HP, with their non-Android based WebOS, was the only company capable of making a dent - or a beachhead - against iPad sales. When you have two parties making h/w and s/w for a tablet all you get is finger pointing and blame when problems arise. My LG Optimus smartphone crashes/reboots about once a week. Nobody takes responsibility. I cannot pay $50 to get Android 2.3 or 3.0. As soon as I buy the device the support is gone. It's the disposable feature-phone market all over again, but this time with tablets and Android.
It's not always the tech or sexiness of the Apple brands that attract people, it's their commitment to fixing bugs. (I'm not saying they're superb at it, but nobody else seems to be trying at all)
He said it was $7k/yr FLAT FEE. That means it doesn't change no matter how many people he hires. In fact, the regulations are set up so that he should hire as many people as possible to get the most use out of his $7k.
But, less than question mark and a space are not a valid XML combination. XML processing instructions cannot begin with a space. Likewise, PHP cannot run commands into the short tags, like <?echo $foo; ?>. So, there really is no collision, it's just grandstanding.
Also, if you can code the change yourself it gets rejected as "not a bug" for a few times, then they think about it and say that it's too late for any reasonable release and that it will go into PHP 6 or 5.3 or something that you won't upgrade too because it breaks too much other stuff.
Boo, deleted short tags. Why do people hate short tags again? I can't remember because <? is not valid XML so there shouldn't be any problems with mixing php and xml... hmm... I wonder ....
Yes, they feel invisible because they weren't made because the guy had an accident because he shows up to work high and operates heavy machinery and gets hospitalized and the company's insurance rates go up.
The performance issues have just been masked with caching. The template layer makes hundreds of useless classes each request. Could speed it up 40% or so with flyweight pattern on the template classes. Could reduce memory usage each request by not using XML config files and not included configs for modules that are turned off.
ZF and CI are horrible examples of coding practices. They are extreme examples of "make a class for everything because you can". ZF file and directory structure is at odds with PHP 6's namespaces, in fact it will probably have to be completely thrown away to make way for a ZF 2.
CI doesn't even have the base class of any "controller" defined anywhere for you to read. It is created on the fly every request. This guy is a noob and doesn't understand what good programming is.
I find it nearly impossible to navigate adobe.com. Takes like 2 or 3 days of visiting, getting frustrated/lost and then stopping for me to get the latest version of flash.
WP is trash. You can speed it up about 10 times with just a couple query fixes and removing the 100 extra calls to stripslashes you get when you pull a get var 100 times.
Sounds like really bad coding taken to another level. At some point in your program you will know which thumbnails are needed for the page. Instead of structuring that logic and commenting it well, perhaps even turning it into a sub-system or library, you pepper the templates with database calls. And then, you waste more CPU time by scanning the full HTML output of a page multiple times.
This is like AJAX all on the server side. All the hassle of async processing with none of the benefits.
The challenging thing about freelancing is trying to convince customers that they're solving the wrong problem. Companies generally don't need another flex/php/.net/python/ruby expert, they fail to understand that they need to adhere to software development standards. The old chestnut, "We're not a software shop" never gets old.
Once you actually define the problem enough to put it into a "challenging" category, it's already been solved. The challenging part anyway. The rest is just doing what's already been set out. Very rarely will you hit upon a company that admits, "you know, if we just scrapped everything and start over with TDD and CI we wouldn't have any problems."
It's not always the tech or sexiness of the Apple brands that attract people, it's their commitment to fixing bugs. (I'm not saying they're superb at it, but nobody else seems to be trying at all)