As with any comedy, some of its great and some of it fails, and a lot is in between. But some of the people on Amazon are basically review comedians, and they're really really good. And maybe the best funny-per-word ratio, of uranium ore:
I purchased this product 4.47 Billion Years ago and when I opened it today, it was half empty.
Right. As computing devices with a user-facing operating system become more and more ubiquitous(at least in the short term), Linux will win from the bottom-up. The price of a device will be inversely correlated with the manufacturer's willingness to shell out the money for a Windows license, and the price of computing is continuing to fall (obviously)
In the same way that humans are the only technological civilization on the earth, we're likely the only technological civilization in the universe as well. The time scale of evolution pales versus the time scale of intelligently-directed technology, so as soon as one group develops technology it will near-instantly spread and conquer ever-larger areas of space. In the same way that we've come across other intelligent but non-technological species (primates, whales/dolphins, birds), we'll likely come across other intelligent and non-intelligent species as we conquer the universe in the relatively near future. Maybe even technological civilizations inferior to ours (there's still a small window of opportunity for another civilization to beat us to the punch and take over earth), but we can predict the general shape of those encounters by looking at the history of such encounters on earth (the first being the destruction of neanderthals)
What's funny is this is practically just a restatement of a fermi paradox, except instead of asking "why aren't they here", it takes into account what would likely happen if they were here - we'd be gone
Does anyone think the web per-se will still exist 25 years from now, much less 100? Clearly to some extent all the major players(Mozilla, Google, MS, Apple) want to push the web in a variety of directions. Can Mozilla give us a vision of what sort of Mozilla product we'd be using say 15 years from now to browse the "web"
That's not sarcasm, I'm genuinely curious. 15 years ago Mosaic had just been released. Today people can message each other online using a wireless network that didn't exist back then, on a tiny iPhone that's an order of magnitude more powerful than desktop computers from 1993. Can Mozilla really write a business plan that looks even 15 years into the future and tells what it's place will be?
You could use gmail as conduit for other data. e.g. email a URL to gmail, some server-side app checks the mail account, loads the page for you, and sends it back in a reply email. You could presumably also have an Android app that hides the mechanics of this to allow you to just load web pages or other data through gmail, free of charge
If you're using FF 3 and want to try out 3.1, chances are you've got a bunch of extensions that will get disabled. Doesn't look like they made any major changes that should affect extensions, so just go to about:config and add/set "extensions.checkCompatibility" to false
Seriously now Sony wants us to call BluRay 'BD'? That sounds like a disease you'd catch from an upscale hooker. 'Damn you, now I have painfully inflamed BD on my Wii'
Seems like a growing trend of "watching the watchers" websites. I also know of nocheckpoints.com, that sends out alerts about police conducting random sobriety checks. There are a great deal of Americans who feel the police have been increasingly overstepping their bounds constitutionally and professionally, and an internet-based push back against this is a great idea
Actually, unless you don't expect one or the other format to win, releasing on both seems unethical. Eventually one of these formats will die, and the people who've bought discs in that format will be left holding the bag
The people who will write apps for the iPhone are Mac developers, because iPhone is running a lite version of Mac OS X. Almost any Mac developer is all already writing Obj-C/Cocoa, and would much prefer that to Java. Apple used to allow Java/Cocoa development and then killed it because no one wanted to use it
Well it's funny, because I believe weblog.rubyonrails.org is using Mephisto, which creates a static HTML cache of posts after they're hit the first time, and only updates the cache when the post changes. So the vast majority of requests to the post should be getting served straight from the webserver without even running any Ruby/Rails at all. The slow site would be more attributed to a lack of hardware resources than anything involving Rails
Things like this sound silly until you understand the cases where they make code much cleaner and more readable. For instance, creating an association within ActiveRecord:
The second example, rewritten with more rigid syntax: belongs_to(:publisher, {:class_name => 'Company'})
Or making a link within an ERB template: <%= link_to @book.name, @book %>
Ruby's 'loose' syntax in certain places allow framework/API designers to give their users cleaner, more declarative code. Most places in Ruby you will use parentheses for method calls, but it's nice that when you don't need to - you don't need to
And then I think "Doh! Why does this exist in the first place? Why not just write that SQL query inside a GetMonster() function inside the application?"
Heh. In Rails that would be Monster.find_all_by_name('whatever'). Without creating any methods at all - ActiveRecord 'created' it for you. The guy below mentioning protecting data from programmers - if that's the philosophy you want to use, why not just quit now?
And I'll admit, SQL databases don't exactly make it easy for anybody (how about letting DBAs create a VIEW with the "Rails design", on top of a properly designed database? That's what views are for! Codd is rolling in his grave).
Go for it - I've done it more than once when I needed to get data out of legacy(and very poorly designed) databases. Rails supports this and it works just fine. The one point you make that I really agree with you on is ActiveRecord's inability to detect changed attributes and save only them to the database. You may want to take a look at DataMapper, a bit of a different take on a Ruby ORM
No, in Rails conventions you would have a join table, called 'loans_tax_parcels' with the loan_id/tax_parcel_id fields, and then your Loan model would say: has_and_belongs_to_many:tax_parcels
and your TaxParcel model would say: has_and_belongs_to_many:loans
And then you could do @loan.tax_parcels, or TaxParcel.find(:all,:include =>:loans), etc.
If you do a search for "composite keys rails", hit #1 is this, a gem written by a fairly prominent ruby programmer that makes it trivially easy to use composite primary keys within ActiveRecord. My guess is if you actually cared about this issue, rather than just raising it as a canard to bash Rails with, you would have found this solution to your problem and wouldn't be posting here
Re:Scaling matters if you're Digg. Are you Digg?
on
Ruby on Rails 2.0 is Done
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Exactly. The fact is, Ruby is slow. Rails is slower. This is a very accurate complaint about Rails as a web framework, although in the real world it's generally not much of a problem. Somehow though, people have confused speed with scalability, and start claiming the Rails isn't scalable. In fact Rails tends to encourage or at least make fairly easy a shared-nothing architecture which allows a trivial "throw more servers at it" solution to scaling
That said, because of Rails speed, you will wind up needing to scale it sooner and larger than you would a site written in Django, say. If people want to complain about the hardware costs of running a real-world Rails site, I encourage them to do so and put up real numbers regarding the money they spend on developer time and other company expenses vs. server costs, and how Rails being so CPU-hungry is killing their bottom line. So far I've seen none of that, just uninformed whining
Please just try Rails for a little while. While Rails has its flaws, overall it's a highly productive framework - and much of the credit for the terrific code clarity goes to Ruby, which is much more powerful and dynamic than almost any other mainstream language(other than maybe Javascript)
Some things to read about and try within Rails: * ActiveRecord's ability to introspect the DB schema at runtime. e.g. autocreating the method to allow: User.find_by_name('Joe') * ActiveRecord's magic-fields, e.g. created_at/updated_at * the ActiveRecord associations, and the easy DB queries that come with them, e.g. @user.posts.find(:all,:conditions => {:status => 'pending'}) * the scope_out plugin, which provides some nice additions to 'with_scope'. e.g. in the Post model you could do scope_out:pending,:conditions => {:status =>:pending}, and then be able to change the previous example to: @user.posts.pending * ActiveRecord callbacks and the controller before/after filters * the RESTful routing and easy links that come with it, e.g. link_to(@user.name, @user) will create a hyperlink to the correct URL for that user record's 'show' page * the form/field helpers which also integrate with the routing, so you can now do just form_for(@user) - it will create a proper form tag for hitting either the create or update method for that @user, depending on whether the record has already been saved to the database - the form_for/fields_for block syntax is also very powerful, especially when you add your own form helper methods * all the convenience methods provided by active_support, like 5.minutes or 1.month.ago * Ruby itself - Ruby is simply a joy to code in. even if I were going to dump Rails, I would now strongly prefer to find a new Ruby framework(like Merb) than using another language
I'd strongly urge you to pick one or more of the PHP MVC frameworks to look at while you read about Rails. Most of them are copies or at least inspired off Rails to some degree, so they often use similar conventions. You'll see the difference between what's possible in PHP and Ruby - PHP doesn't come out looking too good at the end
Slashdot Mirror
As with any comedy, some of its great and some of it fails, and a lot is in between. But some of the people on Amazon are basically review comedians, and they're really really good. And maybe the best funny-per-word ratio, of uranium ore:
Right. As computing devices with a user-facing operating system become more and more ubiquitous(at least in the short term), Linux will win from the bottom-up. The price of a device will be inversely correlated with the manufacturer's willingness to shell out the money for a Windows license, and the price of computing is continuing to fall (obviously)
In the same way that humans are the only technological civilization on the earth, we're likely the only technological civilization in the universe as well. The time scale of evolution pales versus the time scale of intelligently-directed technology, so as soon as one group develops technology it will near-instantly spread and conquer ever-larger areas of space. In the same way that we've come across other intelligent but non-technological species (primates, whales/dolphins, birds), we'll likely come across other intelligent and non-intelligent species as we conquer the universe in the relatively near future. Maybe even technological civilizations inferior to ours (there's still a small window of opportunity for another civilization to beat us to the punch and take over earth), but we can predict the general shape of those encounters by looking at the history of such encounters on earth (the first being the destruction of neanderthals)
What's funny is this is practically just a restatement of a fermi paradox, except instead of asking "why aren't they here", it takes into account what would likely happen if they were here - we'd be gone
Pretty good combat the horror of life advice. OTOH, DFW killed himself this year, so maybe that's not a ringing endorsement
Does anyone think the web per-se will still exist 25 years from now, much less 100? Clearly to some extent all the major players(Mozilla, Google, MS, Apple) want to push the web in a variety of directions. Can Mozilla give us a vision of what sort of Mozilla product we'd be using say 15 years from now to browse the "web"
That's not sarcasm, I'm genuinely curious. 15 years ago Mosaic had just been released. Today people can message each other online using a wireless network that didn't exist back then, on a tiny iPhone that's an order of magnitude more powerful than desktop computers from 1993. Can Mozilla really write a business plan that looks even 15 years into the future and tells what it's place will be?
You could use gmail as conduit for other data. e.g. email a URL to gmail, some server-side app checks the mail account, loads the page for you, and sends it back in a reply email. You could presumably also have an Android app that hides the mechanics of this to allow you to just load web pages or other data through gmail, free of charge
Hey! I'm 26 damnit
If you're using FF 3 and want to try out 3.1, chances are you've got a bunch of extensions that will get disabled. Doesn't look like they made any major changes that should affect extensions, so just go to about:config and add/set "extensions.checkCompatibility" to false
I can't upmod you any more, but just wanted to say thanks - that's one of the best comments I've ever seen on /.
Seriously now Sony wants us to call BluRay 'BD'? That sounds like a disease you'd catch from an upscale hooker. 'Damn you, now I have painfully inflamed BD on my Wii'
Seems like a growing trend of "watching the watchers" websites. I also know of nocheckpoints.com, that sends out alerts about police conducting random sobriety checks. There are a great deal of Americans who feel the police have been increasingly overstepping their bounds constitutionally and professionally, and an internet-based push back against this is a great idea
And small but rapidly increasing numbers of jobs is evidence of a "huge backlash against Ruby lately"? Or were you just attacking a straw man?
Yeah, I feel really sorry for Ruby
Actually, unless you don't expect one or the other format to win, releasing on both seems unethical. Eventually one of these formats will die, and the people who've bought discs in that format will be left holding the bag
The people who will write apps for the iPhone are Mac developers, because iPhone is running a lite version of Mac OS X. Almost any Mac developer is all already writing Obj-C/Cocoa, and would much prefer that to Java. Apple used to allow Java/Cocoa development and then killed it because no one wanted to use it
Ahh sorry, I misread the GP. It isn't
Well it's funny, because I believe weblog.rubyonrails.org is using Mephisto, which creates a static HTML cache of posts after they're hit the first time, and only updates the cache when the post changes. So the vast majority of requests to the post should be getting served straight from the webserver without even running any Ruby/Rails at all. The slow site would be more attributed to a lack of hardware resources than anything involving Rails
Things like this sound silly until you understand the cases where they make code much cleaner and more readable. For instance, creating an association within ActiveRecord:
:authors :publisher, :class_name => 'Company'
has_many
belongs_to
The second example, rewritten with more rigid syntax:
belongs_to(:publisher, {:class_name => 'Company'})
Or making a link within an ERB template:
<%= link_to @book.name, @book %>
Ruby's 'loose' syntax in certain places allow framework/API designers to give their users cleaner, more declarative code. Most places in Ruby you will use parentheses for method calls, but it's nice that when you don't need to - you don't need to
And then I think "Doh! Why does this exist in the first place? Why not just write that SQL query inside a GetMonster() function inside the application?"
Heh. In Rails that would be Monster.find_all_by_name('whatever'). Without creating any methods at all - ActiveRecord 'created' it for you. The guy below mentioning protecting data from programmers - if that's the philosophy you want to use, why not just quit now?
And I'll admit, SQL databases don't exactly make it easy for anybody (how about letting DBAs create a VIEW with the "Rails design", on top of a properly designed database? That's what views are for! Codd is rolling in his grave).
Go for it - I've done it more than once when I needed to get data out of legacy(and very poorly designed) databases. Rails supports this and it works just fine. The one point you make that I really agree with you on is ActiveRecord's inability to detect changed attributes and save only them to the database. You may want to take a look at DataMapper, a bit of a different take on a Ruby ORM
No, in Rails conventions you would have a join table, called 'loans_tax_parcels' with the loan_id/tax_parcel_id fields, and then your Loan model would say: :tax_parcels
:loans
:include => :loans), etc.
has_and_belongs_to_many
and your TaxParcel model would say:
has_and_belongs_to_many
And then you could do @loan.tax_parcels, or TaxParcel.find(:all,
If you do a search for "composite keys rails", hit #1 is this, a gem written by a fairly prominent ruby programmer that makes it trivially easy to use composite primary keys within ActiveRecord. My guess is if you actually cared about this issue, rather than just raising it as a canard to bash Rails with, you would have found this solution to your problem and wouldn't be posting here
Exactly. The fact is, Ruby is slow. Rails is slower. This is a very accurate complaint about Rails as a web framework, although in the real world it's generally not much of a problem. Somehow though, people have confused speed with scalability, and start claiming the Rails isn't scalable. In fact Rails tends to encourage or at least make fairly easy a shared-nothing architecture which allows a trivial "throw more servers at it" solution to scaling
That said, because of Rails speed, you will wind up needing to scale it sooner and larger than you would a site written in Django, say. If people want to complain about the hardware costs of running a real-world Rails site, I encourage them to do so and put up real numbers regarding the money they spend on developer time and other company expenses vs. server costs, and how Rails being so CPU-hungry is killing their bottom line. So far I've seen none of that, just uninformed whining
What language do you use that's more readable and expressive than Ruby?
Please just try Rails for a little while. While Rails has its flaws, overall it's a highly productive framework - and much of the credit for the terrific code clarity goes to Ruby, which is much more powerful and dynamic than almost any other mainstream language(other than maybe Javascript)
:conditions => {:status => 'pending'}) :pending, :conditions => {:status => :pending}, and then be able to change the previous example to:
Some things to read about and try within Rails:
* ActiveRecord's ability to introspect the DB schema at runtime. e.g. autocreating the method to allow: User.find_by_name('Joe')
* ActiveRecord's magic-fields, e.g. created_at/updated_at
* the ActiveRecord associations, and the easy DB queries that come with them, e.g. @user.posts.find(:all,
* the scope_out plugin, which provides some nice additions to 'with_scope'. e.g. in the Post model you could do scope_out
@user.posts.pending
* ActiveRecord callbacks and the controller before/after filters
* the RESTful routing and easy links that come with it, e.g. link_to(@user.name, @user) will create a hyperlink to the correct URL for that user record's 'show' page
* the form/field helpers which also integrate with the routing, so you can now do just form_for(@user) - it will create a proper form tag for hitting either the create or update method for that @user, depending on whether the record has already been saved to the database - the form_for/fields_for block syntax is also very powerful, especially when you add your own form helper methods
* all the convenience methods provided by active_support, like 5.minutes or 1.month.ago
* Ruby itself - Ruby is simply a joy to code in. even if I were going to dump Rails, I would now strongly prefer to find a new Ruby framework(like Merb) than using another language
I'd strongly urge you to pick one or more of the PHP MVC frameworks to look at while you read about Rails. Most of them are copies or at least inspired off Rails to some degree, so they often use similar conventions. You'll see the difference between what's possible in PHP and Ruby - PHP doesn't come out looking too good at the end