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Of course I didn't RTFA

And everything you wrote was off topic, and yet people moderated you to +4 "Insightful".

What Microsoft has done differently this time is that it used its army of lawyers to trademark, patent, copyright, and protect every aspect of the "ribbon". This is a licence to use UI designs, which Microsoft has protected. Knowing infringing patents increases the damages a good deal. So by promoting this licensing agreement, Microsoft is basically ensuring that people know that there are patents. What Slashdot is doing is propagating that knowledge.

Here's what you wrote:
Seriously - would you lose any sleep because MS won't give you a new toy? Even if OO.o wanted it, and even if MS gave them it, they probably couldn't use it because it'll probably be Vista- (or at least Windows-)only.

Microsoft isn't giving you a new toy. It's licensing the right to use patents/other IP to people who don't compete with Office.

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

I doubt it. You haven't read enough. Obviously, you haven't RTFA so you don't know WTF you are talking about. Let me give you another FA not to read here.

"Software is not interchangable, as the StarOffice marketing team is learning. Even when the price is zero, the cost of switching from Microsoft Office is non-zero. Until the switching cost becomes zero, desktop office software is not truly a commodity. And even the smallest differences can make two software packages a pain to switch between."

And seeing as most critics have slammed the new MS Office UI as being generally awful, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that OO.o's similarity to the "old" MS Office UI might pick them up a few users.

Where do you read that? Microsoft is taking a gamble with the new UI by introducing a lot of change. You apparently don't read the same reviews that I do. Maybe you just don't read reviews. So let me look around for some Office 2007 reviews...

PC Magazine
"Pros: New interface give beginners the same power as experts. Dazzling new graphics engine. Massively improved security. Smoother collaboration.

Cons:
Not all applications get an interface overhaul. New interface can't be customized--yet. Potential for document-sharing problems with users of versions before Office 2003."

Pointer to 22 page review on NeoWin I found the comments following the link to the review interesting.

There is a reason why I don't read /. very often, and your +4 insightful reply is neither +4 nor insightful.

By replying to this, I know I'm giving up my moderating/meta-moderating power, so people who do meta moderate... please do your job and remove this gibberish...

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between nine, count them, nine options: two icons and seven menu items.

So, it appears to have taken Joel 5 years to discover that the "80% rule" of software design wasn't what he thought it was: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 20.html Actually, take that back: there is not at all clear he has realised it yet. The point is to focus on the functionality which satisfies 80% of your users. That's very different from saying that you only need 20% of the features to get 80% sales!

Seems like this is just another shot in the feud between Spolsky and Heinimer Hansson?

The Joel Test

1. Do you use source control?
2. Can you make a build in one step?
3. Do you make daily builds?
4. Do you have a bug database?
5. Do you fix bugs before writing new code?
6. Do you have an up-to-date schedule?
7. Do you have a spec?
8. Do programmers have quiet working conditions?
9. Do you use the best tools money can buy?
10. Do you have testers?
11. Do new candidates write code during their interview?
12. Do you do hallway usability testing?
Read the article for details

Joel has a very good article on this at joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html written several years ago.

I wonder if Google will forward your gmail address if you decide to quit?

In certain situations this is useful and is already being used to an extent. But rabid use of it is generally bad. Remindes me of hammer factory factory

In all fairness to the guy, he probably just did something similar to this Joel on Software article.

Joel Spolsky has a good article about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 50.html

Basically, you have to be willing to give competitive pay. Your company can give itself an edge with some items that are 'cheaper than money' like interesting projects and a plush work environment.

I know a lot of you people fly into a rage at the mention of his name, but: Joel Spolsky on this very topic and related topics.

I know a lot of you people fly into a rage at the mention of his name, but: Joel Spolsky on this very topic and related topics.

Charles Simonyi is the Hungarian in Hungarian notation (you know, m_lpszUsrTxt and the like).

To be entirely fair to him, it wasn't intended to make variable names inscrutable, it applied to a language with weak type checking and few real types, and it still has valid uses today if you use it to mark information about the type of data instead of the "type" of variable.

"If somebody was to illegally obtain a copy of each of those, they have "over $7000 worth of pirated software," ignoring the fact that nobody, ever, has any excuse for charging over $500 for any piece of software. Seriously. I predict that if a price cap of $500 on all software was imposed, the global pirated software trade would decrease by a factor of 10 (note: the actual number of copies would remain the same, but no longer would the average person have tens of thousands of dollard worth of pirated software)."

If people are willing to pay for it, I say it's fair. If this wasn't the case, these companies would lower their price.

Piracy may have also allowed for these things (pretty ironic..isn't it?). Piracy may have been used as a grass-roots effort to make something popular.

So your answer to stopping pirating software is to force companies to stop charging a certain price for it? I like the free market. It allows someone to charge $100 or $1000..and if you don't want to pay it, you can go somewhere else.

I also don't think it would decrease pirates at all. Check out http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ sometime. There are many Micro-ISVS that sell software for under $100. When a pirate website gets a copy, and people start getting a cracked copy..it is very easy to see sales go down to nothing at this level, which is what would eventually happen to a bigger company..if they didn't have the resources.

Large companies like microsoft might be able to handle it, but small companies just end up going out of business. Piracy actually keeps companies like Microsoft and Adobe on top of the software market.

Oh, I can answer this one (although I suspect that anyone working on IE7 might have a different, official answer).

There is one strong, obvious reason why MS still needs it's own browser.
With every app slowly moving to the web, and the slow death of shrinkwrap software (i.e. you buy it at staples and it installs), you need one thing to have a usable computer: a web browser.

Problem is, you don't need Windows to run a web browser.

This is the situation that MS was trying to prevent back when they went out of their way to quash Netscape, albeit, it turns out, they were somewhat unsuccesful (thank-you-open-source).

So, what do you do now? You're in danger of becoming obsolete in the desktop arena, the one where you cash the majority of your profits in.

Well, you release your own newfangled browser to compete with the other, portable browsers - for one.
People hate change (even techies and software developers); if you have a good running browser in one platform, well, no reason to switch.

Finally, if you have a virtual monolopy on any market, you set the defacto standard (see every comment in here bitching about how they code for Firefox, then go about putting in IE hacks). All you need to do is move a bit forward and everyone has to rush to implement what you've been upto, or face becoming effectively useless and obsolete.

If firefox gains more marketshare, you might start to encounter more and more web devs who refuse to code for the outdated horror that is IE, which only further propels FF. This way MS can still hedge it's bets and keep people locked in. (Re: Why IE still doesn't fully implement W3C standards, and introduces it's own Javascript oddities).

Google netscape, "extend, embrace, extinguish", etc.

Oh, I can answer this one (although I suspect that anyone working on IE7 might have a different, official answer).

There is one strong, obvious reason why MS still needs it's own browser.
With every app slowly moving to the web, and the slow death of shrinkwrap software (i.e. you buy it at staples and it installs), you need one thing to have a usable computer: a web browser.

Problem is, you don't need Windows to run a web browser.

This is the situation that MS was trying to prevent back when they went out of their way to quash Netscape, albeit, it turns out, they were somewhat unsuccesful (thank-you-open-source).

So, what do you do now? You're in danger of becoming obsolete in the desktop arena, the one where you cash the majority of your profits in.

Well, you release your own newfangled browser to compete with the other, portable browsers - for one.
People hate change (even techies and software developers); if you have a good running browser in one platform, well, no reason to switch.

Finally, if you have a virtual monolopy on any market, you set the defacto standard (see every comment in here bitching about how they code for Firefox, then go about putting in IE hacks). All you need to do is move a bit forward and everyone has to rush to implement what you've been upto, or face becoming effectively useless and obsolete.

If firefox gains more marketshare, you might start to encounter more and more web devs who refuse to code for the outdated horror that is IE, which only further propels FF. This way MS can still hedge it's bets and keep people locked in. (Re: Why IE still doesn't fully implement W3C standards, and introduces it's own Javascript oddities).

Google netscape, "extend, embrace, extinguish", etc.

So you have a law phrased in several different ways so that everyone understands... what do you do if there is ambiguity between phrasings?

Nothing's ever going to be perfect and eternal. Things and language are changing all the time, and there's always going to be something that somebody never thought of. You can keep adding words and sentences and specifics until your face turns blue, but the law will still have uncharted territory - maybe not today, but eventually.

The nature of this conversation reminds me of The Law of Leaky Abstractions ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstra ctions.html ), since language is just an abstract way of communicating our thoughts.

Think of it this way: Was the Windows API perfect when Windows 3.1 hit the shelves? No. They've added functions and parameters, which most likely were not needed at the time of its original creation.

Cell phone users are hopeless. Of course they'll care.

Furthermore, you can bet that Apple will get it right where others like Sprint couldn't.

Personally, I just hope you can use that iPod circular input as a rotary dial!

Be paid to help any big company expand by commoditizing their complements. (As usual for Joel, you can't tell whether it's his own idea or whether there's another, better treatment out there.)

hmmm, lets see what joel has to say about this

Let me, for a moment, talk about the famous Aeron chair, made by Herman Miller. They cost about $900. This is about $800 more than a cheap office chair from OfficeDepot or Staples.

They are much more comfortable than cheap chairs. If you get the right size and adjust it properly, most people can sit in them all day long without feeling uncomfortable. The back and seat are made out of a kind of mesh that lets air flow so you don't get sweaty. The ergonomics, especially of the newer models with lumbar support, are excellent.

They last longer than cheap chairs. We've been in business for six years and every Aeron is literally in mint condition: I challenge anyone to see the difference between the chairs we bought in 2000 and the chairs we bought three months ago. They easily last for ten years. The cheap chairs literally start falling apart after a matter of months. You'll need at least four $100 chairs to last as long as an Aeron.

So the bottom line is that an Aeron only really costs $500 more over ten years, or $50 a year. One dollar per week per programmer.

A nice roll of toilet paper runs about a buck. Your programmers are probably using about one roll a week, each.

So upgrading them to an Aeron chair literally costs the same amount as you're spending on their toilet paper, and I assure you that if you tried to bring up toilet paper in the budget committee you would be sternly told not to mess around, there were important things to discuss.

The Aeron chair has, sadly, been tarnished with a reputation of being extravagant, especially for startups. It somehow came to stand for the symbol of all the VC money that was wasted in the dotcom boom, which is a shame, because it's not very expensive when you consider how long it lasts; indeed when you think of the eight hours a day you spend sitting in it, even the top of the line model, with the lumbar support and the friggin' tailfins is so dang cheap you practically make money by buying them.

QuantumG has obviously not used the GIMP in many years--drawing a circle in it is at least as easy as drawing a circle in PhotoShop, as multiple posters have pointed out.

Also, Excel is hardly a paragon of design.

You might be interested in this article.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 20.html - the software is bloated until the users can't find a feature that he desperated need. Vista is inline with the current hardware technology.

also look at

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidet oDevelopers.html

basically most developers would be a lot happier with a private office (with a door!) than in the typical cube farm arrangement.

Have you seen Joel's article on what his office looks like? http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffic e.html

In reality most software is either continously developed or it dies.

Euh... yes and no.

As Joel has pointed out, you need to continuously develop something for many years, but after it reaches a critical point, you only need to do a little maintenance. It's done.

All of the hot software I use today that's been around for 10 years hasn't seen any major changes in many years. GCC, Photoshop, Emacs, Illustrator, ... -- they're done. Sure, there's still work being done, and they even get new features now and then, but nothing major.

(Here's where some dork jumps out and says "healing brush!" or "autovectorization!". Yeah, yeah, sure, it's an important feature to you, but it's still just one feature. The app didn't change much.)

Even if you found and fixed every bug (haha), feature requests will continue to come in as people use the software. As soon as bugs/feature request quit coming in most software is essientially dead b/c that means people have quit using it.

True, but at some point you just can't respond to everything, even if you had infinite resources. I'm working on a project and some people say "it must do A!" and other people say "it must do B!" and A and B are contradictory. One group is *always* going to be upset, and keep nagging me. (Until at some point I decide to come up with a really, er, innovative solution, like the Vista Office Ribbon, and then the A people and the B people are *both* upset for a while...)

And if you have a 10-year program that's done, you can't really change the UI drastically without fear of losing people. Or, more likely, the task which it accomplished is either no longer important, or best solved some other way, or whatever. (If GCC dies, it won't be because it's a crappy C compiler, but because nobody cares about compiling C any more. It'll happen, someday.)

Take Slashdot, for example. It hasn't changed very much at all in recent history (except for some CSS). Is it dead? Jokes aside, no, it isn't.

were pretty much not doing anything but helping the manufacturers of $800 office chairs get rich

Those $800 office chairs are worth every penny. Everyone at my company has one (unless they prefer something else) and I'll never again work for a company that does not provide them. When you're spending 8+ hours a day sitting in a chair, you need a good one.

If you have to teach people something, you have already failed. Users Don't Read the Manual. So if your interface expects them to do so, your interface is probably flawed.

They are not trying to guess what the users might do, they are doing some serious research on it. As a result, they have come up with some great improvements such as kickoff. And their new HIG

It is not about the computer deciding what is best, quite the opposite, on usability you are supposed to empower the user. The link is from what will become their next HIG. It is pretty safe to say that KDE has allways done well in this particular area.

As Joel pointed out ( http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLet terV.html ) you want your product's companion-products to be commodities. People can buy your thing knowing they can get the rest of the kit cheaply from various other places - then you compete just in terms of your own product, not in terms of other stuff you have no control over.

Despite what you may have read on slashdot, design is not about making everything "cool". Design is about making things *appropriate*. For Apple, these are often one and the same, but this is not always the case: even the trash can on the corner had to be designed by somebody.

In the case of the OLPC, a design goal was for it to stick out, and scream "educational". This will help reduce theft, they believe. Garish colors are good for that.

Similarly, a mail truck isn't as sexy as an Audi. But that's OK, because it has different purposes. It's hard to imagine anybody wanting to steal a mail truck, and that's more important than Newman having a sweet ride.

I think Joel Spolsky said it all here:

  http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 73.html/

Hire people who are #1 Smart, #2 Get things done.

Of course Smart is somewhat a matter of opionion (i.e. what I consider smart, you may find irrelevant), and culture and chemistry are important too, but I think his article is a good guide to finding the right people. At least it works for me :)

"You don't believe the researchers? Contact them about it. You cannot site a single study to support your point of view, but you are making blind assertions based on the statements of biased parties. Whether or not you believe actual research, the numbers show that P2P networks, including Napster, have not had a statistically significant impact on content sales."

One piece of research (every slashdotter making the argument for piracy uses the exact link that you posted) is not proof. I have first-hand experience. I have been involved in many small to mid-sized software companies and I know that piracy hurts sales..without a doubt (large companies might be able to take the hit) (want proof? go to http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ .. the BoS section and ask how piracy has effected sales..you will get some interesting and eye-opening responses).

I also know someone who is an independent artist and tried to sell MP3s online. His sales were great for the first month or two..until his songs started getting shared on many of the P2P networks at the time. Sales declined after that..and he eventually was forced to take all of his MP3s offline (and not offer digital downloads in the future).

For small, independent artists (the people filesharers claim to be protecting), P2p networks are only working against them. This is because the more popular a song is, the less money they will make (because it will be more available on a P2P network). For a large company or recording studio, it might take a lot longer for them to see these effects, but it will eventually happen if they allow people to share their content for free on a P2P network.

"Kazaa outdid Napster's popularity, with Napster peaking at under 30 million registered users and Kazaa peaking at over 50 million. Kazaa is also a far more efficient network than Napster was and it scales better. The RIAA has been 100% ineffective at preventing P2P traffic. This cannot be explained by anything other than people who cannot afford to buy CDs going to P2P networks instead. How is this different from the pre-Napster days of burning copies of your friends' CDs?"

Can't afford a CD? Don't fucking download it (it's just that easy). It's no excuse and it just makes my point. If you can afford high speed internet access, you can afford music.

When you burn your friends' CDs, you might only be able to get a few CDs a week/month. With P2p, you can get almost any song off of a CD whenever you want. This is the difference.

Also, Napster was in the news every other day during its peek. Kazaa might have been in the news once or twice during its popularity.

"In fact, P2P filesharing is no more dangerous to profits than CD burners, which were lobbied against, or FM radio, which was lobbied against...the RIAA has a history of vehemently opposing any new technology that allows people to hear music when they could not have afforded to otherwise. It is a group that is led by millionaires, who can afford to buy whatever music they wish to hear, not average people who have to be scrupulous in their buying decisions."

What about a radio? There are a ton of radio stations in most areas..and you can listen to music for free.

This is a typical standpoint by lazy and or naive people that have no idea what it takes to create a work of art or make money. All millionaires must have all the breaks in life....right?

Making money is fucking hard..and most people who have a lot of it..worked their ass off to get in that position (of course, there are exceptions).

He said: "even the simplest metaphoric GUI.."

Right. The simplest metaphoric GUI. The problem is with bad metaphors, and the fact that many popular GUIs are riddled with them.

The ribbon took the most popular features, the 10% or so that your normal person uses, and made them easier to get to. Menus are really, really slow to navigate. And everyone knows how to use tabs.

I mean, yes, Word 2007 would have probably annoyed a lot of old-timers, but the ribbon was well-designed. It was, imho, a step in the right direction. I'm saddened that it has been dropped.

By now I've performed about 80-100 tech interviews for a variety of IT companies. I will ask the brain dead questions, but ramp up accordingly. I essentially want to ask just enough to know whether or not I can say with confidence "HIRE" or "NO HIRE". ( Recommend reading: Joel On Software )

If relevant, I will ask for some white-boarding of UML, or a code fragment to perform a simple task.

I do all of this because, I have found that age means nothing. I've worked with some seasoned geeks who taught my colleagues and I alot on the latest technologies. I've also worked with a guy I hired who had well over 20 years experiences and was absolutely useless. I can personally say the same to guys just a few years in the field.

It's a crap shoot...and I don't like to gamble.

Another way I look at it... I've also been on the receiving end of an interview at least a dozen times. When this happens I try to show my patience when going through the brain-dead questions, because I know acting rushed or anxious is a sure way to send bad mojo to the interviewer, even if I've nailed all the tech questions.

I know I'm interviewing for a good contract when the interview switches to more challenging questions based on my answers. If the interviewer just runs through the list or makes self-contradictory statements, there is a good chance it's either a manager who doesn't know the subject matter or possibly a technie called in to give the interview and isn't good at it. At which point, it can be a fun challenge to turn up the charm with the interview, because I know the questions coming are no sweat. The degree of confidence shows leadership skills and does stick in their mind when making decisions. (Especially if the interviewer WAS a non-technie.)

P.S.: Also regarding semantically incorrect or self-contradictory statements... I sometimes deliberately throw out a misstatement to see how the interviewee responds (if at all).

--
Help me find 3 kidnapped children!
Cheers.

Bad programmers are a dime a dozen, which is why so are bad programs.

Good programmers are worth their weight in gold, or at least 10-28 times their weight in bad programmers.

Anyone could hire some teenage VB6 script kiddie out of school to bodge up something similar to what they were thinking for dollars an hour, max. The trick is in finding someone who'll take on your vague idea[1] and develop it into something beautiful, functional and usable that you can take credit for.

That is neither easy nor cheap to outsource.

Footnotes:

[1] I'm sorry, but if long experience developing has taught me anything, it's this: If you don't know how to code, and have no experience of coding, you have no idea what you want.

You might have the vaguest inkling of what you desire, but you won't have considered 90% of the edge cases, it'll be wrong in at least three ways and the whole requirement will need re-writing by the developer once he understands what you actually do want.

All Excel added was running with a native Windows UI.

On the contrary: Excel was the first spreadsheet program to take spreadsheets out of the financial planning domain and make them useful to everyone. People had been using spreadsheets for all kinds of other things before, but only Microsoft actually noticed this and gave people the tools for it (in Excel 5.0). Lotus, at the time, was working in the opposite direction with Improv, which was really good at financial planning but not so great at the rest. Joel Spolsky explains more here.

I wrote a blog post about this a while back: the basic spreadsheet model and its tools are incredibly useful for a whole bunch of different jobs, and Excel was the first software to really make use of this. The spreadsheet structure has become as fundamental and useful for data as the text file, the document object model or the relational database. The reasons for Excel's market dominance may have more to do with the marketing and positioning of MS Office in general, but both recognising the use of spreadsheets as a fundamental datatype and assisting it with easy tools is why it's revolutionary.

Is it really hard to imagine that Bill Gate's is a good programmer? Just about all the history/bio's of him and MS I've read focus on how he is very technically-oriented vs. simply interested in the business aspect of the application. He is well known for asking tough questions of his developers. I'll point you to this history of Bill Gate's reviews [joelonsoftware.com].

i think the answer is- because they can.

here is a very interesting article on the subject of product pricing.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRu bberDuckies.html

Bad idea if you're doing heap allocation in a time-critical code section. Heap allocation ala 'malloc' isn't deterministic, it can take significant time if there's heap fragmentation.

With a generational garbage collector there is a pool of memory in the young generation (typically called "eden") that new objects are allocated from, and they are all contiguous, and there is a pointer to the end of the allocated space. Allocating a block of memory is literally as cheap as incrementing that pointer.

On a somewhat related note, Joel wrote about the importance of languages which manage memory for you automatically in his article How Microsoft Lost the API War. It's from a while back but it's still a great read, so if you missed it, correct that right now.

Bad idea if you're doing heap allocation in a time-critical code section. Heap allocation ala 'malloc' isn't deterministic, it can take significant time if there's heap fragmentation.

With a generational garbage collector there is a pool of memory in the young generation (typically called "eden") that new objects are allocated from, and they are all contiguous, and there is a pointer to the end of the allocated space. Allocating a block of memory is literally as cheap as incrementing that pointer.

On a somewhat related note, Joel wrote about the importance of languages which manage memory for you automatically in his article How Microsoft Lost the API War. It's from a while back but it's still a great read, so if you missed it, correct that right now.

Experience: 7 years
Title: Progammer
Location: Barcelona, Spain
SALARY: 20.000 Euro a year

Experience: >10 years dev and IT
Title: IT manager
SALARY: $50,000 a year

Experience: 5 years
Title: Tech Lead - Project Director
SALARY: 35000 Euro

Keep in mind that the best talent already has jobs.

For home and independent use, where one has the luxury of being oriented to functionality rather than tied to specific products, there are few barriers to going Mac. Robust choices are available for word processing, web browsing, email, and a wide variety of other tasks.

There is a nice series of articles (Strategy Letters), the most directly applicable to going Mac is the one that discusses barriers to entry. In the past few years, Apple has neatly address all the psychological obstacles, including serious issues like cost and familiar hardware and software, and trivial details like multi-button mice. At the very same time Microsoft is asking its customers to invest heavily in new hardware and a new user interface, Boot Camp is making it easy to keep running the old stuff! Like it or not, sometime in the next few years, most people will find themselves in the market for new hardware and a new OS. Really, why wouldn't a reasonable person give OS X a try?

I am optimistic that Apple really will capture significant consumer market share, say 25%, over the next few years. The increased acceptance in the home could reasonably be expected to heightened awareness of the importance and value of cross-platform compatibility. Might this in turn be the tipping point to thawing the software monoculture? Like many here, I sincerely believe Microsoft's dominance is holding back the whole IT industry. Am I being naive to pin so much hope on Apple?

It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?

Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:

They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.

JWZ might have also written one about it, but I don't recall it. I read quite a bit of his stuff a while back. What you are discussing sounds exactly like a Joel on Software article.

Any chance this article rings true with you?

Kirby

another supporting opinion on this subject
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 69.html

Joel has addressed this technique long ago, and far away: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog00000000 69.html

I have to agree with this. Django, while underdocumented (again though, thanks to Mr. Spolsky's Law of Leaky Abstractions needing to go through the source to learn how something works is acutally a pretty good learning metaphore) is really the framework Rails should have been. Dynamically compiled models, complete decouplization from it's separate components (don't like the template system? use something else! or just write HTML to the output. or XML. or whatever), and thanks to the recent branch merge, a lack of "magic" which helps when you're trying to figure out why something didn't work when it was supposed to "just work."

plus, the built in admin interface is super easy fgor getting stuff started, and while it does have some drawbacks, is still a pretty solid freebee that just doesn't exist anywhere else.

and lastly I don't want to have to run another server. mod_ruby doesn't work correctly, and i'm already running apache2. i just run mod_python and don't have to worry about proxy requests or lighttpd configuration (or the problem with high loads and lighttpd/fastcgi interaction).