It's only "wasted" if you got no value out of it. If you thought it was entertaining (which, presumably people who watched it many times did) then it's no more of a waste than time spent listening to The Beatles or Beethoven, relative merits aside.
201 karma · joined March 22, 2011
Its like if Mercedes Benz claimed "only we could come up with the idea of a steering wheel, seat belts and a motor" when announcing their new model vehicles every year.
If they were still doing the "everybody plays, everybody gets a participant ribbon" thing on the varsity team, that would be weird.
But folks outside the tech industry are dropping PCs completely in favor of these types of consumption-centric devices.
Google Glass, in its current iteration, will likely never catch on with consumers. But it's a limited availability "preview" for a reason. Something like this is eventually going to get cheap enough and usable enough that consumers will buy it.
The ecosystem is the valuable thing, and they'd be insane to throw that away. All the problems he notes are basically just a result of WordPress growing and changing over the decade it's been around, and/or direct results of having originally been written in PHP 4.
Gradual refactoring, as you say, makes more sense. Otherwise you might as well just build an entirely new system from scratch.
Whether or not it makes sense as a WordPress add-on is not really taken into account by users, who just see it as easy to set up and manageable from the same dashboard as the rest of their site.
It's very likely that this utility also breaks some of the sandboxing of metro applications, introducing security vulnerabilities that don't exist in vanilla Windows 8.
That said, this utility looks cool, and I hope Microsoft encourages, rather than discourages, stuff like this going forward. Let the power users customize the environment however they like.
But there are good reasons that they don't enable this out of the box.
Whether they will end up succeeding is yet to be seen, but this does definitely seem like an area where competition will benefit the greater good, as displacing PHP with any one of the better designed languages out there would benefit the internet as a whole.
I do wonder though: is the procedural nature of PHP equally responsible for it's adoption by inexperienced developers?
Sure, PHP is cheap and widely available, but you also don't need to understand the concepts behind object orientation to hack together a "dynamic" website with a few includes. And at that point you're just familiar enough with PHP to favor it for future development.
In the 2nd part of Example 2, using "else if" instead of several "if" statements to check the same value would result in fewer comparisons having to be done since the way it's written now the second comparison will always run even if the first one was true. It would be even better to use a switch statement if you're comparing the same variable in each case.
TV is obviously still around, but it's much more of a bazaar now.
Lots more people have access to the internet, or are internet-savvy enough to use social media sites, than twelve years ago, when MySpace was in its prime.
There were no MySpace apps for iPhone or iPad, because the most popular phone at the time was the old Nokia "snake" phone.
Granted, it's much less aggressively bad than MySpace was at that time, since people can't arbitrarily embed HTML/CSS/JavaScript wherever they want, but its stock prices are absurdly over valued and it has never found a way to monetize its audience, and it has totally lost the trust of its users.
The main thing Facebook has going for it is that everyone is on it. But most high-profile people only use it as a place to link to their profiles on the services they actually use, and people will follow the people they "follow" on to new services, if you follow me.
I think it's safe to say that it will become more and more of a ghost town over the coming year or two.
However, the solution isn't to pick a new, slightly larger point size and just set everything to that, it's to use media queries to set an appropriate size for whatever medium the content is being displayed in, and to use sizes relative to the user's default rather than specifying exact point sizes.
You can also use absolute sizes (in and cm in CSS) so that the browser will display the font at the given size without regard to the display resolution or DPI.
Edit: Also, I highly recommend Readability, but obviously it'd be preferable if people just did the right thing to begin with.
Having tightly coupled objects that depend on other classes in your application that you wouldn't expect is worse than having a little bit of business logic in your controller (or some service object), in my opinion.
Plus he should probably just break the send_email method into it's own method, which he can then call depending on if create_contact returns successfully.