Wright-Phillips unfazed
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England midfielder Sean Wright-Phillips has no idea whether he will replace the suspended and injured David Beckham against Azerbaijan on Wednesday.
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A new comparison of four dietsâincluding mineâis misleading and riddled with problems.
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The simple answer is that there's no simple answer.
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I'm back, with a very interesting topic too!  Joel Spolsky, ex-Microsoft Manager and software engineering guru has a new essay, How Microsoft Lost the API War that is creating quite a big storm in the blogging communitiy.  Joel posits that the priests in the holy Temple of Microsoft have lost their way, because it has split into two factions, and the wrong faction is winning. One faction worships on the alter of backward compatibility, while the other is led by fervent priests who are proselytizing to raise up the new gods of .NET and Longhorn. Joel suggests that the new gods will cause the destruction of the holy Temple because Microsoft's great victories were built on the altar of keeping customers happy with backward compatibility. Furthermore the old gods of the Windows API continue to grow more grotesque and cruel with the passing of time, driving former worshipers into the arms of the friendlier gods of World Wide Web.  This story sounds extremely plausible. I must admit that i fit the profile of the developer who used to develop on the Window's API, is familiar with COM and Win32 who now develops mostly using PHP and Python. However I continue to develop and maintain Windows apps that keep our customers happy, and we still plan to develop new Windows apps. Some points:  Temple of the Blind? Firstly, Microsoft is still a compelling place to work for to people who feel that they can make a difference. The Temple continues to attract talented people with a Unix background. For example we have the recent hiring of Ward Cunningham, author of the Wiki.  Microsoft is still able to keep talented people like Raymond Chen, and others like him who continue to look after the Windows API, and Longhorn apparently will still give high priority to backward compatibility. Open sourcerers like Miguel Icaza are sufficiently attracted to the .NET vision to stake their careers on Mono. Longhorn and .NET are compelling technologies, so even if Win32 is not so cute anymore, M'soft is providing something that remains very attractive.  What i do see M'soft doing wrong is that they aren't disseminating the .NET runtime fast enough. It remains an optional install in XP Service Pack 2 for example. Also their IE dev team appears to be hog-tied due to political reasons; nevertheless IE remains good enough, particularly when I can embed IE as an activeX control, something I cannot do with Mozilla (AFAIK) - Update: I'm wrong.  Temple of the Spider?  Secondly, people don't merely use a web browser. They run the web browser in the OS.  So let me ask you, if you are using DreamWeaver or HomeSite or Photoshop or vi or emacs or Gimp, how many of you are willing to give it up for a java applet (or whatever your favorite technology is) running in your web-browser? Precisely.  Temple of the Abandoned?  Third, Joel makes the claim that developers are not developing to the Windows API. Well he could be right. But I bet a lot of them are still calling Win32.  If you are using a framework or IDE like Delphi or wxWindows (or .NET or VB) then you certainly are insulated from the Windows API, but that doesn't mean that you're not calling the Windows API all the time. I don't see Borland dropping their Windows version of Delphi at any point in time.   In fact, the fact that many developers are using some form of framework is a compelling argument for Microsoft to enhance the .NET framework to attract developers who are using other frameworks.  Today, not that many students learn x86 assembler, but that doesn't mean that Intel lost the CPU wars. Just because fewer people are learning Win32 doesn't mean Microsoft has lost the API wars, if the frameworks run predominantly on Win32.  Temple of the Lost  Joel even warns you in the beginning that "because I'm talking about big trends, I need to exaggerate and generalize". But you still get sucked in because Joel Spolsky is a first-class writer, in the same order as Philip Greenspun or Eric Raymond. That makes him so persuasive and plausible. But this is not Indiana Jones and doomed temples, but Steve Jobs and reality distortion fields.  Other opinions:  Harry Fuecks (PHP is ASP's upgrade path),  Dennis Hamilton (M'soft is just covering all bases), Robert McLaws (Joel is wrong in 7 points), Oliver Travers (the web is not good enough), One Run-time to Rule them all....
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That&#39;s what Jaret Wright, the Braves&#39; starting pitcher today, wanted to know about Roger Clemens in his improbable career extension with the Astros.
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By Newsday, Melville, N.Y.  Dec. 11--Gone are the days of the Master Builder, or even the Master Planner. For better or worse, Long Island will never again see the likes of Robert Moses or Lee Koppelman, who, in their separate ways, left indelible marks.
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Northern Ireland must win in Wales to revive their World Cup hopes according to former goalkeeper Tommy Wright. Saturday&#39;s 3-0 defeat at home to Poland was a disastrous start for Lawrie Sanchez&#39;s side and
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No tradition this time. No storied rival that dates to the beginning of the 20th century. No ghosts of Christy Mathewson, Rube Marquard, or Enos Slaughter. Not even a Ray Knight in sight.
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Jaret Wright's bid to become the Braves' ace in the postseason was a bust.
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Analysis Fragmentation and US indifference
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The Braves gasped when Jaret Wright was forced to leave in the third inning of Tuesday night&#39;s game against the Mets after being struck just above his right foot with line drive.
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Although frankly I really didn't feel the need to read the entire thread, I can tell you that the posting to the PHP 3 mailing list is related to the Smarty Templating Engine back in the day. In fact, I believe this was the original spec Andrei proposed before Smarty even existed. Although I don't remember the exact e-mail, this posting reminded me that there was a point in time I thought exactly this way... quoting myself:
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Ignore the rankings. Ignore recent form. Remember this: You never can count a Williams out.
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There's a hidden promise in these results.
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In his latest post, Padraic Brady takes a look at PEAR in a verb form - both in how you can use it and what sorts of things it has in store.   over the last few months after finally getting over my ignorance of PEAR beyond it being a hodge podge of packages of dubious quality I've been questioning whether pearifying my future and past code is worthwhile. The answer is a resounding YES.   Unfortunately, there are some barriers for most people to get into the PEAR world (including the lack of the "coolest packages") with some of the perceived barriers including:   PEAR will require large scale changes to my shiny new cool code PEAR only allows proposals for complete functional code PEAR is elitist PEAR is fossilised   He also talks about PEAR packages and dispels one of the most popular myths about the package repository - "you can't use PEAR on a shared host".
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In response to this recent article from the Hiveminds website, Marco Tabini has a few choice words about some of the topics they cover in the article, and cover incorrectly.   Over the last few years, I've made it a point of trying to respond to at least some of the "PHP is dead"-type articles that crop up on the Net from time to time. The latest one comes from Hiveminds and reveals a complete misunderstanding of almost every point it covers.   He notes that though the article seems to be a coherent whole for why PHP is dwindling, it's "based on nothing more than a string of misinformed concepts cobbled together to give the appearance that the author knows what he or she is talking about". Marco comes back against each of the points made in the article, setting things right and eliminating some of the FUD (fear, uncertainly, and doubt) that the Hiveminds article spreads.
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Tycho:   It has become the Saturday tradition to do the next strip upon the expo's stark and terrifying stage, but since Armadeaddon needed its proper epilogue it got moved out to Wednesday.  Gabe was highly indulgent of audience suggestions in the final version, far more than he is to me, adding many, many things based on them being called out from the microphone - he has a version with more additions still that he'll be putting up later today.  But there are things in there like the blue ball in the last panel - to say nothing of the official "Hot-Dog Fairy" merchandise! - that began as anecdotes and have now graduated to true PAX lore.