My impression is that Intel has been irritated that they come up with new technologies that the PC world isn't particularly interested in. Despite the "Wintel" moniker, Intel has had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft; back in the BeOS days, Intel offered engineering assistance (and I suspect financial support) directly to Be to get the OS ported. And today, Apple doesn't have 20 years of backward-compatibility hardware baggage to deal with, so they have the potential to be a showcase partner in a way that the Dells of the world just aren't.
As for why not AMD, though, Intel has placed a much higher focus than AMD has on very low-voltage chips, and from what I've heard, that's what ultimately gave them the Apple nod. Arguments about production capacity aside, AMD doesn't have the R&D resources of Intel, and they have to pick their battlegrounds carefully. They've picked them wisely, but as of right now, they don't have anything competing with chips like Intel's low-power, dual-core lineup for 2006. If that's remedied in 2007, I'm sure Apple would have no problem revisiting it, but right now, AMD just doesn't have the chips they want.
(As for the production capacity arguments, I've seen people here point out that Intel has had problems meeting their demand recently and AMD hasn't. While this is true, it's important to keep in mind that Intel's overall demand is still over five times that of AMD's, and the gap in notebooks -- the segment where Intel's production capacity fell behind demand temporarily -- favors Intel by an even greater margin.)
What you're describing is essentially what Ruby does: there are true and false constants, but there's also a nil constant, which is what an uninitialized variable is set to. ("Uninitialized" is not the same as "undefined" in Ruby; if the variable isn't defined and you use it in a comparison, your program breaks.)
The problem, one could say, is that people aren't using high-level languages enough. But I recognize that leads to religious wars.:)
OS X does that to some degree, although I'm not sure it's as thorough about it as Rox is. (It's been years since I used Rox, so my memory is very fuzzy of it.) OS X does have the interesting idea of the "proxy icon" in the window bar; drag it to a Finder window to create a copy of the file (or an alias to it), drag it to a message window of just about any e-mail program and create an attachment, heck, drag it to another program icon to open it in that program, too. A lot of programs even let you drag and drop colors if you have a palette window open.
I think people who dismiss the usefuleness of drag and drop really haven't used an operating system (or window manager) that supports it effectively. Something you'll often notice is that Windows users tend to run nearly every application full-screen, while Mac users tend to run them all in, well, windows; I've always suspected this is because Windows has historically given you very little benefit from having multiple windows visible, whereas Mac OS has historically allowed a range of actions between windows.
I remember ObjektSynth! I always wondered if you guys were going to try to restart it on another OS after Be torpedoed their desktop developers, but I gather the answer was "no"...
Visio's big deal is -- like a lot of market leaders -- the community and plugins and the ways the product has evolved to meet surprisingly complex demands. It deals with a lot of things beyond "drawing stick figures," as one other Slashdotter (rather stupidly) put it.
With various incarnations of Visio or third-party addins, you can point it at a database and have it do automatic diagramming. You can point it at a network and have it do a network map, then connect that *to* a database and integrate it with your NMS. It can do asset management. And there are undoubtedly an order of magnitude more canned templates available for Visio than for any other comparable product. (When I was at Intermedia, we had Visio 'objects' for every kind of hardware we used in the network. If I did a diagram with an Cascade 9000 Frame Relay switch, the icon wasn't "generic switch," it was a Cascade 9000.)
None of these things are insurmountable -- I'm sure people can say, accurately, "I can find open source equivalents for all the functionality you're describing and the stuff I can't find, like the actual Cascade 9000 icon, isn't that important anyway." The problem is, that's not a real compelling reason to switch, particularly for any company that's already invested in Visio in the first place.:)
I think my SLS disk set was only 27 disks. It's been a long, long time, though. I still think of Slackware as SLS's de facto descendant.
Having said that, if I get a PC again as a server, I'm not sure whether it'll be running any version of Linux. I got dragged into the FreeBSD camp a few years back, and as I'm now an OS X user, it's sort of like using FreeBSD's strange cousin twice removed. If I do go back to Linux, it'll probably be either Slackware or Gentoo, though. (Ubuntu looks pretty impressive, from what I've seen, but it gives me the impression of being more desktop-oriented.)
90K is the going rate for *what* in the Silicon Valley, pray tell?
I'm not trying to be flip here, but look, I live in San Jose. When I grab lunch at Quizno's, get groceries at Lunardi's, shop at Fry's or Best Buy or Rasputin Music, none of the people there, not even managers, are making 90K. Waiters, bus drivers, janitors, teachers, secretaries, file clerks.... Open your eyes and look around, dude: most of the people in Silicon Valley are not tech geeks struggling to get by on a mere $1500 a week. They are in positions making half that, or less. The median household, not individual, income in San Jose is $73K. (The income per capita is $24K.)
Yet, all of these people actually do it. I can assure you they're not all commuting in here from Livermore, Salinas and Ukiah. And in point of reference, as a technical writer, I'll make about $60K this year myself... which is considerably more than I made the two years before that.
No offense, but there are a lot of Valley area Slashdot posters, and this may well include you, who post comments to stories like this that show they have a very foggy grasp of what a livable wage in this area entails -- much less what "living like someone in the third world" entails. If you "need" $90K a year to pay for rent and groceries, you're living in one damn expensive rental unit even by area standards and/or feasting on aged prime beef, fine wine and caviar a bit too often.
While I haven't done much -- well, okay, any -- formal testing, I've been running OS X on various Macs since the 10.1 release and it's mostly been quite stable. Possibly less so than Linux and FreeBSD boxes (Intel) that I've run in the past, but the OS X box sometimes suffers with buggy third-party extensions I've subject it to.
I really haven't compared OS X to Linux on the same hardware, other than a Live CD version of Ubuntu (which was glacially slow, but running from a CD does that). OS X does seem to be subjectively a bit "sluggish" in some operations for a Unix, but I don't know how much of that -- like your example of file transfer speed -- can really be blamed on the kernel.
FYI, in my experience, Tiger has been the least stable 10.x release since 10.1. This isn't to say that it's been crashing all the time, but I can't recall ever once having a kernel panic under 10.2 and 10.3, and I've had two under 10.4.
I'll only laugh at one of their clever witticisms here: an Encyclopedia should be judged on its worst entries, not its best.
Erm, that wasn't a Register "witticism," it was a quote from the comments to a considerably better-written and much more thought-provoking critique of the grand "Web 2.0" hype:
And, sure, you're right--if you look for the most egregious articles, that's a bad comparison point. But the thing is, if you pick a series of random articles to get a sense of what the median is, do you really think you're going to get stuff which is, on average, written to a higher standard than Britannica? I'm not. Even as a fairly regular Wikipedia user who's impressed by both its scope and depth, I'm not blind to its problems.
I think there's a fundamental misconception in "everyone can be a publisher" philosophy: the belief that editors are superfluous. When readers have the time and subject matter expertise to sort through all the choices that the internet presents to them, that's great, but most readers really don't have that time. They're going to read--and often trust--a limited number of sources. Wikipedia. The Drudge Report. Or the first page of Google results on the search they've entered. (If they used a good search term, that can be better than anything else on the net, but if they didn't...)
For all of the pithy dismissals people have of biased elitists, you would be, and this is not too strong a phrase, utterly batshit to favor a Wikipedia entry or an eloquent rant from the blogosphere over an article on military hardware written by an editor at Jane's or a biography of a president written by a Pulitzer-winning historian.
I'd really like it if Wikipedia did have some kind of "standards with teeth" for product, not just process. An editorial board that could mark articles as having been reviewed. We're not talking about censorship here, but something that embraced the premise that being an expert on a subject matters.
Re:I bet it does it all by convention...NOT!
on
What is Ruby on Rails?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
ActiveRecord isn't a code generator. The scaffolding scripts are code generators. ActiveRecord is an ORM system. In fact, AR doesn't generate any code at all, which makes it hard to believe you've even given the Active Record Overview a quick glance. The "convention over configuration" magic is one listed feature out of a dozen.
Yes, ActiveRecord is immature, and yes, it's clearly designed more with the idea of being used from the ground up. But, see, when you start slagging off AR because it's "just" something that it doesn't even do...
Ruby on Rails is awesome. Ruby on Rails is a relatively new Web application framework built on the Ruby language. Ruby on Rails is the first startling example of this trend. Ruby on Rails is way over hyped. Ruby on Rails is finally a bullet point! Ruby on Rails is NOT a new programming language.
And, definitively, from Joel on Software:
If you don't know whether or not Ruby on Rails is a good tool, give it a try yourself. Most smart people I know love Rails.
Don't you want to be a smart person?
[Disclosure: Yes, I actually do like Ruby on Rails from what I've seen. It's fun to bitch about the hype, but most of the bitching is much less well-informed than the hype being bitched about. "If you can't convince me in five minutes that I need to drop everything and learn this, obviously there's no value to it!" Yeah, uh-huh. Some people compensate with fast sportscars, some with Java frameworks, I guess.]
I see "Desperate Housewives" slagged a lot by people who I don't think have actually ever watched the show. Yes, it's a soap opera, but in terms of style, it's more like a black comedy version of "Twin Peaks" than it is like Dallas. I've only seen a few episodes, including the pilot--which is narrated by a woman who committed suicide--but they've been pretty damn well-written.
If you've watched it and don't like it, fine, but if you're just looking at the name and mocking it... stop.:)
I think you'll find that eminent domain only applies to property, i.e., real estate. Whatever legal reasoning (if any) is behind the injunction's exception for government account holders, it has nothing to do with eminent domain.
And, actually, the USPTO keeps dismissing NTP's patents after re-examination, which is going to eventually throw this whole thing into further disarray.
Since you can't really buy and destroy open source software, they may well be trying to throw a monkey wrench into it. InnoDB brought ACID compliance to MySQL, and the new 5.0 release brings, well, SQL to MySQL. Despite what I'm sure Oracle would say, this is a problem for them.
I know there are copious reasons people can bring up about why MySQL still can't hold a candle to Oracle. Those people are, in my experience, the ones who fail to appreciate that when money is, in fact, an object, "good enough" frequently trumps "unreservedly best." (While I'd agree with the ones who'd suggest PostgreSQL instead, MySQL has a great deal more mindshare, and if MySQL 5's new features hold up in practice, the gap between the two is much smaller now. Also, like it or not, having the database vendor provide commercial-level support, as MySQL AB does, trumps PostgreSQL's approach of "here's a list of independent consultants to call" for most companies.) I'm aware of more than one company that evaluated Oracle and chose MySQL anyway, because they decided the performance and stability gain for their particular application didn't justify the cost.
So would Oracle make this purchase solely to try to slow MySQL's progress? Absolutely.
If they hadn't gone with the boneheaded idea of making the main page's body text ridiculously oversized, I don't think people would be complaining about the design much at all. Again, look at the "About" page.
Yes, there are still design issues -- the headline is still a little too big, and there's not enough space between it and the start of the body -- but the font choice and colors are hardly eye-destroying.
At any rate, this is sort of tangential to the main point I was trying to make.:)
Did you actually look at PostgreSQL's license before writing this? They use the BSD license, which is very similar to PHP's, and has none of the issues with restriction that MySQL did. Perhaps the choice of SQLite as the default database is telling you that SQLite is very small and very fast, and if you don't need the power of a real RDBMS (which most web applications don't), it's a far more lightweight solution than either PostgreSQL *or* MySQL.
Even in the open source world, sometimes these decisions are actually made for--yes--technical reasons.:)
Because it has recognized talent and some big-name backers behind it?
I can understand a healthy amount of skepticism about this system, but some of the comments here have gone beyond "healthy amount" into Sad Bitter Monkey territory. The web page isn't that bad, although it's certainly not that good. If you look at the "About" page you'll see the look they're presumably really trying for, though, and it's hardly a work of eye-bleeding terror.
And, enough with the accusations of stealing from Firefox. Most articles other than Business Week's, like this and this and this, refer to it as being Mozilla-based. This isn't a shell game. They're not hiding anything. Wait until they actually, oh, release the damn browser before whining about MPL violations.
I'm not really sure I'm interested in Flock, given its "social browser" focus, but I think they're on the right track: the new frontiers in web browsing aren't rendering. Sure, there's work to be done in improving engines to be fully compliant with W3C standards, and in keeping up with new standards as they happen, but the most interesting browser out there right now is the Mac-nly OmniWeb, and that's entirely because of its UI innovations. It does stuff other browsers don't do.
So c'mon, guys. Put a sock in the hip "they're out to scam you" cynicism for just a bit. Their business model may prove non-existent, the company may be a flash in the pan, but all the evidence suggests that they're sincere in trying to do some cool stuff in a new Gecko browser. More power to 'em.
I think finding work that is fun is a great goal. Easier said than done, granted, but not completely unrealistic. But, even jobs that are fun on the balance have the drudge work.
As someone else commented, the kind of cubicle does make a difference. I really like the one I'm in now -- high walls (I'd say about five and a half feet), a pretty large working area with a wrap-around desk, ample storage, and importantly to me, a place I can sit so my monitor isn't facing the cubicle's entrance. I hate having people be able to see over my shoulder. One of the worst environments I've been in was also nominally cubicle-based, but it was a "quad cube," with four desks in the four corners, everyone's back to one another, which of course only amplified the problems you mentioned with respect to overheard conversation.
As for the "firm grasp on the next tree branch," I realize you didn't have that option (an hour's severance pay is vaguely insulting, somehow). That was more responding to the general "When is it time to quit?" tone -- if you're jumping out of the plane on your own, do your best to pack your parachute, to horribly mangle a metaphor....
I'm going to nitpick a bit at the article's first point: as much as we may dislike cubicles, a blanket statement like "working in cubicles is the sure sign that you're not working for a successful company" is... well, a sure sign that the article's author hasn't worked at many companies. I've worked at some very successful companies with cubicles (my current one is arguably the world's most successful network equipment manufacturer), and more than one small, dismal and unfortunate place without.
I don't want to imply that happiness on the job is overrated, but very few of us can claim to be happy all, or even nearly all, of the time with our work--even the self-employed. For most of us, a significant chunk of whatever our given job is involves Sadly Boring Shit. Drudge work, waiting for work, paperwork about waiting for drudge work.
Do look out for warning signs about when to quit your job, sure. But make sure those aren't just signs of a bad day (or week, or even month). And if at all possible, get the next job before you quit the crappy one.
If you don't do that, make sure you're prepared for unemployment. Try to follow all the standard cliche advice: have enough money to live on for six months. (This means figuring out what your minimum outflow--housing, food, gas, utilities, other debt payments--is per month. A whole lot of people I know have no idea what this is.) You can expect to spend a month looking for work for every $10K of salary in the range you're looking for (I know people who've spent a lot less, yes, but I also know people who've spent well past that time)
I got the impression SoftImage was purchased by Microsoft solely to force them to port their products to NT, when Microsoft was moving low-level graphics support into NT4's kernel specifically to try and make it a viable challenger to Silicon Graphics. Which seemed to work; I recall the SIGGRAPH I went to around that time being filled to the brim with Intergraph Z workstations in places SGI workstations would have been just a couple years before that.
The city is going to get lots of new, very high-paying jobs. Those people will pay sales tax, buy homes and pay property tax, and in general add to the prosperity of the area.
None of those benefits depend on Google getting space at Ames, though, they just depend on Google being in the Mountain View area. The explanation that this brings jobs and property taxes and all those things that, well, any big company brings to the area isn't a justification for certain big companies to be given tax breaks.
If this is space that NASA wants to give up, I see no reason why the land shouldn't be "decomissioned," lose its federal land status, and put up for sale. Everybody's happy then: NASA (and federal taxpayers, as you put it) are paid fair market value, and the local/state government doesn't feel like they're losing anything. Why isn't this a better, fairer, and arguably more more market-based approach?
And PunBB does just about everything that I actually want a bulletin board system to do, without the "kitchen sink" feeling. I was wondering if I was the only person who'd ever run across the thing. (I quasi-integrated it with the Textpattern Blog/CMS for one site for a while, inspired by--well, Textpattern's own web site, where they use PunBB for the same reasons I liked it, and that you cited.)
I write "macros" for Excel and Word fairly frequently, or at least used to. In the VBA IDE that comes with Office. With IF and WHILE statements.:) By taking work that could be automated and, well, automating it, I reduced the time some staff spent putting together quarterly "state of the network" reports by 90%. This is automation that's perfectly logical to put in Microsoft Excel, because that's where all the data was to start with, and you have access to all of Office's formatting objects.
I'm all for good programming practices, and I certainly understand your basic point. People really should learn how to program, and it's ridiculous to get a "certification" in a programming language when all you really know how to do is use the form builder. But, I'm not for taking away functionality that really makes people's work easier. Some of those little macros created by people who honestly don't know how to program are little macros that save them 90% of their time on a given task (if likely a much smaller one than the one I worked with). I'm not willing to tell them, "Sorry, that's philosophically impure -- if you can't take time out from your busy schedule to learn the programming language behind that macro capability, do it manually."
Slashdot Mirror
My impression is that Intel has been irritated that they come up with new technologies that the PC world isn't particularly interested in. Despite the "Wintel" moniker, Intel has had a love-hate relationship with Microsoft; back in the BeOS days, Intel offered engineering assistance (and I suspect financial support) directly to Be to get the OS ported. And today, Apple doesn't have 20 years of backward-compatibility hardware baggage to deal with, so they have the potential to be a showcase partner in a way that the Dells of the world just aren't.
As for why not AMD, though, Intel has placed a much higher focus than AMD has on very low-voltage chips, and from what I've heard, that's what ultimately gave them the Apple nod. Arguments about production capacity aside, AMD doesn't have the R&D resources of Intel, and they have to pick their battlegrounds carefully. They've picked them wisely, but as of right now, they don't have anything competing with chips like Intel's low-power, dual-core lineup for 2006. If that's remedied in 2007, I'm sure Apple would have no problem revisiting it, but right now, AMD just doesn't have the chips they want.
(As for the production capacity arguments, I've seen people here point out that Intel has had problems meeting their demand recently and AMD hasn't. While this is true, it's important to keep in mind that Intel's overall demand is still over five times that of AMD's, and the gap in notebooks -- the segment where Intel's production capacity fell behind demand temporarily -- favors Intel by an even greater margin.)
What you're describing is essentially what Ruby does: there are true and false constants, but there's also a nil constant, which is what an uninitialized variable is set to. ("Uninitialized" is not the same as "undefined" in Ruby; if the variable isn't defined and you use it in a comparison, your program breaks.)
:)
The problem, one could say, is that people aren't using high-level languages enough. But I recognize that leads to religious wars.
OS X does that to some degree, although I'm not sure it's as thorough about it as Rox is. (It's been years since I used Rox, so my memory is very fuzzy of it.) OS X does have the interesting idea of the "proxy icon" in the window bar; drag it to a Finder window to create a copy of the file (or an alias to it), drag it to a message window of just about any e-mail program and create an attachment, heck, drag it to another program icon to open it in that program, too. A lot of programs even let you drag and drop colors if you have a palette window open.
I think people who dismiss the usefuleness of drag and drop really haven't used an operating system (or window manager) that supports it effectively. Something you'll often notice is that Windows users tend to run nearly every application full-screen, while Mac users tend to run them all in, well, windows; I've always suspected this is because Windows has historically given you very little benefit from having multiple windows visible, whereas Mac OS has historically allowed a range of actions between windows.
I remember ObjektSynth! I always wondered if you guys were going to try to restart it on another OS after Be torpedoed their desktop developers, but I gather the answer was "no"...
Visio's big deal is -- like a lot of market leaders -- the community and plugins and the ways the product has evolved to meet surprisingly complex demands. It deals with a lot of things beyond "drawing stick figures," as one other Slashdotter (rather stupidly) put it.
:)
With various incarnations of Visio or third-party addins, you can point it at a database and have it do automatic diagramming. You can point it at a network and have it do a network map, then connect that *to* a database and integrate it with your NMS. It can do asset management. And there are undoubtedly an order of magnitude more canned templates available for Visio than for any other comparable product. (When I was at Intermedia, we had Visio 'objects' for every kind of hardware we used in the network. If I did a diagram with an Cascade 9000 Frame Relay switch, the icon wasn't "generic switch," it was a Cascade 9000.)
None of these things are insurmountable -- I'm sure people can say, accurately, "I can find open source equivalents for all the functionality you're describing and the stuff I can't find, like the actual Cascade 9000 icon, isn't that important anyway." The problem is, that's not a real compelling reason to switch, particularly for any company that's already invested in Visio in the first place.
I think my SLS disk set was only 27 disks. It's been a long, long time, though. I still think of Slackware as SLS's de facto descendant.
Having said that, if I get a PC again as a server, I'm not sure whether it'll be running any version of Linux. I got dragged into the FreeBSD camp a few years back, and as I'm now an OS X user, it's sort of like using FreeBSD's strange cousin twice removed. If I do go back to Linux, it'll probably be either Slackware or Gentoo, though. (Ubuntu looks pretty impressive, from what I've seen, but it gives me the impression of being more desktop-oriented.)
90K is the going rate for *what* in the Silicon Valley, pray tell?
I'm not trying to be flip here, but look, I live in San Jose. When I grab lunch at Quizno's, get groceries at Lunardi's, shop at Fry's or Best Buy or Rasputin Music, none of the people there, not even managers, are making 90K. Waiters, bus drivers, janitors, teachers, secretaries, file clerks.... Open your eyes and look around, dude: most of the people in Silicon Valley are not tech geeks struggling to get by on a mere $1500 a week. They are in positions making half that, or less. The median household, not individual, income in San Jose is $73K. (The income per capita is $24K.)
Yet, all of these people actually do it. I can assure you they're not all commuting in here from Livermore, Salinas and Ukiah. And in point of reference, as a technical writer, I'll make about $60K this year myself... which is considerably more than I made the two years before that.
No offense, but there are a lot of Valley area Slashdot posters, and this may well include you, who post comments to stories like this that show they have a very foggy grasp of what a livable wage in this area entails -- much less what "living like someone in the third world" entails. If you "need" $90K a year to pay for rent and groceries, you're living in one damn expensive rental unit even by area standards and/or feasting on aged prime beef, fine wine and caviar a bit too often.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20040 101194202284
Does this FAQ help you?
While I haven't done much -- well, okay, any -- formal testing, I've been running OS X on various Macs since the 10.1 release and it's mostly been quite stable. Possibly less so than Linux and FreeBSD boxes (Intel) that I've run in the past, but the OS X box sometimes suffers with buggy third-party extensions I've subject it to.
I really haven't compared OS X to Linux on the same hardware, other than a Live CD version of Ubuntu (which was glacially slow, but running from a CD does that). OS X does seem to be subjectively a bit "sluggish" in some operations for a Unix, but I don't know how much of that -- like your example of file transfer speed -- can really be blamed on the kernel.
FYI, in my experience, Tiger has been the least stable 10.x release since 10.1. This isn't to say that it's been crashing all the time, but I can't recall ever once having a kernel panic under 10.2 and 10.3, and I've had two under 10.4.
I'll only laugh at one of their clever witticisms here: an Encyclopedia should be judged on its worst entries, not its best.
r ality_o.php
Erm, that wasn't a Register "witticism," it was a quote from the comments to a considerably better-written and much more thought-provoking critique of the grand "Web 2.0" hype:
http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2005/10/the_amo
And, sure, you're right--if you look for the most egregious articles, that's a bad comparison point. But the thing is, if you pick a series of random articles to get a sense of what the median is, do you really think you're going to get stuff which is, on average, written to a higher standard than Britannica? I'm not. Even as a fairly regular Wikipedia user who's impressed by both its scope and depth, I'm not blind to its problems.
I think there's a fundamental misconception in "everyone can be a publisher" philosophy: the belief that editors are superfluous. When readers have the time and subject matter expertise to sort through all the choices that the internet presents to them, that's great, but most readers really don't have that time. They're going to read--and often trust--a limited number of sources. Wikipedia. The Drudge Report. Or the first page of Google results on the search they've entered. (If they used a good search term, that can be better than anything else on the net, but if they didn't...)
For all of the pithy dismissals people have of biased elitists, you would be, and this is not too strong a phrase, utterly batshit to favor a Wikipedia entry or an eloquent rant from the blogosphere over an article on military hardware written by an editor at Jane's or a biography of a president written by a Pulitzer-winning historian.
I'd really like it if Wikipedia did have some kind of "standards with teeth" for product, not just process. An editorial board that could mark articles as having been reviewed. We're not talking about censorship here, but something that embraced the premise that being an expert on a subject matters.
ActiveRecord isn't a code generator. The scaffolding scripts are code generators. ActiveRecord is an ORM system. In fact, AR doesn't generate any code at all, which makes it hard to believe you've even given the Active Record Overview a quick glance. The "convention over configuration" magic is one listed feature out of a dozen.
Yes, ActiveRecord is immature, and yes, it's clearly designed more with the idea of being used from the ground up. But, see, when you start slagging off AR because it's "just" something that it doesn't even do...
Google on "ruby on rails is":
Ruby on Rails is awesome.
Ruby on Rails is a relatively new Web application framework built on the Ruby language.
Ruby on Rails is the first startling example of this trend.
Ruby on Rails is way over hyped.
Ruby on Rails is finally a bullet point!
Ruby on Rails is NOT a new programming language.
And, definitively, from Joel on Software:
If you don't know whether or not Ruby on Rails is a good tool, give it a try yourself. Most smart people I know love Rails.
Don't you want to be a smart person?
[Disclosure: Yes, I actually do like Ruby on Rails from what I've seen. It's fun to bitch about the hype, but most of the bitching is much less well-informed than the hype being bitched about. "If you can't convince me in five minutes that I need to drop everything and learn this, obviously there's no value to it!" Yeah, uh-huh. Some people compensate with fast sportscars, some with Java frameworks, I guess.]
I see "Desperate Housewives" slagged a lot by people who I don't think have actually ever watched the show. Yes, it's a soap opera, but in terms of style, it's more like a black comedy version of "Twin Peaks" than it is like Dallas. I've only seen a few episodes, including the pilot--which is narrated by a woman who committed suicide--but they've been pretty damn well-written.
:)
If you've watched it and don't like it, fine, but if you're just looking at the name and mocking it... stop.
I think you'll find that eminent domain only applies to property, i.e., real estate. Whatever legal reasoning (if any) is behind the injunction's exception for government account holders, it has nothing to do with eminent domain.
And, actually, the USPTO keeps dismissing NTP's patents after re-examination, which is going to eventually throw this whole thing into further disarray.
This is probably accurate. Oracle was most recently in the news, remember, saying that they wanted to "crush" Salesforce.com's competing CRM products.
u sh_salesforce/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/30/oracle_cr
Since you can't really buy and destroy open source software, they may well be trying to throw a monkey wrench into it. InnoDB brought ACID compliance to MySQL, and the new 5.0 release brings, well, SQL to MySQL. Despite what I'm sure Oracle would say, this is a problem for them.
I know there are copious reasons people can bring up about why MySQL still can't hold a candle to Oracle. Those people are, in my experience, the ones who fail to appreciate that when money is, in fact, an object, "good enough" frequently trumps "unreservedly best." (While I'd agree with the ones who'd suggest PostgreSQL instead, MySQL has a great deal more mindshare, and if MySQL 5's new features hold up in practice, the gap between the two is much smaller now. Also, like it or not, having the database vendor provide commercial-level support, as MySQL AB does, trumps PostgreSQL's approach of "here's a list of independent consultants to call" for most companies.) I'm aware of more than one company that evaluated Oracle and chose MySQL anyway, because they decided the performance and stability gain for their particular application didn't justify the cost.
So would Oracle make this purchase solely to try to slow MySQL's progress? Absolutely.
If they hadn't gone with the boneheaded idea of making the main page's body text ridiculously oversized, I don't think people would be complaining about the design much at all. Again, look at the "About" page.
:)
http://www.flock.com/home/about/
Yes, there are still design issues -- the headline is still a little too big, and there's not enough space between it and the start of the body -- but the font choice and colors are hardly eye-destroying.
At any rate, this is sort of tangential to the main point I was trying to make.
Did you actually look at PostgreSQL's license before writing this? They use the BSD license, which is very similar to PHP's, and has none of the issues with restriction that MySQL did. Perhaps the choice of SQLite as the default database is telling you that SQLite is very small and very fast, and if you don't need the power of a real RDBMS (which most web applications don't), it's a far more lightweight solution than either PostgreSQL *or* MySQL.
:)
Even in the open source world, sometimes these decisions are actually made for--yes--technical reasons.
Because it has recognized talent and some big-name backers behind it?
I can understand a healthy amount of skepticism about this system, but some of the comments here have gone beyond "healthy amount" into Sad Bitter Monkey territory. The web page isn't that bad, although it's certainly not that good. If you look at the "About" page you'll see the look they're presumably really trying for, though, and it's hardly a work of eye-bleeding terror.
And, enough with the accusations of stealing from Firefox. Most articles other than Business Week's, like this and this and this, refer to it as being Mozilla-based. This isn't a shell game. They're not hiding anything. Wait until they actually, oh, release the damn browser before whining about MPL violations.
I'm not really sure I'm interested in Flock, given its "social browser" focus, but I think they're on the right track: the new frontiers in web browsing aren't rendering. Sure, there's work to be done in improving engines to be fully compliant with W3C standards, and in keeping up with new standards as they happen, but the most interesting browser out there right now is the Mac-nly OmniWeb, and that's entirely because of its UI innovations. It does stuff other browsers don't do.
So c'mon, guys. Put a sock in the hip "they're out to scam you" cynicism for just a bit. Their business model may prove non-existent, the company may be a flash in the pan, but all the evidence suggests that they're sincere in trying to do some cool stuff in a new Gecko browser. More power to 'em.
I think finding work that is fun is a great goal. Easier said than done, granted, but not completely unrealistic. But, even jobs that are fun on the balance have the drudge work.
As someone else commented, the kind of cubicle does make a difference. I really like the one I'm in now -- high walls (I'd say about five and a half feet), a pretty large working area with a wrap-around desk, ample storage, and importantly to me, a place I can sit so my monitor isn't facing the cubicle's entrance. I hate having people be able to see over my shoulder. One of the worst environments I've been in was also nominally cubicle-based, but it was a "quad cube," with four desks in the four corners, everyone's back to one another, which of course only amplified the problems you mentioned with respect to overheard conversation.
As for the "firm grasp on the next tree branch," I realize you didn't have that option (an hour's severance pay is vaguely insulting, somehow). That was more responding to the general "When is it time to quit?" tone -- if you're jumping out of the plane on your own, do your best to pack your parachute, to horribly mangle a metaphor....
I'm going to nitpick a bit at the article's first point: as much as we may dislike cubicles, a blanket statement like "working in cubicles is the sure sign that you're not working for a successful company" is... well, a sure sign that the article's author hasn't worked at many companies. I've worked at some very successful companies with cubicles (my current one is arguably the world's most successful network equipment manufacturer), and more than one small, dismal and unfortunate place without.
I don't want to imply that happiness on the job is overrated, but very few of us can claim to be happy all, or even nearly all, of the time with our work--even the self-employed. For most of us, a significant chunk of whatever our given job is involves Sadly Boring Shit. Drudge work, waiting for work, paperwork about waiting for drudge work.
Do look out for warning signs about when to quit your job, sure. But make sure those aren't just signs of a bad day (or week, or even month). And if at all possible, get the next job before you quit the crappy one.
If you don't do that, make sure you're prepared for unemployment. Try to follow all the standard cliche advice: have enough money to live on for six months. (This means figuring out what your minimum outflow--housing, food, gas, utilities, other debt payments--is per month. A whole lot of people I know have no idea what this is.) You can expect to spend a month looking for work for every $10K of salary in the range you're looking for (I know people who've spent a lot less, yes, but I also know people who've spent well past that time)
I got the impression SoftImage was purchased by Microsoft solely to force them to port their products to NT, when Microsoft was moving low-level graphics support into NT4's kernel specifically to try and make it a viable challenger to Silicon Graphics. Which seemed to work; I recall the SIGGRAPH I went to around that time being filled to the brim with Intergraph Z workstations in places SGI workstations would have been just a couple years before that.
The city is going to get lots of new, very high-paying jobs. Those people will pay sales tax, buy homes and pay property tax, and in general add to the prosperity of the area.
None of those benefits depend on Google getting space at Ames, though, they just depend on Google being in the Mountain View area. The explanation that this brings jobs and property taxes and all those things that, well, any big company brings to the area isn't a justification for certain big companies to be given tax breaks.
If this is space that NASA wants to give up, I see no reason why the land shouldn't be "decomissioned," lose its federal land status, and put up for sale. Everybody's happy then: NASA (and federal taxpayers, as you put it) are paid fair market value, and the local/state government doesn't feel like they're losing anything. Why isn't this a better, fairer, and arguably more more market-based approach?
And PunBB does just about everything that I actually want a bulletin board system to do, without the "kitchen sink" feeling. I was wondering if I was the only person who'd ever run across the thing. (I quasi-integrated it with the Textpattern Blog/CMS for one site for a while, inspired by--well, Textpattern's own web site, where they use PunBB for the same reasons I liked it, and that you cited.)
Watch it, whippersnapper!
Kids these days.
I was with you up until this point. :)
:) By taking work that could be automated and, well, automating it, I reduced the time some staff spent putting together quarterly "state of the network" reports by 90%. This is automation that's perfectly logical to put in Microsoft Excel, because that's where all the data was to start with, and you have access to all of Office's formatting objects.
I write "macros" for Excel and Word fairly frequently, or at least used to. In the VBA IDE that comes with Office. With IF and WHILE statements.
I'm all for good programming practices, and I certainly understand your basic point. People really should learn how to program, and it's ridiculous to get a "certification" in a programming language when all you really know how to do is use the form builder. But, I'm not for taking away functionality that really makes people's work easier. Some of those little macros created by people who honestly don't know how to program are little macros that save them 90% of their time on a given task (if likely a much smaller one than the one I worked with). I'm not willing to tell them, "Sorry, that's philosophically impure -- if you can't take time out from your busy schedule to learn the programming language behind that macro capability, do it manually."