There's a certain stage, for some projects, at which people realize that the Great Next Version, if it ever comes, will be too little too late, and that the action has moved elsewhere. For Perl that was 3-5 years ago. For Ruby, 2-4 years ago. For countless non-public projects, it happens; gradually, progress meetings become a bit of a joke, the smart staff get moved elsewhere, and Project Star (there's nearly always a project called 'Star') becomes something that still exists on someone's budget, but which nobody really expects to have to pay attention to. Sometimes there's a meeting about it and a status report tha reads like a State of the Onion; a bit of waffle, a few in-jokes, some words of encouragement, and then back to doing something else.
Sometimes, this does _not_ happen. Vista (which by rights should have entered the Death Valley last year) and Java (which should have entered it after 1.2) manage to escape this fate; disappointment after disappointment they somehow stay in the spotlight, stay relevant in hearts and minds.
The question is what to do with a project in Death Valley. In a company, someone usually eventually rolls out _something_ and declares victory so that everyone can forget about it. In open source, though, they _never_ administer the final blow. Look at CVS -- it's been in Death Valley for so long, people are beginning to think that _Subversion_ is old hat! Sure, people _use_ it, if they haven't moved on to something else yet, but the last interesting CVS news item was probably in the late 90s... and yet it jogs along... and now Perl jogs along beside it, in the gated retirement community of Open Source.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it is a definite difference between OS and commercial software; you get far more resources spent on the 'long tail' of a project's life in OS.
What's 'primitive' about dating? You think they have or had 'dating' in primitive societies? Modern Western culture, and those parts of the rest of the world that have been globalized into it, are the only places we find this custom. They didn't 'date' in Europe/America in the 1900s, and they don't 'date' in most of the world now, except for that internationalized overclass that you get in big cities.
They have lots of sex, but that's a whole nuther thing.
Enjoy the sophisticated, rarefied culture that allows you to have such esoteric customs as dating! But don't think it's a basic primitive instinctive thing, because it's about as natural to human culture as the iPod.
There are two myths in the above, one obvious and one less so.
Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
I was under the impression that the above has been debunked pretty heavily, but I guess there are people who still need to believe.
If the number of deaths by war were plotted over the course of human history you would see a a line that increased every year and each year the increase grew steeper.
No, you would see definite fluctuations, with high 'plateaus', spikes, and quiet periods. For example, the latter half of the 1800s contains a massive sustained high -- the Taiping war, with a bit of help from the American Civil War and some others. The first few decades of the 1800s are very high too, whereas the 18th century, despite some decorative European wars, is very very quiet -- no Mongols, no Jihads, and most importantly no major wars in China (which is the main driver of war deaths).
What Heinlein said about 'always looking for the facts'.
According to expert futurologists, we face a nightmarish future -- a future without expert predictions of the future!
"People will get sick of it," said a spokesman for the Institute for Predictions. "They just won't want any more baseless predictions -- so people will stop making any."
Professor Isaac Sagan of the University of Pontification agrees. "In the future, people will almost certainly have gotten sick of hearing me talk about what will happen in the future. Very likely, I'll have to find another job -- such as fry cook, or hat salesman."
Although vapid, uninteresting predictions of the future are currently at a record high, even those who attempt to make actualy useful predictions foresee a downward trend.
"At some point, real problems are going to become impossible to ignore," pointed out Dr. Bob Gore of the Smartville College, Oxford. "With climate change already depopulating some areas, and the deepening split between the American, Muslim, and Chinese spheres of influence, it's only a matter of time until people just don't have the time to talk about whether, in future, they will have the time to make predictions about... hang on, I can't remember how I started this sentence."
Whoever you listen to, one theme is clear -- futurologists and the kind of 'experts' who appear in newspaper articles as 'experts predict' will one day die out, and that day may be sooner than we think. Which gives us all a ray of hope for the future.
I'm sure that's already occurred to DARPA. Unfortunately, the military goes off to Iraq when they are ordered to by the elected representative of you, the voter. So what are you doing about it?
How can any company have confidence in a leader who willfully uses incompetence as a defense to wrong doing?
Well, it depends on whether, by doing so, he produces a return in the form of higher share price or dividend payments.
If he does, then it's easy to see why they have confidence.
If you were an investor, which would you prefer -- a CEO who's a pretty cool guy, or a CEO who uses every degrading, demeaning plea, threat, and trick to increase the value of your investment?
It means 'open to debate'. What the above post meant was 'irrelevant' or 'unknowable'. Correct usage might be:
The oil lobby would have us believe that global warming is moot, whereas in fact there is widespread consensus....or...
Cuaron's motives in producing a 'movie' that consists almost entirely of heavy-handed polemic may be moot, but that the result is cinematic failure is surely beyond dispute....or you could even say...
Whether Private Gumbo was clinically dead at the time the eighth round hit him is still a moot point in the forensic establishment.
On the other hand, thank you for not spelling it 'mute'.
How typical of a socialist to start pumping money into airy fairy 'long term solutions' instead of letting market forces sort it out.
I suppose this counts as a troll but honestly, I am saving the libertarians so much time by writing it first. I should be considered a hero -- yet it is my destiny to be modded down:(
This is all because my wife said that she would make breakfast, and she's making BAGUETTES for breakfast, not proper breakfast, and she's taking HOURS to do it so here I am sitting here really hungry wasting my morning waiting for these darn baguettes, it's freakin 10:45 ffs, WHERE IS MY BREAKFAST WOMAN???
I was kind of hoping she would get finished while I am writing this but no... 10:46 and still I have had NOTHING TO EAT all day. The reason for this disaster is that I bought her a sandwich toaster a while ago and since then she won't do anything that doesn't involve a sandwich toaster, even though being Korean she is hardly in tune with the sandwich way of thinking, and so every bit of food in the house is now basically a flat asbestos-like sheet, lightly charred throughout and as dense as a neutron star.
Nobody reads/. stories that are a whole 24 hours old, but...
1 -- scriptability. Via VBA, obviously, but also via any other scripting system that can work with COM. 2 -- embeddability. I can embed my application in Excel, and vice versa.
These things enable Excel to be used as a highly flexible front-end to other applications, or as a monitor for real time data, or as a node in a distributed data streaming system. The applications that many./-ers think of as 'Excel competitors' are basically doing the least interesting part of the work, ie displaying a grid of cells with values in.
Yes, there are many many large institutions that can't do without Excel, because there simply isn't another product that can do what it does. I've been struck how over the many large sites I've visited, the one invariant is Excel -- can't do finance without it.
However, I think you'll find that on slashdot the replies will divide into:
1 -- Check out OO.o. It does what Excel does. 2 -- LOLz0rZ u use Ex-Hell!!!1! U shld get a real db like MySQL!!1!!...which I think says something about the difficulty of communicating requirements across different mindsets. Also, I guess it's easy to forget what a complicated and powerful environment Excel is; even understanding what people _need_ to do in it (over what OO.o does) is hard, I guess.
I, the great Kahei, command it -- BRING ME this strange foreign trinket that it may AMUSE ME! Go, my warriors, slaves and concubines, GO, scour the world! A jar of gold coins for the first to bring me this device! Search, my subjects, search until MY DESIRE IS APPEASED.
Except you, Svetlana. You should, uh, stay behind. In case, you know, extra appeasing opportunities arise. Also your sister should stay too.
It's certainly interesting that so many people post very revealing stuff about themselves on these sites.
No, that's not interesting.
The 'revealing stuff' they post isn't interesting; it would only be interesting if it represented extremes of behavior or threw light on fascinating personalities or great events.
The fact that they post it isn't interesting either; it would only be interesting if there was some good reason for them not to post, or if there was something else they could be doing instead.
'Dull people talk about themselves.' Not news. Sorry.
If anything, it's interesting that they choose to make their pages so ugly. That really is pretty interesting; you'd think that because they attach importance to the details of their own lives, they'd ask themselves 'how can I make this crap (and thus myself) look attractive? how can I make this crap (and thus myself) seem important?' But they don't. That's mildly interesting.
Recently, Richard Stallman gave a speech in which he illustrated an academic point about programming history by quoting a guy who described vi as 'an editor spread at sword-point and which is really hard to use'.
I think I speak for all moderate vi(m) users when I say -- DEATH and DAMNATION (in that order) to this Cardinal of the CTRL key! Needless to say my own local vim user group has dispatched assassins to kill Mr. Stallman, but this is hardly the end of the story. The fact is that a man has referred to another man who in turn expressed some often-voiced reservations about OUR EDITOR! On behalf of all editors of text everywhere, I implore EMACS users to return to the true path, lest you be burned at the stake and then go to hell, the Buffer From Which There Is No Unloading. We'll see how productive you are then, with your ctrl-meta-alt and your ELISP and your 'ring buffer', whatever THAT is.
Peace and love to all. ^C ^X quit q QUIT exit:exit zz ZZ
I am not a fan of our current president and I have never voted for him (but I did vote) But the democrats were stupid enough to put a Northern Liberal Democrat against a South Western Republican. So what it did was create a polarized nation during the election, it forced people to be deadly afraid of the other side. So they all voted for one side or the other.
Yeah, that never happens in elections. Usually people vote for pink kakrafoon grobnitz wibble.
I'm personally curious as to why drupal is, in some ways, such a mess.
Because it's in PHP. If all that effort had been in a scalable language promoting encapsulation and well-defined interfaces, Drupal would rule the world. Even so, I think of it as a good mess that's messy according to rules that you can figure out in the end.
All my problems began when I installed the categories module, but now I still have them when it's uninstalled.
The category module has MANY problems and much of what it does you can do with the far more stable and friendly Views module. Unfortunately, Drupal modules typically do nothing when uninstalled -- in other words, nothing is ever really uninstalled, and the DB tables, nodes etc that Category created for you are still present. IMHO the best approach is to maintain a separate Drupal to test modules.
But what's worse is that I posted message about this problem, and then bumped it, and have no replies in two days.
Categories is not a Drupal core module. Feedback on core modules or major modules is often extremely fast and effective, as you can tell by looking at the message histories on the site. However, Categories is more of an 'aspiring Core module' and you shouldn't judge the Drupal community as a whole by the response time on that particular project.
In sum, Categories really represents the 'wild west' of Drupal. Drupal does have some real problems with static tree-like sites, which Categories tries to address, but I wouldn't say that most of Categories is even beta-quality. The real problem is that outside the Core modules, there's no rating of drupal modules -- even though some (Views and CCK to name but two) are extremely powerful almost a necessity.
A secondary problem is that because PHP makes it so hard to define an interface, some modules react badly with each other -- this is especially true of modules that have a Drupal 4.6 way of thinking. Like I said in my first post, I wouldn't think of Drupal as heavy duty scalable expandable software. But once you've learned which parts of town to avoid, I really think it's a very flexible and high-productivity small to medium scall CMS.
. If anything, Lerdorf merely publicly demonstrated his own immaturity.
I'm pretty sure that inventing PHP demonstrated that pretty effectively./Don't hate PHP//Don't get it mixed up with proper languages though///Slashies on Slashdot!
Recently, I've been using Drupal (PHP CMS system) with a MySQL backend and I am STUNNED, STUNNED I SAY by how productive the combination is compared with, say, ASP.NET and SQL Server. It's a messy, awkward, ambiguous and utterly unscalable language with a cluttered global namespace stuffed full of magic variables and near-identical functions -- combined with a 'database' that simply does not do what a proper database does. And I love it!
I don't understand this compulsion to prove that PHP and MySQL are good. They're not good. They're sh*t. They're extremely old fashioned and underpowered solutions to problems that are already solved far more effectively in the MS world AND in the OSS world AND even in the proprietary Unix world. Every time I poke around in the Drupal source I have a little smugness session as I think how much clearer and more efficient and more cleanly extendible it could be in C#, or even Java. Then I go right back to using it -- not because it's good, but because for the size of task I'm using it for, it's productive.
Sure, SQL Server is better and so is PostgreSQL, and sure, the antics of LAMP people to prove that PHP and MySQL (and CVS, for that matter) are real grown up systems are laughable. But so what? I'm not trying to be scalable or extensible or secure beyond very narrow parameters that I already know fall within the limited scope of PHP and MySQL. I don't want to use the best tools; I'm familiar with the best tools and the scale of operation they best suit. When I want the following methodology:
GET gunzip tar -xvf vim vim vim exit...I want PHP and MySQL!
1 -- Angband, and the Roguelike genre in general 2 -- The great 8 and 16 bit console RPGS -- no Phantasy Star, no 2D Final Fantasy, no Secret of Mana? 3 -- MMORPGs. I hate them, I don't play them, but to have none at all is strange. 4 -- Alpha Centauri, greatest Civ game. 5 -- Planescape: Torment.
I'm also surprised a bit by the absence of both the X-Com and Total War series.
I can understand omitting 2 and 5 if you don't have a soul. But the others are inexplicable!
So, we have a tight case there. Besides Matz is also working on Ruby2.0, which will have VM execution kind of stuff. So, though you may celebrate if you want, I would rather like to have C Ruby for my breakfast. There are two major problems of Ruby: 1. Slow (yes its slow and stylish) 2. GUI programming And guess, what Jruby is not going to bring anything better on the table on these two fronts.
I disagree -- there are more problems with Ruby than just those, and they are things Jruby could fix.
The big problems are:
--Slow: unlikely to be completely fixed by using a JVM, but it would probably help. Matz's VM was going to be ready Real Soon Now in about the year 2000. --Unicode: The JVM would FINALLY give Ruby the ability to take in text in various languages and just process it in the normal way, rather than messing with individual bytes and having Japanese be a special case. --Threads: The JVM would FINALLY give Ruby proper threads.
And another problem is:
--Project Management: Involvement from Sun might make for a more efficiently run, less 'hobby like' project.
So, I'd say there's a lot Sun could offer to Ruby. Whether any of it will happen I don't know -- and of course bad Ruby code is a lot worse than bad Java code and I'm not sure if I wouldn't rather people stuck with Java.
When asked, "Is Britain my country?" only one in four British Muslims it is.
Hmm, let me fix that for you:
When asked, "Is Britain my country?" only one in four British say it is. ...and that one in four is composed of people in flat caps and green rubber boots standing in a field in Hampshire. The UK is the world's most cosmopolitan country, dude. Most people in it are from somewhere else. It's a bit like Babylon 5 in that respect.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a certain stage, for some projects, at which people realize that the Great Next Version, if it ever comes, will be too little too late, and that the action has moved elsewhere. For Perl that was 3-5 years ago. For Ruby, 2-4 years ago. For countless non-public projects, it happens; gradually, progress meetings become a bit of a joke, the smart staff get moved elsewhere, and Project Star (there's nearly always a project called 'Star') becomes something that still exists on someone's budget, but which nobody really expects to have to pay attention to. Sometimes there's a meeting about it and a status report tha reads like a State of the Onion; a bit of waffle, a few in-jokes, some words of encouragement, and then back to doing something else.
Sometimes, this does _not_ happen. Vista (which by rights should have entered the Death Valley last year) and Java (which should have entered it after 1.2) manage to escape this fate; disappointment after disappointment they somehow stay in the spotlight, stay relevant in hearts and minds.
The question is what to do with a project in Death Valley. In a company, someone usually eventually rolls out _something_ and declares victory so that everyone can forget about it. In open source, though, they _never_ administer the final blow. Look at CVS -- it's been in Death Valley for so long, people are beginning to think that _Subversion_ is old hat! Sure, people _use_ it, if they haven't moved on to something else yet, but the last interesting CVS news item was probably in the late 90s... and yet it jogs along... and now Perl jogs along beside it, in the gated retirement community of Open Source.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it is a definite difference between OS and commercial software; you get far more resources spent on the 'long tail' of a project's life in OS.
What's 'primitive' about dating? You think they have or had 'dating' in primitive societies? Modern Western culture, and those parts of the rest of the world that have been globalized into it, are the only places we find this custom. They didn't 'date' in Europe/America in the 1900s, and they don't 'date' in most of the world now, except for that internationalized overclass that you get in big cities.
They have lots of sex, but that's a whole nuther thing.
Enjoy the sophisticated, rarefied culture that allows you to have such esoteric customs as dating! But don't think it's a basic primitive instinctive thing, because it's about as natural to human culture as the iPod.
There are two myths in the above, one obvious and one less so.
Japan started the fight and they would not surrender. Very conservative estimates of an invasion of Japan's homeland put American deaths at a million and Japanese deaths as a multiple of that. As horrific the destruction caused by the 2 atomic bombs, those bombs saved American and Japanese lives.
I was under the impression that the above has been debunked pretty heavily, but I guess there are people who still need to believe.
If the number of deaths by war were plotted over the course of human history you would see a a line that increased every year and each year the increase grew steeper.
No, you would see definite fluctuations, with high 'plateaus', spikes, and quiet periods. For example, the latter half of the 1800s contains a massive sustained high -- the Taiping war, with a bit of help from the American Civil War and some others. The first few decades of the 1800s are very high too, whereas the 18th century, despite some decorative European wars, is very very quiet -- no Mongols, no Jihads, and most importantly no major wars in China (which is the main driver of war deaths).
What Heinlein said about 'always looking for the facts'.
Wow, toward the beginning of that conversation it was kicking your ass
I guess 'whaever' threw it though.
According to expert futurologists, we face a nightmarish future -- a future without expert predictions of the future!
"People will get sick of it," said a spokesman for the Institute for Predictions. "They just won't want any more baseless predictions -- so people will stop making any."
Professor Isaac Sagan of the University of Pontification agrees. "In the future, people will almost certainly have gotten sick of hearing me talk about what will happen in the future. Very likely, I'll have to find another job -- such as fry cook, or hat salesman."
Although vapid, uninteresting predictions of the future are currently at a record high, even those who attempt to make actualy useful predictions foresee a downward trend.
"At some point, real problems are going to become impossible to ignore," pointed out Dr. Bob Gore of the Smartville College, Oxford. "With climate change already depopulating some areas, and the deepening split between the American, Muslim, and Chinese spheres of influence, it's only a matter of time until people just don't have the time to talk about whether, in future, they will have the time to make predictions about... hang on, I can't remember how I started this sentence."
Whoever you listen to, one theme is clear -- futurologists and the kind of 'experts' who appear in newspaper articles as 'experts predict' will one day die out, and that day may be sooner than we think. Which gives us all a ray of hope for the future.
I'm sure that's already occurred to DARPA. Unfortunately, the military goes off to Iraq when they are ordered to by the elected representative of you, the voter. So what are you doing about it?
How can any company have confidence in a leader who willfully uses incompetence as a defense to wrong doing?
Well, it depends on whether, by doing so, he produces a return in the form of higher share price or dividend payments.
If he does, then it's easy to see why they have confidence.
If you were an investor, which would you prefer -- a CEO who's a pretty cool guy, or a CEO who uses every degrading, demeaning plea, threat, and trick to increase the value of your investment?
Could people please stop abusing the word 'moot'?
...or...
...or you could even say...
It means 'open to debate'. What the above post meant was 'irrelevant' or 'unknowable'. Correct usage might be:
The oil lobby would have us believe that global warming is moot, whereas in fact there is widespread consensus.
Cuaron's motives in producing a 'movie' that consists almost entirely of heavy-handed polemic may be moot, but that the result is cinematic failure is surely beyond dispute.
Whether Private Gumbo was clinically dead at the time the eighth round hit him is still a moot point in the forensic establishment.
On the other hand, thank you for not spelling it 'mute'.
How typical of a socialist to start pumping money into airy fairy 'long term solutions' instead of letting market forces sort it out.
I suppose this counts as a troll but honestly, I am saving the libertarians so much time by writing it first. I should be considered a hero -- yet it is my destiny to be modded down
This is all because my wife said that she would make breakfast, and she's making BAGUETTES for breakfast, not proper breakfast, and she's taking HOURS to do it so here I am sitting here really hungry wasting my morning waiting for these darn baguettes, it's freakin 10:45 ffs, WHERE IS MY BREAKFAST WOMAN???
I was kind of hoping she would get finished while I am writing this but no... 10:46 and still I have had NOTHING TO EAT all day. The reason for this disaster is that I bought her a sandwich toaster a while ago and since then she won't do anything that doesn't involve a sandwich toaster, even though being Korean she is hardly in tune with the sandwich way of thinking, and so every bit of food in the house is now basically a flat asbestos-like sheet, lightly charred throughout and as dense as a neutron star.
The user would be better off learning perl
:)
Brilliant, classic slashdot and a great argument for outsourcing
Nobody reads /. stories that are a whole 24 hours old, but...
./-ers think of as 'Excel competitors' are basically doing the least interesting part of the work, ie displaying a grid of cells with values in.
1 -- scriptability. Via VBA, obviously, but also via any other scripting system that can work with COM.
2 -- embeddability. I can embed my application in Excel, and vice versa.
These things enable Excel to be used as a highly flexible front-end to other applications, or as a monitor for real time data, or as a node in a distributed data streaming system. The applications that many
Yes, there are many many large institutions that can't do without Excel, because there simply isn't another product that can do what it does. I've been struck how over the many large sites I've visited, the one invariant is Excel -- can't do finance without it.
...which I think says something about the difficulty of communicating requirements across different mindsets. Also, I guess it's easy to forget what a complicated and powerful environment Excel is; even understanding what people _need_ to do in it (over what OO.o does) is hard, I guess.
However, I think you'll find that on slashdot the replies will divide into:
1 -- Check out OO.o. It does what Excel does.
2 -- LOLz0rZ u use Ex-Hell!!!1! U shld get a real db like MySQL!!1!!
I, the great Kahei, command it -- BRING ME this strange foreign trinket that it may AMUSE ME! Go, my warriors, slaves and concubines, GO, scour the world! A jar of gold coins for the first to bring me this device! Search, my subjects, search until MY DESIRE IS APPEASED.
Except you, Svetlana. You should, uh, stay behind. In case, you know, extra appeasing opportunities arise. Also your sister should stay too.
It's certainly interesting that so many people post very revealing stuff about themselves on these sites.
No, that's not interesting.
The 'revealing stuff' they post isn't interesting; it would only be interesting if it represented extremes of behavior or threw light on fascinating personalities or great events.
The fact that they post it isn't interesting either; it would only be interesting if there was some good reason for them not to post, or if there was something else they could be doing instead.
'Dull people talk about themselves.' Not news. Sorry.
If anything, it's interesting that they choose to make their pages so ugly. That really is pretty interesting; you'd think that because they attach importance to the details of their own lives, they'd ask themselves 'how can I make this crap (and thus myself) look attractive? how can I make this crap (and thus myself) seem important?' But they don't. That's mildly interesting.
Recently, Richard Stallman gave a speech in which he illustrated an academic point about programming history by quoting a guy who described vi as 'an editor spread at sword-point and which is really hard to use'.
I think I speak for all moderate vi(m) users when I say -- DEATH and DAMNATION (in that order) to this Cardinal of the CTRL key! Needless to say my own local vim user group has dispatched assassins to kill Mr. Stallman, but this is hardly the end of the story. The fact is that a man has referred to another man who in turn expressed some often-voiced reservations about OUR EDITOR! On behalf of all editors of text everywhere, I implore EMACS users to return to the true path, lest you be burned at the stake and then go to hell, the Buffer From Which There Is No Unloading. We'll see how productive you are then, with your ctrl-meta-alt and your ELISP and your 'ring buffer', whatever THAT is.
Peace and love to all.
^C
^X
quit
q
QUIT
exit
zz
ZZ
I am not a fan of our current president and I have never voted for him (but I did vote) But the democrats were stupid enough to put a Northern Liberal Democrat against a South Western Republican. So what it did was create a polarized nation during the election, it forced people to be deadly afraid of the other side. So they all voted for one side or the other.
Yeah, that never happens in elections. Usually people vote for pink kakrafoon grobnitz wibble.
mysqldump :)
I'm personally curious as to why drupal is, in some ways, such a mess.
Because it's in PHP. If all that effort had been in a scalable language promoting encapsulation and well-defined interfaces, Drupal would rule the world. Even so, I think of it as a good mess that's messy according to rules that you can figure out in the end.
All my problems began when I installed the categories module, but now I still have them when it's uninstalled.
The category module has MANY problems and much of what it does you can do with the far more stable and friendly Views module. Unfortunately, Drupal modules typically do nothing when uninstalled -- in other words, nothing is ever really uninstalled, and the DB tables, nodes etc that Category created for you are still present. IMHO the best approach is to maintain a separate Drupal to test modules.
But what's worse is that I posted message about this problem, and then bumped it, and have no replies in two days.
Categories is not a Drupal core module. Feedback on core modules or major modules is often extremely fast and effective, as you can tell by looking at the message histories on the site. However, Categories is more of an 'aspiring Core module' and you shouldn't judge the Drupal community as a whole by the response time on that particular project.
In sum, Categories really represents the 'wild west' of Drupal. Drupal does have some real problems with static tree-like sites, which Categories tries to address, but I wouldn't say that most of Categories is even beta-quality. The real problem is that outside the Core modules, there's no rating of drupal modules -- even though some (Views and CCK to name but two) are extremely powerful almost a necessity.
A secondary problem is that because PHP makes it so hard to define an interface, some modules react badly with each other -- this is especially true of modules that have a Drupal 4.6 way of thinking. Like I said in my first post, I wouldn't think of Drupal as heavy duty scalable expandable software. But once you've learned which parts of town to avoid, I really think it's a very flexible and high-productivity small to medium scall CMS.
. If anything, Lerdorf merely publicly demonstrated his own immaturity.
/Don't hate PHP //Don't get it mixed up with proper languages though ///Slashies on Slashdot!
I'm pretty sure that inventing PHP demonstrated that pretty effectively.
Recently, I've been using Drupal (PHP CMS system) with a MySQL backend and I am STUNNED, STUNNED I SAY by how productive the combination is compared with, say, ASP.NET and SQL Server. It's a messy, awkward, ambiguous and utterly unscalable language with a cluttered global namespace stuffed full of magic variables and near-identical functions -- combined with a 'database' that simply does not do what a proper database does. And I love it!
...I want PHP and MySQL!
I don't understand this compulsion to prove that PHP and MySQL are good. They're not good. They're sh*t. They're extremely old fashioned and underpowered solutions to problems that are already solved far more effectively in the MS world AND in the OSS world AND even in the proprietary Unix world. Every time I poke around in the Drupal source I have a little smugness session as I think how much clearer and more efficient and more cleanly extendible it could be in C#, or even Java. Then I go right back to using it -- not because it's good, but because for the size of task I'm using it for, it's productive.
Sure, SQL Server is better and so is PostgreSQL, and sure, the antics of LAMP people to prove that PHP and MySQL (and CVS, for that matter) are real grown up systems are laughable. But so what? I'm not trying to be scalable or extensible or secure beyond very narrow parameters that I already know fall within the limited scope of PHP and MySQL. I don't want to use the best tools; I'm familiar with the best tools and the scale of operation they best suit. When I want the following methodology:
GET
gunzip
tar -xvf
vim vim vim
exit
(end of long meandering rant)
1 -- Angband, and the Roguelike genre in general
2 -- The great 8 and 16 bit console RPGS -- no Phantasy Star, no 2D Final Fantasy, no Secret of Mana?
3 -- MMORPGs. I hate them, I don't play them, but to have none at all is strange.
4 -- Alpha Centauri, greatest Civ game.
5 -- Planescape: Torment.
I'm also surprised a bit by the absence of both the X-Com and Total War series.
I can understand omitting 2 and 5 if you don't have a soul. But the others are inexplicable!
allegations of ripped-off processor designs
There are bound to be such allegations, and they're usually well founded.
might slow the effort.
Hee hee
So, we have a tight case there. Besides Matz is also working on Ruby2.0, which will have VM execution kind of stuff. So, though you may celebrate if you want, I would rather like to have C Ruby for my breakfast. There are two major problems of Ruby:
1. Slow (yes its slow and stylish)
2. GUI programming
And guess, what Jruby is not going to bring anything better on the table on these two fronts.
I disagree -- there are more problems with Ruby than just those, and they are things Jruby could fix.
The big problems are:
--Slow: unlikely to be completely fixed by using a JVM, but it would probably help. Matz's VM was going to be ready Real Soon Now in about the year 2000.
--Unicode: The JVM would FINALLY give Ruby the ability to take in text in various languages and just process it in the normal way, rather than messing with individual bytes and having Japanese be a special case.
--Threads: The JVM would FINALLY give Ruby proper threads.
And another problem is:
--Project Management: Involvement from Sun might make for a more efficiently run, less 'hobby like' project.
So, I'd say there's a lot Sun could offer to Ruby. Whether any of it will happen I don't know -- and of course bad Ruby code is a lot worse than bad Java code and I'm not sure if I wouldn't rather people stuck with Java.
Its real easy for a charitable organization such as Wikipedia to dictate moral terms to a money making business like Google.
Now does anyone have any rational suggestions?
Hmm... more charitable organizations, less reliance on money making businesses? Especially where free exchange of information is the goal?
When asked, "Is Britain my country?" only one in four British Muslims it is.
...and that one in four is composed of people in flat caps and green rubber boots standing in a field in Hampshire. The UK is the world's most cosmopolitan country, dude. Most people in it are from somewhere else. It's a bit like Babylon 5 in that respect.
Hmm, let me fix that for you:
When asked, "Is Britain my country?" only one in four British say it is.