I would argue that there is very easy way to get out from under the MSFT umbrella and most of it is right in front of us.
Web centric services (AJAX, Web 2.0, Web Services, SOAP,....) are gaining popularity in large infrastructure environments because they can be interfaced through a highly standardized API that allows the client/server to migrate independently of each other as long as they adhere to this API. There are a few applications which don't work well in this environment that will be more difficult to migrate. But the specialization is such that it's not Windows dependency that is the barrier. CAD programs are highly specialized and require entry level training on any platform.
Conceptually, we are much closer to removing any dependencies than we think we are.
IMHO, migration is best done cold turkey. If you can't fall back to your old Windows computer then you will learn the new interface. And if you can do everything as a web service then it won't matter -- but this is a stretch.
Sure someone will gain from it. Otherwise they wouldn't have made the announcement.
With Vista they can claim to be more secure and that's been their biggest sore spot in the market.
What about Linux?
Well... What about Linux?
I really don't feel that Linux users really care that much about Windows anymore. Use it if you want. The point is that over the past few years Linux and Mac have progressed so far into the user community and ease of use that they have no reason not to be used by anyone/everyone unless you are hooked on specific software for Windows. And that's the key. The pain of migration is the only thing people are avoiding.
I actually don't know anyone in my family who uses Windows. There are some in-laws that do. Over Easter I was at one house and we went to look something up on his computer. He was bitching and fussing over how slow it was. I asked him if he ever considered using something else and he just said the typical, "No, it's what came with the computer and I'm used to it.".
There's always going to be people who think like that. They don't really care and once MSFT stops supporting Windows XP they'll continue using it for as long as possible without upgrades or patches because they don't really care.
When was the last time you vacuumed your refridgerator coils or replaced your furnace filter? Some people don't really care/know that much about it to really do anything.
In time, despite the billions of dollars that Microsoft has available for marketing campaigns, Microsoft will go the way of Word Perfect and Word Star and take up a residence in a museum. At least, the Microsoft that I grew up with will. Perhaps they can change, but they probably can't because they are too revenue bound in the current model to make the necessary changes.
I'm not that impressed with SpamAssassin. Too much overhead in trying to keep all the static filtering rules up to date. Eventually, it get's dumb
The best spam filters I've seen in terms of effectiveness is bogofilter and dspam. Both of these are extensions of the Bayes statistical filtering.
bogofilter is awesome but it can't manage tokens from a database. Hence you can't have multiple machines very easily and users cannot share a database. Virtual hosting makes it harder and eventually you kind of get frustrated with it if trying to deploy a large number of users with user-specific token lists
dspam does a nice job of per-user token lists but it loses email. I found a lot of cases where mail checked in via the postfix logs, but it never came out of dspam or was recorded anywhere as an error or anything. It just got lost. It's a nice approach but scores 0.0 for reliability.
If only bogofilter would run with postgresql, I would be happy.
I work at an Even Larger Company and the answer is absolutely not. Never in a million years. It's got nothing to do with Linux, Unix, or Windows. It's got everything to do with a corporate consistency. The thinking is that if everyone has the same tools and only those tools, then it's easier to manage the IT environment from a central ivory tower. Which is true. But for anyone in a technical position, it also makes the job considerably more difficult.
The issue isn't your last might 5MB but the 1000 users demanding 5MB from YouTube to all their disparate net locations.
I do not find it possible that the last mile is the issue considering that the video streaming protocols have not signficantly changed over the last couple of years and if you check you will find that they are almost always transmitting at below specification data rates -- from that particular website!
Your argument about net neutrality is flawed in that the protocols you are willing to take a performance hit on (email) are not the leading volume consumers of your network. So you want to degrade performance on the 20% of the traffic that doesn't contribute to the problems you are seeing in the first place. Not a very bright solution.
Perhaps the answer is to go back a decade and see how things were solved when things were slow because they were slow and not because they were running a lot of volume. Has anyone seriously considered the impact you will have if you seriously utilize different caching and distributed networking solutions?
For starters I would think if YouTube was really suffering they would set up a lot of alternative DNS sites than the two they have. And those two would not be sitting on the same subnet but at opposite ends of the Mae-East and Mae-West connection (San Francisco & Atlanta). But they didn't so it must not be that much of a problem for them just yet.
Additionally, if they wanted to improve the performance they would offload requests into proxy-cache machines to improve performance of the host servers. This is basic web server 101 stuff that anyone should know. See squid-cache and apache's proxy module for more information. You can easily serve a 1GB/s network from a small machine by todays terms of computing power.
If the ISP's had a problem with web performance then they too would start investing in cache servers to improve the performance of the last mile of network delivery. But again I don't know how much of this is really being done today.
I really do not believe that the problem is with the use of the network. It's with the bad deployment of the web content. If you want to help with the network traffic then try doing the following:
Set up DNS caching on your subnet(s) before it/they hit's the internet.
Set up HTTP proxy caches in front of your web servers
Set up HTTP proxy caches in front of your client subnets
Use the web page META TAG to set cache-expiration times of your content
Use LTSP and you can convert all 3500 existing desktops into terminals without purchasing new hardware. Perhaps you can convince your boss to let you have 10% of the savings.
It wouldn't be an unreliable user-agent identification if web designers didn't restrict the access of their web sites to specific user-agents in the first place. I see no other reason to spoof who you are other than to get around some artards notion of what browsers can access a page.
OK, I think I get the gist of the OP but let me see if I get this straight.
You can make a movie called White Guys can't Jump but you can't make a movie called Black Guys can't swim (fill in swim with whatever).
You can make "logical arguments" against Christianity. You can even make jokes about the religion and it's Members.
But as soon as you breath a word against the Muslims you are silenced.
We have a new minority in America. It's call the muslims. Please, if you are a male white American, add to your list of people not to offend: the Muslims. But remember, anyone can publicly deride the whites, males, christians but never speak ill of the jews, muslims, blacks (oh shit! sorry -- African American), mexicans, or anyone else who didn't have an ancestoral basis in North Western Europe along the paternal lines of the family tree.
It's getting kind of crazy around here with all the people who are demanding both freedom of speech and respect for their own beliefs.
Close. A lot of the signs they talk about aren't the signs that people actually provide before the "snap" and go on a shooting spree. The article makes for a nice jumping point to move all the IT hardware to India and send the admins in North America packing.
Stiffer, as reported, has nothing to do with tougher or harder.
Diamond is not a very tough material. Tough, in metallurgical terms, identified the total amount of energy required to break a bar of material. Diamond is to brittle that once a crack is initiated, it's propogation is hard to stop. So there's not a lot of engergy required to break diamond.
Stiff has to do with a measure of deflection of a mean under a torsional load. This again is not something diamond excels at.
Diamond is known for it's hardness, which is the amount of energy required to make a dent, to put it simply. Are they all related? somewhat. But if unless you want an indept discussion of crystalline structures, bond energies and the like just take it for granted that stiff, hard, and tough are not all equal statements.
There's nothing that significant about a material that is more stiff than diamond.
But I find it strangely stupifying that someone would use a distribution intended to be a cutting edge user desktop installation for what he called Enterprise Solutions.
Only the insane or stupifyingly owned will roll Vista into all their Enterprise environments on the first day it's released. Most wait 6 months to a year. Wouldn't the same consideration hold some merit for Linux distros?
I'm picking on Ubuntu specifically because I think they author made the wrong choice. There are a lot of really well operating distributions out there that work very well. There are few, if any, products that don't pay homage to MSFT that will work with Exchange. And when you talk about using Thunderbird to get Exchange email keep in mind you are only using IMAP and not the whole Exchange Experience kind of thing. He might as well bash Oracle for not making MS Access drivers.
I gave up fighting for Linux a long time ago. Not because it isn't a really great OS. But because people who are in Corporation IT don't want good software. They want simple contracts. As often as something goes wrong with Microsoft, there is almost always someone on a help desk phone number they can yell at. And that makes them feel like they are doing their job.
I work in the opposite environment where no one who is salaried by the Parent Company is permitted to do anything other than manage vendors who manage our business. Ironically we are a company dependent upon software performance.
We don't actually know what our servers are doing for us. Everything has to be funnelled through the contractors as a price. If they left, we wouldn't have anything to call a business.
Perhaps some aspects can be turned over to companies that specialize in something. But there's a dark side to this too.
So who would rather live in a high-rise than a house?
A private home is one of the best means of investment. High Rise buildings are typically provided as a flat for rent -- the worse means of fudicial exercise. You won't get this kind of high density housing in areas where the true ownership of the flat is not transferred to the resident. They might do this in New York or Paris. But it's more the exception to the United States than the rule.
What do other countries do? Can you buy an aparment in the city?
I live in Detroit Michigan. Cars are considered holy shrines in this stupid town.
Even when you do live in a real neighborhood and not some burb the sidewalks may exist in form but they either do not exist in function or are way too dangerous to travel on for any real distance.
And yes, the manufactured small-town communities are either largely abandoned or mis-designed as a place you can drive to and then walk around 500 feet of sidewalk looking at overpriced shops and drinking burnt coffee for $5 a cup. No surprise that they fail in a few years.
But when you consider that companies now have offices which hold >1,000 people it makes a walk/bike commute rather difficult if you have to consider building the houses and other infrastructure (including stores) within that distance of the office building. Even if I did ride every day it would be a 15-20 mile ride for me. My question is -- how am I supposed to get to work in my work clothes (dress slacks, shirt, tie optional) when I have a ride of this distance. I might not be that welcome at work or I may have to resign myself to looking very rumply. How do you do it?
I don't think it's a violation just as long as they keep it in house. Which means they also have to support it in house. Not everyone is willing to keep on retainer kernel developers for their employee desktop computers.
Google is changing the way people do business on the internet. They are also going to change the shape of the internet. Much of this very likely will follow any of a number of historical industrial patterns which eventually lead to severe regulations and a severe restriction of who is allowed to post information on the internet and what kind of information you are allowed to receive on the internet. It is not necessarily true that the regulators will dictate the limits of content but simply reinforce the idea of limiting content.
Examine the history of Television and Radio to see how they followed this path. I don't think anyone really considers the internet that much different. At least they can get it to fit the model. With the exception of the social webs like facebook, youtube, and myspace, most of the internet consists of content delivery and a large portion of that content (by some) is seen not as written words but media in forms of video/audio material. And with the highly publicized problems that these social networks are having (where everyone is a pedophile or worse) it's ripe for all the sheeple to cry out that they need the guberment to protect them from their neighbors. And "bang!". Just like that you have a completely "owned" environment where no one can actually do anything, everything costs money, and the sheeple are happy again.
For the price it had better be thinkers able to solve the problems. Otherwise we'll be pretty screwed if we ever have a career change. By the way, most people have a career change at least once in their life.
The real answer is of course, both. But to be honest the hands-on material is something that you either have to learn before you get into college (at least the basics out of interest for your subject) or you will be picked it up (hopefully) as your work experience.
There is a limited amount of valuable hands on experience the academics can give you considering the wide range of options any career might provide. But there are always some basics in familiarity that are important.
I suppose we could blame Microsoft for this one, really...
Who was it that tried to sell computers as something as easy to use as a light bulb and never ever failed?
It's a great example of marketing trying to spin something as being wonderfully simple to use when they are actually wrong. There exists a disparity between what a computer actually does in details and what people see it doing at the desktop level. Trying to explain how an email message gets from one person to the next is not something they want to try and understand. They just want it to work and when it doesn't they get pissy. Why not? Jetliners are complex but they work, right?
Is the solution is to regulate the hell out of everything involved. People bitch that Apple is evil because they close their hardware from everyone in the world installing options. This keeps their hardware close to just working. Microsoft doesn't and so they have lots of people making lots of inexpensive products. Many of them don't work so well or cause other problems, but they are very inexpensive. This is good economics.
Who wins? Good economics or Good ethics?
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 1
Perl is a great language with some amazing capabilities. They have managed to do a great job refining the real world experiences into a practical language that doesn't do very many kludges with the glaring exception of Objects.
Ruby is a new language with a pristine implementation of what objects are supposed to be without all the cruft of Java.
When Java started, it was also pristine and cruftless. Over time I suspect Ruby may do that same thing, bloat. It's going to take some careful management of the language to prevent this.
Ruby is pretty easy to learn and really forces you into an Object Oriented Language mindset instead of the traditional Procedural mindset that is the natural for Perl. It's easy because there are so many inter-relations between the objects that after a time, you can pretty much guess what methods are available at a given point in time.
Ruby is also butt slow. The real popularity of Ruby is in the Rails framework. It's a groundbreaker in how to do websites. It is also butt slow with some serious problems. But, like VB, it allows a nominal programmer to come up with some cool looking things in a short period of time. But the survivability of a Rails sight from slashdotting is considerably less than a Perl-based sight.
Personally, I like them both and use them both. I use Perl more because that's what I've been using for work and home for eight years. But there are little projects that are nice to do in Ruby. It's just not something I would put on my mail server just yet.
Re:Genuine question about perl vs ruby
on
Lisp and Ruby
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually there is a good reason to look at Perl given Ruby. Regular Expressions. Ruby has a object and method for doing regular expressions but compared to Perl it's very combersome and is even lacking some of the properties that Perl's regex has. Since I tend to use a lot of my programming time dealing with text of some kind, regular expression are important to me.
Ruby is a nice language. It's easy to work with. But it's got some maturing to do and I do hope they spend at least a version working on speed and documentation.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but...
There are only two frequency bands for cellular technology: analog & digital
Starting in February, 2008 the cellular industry is dropping analog in all but the smaller rural communities, if even that.
So by next year they'll all come back, right?
I would argue that there is very easy way to get out from under the MSFT umbrella and most of it is right in front of us.
Web centric services (AJAX, Web 2.0, Web Services, SOAP, ....) are gaining popularity in large infrastructure environments because they can be interfaced through a highly standardized API that allows the client/server to migrate independently of each other as long as they adhere to this API. There are a few applications which don't work well in this environment that will be more difficult to migrate. But the specialization is such that it's not Windows dependency that is the barrier. CAD programs are highly specialized and require entry level training on any platform.
Conceptually, we are much closer to removing any dependencies than we think we are.
IMHO, migration is best done cold turkey. If you can't fall back to your old Windows computer then you will learn the new interface. And if you can do everything as a web service then it won't matter -- but this is a stretch.
Sure someone will gain from it. Otherwise they wouldn't have made the announcement.
With Vista they can claim to be more secure and that's been their biggest sore spot in the market.
What about Linux?
Well... What about Linux?
I really don't feel that Linux users really care that much about Windows anymore. Use it if you want. The point is that over the past few years Linux and Mac have progressed so far into the user community and ease of use that they have no reason not to be used by anyone/everyone unless you are hooked on specific software for Windows. And that's the key. The pain of migration is the only thing people are avoiding.
I actually don't know anyone in my family who uses Windows. There are some in-laws that do. Over Easter I was at one house and we went to look something up on his computer. He was bitching and fussing over how slow it was. I asked him if he ever considered using something else and he just said the typical, "No, it's what came with the computer and I'm used to it.".
There's always going to be people who think like that. They don't really care and once MSFT stops supporting Windows XP they'll continue using it for as long as possible without upgrades or patches because they don't really care.
When was the last time you vacuumed your refridgerator coils or replaced your furnace filter? Some people don't really care/know that much about it to really do anything.
In time, despite the billions of dollars that Microsoft has available for marketing campaigns, Microsoft will go the way of Word Perfect and Word Star and take up a residence in a museum. At least, the Microsoft that I grew up with will. Perhaps they can change, but they probably can't because they are too revenue bound in the current model to make the necessary changes.
This afternoon I'm dropping off my notebook at work to have it upgraded from Windows 2000 to XP.
I'm not that impressed with SpamAssassin. Too much overhead in trying to keep all the static filtering rules up to date. Eventually, it get's dumb
The best spam filters I've seen in terms of effectiveness is bogofilter and dspam. Both of these are extensions of the Bayes statistical filtering.
bogofilter is awesome but it can't manage tokens from a database. Hence you can't have multiple machines very easily and users cannot share a database. Virtual hosting makes it harder and eventually you kind of get frustrated with it if trying to deploy a large number of users with user-specific token lists
dspam does a nice job of per-user token lists but it loses email. I found a lot of cases where mail checked in via the postfix logs, but it never came out of dspam or was recorded anywhere as an error or anything. It just got lost. It's a nice approach but scores 0.0 for reliability.
If only bogofilter would run with postgresql, I would be happy.
I work at an Even Larger Company and the answer is absolutely not. Never in a million years. It's got nothing to do with Linux, Unix, or Windows. It's got everything to do with a corporate consistency. The thinking is that if everyone has the same tools and only those tools, then it's easier to manage the IT environment from a central ivory tower. Which is true. But for anyone in a technical position, it also makes the job considerably more difficult.
The issue isn't your last might 5MB but the 1000 users demanding 5MB from YouTube to all their disparate net locations.
I do not find it possible that the last mile is the issue considering that the video streaming protocols have not signficantly changed over the last couple of years and if you check you will find that they are almost always transmitting at below specification data rates -- from that particular website!
Your argument about net neutrality is flawed in that the protocols you are willing to take a performance hit on (email) are not the leading volume consumers of your network. So you want to degrade performance on the 20% of the traffic that doesn't contribute to the problems you are seeing in the first place. Not a very bright solution.
Perhaps the answer is to go back a decade and see how things were solved when things were slow because they were slow and not because they were running a lot of volume. Has anyone seriously considered the impact you will have if you seriously utilize different caching and distributed networking solutions?
For starters I would think if YouTube was really suffering they would set up a lot of alternative DNS sites than the two they have. And those two would not be sitting on the same subnet but at opposite ends of the Mae-East and Mae-West connection (San Francisco & Atlanta). But they didn't so it must not be that much of a problem for them just yet.
Additionally, if they wanted to improve the performance they would offload requests into proxy-cache machines to improve performance of the host servers. This is basic web server 101 stuff that anyone should know. See squid-cache and apache's proxy module for more information. You can easily serve a 1GB/s network from a small machine by todays terms of computing power.
If the ISP's had a problem with web performance then they too would start investing in cache servers to improve the performance of the last mile of network delivery. But again I don't know how much of this is really being done today.
I really do not believe that the problem is with the use of the network. It's with the bad deployment of the web content. If you want to help with the network traffic then try doing the following:
Use LTSP and you can convert all 3500 existing desktops into terminals without purchasing new hardware. Perhaps you can convince your boss to let you have 10% of the savings.
It wouldn't be an unreliable user-agent identification if web designers didn't restrict the access of their web sites to specific user-agents in the first place. I see no other reason to spoof who you are other than to get around some artards notion of what browsers can access a page.
OK, I think I get the gist of the OP but let me see if I get this straight.
You can make a movie called White Guys can't Jump but you can't make a movie called Black Guys can't swim (fill in swim with whatever).
You can make "logical arguments" against Christianity. You can even make jokes about the religion and it's Members.
But as soon as you breath a word against the Muslims you are silenced.
We have a new minority in America. It's call the muslims. Please, if you are a male white American, add to your list of people not to offend: the Muslims. But remember, anyone can publicly deride the whites, males, christians but never speak ill of the jews, muslims, blacks (oh shit! sorry -- African American), mexicans, or anyone else who didn't have an ancestoral basis in North Western Europe along the paternal lines of the family tree.
It's getting kind of crazy around here with all the people who are demanding both freedom of speech and respect for their own beliefs.
Close. A lot of the signs they talk about aren't the signs that people actually provide before the "snap" and go on a shooting spree. The article makes for a nice jumping point to move all the IT hardware to India and send the admins in North America packing.
That's basically it. Plant more trees. Plant more plants.
The bigger problem is how to reverse the desert growth and can you plan somethint today that will actually still be able to grow in a decade?
This is bunk.
How many disgruntled Automotive Industries went on a shooting spree and NEVER gave any signs? Most. Same for the classic Postal Workers...
And what about the guy in Office Space?
Stiffer, as reported, has nothing to do with tougher or harder.
Diamond is not a very tough material. Tough, in metallurgical terms, identified the total amount of energy required to break a bar of material. Diamond is to brittle that once a crack is initiated, it's propogation is hard to stop. So there's not a lot of engergy required to break diamond.
Stiff has to do with a measure of deflection of a mean under a torsional load. This again is not something diamond excels at.
Diamond is known for it's hardness, which is the amount of energy required to make a dent, to put it simply. Are they all related? somewhat. But if unless you want an indept discussion of crystalline structures, bond energies and the like just take it for granted that stiff, hard, and tough are not all equal statements.
There's nothing that significant about a material that is more stiff than diamond.
I'll admit I have not read the article...
But I find it strangely stupifying that someone would use a distribution intended to be a cutting edge user desktop installation for what he called Enterprise Solutions.
Only the insane or stupifyingly owned will roll Vista into all their Enterprise environments on the first day it's released. Most wait 6 months to a year. Wouldn't the same consideration hold some merit for Linux distros?
I'm picking on Ubuntu specifically because I think they author made the wrong choice. There are a lot of really well operating distributions out there that work very well. There are few, if any, products that don't pay homage to MSFT that will work with Exchange. And when you talk about using Thunderbird to get Exchange email keep in mind you are only using IMAP and not the whole Exchange Experience kind of thing. He might as well bash Oracle for not making MS Access drivers.
I gave up fighting for Linux a long time ago. Not because it isn't a really great OS. But because people who are in Corporation IT don't want good software. They want simple contracts. As often as something goes wrong with Microsoft, there is almost always someone on a help desk phone number they can yell at. And that makes them feel like they are doing their job.
Bunch of Vogons...
I wonder how many of those bots are Microsoft Operating Systems...
I'm just asking...
Yes I have. I've also heard of sarcasm.
So all those high rise buildings are condominiums?
I work in the opposite environment where no one who is salaried by the Parent Company is permitted to do anything other than manage vendors who manage our business. Ironically we are a company dependent upon software performance.
We don't actually know what our servers are doing for us. Everything has to be funnelled through the contractors as a price. If they left, we wouldn't have anything to call a business.
Perhaps some aspects can be turned over to companies that specialize in something. But there's a dark side to this too.
So who would rather live in a high-rise than a house?
A private home is one of the best means of investment. High Rise buildings are typically provided as a flat for rent -- the worse means of fudicial exercise. You won't get this kind of high density housing in areas where the true ownership of the flat is not transferred to the resident. They might do this in New York or Paris. But it's more the exception to the United States than the rule.
What do other countries do? Can you buy an aparment in the city?
I live in Detroit Michigan. Cars are considered holy shrines in this stupid town.
Even when you do live in a real neighborhood and not some burb the sidewalks may exist in form but they either do not exist in function or are way too dangerous to travel on for any real distance.
And yes, the manufactured small-town communities are either largely abandoned or mis-designed as a place you can drive to and then walk around 500 feet of sidewalk looking at overpriced shops and drinking burnt coffee for $5 a cup. No surprise that they fail in a few years.
But when you consider that companies now have offices which hold >1,000 people it makes a walk/bike commute rather difficult if you have to consider building the houses and other infrastructure (including stores) within that distance of the office building. Even if I did ride every day it would be a 15-20 mile ride for me. My question is -- how am I supposed to get to work in my work clothes (dress slacks, shirt, tie optional) when I have a ride of this distance. I might not be that welcome at work or I may have to resign myself to looking very rumply. How do you do it?
I don't think it's a violation just as long as they keep it in house. Which means they also have to support it in house. Not everyone is willing to keep on retainer kernel developers for their employee desktop computers.
Google is changing the way people do business on the internet. They are also going to change the shape of the internet. Much of this very likely will follow any of a number of historical industrial patterns which eventually lead to severe regulations and a severe restriction of who is allowed to post information on the internet and what kind of information you are allowed to receive on the internet. It is not necessarily true that the regulators will dictate the limits of content but simply reinforce the idea of limiting content.
Examine the history of Television and Radio to see how they followed this path. I don't think anyone really considers the internet that much different. At least they can get it to fit the model. With the exception of the social webs like facebook, youtube, and myspace, most of the internet consists of content delivery and a large portion of that content (by some) is seen not as written words but media in forms of video/audio material. And with the highly publicized problems that these social networks are having (where everyone is a pedophile or worse) it's ripe for all the sheeple to cry out that they need the guberment to protect them from their neighbors. And "bang!". Just like that you have a completely "owned" environment where no one can actually do anything, everything costs money, and the sheeple are happy again.
For the price it had better be thinkers able to solve the problems. Otherwise we'll be pretty screwed if we ever have a career change. By the way, most people have a career change at least once in their life.
The real answer is of course, both. But to be honest the hands-on material is something that you either have to learn before you get into college (at least the basics out of interest for your subject) or you will be picked it up (hopefully) as your work experience.
There is a limited amount of valuable hands on experience the academics can give you considering the wide range of options any career might provide. But there are always some basics in familiarity that are important.
I suppose we could blame Microsoft for this one, really...
Who was it that tried to sell computers as something as easy to use as a light bulb and never ever failed?
It's a great example of marketing trying to spin something as being wonderfully simple to use when they are actually wrong. There exists a disparity between what a computer actually does in details and what people see it doing at the desktop level. Trying to explain how an email message gets from one person to the next is not something they want to try and understand. They just want it to work and when it doesn't they get pissy. Why not? Jetliners are complex but they work, right?
Is the solution is to regulate the hell out of everything involved. People bitch that Apple is evil because they close their hardware from everyone in the world installing options. This keeps their hardware close to just working. Microsoft doesn't and so they have lots of people making lots of inexpensive products. Many of them don't work so well or cause other problems, but they are very inexpensive. This is good economics.
Who wins? Good economics or Good ethics?
Perl is a great language with some amazing capabilities. They have managed to do a great job refining the real world experiences into a practical language that doesn't do very many kludges with the glaring exception of Objects.
Ruby is a new language with a pristine implementation of what objects are supposed to be without all the cruft of Java.
When Java started, it was also pristine and cruftless. Over time I suspect Ruby may do that same thing, bloat. It's going to take some careful management of the language to prevent this.
Ruby is pretty easy to learn and really forces you into an Object Oriented Language mindset instead of the traditional Procedural mindset that is the natural for Perl. It's easy because there are so many inter-relations between the objects that after a time, you can pretty much guess what methods are available at a given point in time.
Ruby is also butt slow. The real popularity of Ruby is in the Rails framework. It's a groundbreaker in how to do websites. It is also butt slow with some serious problems. But, like VB, it allows a nominal programmer to come up with some cool looking things in a short period of time. But the survivability of a Rails sight from slashdotting is considerably less than a Perl-based sight.
Personally, I like them both and use them both. I use Perl more because that's what I've been using for work and home for eight years. But there are little projects that are nice to do in Ruby. It's just not something I would put on my mail server just yet.
Actually there is a good reason to look at Perl given Ruby. Regular Expressions. Ruby has a object and method for doing regular expressions but compared to Perl it's very combersome and is even lacking some of the properties that Perl's regex has. Since I tend to use a lot of my programming time dealing with text of some kind, regular expression are important to me.
Ruby is a nice language. It's easy to work with. But it's got some maturing to do and I do hope they spend at least a version working on speed and documentation.