Pointing out alternatives
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It sounds as if Celtics director of basketball operations Danny Ainge has been listening to one of those self-improvement tapes that repeat positive mantras. The message? &quot;I am happy with my roster. I am happy with my roster.&quot; It's clear he will go to great lengths (or is that great pains?) to convince fans and reporters that he is comfortable ...
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By Kevin Saylor  Site might help break o
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This is the question posed by Will Hurley of BMC.  After chatting with him today about life, the upcoming elections, and the open source community in general, I decided that I am pretty curious about how to answer that question myself. read more
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Given at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12, 2006
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Tycho:  Our newest comic is available here, regarding the blogger that Nintendo fired recently.  As usual, Gabriel and I disagree absolutely on virtually every point of this discussion, my own perspective favoring greater liberty while he presents a naked defense of fascism.  The two universal axioms we were both able to agree upon were that:
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But it's not as simple as point-and-click.
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By Tom Angleberger   tomangleberger@yahoo.com
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Do we really have any alternative to biofuels?
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In an effort to somewhat unify the authors of the wide range of PHP database abstraction layers out there in the community, Lukas Smith has proposed a "doctrine miling list" for the discussion of things "like best practices, new discoveries, challenges, etc".    Now I am hoping that all of you are reading this. I know quite a few of you pretty well already (John, Hans, Manuel etc.). [...] So please everybody come out of the woodwork, send me a mail or post a comment.   While I think its fine for end users to also join the list, the goal is not to create a list for end users to ask questions, but more for people who actively develop database abstraction layers. End users should better go to the respective mailing lists.    Ian P. Christian has already stepped up to the plate and is offering a mailing list that you, the database abstraction developer can subscribe to - mailto:phpdbabstraction+subscribe@lists.pengus.net. Be sure to check out the comments for more great discussion.
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Alternative remedies abound, but which actually work?.
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Printing with Lightroom on Leopard...getting Photoshopped for Christmas...cell phones with 5x optical zoom...the optical triangle illusion
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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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Here's a few solid but small hidden opportunities to evaluate.
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By Paixao, S M Saagua, M C; Tenreiro, R; Anselmo, A M  ABSTRACT: To search for reliable testing inocula alternatives to activated sludge cultures, several model microbial consortia were compared with activated sludge populations for their functional diversity.
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In response to his introduction of the non-well-formed XML patch the other day, Christian Stocker has a new posting with a bit of a rebuttal on the subject.
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Pierre-Alain Joye has a little reminder posted to his blog today about two posts from planet-debian and Apache that refer to clones/references in PHP4 and PHP5 and some of the misconceptions presented there.   Reading planet-debian and Apache (from Sven and David), I catched two posts about clones and references in php4 and php5. I do not think it is worth to explain again everything here as Sara wrote a very good post already, check it out here.   He mentions his annoyance with articles/posts like these and the impact that it has on PHP as well as the person posting.   I wonder when the OS community in general will be mature enough to stop bitching at each other. And that's valid for PHP developers, gnome-kde and other well established wars.
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Agilists can miss the point Column â¦