A few things. First, ignoring entirely whether or not Rails is a passing fad, the fact is that it solves a current problem (writing web apps quickly and robustly) extremely well. I quit my job programming.Net to start my startup because I wanted to be productive, and Rails made me far more productive. Secondly, speaking to the 'Ruby will be taken down with it' comment: seriously I can't imagine how this could happen. Ruby's been around for ten years, and its enthusiast community won't leave it because some usurpers' failed framework went down. (Note, I don't think Railsers are either usurpers or doomed to failure - I feel certain this is simply an ignorant poster.) The new Rails Ruby users might jump ship, but that won't change the trend that had been set before Rails now will it?
Honestly, I look at it as a matter of iterations. GMail has become better since it launched. It now has spell checking, and draft autosave, and calendar integration - in other words, Google's pretty good at iterating their apps. They seem far less likely to overdevelop than to underdevelop...and why not?
Look at 37signals. Ruby on Rails has been around for a long time, and it keeps getting better, but it's pretty blatantly incremental. They just didn't forget the 'release often' part of the equation, that so many monolithic software packages ignore.
Our startup has an app right now that's pretty useful. We're at six months of development. We didn't wait until it was perfect to offer it to the public. It has some bumps here and there, and some silly seeming features - much of this is our just adding stuff to see how users will utilize it. Right now I have RSS feeds for each data element in the app - they just show the upcoming events and notes for that element. It's a blatantly useless feature in its current stage. But the methods I had to develop on the way are going to make it easier for me to do more robust reporting, for instance. We're going slow but steady, and so is Google. Why question this?
Once again - look at ViaWeb. They released early and often, and listened to the users. Why do people want to doubt Google? ajaxLaunch is a joke, but that's because there was absolutely no reason to use it. Google Spreadsheets, though, currently allows all kinds of spreadsheetable things - network diagrams, logistics management mini-apps, etc - to be kept track of. Without buying a $200 package that is overkill. And allows remote editing of these sheets. Please explain to me how this merits complaint...
Could I see your xorg.conf? I've not tried setting my laptop up to do anything but mirror my screen through a projector, but I want to, because I want to have a projector in my workspace that has various things like my video conferencing, etc. on it.
Though I fear dragging this conversation out past its prime lifespan (and I must say I've enjoyed it immensely), a significant aspect of my viewpoint is that it's conceivable that the immediate boost the local business economy gets from the influx of money by buy-American folks, combined with the reduction in income that competing businesses in foreign countries with policies at odds with our own, combined with their greater overall costs due to import excises, tariffs, etc., could lead to greater economic benefit in the long run, domestically.
However, the initial point of my post was simply to point out to the poster I was replying to that there reasonable people may disagree with him about whether it is worth taking note of the nationality of a company before purchasing from them. This could have been pointed out solely by my making a distinction between idealism and materialism, though I didn't realize it as fully at the time. I instead chose to poorly articulate my still-held belief that allowing a tendency towards buying American to at least partially influence one's purchasing decision can ultimately lead to greater economic prosperity at home.
The problem here is that China and America are built on philosophies at odds with one another, and quality of life covers more than simply materialistic goods. I am not a materialist, and you are. It seems that that is the core of our disagreement.
Your argument only holds up if infrastructure and education are the things keeping us from being competitive in a global marketplace. In many markets, we are uncompetitive because of our minimum wage laws. In others, we are uncompetitive because of a lack of capital in the affected industry overall.
Also, market forces include matters of values as well as matters of economic self-interest. The market is simply a communication medium - it does not state what it communicates. Ultimately, if Americans chose to buy American, the market would communicate a desire for American made goods, and corporations that listened would move parts of their infrastructure to America. Ultimately, one of our two possibilities may prove to be most likely, or most efficient. But to state that i'm misguided without considering this possibility in your argument is a bit hasty, in my opinion.
I tried to cover this with my mention of the supply chain. I know that Taiwan, China, Korea, etc. are the countries in which an enormous quantity of the parts that go into an individual computer originate. However, in the one case where you *could* choose whether a domestic or foreign company gets your money (the manufacturer themselves make a fair chunk of the profit on a laptop, no?), the argument applies. At any rate, I was just flabbergasted that the poster I was replying to couldn't answer the question 'Why would anybody discard a product just because it is from some other country unless there are quality issues.'
Are you kidding me? There are plenty of reasons to buy domestic, regardless of build quality. To do so directly benefits the domestic economy greater than to buy from China (obv. this argument doesn't apply to chinamen). If you're entirely selfish AND you think that America will maintain its dominance in the marketplace without your help, then sure it makes no sense to buy domestic instead of Chinese. If you have the least bit of patriotism then the benefit buying domestic affords your country will at least become a factor in your decisions. At that point you won't be so one-minded in your buying decisions.
For clarification: I don't say you should buy a crappy American product in place of a high quality Chinese product. But there are plenty of comparably or better built laptops in the domestic market. And even if the supply chain hasn't changed drastically, and the laptops were always being built in China, it still makes sense to care about the nationality of the parent company if this is your concern - IBM was making the most profit of all the companies in the chain, and they were domestic. Now a foreign company is. It's not xenophobia; it's making beneficial, patriotic decisions with your capital.
we'll know and we'll have final proof when we can duplicate the processes ourselves, and then later when we can make our own biology.
Duplication shows possibility. If we can duplicate an evolutionary process, we will be able to show that theoretically it could have happened that way.
I could possibly move a cup of coffee from the floor to my desk via a series of pulleys. If you, having seen the cup of coffee on my desk, and having thought that it was in the past on the counter, proceed to pick up another cup of coffee off of the counter and place it on my desk, you've not proven how it got there or where it came from. You've just sat down some coffee.
Right, so 'ostensibly' is roughly equivalent to 'apparently,' and it hardly seems likely that you mean to get across your own ignorance of the title of his speech.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is ostentatiously?
Speaking for myself, AJAX GUIs are supremely easy to write in something like Rails. I came from.NET, and an AJAX GUI (via Rails) + CSS is absolutely my favorite way to write webapps..NET is the miserable.
Once again I have to bring up my favorite whine from the.NET world: They have a CheckBoxList control. There's no way to return an array of checked items. Sure, I can iterate...but then they aren't providing anything at all with the control, are they? (Disclaimer: I left my old job to start a Rails startup right as the transition to VS2005 was happening, so I'm mildly out of touch. I will say that Atlas was miserable to use as little as two months before its official release.)
Yeah, so it doesn't run on IE = not using MS's rich text component. You didn't RTFA. You didn't TTFS (Try the software?). You didn't RTFComments. You just displayed your stupidity without request.
TCPMP is a great media player that can handle DivX. Then there's some Windows app that downsamples video files to fit the screen rather well. Pick up a 1Gig miniSD card online for $60 and the phone is extremely more useful. Then use Yahoo!Music to pull a gig of music onto the device at will - that part is rather convenient. I've got a single Family Guy episode on there right now, just because I don't really use it as well as it could be.
And this is totally OT, but...
I managed to snag a new one of these for $20 and a three hour conversation with Cingular, because they were trying to sell me a Star Wars sound-injector (lots of demand, I guess, for sounding like you're friends with Chewbacca) with the prefurb I was ordering (they would add it to my basket after I verified my order without any notification they were doing so, and that pissed me off). Anyway, I worked my way up the ladder to the resolutions department.
Me: There is no chance I will use this device. Let me order the prefurb without sending me the $40 Chewbacca toy.
Cingular/ATT: I can't sell you the prefurb without sending that item. But you can return it!
Me: I'd like to do that, preemptively.
CATT: Oh, you'll have to send it back to us once we ship it out.
Me:...
CATT: Sir?
Me: Seriously, you're going to cost yourself greater than $20 to sell me a $20 refurb phone, and waste man hours handling a return?
CATT: It's how the bundle works, sir.
Me: I'd feel morally reprehensible doing business with you if you're that stupid. I'll buy a Sprint phone.
CATT: No, no no! Tell you what, I'll send you a NEW one for the same price, so you don't have to return the Star Wars thingie.
Me:...
CATT: Sir?
Me: Nevermind, I can do business with idiots. Thanks. Send it on.
"The State should pay for the services it requires. Why is it asking for people to pay more tax, voluntarily?"
Well, for one, if someone opted to translate this, it is guaranteed that the overall cost (including their labor cost) would be less than if the government paid for it, as funding a beauracracy to get a task done is never cheaper than doing the task.
Secondarily, are you just an asshat? Allowing people to choose to help the country they live in can't possibly be a bad thing. Seriously, check at least a little of your cynicism, or you'll keep making stupid statements like this and everyone around you that can think will secretly laugh at your idiocy.
Though it's feasible to do what you suggest, it goes against W3C Recommendations. Doing that is what caused the GWA problem in the first place, as prior to GWA the way things were being done weren't a problem. Just follow the W3C...
* Use GET if:
o The interaction is more like a question (i.e., it is a safe operation such as a query, read operation, or lookup).
* Use POST if:
o The interaction is more like an order, or
o The interaction changes the state of the resource in a way that the user would perceive (e.g., a subscription to a service), or
o The user be held accountable for the results of the interaction.
Kevin, I don't know why my modpoints had to disappear in the last week without my noticing (oh, yes I do - I only regularly log in to slashdot on my media center pc, and that's just because I've got my settings all graphically-unobtrusive), but I call for a mod++.
Also, wtf is wrong with you people? Someone reports on someone else suggesting that a company can offer a for-pay service that is usable by an Ubuntu user out of the box, not bundled in, not directly tied to the software, etc. Result? Four hundred ignorant responses about how it's not Open Source.
Neither is that candy bar I know you kids are eating right now. Gay.
"If I want to add a quick way to change a record(ex. disable a user) in a table, I'll add a link that makes an AJAX call."
Yup, GETs to change data. Good thinking. No one's already run into that problem en masse and pushed emphatically for that not to be the way to do things. Oh, crap, except for the whole Google Web Accelerator fiasco.
Man, that's weird. At my old job, I had five (yes) monitors on my desk at one point. All CRTs. It was the most awesome development environment ever. Keep my SQL Enterprise Mangler up on one screen, so I never have to worry about printing out current copies of the db schema to reference (just look at it live), IM and web on one monitor that was easy enough to just hit the power switch on when I needed to really focus...never got any games working in the multi-monitor setup there though, sadly...
I still don't understand the complaint here. One faulty anything can muck things up. And transactions are in no way applicable to the problem domain I suggested triggers for - audit information for small- to mid-sized applications. That's like saying "Steak's bad for you. Try a Chrysler Le Baron!"
I completely disagree with the claim that triggers are a bad idea. They seem particularly well suited for handling audit-level operations, and they allow one to create an auditable database without building an independent data access layer. This is good for smaller-but-auditable projects. Also great for a database with a 5-ish year lifetime, as there's no need to anticipate migrating...
They didn't test a beta feature enough before Slashdot independently posted notice of it to the eager nerdy public? Can you see the error in that? Did you report your mix of os/browser to the team to let them know of the error? As far as signal-to-noise ratio goes, I'll say this: I was looking at an Adobe-related news story when I was testing the feature. It linked up with Adobe's purchase of Macromedia, which then linked to a story about Intel and Macromedia working together on some 3D things. So what this has done for me is to let me know that the infrastructure's in place for Adobe to be working on 3D tech hand in hand with Intel, and is likely doing that right now. There are no news stories that I am aware of that mention this potential coalition. I might just be ignorant, and maybe everyone knows they were working together. But *I* didn't know that, and now *I* know that, and it's all because of this specific "useless" technology.
I'm sorry, you can't pan? Did you maybe spend a single moment attempting such a basic feature? You'll note that clicking anywhere on the diagram actually, *gasp*, pans the diagram to that central point! Please don't criticise something if you haven't taken the time to see if your criticism is in any way relevant or truthful.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Earth
A few things. First, ignoring entirely whether or not Rails is a passing fad, the fact is that it solves a current problem (writing web apps quickly and robustly) extremely well. I quit my job programming .Net to start my startup because I wanted to be productive, and Rails made me far more productive. Secondly, speaking to the 'Ruby will be taken down with it' comment: seriously I can't imagine how this could happen. Ruby's been around for ten years, and its enthusiast community won't leave it because some usurpers' failed framework went down. (Note, I don't think Railsers are either usurpers or doomed to failure - I feel certain this is simply an ignorant poster.) The new Rails Ruby users might jump ship, but that won't change the trend that had been set before Rails now will it?
I found the article both informative, entertaining, and grammatically confused.
Honestly, I look at it as a matter of iterations. GMail has become better since it launched. It now has spell checking, and draft autosave, and calendar integration - in other words, Google's pretty good at iterating their apps. They seem far less likely to overdevelop than to underdevelop...and why not?
Look at 37signals. Ruby on Rails has been around for a long time, and it keeps getting better, but it's pretty blatantly incremental. They just didn't forget the 'release often' part of the equation, that so many monolithic software packages ignore.
Our startup has an app right now that's pretty useful. We're at six months of development. We didn't wait until it was perfect to offer it to the public. It has some bumps here and there, and some silly seeming features - much of this is our just adding stuff to see how users will utilize it. Right now I have RSS feeds for each data element in the app - they just show the upcoming events and notes for that element. It's a blatantly useless feature in its current stage. But the methods I had to develop on the way are going to make it easier for me to do more robust reporting, for instance. We're going slow but steady, and so is Google. Why question this?
Once again - look at ViaWeb. They released early and often, and listened to the users. Why do people want to doubt Google? ajaxLaunch is a joke, but that's because there was absolutely no reason to use it. Google Spreadsheets, though, currently allows all kinds of spreadsheetable things - network diagrams, logistics management mini-apps, etc - to be kept track of. Without buying a $200 package that is overkill. And allows remote editing of these sheets. Please explain to me how this merits complaint...
Could I see your xorg.conf? I've not tried setting my laptop up to do anything but mirror my screen through a projector, but I want to, because I want to have a projector in my workspace that has various things like my video conferencing, etc. on it.
Though I fear dragging this conversation out past its prime lifespan (and I must say I've enjoyed it immensely), a significant aspect of my viewpoint is that it's conceivable that the immediate boost the local business economy gets from the influx of money by buy-American folks, combined with the reduction in income that competing businesses in foreign countries with policies at odds with our own, combined with their greater overall costs due to import excises, tariffs, etc., could lead to greater economic benefit in the long run, domestically.
However, the initial point of my post was simply to point out to the poster I was replying to that there reasonable people may disagree with him about whether it is worth taking note of the nationality of a company before purchasing from them. This could have been pointed out solely by my making a distinction between idealism and materialism, though I didn't realize it as fully at the time. I instead chose to poorly articulate my still-held belief that allowing a tendency towards buying American to at least partially influence one's purchasing decision can ultimately lead to greater economic prosperity at home.
The problem here is that China and America are built on philosophies at odds with one another, and quality of life covers more than simply materialistic goods. I am not a materialist, and you are. It seems that that is the core of our disagreement.
Your argument only holds up if infrastructure and education are the things keeping us from being competitive in a global marketplace. In many markets, we are uncompetitive because of our minimum wage laws. In others, we are uncompetitive because of a lack of capital in the affected industry overall.
Also, market forces include matters of values as well as matters of economic self-interest. The market is simply a communication medium - it does not state what it communicates. Ultimately, if Americans chose to buy American, the market would communicate a desire for American made goods, and corporations that listened would move parts of their infrastructure to America. Ultimately, one of our two possibilities may prove to be most likely, or most efficient. But to state that i'm misguided without considering this possibility in your argument is a bit hasty, in my opinion.
I tried to cover this with my mention of the supply chain. I know that Taiwan, China, Korea, etc. are the countries in which an enormous quantity of the parts that go into an individual computer originate. However, in the one case where you *could* choose whether a domestic or foreign company gets your money (the manufacturer themselves make a fair chunk of the profit on a laptop, no?), the argument applies. At any rate, I was just flabbergasted that the poster I was replying to couldn't answer the question 'Why would anybody discard a product just because it is from some other country unless there are quality issues.'
Are you kidding me? There are plenty of reasons to buy domestic, regardless of build quality. To do so directly benefits the domestic economy greater than to buy from China (obv. this argument doesn't apply to chinamen). If you're entirely selfish AND you think that America will maintain its dominance in the marketplace without your help, then sure it makes no sense to buy domestic instead of Chinese. If you have the least bit of patriotism then the benefit buying domestic affords your country will at least become a factor in your decisions. At that point you won't be so one-minded in your buying decisions.
For clarification: I don't say you should buy a crappy American product in place of a high quality Chinese product. But there are plenty of comparably or better built laptops in the domestic market. And even if the supply chain hasn't changed drastically, and the laptops were always being built in China, it still makes sense to care about the nationality of the parent company if this is your concern - IBM was making the most profit of all the companies in the chain, and they were domestic. Now a foreign company is. It's not xenophobia; it's making beneficial, patriotic decisions with your capital.
Duplication shows possibility. If we can duplicate an evolutionary process, we will be able to show that theoretically it could have happened that way.
I could possibly move a cup of coffee from the floor to my desk via a series of pulleys. If you, having seen the cup of coffee on my desk, and having thought that it was in the past on the counter, proceed to pick up another cup of coffee off of the counter and place it on my desk, you've not proven how it got there or where it came from. You've just sat down some coffee.
Right, so 'ostensibly' is roughly equivalent to 'apparently,' and it hardly seems likely that you mean to get across your own ignorance of the title of his speech.
Perhaps the word you're looking for is ostentatiously?
Speaking for myself, AJAX GUIs are supremely easy to write in something like Rails. I came from .NET, and an AJAX GUI (via Rails) + CSS is absolutely my favorite way to write webapps. .NET is the miserable.
.NET world: They have a CheckBoxList control. There's no way to return an array of checked items. Sure, I can iterate...but then they aren't providing anything at all with the control, are they? (Disclaimer: I left my old job to start a Rails startup right as the transition to VS2005 was happening, so I'm mildly out of touch. I will say that Atlas was miserable to use as little as two months before its official release.)
Once again I have to bring up my favorite whine from the
Yeah, so it doesn't run on IE = not using MS's rich text component. You didn't RTFA. You didn't TTFS (Try the software?). You didn't RTFComments. You just displayed your stupidity without request.
TCPMP is a great media player that can handle DivX. Then there's some Windows app that downsamples video files to fit the screen rather well. Pick up a 1Gig miniSD card online for $60 and the phone is extremely more useful. Then use Yahoo!Music to pull a gig of music onto the device at will - that part is rather convenient. I've got a single Family Guy episode on there right now, just because I don't really use it as well as it could be.
...
...
And this is totally OT, but...
I managed to snag a new one of these for $20 and a three hour conversation with Cingular, because they were trying to sell me a Star Wars sound-injector (lots of demand, I guess, for sounding like you're friends with Chewbacca) with the prefurb I was ordering (they would add it to my basket after I verified my order without any notification they were doing so, and that pissed me off). Anyway, I worked my way up the ladder to the resolutions department.
Me: There is no chance I will use this device. Let me order the prefurb without sending me the $40 Chewbacca toy.
Cingular/ATT: I can't sell you the prefurb without sending that item. But you can return it!
Me: I'd like to do that, preemptively.
CATT: Oh, you'll have to send it back to us once we ship it out.
Me:
CATT: Sir?
Me: Seriously, you're going to cost yourself greater than $20 to sell me a $20 refurb phone, and waste man hours handling a return?
CATT: It's how the bundle works, sir.
Me: I'd feel morally reprehensible doing business with you if you're that stupid. I'll buy a Sprint phone.
CATT: No, no no! Tell you what, I'll send you a NEW one for the same price, so you don't have to return the Star Wars thingie.
Me:
CATT: Sir?
Me: Nevermind, I can do business with idiots. Thanks. Send it on.
"The State should pay for the services it requires. Why is it asking for people to pay more tax, voluntarily?"
Well, for one, if someone opted to translate this, it is guaranteed that the overall cost (including their labor cost) would be less than if the government paid for it, as funding a beauracracy to get a task done is never cheaper than doing the task.
Secondarily, are you just an asshat? Allowing people to choose to help the country they live in can't possibly be a bad thing. Seriously, check at least a little of your cynicism, or you'll keep making stupid statements like this and everyone around you that can think will secretly laugh at your idiocy.
Though it's feasible to do what you suggest, it goes against W3C Recommendations. Doing that is what caused the GWA problem in the first place, as prior to GWA the way things were being done weren't a problem. Just follow the W3C...
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/whenToUseGet.html
From the site...
1.3 Quick Checklist for Choosing HTTP GET or POST
* Use GET if:
o The interaction is more like a question (i.e., it is a safe operation such as a query, read operation, or lookup).
* Use POST if:
o The interaction is more like an order, or
o The interaction changes the state of the resource in a way that the user would perceive (e.g., a subscription to a service), or
o The user be held accountable for the results of the interaction.
Kevin, I don't know why my modpoints had to disappear in the last week without my noticing (oh, yes I do - I only regularly log in to slashdot on my media center pc, and that's just because I've got my settings all graphically-unobtrusive), but I call for a mod++.
Also, wtf is wrong with you people? Someone reports on someone else suggesting that a company can offer a for-pay service that is usable by an Ubuntu user out of the box, not bundled in, not directly tied to the software, etc. Result? Four hundred ignorant responses about how it's not Open Source.
Neither is that candy bar I know you kids are eating right now. Gay.
"If I want to add a quick way to change a record(ex. disable a user) in a table, I'll add a link that makes an AJAX call."
Yup, GETs to change data. Good thinking. No one's already run into that problem en masse and pushed emphatically for that not to be the way to do things. Oh, crap, except for the whole Google Web Accelerator fiasco.
I would definitely suggest SVN coupled with Trac (http://www.edgewall.com/trac/). There is nothing better. :)
Man, that's weird. At my old job, I had five (yes) monitors on my desk at one point. All CRTs. It was the most awesome development environment ever. Keep my SQL Enterprise Mangler up on one screen, so I never have to worry about printing out current copies of the db schema to reference (just look at it live), IM and web on one monitor that was easy enough to just hit the power switch on when I needed to really focus...never got any games working in the multi-monitor setup there though, sadly...
I still don't understand the complaint here. One faulty anything can muck things up. And transactions are in no way applicable to the problem domain I suggested triggers for - audit information for small- to mid-sized applications. That's like saying "Steak's bad for you. Try a Chrysler Le Baron!"
I completely disagree with the claim that triggers are a bad idea. They seem particularly well suited for handling audit-level operations, and they allow one to create an auditable database without building an independent data access layer. This is good for smaller-but-auditable projects. Also great for a database with a 5-ish year lifetime, as there's no need to anticipate migrating...
They didn't test a beta feature enough before Slashdot independently posted notice of it to the eager nerdy public? Can you see the error in that? Did you report your mix of os/browser to the team to let them know of the error? As far as signal-to-noise ratio goes, I'll say this: I was looking at an Adobe-related news story when I was testing the feature. It linked up with Adobe's purchase of Macromedia, which then linked to a story about Intel and Macromedia working together on some 3D things. So what this has done for me is to let me know that the infrastructure's in place for Adobe to be working on 3D tech hand in hand with Intel, and is likely doing that right now. There are no news stories that I am aware of that mention this potential coalition. I might just be ignorant, and maybe everyone knows they were working together. But *I* didn't know that, and now *I* know that, and it's all because of this specific "useless" technology.
I'm sorry, you can't pan? Did you maybe spend a single moment attempting such a basic feature? You'll note that clicking anywhere on the diagram actually, *gasp*, pans the diagram to that central point! Please don't criticise something if you haven't taken the time to see if your criticism is in any way relevant or truthful.