Ruby itself doesn't have threading; it's FAUX threads.
By that standard PHP or python doesn't have threads. Ruby at least is able to run green threads and fibers, and PHP can't even do that. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with "application" versus "web" development, since on the "back end" a web app and an app app look a lot alike, and something like twitter definitely needs a message queue that works with memcached.
After the success of Hulu and LinkedIn and the continued adoption of Rails for larger projects (many sited below), I think we can relegate the "Ruby doesn't scale" meme to crank-land, don't you agree?
Re:Should have used PHP.
on
Twitter On Scala
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· Score: 2, Funny
Well, it wasn't stable enough for twitter:D
Re:Should have used PHP.
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
RoR was (and still is to a certain extent) a fad environment, popular primarily because of its differentness.
Huh, I generally use it because it has really good ORM and migrations, and I really like the syntax (coming from Objective-C it's pretty slick. I also used the PHP language when I was starting out, but one day it tried to insist that $myArr[0] and $myArr["0"] actually pointed to the same object, and I have refused to deal with it ever since; I also got tired of typing str_sub_case_insensitive_for_real_safe(haystack, needle) -- or is it needle, haystack? And is this one of those prank functions that fails to substitute the value but still returns a value that evals true? Or if I leave out one of those underscores, am I in fact calling a function that behaves almost exactly the same way but fails under difficult-to-reproduce circumstances? Maybe they've fixed this and the other sundry atrocities? Maybe they've stopped trying to make it into Perl, as compiled by a C++ compiler, and tried fashioning it into an actual dynamic language? I know, I know, some people like PHP, but I think arguments for the superiority of PHP over Ruby (or Python or Scala or Lisp or WebObjects or Perl6 or really anything else) are going to rest completely on the skills of the Zend interpreter writers, and almost never on the quality/readability/maintainability of the code, or the ease of the development process. You can write good safe code in PHP, that is true, but it isn't very ergonomic.
You know, RoR is really good at replacing those old Paradox and FMP database systems. I can see how Facebook might prefer PHP, but people trying to replace little inventory/business processes systems generally only need to support a few dozen users, and don't have an army of developers to keep it running. The Universe is big enough to accommodate the utility of Ruby on Rails and the Twitter developer's stupidity.
We coulda built three superconducting supercolliders with the money spent on one ISS, and I don't think the ISS will ever deliver the science of the SSC. At least that's what Steven Weinberg thought, and he's better situated to know than either of us.
The DoD also approved the Space Shuttle's final dimensions on the basis of $100/lb launch costs and a constant schedule of military payloads... I think if you were to hand the DoD a purchase order for a pallet load of marshmallow peeps, they'd only be to happy to certify their nuclear/chem/bio survivability and tactical necessity. They just like to buy toys, and nobody questions them about wether they really need something, and nobody ever tests them to make sure they really use it...
At least in this case we ended up with the Internet, and not the spaceplane-that-wouldn't-die-and-syphons-science-money.
I think the quality of games projects like this would improve immensely if the developers/BDFLs did a few things...
Develop useful and easy tools for authoring the content. Map editors, audio sequencing, all of that stuff. It should all be useable without any knowledge of the code.
The developers should work hard to integrate a few key artists into the devlopment workflow to code the packaged levels.
It isn't sufficient to put out a game and tell a mass-market audeince "you can build whatever level you want!" A game needs a very high-quality campaign the brings in newbies and showcases the abilities of the platform.
The artists should be able to submit their work in an analogous way to how coders submit their work. The developers should foster a commuity process that lets everyone have their say without stepping on the artist's prerogative to create. (This is a really hard one. Not everyone knows the best way to ray trace, but every idiot with a keyboard thinks they know what color the BFG's stock should be). The art can go through code review like anything else -- a big problem with this is that most audio/visual file formats are undiffable and can't be run efficently through an SCM. I know, I've tried.
The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.
As a sound designer and someone that wasted most of his undergrand noodling around with the StarCraft map editor, I don't really buy this. There are A LOT of creative people in graphics and audio and music that would love to demonstrate their abilities and have a "calling card" for their work. I don't know the specifics of this project, but in my experience as an erstwhile OSS dev (I do too many things) the people who run these projects are way too developer-coder centric in their management and don't make any effort to create easy tools for artists. I don't mean "download this python script and you can only use GIMP, luzer!" I mean "drag-and-drop your art from whatever source you want and use your wacom or whatever industry-standard tools you're confortable with to manipulate it." If you need to know any coding at all in order to contribute art to these projects, you are in fail territory.
Read the original link. In the end, they figured out that users were not trained to expect a floppy to spin immediately upon insertion, and would suspect they unleashed a virus or something even nastier.
That's sortof a false sense of security, no? Better that they be infected by the MBR when they go to read the disk than when they insert it? I guess there's an issue here with users habituated to a certain way of working, but that's not a very good justification; I suppose all those Win95 users thought they were infected with a "virus" when all their windows had a blue frame instead of a white one.
Umm... This is an experimental platform that can track a massive 3-dimensional object, calculate its position and build a sufficient model of where it's going (at least as good as a human being), and then actuate mechanisms (with their own inherent delay, displacement, physical characteristics, and nonlinearities w/r/t the ball) in order to cause a state change in the ball, with the goal of delivering the ball to a set of state vectors at the goal.
It seems "silly," but there's dozens of very difficult engineering problems to be solved here, and all of this is relates to real-world problems. The sorts of problems can often lead to new thinking about old, "serious" problems and novel solutions.
I don't think I'm violating an NDA by telling you that a client uses CFNetwork (for primitives) and the Cocoa URL loading system for network access (this is a whole bunch of classes for everything from URL requests to certificate policies). There's an API for discovering if the system is connected to the Network (I'm avoiding "internet" since that seems to be a loaded term) by Wifi or "carrier network" as they put it. I'm pretty sure you can use the BSD socket API as well, but Apple probably would rather you didn't so they have to option of switching it out in the future. You connect to hosts with names and IP addresses and ports just like anything else. What happens between the client API and the antenna is private, but from the 3rd party perspective the network is either there or not, and platform is the one that worries about exactly how you're connected.
The client networking API on the iPhone and on Mac OS X proper are pretty much indistinguishable. I'm not sure how relavant this is to your point, however.
I would agree with you about most artistic endeavors but not about the sausageworks that is big studio moviemaking.
I can tell you from personal experience, having worked on Spiderman 1 and 3 (at Sony) and Fantastic 4 (at Fox) that the people making the thing really don't see it that way, at least Sam Raimi sure as hell doesn't, and really who are you to judge? Or are people only allowed "artistic integrity" if they're starving in a garret somewhere?
If you can see the pixels on the screen, it's probably not "Digital Projection." Somebody's conning you... A 4k D5 has higher resolution than film grain.
The fact that there are a LOT more movies coming out might give the appearance of low quality, but, frankly, there were a lot of low quality movies "back in the day".
Fun fact- at the height of its output in 1934 or so, MGM was producing a feature film every week, with several simultaneous side units producing episodes of serials ever 5 days or so. All of the other studios had similar output -- even a small studio like Republic could shoot, cut and deliver a western in a matter of weeks; most of these films were average, and are forgotten. Have you any idea how many Wallace Beery boxing films there were? Or Charlie Chan features? There were like 12. You open up a fan magazine from the 30s and you can read about 40 films and you're lucky if you recognize 3 of them.
There's always been gobs of product, and every year only a few of them rise to the top. The quality of feature motion pictures now is probably, in the mean, better I'd say, just because there's so much room now to get downscale stuff release on TV and cable.
fuckwits, the overall quality of acting is taking a nosedive
Did you even see Michael Clayton? Or Little Children, or In the Bedroom, or The Queen, or Doubt.
Guess what, dude. The acting in the original Star Wars and the first three Treks is pretty bad, too; there's nothing exceptionally bad about newer films-- You're just remembering it through rose-colored glasses. Acting in CGI/scifi/action films has always been pretty "eh."
Film has always been a prime actors medium, just not when acting against a green screen.
Also, the entire basis for this comparison is wrong... as the ad shows, it has nothing to do with the "exact" features. Consumers look for a couple key features and operate "within a market." If you want the real take-away here it's that Apple either a) doesn't understand the market they're targeting with the 13" macbook or b) is purposely trying to drive people to the more expensive machine.
That's one way to interpret it... On the other hand, the message of the ad is basically:
There's Macs and there's PCs. They are basically comparable on price to features, but we aren't going to talk about that. We're going to show you some high price tags and then send you a bunch of psychological messaging about how the price of a particular company's computer is elitist, and how they look down their nose at honest folk like you. A 13 inch MacBook isn't a product being sold in the market, it's merely a gesture by San Francisco segue-rider types to condescend and insult you. Consider buying our product, which we can concede is inferior, but at least isn't made by a buncha dirty hippies who don't understand the value of a dollar.
There is always an ample supply of mid-range macs (Intel/PCIe and everything) here and here. The second place will even give you a warranty.
I know that's not the answer everyone wants to hear, but it's not like it's physically impossible to get a mid-range Mac for a very low price. All you have to do is buy it from the sucker who paid full price for it when it was cutting edge two years ago.
An "Elite" is a person or group that have superlative skills an ability, and are granted enhanced social status on account of this, to wit "I'm good at what I do therefore I should lead/be popular/be recognized." This is probably tolerable.
"Elitism" is a dysfunction where a person or group uses enhanced social status to asserts superlative skill and ability in order to justify their social status and to exclude others. "I'm popular/leading/recognized therefore I am good at what I do therefore I should lead/be popular/be recognized and there ain't no way those dirty punks over there are as good as us, after all they aren't as popular."
I never said anybody was lying, silly goose. I just think the OP is pessimistic, and maybe a little gripe-happy. It's one thing to not like a product and to stop using it. But to complain about a product and to keep using it is irrational.
Obviously he might not have any choice, he might be poor and cannot afford a cellphone to replace the iPhone, but in that case he really has no standing to complain either, since in that case he's not in the market. A feature list will be rightly ignored if the specifier can't afford the thing that embodies the features. "All I can afford is junk," is an argument against buying junk, not against selling it. Maybe Apple would stop selling "junk" if it couldn't sell it, but it would appear that there's a pretty huge market for its "junk."
Sorry if this is abstruse, but nothing irritates me more than the typical nerd pose/social shibboleth of complaining about the product you regularly buy and use and rely on. Smart hackers build their own solutions and work with others to build their own solutions; dumb consumerist gadget whores bitch about vendors and lock-in. If you don't want it, don't buy it, don't use it, STFU.
Since you did win it in a contest, you know that you could abandon it now at no cost to you and just use what you'd prefer, a Nokia, Blackberry, whatever. But it would appear that you get enough use out of this "hamstrung, nerfed piece of junk," (and Apple's been providing pretty decent support to you on it) that you haven't gotten rid of it.
No snark, but how bad could the thing possibly be if you haven't replaced it? I have known some pieces of junk in my time... I do not think this term means what you think it means.
Slashdot Mirror
Ruby itself doesn't have threading; it's FAUX threads.
By that standard PHP or python doesn't have threads. Ruby at least is able to run green threads and fibers, and PHP can't even do that. I'm not sure what any of this has to do with "application" versus "web" development, since on the "back end" a web app and an app app look a lot alike, and something like twitter definitely needs a message queue that works with memcached.
After the success of Hulu and LinkedIn and the continued adoption of Rails for larger projects (many sited below), I think we can relegate the "Ruby doesn't scale" meme to crank-land, don't you agree?
Well, it wasn't stable enough for twitter :D
RoR was (and still is to a certain extent) a fad environment, popular primarily because of its differentness.
Huh, I generally use it because it has really good ORM and migrations, and I really like the syntax (coming from Objective-C it's pretty slick. I also used the PHP language when I was starting out, but one day it tried to insist that $myArr[0] and $myArr["0"] actually pointed to the same object, and I have refused to deal with it ever since; I also got tired of typing str_sub_case_insensitive_for_real_safe(haystack, needle) -- or is it needle, haystack? And is this one of those prank functions that fails to substitute the value but still returns a value that evals true? Or if I leave out one of those underscores, am I in fact calling a function that behaves almost exactly the same way but fails under difficult-to-reproduce circumstances? Maybe they've fixed this and the other sundry atrocities? Maybe they've stopped trying to make it into Perl, as compiled by a C++ compiler, and tried fashioning it into an actual dynamic language? I know, I know, some people like PHP, but I think arguments for the superiority of PHP over Ruby (or Python or Scala or Lisp or WebObjects or Perl6 or really anything else) are going to rest completely on the skills of the Zend interpreter writers, and almost never on the quality/readability/maintainability of the code, or the ease of the development process. You can write good safe code in PHP, that is true, but it isn't very ergonomic.
You know, RoR is really good at replacing those old Paradox and FMP database systems. I can see how Facebook might prefer PHP, but people trying to replace little inventory/business processes systems generally only need to support a few dozen users, and don't have an army of developers to keep it running. The Universe is big enough to accommodate the utility of Ruby on Rails and the Twitter developer's stupidity.
We coulda built three superconducting supercolliders with the money spent on one ISS, and I don't think the ISS will ever deliver the science of the SSC. At least that's what Steven Weinberg thought, and he's better situated to know than either of us.
The DoD also approved the Space Shuttle's final dimensions on the basis of $100/lb launch costs and a constant schedule of military payloads... I think if you were to hand the DoD a purchase order for a pallet load of marshmallow peeps, they'd only be to happy to certify their nuclear/chem/bio survivability and tactical necessity. They just like to buy toys, and nobody questions them about wether they really need something, and nobody ever tests them to make sure they really use it...
At least in this case we ended up with the Internet, and not the spaceplane-that-wouldn't-die-and-syphons-science-money.
Sorry, I realize I didn't finish my point...
I think the quality of games projects like this would improve immensely if the developers/BDFLs did a few things...
The major reason is because they are extremely content-intensive, and the collaboration advantages open source has in creating code just don't apply to things that require sound and art studios.
As a sound designer and someone that wasted most of his undergrand noodling around with the StarCraft map editor, I don't really buy this. There are A LOT of creative people in graphics and audio and music that would love to demonstrate their abilities and have a "calling card" for their work. I don't know the specifics of this project, but in my experience as an erstwhile OSS dev (I do too many things) the people who run these projects are way too developer-coder centric in their management and don't make any effort to create easy tools for artists. I don't mean "download this python script and you can only use GIMP, luzer!" I mean "drag-and-drop your art from whatever source you want and use your wacom or whatever industry-standard tools you're confortable with to manipulate it." If you need to know any coding at all in order to contribute art to these projects, you are in fail territory.
That's sortof a false sense of security, no? Better that they be infected by the MBR when they go to read the disk than when they insert it? I guess there's an issue here with users habituated to a certain way of working, but that's not a very good justification; I suppose all those Win95 users thought they were infected with a "virus" when all their windows had a blue frame instead of a white one.
Umm... This is an experimental platform that can track a massive 3-dimensional object, calculate its position and build a sufficient model of where it's going (at least as good as a human being), and then actuate mechanisms (with their own inherent delay, displacement, physical characteristics, and nonlinearities w/r/t the ball) in order to cause a state change in the ball, with the goal of delivering the ball to a set of state vectors at the goal.
It seems "silly," but there's dozens of very difficult engineering problems to be solved here, and all of this is relates to real-world problems. The sorts of problems can often lead to new thinking about old, "serious" problems and novel solutions.
I don't think I'm violating an NDA by telling you that a client uses CFNetwork (for primitives) and the Cocoa URL loading system for network access (this is a whole bunch of classes for everything from URL requests to certificate policies). There's an API for discovering if the system is connected to the Network (I'm avoiding "internet" since that seems to be a loaded term) by Wifi or "carrier network" as they put it. I'm pretty sure you can use the BSD socket API as well, but Apple probably would rather you didn't so they have to option of switching it out in the future. You connect to hosts with names and IP addresses and ports just like anything else. What happens between the client API and the antenna is private, but from the 3rd party perspective the network is either there or not, and platform is the one that worries about exactly how you're connected.
The client networking API on the iPhone and on Mac OS X proper are pretty much indistinguishable. I'm not sure how relavant this is to your point, however.
This is exactly the reason why Solarbonite poses such a threat.
I admit I find your metaphor dizzying. I would say Sam Raimi or George Lucas is a guy with a hog and a knife. Brett Ratner... well...
You can get trichinosis from either equally, though.
I can tell you from personal experience, having worked on Spiderman 1 and 3 (at Sony) and Fantastic 4 (at Fox) that the people making the thing really don't see it that way, at least Sam Raimi sure as hell doesn't, and really who are you to judge? Or are people only allowed "artistic integrity" if they're starving in a garret somewhere?
If you can see the pixels on the screen, it's probably not "Digital Projection." Somebody's conning you... A 4k D5 has higher resolution than film grain.
Fun fact- at the height of its output in 1934 or so, MGM was producing a feature film every week, with several simultaneous side units producing episodes of serials ever 5 days or so. All of the other studios had similar output -- even a small studio like Republic could shoot, cut and deliver a western in a matter of weeks; most of these films were average, and are forgotten. Have you any idea how many Wallace Beery boxing films there were? Or Charlie Chan features? There were like 12. You open up a fan magazine from the 30s and you can read about 40 films and you're lucky if you recognize 3 of them.
There's always been gobs of product, and every year only a few of them rise to the top. The quality of feature motion pictures now is probably, in the mean, better I'd say, just because there's so much room now to get downscale stuff release on TV and cable.
Did you even see Michael Clayton? Or Little Children, or In the Bedroom, or The Queen, or Doubt.
Guess what, dude. The acting in the original Star Wars and the first three Treks is pretty bad, too; there's nothing exceptionally bad about newer films-- You're just remembering it through rose-colored glasses. Acting in CGI/scifi/action films has always been pretty "eh."
Film has always been a prime actors medium, just not when acting against a green screen.
All of these worlds are yours, except Europa. attempt no landings there. Use them together. Use them in peace.
Heh, someone doesn't like the truth...
That's one way to interpret it... On the other hand, the message of the ad is basically:
There's Macs and there's PCs. They are basically comparable on price to features, but we aren't going to talk about that. We're going to show you some high price tags and then send you a bunch of psychological messaging about how the price of a particular company's computer is elitist, and how they look down their nose at honest folk like you. A 13 inch MacBook isn't a product being sold in the market, it's merely a gesture by San Francisco segue-rider types to condescend and insult you. Consider buying our product, which we can concede is inferior, but at least isn't made by a buncha dirty hippies who don't understand the value of a dollar.
That's basically the subtext of the ad.
There is always an ample supply of mid-range macs (Intel/PCIe and everything) here and here. The second place will even give you a warranty.
I know that's not the answer everyone wants to hear, but it's not like it's physically impossible to get a mid-range Mac for a very low price. All you have to do is buy it from the sucker who paid full price for it when it was cutting edge two years ago.
An "Elite" is a person or group that have superlative skills an ability, and are granted enhanced social status on account of this, to wit "I'm good at what I do therefore I should lead/be popular/be recognized." This is probably tolerable.
"Elitism" is a dysfunction where a person or group uses enhanced social status to asserts superlative skill and ability in order to justify their social status and to exclude others. "I'm popular/leading/recognized therefore I am good at what I do therefore I should lead/be popular/be recognized and there ain't no way those dirty punks over there are as good as us, after all they aren't as popular."
All US cell phone companies require a contract.
Stop filling slashdot with crazy.
I never said anybody was lying, silly goose. I just think the OP is pessimistic, and maybe a little gripe-happy. It's one thing to not like a product and to stop using it. But to complain about a product and to keep using it is irrational.
Obviously he might not have any choice, he might be poor and cannot afford a cellphone to replace the iPhone, but in that case he really has no standing to complain either, since in that case he's not in the market. A feature list will be rightly ignored if the specifier can't afford the thing that embodies the features. "All I can afford is junk," is an argument against buying junk, not against selling it. Maybe Apple would stop selling "junk" if it couldn't sell it, but it would appear that there's a pretty huge market for its "junk."
Sorry if this is abstruse, but nothing irritates me more than the typical nerd pose/social shibboleth of complaining about the product you regularly buy and use and rely on. Smart hackers build their own solutions and work with others to build their own solutions; dumb consumerist gadget whores bitch about vendors and lock-in. If you don't want it, don't buy it, don't use it, STFU.
Since you did win it in a contest, you know that you could abandon it now at no cost to you and just use what you'd prefer, a Nokia, Blackberry, whatever. But it would appear that you get enough use out of this "hamstrung, nerfed piece of junk," (and Apple's been providing pretty decent support to you on it) that you haven't gotten rid of it.
No snark, but how bad could the thing possibly be if you haven't replaced it? I have known some pieces of junk in my time... I do not think this term means what you think it means.
Lets define our terms:
This story would appear to be an instance of the second thing.