SQL Server has IDENTIY(), Postgres has sequences. 99% of the time these operate the same as autoincrement, with all the same problems. I doubt Oracle, Sybase and DB2 lack this feature by another other name. While popularity does not make this feature right.

[quote]
In the good ol’ days when I had to walk to school 20 miles each way in the ice and snow, naked, disk space was expensive and RAM was even worse. Then this kind of approach would have been appreciated as a cost cutting move. Nowadays? Fuhgeddaboudit.
[/quote]

DBs are one of the areas where this does not really apply. No matter how many gigs of music/video/word document I have I’m only using one at a time so there is a “fast enoiugh.” When I have a blog, an accounting system, or something else, I want a billion people to be able to access said blog. I want to be able to store a millions of articles and billions of comments in one database. I also want to serve them to hundres of people a second. From that point of view, keysize matters. Of course, if you want to be able to shard and have an artificial key, even a a 96bit OID or a 128 bit UUID is smaller than most email addresses.

I know nothing about an anti-vaccination movement. I’m happily signing up for the anti-pharmaceutical cartel movement though.

If I knew these scientists were actually independent thinkers and were researching for the sake of research, I’d be all for it. But they never find a solution. They always seem to find a disease that is just about to blow up and be a major issue. Then right afterwards one of the multinational pharmaceuticals announces that they have a solution, if you can pay the price.

The scientists are not conducting research, they are justifying a business plan. If they were actually practicing science, I’d defend them tooth and nail.

Let’s stick with your software analogy. Imagine my web software only ran on a special computer, and I was the only person that sold that computer. And that computer cost a $#%load of money.

There’s absolutely no conflict of interest or ethical quandary if I make a buck, right? Nope, that makes perfect sense, we call it capitalism!

Medical industry is not the same though. There are ethics and standards that are supposed to be practiced and they aren’t. Two questions for you then:

1) When the WHO announced that swine flu was a pandemic, did you notice the immediate press release from the pharmas that they already had a fix that was in trials? Timing is everything, what a coincidence…

2) Speaking of the swine flu, do you know where it came from? And the vaccine, how much profit did that turn? Was there not enough profit to justify helping impoverished nations combat the outbreak? I mean, the outbreak was bad enough to be called a pandemic right?

Back to the statement of ‘mindless vaccination’ – when the pharmaceuticals are bankrolling the researchers, and the solution always happens to be a product that is in a TRILLION dollar industry, something is up.

I’m a computer scientist, and it would be totally hypocritical for me to be anti-scientist. This isn’t science though. This is economics, and for the medical industry that is extremely questionable.

Here’s some independent research from someone that was NOT bankrolled by a pharma:

http://www.neiu.edu/~agkanali/ACTG450/Pharma.html

Hopefully you will at least understand my cynicism.

To me, it sounds like you don’t trust scientists. You say you’re against ‘mindless vaccination’ as if the general population is equipped with the skills to comb through the data and come to the correct conclusion. You can liken it to me looking over some of your code and hoping to understand what it does — I can’t, because I’m not an expert in the field.

An anti-vaccinationist would shudder if I told them I trust the consensus of the scientific community. And it is a consensus. We’re not talking about one scientist who comes out of his basement and wants to inject you with a strange substance — no one would want to be injected by that guy. We’re talking about a global community of scientists. They’ve done the research, and they agree that vaccines work.

That’s why I said the anti-vaccination movement is a conspiracy movement. If you don’t think vaccines work, then you’re saying that this community of scientists is conspiring against the public. Either that, or you have the extreme hubris to say that their data is wrong. That’s me combing through your code and saying it won’t make a website, even though you, and all your programmer colleagues, assure me it will.

The newer frameworks, like Yii and Kohana are created for PHP5 and obviously are much optimized (and therefore fast and scalable) as compared to Cake.

My assumption is there is a URL mapping provided by the default theme that is not available in many 3rd party themes.

Did you have any problems using the app with this theme active?