Well yeah, I suppose that it'll work if you run it as regular CGI. But then it will be very slow. Extremely slow. Almost unusabily slow. It will have to start RoR for each request, which can take 2-6 seconds depending on the speed of the server.
Yes, I was stunned when I found this out last year. If one wants to run RoR on Apache, then one has to use either mod_fastcgi (or mod_fcgi or whatever it was called; it'd run RoR as a FastCGI process) or mod_ruby. mod_ruby seems to be abandoned, and I have heard stories about excessive memory usage. mod_f(ast)cgi doesn't seem to work on Apache 2 at all.
So there are two ways to run RoR: either in Lighttpd (which has proper FastCGI support) or in Mongrel (a web server which can run RoR directly).
Because it's easy. MP3 players are all pretty much compatible and interoperable. They look a bit different but nobody has trouble using them.
Browsers, now that's a different story. Even in 2007 there are still Internet Explorer-only sites (and I'm not talking about Windows Update). This is especially true in South Korea and other Asian countries, where most people have never heard of Firefox. Interoperability among browsers is not as good as interoperability among MP3 players. Furthermore, computers tend to have a reputation of being "scary". If you change anything, many users will instantly complain that they don't know how to use it and that they want it to be revert back to whatever they used to use. All of this makes it much harder for an average user to switch browsers.
Operating systems are an entirely different story. Windows has 95% market share and there are tons and tons and tons of applications and hardware that depend on it. It's not even about usability anymore. Even MacOS X, which has existed for 6 years now, excellent marketing, and widely praised to be a user friendly operating system, still fails to catch more than 7% of the market. An average user is more likely to jump off a bridge than to switch his OS (if he even knows what OS means).
So yes, 10% of the OS market *would* rival the second coming of Christ.
Sure, but how's that relevant now? There are FCGI implementations that are ready to use. FCGI seem to be maintained right now. So what makes FCGI a bad choice *today*?
Yeah, that's great and all, but notice how you're entirely dodging his main question? He asked you to explain the moderation behavior based on "growing up Linux fanboys/hippies", and you've failed to provide any explanation whatsoever, other than making clear that you're a troll.
It is? I keep hearing that our uranium sources will only last for 50 years unless we seriously modernize our plants (so that they can process nuclear waste products as well).
"Huh? Do you prepare your statements every time you execute them?"
Uhm, if you use PHP then you *can't* cache your prepared statements (unless you do the same query many times in the same PHP run, but that's unlikely). PHP is stateless, after one run it frees everything.
"but if you prepare the statement once and execute it many times, the local overhead becomes minimal and the execution time in the database improves because the DB doesn't have to re-parse and re-plan the query."
In theory, yes. But are there any benchmarks that support this claim? Many people say this but I've yet to see any hard numbers that prove it. I wrote a little test script which inserts 300000 rows in MySQL, and using prepared statements didn't improve performance *at all*. The Ruby on Rails guys also seem to be skeptical about the advantages of server-side prepared statements. Someone mentioned that it might help on complex queries with lots of joins, but I can't find any benchmarks for such a case.
Do you know such a benchmark? I am looking for one.
What do you mean, "I'll bite"? What makes you think it's a troll? Can't people have a legit question these days without being seen as flamers and trolls?
"What happened to Kylix, which Borland developed for Linux (Delphi for Linux). They had almost no sales and abandoned it a couple of years later."
You've got to be kidding. Kylix sucked. It was slow, and the binaries it generated somehow didn't work with the system's native Qt library (it gets into an infinite loop at startup). I was a huge Delphi fan but I looked at Kylix and never used it again. If Kylix was *good* then things would have been different.
Yeah, so? Saddam Hussein is not the Thai king, they're two different people. Just because Saddam Hussein is "popular" because of the law, doesn't mean the Thai king is popular for the same reason.
It may very well be that 99% of the Thai sincerely adore the king, but that only 1% want to mock him. The existence of such laws do not necessarily imply that people are forced to like the king.
How is MySQL supposed to know that the data it gets is unicode instead of latin-1? Latin-1 characters are 1 byte, what MySQL receives may be an actual unicode string or may just be a sequence of latin-1 characters. There's no way to reliably find out.
"Seriously, rather than copy them, try being creative for a change and invent something better." Oh, you mean this? GTK+ is a very good toolkit (the best one, as far as I'm concerned). And GTK is available on Mono. I used it, it's good - VERY good, very easy to use. As far as I'm concerned, this is much, much better than Windows.Forms.
Look around you. There are tons of high-quality non-MS open source projects that run on Mono. You seem to be thinking that copying the Microsoft runtime library is all that Mono does. That's far from the truth. C# is a good language. I don't care whether MS made it or the Martians - it's good, there is an open source implementation, there are open source libraries, so I will use it.
Oh and you seriously think accusing people of being an "elitist" is going to make your point clear?
Do you have any idea how many hours I spent on writing http://www.autopackage.org/docs/howto-install/ [autopackage.org] ? I took the time to launch 2 different desktop environments and to take screenshots from 4 different file managers. I circled the exact buttons that people have to click on. I did my best to write everything without using jargon. I tried my best to use as little text as possible, to describe things as unambiguously as possibly, and to layout things as readably as possible. I took the time to make nice thumbnails with drop shadows. I let non-technical people proofread the guide. At first I even refused to provide commandline instructions and wanted everybody to use the GUI - the only reason why I added it later is because users kept asking for it.
I did all this hard work for the sake of anonymous end users whose face I will never see. Nor will I ever get any reward for it. And now you suddenly jump out of the bushes, calling me an elitist? Seriously, you need to stop applying stereotypes to people.
"Documentation is boring. Nobody wants to do it. Most people try to make writing documentation as easy as possible for themselves, instead of making it as easy as possible for the reader." Please, can you speak for yourself? Do you have any idea how many hours I spent on writing http://www.autopackage.org/docs/howto-install/ ? I took the time to launch 2 different desktop environments and to take screenshots from 4 different file managers. I circled the exact buttons that people have to click on. I did my best to write everything without using jargon. I tried my best to use as little text as possible, to describe things as unambiguously as possibly, and to layout things as readably as possible. I took the time to make nice thumbnails with drop shadows. At first I even refused to provide commandline instructions and wanted everybody to use the GUI - the only reason why I added it later is because users kept asking for it.
And now you suddenly jump out of the bushes, calling me an elitist? Seriously, you need to stop applying stereotypes to people. Frankly I'm offended. After all the work I've put in ensuring that things are as easy as possible for the end user, you destroy everything and by pasting a stupid stereotype label on me, while ignoring all the hard work that I've done.
"I know that like most geeks you don't realize or are unwilling to accept it, but you are an elitist." Dude, that was an honest question. All I want is some polite discussion and then you suddenly go screaming around and calling people "elitist". Shees, what the hell is your problem?
And no I didn't bother read the rest of my post. As soon as you said "elitist" I know you're just someone with a passionate, irrational hate for technologists.
Yeah but the guides don't teach you commandline - they just tell you to copy & paste some text verbatim. There is nothing to learn. Why is that difficult?
And back in 1997, there was a book called "Windows 95 voor Kinderen" ("Windows 95 for Children") - you can guess that the book was for. The book was accompanied with a floppy disk with some software. The book's installation instructions tell the user to install the software by: 1. Clicking on Start->Run... 2. Entering "A:\install" 3. Clicking on OK. This is essentially the same as copy & pasting a command. Yet nobody experienced this as difficult. So why is a commandline experienced as difficult even when you're doing nothing more than copy & pasting?
*Is* it? Sure, command line looks harder, but is copy & pasting a single command in the terminal and pressing Enter, really harder than clicking on 10 buttons in a GUI? Wouldn't the first be easier because it's just 1 action?
"When even what are widely considered the best, most usable and user friendly distributions of Linux continue to be shipped out with bad showstopper bugs in full release versions, and basic usability features like automatic determination of your video card and monitor specs are still unreliable, it isn't there yet. Fail."
You know, I've been wondering this for years: is this caused by bad engineering, or is it because there are too many different broken hardware out there? I'm increasingly suspecting that it's the latter: you have to write thousands of different workarounds for thousands of different bugs in thousands of different kinds of monitors and video cards. Am I the only one who hasn't experienced any video hardware problems in Linux for 6 years now?
Slashdot Mirror
Well yeah, I suppose that it'll work if you run it as regular CGI. But then it will be very slow. Extremely slow. Almost unusabily slow. It will have to start RoR for each request, which can take 2-6 seconds depending on the speed of the server.
Ruby on Rails cannot be run in Apache.
Yes, I was stunned when I found this out last year. If one wants to run RoR on Apache, then one has to use either mod_fastcgi (or mod_fcgi or whatever it was called; it'd run RoR as a FastCGI process) or mod_ruby. mod_ruby seems to be abandoned, and I have heard stories about excessive memory usage. mod_f(ast)cgi doesn't seem to work on Apache 2 at all.
So there are two ways to run RoR: either in Lighttpd (which has proper FastCGI support) or in Mongrel (a web server which can run RoR directly).
Because it's easy. MP3 players are all pretty much compatible and interoperable. They look a bit different but nobody has trouble using them.
Browsers, now that's a different story. Even in 2007 there are still Internet Explorer-only sites (and I'm not talking about Windows Update). This is especially true in South Korea and other Asian countries, where most people have never heard of Firefox. Interoperability among browsers is not as good as interoperability among MP3 players. Furthermore, computers tend to have a reputation of being "scary". If you change anything, many users will instantly complain that they don't know how to use it and that they want it to be revert back to whatever they used to use. All of this makes it much harder for an average user to switch browsers.
Operating systems are an entirely different story. Windows has 95% market share and there are tons and tons and tons of applications and hardware that depend on it. It's not even about usability anymore. Even MacOS X, which has existed for 6 years now, excellent marketing, and widely praised to be a user friendly operating system, still fails to catch more than 7% of the market. An average user is more likely to jump off a bridge than to switch his OS (if he even knows what OS means).
So yes, 10% of the OS market *would* rival the second coming of Christ.
Sure, but how's that relevant now? There are FCGI implementations that are ready to use. FCGI seem to be maintained right now. So what makes FCGI a bad choice *today*?
Yeah, that's great and all, but notice how you're entirely dodging his main question? He asked you to explain the moderation behavior based on "growing up Linux fanboys/hippies", and you've failed to provide any explanation whatsoever, other than making clear that you're a troll.
It is? I keep hearing that our uranium sources will only last for 50 years unless we seriously modernize our plants (so that they can process nuclear waste products as well).
"Huh? Do you prepare your statements every time you execute them?"
Uhm, if you use PHP then you *can't* cache your prepared statements (unless you do the same query many times in the same PHP run, but that's unlikely). PHP is stateless, after one run it frees everything.
"but if you prepare the statement once and execute it many times, the local overhead becomes minimal and the execution time in the database improves because the DB doesn't have to re-parse and re-plan the query."
In theory, yes. But are there any benchmarks that support this claim? Many people say this but I've yet to see any hard numbers that prove it. I wrote a little test script which inserts 300000 rows in MySQL, and using prepared statements didn't improve performance *at all*. The Ruby on Rails guys also seem to be skeptical about the advantages of server-side prepared statements. Someone mentioned that it might help on complex queries with lots of joins, but I can't find any benchmarks for such a case.
Do you know such a benchmark? I am looking for one.
Prepared statements are slower because it needs an extra server roundtrip. I've recently discussed this issue on the Ruby on Rails core mailing list, and people mentioned this while asking why we need prepared statements.
What do you mean, "I'll bite"? What makes you think it's a troll? Can't people have a legit question these days without being seen as flamers and trolls?
"What happened to Kylix, which Borland developed for Linux (Delphi for Linux). They had almost no sales and abandoned it a couple of years later."
You've got to be kidding. Kylix sucked. It was slow, and the binaries it generated somehow didn't work with the system's native Qt library (it gets into an infinite loop at startup). I was a huge Delphi fan but I looked at Kylix and never used it again. If Kylix was *good* then things would have been different.
"sharp-bang worried that his comment will be archived and used against him later"... noted. This will be used against you later.
Yeah, so? Saddam Hussein is not the Thai king, they're two different people. Just because Saddam Hussein is "popular" because of the law, doesn't mean the Thai king is popular for the same reason.
It may very well be that 99% of the Thai sincerely adore the king, but that only 1% want to mock him. The existence of such laws do not necessarily imply that people are forced to like the king.
MySQL supports that too. If people don't use it - well - then it's their own fault.
How is MySQL supposed to know that the data it gets is unicode instead of latin-1? Latin-1 characters are 1 byte, what MySQL receives may be an actual unicode string or may just be a sequence of latin-1 characters. There's no way to reliably find out.
Mono means monkey in Spanish.
Well too bad for MS that, at least for the time being, software patents are invalid in Europe. Patents are a non-issue to me.
"Seriously, rather than copy them, try being creative for a change and invent something better."
Oh, you mean this? GTK+ is a very good toolkit (the best one, as far as I'm concerned). And GTK is available on Mono. I used it, it's good - VERY good, very easy to use. As far as I'm concerned, this is much, much better than Windows.Forms.
Look around you. There are tons of high-quality non-MS open source projects that run on Mono. You seem to be thinking that copying the Microsoft runtime library is all that Mono does. That's far from the truth.
C# is a good language. I don't care whether MS made it or the Martians - it's good, there is an open source implementation, there are open source libraries, so I will use it.
Oh and you seriously think accusing people of being an "elitist" is going to make your point clear?
Do you have any idea how many hours I spent on writing http://www.autopackage.org/docs/howto-install/ [autopackage.org] ? I took the time to launch 2 different desktop environments and to take screenshots from 4 different file managers. I circled the exact buttons that people have to click on. I did my best to write everything without using jargon. I tried my best to use as little text as possible, to describe things as unambiguously as possibly, and to layout things as readably as possible. I took the time to make nice thumbnails with drop shadows. I let non-technical people proofread the guide. At first I even refused to provide commandline instructions and wanted everybody to use the GUI - the only reason why I added it later is because users kept asking for it.
I did all this hard work for the sake of anonymous end users whose face I will never see. Nor will I ever get any reward for it. And now you suddenly jump out of the bushes, calling me an elitist? Seriously, you need to stop applying stereotypes to people.
Oh, sorry. I misread the Slashdot threading. :(
"Documentation is boring. Nobody wants to do it. Most people try to make writing documentation as easy as possible for themselves, instead of making it as easy as possible for the reader."
Please, can you speak for yourself? Do you have any idea how many hours I spent on writing http://www.autopackage.org/docs/howto-install/ ? I took the time to launch 2 different desktop environments and to take screenshots from 4 different file managers. I circled the exact buttons that people have to click on. I did my best to write everything without using jargon. I tried my best to use as little text as possible, to describe things as unambiguously as possibly, and to layout things as readably as possible. I took the time to make nice thumbnails with drop shadows. At first I even refused to provide commandline instructions and wanted everybody to use the GUI - the only reason why I added it later is because users kept asking for it.
And now you suddenly jump out of the bushes, calling me an elitist? Seriously, you need to stop applying stereotypes to people. Frankly I'm offended. After all the work I've put in ensuring that things are as easy as possible for the end user, you destroy everything and by pasting a stupid stereotype label on me, while ignoring all the hard work that I've done.
"I know that like most geeks you don't realize or are unwilling to accept it, but you are an elitist."
Dude, that was an honest question. All I want is some polite discussion and then you suddenly go screaming around and calling people "elitist". Shees, what the hell is your problem?
And no I didn't bother read the rest of my post. As soon as you said "elitist" I know you're just someone with a passionate, irrational hate for technologists.
Yeah but the guides don't teach you commandline - they just tell you to copy & paste some text verbatim. There is nothing to learn. Why is that difficult?
And back in 1997, there was a book called "Windows 95 voor Kinderen" ("Windows 95 for Children") - you can guess that the book was for. The book was accompanied with a floppy disk with some software. The book's installation instructions tell the user to install the software by:
1. Clicking on Start->Run...
2. Entering "A:\install"
3. Clicking on OK.
This is essentially the same as copy & pasting a command. Yet nobody experienced this as difficult. So why is a commandline experienced as difficult even when you're doing nothing more than copy & pasting?
*Is* it? Sure, command line looks harder, but is copy & pasting a single command in the terminal and pressing Enter, really harder than clicking on 10 buttons in a GUI? Wouldn't the first be easier because it's just 1 action?
"When even what are widely considered the best, most usable and user friendly distributions of Linux continue to be shipped out with bad showstopper bugs in full release versions, and basic usability features like automatic determination of your video card and monitor specs are still unreliable, it isn't there yet. Fail."
You know, I've been wondering this for years: is this caused by bad engineering, or is it because there are too many different broken hardware out there? I'm increasingly suspecting that it's the latter: you have to write thousands of different workarounds for thousands of different bugs in thousands of different kinds of monitors and video cards.
Am I the only one who hasn't experienced any video hardware problems in Linux for 6 years now?