Funny enough I've been using Slashdot for over a decade and never had to message anyone on here. I've looked around but I can't seem to find any PM system. How can I get in touch with you? I'm the CTO of a tech startup in Beijing. I learned Mandarin as a second language and our office operates 70% Chinese 30% English. We are looking for non-Chinese nationals interested in working in Beijing. I can tell you more off of Slashdot.

Rdio would be awesome if it weren't another shit service with regional restrictions. I can't use Pandora, Spotify, or Rdio where I'm located. Why can anyone come up with a worldwide service for god sake.

After several months of effort I dug in quite deeply, but didn't make it to the point of realizing that there were 100 joins occurring, because I realized that drupal was a piece of shit before I had to figure that out. Seems like an idiotic way to implement it in any case. Any insight into that design decision?

Unfortunately that is not how it is sold by most drupal advocates. During my many months of experimentation, I asked dozens of questions and read thousands of forum threads, and everyone seemed to push that anything could be done in drupal if you knew the right way to do it. This "right tool for the job" thought process is something I haven't heard in regards to Drupal until very recently. But in that case, why not use a much less obtuse CMS like Pimcore or TomatoCMS or Symfony or ModX? A hammer is the right tool for hammering nails, but some hammers are made from glass, and they are not the right tool for ANY job. They are shit.

Interesting that you take this as a personal insult when I don't even know who you are. I've got a degree in computer science and engineering from a top 10 university in the US. I've worked on antivirus for symantec, printer firmware and drivers for HP, and have built websites with over 30 million uniques per day. I've built CMS systems used by 27 different hotel brands. I'm not saying that makes me better than you. But it just goes to show that you have serious judgement problems, especially when you are so willing to tie such a sorry excuse for a framework to your personal self worth.

Thought you might appreciate this

I agree, Drupal is a steaming load. The only people who dig it haven't actually worked with maintainable well-engineered OO systems. Drupal seduces you with a facade of broad functionality but turns out to be a morass of bad architecture underneath. It is useful for run of the mill CMS sites, but anything slightly custom and you are fucked.

I spent several months trying to port a site to Drupal. And it didn't work. There you go: One great example of where Drupal fails. If you want to build something in Drupal, you gotta do it from scratch, and you gotta do everything the Drupal way. And there's a lot of shit you can't do in Drupal. I have node types on my site that support 100 fields. Do you know how much memory Drupal takes when you load up a CCK form with 100 fields? And how does drupal support multiple languages? Instead of supporting multiple languages per node, you have some hacked up shit where multiple nodes are tied together (At least when I was working with 6). And if you want to edit two languages at once, you have to dig into the heart of the mostly undocumented form engine and load two nodes at once. Which didn't work because it maxed out my PHP install's memory. Why the fuck is Drupal taking several tens of megabytes for only 100 fields?

And then you get to the code structure. It's not object oriented. There are global variables everywhere. The names of variables are completely unintelligible and the depth of data structures is heinous. It's the definition of spaghetti code.

Ok, if you are a CMS jockey and every $3k site you build is pretty much the same with a different skin, then yes, Drupal is great. But if you are an actual developer, and need to do a lot of custom things, then try a real framework like Zend, or Codeigniter, or Laravel, or Yii, or even another CMS, like ModX or TomatoCMS or Pimcore. But for god's sake don't waste your short life by dipping into the cesspool that is Drupal.

I ported my site to Zend in under two weeks. While it's not the least resource intensive framework, it is rationally designed around OO patterns, and the code comes out beautiful and maintainable.

Is that specific enough for you?

Reflexively label anyone with a theory that attacks "sacred" institutions? You are either a mindless robot or a shill yourself. As if the CIA doesn't have an endless list of indiscretions to their name. If you are going to call out the tinfoil mad hatters, go after the people that said the moon mission was faked and that george bush is a lizard, and not people that point out the right criminals for perhaps the wrong reasons.

And you apparently are a douche. You ignore the first two links, then anonymously trash someone with tired epithets.

You miss my point entirely. I'm not claiming these issues will be solved within 10 or even 20 years. I'm speaking theoretically. 50 years ago, someone would have said the same thing you are saying about handheld tablet devices. Sometime in the future, it will be clear that there will be shared UI that will be visible and interactive for everyone within range, without any obvious equipment usage. And over time it will be made reliable under severe conditions. The military already uses this type of equipment in all kinds of conditions. The point is that there isn't something fundamentally flawed with these types of devices. They are just far too immature.

On a side not, Kinect was just an example, and you shouldn't get hung up on the current incarnation of the tech. It's like looking at the first mouse and claiming that shit will never work. Firstly, it uses infrared, so the dark wouldn't affect its ability to function. Its descendants in the future would not be limited by any of the factors you describe, and the ideal would be real-time high-fidelity detection and location of all objects within a bounded 3d box.

what about a low profile heads up display that overlays something in the form factor of a tablet over ANY object in your view and allows you to interact with it the same as a tablet, using a kinect-style input device? Wearable computing could be considered a super-set of the tablet form factor, not mutually exclusive. You are still thinking in terms of usability and comfort issues of wearable computing, but when it becomes invisible and transparent, i.e. you don't even realize you are wearing it, and the usability of a floating virtual device is as easy as a physical device, then your opinion might change.

Despite the fact that twitter played a part in several "revolutions", twitter never had freedom in its DNA. Just look at some of their actions:

Country specific censorship controls

Purchase and subsequent shutdown of Whispercore, an android build used for secure communications in Egypt

I also have a friend that was an organizer for OWS in NY during its inception, and he claimed that several of his tweets were removed.

LS

People were making the same prediction right before the last election, including myself. Didn't happen dude.

The Internet doesn't suck outside of the US... Hulu, Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon suck outside of the US. They are all implementing bullshit regional policies that don't take into account the global nature of the Internet. The Internet works just fine.

You are right for the long term. But web tech isn't here yet. You still can't do anything media- or hardware-intensive in the browser at this point.

What people forget is that science is a tool, and not a religion or a world view. It's a set of practices for discovering useful models. It says a lot about descriptions and mechanisms. But it never says "why" in an absolute sense. It can say why in a causal sense, but the causal chain is endless. And thus, we know that electro-magnetic radiation exists, and what leadas to its appearance and behaviors, but not WHY or HOW it exists at all. that shit is magic!! Trying to say anything final about our infinitely detailed reality is like trying to pinpoint a discrete object in the mandelbrot set. You can't. At the core, reality is magic, and science is a tool for exploring the world and codifying approximate models of the phenomena we encounter.

LS

Guppy? Think you forgot the anonymous checkbox....