Even if PhotoShop has these capabilities, it's not a tool for the masses. The goal of ScrapWalls seems to be making it easy for anybody to make the collage whereas not everyone has or knows how to use PhotoShop.
I'd call the API a success: it has thousands of authors releasing thousands of plugins and themes and this is only the code that's been released open-source.
#1) True. It does not use an MVC paradigm. That's not the way it was designed, and they're not able to make it MVC w/o breaking backward compatibility with the huge ecosystem of plugins and themes that currently exist.
#2) True, and I agree. The function naming could be improved. If you don't know what the function does, look it up in the codex or the source code. The documentation could improve, too, but one of the stated goals for their next development period is improved docs.
#3) Look at the docs. Yes, the_title() writes to the page. If you want to use the title in a variable, there is get_the_title(). There are generally other functions or parameters you can do if you want it to return the value rather than writing it.
#4) False. The comments template file is comments.php.
WordPress is abandoning support for PHP4 and MySQL 4 in version 3.1. This will allow them to incorporate many of the features in PHP5 they haven't been able to do yet such as stronger OOP.
It doesn't need a rewrite. Instead, work with the many brilliant devs who have been improving it for years and know it inside-and-out -- including its flaws and areas for improvement.
For development, 256 works pretty well. If you host more than one site or have a lot of dynamically generated content, you can quickly surpass the 256MB limit and need 512MB.
This depends a lot on the stack you're using and what software your site depends on.
Blue Box Group, EC2, Linode, Rackspace Cloud, Slicehost, ... there are a lot of options out there depending on the features you require and the level of support.
The walkthroughs cover a variety of distros including Ubuntu, Debian, and CentOS and can be quite useful regardless of where your VPS is hosted. The articles emphasize good security practices as well which can be helpful for a beginner to understand.
The other thing to do is dig into the docs for anything specific you plan to work on. I tend to look for tools with good documentation before getting started. I've always been impressed with Apache HTTP Server's documentation (http://httpd.apache.org/) and have learned a lot by referencing it when I've had issues.
Whenever you have questions, ask friendly geeks for help. I always do best with real-life assistance, but IRC is a good way to go as well.
Same. I've tried their normal site and mobile site.
I was excited about the sale and the chance to purchase an ebook in a format that would work on my Android phone, but this experience has dampered my excitement.
As a technology publisher, O'Reilly should be ashamed of themselves.
http://blog.afterthedeadline.com/2009/09/08/after-the-deadli...