People would have to be using or willing to use BeOS/ZeOS.
The OS has been out for 10 years without any ownership debate and what kind of market penetration does it have? 0.000005% maybe? There could be a thousand people worldwide who actually run it 50% of the time?
Microsoft broke the law to get Windows where it is against OS/2, DOS clones and Mac, let's stop claiming that Linux and BeOS are losing on the desktop because of a massive MS conspiracy. They're losing because few desktop apps would run on them and consumers just want their Quicken, games, etc..
We've learned over and over on this board that there's only one litmus test for a language's commercial success: whether people are adopting it and using it for business, NOT academic, purposes. Lua has been in the mainstream for game scripting for some time now.
You're right, it has spoken: there's a massive market for streaming subscription music. See all of those "muzak" satellite dishes on every 7-11 or Taco Bell in the country? Hello! XM and Sirius want that market now, and that's exactly a market that Rhapsody, Yahoo, Urge or Zune can fill that iTMS cannot. I went to a furniture store in SF the other day and noticed the owner was streaming his music from Yahoo.
I use Rhapsody because I'm coding at a computer all day. If I bought all of the songs I listened to on Rhapsody, I'd spend thousands, easy. And Real is not doing bad with this business, Rhapsody has something like 1.5m or 2m subscribers, so $20m-$30m a month. A quarter bill per year.. that's not a bad business at all.
Have Intel come up with anything genuinely new recently?
Yes, they can actually make the stuff with extremely high yields. That's Intel's contribution to the innovation. Maybe the ideas came from elsewhere, but Intel are the world's best chip fabricators.
We've had "Silicon Prairie" (Champaign, IL). "Silicon Alley" in New York. There's more I'm forgetting right now.
Ultimately all of the talented people who live in places designated to be the next Silicon Valley end up moving to Silicon Valley! We live in a beautiful area and get paid better. Top talent won't stay in Siberia, or Champaign, when they can live in San Francisco.
If there's any "Next Silicon Valley", it would be Los Angeles. Recently it seems that more of the interesting startups are in LA than the Bay Area. Given that so many of the Web 2.0 properties are more about entertainment, this kind of makes sense. And the proximity to Silicon Valley makes it easy for traditional tech investors to go down there.
You talk of "production," which sounds like "movie," but it isn't a chump app just because movies don't use it for their render engine
Well, movies, commercials, games, TV series, student pieces... anything using 3D.
I never said it was a chump app, just that it's doubtful anyone reading is going to make a hardware decision specifically to run POVRay. While it might be used to render a the occasional 3D picture for academic purposes (i.e. no budget but needs high quality), I find it highly unlikely it's being used on several thousand, tens of thousands or million dollar farms rendering thousands of frames a day. On that scale, it would be really useful to see direct comparisons using the software people do use.
As far as price goes, considering that we had to go through 11 ad-laden pages to see their results, I'd hope the people who wrote TFA could buy a couple licenses to do tests with.
TR's benches clearly show that someone working primarily with POV-Ray would get better performance for $599 with AMD than for $999
Ok, let's be realistic here. Does anyone use POV ray for anything other than processor benchmarks? I have yet to see one real production, student or otherwise, rendered with POVRay. Let's see benchmarks with PRMan and Mental Ray. Those are production renderers people are actually using.
And speaking of agendas, George Ou's definitely got a hard-on [zdnet.com] for Apple.
Uhm, so do the slashdot editors. So does any blogger with AdSense on their site. The best way to get traffic to your site is to say something controversial about Apple. Duh. John Dvdork's been doing it for years. Now we have that blogger guy who the./ editors can't stop posting on the weekends with critiques of the Zune/iPod... like anyone who buys a Zune would ever read his column.
Remember Wired's Wired/Tired column (I haven't read Wired since 1994, so maybe it's still there)? Has the subject of Apple made the Tired column yet? They're not solving the mysteries of the Universe, they make computers and music players. Get over it!
And Slashdot editors, for the love of god stop giving lame pro- or anti-Mac bloggers higher pageranks by linking to them. Just stop.
I said Carter had banned reprocessing. His administration did so out of fear of proliferation. Some have attributed it to the Ford administration, which is fine. However, Carter, being a nuclear engineer himself, should have promoted the technology rather than abolish its future in the face of oil crises.
but I haven't yet seen a (proven) solution for the latter*
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it's not there. Integral Fast Reactors. There are other reprocessing techniques out there. These are proven solutions.
The Clinton administration pulled the plug on the IFR project. Furthermore, the Carter adminstration outlawed nuclear reprossessing altogether. These policies need to be reversed to get rid of the current situation, wherein we plan to bury waste in Yucca Mountain that's still 98% viable for producing more energy, were it reprocessed.
If noone bought things they didn't need, we'd eliminate all jobs but agriculture and medicine
Well, and construction. And architecture. And computers for architects to use. And programmers for to write software for architects to use. And junk food and soda makers to feed programmers. And pizza delivery guys to show up with junk food and soda. And someone to make Taco Bell hot sauce.
No, no no, you're thinking of the one where Jack yelled into his cellphone "Chloe, There's NO TIME!", got shot and died, was brought back to life, saved the President, yelled "DAMMIT!", confonted the bad guy (a different high ranking government official bad guy than last week), pulled out his gun, pistol-whipped the high ranking government official and threatened to kill him with "TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW NOW!"
From the summary: It's the opinion of the article's author that Apple doesn't have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win.
So by changing the definition of "win", Apple can "win." Meanwhile, back in reality, as long as there are hundreds of millions more machines being sold that run only Linux and Windows and can't run MacOS X, there's no way for Apple to "win" the desktop market.
Why do Slashdot moderators post this Roughly Drafted guy's blog rants? He's an unapologetic Apple fanboy and pulls stuff out of his ass. Take this quote for example: "Just like Apple in 1990, Microsoft appeared untouchable in 2000.... Apple also didn't count on Microsoft offering much of a threat, since the company's Windows product had been an embarrassing joke until 1990, and was still laughably behind.". First of all, why does Windows seem any less touchable now than 7 years ago? They still dominate the desktop. And it must have been a different 1990 he was living in because Microsoft had already locked up the desktop business market by 1990. LOTUS 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were the #1 applications in their space, and they ran on DOS.
Everyone seemed to know where Microsoft stood back then. Fall of 1990, not far from Apple's height of Mac sales as the percent of the total PC market (1991-2), Microsoft was already valued about 30% higher than Apple in market cap. In 1990, Apple was facing a market that did not want to pay a premium for commodity computer parts and they released the LC and Classic to get some steam. Yet this roughly drafted guy is trying to claim that a desire for low cost commodity parts somehow won't stop Apple in the future. That's just not how it works in a free market.
People knew then exactly what the support stakes were:
Microsoft is not ending support for Windows 2000. During the Extended Support phase, Microsoft continues to provide security hot fixes and paid support but no longer provides complimentary support options, design change requests, and non-security hotfixes.*
Everyone had 18 months to update to XP and WS2003 and didn't do it. Of course, this is Slashdot, it must always be Microsoft's fault!
> "I don't care if our government lies to us about something to pass it, because it's better for us."
It doesn't work for me when people put words in my mouth. Invoking terrorism for the RealID debate is an overstatement, but not a lie. Now that we have much more effective watch lists, and I would really hope some of those guys on the 9/11 flights would have showed up on them in this day and age. If they would have, and the guys would have needed fake IDs, having better identification would actually help in fighting terrorism.
In any case, I'm surprised that you're surprised about the government officials using overstatement as a tool. It is a necessary, standard operating procedure in politics in the US. Since Katrina happened, all politicians invoke it to get public works projects done like fixing levees in California, which, even if they broke, would be far, far less impactful than it was on New Orleans. You'll hear things like "We have another Katrina on our hands in Sacramento" -- a gross overstatement of the real issue -- but which might be the only thing that can get taxpayers to approve another $5bn bond.
A good definition of politics in a republic or democracy might be "Convincing people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons." I've always said the debate over Al Gore's global warming claims are in this category. Does it matter if he's wrong? Wouldn't it be best if we did cut down on fossil fuel use either way? I'd rather have Al Gore be wrong and cut down on imported oil than keep sending money to the Saudis.
In any case, I read up on the RealID plan more after my post and it seems like they just want to change the requirements for driver's licenses. I'm not sure it will really help identity theft like they say it will. That kind of impact would be too inconvenient for Visa and Mastercard:\
What's the problem with trying to create a more reliable identification system? Why is this considered an invasion of privacy? Is Slashdot full of id theiving outlaws or something?
Even if the government is selling this with the wrong focus ("9/11 terrorists oh noes!"), we still need a more reliable ID system than drivers licenses. Ever had your credit card number stolen, or your bank account drained simply because someone knows the last 4 of your SSN? That last four digits seems like it's the key to everything in your life these days.
It's obvious that Citibank, BofA, Visa, etc. aren't ever going to do anything to stop identity theft, maybe it's time the government starts doing something about it. If ReadID helps, it would be a big step forward on that front. I don't care if it has to be sold to the public using terrorism, because it's still an improvement over what we have today.
Funny, I don't see Jobs pushing to release Disney movies and ABC shows without DRM on iTunes. Seems like the only content he doesn't want to DRM is content he doesn't control.
If you've spent this much time reading articles about Vista for the last 4 months (since enterprise release) or 1 month (since wide release), just buy the freakin' thing already. If you bill yourself by the hour for the things you do on your own time, you've already spent more money reading about Vista then you would have just buying it.
This is the best comment I've read in a while. Many people don't want a Mac because of exactly what ou describe.. it's more of a hassle and more money to change and buy all the new software than to just stick with what you've got. For most people, incrementally better solutions are just not worth the time. It's the significantly better solutions that make people take notice, but more on point integrated solutions are what businesses want.
That's exactly why your final points about Linux are great. I think all corporations would love to have the non-vendor locked solution of Linux with generic hardware; but, a really powerful integrated yet vendor-locked solution can usurp the hopes of independence because it often ends up actually being cheaper. Microsoft's offerings fit into this category. Office and Windows are only part of what businesses buy from Microsoft. They also buy into SQLServer, ASP.NET,.NET, IIS, Sharepoint, Exchange, their Business intelligence, etc. From 3rd parties, you can buy 10x that which integrates into all of these easily. People who have used any of these together know it all works pretty well together straight out of the box. When this gets compared to cobbling your own together on Linux, it will often lose. We can wax poetic about Linux all day long, but there's a free market out there that keeps deciding to buy from Microsoft for the very reasons mentioned.
I just don't see inroads being made against Microsoft until someone can come up with a platform that gives businesses the power of Windows and all of Microsoft's solutions for it for cheaper. On the home/consumer side, I don't really see it happening until a major new product comes along. MacOS X can't do it. It's arguably better for the average consumer, but only incrementally so.
A good question! I simply wanted to have an environment that was more akin to what the server was running to get a better idea of performance and such. When doing Python development for the web, I've always had the same setup on my Windows box and server (Apache + mod_python + clearsilver).
Anyway, to the other posters: Don't shoot the messenger telling you that Ruby sucks on Windows. As I said, TFA points it out very well by having tests that crash out completely on Ruby 1.8.5 for Windows. It's not going to change my life to use Ruby anyway, I'm just letting proponents know that "scripting" languages which emerge into more serious language contenders have good Windows support.
I do not want to deploy Linux on my home machines, but a couple of my sites are hosted on Linux with Rails. It would be nice to be able to work locally with the same apache-mysql-ruby config, even though I don't want to install Linux at home. Ruby also would have probably made more inroads into my Windows-centric workplace if it had better support, but instead I went with ASP.NET after failing to get Rails on Windows to work effectively on Windows with Apache and MySQL.
If, for some perverse reason, you want it to work well, the code is there, but why should we help you?
You don't have to, just don't be surprised while we continue to choose Python. I was pointing out that there seem to be no strong advocates for this language on the world's most popular OS. Python would not be in the place it is on Windows without the early persistence of one man in the mid- to late-90s (Mark Hammond). Now there's a Python implementation on Windows supported by Microsoft (IronPython). No one seems to have stepped up that plate for Ruby, which it will need if it is to be taken seriously outside of the Rails on Mac and Linux domain.
This study backs up what everyone who has tried Ruby on Windows already knows... it stinks! I'm actually not surprised to see that some of their tests errored out completely on Windows, even with the Ruby 1.8.5 binary.
Granted, Ruby is mostly used with Rails right now, but you'd think that if the language proponents want the language to take off, Windows support would be taken more seriously. In the couple years since I first tried Ruby, it doesn't seem like it has improved much at all.
How can any educated person deny that we have seriously affected our world ecosystem? Species are going extinct everywhere, local climates are fluctuating wildly, and I sure as hell won't be buying any land that is close to our current sea level.
All of your points are good but won't change anyone's mind. We burn fossil fuels to feed ourselves, live longer and reproduce, just like any other animal would do if they had the mental capability to find that efficiency (yes, burning fossil fuels has an given us a massive efficiency towards those ends).
And right now the changes environmentalists make are token changes at best. A hybrid car is neat, but how many people have cut their electricity usage in half last year? How many people fought to have a nuclear power plant built in their county and the coal plant torn down? How many picketed the oil terminal to have a supertanker turned away, or shelled out $20K for solar panels on their roof?
The next phase for humans is to find the political resolve up front to deal with the resulting problems of actions like burning fossil fuels. Most of the time people talk about giving up their gas SUV when "something that's just as cheap as gas and better" is discovered. That's to be expected because we live in a free market where price/performance is what people stick to. Except that no new solution will ever be cheaper than gas. The price of gas will drop if a new solution (say, electric cars, or hydrogen, or ethanol) comes along and threatens it. It will take significant resolve to overcome this in a free market... it might require a non-free market.
So I'm not sure why we even debate this. Our destiny cannot be changed with talk, we just aren't wired that way. It will take no less than catastrophe or a major political/economic shift.
You bring up a good point about generation, but we know how to solve that (build nukes). So to use electricity in cars, the main problem is storage on the car. We have an infrastructure we know how to improve if we want to use electric cars.
With all other alternatives, the problems are generation, distribution and/or storage on the car. For ethanol, we know how to distribute it (just like gas), but it's not so clear how we're going to grow all of that corn and process it (imagine all of the required pesticides, water, etc). On the other end of the spectrum, we know how to produce hydrogen, but have no idea how to distribute it and store it in the car safely. There's no infrastructure for these.
Electricity has a clear infrastructure for all of these needs once the storage problem is solved. It will take years to get there, but at least we know what to do.
Slashdot Mirror
People would have to be using or willing to use BeOS/ZeOS.
The OS has been out for 10 years without any ownership debate and what kind of market penetration does it have? 0.000005% maybe? There could be a thousand people worldwide who actually run it 50% of the time?
Microsoft broke the law to get Windows where it is against OS/2, DOS clones and Mac, let's stop claiming that Linux and BeOS are losing on the desktop because of a massive MS conspiracy. They're losing because few desktop apps would run on them and consumers just want their Quicken, games, etc..
We've learned over and over on this board that there's only one litmus test for a language's commercial success: whether people are adopting it and using it for business, NOT academic, purposes. Lua has been in the mainstream for game scripting for some time now.
The market has spoken here.
You're right, it has spoken: there's a massive market for streaming subscription music. See all of those "muzak" satellite dishes on every 7-11 or Taco Bell in the country? Hello! XM and Sirius want that market now, and that's exactly a market that Rhapsody, Yahoo, Urge or Zune can fill that iTMS cannot. I went to a furniture store in SF the other day and noticed the owner was streaming his music from Yahoo.
I use Rhapsody because I'm coding at a computer all day. If I bought all of the songs I listened to on Rhapsody, I'd spend thousands, easy. And Real is not doing bad with this business, Rhapsody has something like 1.5m or 2m subscribers, so $20m-$30m a month. A quarter bill per year.. that's not a bad business at all.
This is the modern world. We know where we were yesterday... in front of a computer, same as today.
Have Intel come up with anything genuinely new recently?
Yes, they can actually make the stuff with extremely high yields. That's Intel's contribution to the innovation. Maybe the ideas came from elsewhere, but Intel are the world's best chip fabricators.
We've had "Silicon Prairie" (Champaign, IL). "Silicon Alley" in New York. There's more I'm forgetting right now.
Ultimately all of the talented people who live in places designated to be the next Silicon Valley end up moving to Silicon Valley! We live in a beautiful area and get paid better. Top talent won't stay in Siberia, or Champaign, when they can live in San Francisco.
If there's any "Next Silicon Valley", it would be Los Angeles. Recently it seems that more of the interesting startups are in LA than the Bay Area. Given that so many of the Web 2.0 properties are more about entertainment, this kind of makes sense. And the proximity to Silicon Valley makes it easy for traditional tech investors to go down there.
You talk of "production," which sounds like "movie," but it isn't a chump app just because movies don't use it for their render engine
Well, movies, commercials, games, TV series, student pieces... anything using 3D.
I never said it was a chump app, just that it's doubtful anyone reading is going to make a hardware decision specifically to run POVRay. While it might be used to render a the occasional 3D picture for academic purposes (i.e. no budget but needs high quality), I find it highly unlikely it's being used on several thousand, tens of thousands or million dollar farms rendering thousands of frames a day. On that scale, it would be really useful to see direct comparisons using the software people do use.
As far as price goes, considering that we had to go through 11 ad-laden pages to see their results, I'd hope the people who wrote TFA could buy a couple licenses to do tests with.
Btw, mental ray is not owned by Autodesk.
TR's benches clearly show that someone working primarily with POV-Ray would get better performance for $599 with AMD than for $999
Ok, let's be realistic here. Does anyone use POV ray for anything other than processor benchmarks? I have yet to see one real production, student or otherwise, rendered with POVRay. Let's see benchmarks with PRMan and Mental Ray. Those are production renderers people are actually using.
And speaking of agendas, George Ou's definitely got a hard-on [zdnet.com] for Apple.
./ editors can't stop posting on the weekends with critiques of the Zune/iPod... like anyone who buys a Zune would ever read his column.
Uhm, so do the slashdot editors. So does any blogger with AdSense on their site. The best way to get traffic to your site is to say something controversial about Apple. Duh. John Dvdork's been doing it for years. Now we have that blogger guy who the
Remember Wired's Wired/Tired column (I haven't read Wired since 1994, so maybe it's still there)? Has the subject of Apple made the Tired column yet? They're not solving the mysteries of the Universe, they make computers and music players. Get over it!
And Slashdot editors, for the love of god stop giving lame pro- or anti-Mac bloggers higher pageranks by linking to them. Just stop.
Okay, but that's not what I said.
I said Carter had banned reprocessing. His administration did so out of fear of proliferation. Some have attributed it to the Ford administration, which is fine. However, Carter, being a nuclear engineer himself, should have promoted the technology rather than abolish its future in the face of oil crises.
but I haven't yet seen a (proven) solution for the latter*
Just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it's not there. Integral Fast Reactors. There are other reprocessing techniques out there. These are proven solutions.
The Clinton administration pulled the plug on the IFR project. Furthermore, the Carter adminstration outlawed nuclear reprossessing altogether. These policies need to be reversed to get rid of the current situation, wherein we plan to bury waste in Yucca Mountain that's still 98% viable for producing more energy, were it reprocessed.
If noone bought things they didn't need, we'd eliminate all jobs but agriculture and medicine
Well, and construction. And architecture. And computers for architects to use. And programmers for to write software for architects to use. And junk food and soda makers to feed programmers. And pizza delivery guys to show up with junk food and soda. And someone to make Taco Bell hot sauce.
Wasn't this in the last episode of "24"?
No, no no, you're thinking of the one where Jack yelled into his cellphone "Chloe, There's NO TIME!", got shot and died, was brought back to life, saved the President, yelled "DAMMIT!", confonted the bad guy (a different high ranking government official bad guy than last week), pulled out his gun, pistol-whipped the high ranking government official and threatened to kill him with "TELL ME WHAT I WANT TO KNOW NOW!"
From the summary: It's the opinion of the article's author that Apple doesn't have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win.
So by changing the definition of "win", Apple can "win." Meanwhile, back in reality, as long as there are hundreds of millions more machines being sold that run only Linux and Windows and can't run MacOS X, there's no way for Apple to "win" the desktop market.
Why do Slashdot moderators post this Roughly Drafted guy's blog rants? He's an unapologetic Apple fanboy and pulls stuff out of his ass. Take this quote for example: "Just like Apple in 1990, Microsoft appeared untouchable in 2000.... Apple also didn't count on Microsoft offering much of a threat, since the company's Windows product had been an embarrassing joke until 1990, and was still laughably behind.". First of all, why does Windows seem any less touchable now than 7 years ago? They still dominate the desktop. And it must have been a different 1990 he was living in because Microsoft had already locked up the desktop business market by 1990. LOTUS 1-2-3 and Wordperfect were the #1 applications in their space, and they ran on DOS.
Everyone seemed to know where Microsoft stood back then. Fall of 1990, not far from Apple's height of Mac sales as the percent of the total PC market (1991-2), Microsoft was already valued about 30% higher than Apple in market cap. In 1990, Apple was facing a market that did not want to pay a premium for commodity computer parts and they released the LC and Classic to get some steam. Yet this roughly drafted guy is trying to claim that a desire for low cost commodity parts somehow won't stop Apple in the future. That's just not how it works in a free market.
People knew then exactly what the support stakes were:
Microsoft is not ending support for Windows 2000. During the Extended Support phase, Microsoft continues to provide security hot fixes and paid support but no longer provides complimentary support options, design change requests, and non-security hotfixes.*
Everyone had 18 months to update to XP and WS2003 and didn't do it. Of course, this is Slashdot, it must always be Microsoft's fault!
> "I don't care if our government lies to us about something to pass it, because it's better for us."
:\
It doesn't work for me when people put words in my mouth. Invoking terrorism for the RealID debate is an overstatement, but not a lie. Now that we have much more effective watch lists, and I would really hope some of those guys on the 9/11 flights would have showed up on them in this day and age. If they would have, and the guys would have needed fake IDs, having better identification would actually help in fighting terrorism.
In any case, I'm surprised that you're surprised about the government officials using overstatement as a tool. It is a necessary, standard operating procedure in politics in the US. Since Katrina happened, all politicians invoke it to get public works projects done like fixing levees in California, which, even if they broke, would be far, far less impactful than it was on New Orleans. You'll hear things like "We have another Katrina on our hands in Sacramento" -- a gross overstatement of the real issue -- but which might be the only thing that can get taxpayers to approve another $5bn bond.
A good definition of politics in a republic or democracy might be "Convincing people to do the right thing for the wrong reasons." I've always said the debate over Al Gore's global warming claims are in this category. Does it matter if he's wrong? Wouldn't it be best if we did cut down on fossil fuel use either way? I'd rather have Al Gore be wrong and cut down on imported oil than keep sending money to the Saudis.
In any case, I read up on the RealID plan more after my post and it seems like they just want to change the requirements for driver's licenses. I'm not sure it will really help identity theft like they say it will. That kind of impact would be too inconvenient for Visa and Mastercard
What's the problem with trying to create a more reliable identification system? Why is this considered an invasion of privacy? Is Slashdot full of id theiving outlaws or something?
Even if the government is selling this with the wrong focus ("9/11 terrorists oh noes!"), we still need a more reliable ID system than drivers licenses. Ever had your credit card number stolen, or your bank account drained simply because someone knows the last 4 of your SSN? That last four digits seems like it's the key to everything in your life these days.
It's obvious that Citibank, BofA, Visa, etc. aren't ever going to do anything to stop identity theft, maybe it's time the government starts doing something about it. If ReadID helps, it would be a big step forward on that front. I don't care if it has to be sold to the public using terrorism, because it's still an improvement over what we have today.
Funny, I don't see Jobs pushing to release Disney movies and ABC shows without DRM on iTunes. Seems like the only content he doesn't want to DRM is content he doesn't control.
If you've spent this much time reading articles about Vista for the last 4 months (since enterprise release) or 1 month (since wide release), just buy the freakin' thing already. If you bill yourself by the hour for the things you do on your own time, you've already spent more money reading about Vista then you would have just buying it.
This is the best comment I've read in a while. Many people don't want a Mac because of exactly what ou describe.. it's more of a hassle and more money to change and buy all the new software than to just stick with what you've got. For most people, incrementally better solutions are just not worth the time. It's the significantly better solutions that make people take notice, but more on point integrated solutions are what businesses want.
.NET, IIS, Sharepoint, Exchange, their Business intelligence, etc. From 3rd parties, you can buy 10x that which integrates into all of these easily. People who have used any of these together know it all works pretty well together straight out of the box. When this gets compared to cobbling your own together on Linux, it will often lose. We can wax poetic about Linux all day long, but there's a free market out there that keeps deciding to buy from Microsoft for the very reasons mentioned.
That's exactly why your final points about Linux are great. I think all corporations would love to have the non-vendor locked solution of Linux with generic hardware; but, a really powerful integrated yet vendor-locked solution can usurp the hopes of independence because it often ends up actually being cheaper. Microsoft's offerings fit into this category. Office and Windows are only part of what businesses buy from Microsoft. They also buy into SQLServer, ASP.NET,
I just don't see inroads being made against Microsoft until someone can come up with a platform that gives businesses the power of Windows and all of Microsoft's solutions for it for cheaper. On the home/consumer side, I don't really see it happening until a major new product comes along. MacOS X can't do it. It's arguably better for the average consumer, but only incrementally so.
A good question! I simply wanted to have an environment that was more akin to what the server was running to get a better idea of performance and such. When doing Python development for the web, I've always had the same setup on my Windows box and server (Apache + mod_python + clearsilver).
Anyway, to the other posters: Don't shoot the messenger telling you that Ruby sucks on Windows. As I said, TFA points it out very well by having tests that crash out completely on Ruby 1.8.5 for Windows. It's not going to change my life to use Ruby anyway, I'm just letting proponents know that "scripting" languages which emerge into more serious language contenders have good Windows support.
...why do you care about Windows support?
I do not want to deploy Linux on my home machines, but a couple of my sites are hosted on Linux with Rails. It would be nice to be able to work locally with the same apache-mysql-ruby config, even though I don't want to install Linux at home. Ruby also would have probably made more inroads into my Windows-centric workplace if it had better support, but instead I went with ASP.NET after failing to get Rails on Windows to work effectively on Windows with Apache and MySQL.
If, for some perverse reason, you want it to work well, the code is there, but why should we help you?
You don't have to, just don't be surprised while we continue to choose Python. I was pointing out that there seem to be no strong advocates for this language on the world's most popular OS. Python would not be in the place it is on Windows without the early persistence of one man in the mid- to late-90s (Mark Hammond). Now there's a Python implementation on Windows supported by Microsoft (IronPython). No one seems to have stepped up that plate for Ruby, which it will need if it is to be taken seriously outside of the Rails on Mac and Linux domain.
This study backs up what everyone who has tried Ruby on Windows already knows... it stinks! I'm actually not surprised to see that some of their tests errored out completely on Windows, even with the Ruby 1.8.5 binary.
Granted, Ruby is mostly used with Rails right now, but you'd think that if the language proponents want the language to take off, Windows support would be taken more seriously. In the couple years since I first tried Ruby, it doesn't seem like it has improved much at all.
How can any educated person deny that we have seriously affected our world ecosystem? Species are going extinct everywhere, local climates are fluctuating wildly, and I sure as hell won't be buying any land that is close to our current sea level.
All of your points are good but won't change anyone's mind. We burn fossil fuels to feed ourselves, live longer and reproduce, just like any other animal would do if they had the mental capability to find that efficiency (yes, burning fossil fuels has an given us a massive efficiency towards those ends).
And right now the changes environmentalists make are token changes at best. A hybrid car is neat, but how many people have cut their electricity usage in half last year? How many people fought to have a nuclear power plant built in their county and the coal plant torn down? How many picketed the oil terminal to have a supertanker turned away, or shelled out $20K for solar panels on their roof?
The next phase for humans is to find the political resolve up front to deal with the resulting problems of actions like burning fossil fuels. Most of the time people talk about giving up their gas SUV when "something that's just as cheap as gas and better" is discovered. That's to be expected because we live in a free market where price/performance is what people stick to. Except that no new solution will ever be cheaper than gas. The price of gas will drop if a new solution (say, electric cars, or hydrogen, or ethanol) comes along and threatens it. It will take significant resolve to overcome this in a free market... it might require a non-free market.
So I'm not sure why we even debate this. Our destiny cannot be changed with talk, we just aren't wired that way. It will take no less than catastrophe or a major political/economic shift.
You bring up a good point about generation, but we know how to solve that (build nukes). So to use electricity in cars, the main problem is storage on the car. We have an infrastructure we know how to improve if we want to use electric cars.
With all other alternatives, the problems are generation, distribution and/or storage on the car. For ethanol, we know how to distribute it (just like gas), but it's not so clear how we're going to grow all of that corn and process it (imagine all of the required pesticides, water, etc). On the other end of the spectrum, we know how to produce hydrogen, but have no idea how to distribute it and store it in the car safely. There's no infrastructure for these.
Electricity has a clear infrastructure for all of these needs once the storage problem is solved. It will take years to get there, but at least we know what to do.