Isn't that awful? I can't understand why they did it.
Moving stuff on web pages sucks. Especially on that web page.
The bad thing isn't the fade in itself. It's that Google used to be run by people who knew what sucked and what didn't. Now it seems like there are people who don't know in positions to call some shots. It's a bad omen.
They're probably about 10 years away from their own version of Microsoft's "Bob".
This sounds more stupid than evil, which is interesting, because Google doesn't do obviously stupid things very often.
The patent won't do them any good, because it won't stand up in court. They could use it to attack someone small -- an open source developer who would have to back down because they couldn't handle teh legal fees -- but they don't have much of a history of that sort of thing, and there's no reason to think they would in this case, either.
It won't do them any good at all against someone big -- MS and Bing, for example -- because MS would have good lawyers who could demonstrate prior art to a court.
I have an iPhone, I live in NYC, and my network is terrible. That's exactly the kind of problem markets are supposed to solve, right? I should ditch AT&T and go with a competitor.
The problem is that my phone cost $300, the Apple Care costs $70 (and you need it because the battery is sealed into the phone, and won't last 2 years), and there's a $175 early termination fee. So walking away is pretty expensive.
This Google phone will have essentially the same deal. You'll still be tied to a carrier, and it will be expensive to walk away. Maybe Verizon or T-Mobile will be a lot better than AT&T. Or maybe when many millions of people buy these data hungry phones in a short period of time, their networks will sink just like AT&T's has.
We need to commoditize wireless bandwidth. We want a universe in which we buy our phones directly, we own them, and we can choose which networks to plug them into. And if a network is bad, we have to be free to walk.
These walled gardens are always going to give us crummy throughput, unreliable service, and restrictions on the apps we can run. Just swapping one corporation (T-Mobile) for another (AT&T) isn't going to fix anything. Maybe they'll be marginally better. But without a real market operating, and the ability for us to move around in response to the quality of service we receive, we'll never get a good wireless network.
How much do we know about the ways in which Apple uses rumors to gin up interest in new products?
It seems likely to me that they leak stuff to keep us all talking, but I don't have any proof of that. It also seems likely to me that if they're going to be leaking stuff, they might not always leak accurate information.
There was a story awhile back that quoted Yoko Ono as saying that the Beatles were coming to iTunes. Does anyone ever bother to dig into those stories to see what happened? Did Yoko actually say that? Was there a deal that fell apart? Did the reporter just make it up? If so, why? Was Apple trying to get us talking?
Despite all of my suspicions about leaks and promotion, I'm really excited about the tablet. It will be really interesting to see what they do with the interface.
The phone is surprisingly popular, and no one has a crystal ball.
For most products, there's some sort of limit on how much you can sell, that's connected to how many of them you make.
Southwest can only fly so many people to a certain destination, a bakery can only sell so many cupcakes, a barber can only take so many appointments, a restaurant only has so many tables, etc.
Sometimes popular products and services sell out -- it's a very common situation in business.
There is a limit on the number of iPhones the AT&T network can support. The exact number is fuzzy, but there's no doubt that they've gone beyond it here in NYC. They should just say that they're sold out until they grow the network.
Again, it's not any different than a restaurant declining to take a reservation because they're full. Respectable businesses do this all the time. It's perfectly reasonable.
This is responsible -- they don't have enough towers, and they shouldn't be selling any more phones until they build more capacity.
It's not any different than not selling additional seats on an airplane that's already full. No one would blame an airline for not overbooking. I don't think we should blame AT&T for doing the right thing.
As a New Yorker with an iPhone, I hope Apple follows suit and stops selling iPhones to New Yorkers until the network is robust enough to provide decent service.
Failing that, I think they should waive early termination fees for NYC users.
I don't have a Kindle, but I use the iPhone app, and it's pretty great. Carrying books in your pocket is very convenient, and I like the reading experience the Kindle app provides. I put it in landscape mode, crank up the typeface size a bit, and it's really wonderful. Ideal for reading on the subway.
The ironic thing is that the iPhone app made me less likely to buy a physical reader -- when I first got the app, I really wanted to run out and buy one. But most of the books I want to read aren't available, so two or three months after starting with the app, the experience of searching for book after book that isn't available has soured me on the product. No matter how convenient the device is, and no matter how nice the reading experience is, it's not a great solution for me.
I don't understand how publishers can live with a single company like Amazon controlling electronic distribution. And I don't understand how customers would be able to live with a balkanized world of competing readers that all carry different sets of books, due to different deals with publishing houses. And finally, I don't understand how a truly open format can come into being without creating substantial piracy problems.
I use NX all the time -- I'm using it now. My main desktop is on a VPS account, that I hit from both work and home.
The criticisms of the NX server are right on the money. It's pretty rough. Problems don't get fixed, and it doesn't move forward.
I doubt this is what Google is thinking, but it seems to me that NX represents an alternative way to do the cloud. I have everything in the cloud -- a full suite of desktop apps -- because I use my VPS and NX. It all just works. And it's all under my control. There aren't any privacy issues.
Do they have something on the web site about this?
My reaction when I read the story was (a) Wow, I really want to do this, and (b) what if I'm denied coverage at some point down the road because of it?
As soon as I'm really confident that I won't get burned, I'm in.
This will give the Merb people a lot more momentum, and their project will have a really big community, a thriving job market, and lots of books written about it.
And it will give Rails the value of all of the good stuff that Merb brings to the table -- Rails will be more modular and less monolithic, easier to learn, and easier to move forward because people will be able to split off smaller pieces and improve them.
The technology exists. It's out of the bag. It doesn't matter if Google does it -- if they don't, someone else will.
You have to assume that in a couple of years, someone can take a phone cam picture of you on the street and use it to trace you back to a Facebook page (or whatever). Or that the police can trace you back to your DMV photo.
If you can't handle that, stop posting pictures of yourself in a way that allows someone to tie them to your real name. And take down the ones that are already up there.
I'll bet there's a really interesting story behind this.
Here's the answer. She's trying to solve a human problem with a technical solution. It won't work. If she has to use a suspect windows computer, there's no software that will guarantee it's clean. It can't be done.
And if you can't trust the person you're married to, your main problems in life aren't computer problems.
I learned Algol in the 8th grade -- it was my second language, after BASIC. I had an account on a PDP-10 timesharing system.
I don't remember it being conceptually difficult. It just had the block structure syntax. Which is actually a lot easier for non-trivial programs than BASIC's spaghetti code.
I have an iPod touch. I bought one within a week of its being available. I got the 16G one. It was $400.
Apple locked me out of linux with it -- it won't sync on my computer. I can't add 3rd party apps. And now when I sync it, I keep seeing ads for a $20 upgrade they want to sell me. Whenever I see people who have a touch, I ask them -- and we all feel the same way. We're all kind of offended by that nickel and dime $20 pitch.
It's a beautiful device. As an object, it's pretty much the best gadget I've ever owned. But apple is really making it suck for me, to the point where I don't think I'd buy another iPod.
And it's dumb. They're not going to sell me that $20 upgrade, and not only that, but by pushing it, they're going to lose the next $400 iPod sale. And I can't use the thing if it won't sync on linux. I can't sync my podcasts. I carry my old iPod with me, and leave the touch at home. Seriously.
And again, this is pretty much the coolest object I've ever owned. They've started out with that, and made it crummy and negative.
If history has taught us anything over the past few years, it's that putting guys from Yale in charge of things is always a great idea.
So let's let this wise man create a national biometric identification system. It sounds like a bad idea to me, but I'm just part of the rabble. I haven't had the benefit of his education and experience. I've never even been to a regatta!
MS looses to Google because their management makes bad choices. At least their choices are bad when compared to Google's.
MS's management will continue to make bad choices. If they had enough money to buy Google itself, and if anti-trust concerns weren't a factor, it wouldn't matter. They would break Google and push it into the ground. They problem isn't their strategic position. The problem is in between their ears.
Look at Hotmail and Gmail. Hotmail was a very early web email service. MS bought them. Then they just let it sit there. MS people saw Oddpost coming down the road, and they should have gotten all pumped up with what was possible. That's apparently what happened at Google -- someone saw that fancy Oddpost ajax email client, and said, let's do this better than Oddpost is doing it.
MS doesn't try to do much until someone pokes them with a stick, and a lot of times they don't do much even then. Right now the world is screaming at them about all of the things wrong with Vista, and their response is -- no, you are all STUPID, and we are right, and you just don't get how awesome Vista is.
They're not fixing anything.
They're the victims of their own monopoly. They're fat and stupid and lazy, and they think the world owes them success. They're insanely profitable, but it's because they're in the catbird seat, and not because they're earning it. They don't have to earn it, and because they don't feel the heat, they can't earn it.
So you know, sit back in your lavish headquarters, and reminisce about how great it was to go out and threaten to cut off people's air supplies, and how wonderful the world was when you could bully people effectively.
I feel bad for yahoo. I remember when it was just some page on a guy's workstation at stanford. They did a lot of great things. They don't deserve this ignominious fate.
And there are stories floating around that yahoo people are saying -- there's no way in hell that we'll work for MS. So, MS, know that everyone dislikes you. And know that it's a direct consequence of your deliberately cultivated culture of bullying and thuggery.
Everyone at yahoo knows that when you buy that company, you're going to break it, and that going to work on a day to day basis is going to suck. And believe it or not, that has a lot to do with why you will not beat google.
Someday google will suck too. Their culture will rot, and dumb people will climb on top of the smart people. But that day is a long way off.
So you know, go off and think about how to make sure my monitor will prevent me from playing unauthorized videos, or how to make my computer's audio system check up on the license status of my music. Because I'm your customer, and believe me, that's what I'm really pining away for. That's what I want more than anything. You know me so well it's scary sometimes.
You can see MS compounding their errors here, by spinning Vista's successes, and not facing honestly up to the things that people don't like about it, and coming up with solutions.
Customers says, "We don't like Vista!" and MS says, "Yes you do!"
If that doesn't prove that they have a monopolist's attitude, nothing does.
I don't know Python, and I don't want to try to compare Ruby with it. And I'm not a real programmer, just an amateur, so take this with a big grain of salt. I could be completely wrong here.
The heart of Ruby is its use of idiom. It's a difficult thing to describe, and I don't know how you'd find some metric to measure it, or to compare it to another language. But it's very clean, and very sensible, and surprisingly simple, at least on the surface.
There's a kind of aesthetic pleasure to be had in the syntax of Ruby. I was about to write that in that sense it's kind of an anti-perl, but that's flame bait, and I never connected with perl, and lots of people probably find perl beautiful. But Ruby is really great.
You can do things like:
1.upto(10) {|x| puts x }
Which does:
1 2 3...
This thing looks a lot like an old fashioned for/each loop, but it's an iterator, and the code in the curly brackets is a closure. So under the hood, it's fairly different from a for/each loop.
There are a few things to mention about this.
First, because there are lots of iterators on the shelf, and because you can write your own iterators if you want, this thing is a lot more powerful than looping constructs in many other languages.
Second -- and this is the sort of thing I was trying to get at above -- the syntax for closures is tweaked so it makes human intuitive sense when you're using closures with iterators. In your head, you might be thinking in for/each terms, and the syntax colludes with you if you want to hang on to that useful fiction.
In Lisp, you can never forget about the lambdas. In Ruby, you just sort of do what you want, and the lambdas are there under the hood, but they're not jumping out at you in the same way. Ruby's syntax fits the way a lot of people think, and it hides the stuff that it makes sense to hide, and exposes the stuff that it makes sense to expose.
And when you write out that line of code, its meaning is very clear and easy to grab a hold of, and it turns out that it's usually very concise and compact as well.
This is a little redundant, but I want to stress it, that line of code really is a pretty thing, in a sense. It's not so remarkable if you think of it as a for/each loop, but it's not a for/each loop -- it's an iterator and a closure, and that's a somewhat complicated thing, but here it isn't complicated, or opaque. It's clean, and it makes sense, and it's concise, but most of all, the shape of the code conforms to the shape of the idea in your head. That's what Ruby is all about, and you see that over and over and over again.
Third, this approach to idiom is a real dual edged blade for me, because there's a culture in Ruby books that sort of says, "You know what this line of code is doing, so don't worry too much about the lambdas." For a long time, I felt lost in Ruby -- like, I kind of knew what the code was going to do, but I wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen under the hood. That's a really uncomfortable place to be. I had to watch the SICP lectures to really grab hold of Ruby.
It's always dangerous to talk about some other culture -- I could be way off base here, and I hope I don't say anything really dumb. But it feels Japanese to me -- it reminds me of a drawing where there aren't many lines, but all the lines are kind of perfect and clean. It's got that same sense of elegance to it. Let's boil this big thing down to its essence, and make it beautiful and sparse.
I can't tell you that Ruby is better than some other language. But I can tell you that it's very beautiful, and that the beauty lives in lots of small little details. The experience of learning and using Ruby is one of noticing these little things and saying, "Wow, how great is that?"
I used to live in an apartment building that had been designed by a famous architect -- Mies van der Rohe. The design made a difference -- I can't tell you why or how, exactly, but it d
The whole notion of "or any future version" of the license, as is commonly used in GPL and GFDL licenses, has always worried me. IANAL, but from a legal standpoint, it seems odd that you can agree in a binding way to something which is yet to be defined.
I'm not a lawyer, so this is pretty much worthless. But in my experience, most contracts or agreements have stuff that's vague or poorly defined in them, and when conflicts arise or businesses go broke, people fight tooth and nail over them.
For example, when people are forming a partnership for some new venture, they're usually not thinking about what happens if the thing busts out, or there's only enough salary to pay one instead of two, or whatever.
I'm sure lawyers could fight over that clause in the license. I don't know if they'd win. But I'm sure someone could try, and I'd be surprised if the outcome would be easy to predict even though the language in the license is clear. So to me -- and again, I'm not a lawyer, and the people who draft these licenses are a lot smarter than I am, so take this with a grain of salt -- it looks really dumb.
There's a thing that people do sometimes -- they'll have you sign some stupid form, or put up a sign that says, "not responsible for xxx." None of that is sturdy legally -- but they try to convince gullible people that they've lost before they've started.
Maybe that's what this is -- an attempt to sweep as many people along into the next generation of a license, by trying to convince them that they've already agreed to it. I hope that's not what they're doing here. But if they put that language in, and aren't confident that it would stand a challenge, then it kind of would be what they're doing.
And again, obviously, to head off the critics, I don't know what I'm talking about, so take it all with a giant grain of salt.
Lawyers, even the good guys, bring out the cynic in me.
Why not just have people use their driver's license every time?
Wouldn't the comparatively simple low tech solution be better? Wouldn't even older smokers rather have a reliable system that one that's probably going to deny them cigarettes when it misreads their faces?
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't that awful? I can't understand why they did it.
Moving stuff on web pages sucks. Especially on that web page.
The bad thing isn't the fade in itself. It's that Google used to be run by people who knew what sucked and what didn't. Now it seems like there are people who don't know in positions to call some shots. It's a bad omen.
They're probably about 10 years away from their own version of Microsoft's "Bob".
This sounds more stupid than evil, which is interesting, because Google doesn't do obviously stupid things very often.
The patent won't do them any good, because it won't stand up in court. They could use it to attack someone small -- an open source developer who would have to back down because they couldn't handle teh legal fees -- but they don't have much of a history of that sort of thing, and there's no reason to think they would in this case, either.
It won't do them any good at all against someone big -- MS and Bing, for example -- because MS would have good lawyers who could demonstrate prior art to a court.
So what's the point?
I'm pretty underwhelmed by the announcement.
I have an iPhone, I live in NYC, and my network is terrible. That's exactly the kind of problem markets are supposed to solve, right? I should ditch AT&T and go with a competitor.
The problem is that my phone cost $300, the Apple Care costs $70 (and you need it because the battery is sealed into the phone, and won't last 2 years), and there's a $175 early termination fee. So walking away is pretty expensive.
This Google phone will have essentially the same deal. You'll still be tied to a carrier, and it will be expensive to walk away. Maybe Verizon or T-Mobile will be a lot better than AT&T. Or maybe when many millions of people buy these data hungry phones in a short period of time, their networks will sink just like AT&T's has.
We need to commoditize wireless bandwidth. We want a universe in which we buy our phones directly, we own them, and we can choose which networks to plug them into. And if a network is bad, we have to be free to walk.
These walled gardens are always going to give us crummy throughput, unreliable service, and restrictions on the apps we can run. Just swapping one corporation (T-Mobile) for another (AT&T) isn't going to fix anything. Maybe they'll be marginally better. But without a real market operating, and the ability for us to move around in response to the quality of service we receive, we'll never get a good wireless network.
How much do we know about the ways in which Apple uses rumors to gin up interest in new products?
It seems likely to me that they leak stuff to keep us all talking, but I don't have any proof of that. It also seems likely to me that if they're going to be leaking stuff, they might not always leak accurate information.
There was a story awhile back that quoted Yoko Ono as saying that the Beatles were coming to iTunes. Does anyone ever bother to dig into those stories to see what happened? Did Yoko actually say that? Was there a deal that fell apart? Did the reporter just make it up? If so, why? Was Apple trying to get us talking?
Despite all of my suspicions about leaks and promotion, I'm really excited about the tablet. It will be really interesting to see what they do with the interface.
I didn't know that they were required to provide service to anyone who asks. I have to admit that knocks a pretty big hole in my argument.
Thanks.
No one is listening to you!
Thanks, though. :)
The phone is surprisingly popular, and no one has a crystal ball.
For most products, there's some sort of limit on how much you can sell, that's connected to how many of them you make.
Southwest can only fly so many people to a certain destination, a bakery can only sell so many cupcakes, a barber can only take so many appointments, a restaurant only has so many tables, etc.
Sometimes popular products and services sell out -- it's a very common situation in business.
There is a limit on the number of iPhones the AT&T network can support. The exact number is fuzzy, but there's no doubt that they've gone beyond it here in NYC. They should just say that they're sold out until they grow the network.
Again, it's not any different than a restaurant declining to take a reservation because they're full. Respectable businesses do this all the time. It's perfectly reasonable.
This is responsible -- they don't have enough towers, and they shouldn't be selling any more phones until they build more capacity.
It's not any different than not selling additional seats on an airplane that's already full. No one would blame an airline for not overbooking. I don't think we should blame AT&T for doing the right thing.
As a New Yorker with an iPhone, I hope Apple follows suit and stops selling iPhones to New Yorkers until the network is robust enough to provide decent service.
Failing that, I think they should waive early termination fees for NYC users.
I don't have a Kindle, but I use the iPhone app, and it's pretty great. Carrying books in your pocket is very convenient, and I like the reading experience the Kindle app provides. I put it in landscape mode, crank up the typeface size a bit, and it's really wonderful. Ideal for reading on the subway.
The ironic thing is that the iPhone app made me less likely to buy a physical reader -- when I first got the app, I really wanted to run out and buy one. But most of the books I want to read aren't available, so two or three months after starting with the app, the experience of searching for book after book that isn't available has soured me on the product. No matter how convenient the device is, and no matter how nice the reading experience is, it's not a great solution for me.
I don't understand how publishers can live with a single company like Amazon controlling electronic distribution. And I don't understand how customers would be able to live with a balkanized world of competing readers that all carry different sets of books, due to different deals with publishing houses. And finally, I don't understand how a truly open format can come into being without creating substantial piracy problems.
Real books do have some upsides.
I use NX all the time -- I'm using it now. My main desktop is on a VPS account, that I hit from both work and home.
The criticisms of the NX server are right on the money. It's pretty rough. Problems don't get fixed, and it doesn't move forward.
I doubt this is what Google is thinking, but it seems to me that NX represents an alternative way to do the cloud. I have everything in the cloud -- a full suite of desktop apps -- because I use my VPS and NX. It all just works. And it's all under my control. There aren't any privacy issues.
So I'm really pleased by this development.
Thanks to the folks at Google for this project.
It's amazing how they keep going, and going and going. And how a management team can fly the plane into the side of a mountain and keep their jobs.
Do they have something on the web site about this?
My reaction when I read the story was (a) Wow, I really want to do this, and (b) what if I'm denied coverage at some point down the road because of it?
As soon as I'm really confident that I won't get burned, I'm in.
This will give the Merb people a lot more momentum, and their project will have a really big community, a thriving job market, and lots of books written about it.
And it will give Rails the value of all of the good stuff that Merb brings to the table -- Rails will be more modular and less monolithic, easier to learn, and easier to move forward because people will be able to split off smaller pieces and improve them.
That's what I was thinking -- it would be nice to pick one up for cheap.
The technology exists. It's out of the bag. It doesn't matter if Google does it -- if they don't, someone else will.
You have to assume that in a couple of years, someone can take a phone cam picture of you on the street and use it to trace you back to a Facebook page (or whatever). Or that the police can trace you back to your DMV photo.
If you can't handle that, stop posting pictures of yourself in a way that allows someone to tie them to your real name. And take down the ones that are already up there.
This is inevitable.
I'll bet there's a really interesting story behind this.
Here's the answer. She's trying to solve a human problem with a technical solution. It won't work. If she has to use a suspect windows computer, there's no software that will guarantee it's clean. It can't be done.
And if you can't trust the person you're married to, your main problems in life aren't computer problems.
There's no way a site like this could withstand heavy traffic. I don't know why the editors would sink it like this.
It will probably be dead for days now.
I learned Algol in the 8th grade -- it was my second language, after BASIC. I had an account on a PDP-10 timesharing system.
I don't remember it being conceptually difficult. It just had the block structure syntax. Which is actually a lot easier for non-trivial programs than BASIC's spaghetti code.
I have an iPod touch. I bought one within a week of its being available. I got the 16G one. It was $400.
Apple locked me out of linux with it -- it won't sync on my computer. I can't add 3rd party apps. And now when I sync it, I keep seeing ads for a $20 upgrade they want to sell me. Whenever I see people who have a touch, I ask them -- and we all feel the same way. We're all kind of offended by that nickel and dime $20 pitch.
It's a beautiful device. As an object, it's pretty much the best gadget I've ever owned. But apple is really making it suck for me, to the point where I don't think I'd buy another iPod.
And it's dumb. They're not going to sell me that $20 upgrade, and not only that, but by pushing it, they're going to lose the next $400 iPod sale. And I can't use the thing if it won't sync on linux. I can't sync my podcasts. I carry my old iPod with me, and leave the touch at home. Seriously.
And again, this is pretty much the coolest object I've ever owned. They've started out with that, and made it crummy and negative.
For nothing.
If history has taught us anything over the past few years, it's that putting guys from Yale in charge of things is always a great idea.
So let's let this wise man create a national biometric identification system. It sounds like a bad idea to me, but I'm just part of the rabble. I haven't had the benefit of his education and experience. I've never even been to a regatta!
MS looses to Google because their management makes bad choices. At least their choices are bad when compared to Google's.
MS's management will continue to make bad choices. If they had enough money to buy Google itself, and if anti-trust concerns weren't a factor, it wouldn't matter. They would break Google and push it into the ground. They problem isn't their strategic position. The problem is in between their ears.
Look at Hotmail and Gmail. Hotmail was a very early web email service. MS bought them. Then they just let it sit there. MS people saw Oddpost coming down the road, and they should have gotten all pumped up with what was possible. That's apparently what happened at Google -- someone saw that fancy Oddpost ajax email client, and said, let's do this better than Oddpost is doing it.
MS doesn't try to do much until someone pokes them with a stick, and a lot of times they don't do much even then. Right now the world is screaming at them about all of the things wrong with Vista, and their response is -- no, you are all STUPID, and we are right, and you just don't get how awesome Vista is.
They're not fixing anything.
They're the victims of their own monopoly. They're fat and stupid and lazy, and they think the world owes them success. They're insanely profitable, but it's because they're in the catbird seat, and not because they're earning it. They don't have to earn it, and because they don't feel the heat, they can't earn it.
So you know, sit back in your lavish headquarters, and reminisce about how great it was to go out and threaten to cut off people's air supplies, and how wonderful the world was when you could bully people effectively.
I feel bad for yahoo. I remember when it was just some page on a guy's workstation at stanford. They did a lot of great things. They don't deserve this ignominious fate.
And there are stories floating around that yahoo people are saying -- there's no way in hell that we'll work for MS. So, MS, know that everyone dislikes you. And know that it's a direct consequence of your deliberately cultivated culture of bullying and thuggery.
Everyone at yahoo knows that when you buy that company, you're going to break it, and that going to work on a day to day basis is going to suck. And believe it or not, that has a lot to do with why you will not beat google.
Someday google will suck too. Their culture will rot, and dumb people will climb on top of the smart people. But that day is a long way off.
So you know, go off and think about how to make sure my monitor will prevent me from playing unauthorized videos, or how to make my computer's audio system check up on the license status of my music. Because I'm your customer, and believe me, that's what I'm really pining away for. That's what I want more than anything. You know me so well it's scary sometimes.
You can see MS compounding their errors here, by spinning Vista's successes, and not facing honestly up to the things that people don't like about it, and coming up with solutions.
Customers says, "We don't like Vista!" and MS says, "Yes you do!"
If that doesn't prove that they have a monopolist's attitude, nothing does.
I don't know Python, and I don't want to try to compare Ruby with it. And I'm not a real programmer, just an amateur, so take this with a big grain of salt. I could be completely wrong here.
...
The heart of Ruby is its use of idiom. It's a difficult thing to describe, and I don't know how you'd find some metric to measure it, or to compare it to another language. But it's very clean, and very sensible, and surprisingly simple, at least on the surface.
There's a kind of aesthetic pleasure to be had in the syntax of Ruby. I was about to write that in that sense it's kind of an anti-perl, but that's flame bait, and I never connected with perl, and lots of people probably find perl beautiful. But Ruby is really great.
You can do things like:
1.upto(10) {|x| puts x }
Which does:
1
2
3
This thing looks a lot like an old fashioned for/each loop, but it's an iterator, and the code in the curly brackets is a closure. So under the hood, it's fairly different from a for/each loop.
There are a few things to mention about this.
First, because there are lots of iterators on the shelf, and because you can write your own iterators if you want, this thing is a lot more powerful than looping constructs in many other languages.
Second -- and this is the sort of thing I was trying to get at above -- the syntax for closures is tweaked so it makes human intuitive sense when you're using closures with iterators. In your head, you might be thinking in for/each terms, and the syntax colludes with you if you want to hang on to that useful fiction.
In Lisp, you can never forget about the lambdas. In Ruby, you just sort of do what you want, and the lambdas are there under the hood, but they're not jumping out at you in the same way. Ruby's syntax fits the way a lot of people think, and it hides the stuff that it makes sense to hide, and exposes the stuff that it makes sense to expose.
And when you write out that line of code, its meaning is very clear and easy to grab a hold of, and it turns out that it's usually very concise and compact as well.
This is a little redundant, but I want to stress it, that line of code really is a pretty thing, in a sense. It's not so remarkable if you think of it as a for/each loop, but it's not a for/each loop -- it's an iterator and a closure, and that's a somewhat complicated thing, but here it isn't complicated, or opaque. It's clean, and it makes sense, and it's concise, but most of all, the shape of the code conforms to the shape of the idea in your head. That's what Ruby is all about, and you see that over and over and over again.
Third, this approach to idiom is a real dual edged blade for me, because there's a culture in Ruby books that sort of says, "You know what this line of code is doing, so don't worry too much about the lambdas." For a long time, I felt lost in Ruby -- like, I kind of knew what the code was going to do, but I wasn't exactly sure what was going to happen under the hood. That's a really uncomfortable place to be. I had to watch the SICP lectures to really grab hold of Ruby.
It's always dangerous to talk about some other culture -- I could be way off base here, and I hope I don't say anything really dumb. But it feels Japanese to me -- it reminds me of a drawing where there aren't many lines, but all the lines are kind of perfect and clean. It's got that same sense of elegance to it. Let's boil this big thing down to its essence, and make it beautiful and sparse.
I can't tell you that Ruby is better than some other language. But I can tell you that it's very beautiful, and that the beauty lives in lots of small little details. The experience of learning and using Ruby is one of noticing these little things and saying, "Wow, how great is that?"
I used to live in an apartment building that had been designed by a famous architect -- Mies van der Rohe. The design made a difference -- I can't tell you why or how, exactly, but it d
I'm not a lawyer, so this is pretty much worthless. But in my experience, most contracts or agreements have stuff that's vague or poorly defined in them, and when conflicts arise or businesses go broke, people fight tooth and nail over them.
For example, when people are forming a partnership for some new venture, they're usually not thinking about what happens if the thing busts out, or there's only enough salary to pay one instead of two, or whatever.
I'm sure lawyers could fight over that clause in the license. I don't know if they'd win. But I'm sure someone could try, and I'd be surprised if the outcome would be easy to predict even though the language in the license is clear. So to me -- and again, I'm not a lawyer, and the people who draft these licenses are a lot smarter than I am, so take this with a grain of salt -- it looks really dumb.
There's a thing that people do sometimes -- they'll have you sign some stupid form, or put up a sign that says, "not responsible for xxx." None of that is sturdy legally -- but they try to convince gullible people that they've lost before they've started.
Maybe that's what this is -- an attempt to sweep as many people along into the next generation of a license, by trying to convince them that they've already agreed to it. I hope that's not what they're doing here. But if they put that language in, and aren't confident that it would stand a challenge, then it kind of would be what they're doing.
And again, obviously, to head off the critics, I don't know what I'm talking about, so take it all with a giant grain of salt.
Lawyers, even the good guys, bring out the cynic in me.
Why not just have people use their driver's license every time?
Wouldn't the comparatively simple low tech solution be better? Wouldn't even older smokers rather have a reliable system that one that's probably going to deny them cigarettes when it misreads their faces?