Why canât Johnny compute?
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When I suggested in a recent column that a problematic 5 percent of employees account for 75 percent of the IT support burden, I expected a wave of âright on!â letters from IT support staffers. After the column was published, the letters did come â most of them disagreeing with my premise, with one reader suggesting that the real whiner was yours truly. I still think itâs outside the realm of overextended IT departments to provide training on basic computing skills (which I defined as âmanaging and finding files, and basic working knowledge of suites such as MS Officeâ). But my thinking was adjusted a bit by the thoughtful feedback.
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Brian Moon has posted some thoughts about "the post" that Terry Chay recently wrote including comments on smart versus intelligent, object nonense, and funky function names.    So, if you are not smart, then stop coding PHP.  Its a good thing that C developers are smart.  They have to remember all those functions.  Assembly language developers donât have to remember functions.  I guess they are not smart?   Ok, that last paragraph was tongue in cheek.  Knowing 3000+ functions does not make you smart.  It means you have a good memory.  I will take intelligence over smart or a good memory any day.     His comments on the "object nonsense" makes note of the difference between functions and methods and the function naming issue - well, he has "no solid defense" as they do make it difficult to learn the language and send some developers running back to the manual to make sure the parameter order is right each time.
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Lukas Smith is sending a wakeup call to the internet providers and web hosters out there - get involved in the PHP community!   We do not seem to have any ISP's active inside the PHP community. This is kind of odd, considering that PHP seems to be driving the business of hosters quite a bit. Why have none of them decided that PHP is important enough for their business that its worthwhile to ensure that their interests are taken into account?   He makes the suggestion of passing along the suggestion to bosses/co-workers/anyone who'll listen about getting involved. Suggested places to start would be as a part of the testers group or even contributing to the migration guide.
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Tycho:  I uploaded the comic early, as many of you noticed.  I entered the wrong number in the update field.  You may also have noticed that the spelling in these posts has really gone to hell.  So, that's numbers and letters.  I hope to one day discover a set of pictograms with which I can manage some baseline fucking proficiency.
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By Bill Husted, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution  Feb. 18--NEW OPERATING SYSTEMS NEED MORE HORSEPOWER: There may be few  certainties in life, but there's at least one in the computer world.
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By Joe Bauman Deseret Morning News  A University of Utah physicist and his team have made a breakthrough that could pave the way to quantum computing, in which computers can calculate many billions of times faster than they do now.
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Thinks PCs are a fatty, fatty 2x4 When is a thin client computer too thin?â¦
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The fundamental memory component of a quantum computer has been built for the first time using a string of atoms. This could offer a more reliable way to build a working quantum computer than other techniques, suggest researchers.
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And to help sick kids Cisco Systems has done the near impossible and put Santa on its payroll.â¦
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The computing technologies to go beyond Moore's Law
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In recent work, Ian Selby came across something odd - a setup where PHP was segfaulting without any real indication of where the error might be:   Starting to get a little frustrated, I took a peek at my error logs (/var/log/httpd/error_log for the unitiated), and discovered a wonderful message [about the segfault]. As any person scratching their head would do, I hit up google.. to no real avail. Just a bunch of php bug reports. So, what happened, and how did I fix it?   After searching through the code and narrowing down where it could be, the culprit looked like a custom session handler he was using. It uses MySQL to store the sesion information and, unfortunately, when Ian had compiled the server he didn't let PHP know about his unique setup.   His default installation was trying to use the default MySQL information (including the socket) to reach the database. Obviously failing, the server simply gave up and segfaulted. Thankfully, all it takes it a recompile with a few extra parameters and you're back in business.
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Simple to code does not always mean simple for the user. And simple for the user is often not easy to code.
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Can computers get along fine without writers? Word is they just might. In an essay in the New York Times...
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PC Magazine - Opinion: CPUs, like software, have always had bugs. The security implications of this are a relatively new problem, and open-source users may be at a disadvantage.
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In an effort to have a definitive resource to point to when people ask about PHP scaling, Sebastian Bergmann is asking for suggestions and information on the topic in his latest blog entry.    In "The J2EE guy still doesn't get PHP", Harry Fuecks suggests that PHP really needs [someone] to get together and write a detailed paper on how it works and why PHP scales so we can all live happily ever after.   I could not agree more.    Sebastian even notes that just recently, such a document would have come in very handy in a discussion. Unfortunately, he hasn't had the experience needed to make such a paper himself, so he's asking the community to help on the project and give suggestions/comments/offers of help in the comments of this blog posting.
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Jon Udell tries the Elastic Compute Cloud -- a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity.
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This is a math problem that voters or hard drives can&#39;t solve. It sounds so simple, but in the 2004 college football season, three into two won&#39;t go.