From yesterdays post:

Michael Geist reports that Netflix and Google are ready to challenge it in a case that could head to the Supreme Court of Canada.

There is a tiny bit of new news here. It's gone from speculation to being confirmed, but really, this is just a repost of the same thing.

If ever a language needed some help getting people to write *good* code instead of just being able to write code, PHP is it..

I've always wanted to have a fairly minimal setup.. We don't have a lot of space, and I don't want to waste a lot of energy, so I've always tried to have 1 always on server as my target. I've had two and three at times, but mostly just during upgrades, or while I was waiting to find the time to upgrade..
I have 1 quad core i7 with 32 gigs of ram, and 8 1.5 terrabyte hard drives running in RAID 6. The hardware has two network cards, which allows me to do just about everything I want with virtual machines running under KVM. Things are getting a little tight these days, so I'm looking to upgrade to 3 terrabyte drives for 18 terrabytes usable space, and I'd also like to move up to 64 gigs of ram, but I'm going to wait as long as I can so maybe the prices will come down a bit.
The server runs cool and is pretty quiet as I've chosen to go with a 4U case with the largest fans I could find. I've got a 24 port gigabit switch and an access point to round out my hardware.. Everything else is virtualized.

Hardware Summary:
4U server - 32 gigs ram, i7 9 terabytes usable RAID 6, and dual nics
1U 24port gigabit smart switch
2U rack mount UPS
generic 802.11 b/g/n access point

Virtualized:
Firewall/vpn server
File server
Plex server
4x part time windows XP for experiments and various utilities
3x part time windows 7
Vuze server

Benefits:
quiet
reliable
small footprint
relatively low power (about 150-175 watts most of the time, and during the winter it just reduces the amount the electric furnace runs)
low maintenance

Downside:
All your eggs in one basket - I have backups, but I'll be down in the event of hardware failure.
VM host is a little weaker than is optimal when I'm running a lot of guests

I don't think that bash really has it.. It seems like it does, but at least on most systems I've used, that's part of the program "test".

"Test" usually has a symlink to it under the name "[" which is actually what you're running when you type something like "if [ 5 -eq 7 ]"... Note.. the program "test" ignores any parameter of "]" making them completely optional most of the time..

It sure looks like syntax, but I think that "[" is just like any other character in bash.. "if" is just testing the return value from the program "["..

Doh.. and Halo should probably have been on the list..

Per someone else's comment.. I meant Mechwarrior 2.. They're right..

We do need this on Slashdot. I don't want the list that people from a gamer site would come up with. I'm sure it would be very different.

It is not news.

It *IS* stuff that matters.

That's s good list.. I'd like to add to it, and make it a little more eclectic..

Descent
Mechwarior
Portal / Portal 2
DIablo
Wizball (c64)
Impossible MIssion 2 (c64)
Raid over Moscow (c64)
The old Ultima series (like Ultima IV)
Quake
Quake 3 arena
Doom (it's classic, but it is hard to play these days after having gotten used to being able to look and move up and down)
Empire (c64 BBS - You probably can't just keep this one around to play, but it was fun when it was out there)
Legend of Zelda

Arcade:
Hard Drivin (I think that was it.. early car simulator with impossible tracks.. loops etc)
Tempest
Missile command
The original Tron game
Super Mario Bros
Donkey Kong

Board/card:
Cribbage is good
Uno is nice if you don't want to have to use your brain, or you need something very inclusive
Monopoly is a good staple to have around

Well, that's what comes to mind quickly.. I'm sure I've still missed quite a few classics..

I wonder how feasible it would be to modify tor, or maybe make a tor version 2 protocol so that the onion layers are determined packet by packet, instead of by the stream.

I'm not all that knowledgeable when it comes to the tor protocol, but it sounds like each stream is bounced off a series of relays.. If you could change that to each packet, or split the stream into a few other streams that took different routes (and let the stream get reassembled from packets from multiple streams at the destination), then it seems like you could make this sort of attack a lot harder..

I'm not sure about people trying to discover the location of the tor hidden service, but it seems like it would help protect the client -> server integrity quite a bit..

I haven't had a credit card in over 10 years, and my credit is fantastic. Of course, I've had a couple of car loans, and a home loan... all in good standing and/or paid off, but I never had a credit card when I got any of those loans either, so it certainly wasn't required for good credit.

The only thing I even ponder having a credit card for is for emergency purposes only. I'd consider something with no fees (unless used) for a rainy day backup, but instead of doing that, we've chosen to just have our own rainy day fund.

I am very thankful for the credit card companies though. I don't think that I could heat our home for free without their contribution to our junk mail pile. The rest of the junk mail on it's own just wouldn't be enough..

One reason that I'm sure is a factor in the difference, is that companies are less inclined to bother reporting the "past due" status. It's overhead for them to do it, and there's not really any benefit, but when someone hits the collections threshold, they'll go ahead and take the time to report it.

He was asking about languages and frameworks and developing their web application for the future.

If they're redeveloping from scratch in order to future proof things, it's unlikely that they're going to be wanting to produce the exact same HTML that they always have. A framework to help you develop better HTML easier is something they should be considering at the same time.

It would really suck to rebuild your application, get to the end, and then decide it's time to make it more mobile friendly, at which point they realize they have to do another redesign because they didn't think about how their user interfaces were going to break down.

If they need to ask which server side language they should use, then they almost certainly need to have these things pointed out to them as well. If it turns out that they didn't need any of that pointed out to them, then they can easily disregard the extra information.

Globals have been disabled by default in PHP for a very long time.

"register globals" which allowed post and get parameters to be automatically registered in the global scope was defaulted off a long time ago, and in newer versions of php (5.4+) is not even an option any more. This is historically the feature that got a lot of bad programmers in trouble.

Almost every language has a way for functions to access global scope variables, and PHP is not exception, but to do so now, you have to specify exactly what you're going to access by doing it through _GLOBALS or by calling "global " inside your function.

The default scope for variables is to have no globals, and to direct you toward a more OO programming style. You can still shoot yourself in the foot, just like every other programming language, but you have to at least try a little to do it.

PHP of old used to make it very easy to write applications with large security holes, but newer versions do a much better job of preventing developer's tendancies to shoot themselves in the foot.

I think it will be a very viable choice for web applications for the next 10 years or more.

There are a number of frameworks written in PHP that are pretty good as well. For my current project though, I've chosen to write a framework that is geared toward exactly what that project needed. I did choose to use an HTML framework to aid in the UI creation and standardization. For my project I chose "Foundation", but there are a lot of other good ones as well.. If your application has a requirement of being mobile device friendly (is there anything that doesn't?) then I would highly recommend a 12 column HTML framework.. If you don't know why a 12 column framework is the way to go, Google it, there are plenty of write ups.