Magento has some fantastic features, but it has some mind bogglingly bad ideas that it almost becomes unusable.

The worst one I came across is EAV (http://fishpig.co.uk/2010/06/07/magento-database-structure-eav/)

We were having a really strange problem with SagePay our payment gateway. Everything seemed to be working fine, and we launched the site. But then by chance one of us happened to order about 10 individual items and the payment failed, but Magento recorded a successful transaction. This would happen consistently. After a lot of digging around we discovered that SagePay would make a callback to Magento to verify the payment details, but the verification script would take over 30 seconds to complete execution by which point SagePay would give up and cancel the payment, but Magento would continue on and record a successful transaction once execution finished.

Further digging and we realised it was saving the order information and using EAV for every single item and generating about 6000 (not a typo, six thousand) inserts to the database. This cannot be fixed without a major restructure of the whole system. It relies on this far too heavily. I do not have a problem with the concept of EAV, I have used similar techniques myself when requiring something more flexible, but this is just Nieve and makes would could be a great system virtually unusable.

Brought peace!

You seem to be confusing the freedom of speech with "Freedom to do whatever the fuck I like". They aren't the same thing.

What you are telling me is I am free to say "Jesus is a bum pounding mother fucker", but I can't I am free to say "Mohamed if a cock sucking kiddie fiddler". What is the difference? Answer: there isn't one. I have the right to say that; but a muslim is not free to kill me for it.

They are free to take their beliefs as deeply as they like. They are not free to impose that belief on others.

But it does affect you. Their behaviour is telling you how you feel and think, and you are defending that. How can you not see that as infringing on your personal freedoms, and as such "affecting you"?

Your beliefs offend me. The fact that you would allow my right to free speech be stifled offends me. That you would defend a person who threatens to kill over any minor offence offends me.

So what are you going to do now? You can't be tolerant of both views, they are completely incompatible with each other. You are arguing that you don't have a right to offend anyone, but now you have to offend someone.

No matter how you live your life, or what you believe you will offend someone. So the question is are you going to be tolerant of the person who will kill you over such an offence, or the person who will be offended but respect your right to believe what you do?

I once read a comic that was all about raping women and then cooking and eating them. It was offensive, really sick stuff and I was offended by it. But I would never even consider harming the author of it. No one was harmed in the making of it, and I would say that it's existence is also not harmful so I choose to censor myself and not read it.

This has nothing to do with Islam. It has everything to do with protecting a person's right to express themselves, or to criticise without fearing for their life.

What is the difference? If it feels faster then isn't that what matters? You may have the best benchmarks out there, but if your application feels slow and bloated it will lose to the one that really is slower, but feels faster.

They occurred in a different way though. In those cases the government started with a very slim majority, but lost that majority due to losing by-elections and defections.

And then when you go back from Mail to Safari it re-downloads all the pages again.

I used an iPhone for two years and you can't compare this. Android remembers your whole user journey no matter what applications you navigate through, Mail -> Browser -> Maps etc etc, and it stores the app state and memory no matter what you do so the application is restored memory and all when you go back to it. IPhone just doesn't do that, you have to terminate the app and then start the other app. It may remember certain aspects of what you were doing last time you were there, but it still has to restart the whole application and it is slow. If you want an analogy it's like having your browser close down the tab as soon as you leave the site, and if you want to get back to that site you have to open up a new tab and select the previous site from your browser history.

The whole process in Android felt like it was one single application with no lag whatsoever.

I replaced my iPhone with a Desire just a few weeks ago. It has taken me a little while to get used to it. I forgot about the existence of the hardware buttons and would expect all functionality to be available on screen via a touch, like the iPhone. I'm quickly getting past that though, and I don't think either system is better or worse than the other, just different.

First the iPhone does feel more polished than the desire. Part of that may be because of familiarity, but other things, like my gmail account not showing up with the HTC mail widget is just annoying.

Other things though are much much better. Widgets are fantastic. All the information I want if available on the phone's 'desktop'. Multi-tasking! It's great! The best experience I had was something really simple. I recieved an email with a link to google maps. Touching the link opened up the maps application. I was able to navigate around the map and then clicked the back button. Because Android allows multi-tasking clicking back left the map and put me back into my email on the mail app exactly as I left it. That may sound trivial, but I think it's a major improvement over the iPhone. It's the way any device should work.

Apple deliberately leak information all the time. This is a well known "secret". Just do a google search for "How apple leak information".

Android has been getting a lot of press recently with all the new android devices coming out. It's very conceivable this was done deliberately as a "leak" as long as there was a promise to return the device. Do really think that these guys would actually pull this thing apart if they didn't have permission? I'm sure such an act is potentially illegal otherwise.

That is really interesting.

I think it would be a different situation here though. In London the City itself is probably acting as insulation preventing the heat from the tunnels escaping; no one likes being cold, so all the building have heating.

In this situation the mountain would lose heat to the surrounding atmosphere much more readily.

Because everything isn't a web app. Linux is what I require to do my job as a back-end web developer. Windows is what my project managers require, and OS X is what my graphic designers require. Now you could argue that all of the things that I want to do with Linux is possible with Windows, or all the things that my designers require can be done with windows and you would probably be right; but you would then contradict your own "familiar environment = more productive" argument.

It really has nothing to do with whether it is possible to achieve the same thing using VMWare/VirtualBox I know you can, but why should I have to? It's extra administration and extra hassle; and with that extra cost. It's calls at 3am telling the sys-admin the VPN is down again. It's calls to the help desk asking why their VMWare copy of Windows is asking for activation again. It's training and confusion that isn't necessary when everyone knows what a web browser is.

The best tools for the best job. Google Apps gives me what I need. Office 2007 does not. It's really that simple.

The fact is web-apps are changing rapidly. 5 years ago almost no one had heard of AJAX. Then Google Maps showed us what it was capable of and it has exploded into an integral part of the Web. 5 years from now things are going to be very different again and I will bet you anything that in the very near future you will be using web-apps like Google docs on almost a daily basis.

Really? Thank God you are here to tell me what is simple and what isn't. All this time I thought I had to fuck about with Wine on my work Linux station, VMWare on my Mac home computer and USB thumbdrives/VPN work servers in order to take my basic System documentation home with me to work on with Office 2007.

I'm really glad someone as smart as you can tell me that a Web driven application that is able to run on any Operating System that can run a modern web browser is wrong for my needs. No wait! I just realised I'm being sarcastic.

Let me tell you what I need in basic terms in order to do my job efficiently. I need basic document editing and collaboration. I have to write technical documentation for the systems I develop and Google Docs is perfect for my needs. I write all of my documentation at work, I can then fuck off to the pub, go home an hour later and do a couple more hours work. When it's ready I am able to share the document with my coworkers allowing them to make changes then come back into the office and make more amends. To put it simply, it all just works FAR better than if I had to use Office. I don't have to worry about copying the file to a portable device, I don't have to worry about the coworkers that use Windows, or OS X, or Linux. Everyone can read it, everyone can edit it, and best of all there is a single master copy that everyone is changing.

So don't come in here with your high and mighty Office is good enough and has better availability bullshit, because that is true for you. It's not true for everyone. Put simply, if what you were saying was true, and these are features no one needs MS would not be bothering trying to do the same thing with Office Web Apps.

This is what is so annoying about all these new frameworks.

From a business point of view I will not develop with anything other than the most popular frameworks because if I need to hire a contractor, or even a new employee, it is more cost effective to use a popular framework that I don't have to train them in.

This isn't a phone! This is a large screen computing device with a much more powerful CPU and lots more memory. In fact, even the phone is an order of magnitude more powerful than my old 286 and it could multitask just fine! A large screen gives you room to implement the necessary UI changes; a dock ala Windows 7; a quit button; whatever else you need to add.

But you are right, multitasking is far too complicated and confusing to do. Oh wait! They ALREADY DID IT! What do you think Safari does? Do you consider the ability to have multiple web pages open to be too confusing? Oh my god! How do you close the open web pages? How do I switch?!

The Safari interface is the perfect UI demonstration of how to implement multitasking on a touch device. Touch the "Application" icon that is in the corner of the screen and get a view of all the running application thumbnails. Touch the thumbnail to switch, touch the X to quit. With that sort of interface you could get rid the last physical button on the device; this should be Steve Job's wet dream. Or if you like having the physical button make that activate the task manager.

You are right about one thing though, multitasking would not be the greatest thing since sliced bread; it would BE sliced bread. Just like how the ability to cut and paste was not a reason to celebrate but a reason to cry out "About fucking time!" multitasking would also be a reason to welcome Apple to the 1970s.

You really believe that having a row of icons along the bottom of the screen to indicate the running apps to be confusing?

Do you want to know what really is confusing to a non-computing person? Push notification. Another friend got themselves a new iPhone. They love it, and installed an IM client. But then they couldn't understand why they never went offline and kept getting notifications. "But I quit the app. Why won't it shut the fuck up?"

Do you really want to tell me that is less confusing?

I have a final question for you, when Apple finally do release multitasking for the iPad (and they will have to) are you going to be telling everyone how brilliant it is?