Rails is fine if you want to do another Basecamp or similar 37signals-type project. It's even better if you want to whip out an amazing number of structurally identical, common-organization Hype 2.0 apps. But just ask the folks at Twitter how well its database access scales to meet demand - it almost put them out of business. Several times. Rails is a poster child for the perils of an application-specific language being used as a general-purpose one.
A lot of things that I read obout it remind me of Python in the early days - but I don't recall Guido van Rossum being so Great Leader-ish, and there's also the difference that Python actually can be used for an amazing range of applications. Ruby can too; it's a beautiful language - until you cut its balls off with Rails.
I wasn't saying either that MS was the only offender or that it didn't happen in other industries.
Rather, the point was that it doesn't happen WITH IMPUNITY in other industries. Ford, for example, can't (and wouldn't) sell a car with a drivetrain they knew had a one-in-ten-thousand chance of falling off when the car hit 30 MPH. And if they did, the blowback could well be an existential threat to the company.
Microsoft believes they don't face any existential threats, marketing bluster to the contrary. They can do what they want, even if they know beforehand that it will break the law and that they will be subject to penalties. Look at the situation in the EU: how much is that costing them? Chicken feed; it's part of "the cost of doing business".
In any industry other than consumer software, Microsoft would have been shut down years ago for negligently exposing consumers to grossly defective products. Vista is the Aqua Beads of software. You wouldn't tolerate this level of nonsense in your automobile, your television, or your kids' breakfast cereal; why tolerate it in a commercial product that has huge economic and public-policy exposure?
Windows knows better than you do what should be done with a new drive. And if it doesn't, that's your tough schist. After all, you're not foolish enough to believe you actually own your computer once you've put Windows on it and connected to the Wild Wild Web? Your friendly global software megalomaniac "owns" it, and some pimply-faced teenager from East Slobodnia pwns it. Don't like that? Use another system....
seriously - autorun (for ANY media - optical or other) should be one of those times when Windows puts up a dialog saying "I'm about to run the autostart program from this drive you just connected. Yes/No/Format?" Any "security" system worth its weight in used toilet paper should do that for you.
...to the bacteria has been returned with a note attached: "Dear humans: If you insult our intelligence again, we'll stop helping you digest for a month or two. If this is indicative of your average intelligence, the world will be a better place with the cockroaches."
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming -- Beavis and Butt-head in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are (heh-heh) like, dead, man!"
We're obsol^H^H^H^H^Hdating ourselves, Rudyard. I had an interview lately with a "senior IT manager" at a firm here (Singapore) who proudly informed me that he'd been "into computers since Windows 95". (Which was really to be expected; if he'd passed 30, he could reach back and choke it without working too hard.) The bane of his professional existence was a set of industry-specific programs that were running on a gen-you-wine Compaq Deskpro 386 and Windows 98 (not SE). He asked me what I knew about (let's just call it FooBar Deluxe) 4.2. I told him that I was on the team that had developed FooBar Deluxe 1.0 to 2.4, that I knew how to automate everything they were doing with FBD with current, open-standard software, and that even if they didn't like the new stuff, that they were idiots for keeping a Windows 98 box around and outside their firewall when there were any number of virtualization solutions available. He continued to fumble with papers on his desk, and running his hand through his (full head of) hair. The next question was whether I had any other particular qualifications for the job (I've been doing IT professionally since '78, for what that matters). I was obviously not going to get the job, by this point.... "Well, I don't have such beautiful hair to run my hands through anymore." (I'm your stereotypical premature half-baldy.)
"Why is that relevant?"
"I tore most of it out while learning to deal with Pretty Boys who don't know how much they don't know."
I never did get a call back.... I read in the paper that the company has been acquired by a competitor, "with extensive staff retrenchment". Couldn't happen to a better group of folks.
The earlier poster who was commenting on the relative levels of polish/thinking through user needs between OOo and M$ was spot on.
2.3 *should* be the coolest thing since ice. Especially with a new chart tool and some cool extensions, this *should* be the version that goes mano-a-mano with Office 2007 and at least stays in the ring the full twelve rounds. As a long-time Open Source promoter running a business moving SMEs to open standards, I was really hoping to have some heavy artillery here.
All of the UI gripes are real. The complete lack of support for statistics in the charting tool is painful. The remaining clunkiness of the charting tool in comparison to what Microsoft ships is *very* painful. On both Linux and Windows, performance and responsiveness have taken definite hits since 1.1. Maybe the Debian and Ubuntu repository folks have the right idea, sticking with 2.2 and not "refreshing" to 2.3 in the repositories (as of 10/10).
Businesses like the idea of "free" as much as home users do - but if the amount of work that actually gets done per unit time takes a hit, that soon outweighs the cost of a more usable non-free package - even at Microsoft's robber-baron pricing. People will choose the devil they know over the saint they don't at least unless and until that "saint" can appeal to them on practical as well as philosophical grounds. OOo has been moving asymptotically close to that -- but they won't, or can't, close the usability/features/polish/perceived value gap. Until it does - or some other open/free alternative rises to present a better challenge to the Microsoft megalith (a much improved KOffice, perhaps?), Li ux and free software in general will continue to stop at the server-room door, not crossing over to the Promised Land of widespread desktop (office and home) use. The second- and third-order ramifications of that are just too depressing to think about this early in the morning.
How much mindless drivel is cluttering up people's minds (memories, thoughts, lifestyles) these days? What, exactly, is being encouraged and reinforced by our attention-deficit lifestyles?
A hundred and fifty years ago, an educated man wasn't just literate and fluent in his own language and/or those of his neighbors (say, Spanish in Texas or German in Walloon Belgium) but also had soemthing of a "classical" education (typically Latin and possibly Greek in these two examples). He had working familiarity with the theology of the religion he adhered to, could quote from its scripture at length, and generally knew and respected at least one individual who had memorized the entire work. Being from a larger family than is common in early 21st century Western society, he knew a much larger "tree" of his relatives than is generally the case today. (Quick: What's the difference between a second cousin once removed and a third cousin? "It doesn't matter now," you say, but society is different now - for good and ill.) He didn't have the technology that is commonplace today, but what he did have, he took it as a given that he had to understand what he used. (again, a broad generalization, but this entire thread is, no?) A childhood friend of mine came from a family with an *eight-hundred-year* oral history; it had been written for over a century, but family tradition still demanded the ability to carry on the oral tradition - emphasizing memorization skills. How many Wii-wielders today could take such a challenge?
How many of the iPod-using generation can explain basic electrical theory? Something as simple as Ohm's Law, let alone, say, the difference between an NPN and PNP transistor? (And if you say "ICs make transistors obsolete," you're proving my point about what you know).
Instead of useful information, our kids learn trivia. I'd be willing to bet that more American grade-school kids know Britney Spears' bra size than know what a subjunctive is, or how osmosis works. I think I'd also be on safe ground wagering that those who are complaining the most about other people's religions pose a "threat to the nation" know very little of that religion and even less of their own. Another inexpensive proposition would be to reward those high-school graduates who are fluent and literate in more than one language. This despite the urgency that globalization brings to effective communication across cultural and geographic divisions.
How to solve the problem? We need to get away from the thinking of the last century or so that schools are primarily a place to warehouse children until they can be beneficial to the current corporate economy. This will in turn necessitate the end of "one size fits nobody" uniform education, enforced by standardized tests that test skills of at best limited lifetime use. Above all, we need to get away from the idea that paper certifications are the sole and sufficient indicator of a person's ability to teach effectively. The gifted are *not* the same as the average kids; neither have the same needs as the "slow" kids...and experience has proven that subjecting them to a uniform edicational system merely guarentees uniform mediocrity as a result. We need a system that provides a general-purpose education that can then be specialized as needed for different phases of life -- *not* the present vocational training masquerading as education which leads only to a mind-numbingly specialized vocation which can become obsolete (and therefore unsustainable) at the whim of ill-defined, inassailable "economic forces", usually standing in for individuals of largely hereditary wealth well-connected to influential corporations and nation-states.
Twenty-some years after we as a society embarked on a "greed-is-good" focus on short-term results/instant gratification at any and all costs, we as a society need to rethink that idea in light of the myriad problems it has either caused or made needlessly worse. Education - and our attitudes towards it - can be seen as a general application of tha
People who aren't from that part of the country might want to first learn about important details like the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Quoting the Wikipedia article (which quotes USGS and the University of Memphis), {t]he seismic zone covers parts of five U.S. states: Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee."
Anything that shakes the ground enough to make the Mississippi River change course or (temporarily) "flow backward", as eyewitness reports have recorded, is not something I particularly care to be close to. But then, I grew up in the Bay Area and, as a loyal Giants fan, was in Candlestick Park for World Series Game 3 on 17 October 1989...."game called on account of earthquake", for those with short memories.
Another reason to get humanity off this rock - it just isn't safe anywhere.
Also a definition of "element" which is poor a choice of words. I fall under that category as an XP user but I haven't been an "element" since I was a teenager if you know what I mean.
There are no XP users. The correct word for people attempting to get useful work from a PC infested with Microsoft Windows is "usee". English, people....
Get Smart. If it were any smarter, they wouldn't make it at all. Don Adams must be rolling in his grave so fast that he couldn't answer his shoe phone. (When is someone going to make a cell phone in a shoe, for the yuppie fan-with-everything?)
for the Reich is to have PATRIOT III include language to require logging and storage of unencrypted copies of all data that has an endpoint on said ISP's server. All your POPS belong to us.....
For the guy a few posts earlier who asked the obvious question about when we're going to get riots in the street, watering Jefferson's "tree of liberty": the two obvious answers are that 1) thanks to the efforts of those who really run the country, consumers (formerly known as "the people" or, in even more archaic terms, "voters") have been relieved of the burdens of "critical thinking" and "political dynamism" since about 1974, and 2) just in case, the Best Congress Money Can Buy has been funding military semi-lethal weapons and domestic deployments (Posse Comitatus? The Decider says it's "just a scrap of paper") since shortly after the events in Item 1. Short version: The United States of America was a Constitutional republic from 4 March 1789 to sometime around November 1974; a hybrid state from 1974 to 12 December 2000, and a fascist kleptocracy since that time. This is just another warhead tossed onto the pile to see how high the rubble of freedom can be bounced.
I'll temper my sarcasm when I stop hearing about other over-30 IT guys like me having to (attempt to) train their replacements, or when more than 2 of the 60 or so over-40 IT guys like me have a job again in the industry we built. Bitter? You're damn straight I'm bitter; in the last ten years, my income has gone down literally 94%...which isn't compatible with living a middle-class lifestyle in what was once the United States of America. I'm the first generation in my family for nearly 300 years never to have to pick cotton for a living - but guess what? exploited, below-minimum-wage farmworkers in California made twice as much as I did last month - and I did better than a half-dozen of my more experienced colleagues.
"Expect freedom"? Too many people have been doing that for the last 30-35 years, and not nearly enough doing anything to make it actually expectable, or sustainable. Witness the current corporate-fascist kleptocracy that replaced what once was a perfectly decent constitutional Republic.
Santayana was a blithering optimist.
Kwitcherbitchen.... WFMI over the last five years has outperformed the S&P 500 and the DJIA, not to mention Kroger and Safeway. Sure there's been a bit of a dip since the first of the year, but if you bought five years ago, you're still sitting on top of better than double your money. Most folks don't do that well over the long term.... and if you're not in it for the long term, then the stock market is just a numbers racket and you get what you pay for (which is where I believe this thread started out, no?)
Fair notice: I have no financial interest in any of the above-mentioned companies. I moved my money out of American stocks to pay my rent many, many moons ago.
...has already blessed us in countless ways. After all, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was when corporations were unassailably entrenched as legal persons within the legal framework of the United States (and other countries which it would later dominate). Without corporate legal personhood, the RIAA and all the other mafIAA, not to mention your friendly local transnational megacorp, wouldn't be in the position of absolute power and unwarranted power over mere natural persons which they enjoy today. So, every time you feel oppressed by some corporate-fascist diktat, give thanks to the railroads, to the Best Government Corporate Money Can Buy, and to the megacorps without whom only freedom would be possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Rails is fine if you want to do another Basecamp or similar 37signals-type project. It's even better if you want to whip out an amazing number of structurally identical, common-organization Hype 2.0 apps. But just ask the folks at Twitter how well its database access scales to meet demand - it almost put them out of business. Several times. Rails is a poster child for the perils of an application-specific language being used as a general-purpose one.
A lot of things that I read obout it remind me of Python in the early days - but I don't recall Guido van Rossum being so Great Leader-ish, and there's also the difference that Python actually can be used for an amazing range of applications. Ruby can too; it's a beautiful language - until you cut its balls off with Rails.
or you did in Ohio as late as '83-'84.... the last 5-cent pay phone I saw was in Miamisburg (outside Dayton) about then....
Didn't Einstein say "I do not know how the third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth--rocks!"?
Robert Heinlein, call your agent.
I wasn't saying either that MS was the only offender or that it didn't happen in other industries.
Rather, the point was that it doesn't happen WITH IMPUNITY in other industries. Ford, for example, can't (and wouldn't) sell a car with a drivetrain they knew had a one-in-ten-thousand chance of falling off when the car hit 30 MPH. And if they did, the blowback could well be an existential threat to the company.
Microsoft believes they don't face any existential threats, marketing bluster to the contrary. They can do what they want, even if they know beforehand that it will break the law and that they will be subject to penalties. Look at the situation in the EU: how much is that costing them? Chicken feed; it's part of "the cost of doing business".
In any industry other than consumer software, Microsoft would have been shut down years ago for negligently exposing consumers to grossly defective products. Vista is the Aqua Beads of software. You wouldn't tolerate this level of nonsense in your automobile, your television, or your kids' breakfast cereal; why tolerate it in a commercial product that has huge economic and public-policy exposure?
After all, to the average non-Redmondian, "Microsoft code" and "defects" are too often synonymous, no?
Windows knows better than you do what should be done with a new drive. And if it doesn't, that's your tough schist. After all, you're not foolish enough to believe you actually own your computer once you've put Windows on it and connected to the Wild Wild Web? Your friendly global software megalomaniac "owns" it, and some pimply-faced teenager from East Slobodnia pwns it. Don't like that? Use another system....
seriously - autorun (for ANY media - optical or other) should be one of those times when Windows puts up a dialog saying "I'm about to run the autostart program from this drive you just connected. Yes/No/Format?" Any "security" system worth its weight in used toilet paper should do that for you.
...to the bacteria has been returned with a note attached: "Dear humans: If you insult our intelligence again, we'll stop helping you digest for a month or two. If this is indicative of your average intelligence, the world will be a better place with the cockroaches."
We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming -- Beavis and Butt-head in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are (heh-heh) like, dead, man!"
We're obsol^H^H^H^H^Hdating ourselves, Rudyard. I had an interview lately with a "senior IT manager" at a firm here (Singapore) who proudly informed me that he'd been "into computers since Windows 95". (Which was really to be expected; if he'd passed 30, he could reach back and choke it without working too hard.) The bane of his professional existence was a set of industry-specific programs that were running on a gen-you-wine Compaq Deskpro 386 and Windows 98 (not SE). He asked me what I knew about (let's just call it FooBar Deluxe) 4.2. I told him that I was on the team that had developed FooBar Deluxe 1.0 to 2.4, that I knew how to automate everything they were doing with FBD with current, open-standard software, and that even if they didn't like the new stuff, that they were idiots for keeping a Windows 98 box around and outside their firewall when there were any number of virtualization solutions available. He continued to fumble with papers on his desk, and running his hand through his (full head of) hair. The next question was whether I had any other particular qualifications for the job (I've been doing IT professionally since '78, for what that matters). I was obviously not going to get the job, by this point.... "Well, I don't have such beautiful hair to run my hands through anymore." (I'm your stereotypical premature half-baldy.) "Why is that relevant?" "I tore most of it out while learning to deal with Pretty Boys who don't know how much they don't know." I never did get a call back.... I read in the paper that the company has been acquired by a competitor, "with extensive staff retrenchment". Couldn't happen to a better group of folks.
wtih a tribute to dyslexics everywhere: how many of you, semi-consciously scanning the page, read the headline as "H.M.S. Pinafore"?
:)
Scareduck, you have a sterling future as a writer of 19th-century British satire. That should come in useful in the 19th century.
Keep it cumming!
At least his youth and any talent he may once have had at acting have been reunited... to baldly go where no ham has gone before
The earlier poster who was commenting on the relative levels of polish/thinking through user needs between OOo and M$ was spot on.
2.3 *should* be the coolest thing since ice. Especially with a new chart tool and some cool extensions, this *should* be the version that goes mano-a-mano with Office 2007 and at least stays in the ring the full twelve rounds. As a long-time Open Source promoter running a business moving SMEs to open standards, I was really hoping to have some heavy artillery here.
All of the UI gripes are real. The complete lack of support for statistics in the charting tool is painful. The remaining clunkiness of the charting tool in comparison to what Microsoft ships is *very* painful. On both Linux and Windows, performance and responsiveness have taken definite hits since 1.1. Maybe the Debian and Ubuntu repository folks have the right idea, sticking with 2.2 and not "refreshing" to 2.3 in the repositories (as of 10/10).
Businesses like the idea of "free" as much as home users do - but if the amount of work that actually gets done per unit time takes a hit, that soon outweighs the cost of a more usable non-free package - even at Microsoft's robber-baron pricing. People will choose the devil they know over the saint they don't at least unless and until that "saint" can appeal to them on practical as well as philosophical grounds. OOo has been moving asymptotically close to that -- but they won't, or can't, close the usability/features/polish/perceived value gap. Until it does - or some other open/free alternative rises to present a better challenge to the Microsoft megalith (a much improved KOffice, perhaps?), Li ux and free software in general will continue to stop at the server-room door, not crossing over to the Promised Land of widespread desktop (office and home) use. The second- and third-order ramifications of that are just too depressing to think about this early in the morning.
How much mindless drivel is cluttering up people's minds (memories, thoughts, lifestyles) these days? What, exactly, is being encouraged and reinforced by our attention-deficit lifestyles?
A hundred and fifty years ago, an educated man wasn't just literate and fluent in his own language and/or those of his neighbors (say, Spanish in Texas or German in Walloon Belgium) but also had soemthing of a "classical" education (typically Latin and possibly Greek in these two examples). He had working familiarity with the theology of the religion he adhered to, could quote from its scripture at length, and generally knew and respected at least one individual who had memorized the entire work. Being from a larger family than is common in early 21st century Western society, he knew a much larger "tree" of his relatives than is generally the case today. (Quick: What's the difference between a second cousin once removed and a third cousin? "It doesn't matter now," you say, but society is different now - for good and ill.) He didn't have the technology that is commonplace today, but what he did have, he took it as a given that he had to understand what he used. (again, a broad generalization, but this entire thread is, no?) A childhood friend of mine came from a family with an *eight-hundred-year* oral history; it had been written for over a century, but family tradition still demanded the ability to carry on the oral tradition - emphasizing memorization skills. How many Wii-wielders today could take such a challenge?
How many of the iPod-using generation can explain basic electrical theory? Something as simple as Ohm's Law, let alone, say, the difference between an NPN and PNP transistor? (And if you say "ICs make transistors obsolete," you're proving my point about what you know).
Instead of useful information, our kids learn trivia. I'd be willing to bet that more American grade-school kids know Britney Spears' bra size than know what a subjunctive is, or how osmosis works. I think I'd also be on safe ground wagering that those who are complaining the most about other people's religions pose a "threat to the nation" know very little of that religion and even less of their own. Another inexpensive proposition would be to reward those high-school graduates who are fluent and literate in more than one language. This despite the urgency that globalization brings to effective communication across cultural and geographic divisions.
How to solve the problem? We need to get away from the thinking of the last century or so that schools are primarily a place to warehouse children until they can be beneficial to the current corporate economy. This will in turn necessitate the end of "one size fits nobody" uniform education, enforced by standardized tests that test skills of at best limited lifetime use. Above all, we need to get away from the idea that paper certifications are the sole and sufficient indicator of a person's ability to teach effectively. The gifted are *not* the same as the average kids; neither have the same needs as the "slow" kids...and experience has proven that subjecting them to a uniform edicational system merely guarentees uniform mediocrity as a result. We need a system that provides a general-purpose education that can then be specialized as needed for different phases of life -- *not* the present vocational training masquerading as education which leads only to a mind-numbingly specialized vocation which can become obsolete (and therefore unsustainable) at the whim of ill-defined, inassailable "economic forces", usually standing in for individuals of largely hereditary wealth well-connected to influential corporations and nation-states.
Twenty-some years after we as a society embarked on a "greed-is-good" focus on short-term results/instant gratification at any and all costs, we as a society need to rethink that idea in light of the myriad problems it has either caused or made needlessly worse. Education - and our attitudes towards it - can be seen as a general application of tha
People who aren't from that part of the country might want to first learn about important details like the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Quoting the Wikipedia article (which quotes USGS and the University of Memphis), {t]he seismic zone covers parts of five U.S. states: Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee."
Anything that shakes the ground enough to make the Mississippi River change course or (temporarily) "flow backward", as eyewitness reports have recorded, is not something I particularly care to be close to. But then, I grew up in the Bay Area and, as a loyal Giants fan, was in Candlestick Park for World Series Game 3 on 17 October 1989...."game called on account of earthquake", for those with short memories.
Another reason to get humanity off this rock - it just isn't safe anywhere.
Get Smart. If it were any smarter, they wouldn't make it at all. Don Adams must be rolling in his grave so fast that he couldn't answer his shoe phone. (When is someone going to make a cell phone in a shoe, for the yuppie fan-with-everything?)
Didn't your mum ever teach you, "look but don't touch"?
for the Reich is to have PATRIOT III include language to require logging and storage of unencrypted copies of all data that has an endpoint on said ISP's server. All your POPS belong to us..... For the guy a few posts earlier who asked the obvious question about when we're going to get riots in the street, watering Jefferson's "tree of liberty": the two obvious answers are that 1) thanks to the efforts of those who really run the country, consumers (formerly known as "the people" or, in even more archaic terms, "voters") have been relieved of the burdens of "critical thinking" and "political dynamism" since about 1974, and 2) just in case, the Best Congress Money Can Buy has been funding military semi-lethal weapons and domestic deployments (Posse Comitatus? The Decider says it's "just a scrap of paper") since shortly after the events in Item 1. Short version: The United States of America was a Constitutional republic from 4 March 1789 to sometime around November 1974; a hybrid state from 1974 to 12 December 2000, and a fascist kleptocracy since that time. This is just another warhead tossed onto the pile to see how high the rubble of freedom can be bounced.
I'll temper my sarcasm when I stop hearing about other over-30 IT guys like me having to (attempt to) train their replacements, or when more than 2 of the 60 or so over-40 IT guys like me have a job again in the industry we built. Bitter? You're damn straight I'm bitter; in the last ten years, my income has gone down literally 94%...which isn't compatible with living a middle-class lifestyle in what was once the United States of America. I'm the first generation in my family for nearly 300 years never to have to pick cotton for a living - but guess what? exploited, below-minimum-wage farmworkers in California made twice as much as I did last month - and I did better than a half-dozen of my more experienced colleagues. "Expect freedom"? Too many people have been doing that for the last 30-35 years, and not nearly enough doing anything to make it actually expectable, or sustainable. Witness the current corporate-fascist kleptocracy that replaced what once was a perfectly decent constitutional Republic. Santayana was a blithering optimist.
Kwitcherbitchen.... WFMI over the last five years has outperformed the S&P 500 and the DJIA, not to mention Kroger and Safeway. Sure there's been a bit of a dip since the first of the year, but if you bought five years ago, you're still sitting on top of better than double your money. Most folks don't do that well over the long term.... and if you're not in it for the long term, then the stock market is just a numbers racket and you get what you pay for (which is where I believe this thread started out, no?)
Fair notice: I have no financial interest in any of the above-mentioned companies. I moved my money out of American stocks to pay my rent many, many moons ago.
...has already blessed us in countless ways. After all, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad was when corporations were unassailably entrenched as legal persons within the legal framework of the United States (and other countries which it would later dominate). Without corporate legal personhood, the RIAA and all the other mafIAA, not to mention your friendly local transnational megacorp, wouldn't be in the position of absolute power and unwarranted power over mere natural persons which they enjoy today. So, every time you feel oppressed by some corporate-fascist diktat, give thanks to the railroads, to the Best Government Corporate Money Can Buy, and to the megacorps without whom only freedom would be possible.