Wednesday I got a visit from my neighbor asking for help with his computer. My heart sank. I had set him up with Mint 15 on his laptop and he was happily using it for the past 6 months. "What's wrong?" I asked. He said "something about "user profile service"". Oh, he means his desktop (Vista) so I fix it by doing a system restore. I asked about the laptop. "Its working fine, no complaints."

For this man to have no complaints, you have to understand what a dramatic experience computers are for him. He was a truck driver for the county. Never worked a day of his life at a computer, but his wife was a secretary. (She has passed on). So he tries to do stuff.. but any little thing that changes is a big deal. MSN shut down MSN messenger service and replaced it with Skype. That generated two visits from him - one the "little man" disappeared. And the new Skype icon that they installed for him. He even added his own MyFi to it.

And that is why I recommend Linux. It's never generated a support call to me from him.

XKCD

It's called a counter example.

UA, a Baltimore company hosts data science meetups. Why? Because UA is data science driven. All company decisions are made based on data. So it seems that the OP is complete BS, because it is effectively creating results, and those results are highly successful for a major corporation.

Well, it's like giving children knives and telling them to go play. They are too inexperienced to know the possible outcomes of knife usage. Whose fault is that? If you're going to give them a knife, make sure it at least has a sheath with it. The simple way to do this is to only give them a prepare/bind interface.

Meanwhile in PHP every sql demo and intro I see is gluing SQL together. You have to go looking for the bind interface.

It's that same easy substitution, i.e. $sql = "SELECT fname, lname from people where id='$id'" that leads to data breaches.

You never should have to sanitize your db inputs. Why? Because then you have to always unsantize them, else you end up with a crap string because it isn't escaped/unescaped enough times. The right thing to do is to use the database driver's bind interface. Basically, your DB values should be treated as opaque blobs as far as entry and retrieval go. Now if you need to verify a date, that's another matter. But you should be treating them as opaque blobs, full of nulls, quotes, semicolons and unprintable characters.

You might not be aware of PHP in the old days, but they used to move all the variables into the script so that
$_GET['x'] and $_POST['y']

would be $x and $y... ("register globals") So yeah, you couldn't tell where they came from. The situation with $_* greatly improved things especially when they deprecated register globals.

In an object oriented language, as PHP attempts to be, $ is a stupid idea, just like decorating variables with types, like bInstalled (bool installed) it iMaxLength. It's not such a bad idea in JavaScript though, where anything goes.

I've been complaining to a friend of mine about PHP. I was an early adopter around 1.0/2.0, avid user at 3, and have fallen out with it since then. PHP was good, even revolutionary at the time because you either had C or perl PHP had a friendliness to it... Something that ended up making it second rate.

It's always been second rate. Even the PHP devs themselves end up coding vulnerabilities. And look at MtGox. What was it coded in? PHP!

Why in 2014, do I have to decorate variables with '$'? Why is the assiciative array syntax take two characters that look a comparison operator? Why do I need == and ===? ANd vaiable confusion between $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE

No one can do a safe site in PHP, it's just too much work to 1) know best practices and 2) code it.

Finally the web has changed. Back when it enabled a dynamic site, it was the shit. In a web 2.0 world it is shit. You've got to work with MIME, HTML, PHP CSS, JSON, JavaScript.... There is no "php" solution.

Today, there are many ways to develop dynamic web content. My favorite two are Node[JS] and witty (webtoolkit.eu). While there is no "ace of the page" the Witty apprror say SPDY2.0, approach is best, where you write your application code and it renders code for whatever browser and browser capabilities it has. If Websockets, HTML6, or SPDY2.0 comes out, you just recompile your app against the new library that just uses the new features as appropriate.

In retrospect, there never really was a time when PHP was a "good thing".

You're assuming that the speed at which the problems are solved is positively correlated with fundamental understanding of the concepts. For problems like multiplication, this isn't really the case.

Not only is it not the case, in highly intelligent people, for large problem sets, it is often reverse-correlated. When I was a kid, if you gave me 50 math problems, I'd take longer to solve them than the folks who were making Fs in the class—not because I was struggling, but because after the first five or ten problems, I was so bored that I'd spend a few seconds working on a problem, followed by fifteen minutes daydreaming about anything else but the subject at hand.

If you remember, the O(N^2) shuffe sort is fastest on piles n =6 So I. make sorted piles of 6. These sorted piles of 6 are done using the brains only internal intutitve sort. Then you linear sort the piles of 6 together. I try to go for as many piles at the same time, not just 2. If fact this is more limited by distance than anything else. Since you are sorting things with a physical representation you need to take the time cost of moving yourself into account. With a deck of cards, there is no move costs but with dozens of 8x11 or A4 papers, reach becomes a factor.

I've been doing this since 2001 and I have yet to find a better way.

In the Ted Video (link below) he claims to have treated phantom limb pain with a mirror. Yes, a chap mirror. No expensive VR.

Ted Talk: Vilayanur Ramachandran

I remember when facebook replaced all of my contact info with @facebook.com addresses, the bulk update ripped through my phone and messed a lot of things up.

Can I now get my original contacts restored?

The comic seems to hint at a relationship between he two. Is that correct? Do different values of the higgs field make for different speeds of light?