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  1. Re:Python? Why not Ruby (on Rails)? Because ... on Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional · · Score: 1

    I see two noticable differences between the Python and Ruby examples

    Noticable? yes. Significant? No.

    A significant difference would be

    for(int i = 0; i numberOfStock; i++)
    {
    System.out.println(list[i]);
    }

    or

    NSEnumerator *childEnumerator = [list objectEnumerator];
    NSObject *obj = nil;
    while (obj = [childEnumerator nextObject])
    {
    NSLog(obj);
    }

    That said, it's interesting to look at the small differences - I wonder if there's a site someplace that does comparisons of languages with basic routines each rewritten in the different idioms?

    I personally love the loss of braces and the use of indentation in python, but haven't really explored the language as I picked up Ruby first and enjoy that too much. The do end doesn't really bug me very much either - that weird ':' at the end of the for x in list line upsets me just as much : )

  2. Re:Python? Why not Ruby (on Rails)? Because ... on Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional · · Score: 1

    oh great, mangled by the slashdot bit-eater, well, I'm sure you could guess the rest : )

    #!/usr/bin/ruby

    list = [1,2,3,4,7,8,11]
    puts list
    list << 13
    list.each do |x|
        puts x
    end

    def sum(a, b)
        a + b
    end

    puts sum(42, 47)
    puts sum('spam ', 'eggs')

  3. Re:Python? Why not Ruby (on Rails)? Because ... on Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional · · Score: 1

    Just for fun here's a couple of the very basic examples in Thinking in Python going from Python to Ruby.

    #!/usr/bin/python

    list = [1,2,3,4,7,8,11]
    print list
    list.append(13)
    for x in list:
        print x

    def sum(arg1, arg2):
        return arg1 + arg2

    print sum(42, 47)
    print sum('spam ', "eggs")

    #!/usr/bin/ruby

    list = [1,2,3,4,7,8,11]
    puts list
    list "although basically smoke and mirrors"

    Are they really so different? Does it really matter? Do we all have to take sides?
    To me the differences between the languages look very small, they're more about outlook and ethos than technicalities. The features are pretty close to even, and the syntax is even almost the same. So I don't see why you have go for a pre-emptive strike against the evil hordes of RoR users, who don't seem to have materialised in this article anyway : )

  4. Re:No radio on 50 Fun Things to Do With Your iPod · · Score: 1

    Have fun stumbling onto new stuff you like with that format.

    There are many podcast directories you can visit to do just that.

    or a real alternative station that isn't clearchannel owned

    You'll find that much easier with podcasts (given that they are international and free, and anyone can set one up) than with Radio stations, I really don't see your point. Your local college radio station probably already has a podcast : )

    Whatever you call them, audio subscriptions are here to stay and are significantly better than Radio for many uses (save up to the minute news of course).

  5. Re:Price increases for iTunes on The Odds at Macworld · · Score: 1

    Doesn't matter whether it's illegal in Russia or anywhere else. It's immoral.

    They say they have the money put aside, ready for when the various publishers register for it (as required by Russian law).

    I have a hard time believing you actually think that's true. Why don't you just copy the music from P2P instead? To the artists, producers, and sound technicians who worked hard to make that music, it has the same end result.

    "well, they should be sending the money to the companies, instead of waiting for them to ask"

    YOU the user shouldn't be making excuses for what is blatant copyright infringement. It's your responsibility to try to make sure you're not buying stolen goods. Because you can get away with it and it is possibly legal doesn't make it right.

    If you want to hear more independent and interesting music, and help artists actually make money from it instead of selling their life's work to middlemen, why don't you head over to one of the online retailers that sells without DRM and pay proper money for music. By going to allofmp3.com you're undermining any motivation to make music. Why should anyone make music for an audience as selfish as that?

  6. Re:Seems like a wast of time to me on Microsoft Ends IE for Mac · · Score: 1

    They have backported the new version of Safari to 10.3.9 - that seems to be their baseline platform now. MS are in that position because they have updated neither the OS nor the browser in significant ways in the last 5 years, so their support of old technologies costs them nothing because that's all they're selling.

  7. Re:Mixed feelings on Little Red Book Draws Government Attention · · Score: 1

    on the ashheap of history

    Dear citizen,

    you have been noted by our monitoring software reprising the words of the famous subversive Trotsky in a public forum. This is obviously the act of

    a> A historian (historians may only practice when under the supervision of the homeland security division, you are not authorised)
    b> Someone with subversive tendencies
    c> Retards who don't know where the phrase came from and think it came from Reagan

    Please report to your nearest re-education camp. There is no appeal process. Have a nice day.

  8. Trollicious on Ruby on Rails 1.0 Released · · Score: 1

    So why don't you want to put your name (your anonymous slashdot handle at that) to this? Because it's an easy, cheap shot playing to the peanut gallery.

    Wow, a bunch of li's on a page. That's never been done before.

    Interesting that you think this site, just as an example, is 'just a bunch of li tags'.

    http://www.yakimaherald.com/

    It's been advertised enough. It doesn't need a cult-like following -- "use Ruby on Rails and you get to be one of the cool kids."

    People who talk about cults and zealots tend to enjoy battling straw men - why not discuss real implementations, and real points, instead of declaring victory over imaginary enemies? No one said anything remotely like the statement above, aside from yourself of course.

    Having used Ruby on Rails, I can tell you that it's really not worth the hype. It brings nothing new to the table, it doesn't really improve development times at all (if you, you know, actually try to implement something full-featured), and it's 50-100x+ slower than a comparable PHP or Java Servlet implementation.

    As compared to PHP, it brings a few interesting ideas to the table, including MVC, auto-generated methods and the ORM layer. If you wish to compare bits of Rails to bits of lots of other frameworks, of course you can find something of it in a lot of different places. As to your '50-100' times slower than 'x', I'm afraid that's just nonsense. For most of these frameworks if you have caching set up right you won't be hitting the database very often, and the speed has been shown to be comparable. Either can be faster than the other depending on how you program/cache. Here's a java guy having a look at rails (I think there was a slashdot story about it a while ago). Sounds fair to me.

    http://www.relevancellc.com/blogs/?p=31

    As to improving development times, it probably depends on the programmer. It doesn't have a 'write my app for me' button, but does provide useful helpers and abstractions, a lot of conventions which will help you not make a mess of your code, plus you get to program in Ruby, which is a fun language. Now perhaps you found it too restrictive, or limited in certain ways, if so, perhaps you'd like to post something more constructive and debate the weaknesses of the framework (no officially blessed internationalisation, authentication or sub-applications).

  9. Re:A rather large problem on Ruby on Rails 1.0 Released · · Score: 1

    Hi,

    installing a rails app at dreamhost is presently as simple as

    1> log in and type 'rails your_app_name'
    2> To get decent speed you need to turn on fcgi in the web interface and edit your .htaccess file to use fcgi rather than cgi.
    3> Start changing your app's config files to point to the right database and off you go

    People have had problems in the past getting up to speed, but nowadays they have all the kinks ironed out and it really is that easy. If you want to run the rails app in a subdirectory that will be more painful at present, but is doable - I think the wiki recommends trying a subdomain instead.

    The main barrier to adoption I see is that you need to get your head round the MVC abstractions before you start. Given this is one of the things about Rails that encourages good practice over the long term, that's probably not a bad thing.

  10. When there is nothing left to take away on Woz Says Big Software Doesn't Work · · Score: 1

    Don't take the sharp bits off the saw because sharp bits are not friendly to humans--let the saw have sharp bits because it's in the nature of the tool to work that way.

    That's really a caricature of his position. He's not saying make the tools less useful, but make them more intuitive and make it difficult to do the wrong thing and cut yourself. Simplify them and don't have so many buttons on your saw all with cryptic icons jammed next to each other (remind you of any software?) that the user isn't sure what each one does and could press something dangerous by accident. Then when you have a new feature like 'loosen blade' add another button, and hope the user doesn't try it when in use.

    I think the latter approach might be more interesting. We've tried to use the GUI to "intuitively" show the user what to do, but frankly this only worked when you had like a dozen tool icons to pick from. Software now has so many features, so many file formats, so many protocols and stuff, that GUIs are just really complex. So what if there's a button for everything? Most people can't find the buttons because there so many layers to the GUI. People thought it would be easy because you could just "press a button", whereas a lot of the power is in scripting and modeling stuff.

    The problem lies with the assumption that all those features need to be exposed to the user all at once. There are established methods for cutting down on the features exposed, but the most important one is to go for 'convention over configuration' (a RoR phrase, but applicable here) - don't make the user choose unless they want to, and when they do want to tweak make it obvious where they would go. There are sensible defaults for most things, but they're not often chosen, or even thought about.

    The aim of the interface should be to simplify the tasks to the point where the user can just start their main task and then add other stuff later if they need to. Now I'm not very keen on the MS 'Task based' approach, and Apple, frankly, has lost its way by abandoning consistency, but this stuff isn't rocket science. Your software should teach people to think about and organise information. It should guide them to do the right things and not the wrong things. It should make decisions for them and then let them easily modify those defaults if they need to.

    I don't feel we're stuck with bazillions of Word documents because it made the computer easy to use and natural. We're stuck with them because MS wanted to lock its customers into one solution, and left it with a borked binary format to ensure that. Word is an example of almost everything that's wrong with GUI design in software today - the cryptic buttons, ad-hoc styling, overloaded menu bar, inconsistent behaviour when printing, attempts to auto-style which get in the way, 'handy-hints'.

    A counterpoint to that approach from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry -
    "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

  11. Re:HTML and CSS on The Future of HTML · · Score: 2, Funny

    HTML along the lines of using h1 through h6 is foolish, but I've (literally) never seen anyone use any heading smaller than h2.

    That's funny, because I could have sworn I saw an H4 tag around here somewhere, perhaps you should check what tag wraps the head of your post?

  12. Re:who? on Woz Says Big Software Doesn't Work · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Looking at the other benighted posts on this thread, your one was sadly prescient.

  13. Re:Yeah, NOBODY! on Ajax Sucks Most of the Time · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Get a clue. Just because you can't see frames, does not mean they are not there. Frames are used all over the freaking place. Nearly every web page you visit has an ad in an iframe in it.
    This is the reason that this article, and also the one it spoofed, are both wrong. Not every state of a web page has to be, or should be, bookmarkable. The back button was never meant to be an 'undo' and should not be treated as such. etc etc...
    Both frames and Ajax are very useful and powerful in web applications.


    1> There's no need to be so obnoxious - an iframe is not a frame, and the original article was talking about frames, which did break the web and were a Bad Thing.
    2> The back button should be usable to navigate from resource to resource. Each URL should identify a resource, and each unique resource (message,post,whatever) should have an URL.

    Sometimes web apps break this rule, and when they do, it can be bad. Obviously state shouldn't be bookmarkable, but resources should be. Ever tried to give someone a link to a product on the Apple store? Applications which misuse AJAX can have this problem if they use it exclusively and don't change the url, or worse put some garbage to do with THEIR session info in the url which is shown to the user. Gmail gets away with it because you mail is private and you don't need to send links, with google maps it's kind of annoying because you have to click the 'link to this page 'kludge to send the map to someone else, and you can't click back through various locations easily.

    Not that I'd agree that AJAX sucks most of the time, it doesn't at all, can't work out why everyone is getting so worked up about a small part of the toolset.

  14. Re:Embrace, extend... on MS Reveals Info On New RSS Extensions · · Score: 1

    Yes because we've all seen what a failure Bill Gates and Microsoft have been over the last 20 years.


    Is a successful monopoly for Microsoft success for you as their customer/client?

  15. Re:Farewell Freehand, You'll be missed :( on Adobe Acquiring Macromedia on December 3, 2005 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    heh, I just disabled Flash in my browser because of the intrusive distracting ads that use it. I decided it was worth losing access to the few sites I use (very few) which do use it for good reasons.

  16. Re:It crashes too on Fix Your Crashing X-Box 360 With String · · Score: 1

    First, the machine should not come down if it runs short of memory, it should just page and become a bit unresponsive.

    Second, as you rightly point out there are no sane defaults for memory allocation, and it shouldn't be preset, but if the IE programmers wish to avoid *this* of attack (asking for an insanely large image), they could pre-flight resource allocation, check how much memory is left, and if it's not enough to render a graphic, just post a placeholder saying 'not enough memory'. That's really not too difficult.

  17. Re:Who cashes in? on iTMS Moving Up The Sales Charts · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Somehow I get the feeling the record companies are the ones cashing in.

    Apple cashes in now on ipods, and later on music when the record companies are obsolete.

    They don't have to worry about margins on music just now so long as it's in profit and growing the market.

  18. Re:About your proposed revolution on Ajax in Action · · Score: 1

    It seems you already have religion, so why do you want a revolution? Or maybe you were reading the wrong posting because mine only implied a wish: that "technology" people stop acting like herd animals and actually fulfill their reputation as independent thinkers. Or is that hype too?

    Independent thinking is actually pretty easy and really quite commonplace, in fact I believe every teenager ever born has indulged in some of that; it's persuading other people to adopt your ideas and making them work that's hard. Hence the reference to Revolutions, which usually seem like a better idea before them than they do after.

    As to hype and religion, I'm not interested in either : ) If you're going to complain about the slow progress made in Web apps, and the limited utility of AJAX at least come up with an alternative.

  19. About your proposed revolution on Ajax in Action · · Score: 1

    We'd all love to see the plans.

  20. Re:AJAX inthe Real World on Ajax in Action · · Score: 1

    I've just done a site in Ruby on Rails, which includes nice javascript libraries for AJAX stuff (I think it's from here), and you can use the AJAX stuff without using Rails.

  21. Re:Whatever happened to the US Navy? on History's Worst Software Bugs · · Score: 1

    I believe the default behaviour of NT in this situation is to blue screen. If the application had proper error handling (or input validation) it would have been fine...

    The same could be said for the OS.

  22. Re:And the newest Finder Fukup is... on Mac OS X 10.4.3 Released · · Score: 1

    er, guilty as charged, I didn't read it properly. You're quite right, it is inconsistent as it doesn't remember that you've chosen column view for that view before if you double click a folder.

  23. Re:And the newest Finder Fukup is... on Mac OS X 10.4.3 Released · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, if this were true, they'd make it easier to get windows to open in column view by default.

    Finder > Preferences > General

    Tick the box that says 'Open new windows in column view' and be happy.

  24. Re:No, they are not on MS To Launch Internet Versions of Office And Windows · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I already said in another post that I want coexistence, not a monopoly on any side.

    Unfortunately what you want doesn't matter at all.

    What Microsoft wants is to kill all competitors by 'cutting off their oxygen supply'. BTW, every other IT company is seen as a competitor. This is ingrained in the corporate culture, and starts at the very top with Gates/Balmer. That is why no one trusts them, not because they love Linux and hate MS (or whatever), but because they hate the things Microsoft has done and wants to do.

  25. Re:Hell Of A Niche on Sprint Launchings Music to Mobile Downloads · · Score: 1

    Ringtones are a public statement. They are like accessories, phone cases, jewellery or designer clothes in that they help define to others who you are. Therefore people are prepared to spend large amounts of money on them for reasons of status. I personally wouldn't but I see why people, particularly teenagers, do. For the same reasons as people buy trainers (US:sneakers) for £100.

    Having music on your phone is a completely different market which is based on private listening habits and convenience. At these prices and with these limitations I think it'll go down about as well as WAP and mobile internet did, that is to say, not very well.

    In addition to that problem, you need quite a new expensive phone, and you need a lot of memory to store the songs - the memory in phones at the moment is pitiful. One day we will all have one device which functions as a phone/music player/terminal. This is not that day.