My HP photo printer has a touchscreen LCD. I think most have an LCD of some sort. I can imagine HP thinking they could reserve some of the space for ads...
I will teach a programming class this summer to advanced middle and high-school students. I plan to teach Ruby. Python is a good choice as well; the two languages are actually quite similar.
I've heard that the book Learn to Program is excellent for this type of student.
Hmm. I don't think you have proven its better than Rails. All you've proven is that you don't know Rails, so you *want* Django to be better. The truth is, they're more similar than you think. And they are both great frameworks.
Let me address your comments...
An object-relational mapper so you don't have to write SQL. But you can still use SQL if needed;
Exactly like Rails.
Automatic admin interfaces. You never need to write another stinkin' admin interface again.
In Rails, you can pick from many plugins that give you very nice ajaxy admin interfaces, or generate a simple one automatically. You don't need to write one if you don't want to.
It's own template language. Although, you can use any other template language you want.
Rails has a template language, too. Erb. And you can use other template languages as well via plugins. I prefer Erb, but many like Haml.
Support for memcached caches is built-in
This is built into Rails too. Along with support for other types of caches as well.
Built in support for i18n and l10n.
You can do this now, though it's not quite as clean as in Python. I was surprised, with a language that started in Japan, that Ruby didn't initially support these things.
Honestly, as a J2EE developer who is using Rails to develop an application for personal use, I think you're totally right. Rails isn't perfect but it has some serious advantages. The scary part for businesses is that they can't use it in conjunction with their existing J2EE developers and infrastructure (e.g. App server).
Um, JRuby on Rails can do that. I've packaged up Rails apps in a war file and deployed it to app servers.
In fact, the IDE I'm using (NetBeans) uses JRuby by default and automatically creates a war for you. Couldn't be easier.
Yes, but the syntax alone doesn't make something more "OOPy". For example, in Ruby the expression
"String" =~/ring/
is completely OO: it is calling a method named '=~' on a string with a Regexp object as its argument. It's as if you had typed:
"String".=~(Regexp.new('ring'))
except syntactic sugar makes it simpler. Of course '=~' is a strange method name and it is only used to make the "sugared" version look like an operator. Nobody would write code like that. But you might see:
"String".match(/ring/)
In Ruby, matching is a commutative operation so you can reverse it./ring/.match("String")
or/ring/ =~ "String"
Ruby has built-in syntactic sugar for several methods (even '=' (equals) is a method). But this is the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) example of having so many ways to do something.
That reminds me of something hilarious. Last year I wrote an automated avatar that would talk to people using a canned list of sentences. If anyone responded, it would sent another sentence. As long as the other person kept responding, it would keep sending. Many people finally caught on to this, but one time this guy kept replying back and forth as if it were real for over 2 hours!
It's more than that. For most people at the time, pong was the first video game they had ever seen or heard about. New and shiny! Hand-held controllers! See it on TV! It was exciting because it opened up a new era for gaming. It wasn't so much that the playability of the game but the groundbreaking nature of it. I didn't actually play it that much but I did think it was the coolest thing ever. Until the Atari 2600 came about, that is, and pretty much defined console gaming for the next decade or two.
I recently read an article (wish I could find the source now) that studied the "techie density" of people in metropolitan areas across the U.S. Silicon Valley was of course #1, but a close second was the Washington DC metro area which includes the part of northern Virginia where AOL is located.
But imagine this. You are a pro, and you take 150 shots on a corrupt SD card. I'm pretty sure at that point you'll be kicking yourself for not shelling out for a $100 wi-fi SD card...
I'm pretty sure if it was the $100 wi-fi SD card that was corrupt, you'd be kicking yourself too...
Finally I note that we are not really interested in planets that don't rotate in their orbital plane since otherwise they'd be roastingly hot on one side and freezing on the other.
Yes, but wouldn't there be a certain ring that is exactly 70 degrees? Also, you'd have an endless supply of geothermal energy. The hot-as-lava side could double as an incinerator--no trash problems. Obviously terraforming would be impossible but I'd think you could establish a permanent colony there.
I stopped by Blockbuster the other day for the first time in years (a few kids will do that to you). Asked for a movie, and did my usual "is it widescreen" because some are not marked, and I hate chopped-up movies even on my old 3:2 TV. A few years ago the answer would have been "we only have fullscreen, customers keep accidentally renting the widescreen and complaining".
However, the number of widescreen movies on DVD in 2.35:1 is increasing, meaning you get a letterboxed movie on 16:9 screens. And I've seen a few that are "formatted to fit your TV" in which they've done pan edits to bring a 2.35:1 movie down to 16:9.
But this time I got "when there's a choice, we only stock widescreen now. Corporate says it's "truer to the director's vision".
I wonder how this is going to play out when the "director's vision" generally becomes 2.35:1. If I were to build a home theater now, I'd seriously consider making the screen 2.35:1, as seen in the home theaters featured here.
Well, I think it is obvious. Amazon didn't intend to be giving pairs of box sets away.
But obviousness is subjective and not legally binding, so from a legal perspective you are probably correct. I'd say that the checkout total should be what you are supposed to pay, whether you knew it was a mistake or not. The onus should be on Amazon to make that value correct. If you were in a grocery store, and if the price the register rings up was less than the listed/advertised price, you'd get the register price (of course, if it rang up as 0.00, there'd probably be a bit of scrutiny by a manager and they'd fix their database but still honor the price for you).
Actually I think there are similar laws in the US, but when you have conflicting information, what is the negotiated price? The "Buy one get one free" offer you clicked on that was obviously the intention, or the mistake?
Personally, I think it's stupid for Amazon to have a system that doesn't at least raise some red flags when people are getting stuff for free in droves. And I'm surprised that it took them so long to figure out what was going on. Amazon should beef up their error-catching system and just chalk this one up as a loss.
Here's another problem: Apple fixes the prices of the iPods, at least in the US. Dealers can't go below list prices. Mail-order places like MacMall compensate for the inability to lower the price by throwing in free stuff.
I don't know if this is a good or bad thing for their index, but as a measure of true market value it sure is lousy.
Has anyone seen a FIOS map? Verizon doesn't seem to have one on their site. I'd like to see where they currently have it, and ideally where they are expanding.
I'm going to run my (third-party) web apps on this phone! Let's see 'em try to stop me!
Seriously, with web access, the high-res screen, and a capable browser like Safari, you can certainly do a lot this way that would ordinarily be done with native apps.
I have a home automation system that I can control via the web. I had been thinking about getting a Nokia 770 wifi web tablet as a portable "house remote" but I think the iPhone would better suit my needs, as access from anywhere would be compelling. I can imagine looking at my "yard cams" and turning on the sprinklers, or adjusting the thermostat, turning off lights, etc, via the iPhone anywhere I happen to be.
Actually that brings up a question, assuming that the iPhone Safari can display streaming video, can EDGE handle that? 15fps postage stamp video is all I'd need.
It's simpler than that. Ads are for the audience, not the participants in the event. Do you think true-to-life NBA players are going to remember what brand name is on the wall at half-court?
What's amazing is it seems that they haven't yet had that d'oh!!! moment.
That's what I thought too. I was VERY skeptical of all the hype. Until I tried it, and found that I like it. Not necessarily Rails specifically (ActiveRecord rocks though!), but the whole idea of quick-to-implement best-practice MVC web apps that are flexible enough to build anything you want with. I'm going to try Django now too. One cannot deny that Rails is an inspiration for a whole new genre of tools in many languages (Catalyst, Django, Grails, Trails, Seaside, etc). I believe that Rails is a disruptive technology because whether or not Ruby and/or Rails survives, web application development will never be the same.
In the U.S. at least, a call center employee is at pretty much the lowest rung of the ladder... hovering around minimum wage. It's a job for the uneducated. The people who know math typically have better jobs paying more.
I imagine that this is different in India. U.S. call center jobs, I've read, are actually desirable.
Yeah, and here's the real genius: it's completely stealth! There are no outward signs whatsoever that Apple is doing anything in the digital media space other than iPods. That's brilliant!
He missed Larry Wall, creator of Perl. Not that Perl makes for great programs (though the fact that Perl works so much, so often, says a lot). But because Wall's C programming of Perl is some of the best programming out there.
Heh... this comment reminds me of the O'Reilly convention a couple years ago, when they called Larry Wall on stage for a Lifetime Achievement Award. The award goes to the author of an indispensable software tool. They got him on stage and presented him with the award... for 'patch'.
In English, it's called the The Sun, not Sol. You don't go around using other random Latin words in otherwise regular English text, do you? I don't suppose you go around calling the Earth "Terra" hmm?
That's what I thought too. I was very skeptical until I actually started learning rails. I now see why it is getting very popular, because it takes advantage of some of the unique aspects of Ruby to blur that dividing line. It actually provides both abstraction and versatility. You get a lot of help out of the box or through an increasing number of plugins, but there are also convenient hooks to customize apps in pretty much any way you want.
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My HP photo printer has a touchscreen LCD. I think most have an LCD of some sort. I can imagine HP thinking they could reserve some of the space for ads...
Bind 10 was written in Perl 6!
I will teach a programming class this summer to advanced middle and high-school students. I plan to teach Ruby. Python is a good choice as well; the two languages are actually quite similar.
I've heard that the book Learn to Program is excellent for this type of student.
Hmm. I don't think you have proven its better than Rails. All you've proven is that you don't know Rails, so you *want* Django to be better. The truth is, they're more similar than you think. And they are both great frameworks.
Let me address your comments...
An object-relational mapper so you don't have to write SQL. But you can still use SQL if needed;
Exactly like Rails.
Automatic admin interfaces. You never need to write another stinkin' admin interface again.
In Rails, you can pick from many plugins that give you very nice ajaxy admin interfaces, or generate a simple one automatically. You don't need to write one if you don't want to.
It's own template language. Although, you can use any other template language you want.
Rails has a template language, too. Erb. And you can use other template languages as well via plugins. I prefer Erb, but many like Haml.
Support for memcached caches is built-in
This is built into Rails too. Along with support for other types of caches as well.
Built in support for i18n and l10n.
You can do this now, though it's not quite as clean as in Python. I was surprised, with a language that started in Japan, that Ruby didn't initially support these things.
Oh, yeah. Building Rails apps is fast, too.
Honestly, as a J2EE developer who is using Rails to develop an application for personal use, I think you're totally right. Rails isn't perfect but it has some serious advantages. The scary part for businesses is that they can't use it in conjunction with their existing J2EE developers and infrastructure (e.g. App server).
Um, JRuby on Rails can do that. I've packaged up Rails apps in a war file and deployed it to app servers.
In fact, the IDE I'm using (NetBeans) uses JRuby by default and automatically creates a war for you. Couldn't be easier.
Yes, but the syntax alone doesn't make something more "OOPy". For example, in Ruby the expression
/ring/
/ring/.match("String")
/ring/ =~ "String"
"String" =~
is completely OO: it is calling a method named '=~' on a string with a Regexp object as its argument. It's as if you had typed:
"String".=~(Regexp.new('ring'))
except syntactic sugar makes it simpler. Of course '=~' is a strange method name and it is only used to make the "sugared" version look like an operator. Nobody would write code like that. But you might see:
"String".match(/ring/)
In Ruby, matching is a commutative operation so you can reverse it.
or
Ruby has built-in syntactic sugar for several methods (even '=' (equals) is a method). But this is the best (or worst, depending on your point of view) example of having so many ways to do something.
That reminds me of something hilarious. Last year I wrote an automated avatar that would talk to people using a canned list of sentences. If anyone responded, it would sent another sentence. As long as the other person kept responding, it would keep sending. Many people finally caught on to this, but one time this guy kept replying back and forth as if it were real for over 2 hours!
It's more than that. For most people at the time, pong was the first video game they had ever seen or heard about. New and shiny! Hand-held controllers! See it on TV! It was exciting because it opened up a new era for gaming. It wasn't so much that the playability of the game but the groundbreaking nature of it. I didn't actually play it that much but I did think it was the coolest thing ever. Until the Atari 2600 came about, that is, and pretty much defined console gaming for the next decade or two.
I recently read an article (wish I could find the source now) that studied the "techie density" of people in metropolitan areas across the U.S. Silicon Valley was of course #1, but a close second was the Washington DC metro area which includes the part of northern Virginia where AOL is located.
But imagine this. You are a pro, and you take 150 shots on a corrupt SD card. I'm pretty sure at that point you'll be kicking yourself for not shelling out for a $100 wi-fi SD card...
I'm pretty sure if it was the $100 wi-fi SD card that was corrupt, you'd be kicking yourself too...
Finally I note that we are not really interested in planets that don't rotate in their orbital plane since otherwise they'd be roastingly hot on one side and freezing on the other.
Yes, but wouldn't there be a certain ring that is exactly 70 degrees? Also, you'd have an endless supply of geothermal energy. The hot-as-lava side could double as an incinerator--no trash problems. Obviously terraforming would be impossible but I'd think you could establish a permanent colony there.
I stopped by Blockbuster the other day for the first time in years (a few kids will do that to you). Asked for a movie, and did my usual "is it widescreen" because some are not marked, and I hate chopped-up movies even on my old 3:2 TV. A few years ago the answer would have been "we only have fullscreen, customers keep accidentally renting the widescreen and complaining".
However, the number of widescreen movies on DVD in 2.35:1 is increasing, meaning you get a letterboxed movie on 16:9 screens. And I've seen a few that are "formatted to fit your TV" in which they've done pan edits to bring a 2.35:1 movie down to 16:9.
But this time I got "when there's a choice, we only stock widescreen now. Corporate says it's "truer to the director's vision".
I wonder how this is going to play out when the "director's vision" generally becomes 2.35:1. If I were to build a home theater now, I'd seriously consider making the screen 2.35:1, as seen in the home theaters featured here.
alarmingly affective
Gregarious Grammar Grouches grumble gravely.
Well, I think it is obvious. Amazon didn't intend to be giving pairs of box sets away.
But obviousness is subjective and not legally binding, so from a legal perspective you are probably correct. I'd say that the checkout total should be what you are supposed to pay, whether you knew it was a mistake or not. The onus should be on Amazon to make that value correct. If you were in a grocery store, and if the price the register rings up was less than the listed/advertised price, you'd get the register price (of course, if it rang up as 0.00, there'd probably be a bit of scrutiny by a manager and they'd fix their database but still honor the price for you).
Actually I think there are similar laws in the US, but when you have conflicting information, what is the negotiated price? The "Buy one get one free" offer you clicked on that was obviously the intention, or the mistake?
Personally, I think it's stupid for Amazon to have a system that doesn't at least raise some red flags when people are getting stuff for free in droves. And I'm surprised that it took them so long to figure out what was going on. Amazon should beef up their error-catching system and just chalk this one up as a loss.
Here's another problem: Apple fixes the prices of the iPods, at least in the US. Dealers can't go below list prices. Mail-order places like MacMall compensate for the inability to lower the price by throwing in free stuff.
I don't know if this is a good or bad thing for their index, but as a measure of true market value it sure is lousy.
Has anyone seen a FIOS map? Verizon doesn't seem to have one on their site. I'd like to see where they currently have it, and ideally where they are expanding.
I'm going to run my (third-party) web apps on this phone! Let's see 'em try to stop me!
Seriously, with web access, the high-res screen, and a capable browser like Safari, you can certainly do a lot this way that would ordinarily be done with native apps.
I have a home automation system that I can control via the web. I had been thinking about getting a Nokia 770 wifi web tablet as a portable "house remote" but I think the iPhone would better suit my needs, as access from anywhere would be compelling. I can imagine looking at my "yard cams" and turning on the sprinklers, or adjusting the thermostat, turning off lights, etc, via the iPhone anywhere I happen to be.
Actually that brings up a question, assuming that the iPhone Safari can display streaming video, can EDGE handle that? 15fps postage stamp video is all I'd need.
It's simpler than that. Ads are for the audience, not the participants in the event. Do you think true-to-life NBA players are going to remember what brand name is on the wall at half-court?
What's amazing is it seems that they haven't yet had that d'oh!!! moment.
That's what I thought too. I was VERY skeptical of all the hype. Until I tried it, and found that I like it. Not necessarily Rails specifically (ActiveRecord rocks though!), but the whole idea of quick-to-implement best-practice MVC web apps that are flexible enough to build anything you want with. I'm going to try Django now too. One cannot deny that Rails is an inspiration for a whole new genre of tools in many languages (Catalyst, Django, Grails, Trails, Seaside, etc). I believe that Rails is a disruptive technology because whether or not Ruby and/or Rails survives, web application development will never be the same.
In the U.S. at least, a call center employee is at pretty much the lowest rung of the ladder... hovering around minimum wage. It's a job for the uneducated. The people who know math typically have better jobs paying more.
I imagine that this is different in India. U.S. call center jobs, I've read, are actually desirable.
Yeah, and here's the real genius: it's completely stealth! There are no outward signs whatsoever that Apple is doing anything in the digital media space other than iPods. That's brilliant!
He missed Larry Wall, creator of Perl. Not that Perl makes for great programs (though the fact that Perl works so much, so often, says a lot). But because Wall's C programming of Perl is some of the best programming out there.
Heh... this comment reminds me of the O'Reilly convention a couple years ago, when they called Larry Wall on stage for a Lifetime Achievement Award. The award goes to the author of an indispensable software tool. They got him on stage and presented him with the award... for 'patch'.
In English, it's called the The Sun, not Sol. You don't go around using other random Latin words in otherwise regular English text, do you? I don't suppose you go around calling the Earth "Terra" hmm?
Um, actually he does.
Pick one of the following:
Abstraction || Versatility
That's what I thought too. I was very skeptical until I actually started learning rails. I now see why it is getting very popular, because it takes advantage of some of the unique aspects of Ruby to blur that dividing line. It actually provides both abstraction and versatility. You get a lot of help out of the box or through an increasing number of plugins, but there are also convenient hooks to customize apps in pretty much any way you want.