Gloriously under-reported in Australian mainstream media. So far the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corp.) is the only one carrying it on its front page.

It's great to see that level of commitment to a team, but it was also a smart move - those guys knew that the intellectual capital sitting in those employees heads was one of Pixar's biggest assets. Get rid of them so they can go work for a competitor? Nuts.

Which then makes me wonder: If they had gotten laid off, how many of those employees would have followed them to the next job?

If your employees are valuable enough, and loyal enough, you might actually win either way in that situation.

If you have no prior affiliation or interest in a particular martial art, choose a school based on the master and the school's culture, rather than the type of martial art.

A good master will make any martial art learning experience great. A poor one will ruin any school.

Go watch a class - are the students training diligently, treating each other respectfully, and being taught firmly but carefully by their instructor?

The master sets the tone, culture, and norms of the school. In a sense the master is the school.

I've been training Hapkido in Melbourne, AU (www.hkd.com.au) for the past 12 years, which ticks all the above boxes.

Congrats on everyone so far avoiding the 'martial' as 'marital' typo :)

Luke!!! You're on HN! Small world indeed. Luke's my instructor who taught me a lot already and keeps teaching, so here's one more vote for hapkido I guess.

Kinda cool, but can anyone imagine why'd you'd do this with PHP?

I had a go at using this a little while ago to implement (erlang style) message passing concurrency in PHP:

http://github.com/dhotson/phork

The main use case is something like: Let's say you've got a mysql query that's going to take a few seconds. In the meantime, you can do some other useful work in PHP while the query runs.

The amount of complexity it could introduce to an application doesn't seem worth the minimal amount of gain.

Probably true. But it depends. Let's say you've got 5 queries that take 1 second each.. There's a potential 5x speedup if you can run them in parallel.

I think some basic concurrency support in PHP (such as Futures) would have a pretty huge benefit. The other alternative is to have async APIs for libraries like mysql.

You could argue that anything that is taking too long that it needs parellelizing is probably a candidate for a background queue + frontend polling (or similar).

It still doesn't make sense to me. I can either use my time to fix the queries or use my time to play around with this disaster waiting to happen.

It's not just db queries though.. it's also things like 3rd party API calls (S3 for example).

Basically anything where you're blocked waiting for a response you could be busy doing something else.

Synchronous APIs are kind of wasteful in a lot of cases. Node.js does a good job of this by using async APIs.

It's a tradeoff. But the extra complexity can be worth it if it means your pages load 2x faster.

My web app has a large amount of data that needs random portions to be served by a PHP script. Because speed is of utmost importance, the data resides in RAM.

I first built a working solution in PHP using IPC Shared Memory Segments and later ditched it in favour of PHP+Redis (you could use your own NoSQL datastore of choice of course).

For me, it was way simpler/cleaner to implement and I got a bunch of features for free.

Shared memory can be handy when you need to keep a secret off disk yet accessible while a machine is running.

In corporate-land, enterprise web applications are generally .net or Java.

Enterprise Java is referred to as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). In this case, the web output a user sees in a browser is generated on an application server using a mix of Java code and templated HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc.

Yes, but the interesting question is why? Many large corporations indeed use Java, and the often-touted reason is safety and/or speed. Is that still a valid answer in today's web dev world? What would you recommend that AT&T for example uses if they could start all over again today?

IMO, Java is appreciated for the following reasons:

  - there are plenty of reliable open source libraries (see Apache)
  - it is easy to learn and to maintain
  - the IDEs are good (IntelliJ IDEA !)

So, yes, this is still a valid answer, IMO.

also, the performances are quite good, and you are able to buy support from ibm/sun/oracle.

Neither it's true for python/ruby/perl etc.

there are more java and .net programmers out there than python/ruby programmers. hence a java programmer is easy to find, cheaper to hire and less disruptive to fire. This is probably one of the most important reasons why corporations prefer java/.net over ruby on rails/python. that said, when a programming language is around for more than a dozen years, it gains the tag of being reliable ( rightfully so).