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You know... I didn't remember ever hearing anything like this happening with them. But, since you asked:

A quick google search and a few minutes turned up the following situation involving Google Checkout. I do remember a string of other things (not related to checkout) that google has recently gotten into that doesn't exactly show that they are perfect including privacy issues, bowing to polital pressures in faraway lands, etc.

As for authorize.net, I'd never even heard of them. I'm not interested in hunting down their complaints as I'm confident they're out there too... everyone has screwed up or been put into an unwinnable situation before.

And I'm not by any means saying Paypal is right for what they did. I'm just saying that immediately jumping ship to one of these other companies that have the exact same capabilities is probably very close to jumping out of the hot frying pan and into the fireplace (whether the logs are on fire or not).

The question is an example of the Slashdot version of How do I build a forum?"

You can only work in a technical service position for a limited amount of time before it loses its luster and shine, and you start to follow. Once you've performed a job for several years, you get into the groove and know how it's done. The knowledge is all there, somewhere, and it becomes routine to just look it up and spit it out on demand. You keep doing this, time and again, and eventually become a fixture: unchanging, unmoving, static.

The problems compound when this job involves the general public. Any technical job that involves helping masses of uncensored human beings understand technology will eventually wear the average man down, causing him to go bat-shit crazy and scream at the top of his lungs while trying to take out a swath of them with a surprise barrage of old SCSI cards. The largest catalyst for such violent behavior and general mental breakdown is best described by stating, simply, that most people exist at a significant intellectual delta from that burnt-out husk of a technology worker.

This doesn't have to pose a problem in an ideal world. In an ideal world, common people would be willing to accept advice from anyone capable of delivering it. In this real world, however, half of those that acknowledge that they need such assistance will turn violently against anyone they seek help from with such winning phrases as: "What do you think I am, stupid?" In most of the remaining cases, the user is a support vampire and that simply ruins those willing to try and help as badly as being berated for offering the answer. This behavior is evident in forums, mailing lists, in person, and most especially on the phone with technical support.

As a technical support agent, you develop mental calluses that help you move on and through the chaff and treasure the customers that are amiable, acknowledge that they need help, and are happy with the answer they're given. Genuinely happy. A good number of calls are actually like that and make the job bearable. A similar number are very, very far from it.

However, the core reason of why I recently quit my job in AppleCare is that in commodity technical jobs there's only so far you can go before you arrive at the end of the career path for the masses of technical agents and hit the lid where only five or ten pass upwards. Ever. When you get there, you have two choices for moving ahead: wait for the person in the cushy job you want to leave or die to make room and pray that it's you among the masses that applied that gets it, or move ahead elsewhere. After waiting for someone to bite it in a freak keyboarding accident for four years, it was time to go with Plan B.

So one day, when I had a life outside of the company set up and ready, I walked up to my manager and said: iQuit.

Bitchman Begins

I worked in Austin's AppleCare center for four and a half years as a desperation move after a programming gig decided they'd rather give it a go without me several months earlier and my severance and unemployment checks stopped paying the bills. I've used a Mac since I had control over my mousing finger, so performing remedial technical support for Macs was an obvious choice for some quick money. Mac OS X 10.1 had just come out a few months previous, which was the only free upgrade Apple has ever released for Mac OS X as it was mostly an apology to those that bought Mac OS X 10.0. The PowerBook Titanium was the king of the road, until you opened it the 333rd time and the hinge decided it was time to move on in life. There were other Apple products, but I didn't care because those were the two I was told I supported at the time.

The job was remarkably easy, but it had been a long time since I'd done phone support, so I had a lot to learn on the procedural side. They have a shortish training course that they put all new-hires through that taught them how to use iMovie, what an iPod was (the 5GB bricks, at the time), and how to troubleshoot Mac OS 9 (no one was

As others have noted, what Rails generates for you are stubs. Even if the stubs are full-featured enough to let you add, edit, view, and delete objects, they're still stubs. It's just that RoR is succinct enough that generating 150 lines of code (including action views and layouts) is all that's necessary to provide all of that functionality in a very basic way.

But, two links for your consumption.

My article on the topic of what I call Scaffold Withdrawal
http://www.slash7.com/articles/2005/12/07/the-fall -from-scaffolding

Structure generation vs code generation (from the Rails' creator's blog)
http://www.loudthinking.com/arc/2005_10.html

It's true that "Ask Slashdot" is vehicle for enlightenment, but I didn't think it was a vehicle for the basest laziness. I don't understand why someone would go Ask Slashdot instead of looking at a couple F/OSS Rails app packages and deciding for himself whether or not they look "maintainable."

If the submitter did, he'd find that it's clear that maintaining Rails apps is no problem. You don't have to know much about a given app to even do serious "maintenance" on it. As long as the programmer hasn't tried really hard to break all the benefits Rails brings to the table (regular file structure, MVC separation, clean models, helper classes, etc), then you'll already know a lot about how the app is structured before you even unzip it.

If I understand you correctly, a large part of your problem was with the code-generated scaffolding. It is true that scaffolding doesn't help you with anything complicated and is hard to maintain. The reality is that most Rails developers stop using scaffolding after the first few days once they've figured out how Rails really works. The problem is that the slick Rails video automagically makes a site with scaffolding in under 15 minutes, so everyone thinks scaffolding is integral to Rails development.

As someone else said, the key is to drop scaffolding altogether. I actually think Rails is hurting its own adoption by featuring scaffolding. At the very least, they should make it clear that scaffolding is best used as a learning device while you are getting started.

My company was contracted to work on Ning, and we've been doing it for over 3 months. It makes me a bit sad that everyone seems to be missing the point of what makes Ning truly great.

It's the data. The SHARED data. It's an ecosystem, not just a platform or a hosted framework. Ning is much greater than any individual application, and I personally don't think that the true popularity will come from the dating applications. Ning's much bigger than any given application (and by that I mean piece of software and application as in "the way it's used"), and it's not a mega app. It's an app playground.

See my blog post on the subject: http://www.slash7.com/articles/2005/10/05/fun-time s-startup-launches

And sometimes LAMP applications don't run PHP, BFD.
Who are you, the acronym nazi? Why are you getting so bunged up?
You knew what they were talking about, right?
Right?

FWIW, all acronyms, by definition, are 'marketing' terms, mainly for mnemonic purposes.
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