We used to be able to pretend it was the editors foisting him upon us... but lo' and behold, democratic Digg comes along, and he still makes the front page!
No, this is backwards. The unwashed masses will never be collectively smart enough to distinguish a troll, statistical certainty and all that. This is the purpose of editorial control, to go beyond the bell curve. Dvorak can be kept off/. All that we need is to convince the few editors that he is, in fact, a full-time troll, And that his rantings do not deserve a place on the front page because they are neither news, nor are they 'stuff that matters'. Unfortunately I think a successful troll is just as good for/. as it is for Dvorak's employers, so there's little incentive for them to change. We can always dream though.
Look, Apple is one of the most vile anti-consumer monster corporations out there. Learn to the live with that. Apple gives not one flying fluck about its 'loyal fans' but it knows a buck when it sees one. If Apple fought more restrictive DRM it was because they thought it would hurt their bottom line not for the sake of their customers.
Welcome to America buddy. Why should anyone think that Apple would be different than any other company? By this standard all corporations are vile anti-consumer monsters. Why the double standard? The only distinguishing aspect of Apple for me is that they make products I like (not in the 90s, but I really dig Mac OS X).
If there's something that I think makes a company 'viley-anti-consumer' it would have to be lobbying for laws to protect monopolies or other business practices that harm the public. The most vile corporations in my mind are the ones that exploit natural resources and create huge amounts of pollution, thus making profits at the expense of things that should belong to all of us. I find it hard to demonize a company for simply creating and marketing a product that I don't like for some reason.
I've found that vertical ownership works out much better than horizontal ownership. Rather than having one database guy, one UI guy, and everybody else writing glue in between, everybody is a database guy and a UI guy and an everything-in-between guy.
The tricky part is building such a team. Everyone wants to hire the people with a perfect skillset, hence the insane job requirements that you sometimes see from corporate recruiters. A good vertical skillset in web development makes not only an extremely attractive candidate, but also someone who can easily freelance or do a web startup.
However rather than complete verticality, most of the benefit can achieve from proper overlap. IE, the designer needs to understand HTML/CSS pretty well. The markup person needs to understand presentational logic and the basics of the language being used. The programmer needs to know HTML/CSS and have good database fundamentals. The DBA maybe just needs to understand the business processes.
This allows the team members to work together efficiently. The minute the programmer looks down on the HTML guy for religious reasons, the whole project goes to shit. If everyone is at the top of their game and has some idea of what their team members need to be efficient then a team of 4-5 specialists can achieve great productivity. On the other hand, all it takes is one hack designer using Dreamweaver as a crutch and things can quickly grind to a halt.
And I'm a web developer, let alone businessmen and the casual Internet surfer.
You're paying too much attention to the marketing. Businessmen and casual surfers are only just beginning to hear about "Web 2.0" and though you may find it distasteful to hear the term over and over, you should recognize a good thing for your profession when you see it. Sure, it might make your skin crawl to have a client demand "Web 2.0" on everything, but it's money in your pocket!
Realistically, strip away the hype and don't tell me that great things haven't happened in the last few years of web development. The guys who are sitting around blogging about "Web 2.0" are mostly just the parasites trying to ride the wave. But for the real practitioners this is an exciting time to be developing web applications. Just try to avoid the fluffy articles like this and you'll be fine.
Bring me real widgets, and Web 2.0 gets to be more than just hype. Deal?
The web is about documents. Tacking some simplistic widgets on is often more effective than taking a good GUI toolkit, adding an overly complex network protocol, and grafting on HTML or some other document format, then cross-compiling and distributing.
Note that I'm not saying that everything should be a web application, but you at least need to acknowledge what the web does well. Of course almost anyone can come up with a better protocol and set of APIs to develop network applications... it already exists! But instead of being just another naysayer, how about some ideas on making the better technology as cross-platform and universally available as the modern web browser.
Personally I'm of the opinion that we can eventually master all aspects of the universe. Sure it may take 1,000's, 1,000,000's, or perhaps even 1,000,000,000's of years.
And I'm of the opinion that unless there's some mass societal changes, no one's going to be doing serious science in 100s of years.
These two lines give away what I dislike and disagree with in the attitude of you and many people like you, including a lot of the people I would blame for bad interface and software organization.
Yes, good for them. These people are more interested in getting on with whatever their job actually is, then in 'exploring' their computers to find out where everything is. Stop trying to make everyone think like you, and instead focus your skills on making it easier for people to do what they do want to do.
Okay, I'm sorry I didn't soften up my rhetoric (this is/. after all), but you are projecting onto me. I am not trying to make anyone think like me. I'm making an observation.
First of all, I help tons of friends and family members with computers. Some of them are interested in what's possible to do with their computer, and some of them are only interested in the task at hand. Either way I don't get impatient with them or use jargon or talk over their head in any way. So I'm not in any way blaming the user.
Secondly, I worked on a large student union website for many years. With the amount of content and the diverse reasons people would come to the site, it was very difficult to create an effective design for everyone. We did frequent usability testing and progressively re-organized the site as we added content. It's a work in progress, but is definitely one of the best sites at that University. The point here is that if you have a zillion things to organize and fit into a design, that makes it inherently difficult to make an easy to use design that works for everyone.
Don't try to minimize the amount of effort that goes into interface design and say that designers just need to work harder to make everything work for everyone all the time. If you have some brilliant idea for a one-size-fits-all solution then please share, but don't go assuming that people just don't care about the users due some ingrained ideological bitterness.
The fact that noones parents understand the filesystem is an indicator of exactly one thing THE FILE/FOLDER METAPHOR IS BROKEN Yes, the whole idea of 'files' is only a metaphor. Even in Unix. A very useful metaphor, sure. But it's not necessary or helpful anymore for the average user.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this one. People have been using hierarchical paper files for hundreds if not thousands of years. It's a basic organizational system, and is a minimum for working sanely with large numbers of files. The confusing thing is that the user's files are saved in the same filesystem as all the system and application stuff, so the hierarchy itself is overwhelming. I can understand the need to separate those.
Older people are not stupid, but they are being made to feel stupid by stupid designers, programmers and documenters, and as technology becomes more important this is more and more damaging to their lives.
This is a common argument, but I think you underestimate how hard it is to make things usable. The trick is to make things as simple as you can but still have the necessary features. I think Apple has been hitting a sweet spot here for a while with iLife.
The problem is essentially that many many people do not have the patience to figure out a complex system. They approach a program with the desire to do one thing, and the only way they could be satisfied is if there is a big button on the screen that says "Do the Thing". However, that same user may potentially want to do 100 different things at different times, and they certainly won't be satisfied by a screen filled with one hundred buttons. Hence the purpose of menus, wizards, hierarchies, preferences and all the other complications us geeks know and love.
There are a large number of people who do not want to think about how to do something or where one might logically find some aspect of a computer program. These people get anxious just looking at a dialog box. They do not enjoy figuring things out.
I'm sorry, but you are not going to design an interface that meets the lowest common denominator and is still useful. It just ain't gonna happen. To get to that point what we need is full-blown artificial intelligence. In other words, a replacement for the techie that they call on the phone to tell them how to do something. It's so easy to blame the designer, and I agree a lot of interfaces are horrendous, but the reality is that there is a certain amount of irreducible complexity inherent any moderately useful general purpose computer system. People who want to do one thing and have no patience for learning any context should be given appliances that do the one thing they want. That's the only way to make things usable for them.
Hey, I've got an idea! Human culture is destroying the planet, but since as individuals we can't really change human society that much we shouldn't even do what we can. Fuck recycling and biking and turning lights off! Let's fully embrace the destruction of the planet so can all be bitter and angry at everything and write 20 paragraphs to random ACs about how much we all suck.
Ok, it was kinda nice, but let's get this out of the way: Why the lucky stiff's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is funnier.
If he wasn't totally biting off Why the lucky stiff, or if he had some writing talent it might be 'nice'. As it is though, the guy just comes off as a hopeless dork.
Whoah whoah whoah. Please read the first post to this article... there's really nothing new here. They're simply not releasing the Intel kernel. The rest of Darwin is still available, and by your ignorance of this fact I'm guessing you've not been doing a lot of kernel hacking on Darwin.
Besides, Apple's open source efforts have been pretty much lukewarm--better than nothing, but not truly impressive. If you chose OS X on the basis of open source then I have to say you've been duped from the start. If open source is your priority then its gotta be Linux Linux Linux (or maybe BSD).
After all, Steve Jobs must know by now if he's going after Microsoft's business he can't be selling low-margin goods while Microsoft is printing money.
Why would Steve Jobs go after Microsoft's market when he has the most stable and dedicated niche market in the technology world. No, I'm not talking about iPods. I mean design and other creative professionals who utilize their computers to the fullest and absolutely in love with Macs. How many Windows boxes are just simple workstations and word processors that could be functionally replaced with Linux and Open Office overnight? No, I think Microsoft has got to be a lot more worried about the future than Apple.
To be fair, Mac OS X should require at least 1GB of memory as well. Particularly the ones with integrated Intel graphics. I bought one with stock configuration so it would ship faster. After turning on Apache and installing a few tools like Quicksilver and SSH Agent I started swapping on login. It was basically impossible to use more than one program at a time. At first I thought Photoshop just sucked under Rosetta, but it actually ran pretty well after dropping 2GB in that sucker.
Perhaps a better solution would be to deal with the piracy issue by, well, catering to a clear demand. What's better, 1,000,000 MacBook sales, and 10,000,000 people with illegal copies of Mac OS X on their Dells, or 1,000,000 MacBook sales, 2,000,000 people with paid-for, unsupported, $100 copies of Mac OS X on their Dells, and 8,000,000 illegal copies? If people are going to do it anyway, and they are, you might as well make some money from them.
If you don't think this would cut into their hardware sales, dilute their brand, and create angry customers despite the fact that it's 'unsupported' you don't understand the first thing about Apple's market.
If you want to run OS X unsupported on a PC then go ahead and pirate it, I'm sure Apple doesn't care. If you seriously want to run OS X then suck it up and buy a Mac. You need to stop deluding yourself and think critically about how its in Apple's interest to sell OS X for beige boxes. First of all, it's not a question of whether they'll lose hardware sales, it's a question of how much. Would they be able to make up the sales with OS X for Dells? Especially given the stability and support issues? Seems like a losing bet anyway you slice it
Look, Apple doesn't have a piracy problem. They don't have complicated DRM. They don't waste money on anti-piracy crusades. They just do a little obfuscation where its convenient, and it's working great for them.
The fact that RoR uses erb templates is one of those opinionated design decisions that I really appreciate. RoR does it's best to encourage proper MVC separation without crippling the framework just to prevent bad practices. Java is the king of preventing bad practices, which is really good if you're hiring a bunch of tech school grads, but it's a bit verbose and cumbersome if you're a good programmer who knows what you want to do and how to do it.
Using erb makes sense to me for one simple reason:
Views need logic
I don't know how many times I've heard that views should not have logic in them. But that's just stupid... they shouldn't have business logic in them, or control logic, but they definitely should have view logic. The idea of limiting views so they can be edited by designers without interfering with the rest of the application is a worthy goal, but too often it results in a crippled and inadequate templating language. Right from the start views are constantly in need of loops and conditionals. Ruby is perfect for this because of its iterators and lightweight syntax. I don't see much need in the general case for a specialized language... even PHP which is considerably more verbose than Ruby makes a decent templating language. I've used Smarty extensively, and it just falls flat on its face for iteration support. I've found myself putting in dozens of lines of code in a controller just to set up the data structures in the way that Smarty needs them (foreach or section syntax). If your controller is becoming bloated with view-support code then I say your templating language needs an overhaul.
The Rails approach with instance variables and external helper methods is just a sane and efficient middle-of-the-road approach. If you're going to be submitting your templates for customization by third-party designers, then you are going to need a little more security, but that security will come at a cost that most applications should never have to pay.
Why, they even use PHP for the official Ruby on Rails site!
That's because it's a website not a web application. The strength of PHP is for a little dynamic code here and there as you need it. The strength of Ruby on Rails is developing web applications.
I'm not a great writer, but I've always gotten good grades on papers without having paid particular attention to grammar or the technical aspects of writing. My writing has steadily improved for one reason:
I notice what works and what doesn't in others' writing
The fact that I can recognize great writing does not really help me write better, but it helps me edit better. I may have to write 4 or 5 drafts, but when I get to something that works I can recognize it. Likewise I don't hesitate to delete whole sections if need be. Too many people try to swing a first draft as final copy, or spend too much time trying to perfect the prose as they go. Better to spew out all your ideas and then organize them through progressive drafts.
So, users are going to try OS X, find it works better for them, keep using it, and this makes them lemmings and pod people?
No, the implication is that anyone who uses a Mac is a lemming or a pod person by definition. Of course, a statement like makes it obvious the author is firmly ingrained in the WinMac flamefest culture and painfully out of touch with the 99% of people in the world who simply use computers rather than advocate them.
I'm thankful though, as it allows me to avoid the troll entirely.
The man is a damn good troll and he deserves far more props (for that) than he gets around here.
You can't expect the slashdrones to not click and read his insipid balderdash, heck, even you, the freethinking spirit has been trolled expertly. There's nothing really clever about going onto a Mac forum and shouting "Apple sucks!" or going onto a Linux forum and shouting "Microsoft is the true programmer's OS!", or coming onto/. and writing inflammatory articles with no basis in logic. I mean, any of those things are guaranteed to get a response. So I don't give Dvorak any particular props. Rather, I give the/. editors negative props for posting every single column he ever writes.
You had 3 bullet points in the post I replied to. I destroyed each and every one of them. Yet all you can muster is a sad "lol"? Spend a little more time on your rebuttal next time and I might think you have a mind of your own.
Where do you come up with this stuff? You never rebutted my thesis which is that the/. comment system is better than the Digg system. Instead you rebutted the imaginary thesis that/. is perfect.
Spend a little time addressing my actual point and I might think that you have some actual insight in addition to reflexive nitpicking pedantry.
Six years ago Napster was hot. Everyone who matters (to the music industry) used it. The brand was synonymous with "listen to whatever you want whenever you want". However, the digital music market changes quickly. Napster is now synonymous with "shitty overpriced service". If they can come up with a truly great service they are better off starting from scratch than slapping a Napster label on it. If they succeed it will be despite the brand.
I don't need 'supporters'. I don't need to conduct a scientific experiment. There was nothing particularly rude about what I said, brusque maybe. Yes it was anecdotal, but your reply isn't even that; it's just a refutation of a supporting argument without evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.
My thesis is that/. has much better comments and conversation. So far you haven't really addressed that, you just don't seem to like what I have to say. Fine, but I don't care enough to submit a paper to a journal with graphs and bibliography so that you'll respect my opinion. If you have an opinion on the matter I'd be interested to hear it; hence my original post.
Slashdot Mirror
We used to be able to pretend it was the editors foisting him upon us... but lo' and behold, democratic Digg comes along, and he still makes the front page!
/. All that we need is to convince the few editors that he is, in fact, a full-time troll, And that his rantings do not deserve a place on the front page because they are neither news, nor are they 'stuff that matters'. Unfortunately I think a successful troll is just as good for /. as it is for Dvorak's employers, so there's little incentive for them to change. We can always dream though.
No, this is backwards. The unwashed masses will never be collectively smart enough to distinguish a troll, statistical certainty and all that. This is the purpose of editorial control, to go beyond the bell curve. Dvorak can be kept off
Look, Apple is one of the most vile anti-consumer monster corporations out there. Learn to the live with that. Apple gives not one flying fluck about its 'loyal fans' but it knows a buck when it sees one. If Apple fought more restrictive DRM it was because they thought it would hurt their bottom line not for the sake of their customers.
Welcome to America buddy. Why should anyone think that Apple would be different than any other company? By this standard all corporations are vile anti-consumer monsters. Why the double standard? The only distinguishing aspect of Apple for me is that they make products I like (not in the 90s, but I really dig Mac OS X).
If there's something that I think makes a company 'viley-anti-consumer' it would have to be lobbying for laws to protect monopolies or other business practices that harm the public. The most vile corporations in my mind are the ones that exploit natural resources and create huge amounts of pollution, thus making profits at the expense of things that should belong to all of us. I find it hard to demonize a company for simply creating and marketing a product that I don't like for some reason.
I've found that vertical ownership works out much better than horizontal ownership. Rather than having one database guy, one UI guy, and everybody else writing glue in between, everybody is a database guy and a UI guy and an everything-in-between guy.
The tricky part is building such a team. Everyone wants to hire the people with a perfect skillset, hence the insane job requirements that you sometimes see from corporate recruiters. A good vertical skillset in web development makes not only an extremely attractive candidate, but also someone who can easily freelance or do a web startup.
However rather than complete verticality, most of the benefit can achieve from proper overlap. IE, the designer needs to understand HTML/CSS pretty well. The markup person needs to understand presentational logic and the basics of the language being used. The programmer needs to know HTML/CSS and have good database fundamentals. The DBA maybe just needs to understand the business processes.
This allows the team members to work together efficiently. The minute the programmer looks down on the HTML guy for religious reasons, the whole project goes to shit. If everyone is at the top of their game and has some idea of what their team members need to be efficient then a team of 4-5 specialists can achieve great productivity. On the other hand, all it takes is one hack designer using Dreamweaver as a crutch and things can quickly grind to a halt.
And I'm a web developer, let alone businessmen and the casual Internet surfer.
You're paying too much attention to the marketing. Businessmen and casual surfers are only just beginning to hear about "Web 2.0" and though you may find it distasteful to hear the term over and over, you should recognize a good thing for your profession when you see it. Sure, it might make your skin crawl to have a client demand "Web 2.0" on everything, but it's money in your pocket!
Realistically, strip away the hype and don't tell me that great things haven't happened in the last few years of web development. The guys who are sitting around blogging about "Web 2.0" are mostly just the parasites trying to ride the wave. But for the real practitioners this is an exciting time to be developing web applications. Just try to avoid the fluffy articles like this and you'll be fine.
Bring me real widgets, and Web 2.0 gets to be more than just hype. Deal?
The web is about documents. Tacking some simplistic widgets on is often more effective than taking a good GUI toolkit, adding an overly complex network protocol, and grafting on HTML or some other document format, then cross-compiling and distributing.
Note that I'm not saying that everything should be a web application, but you at least need to acknowledge what the web does well. Of course almost anyone can come up with a better protocol and set of APIs to develop network applications... it already exists! But instead of being just another naysayer, how about some ideas on making the better technology as cross-platform and universally available as the modern web browser.
It would seem that sci-fi will never be anything other than what it is: a fiction.
Fuck! I guess we'll never make it into outer space. NEVER! *slams head into piano like sesame street musician guy*
Personally I'm of the opinion that we can eventually master all aspects of the universe.
Sure it may take 1,000's, 1,000,000's, or perhaps even 1,000,000,000's of years.
And I'm of the opinion that unless there's some mass societal changes, no one's going to be doing serious science in 100s of years.
These two lines give away what I dislike and disagree with in the attitude of you and many people like you, including a lot of the people I would blame for bad interface and software organization.
/. after all), but you are projecting onto me. I am not trying to make anyone think like me. I'm making an observation.
Yes, good for them. These people are more interested in getting on with whatever their job actually is, then in 'exploring' their computers to find out where everything is. Stop trying to make everyone think like you, and instead focus your skills on making it easier for people to do what they do want to do.
Okay, I'm sorry I didn't soften up my rhetoric (this is
First of all, I help tons of friends and family members with computers. Some of them are interested in what's possible to do with their computer, and some of them are only interested in the task at hand. Either way I don't get impatient with them or use jargon or talk over their head in any way. So I'm not in any way blaming the user.
Secondly, I worked on a large student union website for many years. With the amount of content and the diverse reasons people would come to the site, it was very difficult to create an effective design for everyone. We did frequent usability testing and progressively re-organized the site as we added content. It's a work in progress, but is definitely one of the best sites at that University. The point here is that if you have a zillion things to organize and fit into a design, that makes it inherently difficult to make an easy to use design that works for everyone.
Don't try to minimize the amount of effort that goes into interface design and say that designers just need to work harder to make everything work for everyone all the time. If you have some brilliant idea for a one-size-fits-all solution then please share, but don't go assuming that people just don't care about the users due some ingrained ideological bitterness.
The fact that noones parents understand the filesystem is an indicator of exactly one thing
THE FILE/FOLDER METAPHOR IS BROKEN
Yes, the whole idea of 'files' is only a metaphor. Even in Unix. A very useful metaphor, sure. But it's not necessary or helpful anymore for the average user.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you on this one. People have been using hierarchical paper files for hundreds if not thousands of years. It's a basic organizational system, and is a minimum for working sanely with large numbers of files. The confusing thing is that the user's files are saved in the same filesystem as all the system and application stuff, so the hierarchy itself is overwhelming. I can understand the need to separate those.
Older people are not stupid, but they are being made to feel stupid by stupid designers, programmers and documenters, and as technology becomes more important this is more and more damaging to their lives.
This is a common argument, but I think you underestimate how hard it is to make things usable. The trick is to make things as simple as you can but still have the necessary features. I think Apple has been hitting a sweet spot here for a while with iLife.
The problem is essentially that many many people do not have the patience to figure out a complex system. They approach a program with the desire to do one thing, and the only way they could be satisfied is if there is a big button on the screen that says "Do the Thing". However, that same user may potentially want to do 100 different things at different times, and they certainly won't be satisfied by a screen filled with one hundred buttons. Hence the purpose of menus, wizards, hierarchies, preferences and all the other complications us geeks know and love.
There are a large number of people who do not want to think about how to do something or where one might logically find some aspect of a computer program. These people get anxious just looking at a dialog box. They do not enjoy figuring things out.
I'm sorry, but you are not going to design an interface that meets the lowest common denominator and is still useful. It just ain't gonna happen. To get to that point what we need is full-blown artificial intelligence. In other words, a replacement for the techie that they call on the phone to tell them how to do something. It's so easy to blame the designer, and I agree a lot of interfaces are horrendous, but the reality is that there is a certain amount of irreducible complexity inherent any moderately useful general purpose computer system. People who want to do one thing and have no patience for learning any context should be given appliances that do the one thing they want. That's the only way to make things usable for them.
I'm glad to see you're full of hate today.
Hey, I've got an idea! Human culture is destroying the planet, but since as individuals we can't really change human society that much we shouldn't even do what we can. Fuck recycling and biking and turning lights off! Let's fully embrace the destruction of the planet so can all be bitter and angry at everything and write 20 paragraphs to random ACs about how much we all suck.
Ok, it was kinda nice, but let's get this out of the way: Why the lucky stiff's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby is funnier.
If he wasn't totally biting off Why the lucky stiff, or if he had some writing talent it might be 'nice'. As it is though, the guy just comes off as a hopeless dork.
LMAO
What more can you do in the face of such irony?
This has ended.
Whoah whoah whoah. Please read the first post to this article... there's really nothing new here. They're simply not releasing the Intel kernel. The rest of Darwin is still available, and by your ignorance of this fact I'm guessing you've not been doing a lot of kernel hacking on Darwin.
Besides, Apple's open source efforts have been pretty much lukewarm--better than nothing, but not truly impressive. If you chose OS X on the basis of open source then I have to say you've been duped from the start. If open source is your priority then its gotta be Linux Linux Linux (or maybe BSD).
After all, Steve Jobs must know by now if he's going after Microsoft's business he can't be selling low-margin goods while Microsoft is printing money.
Why would Steve Jobs go after Microsoft's market when he has the most stable and dedicated niche market in the technology world. No, I'm not talking about iPods. I mean design and other creative professionals who utilize their computers to the fullest and absolutely in love with Macs. How many Windows boxes are just simple workstations and word processors that could be functionally replaced with Linux and Open Office overnight? No, I think Microsoft has got to be a lot more worried about the future than Apple.
Is it just me, or is having stringent hardware requirements for the OPERATING SYSTEM kind of ridiculous?
Screw the operating system, I wanna know what the hardware requirements are for the damn website!
To be fair, Mac OS X should require at least 1GB of memory as well. Particularly the ones with integrated Intel graphics. I bought one with stock configuration so it would ship faster. After turning on Apache and installing a few tools like Quicksilver and SSH Agent I started swapping on login. It was basically impossible to use more than one program at a time. At first I thought Photoshop just sucked under Rosetta, but it actually ran pretty well after dropping 2GB in that sucker.
Perhaps a better solution would be to deal with the piracy issue by, well, catering to a clear demand. What's better, 1,000,000 MacBook sales, and 10,000,000 people with illegal copies of Mac OS X on their Dells, or 1,000,000 MacBook sales, 2,000,000 people with paid-for, unsupported, $100 copies of Mac OS X on their Dells, and 8,000,000 illegal copies? If people are going to do it anyway, and they are, you might as well make some money from them.
If you don't think this would cut into their hardware sales, dilute their brand, and create angry customers despite the fact that it's 'unsupported' you don't understand the first thing about Apple's market.
If you want to run OS X unsupported on a PC then go ahead and pirate it, I'm sure Apple doesn't care. If you seriously want to run OS X then suck it up and buy a Mac. You need to stop deluding yourself and think critically about how its in Apple's interest to sell OS X for beige boxes. First of all, it's not a question of whether they'll lose hardware sales, it's a question of how much. Would they be able to make up the sales with OS X for Dells? Especially given the stability and support issues? Seems like a losing bet anyway you slice it
Look, Apple doesn't have a piracy problem. They don't have complicated DRM. They don't waste money on anti-piracy crusades. They just do a little obfuscation where its convenient, and it's working great for them.
The fact that RoR uses erb templates is one of those opinionated design decisions that I really appreciate. RoR does it's best to encourage proper MVC separation without crippling the framework just to prevent bad practices. Java is the king of preventing bad practices, which is really good if you're hiring a bunch of tech school grads, but it's a bit verbose and cumbersome if you're a good programmer who knows what you want to do and how to do it.
Using erb makes sense to me for one simple reason:
Views need logic
I don't know how many times I've heard that views should not have logic in them. But that's just stupid... they shouldn't have business logic in them, or control logic, but they definitely should have view logic. The idea of limiting views so they can be edited by designers without interfering with the rest of the application is a worthy goal, but too often it results in a crippled and inadequate templating language. Right from the start views are constantly in need of loops and conditionals. Ruby is perfect for this because of its iterators and lightweight syntax. I don't see much need in the general case for a specialized language... even PHP which is considerably more verbose than Ruby makes a decent templating language. I've used Smarty extensively, and it just falls flat on its face for iteration support. I've found myself putting in dozens of lines of code in a controller just to set up the data structures in the way that Smarty needs them (foreach or section syntax). If your controller is becoming bloated with view-support code then I say your templating language needs an overhaul.
The Rails approach with instance variables and external helper methods is just a sane and efficient middle-of-the-road approach. If you're going to be submitting your templates for customization by third-party designers, then you are going to need a little more security, but that security will come at a cost that most applications should never have to pay.
Why, they even use PHP for the official Ruby on Rails site!
That's because it's a website not a web application. The strength of PHP is for a little dynamic code here and there as you need it. The strength of Ruby on Rails is developing web applications.
I'm not a great writer, but I've always gotten good grades on papers without having paid particular attention to grammar or the technical aspects of writing. My writing has steadily improved for one reason:
I notice what works and what doesn't in others' writing
The fact that I can recognize great writing does not really help me write better, but it helps me edit better. I may have to write 4 or 5 drafts, but when I get to something that works I can recognize it. Likewise I don't hesitate to delete whole sections if need be. Too many people try to swing a first draft as final copy, or spend too much time trying to perfect the prose as they go. Better to spew out all your ideas and then organize them through progressive drafts.
What if someone in a monster truck drives over all the cars in the parking lot?
LMAO.
Good reason not to park in a huge line of cars: big temptation for monster truck drivers.
So, users are going to try OS X, find it works better for them, keep using it, and this makes them lemmings and pod people?
No, the implication is that anyone who uses a Mac is a lemming or a pod person by definition. Of course, a statement like makes it obvious the author is firmly ingrained in the WinMac flamefest culture and painfully out of touch with the 99% of people in the world who simply use computers rather than advocate them.
I'm thankful though, as it allows me to avoid the troll entirely.
The man is a damn good troll and he deserves far more props (for that) than he gets around here.
/. and writing inflammatory articles with no basis in logic. I mean, any of those things are guaranteed to get a response. So I don't give Dvorak any particular props. Rather, I give the /. editors negative props for posting every single column he ever writes.
You can't expect the slashdrones to not click and read his insipid balderdash, heck, even you, the freethinking spirit has been trolled expertly. There's nothing really clever about going onto a Mac forum and shouting "Apple sucks!" or going onto a Linux forum and shouting "Microsoft is the true programmer's OS!", or coming onto
You had 3 bullet points in the post I replied to. I destroyed each and every one of them. Yet all you can muster is a sad "lol"? Spend a little more time on your rebuttal next time and I might think you have a mind of your own.
/. comment system is better than the Digg system. Instead you rebutted the imaginary thesis that /. is perfect.
Where do you come up with this stuff? You never rebutted my thesis which is that the
Spend a little time addressing my actual point and I might think that you have some actual insight in addition to reflexive nitpicking pedantry.
Here's an idea: lose the Napster brand
Six years ago Napster was hot. Everyone who matters (to the music industry) used it. The brand was synonymous with "listen to whatever you want whenever you want". However, the digital music market changes quickly. Napster is now synonymous with "shitty overpriced service". If they can come up with a truly great service they are better off starting from scratch than slapping a Napster label on it. If they succeed it will be despite the brand.
LOL
/. has much better comments and conversation. So far you haven't really addressed that, you just don't seem to like what I have to say. Fine, but I don't care enough to submit a paper to a journal with graphs and bibliography so that you'll respect my opinion. If you have an opinion on the matter I'd be interested to hear it; hence my original post.
I don't need 'supporters'. I don't need to conduct a scientific experiment. There was nothing particularly rude about what I said, brusque maybe. Yes it was anecdotal, but your reply isn't even that; it's just a refutation of a supporting argument without evidence, anecdotal or otherwise.
My thesis is that