Hehe we must live in two different worlds then. I am, of course, speaking from personal experience. I've been around for a while and have only had the pleasure of meeting one or two.NET or Java developers.
Is it not conceivable that.NET/Java programmers just don't hang out with the Ruby on Rails crowd that much?
Disclaimer: I live in Chicago, home of 37signals, so I'm solidly in Rails country over here. Actually... I may have just answered my own question there.
With a good cryptosystem, even intimate knowledge of the system's operation should not give an attacker sufficient information to break it. Also, in the case of, say, a one-time pad (wiki wiki wiki), the cryptography is absolute security, and knowing how a OTP cipher works won't help you at all to break it. Read the wikipedia article for the theoretical caveats that go along with that statement;).
Knowing all about how Diffie-Helman works, to pick another simple example, doesn't really help you when breaking it quickly requires a polynomial-time solution to the Discrete Log problem. Find one of those and you'll be famous!
What's that even mean? Quantity, in terms of availability of people, absolutely equals quality, since you've a lot more people and it's more likely that one of them will be of a higher quality. If 1% of web programmers are good by your standards it should be much easier to find a good one in a crowd of 10,000 UNIX gurus than in a crowd of 100.NET folks. You could even counter me with a similarly BS argument in favour of your side, but really it doesn't matter.
I was merely pointing out that.NET, being as it only runs on one platform and most general-purpose programmers would not be familiar with it, is a niche, albeit a large one. You can't couch it as "general" development when most developers "in general" do not use it. The web started on *NIX systems and it's still mostly a UNIX and POSIX game. When you say "general web development" I think most people think you're talking about a LAMP-like system.
You can set up your machine this way right now if you want. Just put/home on a traditional disk and have the kernel and maybe a couple more trees of system files on an SSD. This way your SSD doesn't wear out as fast and you have super-quick read access to the kernel and settings.
If you're running something other than linux I'm sure there's a less transparent way of doing this. Mac OS doesn't really let you set mountpoints with Disk Utility but it won't freak out if you put in your own (MacFUSE does this). You may have to do so in a script though since Mac OS ignores the contents of/etc/fstab I thought. Someone out there probably knows for sure.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 1
I haven't noticed massive speed increases even on single Javascript-heavy pages
That's why I wrote my own javascript benchmarks for this sort of thing. They're on my home computer but a basic rundown is that Chrome is wickedly fast. My benchmarks were an empty static for() loop, reversal of a huge array, sorting a huge array of random elements using the array.sort method, sorting a huge array of random elements using bubblesort, and generating random numbers. All of them ran at least a little bit faster on Chrome, and some of them like the bubble sort wouldn't even finish in Firefox or Safari but would take a couple of seconds on Chrome.
I even started an infinite loop in one of my tabs and all the rest of them were just fine. Still just as responsive as if I closed the offending tab.
For a real-world example: try using Meebo in FF then in Chrome. Everything looks the same--until you drag a window around. It's smooth enough in Chrome that you could maximize the window, hide your taskbar, and you could fool yourself into thinking it was just another IM client.
Chrome's a little spartan, I don't really expect good support for ad-blocking, and I'm a little sketched out by the EULA, but it's definitely impressive so far.
Now let's see what happens when FF has a fancy new javascript JIT too:D.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
But hey,whatever melts your butter.
With your permission, I'd like to start saying that sometimes instead of my usual "Whatever blows your skirt up".
Yep. I think you're right. This way there's just two versions, one more stable than the other.
If you've ever paid for Google's apps service, it's missing some of the features of the beta that everyone has access to, but it has telephone support and all the features are guaranteed to work.
Some day, but a wise man once told me never to let them outnumber you, so the maximum is 2 for me.
You shouldn't be just finishing school
I'm not. I finished when I was 21. I've been working since then. My point was that I am still shackled by student debt.
you should have your own home and a history of service in your community
Um.... I'd like to? The market's so damn jumpy even with an absurd amount of money down I still couldn't get a mortgage.
I don't even know what the hell you're talking about with the rest of your post. Admittedly mine wasn't as cogent as I'd've liked, at least I didn't have any bizarre metaphors. Try again maybe?
I think Google does it that way because, for a hosted web application, version numbers are meaningless. There's just "the version", the one that's up there. It's not like you could have two people using different versions of Google Documents somewhere. Knowing that, and knowing that they're never "finished", it makes sense that they're just always in beta.
On the surface you're right, but as a young person I kind of take offense to that viewpoint. You make it seem like everyone in this country is immature and that saving every last penny for your children is the only mature thing to do. I disagree.
I'm 25 years old, American, and I had to pay for 60% of my education myself through a combination of loans and bizarre money-making schemes (one time selling my white blood cells to a lab, or at least I think it was a lab...). I know my experience has not been typical at all but really I don't think the situation is as simple as telling people to grow up.
Take the sub-prime real estate crisis as an example. The whole thing was caused by a combination of banks that wanted to move loans and people who wanted to get what they perceived as the best possible deal. What resulted was an explosion of unpayable loans. I think people need to be more conscious of the risks inherent in credit, but also banks need to be more honest about what you'll be paying back in the end.
I was going to buy an apartment earlier this year, and I was paying 40% cash on it. The rest had to be credit because if I'd waited to save up the absurd amount of money necessary to buy it outright, it would've taken decades because all the while I'd still be paying rent. Meanwhile the mortgage situation allows for me to pay a fee (interest) for the convenience of saving up for the purchase after-the-fact, while I'm living in it. Meanwhile it increases in value (hopefully) in the long run and if I'm lucky that increase happens faster than interest.
The same goes with cars. It's very easy to take for granted that you have a car, but for a lot of people a car is an absolutely essential tool for employment that they simply cannot afford right now. You get into this chicken-and-egg problem where you need work to afford the car you need to find work to buy a car to find work to buy a car... loans are the only real way around that problem. The same thing goes for medical expenses and other time-sensitive purchases. You can't always control when you'll need something and when you'll have the money to pay for it.
Of course, I'm from the South, which is seriously the land of people buying things they can't really pay for. I don't think it's a question of maturity at all. I think it's more that these people just aren't familiar with the concept of interest and they think that they can just pay it all back over time with a little bit of overhead.
As we've delayed the maturing process in this country for so long, many people don't ever "grow up" and become responsible people. A nation of instant-gratifiers who whine that the government needs to help them out because they spent all their money on expensive cars and trips, put it all on credit so that they've ended up spending twice as much for something than they would have if they paid cash, and end up retiring with a buttload of debt that takes up half their retirement income.
It really seems like you're complaining about multiple different things here. I'll agree that, increasingly, my generation and the one after it lean on their parents to make a lot of their decisions. I've seen this a lot with my peers that find it difficult to truly act independently. Also, I'm really not sure if anyone in my generation hasn't given up on social security. The pay-it-backwards mentality upon which it was built wasn't sustainable and I personally have no expectation that my social security tax will ever come back to me.
Most people are uneducated in the ways of finance though, as I said, so if the government or company they work for doesn't manage a retirement for them, how are they supposed to do it?
(Sorry for all the rambling; I'm typing this in little pieces during downtime at work.)
It's kind of hard to understand why, if he already had XAMP and WAMP, he'd want to be using anything else as a simple development environment. For testing prior to deployment a VM is great; even better—if downtown would actually cost you enough money it's worth doubling up—get a second hosting just like your production one and call it staging.
Also, it's worth pointing out that Gentoo has great support for CMSes and similar things via the webapp-config command. It took me a few tries to realize how much more convenient it is. It just puts all the vhost stuff in a new file in/etc/apache2/vhost.d/ directory to reflect what it installed. Very convenient! I *think* it supports nginx too if you want to turn to the dark side.
Yeah that's what I initially thought. Like how birds flock in the same direction. Maybe every group of cattle has one really charismatic cow that likes facing north.
Getting way off-topic here, but remember there's a difference between being "charming" and being an overly-nice doormat type. Tread that line and it almost always works.
We should totally write a/. girl advice column. We'll be heros!
I think the name Javascript is unfortunate that way. It's really only vaguely similar in syntax to Java, and lacks most of the functionality of Javascript. Really what needs to happen is a complete re-work of how Javascript is interpreted in browsers. So, getting back on-topic here, I think this is a wonderful start.
Oh and once again don't dump on us web programmers. Some of us are just as 1337 as you are we just do different things with our awesome coding abilities. And hey without us professionals the whole web would be made by 14-year-olds so don't complain too much.
You could put any other language in that sentence and it would still be just fine. I picked Java to fit in with the other posts in the thread. Continuity, you know.
Javascript is, fundamentally, just as good as Fortran (and the qualities of Fortran as a language are, of course, highly debatable).
Javascript is, fundamentally, just as good as Java (and the qualities of Java as a language are, of course, highly debatable). The main problem is that the syntax and a lot of the nuances of the language have to be kept loose so that if a crappy programmer writes crappy javascript it doesn't completely hose the website you're looking at or your browser. This is why I usually use jQuery or Prototype or something similar: because it abstracts away a lot of the particulars. The need for big libraries means that my own productivity comes at the cost of performance, though.
As for my wish list for the language itself, I really want to see recursion supported. It's there, obviously, the way it is in C or any other language, but it nearly always wrecks everything and it's very difficult to debug. Being a Lisp man, myself, though, it's hard to force my thoughts into while loops with stacks attached;).
C is for real programmers, not for web "programmers".;)
I know C very well but haven't used it in a while because very little that I do requires the performance of C. I use the best tool for the job, which is usually any language or framework that gets the job done fastest. Sometimes that's Ruby, sometimes Python, sometimes Haskell but really it's a scale of my productivity and my time vs. the efficiency of the end product. For just getting something out the door and prototyped quickly, interpreted languages win. You "real" programmers need to get over yourselves. I'm a web programmer and I went to school for the same shit you did. The web's just where the money's at and it's an industry where I can flex my design muscles too. The only real problem is that people at cocktail parties don't usually know the difference between what I do (ruby on rails, CMS dev, and javascript apps that look sexier than Flash) and what their neighbour's 14-year-old kid does (dreamweaver using the design view). Whatever. This is why I get paid so much more.
I have seen a bunch of people (more then 30) where smoking weed was more important then everything else
Who? I lived in northern California (marijuana central) for five years and I've never even heard of such a thing. All the scientific evidence points to marijuana to be psychologically addictive (as in the behaviour itself is addictive, not necessarily the actual chemical), so anyone who can claim to be addicted to marijuana has to be susceptible to that type of addiction. 99.9% of people can stop any time they need to and be relatively clear of any withdrawal-related pissiness in a couple of weeks.
All those people were weak and could have gotten addicted to anything?
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe we must live in two different worlds then. I am, of course, speaking from personal experience. I've been around for a while and have only had the pleasure of meeting one or two .NET or Java developers.
Is it not conceivable that .NET/Java programmers just don't hang out with the Ruby on Rails crowd that much?
Disclaimer: I live in Chicago, home of 37signals, so I'm solidly in Rails country over here. Actually... I may have just answered my own question there.
With a good cryptosystem, even intimate knowledge of the system's operation should not give an attacker sufficient information to break it. Also, in the case of, say, a one-time pad (wiki wiki wiki), the cryptography is absolute security, and knowing how a OTP cipher works won't help you at all to break it. Read the wikipedia article for the theoretical caveats that go along with that statement ;).
Knowing all about how Diffie-Helman works, to pick another simple example, doesn't really help you when breaking it quickly requires a polynomial-time solution to the Discrete Log problem. Find one of those and you'll be famous!
What's that even mean? Quantity, in terms of availability of people, absolutely equals quality, since you've a lot more people and it's more likely that one of them will be of a higher quality. If 1% of web programmers are good by your standards it should be much easier to find a good one in a crowd of 10,000 UNIX gurus than in a crowd of 100 .NET folks. You could even counter me with a similarly BS argument in favour of your side, but really it doesn't matter.
I was merely pointing out that .NET, being as it only runs on one platform and most general-purpose programmers would not be familiar with it, is a niche, albeit a large one. You can't couch it as "general" development when most developers "in general" do not use it. The web started on *NIX systems and it's still mostly a UNIX and POSIX game. When you say "general web development" I think most people think you're talking about a LAMP-like system.
It also does well when you must have generic developers for web development.
Are you implying that us UNIX/linux/OS X Server web developers are a special case? There's more .NET people than PHP/ruby/python/whatever people?
You can set up your machine this way right now if you want. Just put /home on a traditional disk and have the kernel and maybe a couple more trees of system files on an SSD. This way your SSD doesn't wear out as fast and you have super-quick read access to the kernel and settings.
If you're running something other than linux I'm sure there's a less transparent way of doing this. Mac OS doesn't really let you set mountpoints with Disk Utility but it won't freak out if you put in your own (MacFUSE does this). You may have to do so in a script though since Mac OS ignores the contents of /etc/fstab I thought. Someone out there probably knows for sure.
I haven't noticed massive speed increases even on single Javascript-heavy pages
That's why I wrote my own javascript benchmarks for this sort of thing. They're on my home computer but a basic rundown is that Chrome is wickedly fast. My benchmarks were an empty static for() loop, reversal of a huge array, sorting a huge array of random elements using the array.sort method, sorting a huge array of random elements using bubblesort, and generating random numbers. All of them ran at least a little bit faster on Chrome, and some of them like the bubble sort wouldn't even finish in Firefox or Safari but would take a couple of seconds on Chrome.
I even started an infinite loop in one of my tabs and all the rest of them were just fine. Still just as responsive as if I closed the offending tab.
For a real-world example: try using Meebo in FF then in Chrome. Everything looks the same--until you drag a window around. It's smooth enough in Chrome that you could maximize the window, hide your taskbar, and you could fool yourself into thinking it was just another IM client.
Chrome's a little spartan, I don't really expect good support for ad-blocking, and I'm a little sketched out by the EULA, but it's definitely impressive so far.
Now let's see what happens when FF has a fancy new javascript JIT too :D.
But hey,whatever melts your butter.
With your permission, I'd like to start saying that sometimes instead of my usual "Whatever blows your skirt up".
Yep. I think you're right. This way there's just two versions, one more stable than the other.
If you've ever paid for Google's apps service, it's missing some of the features of the beta that everyone has access to, but it has telephone support and all the features are guaranteed to work.
Whoa whoa whoa there.... Do what now?
You are a 25 year old man
Damn straight.
You should already have several children.
Some day, but a wise man once told me never to let them outnumber you, so the maximum is 2 for me.
You shouldn't be just finishing school
I'm not. I finished when I was 21. I've been working since then. My point was that I am still shackled by student debt.
you should have your own home and a history of service in your community
Um.... I'd like to? The market's so damn jumpy even with an absurd amount of money down I still couldn't get a mortgage.
I don't even know what the hell you're talking about with the rest of your post. Admittedly mine wasn't as cogent as I'd've liked, at least I didn't have any bizarre metaphors. Try again maybe?
I think Google does it that way because, for a hosted web application, version numbers are meaningless. There's just "the version", the one that's up there. It's not like you could have two people using different versions of Google Documents somewhere. Knowing that, and knowing that they're never "finished", it makes sense that they're just always in beta.
No. Blame Microsoft. When MS says "Gold" they really mean "beta" (see also: Windows).
To the rest of us "beta" means "still pretty buggy but similar enough to the final product that it can be seen by people".
On the surface you're right, but as a young person I kind of take offense to that viewpoint. You make it seem like everyone in this country is immature and that saving every last penny for your children is the only mature thing to do. I disagree.
I'm 25 years old, American, and I had to pay for 60% of my education myself through a combination of loans and bizarre money-making schemes (one time selling my white blood cells to a lab, or at least I think it was a lab...). I know my experience has not been typical at all but really I don't think the situation is as simple as telling people to grow up.
Take the sub-prime real estate crisis as an example. The whole thing was caused by a combination of banks that wanted to move loans and people who wanted to get what they perceived as the best possible deal. What resulted was an explosion of unpayable loans. I think people need to be more conscious of the risks inherent in credit, but also banks need to be more honest about what you'll be paying back in the end.
I was going to buy an apartment earlier this year, and I was paying 40% cash on it. The rest had to be credit because if I'd waited to save up the absurd amount of money necessary to buy it outright, it would've taken decades because all the while I'd still be paying rent. Meanwhile the mortgage situation allows for me to pay a fee (interest) for the convenience of saving up for the purchase after-the-fact, while I'm living in it. Meanwhile it increases in value (hopefully) in the long run and if I'm lucky that increase happens faster than interest.
The same goes with cars. It's very easy to take for granted that you have a car, but for a lot of people a car is an absolutely essential tool for employment that they simply cannot afford right now. You get into this chicken-and-egg problem where you need work to afford the car you need to find work to buy a car to find work to buy a car... loans are the only real way around that problem. The same thing goes for medical expenses and other time-sensitive purchases. You can't always control when you'll need something and when you'll have the money to pay for it.
Of course, I'm from the South, which is seriously the land of people buying things they can't really pay for. I don't think it's a question of maturity at all. I think it's more that these people just aren't familiar with the concept of interest and they think that they can just pay it all back over time with a little bit of overhead.
As we've delayed the maturing process in this country for so long, many people don't ever "grow up" and become responsible people. A nation of instant-gratifiers who whine that the government needs to help them out because they spent all their money on expensive cars and trips, put it all on credit so that they've ended up spending twice as much for something than they would have if they paid cash, and end up retiring with a buttload of debt that takes up half their retirement income.
It really seems like you're complaining about multiple different things here. I'll agree that, increasingly, my generation and the one after it lean on their parents to make a lot of their decisions. I've seen this a lot with my peers that find it difficult to truly act independently. Also, I'm really not sure if anyone in my generation hasn't given up on social security. The pay-it-backwards mentality upon which it was built wasn't sustainable and I personally have no expectation that my social security tax will ever come back to me.
Most people are uneducated in the ways of finance though, as I said, so if the government or company they work for doesn't manage a retirement for them, how are they supposed to do it?
(Sorry for all the rambling; I'm typing this in little pieces during downtime at work.)
It's kind of hard to understand why, if he already had XAMP and WAMP, he'd want to be using anything else as a simple development environment. For testing prior to deployment a VM is great; even better—if downtown would actually cost you enough money it's worth doubling up—get a second hosting just like your production one and call it staging.
Also, it's worth pointing out that Gentoo has great support for CMSes and similar things via the webapp-config command. It took me a few tries to realize how much more convenient it is. It just puts all the vhost stuff in a new file in /etc/apache2/vhost.d/ directory to reflect what it installed. Very convenient! I *think* it supports nginx too if you want to turn to the dark side.
Is it just me or did a LOT of people leaving comments here totally ignore the first word of the article title?
In machines that aren't networked, it's also hard to catch viruses.
Why? If you needed the keyboard and monitor, and indeed if you already had those, then this would still be smaller than the computer you had before.
Seriously why the nay-saying? This thing's so damn cute!
I just LOLed on the train because of you. Now people are staring more than usual.... Thanks for that.
Yeah that's what I initially thought. Like how birds flock in the same direction. Maybe every group of cattle has one really charismatic cow that likes facing north.
Getting way off-topic here, but remember there's a difference between being "charming" and being an overly-nice doormat type. Tread that line and it almost always works.
We should totally write a /. girl advice column. We'll be heros!
those who don't wish to block ads completely.
Who's that?
How about a "death penalty" where the victims are given the company itself?
What would they do with it?
I think the name Javascript is unfortunate that way. It's really only vaguely similar in syntax to Java, and lacks most of the functionality of Javascript. Really what needs to happen is a complete re-work of how Javascript is interpreted in browsers. So, getting back on-topic here, I think this is a wonderful start.
Oh and once again don't dump on us web programmers. Some of us are just as 1337 as you are we just do different things with our awesome coding abilities. And hey without us professionals the whole web would be made by 14-year-olds so don't complain too much.
You could put any other language in that sentence and it would still be just fine. I picked Java to fit in with the other posts in the thread. Continuity, you know.
Javascript is, fundamentally, just as good as Fortran (and the qualities of Fortran as a language are, of course, highly debatable).
See?
Javascript is, fundamentally, just as good as Java (and the qualities of Java as a language are, of course, highly debatable). The main problem is that the syntax and a lot of the nuances of the language have to be kept loose so that if a crappy programmer writes crappy javascript it doesn't completely hose the website you're looking at or your browser. This is why I usually use jQuery or Prototype or something similar: because it abstracts away a lot of the particulars. The need for big libraries means that my own productivity comes at the cost of performance, though.
As for my wish list for the language itself, I really want to see recursion supported. It's there, obviously, the way it is in C or any other language, but it nearly always wrecks everything and it's very difficult to debug. Being a Lisp man, myself, though, it's hard to force my thoughts into while loops with stacks attached ;).
C is for real programmers, not for web "programmers". ;)
I know C very well but haven't used it in a while because very little that I do requires the performance of C. I use the best tool for the job, which is usually any language or framework that gets the job done fastest. Sometimes that's Ruby, sometimes Python, sometimes Haskell but really it's a scale of my productivity and my time vs. the efficiency of the end product. For just getting something out the door and prototyped quickly, interpreted languages win. You "real" programmers need to get over yourselves. I'm a web programmer and I went to school for the same shit you did. The web's just where the money's at and it's an industry where I can flex my design muscles too. The only real problem is that people at cocktail parties don't usually know the difference between what I do (ruby on rails, CMS dev, and javascript apps that look sexier than Flash) and what their neighbour's 14-year-old kid does (dreamweaver using the design view). Whatever. This is why I get paid so much more.
I have seen a bunch of people (more then 30) where smoking weed was more important then everything else
Who? I lived in northern California (marijuana central) for five years and I've never even heard of such a thing. All the scientific evidence points to marijuana to be psychologically addictive (as in the behaviour itself is addictive, not necessarily the actual chemical), so anyone who can claim to be addicted to marijuana has to be susceptible to that type of addiction. 99.9% of people can stop any time they need to and be relatively clear of any withdrawal-related pissiness in a couple of weeks.
All those people were weak and could have gotten addicted to anything?
Yes. They were.