@scottalanmiller said:

Wow, nearly a thousand views on this one!!

Oh, sorry, I'm obsessively refreshing the page to see when someone's hired.... cannot think of punch line, withdrawing joke.

@scottalanmiller said:

If you play the south of Spain, let me know!

Free Catalonia!

I don't really have an opinion about this, but one time there was this girl and ... well it's important to me now!

Well yell at them until they do as I say! Or at least pass it on maybe

Edit: I see you did, thanks

@Dashrender said:

@tonyshowoff said:

@Dashrender said:

Can you stream you Vudu movies, if you have any?

Vudu still exists? I figured requiring someone to download their own client like its 1998 destroyed that company like 5 years ago.

What are you going on about?

Vudu doesn't require downloading anything. My Bluray player has it built in and I'm pretty sure Roku does as well (probably all the major devices).

They also have a feature where you can download the movies for offline viewing.

Oh, that's my fault, I was thinking of Veoh, though I think now even they have some sort of flash based option and/or a remote control device. I do remember for a while it was this weird pseudo-RealPlayer joke of a technology I couldn't imagine why anyone would want it.

@Ambarishrh said:

Dev team also use tips from http://www.phptherightway.com/

echo "Hello, $name\n";

If they're doing this, god help you.

Skimming through it isn't too bad though, but using double quotes when not escaping character is just an open door to a pack of feral dogs ready to tip over your table, knock your delicious PHP all over the floor and rip it to pieces.

Some things to consider:

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/post/2672172

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/post/1954828

http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/post/1272514

http://tonyshowoff.com/ (My blog, not a lot here yet, but some, primarily focused on PHP and MySQL)

Some other criticisms:

• Composer is a great package manager that will make your libraries super bloated as hell and let you write an absolutely massive autoloader class, it's wonderful crap.
• Twig is actually a neat templating library, but PHP is already a templating language so you're just adding overhead for no reason. Why add thousands of lines of code, tons of CPU process and memory usage to turn {% this %} into <?=$this ?>?
• I do like how it talks about xdebug (which can integrate with PhpStorm), but it seems to talk a little too much about forcing suppression with @, which is bad practice.
• It should go more into using E_NOTICE and E_STRICT, if these are not enabled in development (and logged in production) the developers are going to spend way more time debugging and write much crappier code, thought it does mention using them, but very briefly and without detail.
• I have to bring up the fact they seem to use double quotes, though not always, and also seem to think $variables in the middle of strings is fine.

Overall though, it's pretty good compared to most tutorials/manuals out there, especially W3C and that other one people link to all the time, especially in regard to proper utf8 support.

PhpStorm will also help with a lot mentioned in there such as PHPDoc and so on.

@Dashrender said:

Can you stream you Vudu movies, if you have any?

Vudu still exists? I figured requiring someone to download their own client like its 1998 destroyed that company like 5 years ago.

@garak0410 said:

@Minion-Queen said:

There needs to be much more background on WHY the earth had gotten that way etc. Why the Astronaut was a farmer etc. Would have answered so much, oh yeah and the robots and their use may have made more sense that way.

And yes the jumping around in the story added to the confusion.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one because I really, really wanted to like the film...a lot...the cut scenes as I mentioned above...I was trying to figure out why his fight with Matt Damon and the burning of the fields had to do with each other...I mean, I sort of get it but expected more...

And the Robots...they were cool and all but not introduced well...I expected more from them and they seemed so hollow...

And I appreciate the somewhat twist ending but it just didn't seem cohesive enough for me to really care...

It was supposedly some sort of blight that was creating NO2 or something and was destroying the atmosphere. I thought that whole thing was a bit contrived that somehow nobody in the span of nearly 100 years could genetically modify crops to not affect it or find some sort of fungus that fights against it and use it to your advantage. I guess, though, they needed a reason for a tenseness of needing to leave Earth, I guess it's not a bad reason, better than something silly like "oh no the sun is running out of energy and getting dimmer, even though that's not actually how the sun will die." (the movie Sunshine)

OK:

Machine can be anything, if it's Windows then you need to take care to worry about file case sensitivity. I'd certainly keep all table and column names all lower-case in MySQL, not doing it is a seriously idiotic mistake. I imagine you'll be hosting on something like Linux or BSD, and if not you should otherwise you'll be wasting money for no reason.

The IDE has to be PhpStorm, not Eclipse, not Netbeans, not some other highlighter garbage like Notepad++ or Sublime, it has to be PhpStorm, it is the best there is out there and speeds up development a whole hell of a lot when used to its full potential, plus it fully integrates with git (and cvs, svn, etc), TDD, etc.

Use git.

Always use utf8 (utf8mb4_unicode_* in MySQL itself), do it right the first time.

And of course I've got a billion other tips for proper PHP programming.

I liked how the approach to hard science was better than most sci-fi movies, I'm a fan of hard science fiction myself. I did think not wanting to do anything and wanting to die on Earth as that one character did, which caused them to burn the field, showed he was at least completely psychotic, and to be honest if my son or brother or whatever were holding other family members hostage, awaiting certain death, I'd kill him to save the others, not just burn the field to distract him, he's clearly dangerous as hell and more than willing to commit murder-suicide, not sure why Matthew McConaughey basically thinks it's not as serious as it is.

As for Matt Damon, I understand his motivations of not wanting to be alone, but he understood the risks if the place he went wasn't something worth going to, that he'd be left to die alone, but he wusses out, fakes tests results in order to get people to come and "rescue" him.

So what languages are even in use? There's no sense in even discussing what OS/platform to use if the language(s) haven't been decided on. Your available choices are going to be vastly different if it's C#/MS SQL Server and PHP/MySQL, etc.

A proper IDE, like PhpStorm is cross platform anyway, so it doesn't matter if they use Windows or Mac (MAC = Media Access Control, or it's also a make up store).

Don't jump the gun and work backward. It is important to keep in mind that the development environment should be similar to production, otherwise tons of extra staging tests have to take place if you're working on Windows but hosting on Linux. Case sensitive file system with OS X is close enough to Linux/BSD to where it'd be fairly fine, but again we're back to available languages, libraries, etc.

I second git though, we use that, it's pretty great.

@thecreativeone91 said:

What is it for?

Edit: Oh, it for a new TV series.

Yeah, that took an obscene amount of time.

It's just for a newsletter, what would one possibly be joining?

@Carnival-Boy said:

@tonyshowoff said:

A lot of business owners think grabbing someone by the base of their snarglees and running their lives, draining the happiness out of it, and controlling them like they're teenagers is the best way to get performance out of people,

What if they are teenagers? When I was younger I needed a boss to kick my ass at times. I was reasonably committed to my job, but I was also committed to bars and girls and the three would sometimes conflict. There were times when I was given too much freedom, when I actually needed more structure and discipline. To a degree, the same is sometimes true of me now.

F[moderated] that I don't hire teenagers. Plus it's murky for us anyway since we have an entire adult entertainment division so we just keep it 21+

@nadnerB said:

@lance said:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/windows-10-to-make-the-secure-boot-alt-os-lock-out-a-reality/

Well, I guess it would be Linux first then Windows in VM

Yes, unless it destroys the MBR and so forth, but somebody will find a way around it -- probably very quickly.

Great IDEs

1. PhpStorm if you use PHP
2. RubyMine if you use Ruby
3. If you do JS/node.js WebStorm

Everything else sucks, period, yes especially Eclipse and that other one nobody cares about and Notepadd++ is a highlighter, not an IDE, it doesn't do proper syntax checking, hints, or or anything, nor does that Sy..whatever for OS X.

@thecreativeone91 said:

@tonyshowoff WinAmp is stuck in the 90's still. It's better than iTunes but that's not saying much.

The 90s was my hay-day.

You could probably sell it on eBay for $25 or something, if that's not worth it to you, try Craigslist, and if no responses, take it apart for fun or donate it to a school or something if it still works.

Winamp. I mean there are similar alternatives which run on X, but the little things are missing, and the worst part is that Winamp isn't even that great, and in fact it's kinda crappy.

Everything else is already available if it's worth using.

I do second @scottalanmiller though on Microsoft SQL Server and I'm honestly surprised that Microsoft hasn't done this, but I really know it's because, like Exchange, it's strangled with so many COM+ objects, API calls, etc that porting it isn't really going to happen, instead the base engine and T-SQL parser is what needs to be ported.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Carnival-Boy said:

"At U.S. Robotics we had close to ten thousand employees and we didn't count personal days. We said "Take the days you need." There was a high level of trust. Here's how many employees misused their paid time off: zero. They didn't do it, because they were treated like adults."

I call bullshit on this statement. I guarantee that in any workplace of 10,000 people, many will take the piss. If you're a manager and you're not aware of this, it probably means you need to come down from your ivory tower from time to time.

I've worked at several places that use this policy and the abuse levels are super low when dealing with professional shops. If you have any number of people taking the piss on this, you're hiring poorly.

Indeed, this is our policy as well and we've only had one case of abuse, and it was a receptionist and she was fired a long time ago. Valuing talent and treating people well makes them want to come to work... plus tons of free snacks, coffee (about 10 different flavours of Torani syrups, most of which cannot be found at regular grocery stores), soda, even paleolithic and v*gan compatible snacks, plus we sometimes get lunches and crap.

It costs a fair amount, but we get better performance out of employees than MSPs I worked at years ago, that's why I run mine differently. I still have sales data from two of those MSPs and I've compared a lot from time to time, and in the amount of refunds, miscalculated (under-calculated) work time, etc they still lost way more than we lose in snacks or more days off for people.

A lot of business owners think grabbing someone by the base of their snarglees and running their lives, draining the happiness out of it, and controlling them like they're teenagers is the best way to get performance out of people, but I can say freedom and treating people well works a hell of a lot better.

I didn't even know this would actually work when I implemented these policies (I bought an MSP I had worked for when I sold another company) and was more than willing to stop if it didn't work, but it only got better, and some people who had played hookie from work before, began coming in earlier and staying later, and closing more tickets or committing more code (depending on job).

Crazy!

One I cannot recommend enough and I've listened to every show to date is:

http://thefpl.us/

It's NSFW so don't listen to it around your puritanical boss or great grandfather or something.

They basically go out on the Internet, find crazy things people have written (ideas, recipes, reviews for products, fan fiction, weird sex stories about pokemon, etc) and read them in various voices, etc. There's even a few professional voice actors as well. Some episodes are better than others, but ones I can think of off hand I really enjoyed:

http://thefpl.us/episode/142 - Indie Go Go Go Away
http://thefpl.us/episode/147 - This Episode Doesn't Need A Title, Man
http://thefpl.us/episode/146 - Don't Patreonize Me

Plus ones with this guy tend to be especially great:

http://thefpl.us/meet/adam-bozarth

We just take the devices away as the means to limit usage, so no need for any special stuff there, and we've got a hardware firewall, because I'm pretty nuts.. I mean hardcore... as it is (drop amp, 8 cable modems, etc...)

Anyway, even most off the shelf things, like Netgear routers come with pseudo-"firewalls" (by means of NAT) and allow you to limit time (or create windows of access) based on IP and MAC address.