I absolutely cannot document any decline. I do think the hype has leveled off. But I was in a meeting at YAPC::NA two years ago where they were discussing the decline in new programmers coming into the community.
I would be interested to know what languages you have used.
I have found Perl to be very well documented, even though it appears to be on a decline or leveled off on the number of developers and active projects.
Meanwhile, I have looked into use Rails and found it a great example of shitty code practices. I've stated this very case to the development community and they pretty much debunked my statements as one belonging to an inexperienced developer unwilling to "go the distance".
I hope this might be slightly helpful in getting people like the Rails community to either understand that they really do need documentation or get companies to throw aside Rails as POS software that is so lacking in documentation that it's a greater burden to have it than to use the alternatives.
There is an excellent case where if you have a highly experienced and knowledgeable developer then you maybe don't care. But if you have to replace this developer with one less knowledgeable or want to expand your development team, you suffer a huge start up cost of trying to bring someone up to speed at your expense.
Specifically, the Rails plug-ins are documented with over simplified tutorials that aren't even available for free and so you have to make an extra effort to find the documentation for the software that you download since they aren't in the same location. Restful Authentication is one example in particular.
Add to that the documentation in Ruby DBI. There isn't any. The documentation says to see Perl DBI for documentation. Considering this is a reference to a different language with different syntax and some of the Perl methods aren't possible in Ruby and likewise Ruby DBI has methods that aren't available in Perl. WTF? This is documentation.
You really think the VOIP would cut out when switching between WiFI and cellular? It doesn't do that with anything else, show why would it happen here?
Most people do not exceed their minutes. More so when you offer roll-over minutes.
The model is to sell you a basic subscription for big bucks and hope you never use the service. That way ATT get's money and no load on their service networks. That's a win for them.
It will help ATT a lot since they can now accept a lot more customers without the load on their network. One of the reason I left Verizon was their network is grossly overloaded. Unfortunately, I think ATT is even more so.
There is no sane cellular company that wants to actually have everyone use all their minutes all the time -- they can't afford the network load.
Yes, there are some docs available and you do have to pay what adds up to a pretty price to see it. But even after you buy all the books and tutorials you don't have much value for the money you put out.
The ratio of knowledge gained to dollars spent is on par or below Microsoft's business model.
Rails, and Ruby, does not have a sustainable future under this model. There are too many alternative languages that have everything already out there.
You missed the whole point entirely. I don't have access to the Rails API docs when I am not sitting in a coffee shop or my house. I can't get to the internet while on a plane, train, automobile, or other transportation. Similarly, I don't have internet access everywhere I might be.
Yeah, I tried it. And you know what? It's a horrible way to learn what something does. I have to guess what the action/result is from the code. And if I'm new to Ruby/Rails, which I am, I am often left wondering what the heck is going on.
What you overlook is that sometimes the code I'm looking at was written by people much smarter about Ruby than myself so I am looking at code that is far advanced beyond my knowledge. You can't expect someone to know all of it right away.
This is the fundamental disconnect with Rails. RailsCasts is not documentation. It's a marketing tutorial showing how great it can be if you ignore everything important or secure.
yeah, I have problems with the documenation too. What little documentation they have only works from a connected PC. My notebook it's very portable in this regard. Most places I go I cannot work on any Ruby/Rails code because I can't access the website
Rails and Ruby are nice languages, but they really need to start focusing on their documentation.
The documentation on something as core as DBI returns, "Nothing known about DBI". The website for ruby DBI states that it is a ruby implimenation of Perl DBI. Except that the languages are different and therefore the syntax is different. You spend hours trying to figure out how to use the module.
Rails is much worse. If any documentation exists as all, it's usually behind the web site peepcode for $9 a tutorial. These tutorials are not documentation but serve as a How To for Dummies, leaving you without sufficient knowledge on the scalability, security, or in many cases, any real clue of how to use the code provided.
I have brought this up to the Rails community in my area and was told that if I really wanted to learn what was going on that I needed to read the source code. This was not a single person spouting off an answer but the general concensus of the community.
To find out what public methods are available and how to use them, and even what they do, by trolling through thousands of lines of source code is a sick joke. There is no rational business model that is going to accept this methedology of development and survive in the world for long. It is the availability of fundamental documenation that has made so many languages long standing corner stones of application development.
I'm no great fan of Java, but they have documentation on everything. I continue to use Perl every day because if I don't already know it, I can find the documentation in a few seconds.
And to state that all the documentation is available on some website, which they tend to do, is a little short sighted. I haven't yet managed to get my notebook working in all locations of the planet with internet access that's suitable to store all my documentation. Buses, planes, airports, malls, and many other locations simply don't offer unlimited free internet service. But Perl and Java have local documentation so you don't require internet connectivity to do your job.
Until Ruby & Rails gets their documentation together, they are going to be a minority second class citizen in the world of application development. No company can rationally invest in something that has nothing behind it.
By what means would you attempt to measure the advantage to humanity?
How do you know if something has any positive value to Humanity? War has always shown to have a great contribution to scientific advancement of humanity and is therefore deemed to be good. But what about all that death and destruction, isn't that bad? Recall that the Gatling gun was invented to stop war, so it started as a good but perhaps didn't reach it's intended goal.
When do you know that IP has value to humanity? Nuclear energy, the byproduct of WWII has great potential to bring advantage to humanity, but the debate rages at what cost? It is unclear today that the net value to humanity is good.
Air warfare caused a lot of destruction and death while it was being developed in WWII but it resulted in commercial planes. Commercial planes are good right? Except that they are the source of countless hijackings and don't forget 9/11. So planes are bad?
DARPA funded the internet, which is good. But it took over ten years to realize the value that it has to humanity. Of course we are still struggling with the problems that it presents.
Think the time limit is too short for most. 12 months to produce a product may push you into a position where you are time constrained to make your product to market before you are ready to do so. I love this idea, but think one year is too tight.
Return of patents to the public domain is also great.
The issue with a patent license is probably something that will become obvious to the business involved and may turn into a contingency of the contract. One possible outcome would be to have the contract execute fines or additional fees if the lessee fails to produce a product in a time period that is 75% of the patent time limit. (Recall that I don't agree with 12 months so I used 75% instead.) This will greatly inhibit the tendency for companies to make money by leasing patents because the risk to the lessee is much greater.
But I think the intention here is to force patent holders to play out their hand on their patents and not just camp on the intellectual territory surrounding their product. Where I work they routinely have calls for more patents of any kind to try and expand on the IP range that they cover to try and prevent competition. There is no intention of executing 90% of the patents and for many, they are obsolete by the time they are granted. But it screws with anyone attempting to compete.
We would go along ways to revert back to the notion that you need to bring in a working demonstration of a patent to the USPTO before a patent could be granted. But today that would be unrealistic. Still, some limit must be established.
If people could successfully get legislatures to support privacy rights then any spammer would be considered a criminal. But businesses consider the ability to send cold call email a vital necessity to many of their business models and as such, promote spamming as a right of the free market, thereby eroding personal privacy
Have them submit SQL through a web interface and before anything runs, you have to pass an explain plan with a cost under X and a total bytes read under Y.
And limit their user_resources accordingly.
The point is, you can give them some access, but they probably won't like how it operates because of these limitations. I've been that kind of customer to my DBA's for about 6 years now. My solution has been to run only damn fine SQL. Every single time they have reviewed my SQL they have come back with a comment that they can't do it any better. After 20-30 cycles, they don't ask anymore.
But first I had to prove them I could do it without blowing up anything.
I'm more concerned that they are going to continue it at all. It's pretty significant that they are going to continue Office on the Mac. It's REALLY significant that they are doing this after pronouncing Mac Office dead.
I think what this means is that they are more open to the idea that they are losing the desktop and probably won't be able to do much about it. But they are really worried that the same might happen with Office.
If a small number of significant companies start using non-Microsoft applications instead of the Office suite, then those companies may have the ability to initiate a landslide of all their vendors away from Microsoft.
It is for this reason that they are giving Office away in China for $1. If the Chinese Industry switches to something else, then they have the option of dictating to companies interested in Chinese business ventures that they must use the same or comparable product or lose business.
Mac is growing faster than anything else related to computers right now and growing in market share. If Office loses its foothold on Mac, then they may lose the industry and become a second citizen like WordPerfect.
How is it possible for something that is WEB 2.0 be only available under Windows or WINE? Seems like a contradiction in terms. I thought Web 2.0 was a new thing that was even more platform independent than ever before.
Look around your house. How many digital clocks are there? How many things with Standby LEDs? The quick-on circuitry of appliances takes up a LOT of power when you add them up.
Even those recharge transformers that you leave in the wall after you unplug the phone, notebook , ipod are all taking up power all day long.
The operating costs (including power consumption, labor, chemicals, and fixed capital costs (taxes, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, and return on investment) worked out to $12,000 per hectare. That would equate to $46.2 billion per year for all the algae farms, to yield all the oil feedstock necessary for the entire country. Compare that to the $100-150 billion the US spends each year just on purchasing crude oil from foreign countries, with all of that money leaving the US economy.
iPhone users are absolute whores about borrowing unsecured Wi-Fi. It's the only way to 'Fi'!!!!
I think there are a lot of people who set up unsecure Wi-Fi by design so that people can use it -- most of the WiFi scam come with an identifiable network name, like a restaurant or coffee shop.
Sure web design sucks. But that's because suckers go to those kinds of web pages. Check out the difference between NOAA weather and weather.com. NOAA is far superior in delivering information and without ads. And the irony -- everyone gets their weather from NOAA.
There could be an alternative that would make a lot of people happy, and something like REST makes it pretty easy to do. If you have a story or article that you want to present you should have an alternate sight designation that is to the effect of URL/text_only/article or some highly standardized pattern that will return text/ascii only content.
Of course, for the purest, the answer is to request pages with content-type text/ascii rather than text/html or text/xml and by pushing the content type into the requesting Header, the server can designate the correct response that is more suitable for something like text-to-voice readers.
But to make it a requirement that every page everywhere be 100% compliant with every disability is absolute crap and will drive the cost of web design into the millions of dollars. At the same time, it might not be as much of a problem if, as originally mentioned, people didn't make really stupid pages just to be stupid.
Perhaps we are being short sighted about having oil reserves. It still gets burned into all that nasty green house gases that may or may not actually be affecting the environment.
Slashdot Mirror
I absolutely cannot document any decline. I do think the hype has leveled off. But I was in a meeting at YAPC::NA two years ago where they were discussing the decline in new programmers coming into the community.
Tin whiskers is very real. I've seen electronics fail from them and it only requires a Tin-Lead solder, not pure to do it.
However, the voltages today tend to blow the whiskers like a fuse, thus negating the issue.
I would be interested to know what languages you have used.
I have found Perl to be very well documented, even though it appears to be on a decline or leveled off on the number of developers and active projects.
Meanwhile, I have looked into use Rails and found it a great example of shitty code practices. I've stated this very case to the development community and they pretty much debunked my statements as one belonging to an inexperienced developer unwilling to "go the distance".
I hope this might be slightly helpful in getting people like the Rails community to either understand that they really do need documentation or get companies to throw aside Rails as POS software that is so lacking in documentation that it's a greater burden to have it than to use the alternatives.
There is an excellent case where if you have a highly experienced and knowledgeable developer then you maybe don't care. But if you have to replace this developer with one less knowledgeable or want to expand your development team, you suffer a huge start up cost of trying to bring someone up to speed at your expense.
Specifically, the Rails plug-ins are documented with over simplified tutorials that aren't even available for free and so you have to make an extra effort to find the documentation for the software that you download since they aren't in the same location. Restful Authentication is one example in particular.
Add to that the documentation in Ruby DBI. There isn't any. The documentation says to see Perl DBI for documentation. Considering this is a reference to a different language with different syntax and some of the Perl methods aren't possible in Ruby and likewise Ruby DBI has methods that aren't available in Perl. WTF? This is documentation.
You really think the VOIP would cut out when switching between WiFI and cellular? It doesn't do that with anything else, show why would it happen here?
Most people do not exceed their minutes. More so when you offer roll-over minutes.
The model is to sell you a basic subscription for big bucks and hope you never use the service. That way ATT get's money and no load on their service networks. That's a win for them.
It will help ATT a lot since they can now accept a lot more customers without the load on their network. One of the reason I left Verizon was their network is grossly overloaded. Unfortunately, I think ATT is even more so.
There is no sane cellular company that wants to actually have everyone use all their minutes all the time -- they can't afford the network load.
Yes, but plugins don't come from the gemserver and not all gems, like much of the core API have good documentation to begin with.
Yes, there are some docs available and you do have to pay what adds up to a pretty price to see it. But even after you buy all the books and tutorials you don't have much value for the money you put out.
The ratio of knowledge gained to dollars spent is on par or below Microsoft's business model.
Rails, and Ruby, does not have a sustainable future under this model. There are too many alternative languages that have everything already out there.
You missed the whole point entirely. I don't have access to the Rails API docs when I am not sitting in a coffee shop or my house. I can't get to the internet while on a plane, train, automobile, or other transportation. Similarly, I don't have internet access everywhere I might be.
So the Rails API docs, as a website, sucks.
Yeah, I tried it. And you know what? It's a horrible way to learn what something does. I have to guess what the action/result is from the code. And if I'm new to Ruby/Rails, which I am, I am often left wondering what the heck is going on.
What you overlook is that sometimes the code I'm looking at was written by people much smarter about Ruby than myself so I am looking at code that is far advanced beyond my knowledge. You can't expect someone to know all of it right away.
This is the fundamental disconnect with Rails. RailsCasts is not documentation. It's a marketing tutorial showing how great it can be if you ignore everything important or secure.
yeah, I have problems with the documenation too. What little documentation they have only works from a connected PC. My notebook it's very portable in this regard. Most places I go I cannot work on any Ruby/Rails code because I can't access the website
Rails and Ruby are nice languages, but they really need to start focusing on their documentation.
The documentation on something as core as DBI returns, "Nothing known about DBI". The website for ruby DBI states that it is a ruby implimenation of Perl DBI. Except that the languages are different and therefore the syntax is different. You spend hours trying to figure out how to use the module.
Rails is much worse. If any documentation exists as all, it's usually behind the web site peepcode for $9 a tutorial. These tutorials are not documentation but serve as a How To for Dummies, leaving you without sufficient knowledge on the scalability, security, or in many cases, any real clue of how to use the code provided.
I have brought this up to the Rails community in my area and was told that if I really wanted to learn what was going on that I needed to read the source code. This was not a single person spouting off an answer but the general concensus of the community.
To find out what public methods are available and how to use them, and even what they do, by trolling through thousands of lines of source code is a sick joke. There is no rational business model that is going to accept this methedology of development and survive in the world for long. It is the availability of fundamental documenation that has made so many languages long standing corner stones of application development.
I'm no great fan of Java, but they have documentation on everything. I continue to use Perl every day because if I don't already know it, I can find the documentation in a few seconds.
And to state that all the documentation is available on some website, which they tend to do, is a little short sighted. I haven't yet managed to get my notebook working in all locations of the planet with internet access that's suitable to store all my documentation. Buses, planes, airports, malls, and many other locations simply don't offer unlimited free internet service. But Perl and Java have local documentation so you don't require internet connectivity to do your job.
Until Ruby & Rails gets their documentation together, they are going to be a minority second class citizen in the world of application development. No company can rationally invest in something that has nothing behind it.
By what means would you attempt to measure the advantage to humanity?
How do you know if something has any positive value to Humanity? War has always shown to have a great contribution to scientific advancement of humanity and is therefore deemed to be good. But what about all that death and destruction, isn't that bad? Recall that the Gatling gun was invented to stop war, so it started as a good but perhaps didn't reach it's intended goal.
When do you know that IP has value to humanity? Nuclear energy, the byproduct of WWII has great potential to bring advantage to humanity, but the debate rages at what cost? It is unclear today that the net value to humanity is good.
Air warfare caused a lot of destruction and death while it was being developed in WWII but it resulted in commercial planes. Commercial planes are good right? Except that they are the source of countless hijackings and don't forget 9/11. So planes are bad?
DARPA funded the internet, which is good. But it took over ten years to realize the value that it has to humanity. Of course we are still struggling with the problems that it presents.
I like the first post about time limits but...
The issue with a patent license is probably something that will become obvious to the business involved and may turn into a contingency of the contract. One possible outcome would be to have the contract execute fines or additional fees if the lessee fails to produce a product in a time period that is 75% of the patent time limit. (Recall that I don't agree with 12 months so I used 75% instead.) This will greatly inhibit the tendency for companies to make money by leasing patents because the risk to the lessee is much greater.
But I think the intention here is to force patent holders to play out their hand on their patents and not just camp on the intellectual territory surrounding their product. Where I work they routinely have calls for more patents of any kind to try and expand on the IP range that they cover to try and prevent competition. There is no intention of executing 90% of the patents and for many, they are obsolete by the time they are granted. But it screws with anyone attempting to compete.
We would go along ways to revert back to the notion that you need to bring in a working demonstration of a patent to the USPTO before a patent could be granted. But today that would be unrealistic. Still, some limit must be established.
If people could successfully get legislatures to support privacy rights then any spammer would be considered a criminal. But businesses consider the ability to send cold call email a vital necessity to many of their business models and as such, promote spamming as a right of the free market, thereby eroding personal privacy
Two options exist:
Give them a replicated copy of the database.
Have them submit SQL through a web interface and before anything runs, you have to pass an explain plan with a cost under X and a total bytes read under Y.
And limit their user_resources accordingly.
The point is, you can give them some access, but they probably won't like how it operates because of these limitations. I've been that kind of customer to my DBA's for about 6 years now. My solution has been to run only damn fine SQL. Every single time they have reviewed my SQL they have come back with a comment that they can't do it any better. After 20-30 cycles, they don't ask anymore.
But first I had to prove them I could do it without blowing up anything.
I'm more concerned that they are going to continue it at all. It's pretty significant that they are going to continue Office on the Mac. It's REALLY significant that they are doing this after pronouncing Mac Office dead.
I think what this means is that they are more open to the idea that they are losing the desktop and probably won't be able to do much about it. But they are really worried that the same might happen with Office.
If a small number of significant companies start using non-Microsoft applications instead of the Office suite, then those companies may have the ability to initiate a landslide of all their vendors away from Microsoft.
It is for this reason that they are giving Office away in China for $1. If the Chinese Industry switches to something else, then they have the option of dictating to companies interested in Chinese business ventures that they must use the same or comparable product or lose business.
Mac is growing faster than anything else related to computers right now and growing in market share. If Office loses its foothold on Mac, then they may lose the industry and become a second citizen like WordPerfect.
It's an information tube...
How is it possible for something that is WEB 2.0 be only available under Windows or WINE? Seems like a contradiction in terms. I thought Web 2.0 was a new thing that was even more platform independent than ever before.
Look around your house. How many digital clocks are there? How many things with Standby LEDs? The quick-on circuitry of appliances takes up a LOT of power when you add them up.
Even those recharge transformers that you leave in the wall after you unplug the phone, notebook , ipod are all taking up power all day long.
Dude! I did 100 users on half that machine in Perl... It's a chubby little train.
Look into BioDiesel and then tell me there's no way to make a dent in it. We could become an energy producing nation if we wanted to.
Here is a really impressive link for Widescale Biodiesel Production from Algae that outlines how we could produce enough energy from Biodiesel for the nation.
Now, if we could only get our shit together...
iPhone users are absolute whores about borrowing unsecured Wi-Fi. It's the only way to 'Fi'!!!!
I think there are a lot of people who set up unsecure Wi-Fi by design so that people can use it -- most of the WiFi scam come with an identifiable network name, like a restaurant or coffee shop.
Sure web design sucks. But that's because suckers go to those kinds of web pages. Check out the difference between NOAA weather and weather.com. NOAA is far superior in delivering information and without ads. And the irony -- everyone gets their weather from NOAA.
There could be an alternative that would make a lot of people happy, and something like REST makes it pretty easy to do. If you have a story or article that you want to present you should have an alternate sight designation that is to the effect of URL/text_only/article or some highly standardized pattern that will return text/ascii only content.
Of course, for the purest, the answer is to request pages with content-type text/ascii rather than text/html or text/xml and by pushing the content type into the requesting Header, the server can designate the correct response that is more suitable for something like text-to-voice readers.
But to make it a requirement that every page everywhere be 100% compliant with every disability is absolute crap and will drive the cost of web design into the millions of dollars. At the same time, it might not be as much of a problem if, as originally mentioned, people didn't make really stupid pages just to be stupid.
Hate the game, not the player.
Perhaps we are being short sighted about having oil reserves. It still gets burned into all that nasty green house gases that may or may not actually be affecting the environment.