Yeah, just not one stored in Hatton Garden, London.

Not my experience. Every time I've loaded a project done with spaces, it's inevitable that there is a space too many here, or a space too few there.

I don't see how this is any different to a stray tab quite frankly.

No one owes any website a business. If you setup a sign based on the premise that you need all ad-revenue to survive, profit, and make a living then you're one of that sizeable statistic of people whose businesses fail for the simple fact that you were hopeless at business.

It's like saying you should feel guilty for not bothering to look at adverts in free newspapers and skimming right past them. No you shouldn't. If someone is giving access to something with no upfront payment they have no expectation of payback. If the business model doesn't work, it doesn't work, tough luck.

I don't buy the doomsday scenario of there being no useful sites on the internet if we all have this attitude because I remember the internet from long before ads were commonplace. There was still equally as good information about, in fact, I learnt much of what I know about programming in that era, the only difference is it was all less bloated by presentation.

There should be zero guilt in blocking ads because accessing URL is NOT a contract implicit or explicit that you will accept all content from that URL, nor that you will read every aspect of it. If either of these things were true we'd be legally obliged to download malware, and legally obliged to read every last disclaimer and copyright notice on every site. There is no such obligation, and ads are not special cases, we neither have to read them or receive them, and no one should feel guilty for refusing them.

If a site shuts down because it couldn't afford to run because of ad revenue yet people visited with ad blockers then all that tells us is that there was a business model for the content if free, but not if ad sponsored. Sites with such small viewership typically used to be hosted by bundled ISP hosting. Those large enough to justify proper hosting are large enough to make enough from those that don't use ad blockers or to run as subscription sites.

A business is either viable, or it's not, if it's not, then no one should feel guilty about it's demise.

You still seem to think spawning new processes is in any way a passable form of multi-threading in a high load environment as opposed to spawning new threads. This alone shows you're not fit to have any kind of discussion on this topic.

For starters, it means you can handle drastically fewer concurrent tasks because it has by far a higher memory and CPU footprint to do so. That's before you factor in the problems of shared data meaning you're probably also duplicating data in your separate processes (i.e. each process will probably have to have it's own copy of any configuration data).

But this is just one of many reasons why PHP is shit, stop trying to claim it's not whilst basically inadvertently arguing that it is.

I absolutely agree with the latter half of your post, that these guys got what they deserved for trying to ram a military checkpoint, but I disagree that non-lethal options couldn't have worked.

I say this because I live in the UK, where non-lethal is the only option available to most our law enforcement officers, and they stop aggressive drivers regularly without harm. Even where armed police are involved they typically shoot the vehicle unless there's evidence one of the people in the car physically has hold of a gun and has started firing back. I do not believe it increases the overall risk to people doing the stop, because our officers also have far lower casualty rates than yours by just about every metric breakdown.

On a base like this I'm surprised they don't just have retractable barriers in the floor that a car simply cannot pass until the barrier has been lowered after being given permission to enter. From there it's trivial to hold guns up at the people in the car and tell them to get out slowly, without having to actually shoot them. These sorts of barriers are widely available, as are one way barriers that pop down when driven over, but block if you try and reverse back meaning such a vehicle would be completely trapped between two sets of barriers.

So whilst I disagree with the AC's view that these people shouldn't have expected to be shot, I do think there's some merit in his point that in the US the gun has in far too many circumstances become the first course of action, when it should really be the last.

So Slashdot shouldn't post anything about new product or data releases ever because it's product placement?

It's not like Slashdot is shilling for some ultra-rich company in this case that's just trying to make a quick buck off the user base here. Ordnance Survey is the UK government's official mapping agency - it's a government department, not a private company.

More governmental data being release to the public is a good thing, as it's a continued expansion of transparency and freedom to access data that the tax payer pays to produce in the first place. Open access to data is a big deal in the tech world right now, and it's exactly the sort of thing a tech site like Slashdot should cover as a result - this isn't a story about the latest iWhatever.

Oh are you still here embarassing yourself? I thought you'd gone. Processes != threads. This is CS101.

P.S. The way you speak of IOCP shows you don't even know what IOCP is or how it works.

Is that you Bronscon?

I'm surprised at this point there's not been more effort to allow remote override of aircraft such each plane can have it's autopilot enabled remotely overriding the pilot's actions. I know there's always the fear of hacking, but would that really be much of a threat if:

1) The worst you could do remotely was enable an enforced pre-programmed autopilot course.

2) The system was secure with a one-time key that's set on the runway by an authorised individual

If you put this equipment in an area of the aircraft that's inaccessible during flight I don't really see how this could be a problem? Surely if you've reached a point where radio and radar contact have stopped making sense, and the pilot isn't responding sufficiently, you should be able to remotely force a plane back on course against the will of the pilot in this day and age? It would even likely save lives in the case of cockpit de-pressurisation and so forth. I get that you wouldn't want to do this all the time because the pilot is always going to have better situational awareness and might need to do things manually, but when the pilot is the problem, doesn't this make sense?

Is there a fundamental reason why this can't/won't work or is it simply that there's not been enough will for or interest in this sort of thing yet? It seems odd that we're talking about releasing secure self-driving cars, yet the far easier problem of self-flying planes (that frankly is already a solved problem anyway in modern drones) seem to be out of the question right now.

This might already be mimicry, he could have been mimicking the MH370 pilot.

"multithreading can be used to implement async io but it is not a requirement, see node.js."

Oh god. Node.js uses IOCP, which implements a thread based model. Did you think it used magic or something?

No wonder you're posted AC, you're just embarrassing yourself. Acting as living proof that PHP developers are clueless. Well done, you've successfully proven my points throughout.

Okay, so it sounds like I was right then after all if you're conflating curl hacks which require the spawning of a completely different process and a full blown TCP connection to achieve anything with an actual proper threading solution or async IO implementation (FWIW I find it amusing that you claim multithreading and async IO are completely unrelated things and then pretend curl is an async IO implementation- facepalm. You don't even know how PHP's curl library works).

I was going to reply in a bit more detail to everything in between, but then I got to this section of your post and realised it's fruitless as you don't even understand the basics:

"You're still going to spend 90% of your time waiting on blocking io. you can't complete your request until that io request is done, sure if i have 30ms of php code executing and a 180ms sql query I can use asynchronous io to make that entire request take 180ms instead of 210ms, but you're still spending the bulk of your time waiting for that 180ms sql query."

There's two problems with this:

1) You still demonstrate that your knowledge doesn't stretch beyond basic CRUD environments, you believe that everything you do on the web is simplistic web front-end, database backend CRUD type stuff. This is false, and if you had any worthwhile professional experience you'd know that a lot more typically goes on behind the scenes than my first website type setups (but that's probably also why you think PHP is acceptable, because you're not doing anything that matters).

2) On one hand you're talking about high throughput environments, and on the other you're talking about a process only handling one client at a time, which is what I was referring to when I talked about the PHP way. In more professional environments you don't need a whole new process for each concurrent request. That's a massive amount of unnecessary overhead, and environments like .NET and Java allow you to simply process other incoming requests in the same process whilst one is awaiting IO.

You seem to completely lack any grasp of the cost of firing up processes, as you seem to believe that spawning a process is an equivalently performant thing to do as firing off a new thread. It's sad, and you just prove my point that PHP folks only support PHP so vehemently because they don't know any better.

There's a reason that PHP stirs up hatred towards it more than anything else (well, except maybe Javascript) - it's because it's objectively shit, and the only ones that can't see that are those that are inexperienced and don't know any better. Languages like C# and so on just aren't even close to as controversial because for the most part they largely just work as you expect them to, and aren't as poorly designed.

Yeah you're right, I haven't touched PHP in a couple of years now so I haven't seen anything about (nor can I find anything even now) PHP's new async support for the things you list. Yes I'm aware it's now got some half-arsed threading support hacked in to move away from basing attempts at multi-threading on curl hacks, but it's not me you need to be telling this to - it's the other guy whose argument that PHP is fine performance wise is because you're spending 90% of the timing waiting on blocking IO, which is obviously nonsense. This was historically the PHP way and it shouldn't come as a surprise to someone claiming to be well versed in PHP that this is a deeply entrenched way of doing things in the PHP community for that very reason, but it's never been the way of doing things in the languages I mentioned because they've all been designed to support it from the outset.

At the end of the day, in things like C++, Java and .NET you've got control of asynchronicity through the entire stack, but with PHP you're still limited by a strict bunch of fudges.

The problem is that people like you will continue to deflect the problems away because you're not competent enough to understand them in the first place. You don't know your code is broken.

The fact that you don't know that the type system is broken means that you're wholly unaware that any code you have written involving integers can behave completely differently when you move your codebase from a 32bit system to a 64bit system. It means you probably don't realise that your code is failing when you expect '0.0' to translate in a boolean expression to 0.0 as '0' does 0. It means you probably aren't aware of bugs stemming from the fact that the confused implementation of arrays such that they're partially ordered list, partially hash maps, but that the inherent conflicts that arise mean they fail at both can create nonsensical iteration. It means you don't realise that you have to explicitly declare a global as global, but if you do it might not actually be global depending on where you make the declaration.

But perhaps maybe you do know these things, you're just too much of a PHP fanboy to accept that these sorts of gotchas and faults you have to deal with are problems that people using almost any other language do not. Perhaps you've simply sold it to yourself that it's okay that these inconsistencies and this poor design exists on the language, because you've fallen into the trap of becoming a one trick PHP pony and have cornered yourself with nowhere to go. I've yet to meet anyone with a broad amount of experience across multiple languages (and I mean working on multi-year projects with different languages, not just hacking something together for a day) that really believes that PHP is somehow equally as good as everything else - when someone is genuinely experienced enough to be objective, it becomes obvious that PHP is just a poor choice. I know this precisely because I have not just worked on, but led a multi-year PHP project and have worked on multi-year Java, C#, and C++ projects too - I know that PHP is just objectively bad. It didn't stop us delivering on type and on budget, but it did cut our profit margins by about 10 - 15% on the project compared to if we had used C#, Java, or even RoR.

You talk about customers and revenue streams, but that's exactly when PHP's faults matter - what's a customer going to prefer, PHP with it's higher development costs because of the sorts of poor design above requiring greater development effort, greater unit test coverage, and/or greater testing, or the language that doesn't have those problems and lets developers get things done faster because they don't have to deal with them or even a remotely similarly sized amount of equivalent problems as PHP has and still often get a performance boost to boot given how painfully slow PHP is and how terribly it handles threading (meaning it's blocking and limiting requests more than is optimal).

PHP is fine if you want to do a "doesn't matter" hack project quickly and dirtily, but when professionalism and money is involved it's about the worst option going - it's quirks, problems, and low performance add an inherent cost increase to any development done with it. If you don't understand this it's probably because you just don't know any better, as you've proven with having to even ask the question as to what's broken with the PHP type system.

The TCO of PHP is the overriding reason as to why it's a bad choice, and that's why I'm surprised you try and write off it's problems by implying they're not an issue in the real world when money and customers are involved as that's precisely when it's quirks do become a problem. Obviously you've never had any accountability or responsibility for delivering a project with maximised profit margins, maximised customer happiness, and maximised stability, performance and maintainability or you'd know full well that you've spouted an awful lot of nonsense.

"I'm fed up with the equivocation PHP fans trot out whenever any criticism heads their way. Yes, the quality of a language really does have an effect on the quality of the code you write with it. This is plain for anybody to see, and if you don't see the difference in quality, then you should seriously question your competence."

Absolutely and evidence of this is always only a Google search away. Search on how to do something with a database and the results you get are riddled with things like SQL injection vulnerabilities, even when the source of the official documentation.

There's a reason why like 90% of websites that get hacked nowadays are running PHP - because the community is full of people who just don't know why their language is bad, and because they don't know why their language is bad, they definitely don't understand why their own code is bad.

The second half of the paragraph proves that I understand VM technology in quite a lot of detail, and understand the sorts of difficulties involved in moving from a language to executable code through an intermediate form.

I know that HHVM doesn't support strict PHP which is presumably what you're referring to, but if you're confusing the moderate changes made to make it work in a JIT at all with the complete break needed to be able to act in a competitively optimised JITted environment then it's not me that doesn't know the topic, it's you.