (whether it's human or programming) is all about expressing ideas in the broadest sense of the word. Knowing more just let's you express more...

[i]datain->do something->data out[/i]

Isn't that what computing is all about?

It's been a long time since an internet art project has left me speechless. Even ignoring the technical merits of this site, this is beautfull.

Indeed it is fantastic, But I was more surprised about the powers of self-organization than the limits of it!

The answer is already in the linked article IMHO. What if I started a phone directory service named phonebook (which is a perfectly valid english of the dutch "Telefoonboek"). Shouldn't be a problem IMHO.