"HHVM just closes that gap entirely"

This is wholly false, HHVM is still a long way behind the level of JIT optimisation that both the JVM and the CLR perform, in part because PHP was never designed with the intention of being JIT'd from the outset making it much harder to JIT well in the first place. The amount of language inconsistency, edge cases where it contradicts itself and general design whereby things have been bolted on unplanned and ad-hoc all but guarantees you'll never write a JIT compiler for PHP that can be as effective as the CLR and JVM. The only way you'll get PHP to the point it's a serious competitor for .NET, Java, and C++ is if you create a version of the language that completely breaks free from it's past, tightens up the rules and changes the way things work- it can't even be backwards compatible, put simply, it wont even really be PHP anymore. IIRC someone started a project to do exactly this, maybe it'll bear fruit, though I'd question if it's even necessary when the JVM and now CLR are open source.

"These are web apps not 3d games, io is your limiting factor in almost all instances, even if you're cracking md5 passwords in php you're still going to be using a rainbow table and hence io bound."

Even if you are IO bound this still highlights the problem with PHP thinking- the idea that you can only do one thing at a time, it's nonsense. In .NET, in Java, even in node.js and of course in C++ with IOCP (which node uses on Windows anyway) you don't just sit and wait for IO completion, you process other things. If you're genuinely working in a high end environment the CPU will be kept busy regardless of what IO waits are occuring. The fact that these technologies can get much more done whilst waiting is still wholly relevant. If you think all processing should be done in serial then you really don't understand the way high end server processing is done. If you're only using the CPU 10% of the time and waiting for IO the other 90% of the time you're doing it very wrong.

"The language itself being poorly designed generally boils down to preference, that php is a fractal of bad design site whines about the syntax of the array push operators and how when people put == they really mean ===, these aren't legitimate complaints, i've seen real world bugs in other languages where people put = instead of == or := instead of =, typos and inexperienced developers happen, get over it."

It's got nothing to do with preference. Inconsistencies, additional verbosity and so forth inherently increase the risk of mistakes no matter how good you are (or think you are). Much of it is a result of the fact that many of PHP's key features were bolted on after the fact (like OO for example). It's absurd to suggest that a language that has had things bolted on that it was never designed for from the outset is no worse than a language that was properly planned and thought through from the outset. You cannot increase the complexity of a language without adding anything beneficial in the process and expect it to be just as good for writing software as something more streamlined and better designed from the outset, this is objective fact - more room for mistakes is more room for mistakes and the quality of programmer is irrelevant as the perfect programmer is a myth.

I've always said you can get things done with PHP, I have, I've delivered a large multi year project with it - it's faults aren't crippling. But there's a cost- more development time, or more bugs. Dollar for dollar, pound for pound, you'll get more for you money if you use one of PHP's competitors rather than PHP whether that's faster development time, lower defect rates, better performance, better maintainability, or a combination of these factors - the fact you admit you have your own framework highlights this sort of issue that you face with PHP, you've had to spend time building something that is unnecessary in something like .NET where the framework is extremely well designed and built from the outset.

If you've already invested in it there's probably not much point switching, I wouldn't dispute that, but if there's an opportunity to start again, or to migrate away, right now I'd take it as I see no compelling reason to stick with it. Yes you absolutely can do what you need to do with it, but if you've got the choice you can do more for less with various alternatives.

That requires a few assumptions though, that you're using HHVM rather than the official PHP interpreter and that your application really is IO bound (which is entirely application dependent), and finally that you're not fully optimising your .NET, Java, or whatever else environment too.

Even given these assumptions though, there's still the problem that PHP simply doesn't offer the breadth of support for hosting your application to optimally cater to different cases in the first place. For example, with WCF you can configure it to support node.js style event based programming with few threads rapidly offloading incoming requests, or lots of threads to handle long running IO bound processing requests concurrently.

For typical SMEs and even quite a few large companies you're rarely optimising to this degree, but for those where you are you're still left with far more tools in the .NET and Java world and the divide is typically growing, with improved support for things like .NET native. Effectively you're comparing an optimised PHP environment against a typical .NET/Java environment, rather than comparing two optimised environments where both are using the most cutting edge optimisation options available.

To me the performance benefits of not going with PHP and going for something faster would be an acceptable loss if PHP offered some compelling benefit on top, but the problem is that it really doesn't - the language is more poorly designed, the libraries are more inconsistent, often less useful, and even the toolchain available is typically worse. As such the problem is that the .NET/Java JIT advantage is effectively just a free bonus for using those platforms over PHP which just makes PHP that much less compelling again.

There's a fair argument that with C++ the performance advantage it has over say, .NET really isn't worth it because .NET offers more rapid development (though that's ultimately going to depend on how high performance rates on your scale), but PHP just does not have that same advantage - any initial up and running advantage with PHP is rapidly lost by way of the requirement for more intricate unit test coverage and/or greater testing and more time consuming debugging. PHP is fundamentally both slower to develop with and slower to execute, and that's the problem.

I agree with you about the importance of a good DBA, all too often the benefits of having one is painfully under-appreciated by many companies.

Hmm. No idea what the fuck just happened to the rest of my post, lucky Slashdot isn't written in PHP or I could blame it for that too :)

Anyway, basically my point was that it's really not in question that PHP has a number of problems that it's competition simply does not have, those problems are not caused by the programmer, they're caused by the language and it's libraries.

Yes you can write bad code in .NET, Java, C++ and whatever else, you can also write good code in PHP. None of that is in doubt, but it's a common argument in favour of PHP that sidesteps the fact that like for like, skill for skill, there is a higher cost to PHP- you need to implement more unit tests, you need to spend more time peer reviewing, the code is more verbose and has a higher maintenance burden, and so on and so forth. So yes, you can do things with PHP just fine, but you're paying more to achieve less, and that's really the problem - you're throwing money down the drain by using PHP. It maybe that that's acceptable if you've reached a point where you have so much invested in it that switching would cost too much at that point, but ultimately if you're going to rewrite anything or do it again you're better off switching away from PHP to technologies that are more secure by default, perform better by default, have languages that better support refactoring and maintainability by default, and let you get more done with less cost.

It's got nothing to do with laziness, at the end of the day the fact remains that PHP has an awful lot more inconsistencies, and has an awful track record on security, stability and functionality.

I'm skeptical that anyone who claims to have a good depth of experience of PHP but claims it's as fine as anything else really does have the experience they're claiming. As soon as you need to start doing anything serious, like say, making use of threads, PHP's deficiencies rapidly come to the fore when compared to other technologies like Java and .NET. It's a simple fact that PHP has more inconsistencies in both it's language design and libraries, it's a simple fact that PHP is interpreted not compiled or JIT compiled making it inherently slower, and it's a simple fact

Finland was not independent in World War II, it got partially taken over by Russia, and then was eventually forced to become a puppet state of Nazi Germany, later fighting alongside it. Being subservient to the Nazis and surrendering to the Russians is about as far from being independent as you can be short of being outright annexed by either of them in your entirety.

Perhaps this is part of the Finnish national psyche, that you tell yourself you're better than others because you sided with the Nazi's by choice using the rather arbitrary choice of the Molotov-Ribbentrop construct rather than simply comparing against more similar neighbours like those physically next to you in Scandinavia like Sweden that was actually neutral, or Norway that fought and lost against the Nazis but still at least stood for what it believed in and fought for it's independence. Claiming being forced under the whims of Nazi Germany is somehow retention of independence is a desperate nationalist view at best, a lie at worst.

I know it's painful for you Finns, you've never really accepted that you helped a group of people who were responsible for the most horrendous acts against humanity in modern history, and you like to deflect by saying "But Stalin was a bad guy too and even the allies killed some people!" as if all measures of killing or torturing are somehow equal (I'll give you a hint: Stalin, Churchill et. al. weren't making lampshades out of human skin and throwing babies up into the air as a kind of living clay pidgeon). At the end of the day though, instead of feigning superiority and pretending you're just better than anyone else because you supposedly chose to side with the Nazis, you guys just need to accept the past, get over it, and move on, something the Germans themselves have managed to do incredibly well (now there's a real bastion of moderation, progressivism, and relatively independent thought in international politics if ever their was one - one that puts you Finns to shame).

The reality is that Finland is probably the worst country to talk about freedom and independence, it's been walked all over for much of it's modern history, and I get it, that's the Finnish way, to you that is independence, but to us independence is making our own decisions, deciding the fate of our own sovereignty rather than having it forced upon us. So I'm dismayed, albeit not surprised that Finns like you believe you're somehow superior for being everyone's doormat, to be walked over at will, and to see you spin capitulation as knowing how to defuse conflict.

It's nonsense of course, anyone can defuse a conflict by capitulating, the difference is that nations like Finland are relatively rare in their willingness to give up their independence to actually do that - the rest of us prefer to stand with like minded allies and fight for what we believe in. I don't want what Putin is offering just like I'd never have wanted what either Stalin or Hitler was offering. Corrupt fascist dictatorships are not my thing and I believe they're worth fighting against.

So you should probably stop looking down on other nations in the West, and start looking down at yourself and your countrymen for being willing to give up your independence and identity to whoever scares the shit out of you the most at any given time. It seems right now that that's Russia, so, well, good luck with that. Let us know how it goes, we'll be here waiting to look out for you when you realise that corrupt dictatorships aren't for you, again, as always. Maybe this time you'll learn, but I wont hold my breath, you never have before.

I honestly can't see how having my car searched would ever tarnish the surrounding countryside.

Well, unless they start unpacking my luggage and begin hanging my underwear on the trees or something. That might do it. Is this what they're doing?

No, that's just paranoia. If you haven't been paying attention Microsoft spend a LOT of money on dealing with malware and so forth, they help the authorities take down bot nets and have a genuine commercial interest in stopping the spread of malware.

This is just another step in that quest, all they're doing is saying "Download your unlicensed copy of Windows from us, rather than some dodgy site where it's riddled with malware from the outset".

They've figured out that giving people a clean copy rather than a virus laden copy is cheaper for them than it is to deal with constantly having to spend a fortune dealing with DDOS attacks and spam hitting Outlook.com and that sort of thing.

There's nothing sinister here, it's just way easier and cheaper for them to offer an official Windows 10 download, that it is to have people download it anyway, but riddled with malware that feeds into botnets that cost them money.

They're not giving you a license key, they're not luring you into a trap, they're not tricking you, they're just giving you a clean download that saves them money with the added benefit that it means people might convert to buying the odd copy here and there with less risk of people leaving for other OS' like Linux. It just makes good business sense, there's nothing more to it than that.

It's not like the police even entertain breaking down doors for civil piracy cases anyway, it's not their job, it's not their jurisdiction, and it's not something they get involved in so it's nonsense either way. The worst they could do is haul you into a civil court where they'd then have to a) prove to the judge that you are individually and uniquely tied to the IP address and that no one else could ever have used that connection and b) explain to the judge how you've cost them money when they were the ones that offered the download in the first place. So even if your conspiracy theory did have any merit, they wouldn't have a leg to stand on anyway - it would be the very definition of civil entrapment offering a product download without any payment requirement and then trying to sue people over it to extra payment for it afterwards. That's an entirely illegal practice in itself stemming from an old scam where people used to ship items to people entirely unsolicited, and then sending a demand for payment or even filing a debt claim against them for the cost of the product if the person who received it never sent it back. Nowadays if you receive a wholly unsolicited parcel you're entirely within your rights to keep it with no real recourse for the company who sent it- the same is true here, Microsoft can't demand payment after they offered the download for free.

Well at least you have the courage to admit you were wrong in a roundabout way involving trying to pretend someone else was wrong. I guess it was the old BDUK point that was the killer right? I mean it's kind of hard to argue that the license fee isn't used for infrastructure when, er, it clearly and indisputably is.

I know what you really mean is "I wont argue with you because you've proven me wrong, but I'm too much of a child to admit it so fuck you!".

It's okay, you don't have to pretend with me - I'm smart enough to see what people like you really mean, the old idiot insult is usually the first giveaway, but at least if nothing else you were man enough to know when it's time to shut up and stop making a bigger fool of yourself, so well done on that.

Energy can also be death. If you don't believe me then go get hit by lightning or stand in a furnace then turn it on.

Sure it's great for me, I mean, the UK will get a really nice climate, I'm not much a fan of the cold.

Meanwhile everyone in Africa and Australia will have died from drought.

I don't think your simplistic understanding of energy has done anything to prove your case that warming is inherently better, only that it's inherently better for you personally, a wealthy westerner.

Just because people are going to make money from something doesn't inherently make it bad, or a scam. Only whether it's actually bad or a scam can define that, and you've done nothing to prove your case.

If Al Gore is cashing in on green technology that doesn't mean green technology is a scam, it just means he's a competent investor in spotting markets to invest in that the human race are simply going to have to move towards to reduce the impacts of climate change, and similarly to reduce the impacts on non-renewable sources (like having to depend on middle-eastern dictatorships and Russia for fuel). You don't make money and become a billionaire by investing in shit that has no prospect for growth and that the world sees no value in.

It's possible to care about the environment, still make money, and have whatever you're investing in be a good idea all at once.

Carbon tax makes a lot of sense, because right now everyone else is paying the externalities of fossil fuel burning. Coal is a cheap power source because you and I have to pick up the bill for the health costs via your health insurance or my country's NHS. Moving that cost onto the people who make the profits from burning and causing those billions of pounds of health problems is eminently sensible, and it makes cleaner technologies like nuclear that already have to foot the bill for cleaning up their harmful chemicals (nuclear waste) more competitive.

I'm continuously amazed at how people fail to grasp what a good idea it is to tax polluters for polluting because they have absolutely no idea how much it's costing them personally to pay for the cleanup. Go Google fossil fuel externalities, even with the most conservative estimates you're currently paying a hell of a lot personally for the fact that such pollution has largely been untaxed such that you pick up the bill. There's no such thing as a free ride, burning all that shit and letting them pollute has a cost, why not make the people who profit from it pay for it? Why is that such a terrible idea? Or is yours just a kneejerk libertarian "OMG GOVERNMENT, TAX, IT MUST BE BAD!" response?

It's not even that, I'm very much inclined to no longer vote in the UK's general elections because I voted against the FPTP system and it would seem utterly hypocritical of me to participate in a system that is fundamentally broken and I am staunchly against, especially when there are no parties that even reasonably represent my views (there's no centrist parties in the UK, they're all various flavours running from very much left to far left or very much right to far right and I like a bit of both and hate a lot of each - I want the right wing economic policies and the left wing environmental policies for example).

It should equally be in my power to not vote as it is to vote for any party so as to let the turn out figures tell their own story about the legitimacy of the whole system. If voter turnout drops beneath 50% then the whole system becomes illegitimate and no one winning an election under such circumstances can dare to claim legitimacy.

Not voting is a vote, it's a vote against the current electoral system, and it's not surprising that under two-party favouring systems like we see in the UK that there is always talk of making voting mandatory - they both know the current system has no real legitimacy, but it benefits them, so they both want to protect it.

Mandatory voting is never the answer, fixing political systems so that people have reason to vote is the only fair and reasonable solution, but it does not benefit the people who gain from the status quo so the only way to make them change is to force their hand by defying their attempts to fake legitimacy in the system by forcing voting and spreading myths like "Your grandad fought for the vote!" (no he fucking didn't, he fought to stop the nazis and their intention to have their minority rule over the majority, which is exactly what FPTP encourages). Mandatory voting should not exist because it denies people the opportunity to show their distaste for the electoral system as a whole and any country that has it is just propping up a broken system rather than fixing it.

Mandatory voting is like mandatory proprietary OS installations on all computer sales, some are happy with Windows, some are happy with OSX, but others want neither, they want Linux and if that isn't an option at time of sale they want no OS with their computer until a vendor decides to start giving them what they actually want.

Oh don't even try. Rei is the most aggressive Assange hater Slashdot has ever seen because she was a victim herself once and so has decided that a man accused is a man automatically guilty, and that it's her quest to ensure all accused many are treated as such.

She was pushing the lie that the Swedish prosecutor couldn't question him over here because Swedish law wouldn't allow it even after the Swedish courts said in response to Assange appeal that they could and that it was odd that they hadn't.

I'm amazed she can show her face here now that this lie she pushed so zealously and so vehemently has been shredded by the very prosecutor she was defending, yet here she is, and worse, she's still pushing the anglakad lie, pretending these Swedish terms don't translate to English, even though they translate EXACTLY.

I can't tell if there's a lot of gullible people here or if she has her own team of mod-bot accounts, but if a story says Assange in the title you can guarantee she'll show up flooding it with +5 lies, many of which have been obliterated with the passage of time and the emergence of the truth, just like in this story in fact.

Erm, why are you even having this discussion if you believe that ITV has it's own private terrestrial broadcast infrastructure? You're completely out of your depth here. ITV, Channel 5, and Channel 4 are broadcast on the public service multiplexes, along with a bunch of radio stations, the funding for which is provided from the license fee under the transmission costs.

If the license fee has nothing to do with public infrastructure costs, why do you think hundreds of millions of pounds of license fee money have been diverted to the BDUK broadband rollout? The license fee has always been about funding more than just the BBC itself. That's why it's called the TV license, not the BBC license, and that's why it's a license you must pay if you use the UK's broadcast infrastructure even if you never watch BBC channels or use BBC content. That's also why there is now an argument to make it a tax that's simply paid by everyone given that everyone uses it - you could get FTTC in your home because of license fee money and never ever watch or have anything to do with the BBC but you're still benefiting from license fee money.

Sky has it's own satellite infrastructure, but we haven't been talking about satellite channels, we've been talking about terrestrial. That's why I said terrestrial from the outset.

That doesn't even make any sense, all BBC funded content is funded under the TV break down (~£2.2bn) because there's next to no iPlayer only content, it's just content already shown on TV. The online break down of ~£170m is for the BBC websites. Also, not all iPlayer content is fee funded, a number of iPlayer programs are supplied by BBC Worldwide and produced for foreign commercial sale, sometimes alongside other foreign organisations like America's Discovery Channel.

I'm also still not entirely sure how you think the UK's broadcast infrastructure is funded by ads. The people manning the infrastructure have no process for displaying ads themselves or gaining money from it. The BBC Trust has in the past stated that around 6% (~£200m) of the license fee goes on transmission costs which is the lion's share of the costs. Why do you think that has changed? how do you proclaim the companies running the transmitters are injecting ads into things and gaining revenue from it when as far as the broadcasters are aware they greenlight the ads and pocket the profits with the commercial channels simply paying a token amount for access and usage?

I'm not sure that's really true, cloning the best horse at the time doesn't preclude the possibility of a breeder breeding an even better horse for racing and so forth.

Then of course there's disease vulnerability, there's every possibility a disease could wipe out all the clones, whilst allowing many of the bred ones to survive.

Once you've discovered a horse is awesome in a race or whatever, it's already an adult, so sure you can clone it at that point you know it's awesome, but you still have to wait for the clones to grow up. In the meantime it's possible an even more awesome horse has already had time to grow up and enter the game and all those who bought their close are going to be embarrassed by being uncompetitive.

I don't see this harming breeding and horse racing, at best it's going to give more people access to a very good horse, but you're still going to need to try and breed even better horses if you want to give yourself the edge and more chance of winning.

In car racing you could all already build an identical car to the competition and have every car be exactly equal, but no one does that, everyone still tries to build a better car to give them the edge. It's really no different.

These guys in the summary would have an argument if we were talking about genetic manipulation, because then you could argue both an unfair advantage and that the manipulation means the horse is no longer of the correct breed, it's a custom breed, but that's not what's happening so their argument is basically wholly based on ignorance, they're talking like the type of folks who believe the world is 6,000 years old and flat - they're completely clueless about the science of genetics (which is disturbing for an organisation whose job is purportedly to deal with ensuring exactly that) and are arguing wholly on the basis of superstition.

If I wanted one of these horses their argument would put me off completely so they're probably doing more harm than good for themselves. If they don't have a basic grasp of genetics how can I even begin to trust their ability to ensure I'm getting what I'm paying for? They're supposedly guaranteeing me a breed, but they've no idea what a breed even is.