And that 3-4 minutes is significant compared to how many hours it takes to download the entire file?
I've found that even modem users these days usually don't care how long it takes to download something, as long as it's easy. If people care *that* much about download time then: - Everybody would have switched away from MP3 to Ogg/AAC (which offer the same quality for less space). - Commercial developers wouldn't bundle dependencies with their installer, but instead would ask people to download dependencies seperately. This certainly saves bandwidth because users don't have to download the dependency again if they want to upgrade the program. But in reality, people would rather wait than spending time to download an extra file.
Download time is overrated, only some geeks care about it. And even then, they usually only care about it because of emotions.
Text can be easily compressed by 80-90% by bzip2. Suppose that there are 100.000 names in the code, and the average length of a name is 15 characters. Counting newlines and comment prefixes (in the form of " * [name here]"), the space taken will be 100000 * (15 + 4) = 1900000 bytes, or 1855 KB. If the file is compressed by 85% then it'll become 278 KB. In comparison, the current Firefox 2.0b1 source tar.bz2 is 32 MB. 278 KB is about 0.8% of that. Hardly significant comparing that you as a Slashdotter probably has a broadband connection.
There are many things to worry about but worrying about wasting bandwidth on names is just rediculous.
Besides, marketing is important! You as a geek may not realize it, but crappy products can be more popular than your oh-so-mighty technically correct ones if the former is marketed better than the latter. While you're screaming on forums about the technical superiority of product B, everybody else is using the 'inferior' product A and couldn't care less what you moan about.
Re:Rails needs to be more mature
on
Ruby For Rails
·
· Score: 1
- I don't know how far into the API you've looked, but there are most definitely ways of using literal SQL statements rather than.save().
The point is, I don't want to do literal SQL statements, I want Rails to do it automatically for me. I want to store IPs as integers in the database, but I want the model to expose them as strings. And in the future I may want to use stored procedures to create database entries.
Re:Rails needs to be more mature
on
Ruby For Rails
·
· Score: 1
Create a column called "created_at" and Rails does it automatically according to which db adapter you're using. No function call (on your end) needed.
Are you even talking about the same thing? I'm talking about queries like this: INSERT INTO foo VALUES(INET_ATON('127.0.0.1')); and notice the INET_ATON part. I'm not talking about calling database functions from Ruby, I'm talking about SQL procedures inside the database server.
Re:Rails needs to be more mature
on
Ruby For Rails
·
· Score: 1
"What's wrong with mod_ruby that you're trying to use FastCGI?"
I did a lot of research trying to figure out why the wiki usually recommend FastCGI instead of mod_ruby. Try reading this! I quote: "Having 100 Apaches with 10 FastCGIs will use only 800MB of memory while having 100 Apaches each containing mod_ruby process can easily use 3GB of memory."
So no mod_ruby.
Rails needs to be more mature
on
Ruby For Rails
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I've tried Rails. It's pretty good, but it needs to be more mature because it lacks support for the more advanced stuff. Among the things that it currently (seem) to lack are:
- Support for saving database records using database function. In other words, I want Rails to automatically perform a query that looks like this: INSERT INTO foo VALUES(NOW()); I want to insert a record that uses the database server's time instead of the web server's time.
Or, something like this: INSERT INTO foo VALUES('bar', INET_HTON('127.0.0.1')); --- notice the INET_HTON() part In this example, I want to store IP addresses as integers in the database.
- Apache integration is still too immature. I don't know about Apache 1, but Apache 2 integration using FastCGI doesn't work *at all*. The documentation on the website about Apache integration is very messy: different pages suggest different things. After much research I found out that: (1) mod_fastcgi (not FastCGI itself, which is something else!) is dead, use fcgid instead. (2) Integration using fcgid doesn't work either! After a lot more research I found a working solution: make Apache proxy requests to a lighttpd server, which is running the Rails app. This doesn't seem like an ideal situation.
- Documentation is still too immature. While the API references are pretty good, the Wiki is very messy (see Apache integration).
It is a "work in progress", as written on the front page. Why do you expect it to be a fully finished polished product? It's just a website, calm down!
With a proper design you know what to check where, so you only check once.
That isn't going to weed out all bugs. What if the programmer is tired and makes a mistake and forgot to check for a precondition in some places? Boom. And that kinds of mistakes happen a lot. If the code doesn't crash, that can be even worse, as it may lead to corruptions in the internal states.
I care because I'm a software developer and I distribute software over the Internet and I have to keep the downloads as small as possible for the convenience of my users.
Good enough? There's a huge difference between a 40 and 50 MB file - 20%! Especially dial up users will scream for every byte you can save them. Bandwidth is still too expensive for too many people. I know a few developers who refused to install Cygwin (for the development environment) because they're on dial-up.
I don't know what the compression setting was used. But it's a 50 MB file, anybody sane would have used --best for gzip and -9 for bzip2. And zip is even larger than a tar.gz.
"ZIP is good enough. RAR and 7z (and bz2 and...) are stupid. WAV is not a compressed format. Apples and oranges."
Damn straight
I beg your pardon? ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/ linux-2.6.16.tar.gz - 50 MB linux-2.6.16.tar.bz2 - 40 MB That's 10 MB of space saving! bz2 is stupid? And note that gzip uses the same compression algorithm as zip.
And look at the number of people complaining about bugs in open source software. Lots of people even think closed source software have less bugs because they don't have a public bugs database.
Even if someone did that, so what? You can still use Sun's version. And if pointer support is the only addition in the fork, nobody would use it and the fork will die.
"And thus, the need for a crack...especially if they lost the e-mail in the last hard drive meltdown."
That's not logical, considering these: - People can change their password into something they can easily remember. It's no different from all other things that require a username and password. - It's not mission critical enterprise software. It's consumer software. It wouldn't kill them to wait one day to redownload the program. Plus, it's an add-on for another product, which they have to download seperately. And that other product is at least 900 MB. - Most people in my customer base use webmail accounts, such as Hotmail. They wouldn't lose the email in a hard drive crash. And of course, they can just write down the information on a piece of paper. - 99.99999% of the crack users (or should I say, people who *want* to use the crack; there is no working crack at the moment) are people who don't want to pay, and have never used my program before (so they don't even know about the login-based download system). I've seen their posts on various forum topics. Their main motivation is not having to pay, not that it's too hard to enter a username/password. In fact, I've never heard of any crack users mentioning the login-based download system as the reason why they want a crack. - The number of complaints about the login-based download system is at about 0.1% of the total number of customers. And most of the complaints are about download problems that are not specifically related to the system.
"Which makes me wonder why you bother with the username/password at all?"
To prevent piracy. It's part of the copy protection scheme. And it's a way to prevent people from abusing my bandwidth for pirated copies.
No. When I (and I speak for myself here so stop stereotyping all OSS developers into one bug lump) call you a whiney user, I mean *you* specifically, not all users. There are good and whiney users and you fall in the latter category. I've spent hundreds of manhours into supporting users and making my software user friendly, and I'm sick and tired of all you sleechers making up stereotypes about all OSS developers.
This is what a user is supposed to say to me: "Dear sir, I have found a bug in your (software name here), (bug description here). I use your software in my company, and I would appreciate it if you fix the bug as soon as I can. Thank you." Fine. That's a user I want to help.
But noo, you sleechers login to Slashdot and post comments like "OMFG all OSS developers are miserable failures OSS software will never succeed on the desktop!!!! give me bug fixes and support for FREE and I want them NOW!!! OMG you aren't gonna give me? then I will use commercial software and you OSS developers will die in hell!!!" Does it even surprise you that you will only get angry reactions?
"The conversation goes something like this: [SNIP]"
"Usually"? With how many OSS developers have you talked? I don't speak like that, and frankly I'm extremely insulted that you lump me together with those guys. Stereotypes are bad.
"Sure, but remember those users are also volunteer users."
Then those volunteer users can choose not to help, but that doesn't give them to right to demand things from volunteer developers. Because that's exactly what you people have been doing. It's like children demanding from Santa that he gives them more candies, for free.
"I've committed what I believe to be a fix for the problem to the developer branch of CVS, but it has not yet had the amount of testing to merit deployment. If you want, you can check the code out of CVS and test for us; that would help speed the progress to a release tremendously and would be really appreciated. Thanks!" See? That's much nicer, despite saying almost the same thing in terms of actions to be taken.
Except that leeches still complain about how OSS sucks/commercial software is superior/OSS developers are the scum of the earth even after polite responses. The Slashdot comments are the evidence.
Why do you think some OSS developers give rude responses? Oh I dunno, maybe, just maybe... it's because the users (Slashdotters in particular) have been rude to them?
I wonder how the commercial software companies would respond if you demand them to give you support while you don't give a penny to them. Because that's exactly what you're doing to OSS authors. As been said numberous times, you'll get much better support if you pay the authors. But nooo, instead you people keep on threathening about how you will use superior commercial software.
Stop acting like your the only one who doesn't have time. Have you ever thought of the possibility that the developer himself may be too busy and have a life too?
As for valgrind, the *only* thing you have to do is to run 'valgrind program-name' in the console and copy & paste the error messages. Hardly rocket science. Just because you don't know what it is doesn't mean it'll kill you use it.
And before you go ranting again about not having time: *I* don't have time either, which is why I ask people to do it for me. If you want me to allocate more time for you, then pay me.
"Because I haven't touched any serious program code (in 6502 assembly language to be specific) in 6 years, and in the 20 years I've been in the computer field, I haven't managed to grasp the basics of modern programming languages. That's why."
So? Nobody's asking you to write code. All you have to do is *testing*.
"So, why can't you as the developer listen to my bug report, figure out what's going on"
Because I'm a busy student and I have to study for my exams? Because I have tons of other things to do? Because I have a life?
Dude, as a developer I'm *already* listening to you. All I'm asking you is too see whether you can reproduce the bug in the development version, which doesn't even require you to write a single line of code! Heck, I event spent DOZENS OF HOURS writing user-friendly instructions on how to checkout and test the development version, even with tons of screenshots to guide you through every step. I'm scrificing the little free time I have to help you, and you're not even willing to perform a few nontechnical steps to make it easier for me to help YOU? That's what I call arrogance.
Re:Oh .. I get it.
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What arrogance. That's like saying journalists are only allowed to publish articles that a lot of people will want to read, or that people are only allowed to post blogs if others want to read them. Have you ever heard of freedom?
Re:The diplomatic response
on
The CVS Cop-Out
·
· Score: 0, Troll
And what is wrong with it? Volunteer developers are just that - volunteer developers. You are the user. Why can't you spend just a little efford in helping them to help you fix the problem? Retesting is nothing compared to all the time and efford it takes to fix the actual problem, and they're already doing it for you for free. Your behavior is plain arrogant.
Now, if you paid the developers then it would be a different story. But you didn't.
Slashdot Mirror
And that 3-4 minutes is significant compared to how many hours it takes to download the entire file?
I've found that even modem users these days usually don't care how long it takes to download something, as long as it's easy. If people care *that* much about download time then:
- Everybody would have switched away from MP3 to Ogg/AAC (which offer the same quality for less space).
- Commercial developers wouldn't bundle dependencies with their installer, but instead would ask people to download dependencies seperately. This certainly saves bandwidth because users don't have to download the dependency again if they want to upgrade the program. But in reality, people would rather wait than spending time to download an extra file.
Download time is overrated, only some geeks care about it. And even then, they usually only care about it because of emotions.
Text can be easily compressed by 80-90% by bzip2. Suppose that there are 100.000 names in the code, and the average length of a name is 15 characters. Counting newlines and comment prefixes (in the form of " * [name here]"), the space taken will be 100000 * (15 + 4) = 1900000 bytes, or 1855 KB. If the file is compressed by 85% then it'll become 278 KB. In comparison, the current Firefox 2.0b1 source tar.bz2 is 32 MB. 278 KB is about 0.8% of that. Hardly significant comparing that you as a Slashdotter probably has a broadband connection.
There are many things to worry about but worrying about wasting bandwidth on names is just rediculous.
Besides, marketing is important! You as a geek may not realize it, but crappy products can be more popular than your oh-so-mighty technically correct ones if the former is marketed better than the latter. While you're screaming on forums about the technical superiority of product B, everybody else is using the 'inferior' product A and couldn't care less what you moan about.
The point is, I don't want to do literal SQL statements, I want Rails to do it automatically for me. I want to store IPs as integers in the database, but I want the model to expose them as strings.
And in the future I may want to use stored procedures to create database entries.
Are you even talking about the same thing? I'm talking about queries like this:
INSERT INTO foo VALUES(INET_ATON('127.0.0.1'));
and notice the INET_ATON part. I'm not talking about calling database functions from Ruby, I'm talking about SQL procedures inside the database server.
I did a lot of research trying to figure out why the wiki usually recommend FastCGI instead of mod_ruby. Try reading this! I quote:
"Having 100 Apaches with 10 FastCGIs will use only 800MB of memory while having 100 Apaches each containing mod_ruby process can easily use 3GB of memory."
So no mod_ruby.
I've tried Rails. It's pretty good, but it needs to be more mature because it lacks support for the more advanced stuff. Among the things that it currently (seem) to lack are:
- Support for saving database records using database function. In other words, I want Rails to automatically perform a query that looks like this:
INSERT INTO foo VALUES(NOW());
I want to insert a record that uses the database server's time instead of the web server's time.
Or, something like this:
INSERT INTO foo VALUES('bar', INET_HTON('127.0.0.1')); --- notice the INET_HTON() part
In this example, I want to store IP addresses as integers in the database.
- Apache integration is still too immature. I don't know about Apache 1, but Apache 2 integration using FastCGI doesn't work *at all*. The documentation on the website about Apache integration is very messy: different pages suggest different things. After much research I found out that:
(1) mod_fastcgi (not FastCGI itself, which is something else!) is dead, use fcgid instead.
(2) Integration using fcgid doesn't work either!
After a lot more research I found a working solution: make Apache proxy requests to a lighttpd server, which is running the Rails app. This doesn't seem like an ideal situation.
- Documentation is still too immature. While the API references are pretty good, the Wiki is very messy (see Apache integration).
The problem with your statement is that people disagree with the "and ultimately destroy" part. Define "destruction".
So what you're basically saying is that we are not allowed to advance until we've created a utopia on earth. That's impossible, face it.
"WHAT is it intended to be then???"
It is a "work in progress", as written on the front page. Why do you expect it to be a fully finished polished product? It's just a website, calm down!
That isn't going to weed out all bugs. What if the programmer is tired and makes a mistake and forgot to check for a precondition in some places? Boom. And that kinds of mistakes happen a lot. If the code doesn't crash, that can be even worse, as it may lead to corruptions in the internal states.
ANYTHING is poisonous in large doses. Even oxygen. Nothing new here, move along.
I care because I'm a software developer and I distribute software over the Internet and I have to keep the downloads as small as possible for the convenience of my users.
Good enough? There's a huge difference between a 40 and 50 MB file - 20%! Especially dial up users will scream for every byte you can save them. Bandwidth is still too expensive for too many people. I know a few developers who refused to install Cygwin (for the development environment) because they're on dial-up.
I don't know what the compression setting was used. But it's a 50 MB file, anybody sane would have used --best for gzip and -9 for bzip2. And zip is even larger than a tar.gz.
I beg your pardon? ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6/
linux-2.6.16.tar.gz - 50 MB
linux-2.6.16.tar.bz2 - 40 MB
That's 10 MB of space saving! bz2 is stupid? And note that gzip uses the same compression algorithm as zip.
And look at the number of people complaining about bugs in open source software. Lots of people even think closed source software have less bugs because they don't have a public bugs database.
Even if someone did that, so what? You can still use Sun's version. And if pointer support is the only addition in the fork, nobody would use it and the fork will die.
"And thus, the need for a crack...especially if they lost the e-mail in the last hard drive meltdown."
That's not logical, considering these:
- People can change their password into something they can easily remember. It's no different from all other things that require a username and password.
- It's not mission critical enterprise software. It's consumer software. It wouldn't kill them to wait one day to redownload the program. Plus, it's an add-on for another product, which they have to download seperately. And that other product is at least 900 MB.
- Most people in my customer base use webmail accounts, such as Hotmail. They wouldn't lose the email in a hard drive crash. And of course, they can just write down the information on a piece of paper.
- 99.99999% of the crack users (or should I say, people who *want* to use the crack; there is no working crack at the moment) are people who don't want to pay, and have never used my program before (so they don't even know about the login-based download system). I've seen their posts on various forum topics. Their main motivation is not having to pay, not that it's too hard to enter a username/password. In fact, I've never heard of any crack users mentioning the login-based download system as the reason why they want a crack.
- The number of complaints about the login-based download system is at about 0.1% of the total number of customers. And most of the complaints are about download problems that are not specifically related to the system.
"Which makes me wonder why you bother with the username/password at all?"
To prevent piracy. It's part of the copy protection scheme. And it's a way to prevent people from abusing my bandwidth for pirated copies.
This is what a user is supposed to say to me: "Dear sir, I have found a bug in your (software name here), (bug description here). I use your software in my company, and I would appreciate it if you fix the bug as soon as I can. Thank you." Fine. That's a user I want to help.
But noo, you sleechers login to Slashdot and post comments like "OMFG all OSS developers are miserable failures OSS software will never succeed on the desktop!!!! give me bug fixes and support for FREE and I want them NOW!!! OMG you aren't gonna give me? then I will use commercial software and you OSS developers will die in hell!!!" Does it even surprise you that you will only get angry reactions?
"Usually"? With how many OSS developers have you talked? I don't speak like that, and frankly I'm extremely insulted that you lump me together with those guys. Stereotypes are bad.
Then those volunteer users can choose not to help, but that doesn't give them to right to demand things from volunteer developers. Because that's exactly what you people have been doing. It's like children demanding from Santa that he gives them more candies, for free.
Except that leeches still complain about how OSS sucks/commercial software is superior/OSS developers are the scum of the earth even after polite responses. The Slashdot comments are the evidence.
Why do you think some OSS developers give rude responses? Oh I dunno, maybe, just maybe... it's because the users (Slashdotters in particular) have been rude to them?
"or purchase it"
I wonder how the commercial software companies would respond if you demand them to give you support while you don't give a penny to them. Because that's exactly what you're doing to OSS authors. As been said numberous times, you'll get much better support if you pay the authors. But nooo, instead you people keep on threathening about how you will use superior commercial software.
"Programmers who think their little pearls of code are what makes a project successful need to get over themselves."
Oh and what would you do if all the programmers quit and the program becomes unmaintained?
Nobody thinks their code are "pearls" but that doesn't give you the right to act as if you're a god who must be worshipped by programmers.
You didn't read his entire post.
Stop acting like your the only one who doesn't have time. Have you ever thought of the possibility that the developer himself may be too busy and have a life too?
As for valgrind, the *only* thing you have to do is to run 'valgrind program-name' in the console and copy & paste the error messages. Hardly rocket science. Just because you don't know what it is doesn't mean it'll kill you use it.
And before you go ranting again about not having time: *I* don't have time either, which is why I ask people to do it for me. If you want me to allocate more time for you, then pay me.
"Because I haven't touched any serious program code (in 6502 assembly language to be specific) in 6 years, and in the 20 years I've been in the computer field, I haven't managed to grasp the basics of modern programming languages. That's why."
So? Nobody's asking you to write code. All you have to do is *testing*.
"So, why can't you as the developer listen to my bug report, figure out what's going on"
Because I'm a busy student and I have to study for my exams? Because I have tons of other things to do? Because I have a life?
Dude, as a developer I'm *already* listening to you. All I'm asking you is too see whether you can reproduce the bug in the development version, which doesn't even require you to write a single line of code! Heck, I event spent DOZENS OF HOURS writing user-friendly instructions on how to checkout and test the development version, even with tons of screenshots to guide you through every step. I'm scrificing the little free time I have to help you, and you're not even willing to perform a few nontechnical steps to make it easier for me to help YOU? That's what I call arrogance.
What arrogance. That's like saying journalists are only allowed to publish articles that a lot of people will want to read, or that people are only allowed to post blogs if others want to read them. Have you ever heard of freedom?
And what is wrong with it? Volunteer developers are just that - volunteer developers. You are the user. Why can't you spend just a little efford in helping them to help you fix the problem? Retesting is nothing compared to all the time and efford it takes to fix the actual problem, and they're already doing it for you for free. Your behavior is plain arrogant.
Now, if you paid the developers then it would be a different story. But you didn't.