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Wikipedia is written and maintained by tens of thousands of volunteers across the world. Those, in turn, are assisted by hundreds of "bots" - autonomous computer programmes that keep the encyclopaedia running.
ClueBOT seems to have a clue.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ClueBot_NG/FAQ#Origins[^]
The "Cobi" that is spoken of in the origin section was a classmate of mine in college. He wrote ClueBot while he was still in high school.
The United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative. -Winston Churchill
America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between. -Oscar Wilde
Wow, even the French showed a little more spine than that before they got their sh*t pushed in.[^] -Colin Mullikin
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Life as a web developer can be hard when things start going wrong. The problem could be in any number of places. Is there a problem with the request your sending, is the problem with the response, is there a problem with a request in a third party library you're using, is an external API failing? There are lots of different tools that can make our life a little bit easier. Here are some command line tools that I've found to be invaluable. Curl up and grep a little.
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No one person is really responsible for the internet/organization. The were many things that were required to make it successful: the basic networking technology, HTML, Netscape, going to active content, etc. As Issac Newton if famous for saying "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Anybody who claims responsibility for the internet is arrogant. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants[^]
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Sometimes you have to take a step back from discussions on coupling, cohesion, patterns and katas to give some training to the ones of us that have a procedural mindset. With this article I hope to provide some initial tips for the members of the PHP community that are ready to abandon the concept of the OneSingleProcedure(TM) to embrace the object world. Spaghetti would be fine; my PHP looks more like alphabet soup.
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Step 1: Convert project into something that isn't PHP 
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lewax00 wrote: Step 1: Convert project into something that isn't PHP
voilà! spaghetti Ruby on Rails 
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It's still an improvement 
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Whenever I'm required to use PHP, I try to embrace my C# coding standards in the PHP code to the best of my ability. Most of the time, I do end up with elegant code that does well 
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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While I'm certainly not a fan of PHP, I do admit you can write elegant, readable code with it. You've hit the nail on the head: to produce quality code with PHP, don't code like a PHP programmer.
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I personally try to stay out of programming language flame wars with people because for the most part it is not the language being at fault but more the person using the language.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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Then you're a better man than me.
I can't help noticing the quality of the publicly available code, especially documentation and examples is really poor in PHP which naturally leads to equally poor code when someone who only knows PHP uses said documentation and examples as their starting point.
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jim lahey wrote: documentation and examples is really poor in PHP which naturally leads to equally poor code when someone who only knows PHP uses said documentation and examples as their starting point
I know what you mean. That is how I felt when I was looking around at example code for Lua.
"The clue train passed his station without stopping." - John Simmons / outlaw programmer
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I do the same, but from the Java point of view. I'm working with a colleague on a small project that will be integrated as a module in a larger system (even though it won't actually talk to the system it's part of) and as a funny experiment, we're using folders structured as Java packages .
It does actually work quite well, and it helps enforce some MVC structure
Full-fledged Java/.NET lover, full-fledged PHP hater.
Full-fledged Google/Microsoft lover, full-fledged Apple hater.
Full-fledged Skype lover, full-fledged YM hater.
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Andrei Straut wrote: folders structured as Java packages
That is the one thing I like about Java, and I do my best to incorporate such a train of thought when developing in other languages like PHP or C# as well. Like my comment back to Jim in the above post, I try to avoid language flame wars because they are silly and it is more about the programmer using the language and not always the language itself. Unless the language has some feature to it that really doesn't make any sense why it is implemented.
"Real programmers just throw a bunch of 1s and 0s at the computer to see what sticks" - Pete O'Hanlon
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We are now quite a bit further along the development of ECMAScript 6 so it’s a good time to stop and take a look at what’s been happening. Obviously, the evolution of any language focuses around adding new capabilities. New capabilities are added in ECMAScript 5 and I fully expected that to continue in ECMAScript 6. What I didn’t expect was how new capabilities would end up tied to new syntax. JavaScript: the good, the bad and the ugly parts.
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Engineers have long known that the best way to build stuff is in modules. If one module goes wrong, it's then straightforward to replace it. For example, the graphics card on a computer, the alternator in a car or a camera in the Hubble Space Telescope. By contrast, when a single complex system goes wrong, it's hard to fix, since all the parts are interdependent. Think of the economy or financial markets. It might come as no surprise to discover that nature has also learnt this trick. Evolutionary computing exactly reproduces the process of evolution.
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The more OAuth providers there are, the more inconsistency there is. Not following the specification puts an increased and unnecessary burden on the developer. This article is meant to let the OAuth providers know some of the pain points of dealing with them as providers and steps they could take to make interacting with their API a joy. Follow the specification and be consistent.
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Demand continues to push the infrastructure to its limits. This is mostly driven by video usage: last year Netflix accounted for an astonishing one-third of all downstream internet traffic in the US, with YouTube videos taking another 10 per cent. And online gaming can run to 10 gigabytes a month per person. Killing the interwebs, bite by byte.
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Truly an outdated model - all you can eat internet.
How about all-you-can use electricity? The dope-growers sure would like that!
Why not all-you-can-use gasoline too?
Simple, because the people that use the least subsidise the people that use the most.
I pay $20 a month for combined mobile phone / internet. Fixed-line rental is $29 a month - before you've even made a call.. Sure, I could use and pay more than I do, but anything more that my current usage would be an extravagance.
My usage wouldn't naturally be 2.5 times what it is now if I was to be charged $50/month. But I would make damned sure I used it if I had to pay for it.
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enhzflep wrote: Truly an outdated model - all you can eat internet.
How about all-you-can use electricity? The dope-growers sure would like that!
The comparison is not the same and your example is an excellent example of why.
Although pot growers can use a lot of electricity a hobby botanist might use the the same amount. The electric company has no way of knowing.
On the the other hand internet providers are pushing to be allowed to meter by type. And the result of that, just as with cable, is that business "deals" will be struck that limit choices. Such as assuring that you get charged more if you use google versus bing.
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I think perhaps you've missed my intended point with regards to indoor gardening.
Of course hobby botanists will use a comparable or even greater quantity of electricity. From the perspective of the intended point, they are identical.
Consider the two contrived example households:
- Has CFLs installed throughout the house, has a 24" LED LCD TV, sleeps during the night and has gas cooking and heating
- Has incandescent/halogen lighting, has a 50" Plasma TV, sleeps for 8 hours during the day, has lights on the remainder of the time, has electric heating/cooking
Clearly their electrical energy consumptions will be very different.
If you were the sole resident of household 1, would you think it fair that you pay the same as the total that the 5 people in household 2 pay?
What if you both had power meters and you could irrefutably demonstrate the fact that your power use was 1/8 th of your neighbours.
Consider this more thoroughly worked example:
You are the sole resident of household 1 and are on a disabled pension.
Your usage has been measured and shown to be 25 kWh per week.
You then have neighbours that move in and proceed to use 3 of 5 rooms in the house for growing tomatoes. ('tomatoes' or tomatoes - doesn't matter) They use 1000w metal halide lights in each of their gardening rooms for (say) 16 hours per day.
The consumption of just the gardening lights next door is some 336 kWh per week.
Would you want to pay the same as them, considering their usage was at least 13 times yours?
Being allowed to charge different rates based on the purpose of the consumption is a separate and distinct matter. In my opinion, it's unfortunate &/or disingenuous to equate the two as being directly linked.
We have both metered internet here in Aus, and where I live, we also have smart electricity meters - meters that are able to take into account the time of day to alternate the rate between peak and off-peak. My usage is ~25kWh per week, for which I pay the 'princely' sum of about $13 a week ($7.77 supply + $5.33 for usage). Elephant that for a joke if I was then told to subsidise every other house in the neighbourhood.
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enhzflep wrote: I think perhaps you've missed my intended point with regards to indoor gardening.
I understood it and then qualified it by specifically mentioning metering by "type".
enhzflep wrote: Being allowed to charge different rates based on the purpose of the consumption is a separate and distinct matter.
Not for ISPs. Far as I know there has been no plan proposed anywhere that did not allow them to charge by type. Which was my point.
Matter of fact far as I know all ISPs, or certainly most, already have the capability and willingness to disconnect when a user 'exceeds' some usage threshold (often an undisclosed threshold) in terms of volume.
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enhzflep wrote: Being allowed to charge different rates based on the purpose of the consumption is a separate and distinct matter. In my opinion, it's unfortunate &/or disingenuous to equate the two as being directly linked.
Clearly, it is not possible if there is no metering, but metering != differentiation of usage type. It's greedy businesspeople and laws without teeth that allow that kind of behaviour.
You gasoline is metered at the pump. Oh noes! Those elephanters are gonna charge me more for gas if I'm taking my wife out for the evening than if I was taking the kids to school. Yes, your argument appears that foolish to me.
As for cutting you off for the remainder of the month if you exceed some limit, what exactly is your point? Of course they know how much you're all using - they add em all together, divide by the number of subscribers to get the avg cost/subsciber. Add x% for profit and there's the monthly bill. At some point, for some users the ISP would be left out of pocket. Of course they should be cut off. If not, and everybody consumed this much then how long is the ISP going to last?
Hence my point before about the smallest users subsidising the largest users. I understand that this is how it works in apartment blocks that only have 1 meter, but the same is not true of ISPs, for whom metering each subscriber is an entirely trivial exercise. More meters could be installed but the utility co don't want the expense. We had to pay for the smart-meters that were installed, then (i think) the government 100% subsidised it. It ends up being more fair all-round.
Should the light users subsidise the heavy users, because the heavy users are paranoid that their usage patterns will cost them more in the future?
In the example in my last post, where 1 neighbour's consumption was 13 times that of the other - if their bills were combined then split, the light user will be paying 7 times the rate as the heavy user. Elephant that if individual usage is able to be measured!
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enhzflep wrote: You gasoline is metered at the pump. Oh noes! Those elephanters are gonna charge me more for gas if I'm taking my wife out for the evening than if I was taking the kids to school. Yes, your argument appears that foolish to me.
That analogy is no more apt than the other.
In both cases it is is not economically feasible or actually impossible to determine the actual usage.
On the other hands ISPs are more than capable of metering by type. Certain ISPs have made various restrictions related to this for years. And there are recent cases where users have been disconnected for their type of usage.
enhzflep wrote: As for cutting you off for the remainder of the month if you exceed some limit, what exactly is your point?
The point is that ISPs, at least some of them, ALREADY limit volume. So they certainly don't need a legal mandate to protect themselves from that.
enhzflep wrote: Should the light users subsidise the heavy users, because the heavy users are paranoid that their usage patterns will cost them more in the future?
Again, ALL of the proposals that I have seen that allowed for metering ALSO allowed for limitations based on the type (not volume) of usage. And that specifically allows a ISP to set up deals that either requires a customer to pay more for using a specific service (from someone other than the ISP) or to completely preclude access at all.
An analogy for that last case is the most recent dispute between DirectTV (cable) and Viacom dispute. Also note that this sort of dispute comes up every couple of years in the cable industry.
But I would support such agreements if ISPs allowed themselves to be regulated as a monopoly and as such rates, including increases, and any such limitations by type would need to be justified and approved by an outside committee. At least where I am that is how the electric company works.
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