Don't you think it's a tiny bit dishonest to say that we do not take it seriously? No? I don't know, I've never seen anyone complain about imagery of animals, but images of Muhammed seem to be rather different. Perhaps the issues are more distinct than I recognise, though, certainly "The key concern is that the use of images can encourage idolatry" would suggest so.
You will certainly be in Eternal Hellfire if you are ascribing partners to Allah What does "ascribing partners to Allah" mean? Ah, "ascribing divine attributes to others besides Allah"; polytheism. Are "divine attributes" well defined in Islam?
The problem with pictures is that they LEAD to that. That is exactly how monotheists of the times of Prophet Ibraaheem (Abraham) after generation ended up as polytheist Arabs in Hijaaz at the time preceding the Prophethood of Muhammad, sal Allahu 'alaihi wa sallam. Ah. Yet the world continues to produce images of every conceivable description in ever greater quantities, and we're not exactly seeing a slide into polytheism. Do you think that's likely to change?
So if you draw pictures, you will answer for that on the Day of Judgement. You good deeds might overcome that particular sin and Mercy of Allah is limitless, so you won't necessarily end up in Hellfire Sure, sure, he's full of mercy, but if I've done things he doesn't like, he might just have to torture me in hellfire after I survive my own death. My schools tried to convince me of much the same thing, but they were Roman Catholic. I can see how it might be appealing to those who think god hates all the things they hate.
Logical? Perhaps, I think I'd use the word "hypocritical", though; it basically seems to be saying "well, we don't really take what you said about pictures of animate animals seriously, but some of us will get *extra* upset when someone makes an image of you, because we know you didn't like that sort of thing".
Personally I find the original idea offensive; this "god" tortures dead people forever for making images of animals? All because it "imitates the creative act of Allah"; something which *surely* includes lots of other things, if a mere painting is sufficient.
Ever run or seen Conway's Game of Life or other CA? Ever written or used something which used a genetic algorithm or something else based on AI research (like, say, Google, or a computer game)? Read or written a book that builds a lifelike universe inside people's heads? Would a fatwa be appropriate against Will Wright?
other newer games give me grief such as Supreme Commander and C&C3. Both of these require a No-CD hack to run as neither will recognize the DVD sitting in the drive Dunno about C&C3, but SupCom's CD check was removed in a patch 11 months ago, only a couple of weeks after it was released.
Um, what's all about making pictures of "animate life", not just Mohammed. So why is it making a picture of Mohammed gets you killed and a picture of a stoat goes uncommented?
You wouldn't notice Flickr disappearing? Yahoo Groups? Pipes? (at the very least I'd notice it not flooding us; running feed updates a6 60Hz is taking the piss a bit, guys) del.icio.us?
Copying and pasting code in any language requires you to reindent it just as much as with Python, lest it become an unreadable mess, Except with delimiters I can just type gg=G and I'm pretty much done.
I still remember, a few years ago, showing him how to connect to the internet and search it with Google, and telling him he could find pretty much anything he ever wanted to look up with it.
I seriously doubt that in my lifetime I will see anywhere near the amount of revolutionary change that he saw in his. Let's hope your kids show you how to plug in the UC, have a conversation with it and make it build pretty much anything you ever wanted.
since when has a new Microsoft OS been faster than the old Microsoft OS that it intended to replace? That's not really the point though is it; much of the hype around Vista has been about performance; a smarter scheduler, better scaling to multiple cores with finer grained locking and better APIs for everything from DirectX to block devices, faster graphics using hardware compositing, fancy prefetch and prebinding, support for using flash memory to boost startup and overall performance, and to top it all better usability thanks to years of HCI work.
What we got was some dubious transparent windows and awkward redesigns-by-committee-for-the-sake-of-it, slower 2D, slower 3D, another half a GB or more wasted on the base OS, and a tonne of DRM bullshit.
In the mean time, every other major OS has no problems delivering better performance as time goes on; see, e.g, FreeBSD 7, where the hard work of a handful of people have delivered major performance improvements across the board. I guess that's a telling difference; open source projects often have relatively small groups and even just individuals driving improvements in particular areas -- Jason Evans malloc, Jeff Roberson's sched_ule, Ingo Molnar's CFS, Hans Reiser's reiserfs, the modest team behind ZFS; Microsoft probably wouldn't even consider any project like that without a 40-strong programming team and 15 middle-managers who hold meetings twice a week to make sure the colour of the bikeshed isn't too offensive.
Pfft, I could just about run Crysis on medium at 1024*768 on my 7950GT; numerous other games need settings turning down and/or resolution decreasing to run smoothly, never mind 4xAA or 16xAS. I recently upgraded to a G92 8800GTS and it's great actually being able to run everything in my monitor's native resolution again, and remembering what "smooth" meant.
Now I'm thinking about getting a 30" monitor; 2560x1600 -- ruh oh, now my card needs to be twice as powerful again to avoid having to run in non native resolution. And I *still* can't run everything with full settings, never mind think about making use of multiple monitors.
What is it, specifically, that prevents you from performing dangerous experiments on unwilling human subjects? Not being a psychopath, I identify with other people somewhat, and have some capacity for putting myself in other people's shoes. I wouldn't like to be experimented on unknowingly, so I wouldn't experiment on other people unknowingly. Even if I were psychopathic, those who aren't will tend to keep me in line.
Religions do not have a monopoly, as it were, on morality, but you'll find that most of the moral standards to which we hold ourselves emerge directly from them Such as? Ultimately the things people tend to consider wrong, such as murder, adultery, theft and so on are considered so because of ideas like ownership, desire for social cohesion and stability, in in-built emotional responses evolution has seen fit to provide us with; they're universal (for the most part) not because people are scared Sky Master From Beyond The Universe will beat them up if they break them, but because they're easily recognisable as being bad for the life most people want to lead, and those who disagree tend to get removed from the equation one way or another.
You don't think you find the idea of murdering someone abhorrent because you're Muslim, do you?
I assure you even those questions, not to mention all the others you have not considered, are more complex than you might imagine at first. Why? Because I do not take into account what I think a possible creator of the universe might think on any given matter? "Well, I have no problem with homosexuals, but now I take into account the fact that this book says they're an abomination upon the Lord, I'm going to be an asshole and try to mess up their lives", hmm. "I thought condoms were a pretty good idea, but then I remembered the big guy in the sky who can do absolutely anything He wants gets upset when I thwart His plan with a thin layer of latex".
I ask you, how do, living beyond good and evil, tell Right from Wrong without returning back to religion? Normal people have this thing called a conscience. Perhaps you've heard of it? It's kind of like God, only this invisible friend is normally recognised as being ourselves, and you can actually have a conversation with it. Possibly you're even confusing yours with the creator of the cosmos; an easy mistake to make, and one I made myself, long ago.
With a religion, while the impulse to follow this self-serving bias is still there, it's not nearly as easy to carry through on it. Why? Because an honest man will always go back to the book, the priest, or the sage and ask him, "hey, is this alright?" This is "why social support networks are good for morality", not "why religion is good for morality". In the context of science it's normally a requirement to actually get anything done, if only for practical reasons.
the problem people have with religion is the problem people have with all things; practitioners of a religion are human, just like practitioners of anything else, and they're going to fail and falter occasionally. Well, sure, except many of the problems I have with religions are when they appear to be working properly; decrying the use of contraception, persecuting homosexuals, underminding our own understanding of the nature of reality, indoctrinating children, suppressing women, and pushing their own agendas on everybody else. You talk about evil? That's it, right there.
Atheism has many colours; strong, weak, indifferent, mu. You seem to have "atheism" confused with "strong atheism". If you're agnostic, and don't have a positive belief in existance, you're a weak atheist of some description, because that's the default position; you're without a God, even if you believe the question unsolvable.
If you spend most of your time arguing against strong atheism, you're probably flying right over the head of the vast majority of atheists, for whom the idea isn't so much "absolutely not!!!!!!111 Dawkins proves it zomg!!!" but more "meh, foolish question".
Science without religion just as easily veers towards the cruel and inhuman Really? What is it about religion, specifically, which moderates "science" so? Surely it's not morality or ethics, which are about as unique to religion as silly hats and cheesy music, so.. what does religion do?
How does the church count "recorded membership"? I was baptised and confirmed Catholic, but I've self-identified atheist for most of my life. Did my membership time out, or do I need to get myself explicitly excommunicated?
To me this sounds like the creators of Opera are not happy their market share isn't has high as they'd like, so they hopped on the "blame Microsoft for the world's problems" bandwagon and are hoping the Socalist leaning EU will give them some handouts. The antitrust complaint is primarily about Microsoft's atrocious standards support; standards which Microsoft themselves had a hand in creating are almost invariably poorly supported, with both little coverage and massive bugs which basically go unfixed forever. In the mean time, web developers end up wasting huge amounts of time and effort working around problems, often to the detriment of support for other browsers. If Microsoft actually had to compete in a market for web browsers they'd never get a look in; they'd actually have to make a token effort to keep up with the rest of the industry.
Instead they're abusing their position and holding the industry back. I think every web developer on the planet would like to see them get a kick up the backside . It would make a change from swearing at them in CSS/HTML/JS comments.
The bundling issue I'm more ambivalent about; making them unbundle WMP didn't exactly achieve much, but perhaps the processes surrounding it were more valuable than the unbundling itself. Still, I hardly agree it's got anything to do with Opera wanting a "handout", whatever the fuck that means.
SSD's do rather poorly for random writes; even a decent MTron drive's only rated for something like 130/second, and for the cheaper ones aimed at portables you can drop a zero off that. To actually get decent write performance you have to start jumping through hoops to convert the random writes to sequential.
Its not like your hard drive in your PC now reads from one head at a time. It uses multiple heads to achieve higher rates by reading/writing all the platters at one time No it doesn't. Heads can only "focus" on a single track at a time due to the tolerances involved; you'll notice that single platter drives have much the same STR as drives with 4 double-sided platters, and STR increases are only associated with RPM and platter density.
Well, Ruby introduces concepts you may be unfamiliar with, not just new syntax, but it shouldn't be that foreign once you have the basics down? I'd be interested in some examples of what sort of things confuse you, though; I probably take for granted many things now that confused the hell out of me when I started but don't remember:)
I do think "learn the framework not the language" is a dubious strategy, though; I tend to learn by starting small, with code I can understand and keep in my head, and build up to working with larger systems so I'm not swamped with a lot of stuff I don't understand, and I think that's especially important when you're not familiar with all the concepts that underpin something. You don't learn C by starting with the Apache Portable Runtime or GTK, you start with a 5 line hello.c using stdio.h, especially if you've never used a language with pointers before;)
My point was that you began the rant referring to Rails, and it just morphed into a referral to Ruby, suggesting that even you (intentionally or not) blurred the lines between the framework and the language I don't see how that follows. I lamented the conflating of Rails to languages, and then the conflating of Rails with Ruby web development. I'm not using Ruby as a synonym for Rails in the last sentence; I'm rhetorically asking why that's a problem for Ruby and not PHP/Python.
one of the other parents pointed out that ModPython is a library I mentally mapped "ModPython" to just Python, since mod_python would seem to be to simply be a means for deployment.
Mind you, I think comparisons between PHP and RoR are perfectly valid in their own right, which is different from most people's opinions. PHP is just much more low-level Perhaps, but what "PHP" are you comparing with? The language? An ad-hoc index.php with a huge switch() and a function per page? CakePHP? Rails is a big MVC framework, and there's a set of libraries it can use just because it's Ruby. Comparing with "PHP" seems silly because PHP isn't a huge MVC framework. It's like comparing oranges with soil.
Yes, pretty much, but the general idiom is the ability to easily pass blocks of code to methods; the common use of map/select/reduce-style transformations on enumerations is just one of the results. e.g. you could write map like so:
module Enumerable # included in most things that respond to each()
def mymap
raise ArgumentError, "No block given" unless block_given?
a = []
for item in self # equivilent to self.each do |item|
a << yield(item)
end
return a
end end
Obviously the general ability shown here allows for a lot more than just operations on lists; they're used for event handlers, resource management (e.g. open a file at the top of the method, pass it to the block, ensure you close it afterwards), logging, exception handling, etc. You can do much the same in many other languages, but you end up writing "lambda" everywhere and it's not considered very idiomatic.
Smalltalk goes one step further with this concept: even "if" is just a method on a Boolean object, with blocks passed as named arguments ifTrue and ifFalse.
Based on your words, it looks like you're having trouble distinguishing between the framework and the language as well In what way? People compare Rails to languages. People often don't look at alternatives to Rails when they do web development in Ruby but do look at multiple frameworks in other languages. The words would appear to fit fine.
Yes, but as far as I know, RoR is the main package people use for Ruby, versus Python which has 5-6 packages that I know of.
I suggested at least that many alternatives for Ruby, and there are more. You don't base all your decisions on how popular or well marketed something is, do you?
Part of the reason for this is that Ruby's language has some unique features that make it favorable to RoR's style
Perhaps, but it's also perfectly favourable to various other "styles". Metaprogramming is quite a general tool, as you might have guessed;)
I was assuming that most readers would be smart enough to figure out I meant the standard way you do things in PHP or Python
It's akin to calling PHP development Cake. Names of frameworks are not interchangable with generic terms for web development in a language, and I assumed you'd be smart enough to recognise that. I've used Ruby for 8 years, and I certainly don't equate Rails with the One True Way of doing web development in it. I might end at it for some things, but I certainly don't start there.
There's plenty of sites I'm interested in making that actually have no database whatsoever. Because that's RoR's, I would assume it's not going to help me much.
Like I said; you may not have a database, but you probbaly have data you want to serve dynamically in some way? Much of the advantage Rails provides is a convention for how to interact with that data, with ActiveRecord being the de-facto example, but, for example there's also ActiveResource which talks to web services instead of directly to a database; if you don't want a database, you just fill in the "M" part of MVC with a layer that talks to something else, and try to stick with the conventions to keep the interface Rails-alike. Maybe you'll make find() work off flat files, and put more complex queries through Ferret. Maybe you'll just store it in an object temporarily and use validations to help sanitize your data and drive your forms.
Or, again, if that's all a bit overkill or otherwise a poor fit for your applications, use a different framework, or none at all.
By going back, I didn't mean revision control. I meant changes in the structure of the code (you might have heard of refactoring?) or even the database.
The structure's defined by things like your class definition and routing configuration: generating a controller or model basically makes "class FooController < ApplicationController;end" in the right place, plus helpers for your views and templates for testing. You're generally not generating scary big fragile chunks of code; if you want to rename something, do so, it's not magic. The point of metaprogramming is that you can be agile with these changes without you having to generate and maintain reams of static code.
Database wise, the models are mostly driven by what the database looks like; you add a column to the database (probably using a migration) and your models automagically notice. Renaming a model can be done without renaming the table, and vice versa, and you can make renames less painful by mapping old names to new trivially. Either way, the code generation helps you because it's mostly done dynamically via metaprogramming based on the code you wrote, not statically based on your script/generate commands like, e.g. the C++ GUI generators you might be familiar with.
But again, even that level of code generation might be overkill, and if having lots of files dotted about feels wrong when you really just want one or two modest.rb's for a small application, something like Ramaze, Rack or even Campin
I couldn't care less, and even if I did care, there is nothing I can do about it. Detected early enough, you can push a future impactor away from its course with a couple of buckets of paint. You just need to invest some insignificant sum into projects like Spaceguard so you can do something about it.
The thing is, from what I can tell, it's really specialized. I never had this problem with PHP or ModPython. Stop comparing Rails to languages, you fucking morons *headbutts wall until you all stop*
Of course it's specialized, it's an opinionated web framework for writing web applications in a certain style; on "rails", if you will. If it doesn't suit you, use a different framework, or no framework like you'd do with PHP or Python. Why is that so difficult to grasp when it comes to Ruby?
But how does it fair for more general apps? You mean, without a database? Stateless, or what? Chances are you have data; you can just disable/not use ActiveRecord and have your models for the data do other things, with a similar interface to keep validation, creation, searching etc easy.
One of the big things that worries me is that there are a lot of files generated. That scares me. What if I made a mistake at the beginning? Is it easy to go back? Going back is what revision control is for; if you're not using it, sucks to be you, though the boilerplate's trivial enough to regenerate/update if necessary. If your application is dwarfed by the boilerplate it might signify Rails is overkill for your application; you don't need a 60kLOC framework for Hello World or exporting a single database table to the web.
See, e.g, Ramaze, or Nitro, or Sinatra, or Iowa, or (...), or write your own 100-line nanoframework using Rack. Stop obsessing over Rails! This should answer your final question too;)
Slashdot Mirror
Logical? Perhaps, I think I'd use the word "hypocritical", though; it basically seems to be saying "well, we don't really take what you said about pictures of animate animals seriously, but some of us will get *extra* upset when someone makes an image of you, because we know you didn't like that sort of thing".
Personally I find the original idea offensive; this "god" tortures dead people forever for making images of animals? All because it "imitates the creative act of Allah"; something which *surely* includes lots of other things, if a mere painting is sufficient.
Ever run or seen Conway's Game of Life or other CA? Ever written or used something which used a genetic algorithm or something else based on AI research (like, say, Google, or a computer game)? Read or written a book that builds a lifelike universe inside people's heads? Would a fatwa be appropriate against Will Wright?
Yes, Forged Alliance's DVD check was removed in 1.5.3598, which is about 2 months old. Run GPGNet and it should grab the latest for you.
Um, what's all about making pictures of "animate life", not just Mohammed. So why is it making a picture of Mohammed gets you killed and a picture of a stoat goes uncommented?
You wouldn't notice Flickr disappearing? Yahoo Groups? Pipes? (at the very least I'd notice it not flooding us; running feed updates a6 60Hz is taking the piss a bit, guys) del.icio.us?
I seriously doubt that in my lifetime I will see anywhere near the amount of revolutionary change that he saw in his. Let's hope your kids show you how to plug in the UC, have a conversation with it and make it build pretty much anything you ever wanted.
What we got was some dubious transparent windows and awkward redesigns-by-committee-for-the-sake-of-it, slower 2D, slower 3D, another half a GB or more wasted on the base OS, and a tonne of DRM bullshit.
In the mean time, every other major OS has no problems delivering better performance as time goes on; see, e.g, FreeBSD 7, where the hard work of a handful of people have delivered major performance improvements across the board. I guess that's a telling difference; open source projects often have relatively small groups and even just individuals driving improvements in particular areas -- Jason Evans malloc, Jeff Roberson's sched_ule, Ingo Molnar's CFS, Hans Reiser's reiserfs, the modest team behind ZFS; Microsoft probably wouldn't even consider any project like that without a 40-strong programming team and 15 middle-managers who hold meetings twice a week to make sure the colour of the bikeshed isn't too offensive.
Pfft, I could just about run Crysis on medium at 1024*768 on my 7950GT; numerous other games need settings turning down and/or resolution decreasing to run smoothly, never mind 4xAA or 16xAS. I recently upgraded to a G92 8800GTS and it's great actually being able to run everything in my monitor's native resolution again, and remembering what "smooth" meant.
Now I'm thinking about getting a 30" monitor; 2560x1600 -- ruh oh, now my card needs to be twice as powerful again to avoid having to run in non native resolution. And I *still* can't run everything with full settings, never mind think about making use of multiple monitors.
You don't think you find the idea of murdering someone abhorrent because you're Muslim, do you? I assure you even those questions, not to mention all the others you have not considered, are more complex than you might imagine at first. Why? Because I do not take into account what I think a possible creator of the universe might think on any given matter? "Well, I have no problem with homosexuals, but now I take into account the fact that this book says they're an abomination upon the Lord, I'm going to be an asshole and try to mess up their lives", hmm. "I thought condoms were a pretty good idea, but then I remembered the big guy in the sky who can do absolutely anything He wants gets upset when I thwart His plan with a thin layer of latex". I ask you, how do, living beyond good and evil, tell Right from Wrong without returning back to religion? Normal people have this thing called a conscience. Perhaps you've heard of it? It's kind of like God, only this invisible friend is normally recognised as being ourselves, and you can actually have a conversation with it. Possibly you're even confusing yours with the creator of the cosmos; an easy mistake to make, and one I made myself, long ago. With a religion, while the impulse to follow this self-serving bias is still there, it's not nearly as easy to carry through on it. Why? Because an honest man will always go back to the book, the priest, or the sage and ask him, "hey, is this alright?" This is "why social support networks are good for morality", not "why religion is good for morality". In the context of science it's normally a requirement to actually get anything done, if only for practical reasons. the problem people have with religion is the problem people have with all things; practitioners of a religion are human, just like practitioners of anything else, and they're going to fail and falter occasionally. Well, sure, except many of the problems I have with religions are when they appear to be working properly; decrying the use of contraception, persecuting homosexuals, underminding our own understanding of the nature of reality, indoctrinating children, suppressing women, and pushing their own agendas on everybody else. You talk about evil? That's it, right there.
Atheism has many colours; strong, weak, indifferent, mu. You seem to have "atheism" confused with "strong atheism". If you're agnostic, and don't have a positive belief in existance, you're a weak atheist of some description, because that's the default position; you're without a God, even if you believe the question unsolvable.
If you spend most of your time arguing against strong atheism, you're probably flying right over the head of the vast majority of atheists, for whom the idea isn't so much "absolutely not!!!!!!111 Dawkins proves it zomg!!!" but more "meh, foolish question".
How does the church count "recorded membership"? I was baptised and confirmed Catholic, but I've self-identified atheist for most of my life. Did my membership time out, or do I need to get myself explicitly excommunicated?
Instead they're abusing their position and holding the industry back. I think every web developer on the planet would like to see them get a kick up the backside . It would make a change from swearing at them in CSS/HTML/JS comments.
The bundling issue I'm more ambivalent about; making them unbundle WMP didn't exactly achieve much, but perhaps the processes surrounding it were more valuable than the unbundling itself. Still, I hardly agree it's got anything to do with Opera wanting a "handout", whatever the fuck that means.
SSD's do rather poorly for random writes; even a decent MTron drive's only rated for something like 130/second, and for the cheaper ones aimed at portables you can drop a zero off that. To actually get decent write performance you have to start jumping through hoops to convert the random writes to sequential.
For those interested in such things, DTrace seems to be going really well now too.
Well, Ruby introduces concepts you may be unfamiliar with, not just new syntax, but it shouldn't be that foreign once you have the basics down? I'd be interested in some examples of what sort of things confuse you, though; I probably take for granted many things now that confused the hell out of me when I started but don't remember :)
;)
I do think "learn the framework not the language" is a dubious strategy, though; I tend to learn by starting small, with code I can understand and keep in my head, and build up to working with larger systems so I'm not swamped with a lot of stuff I don't understand, and I think that's especially important when you're not familiar with all the concepts that underpin something. You don't learn C by starting with the Apache Portable Runtime or GTK, you start with a 5 line hello.c using stdio.h, especially if you've never used a language with pointers before
Smalltalk goes one step further with this concept: even "if" is just a method on a Boolean object, with blocks passed as named arguments ifTrue and ifFalse.
Yes, but as far as I know, RoR is the main package people use for Ruby, versus Python which has 5-6 packages that I know of.
I suggested at least that many alternatives for Ruby, and there are more. You don't base all your decisions on how popular or well marketed something is, do you?
Part of the reason for this is that Ruby's language has some unique features that make it favorable to RoR's style
Perhaps, but it's also perfectly favourable to various other "styles". Metaprogramming is quite a general tool, as you might have guessed ;)
I was assuming that most readers would be smart enough to figure out I meant the standard way you do things in PHP or Python
It's akin to calling PHP development Cake. Names of frameworks are not interchangable with generic terms for web development in a language, and I assumed you'd be smart enough to recognise that. I've used Ruby for 8 years, and I certainly don't equate Rails with the One True Way of doing web development in it. I might end at it for some things, but I certainly don't start there.
There's plenty of sites I'm interested in making that actually have no database whatsoever. Because that's RoR's, I would assume it's not going to help me much.
Like I said; you may not have a database, but you probbaly have data you want to serve dynamically in some way? Much of the advantage Rails provides is a convention for how to interact with that data, with ActiveRecord being the de-facto example, but, for example there's also ActiveResource which talks to web services instead of directly to a database; if you don't want a database, you just fill in the "M" part of MVC with a layer that talks to something else, and try to stick with the conventions to keep the interface Rails-alike. Maybe you'll make find() work off flat files, and put more complex queries through Ferret. Maybe you'll just store it in an object temporarily and use validations to help sanitize your data and drive your forms.
Or, again, if that's all a bit overkill or otherwise a poor fit for your applications, use a different framework, or none at all.
By going back, I didn't mean revision control. I meant changes in the structure of the code (you might have heard of refactoring?) or even the database.
The structure's defined by things like your class definition and routing configuration: generating a controller or model basically makes "class FooController < ApplicationController;end" in the right place, plus helpers for your views and templates for testing. You're generally not generating scary big fragile chunks of code; if you want to rename something, do so, it's not magic. The point of metaprogramming is that you can be agile with these changes without you having to generate and maintain reams of static code.
.rb's for a small application, something like Ramaze, Rack or even Campin
Database wise, the models are mostly driven by what the database looks like; you add a column to the database (probably using a migration) and your models automagically notice. Renaming a model can be done without renaming the table, and vice versa, and you can make renames less painful by mapping old names to new trivially. Either way, the code generation helps you because it's mostly done dynamically via metaprogramming based on the code you wrote, not statically based on your script/generate commands like, e.g. the C++ GUI generators you might be familiar with.
But again, even that level of code generation might be overkill, and if having lots of files dotted about feels wrong when you really just want one or two modest
Of course it's specialized, it's an opinionated web framework for writing web applications in a certain style; on "rails", if you will. If it doesn't suit you, use a different framework, or no framework like you'd do with PHP or Python. Why is that so difficult to grasp when it comes to Ruby? But how does it fair for more general apps? You mean, without a database? Stateless, or what? Chances are you have data; you can just disable/not use ActiveRecord and have your models for the data do other things, with a similar interface to keep validation, creation, searching etc easy. One of the big things that worries me is that there are a lot of files generated. That scares me. What if I made a mistake at the beginning? Is it easy to go back? Going back is what revision control is for; if you're not using it, sucks to be you, though the boilerplate's trivial enough to regenerate/update if necessary. If your application is dwarfed by the boilerplate it might signify Rails is overkill for your application; you don't need a 60kLOC framework for Hello World or exporting a single database table to the web.
See, e.g, Ramaze, or Nitro, or Sinatra, or Iowa, or (...), or write your own 100-line nanoframework using Rack. Stop obsessing over Rails! This should answer your final question too