If you're looking for a mac to dabble in iOS development but you don't want to spend a lot of money, go for a Mini. The newest generation Mac Mini is like $570 on Amazon and is more than enough machine. It has a bonus of being tiny and silent and fitting on your current desk alongside your primary machine without getting in the way.

I mean things like data being irrecoverable or problems that require wiping your OS and starting from scratch again.

I don't consider things like hardware failures to be the OS' fault on either Macs or PCs.

I don't think its reasonable to assume that the Genius Bar is dealing with mostly catastrophic failures, but I'm sure they get some. I would never claim that Macs are perfect and don't fail.

I came along right after the switch to Intel so I don't know what Macs were like before that. I'm not sure what you mean about the iPad or Air. I don't see myself getting an iPad but almost everyone I know that has one loves it. I also had an early Air and it was perfect for what it was (a small portable laptop). I've heard really good things about the newest Airs and it seems likely that in a year or so I'll buy one and use it as my primary dev machine.

LOL to paraphrase: "I've never had a piece of hardware fail with company A, but with company B the software fails all the time!"

This is ridiculous. I work for Dell, so I'm biased, and I've had nothing but A++ would deal with again experiences with Apple's customer service. Have had awesome support experiences with my iPhone, iPad, and iPhone accessory support needs. Seriously, they are good.

FYP.

I'm glad this forum is picking up a bit. It was getting kind of slow for awhile.

I wonder to what extent how good people think they are, depends on what country you live in, because allthough my sisters experiences have much to do with it. Its not only that. For a while there were a number of media reports on people having very bad experinces when their products failed. But as I acknowledged before, my reaction is prob a bit of an over reaction.

In a sense its sad that the only real competitor to microsoft is another company behaving in much the same way

Mvh
Inga

I have to say, over the past few years, my view apple as a company has gone down hill. I love their products, but I do think that they are becoming a bit too pushy and not really caring about their customers.

Anyone know how when doing something like a while loop in php and separating the output with a comma or something that I can have the last output not have a comma?

So say I have:

[PHP]
while ($row = db_fetch_array($query)) {

$html =' test '.$row.', ';
print $html;

}[/PHP]

This would output something like test 1, test 2, test 3,

I cannot figure out how I would do this without having the "," after test 3. Any thoughts?

I usually do something like:

[PHP]
$out = "";
while ($row = db_fetch_array($query))
{
$out .=' test '.$row.', ';
}
$out = substr($out, 0, strlen($out)-2);
print $out;
[/PHP]

that is: build up all the output in a variable during the loop, once complete chop off the final two characters which should be ", " then print it in one shot.

Also not at all sure about this, but IIRC I read somewhere print is slow, so it's nearly always better to assemble a larger chunk of output then print it in one go rhater than many small print commands in a loop.

Thank you, that seems to be easy enough. I had never heard of the issue with print, but good to know. I am usually printing it outside of the loop anyway, but now I will look out for that.

Also, I have never quite understood why/when you put the '.' in front of the "=" like you did. Is it only when you have multiple outputs to concatenate them together?

a .= b is the same as a = a . b

i don't know which ones php has but this is a common idiom: +=, -=, *=, etc.

you better check that $out has a length > 0 or you'll get an exception here. This could easily be the case if your query returned 0 rows

I haven't had any major issues with Windows in several years, it's been pretty solid since XP imo.

Ya, Vista was a dream...

[PHP]
$html = array();
while ($row = db_fetch_array($query)) {

$html[] = ' test '.$row;

}
print join(',',$html);

[/PHP]

Lol. This.

Although to be fair, XP was pretty good. Of course, since it was book-ended by ME and Vista I don't give Microsoft much credit for it.

I'm betting that's the "right" way to do it.

I've been running Vista at home on a desktop that I've had for several years now and never had problems.

Yeah that looks much better
I should have noted it in my post, but I didn't do any testing and just googled "php trim last character off a string", and "translated" the technique I use normally in ahk, a language without proper arrays and also where trimming a zero length string is no problem!

Say what you want about php but theres always a cool way to do stuff with it. What other language has a built in levenshtein function?

PHP's haphazard, irregular, randomly constructed library is one of its demerits.

My principal complaint with php is that it insists upon itself

mac users, is it still true that there is no way to maximize a window? and is apple still trying to sell this as a "feature"? or did they finally give in and implement maximize?

The biggest problem with Java are the people that have been convinced that proper Java requires every class to have an interface, all functions to be less than 5 lines long, and all classes to be less than 7 functions.

I'm working on an Open Source Java project and figuring out the logic for even fairly simple things involves looking through 5 functions and 10 files. I swear to God there are private methods that are only one line long and just set an instance variable.

this is a pretty strange complaint unless you aren't working with a decent IDE. Code that is too granular is a far less serious mistake than code that isn't granular enough. If you are using Eclipse, the type of searching you are talking about just involves hitting F3 a few times. Of course, the code in question might have a poorly designed class architecture, but this issue is orthogonal to the philosophy of keeping methods and classes short.