Eh, actually it is. The Jews lived legally in the region, every bit as legally as the Arabs. The Zionist immigration didn't start until 1880, and it was a trickle. At the time the Jew:Arab ratio was about 1:3. In the 1920s there was a massive Arab immigration to the area due to the fact that the British were pouring tons of cash into it, particularly to build a new port at Haifa.
In 1935 the Jews and the Arabs who lived in the British occupied territory had an equal legal and moral right to live there. A tiny minority of Jews were mumbling about their "God Given" right to the area, but they were always a tiny minority.
So, yes, it was their homeland in the same way that the US is the homeland of the US citizens and the UK is the homeland of UK citizens. Legally. Morally. In any way you look at it.
When the Arabs, with both moral and logistical help from the likes of Eichmann, started killing off Jews in 1936, tensions started to rise, but the situation was brought under control by the British by 1939.
The Arab uprising in 1936, their target practice on Jews and the general hatred of anyone non-Muslim in the region in 1947 was the reason that the UN decided to go for a two-state solution. A solution that only divided the country between the people who actually lived there at the time.
Oh and the orriginal Zionists were terrorists that carved a chunk out of muslim land for themself
This is patently false, but I assume ignorance rather than malice. The original Zionists were not terrorists at all. They used money to purchase land, something that is typically legal in most countries. If you are thinking of Irgun and Hanagh they were much later, and they terrorized the British, not the Arabs. They only turned against the Arab population after the general strike in 1936 during which the Arab population started using Jews and Christians for target practice.
After the holocaust nobody could politically say anything bad about the jewish people.
The creation of the state of Israel had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Read the writings of the leader of the commission who actually advocated the two-state solution. A man who, until he met the Arabs of the region, was strongly in favor of a one-state solution.
The borders were more than shaky since its inception and have since that date ever increased in israels favour thanks to them being significantly richer than their neighbors
Again, wrong. Israels borders have increased due to military victories against attacking aggressors. This is not entirely right according to UN charters of war, but not at all without precedent. A huge portion of what is now Poland is actually Germany, and I don't see Germans shooting rockets at Warsaw. Oh, and far more Germans died, after the war when they were forced to march from their own homes back to the new German borders as defined by the allied, then has ever been killed by the Israelis.
Oh and as for expulsion, arabs have been expelled from israel more than a few times
The main "expulsions" of Arabs happened during the 1948 and 1968 wars. Some since. There is still a large minority Arab population in Israel, and even though they have complaints, most of them would rather live there than in any of their surrounding Muslim countries. Why is that do you think? Could it be that it is actually a lot nicer for an Arab to live in Israel than it is for him to live in any of the surrounding countries?
what they're doing in Gaza is both cruel and counterproductive
Sadly I have to disagree with you. What Israel is currently doing in Gaza is necessary and it will hopefully be productive in the long run. It was also getting urgent.
No Palestinian organization ever has signed a peace treatment with Israel in good faith. The Oslo accord were, according to Arafat, just a way to get some breathing room before again moving on with the task of eliminating the "Zionist state" and all within it. He said so from the moment he got back from Washington in every Arab news media. Sadly it hasn't been widely reported in Europe nor in the US. Perhaps the journalists are too dumb to hire Arabic translators, I don't know.
So, with no prospects of a peace treaty with any organization in power in the Palestinian territories, what is Israel to do? Well, they can try to wall them self off and protect themselves in that manner. Maybe peek out from over the wall every now and again to find out if the insane idiots on the other side has calmed down.
Problem was, Hamas was making themselves stronger. They were acquiring fairly advanced weaponry. Qassam rockets, OK, one can live with those, they are errant, fall down in any place and rarely cause any significant damage. After 60 years, Israel is getting used to that. Lately Hamas have been getting much more precise and longer range rockets from Iran however. This is not an acceptable situation for Israel. They would in the next few months acquire the ability to strike far more accurately into far more of Israel.
Israel had to attack now. Hamas left them no choice, which was what Hamas wanted. The only option for Israel is to wipe out the military wing of Hamas, and when I say wipe out I mean that quite literally, and then go in and take control over the area.
After wiping out Hamas Israel can do the smart thing and spend significantly on infrastructure and try to really help the Gazan population, or they can make the mistake they did before and be satisfied with just a military occupation.
A Gaza under Israeli control with Israeli control over the funds to re-build might work. Giving the Palestinians these funds is an exercise in futility. Fatah, which would be the most likely entity is massively corrupt on a scale we could not even begin to imagine. Fatah would utterly squander all the money and piss the Palestinian population off yet again. As they did before, leading to the election win for Hamas.
The simple reality is that there is no institution in the Palestinian territories that is mature enough to actually govern anything. Until such an entity springs into existence, and that would take decades of proper education and peace, the Israeli should govern instead. In doing so they should foster the growth of such an entity by making sure that Gaza and also the West Bank, became fully functional economic societies.
The fact that a successful operation in Gaza will virtually guarantee Livni the election results she wants, that is Livni on top, is just icing on the cake:-)
Israel responded by throwing out anyone inside its borders which seemed to be stabbing them in the back.
This isn't quite true. The Arab population living in "refugee camps" were generally not sent there by the Israeli, quite the contrary, in the lead-up to the 1948 war Golda Meir traveled all over trying to stop the Arabs from leaving. The Arab population (Palestinians as they call themselves today) fled the area because they were told to do so by the Arab military command leading up to the 1948 war. A handful were expelled from two cities between the Jewish area and Jerusalem to secure the transport of aid to the embattled Jewish population inside Jerusalem.
The refugee problem was created by the Arabs. It has consciously and cynically been maintained by most of the Arab countries ever since. The reason they do it is simple. With a population angry over the "Palestinian issue" nobody notices that a huge number of these states are run by corrupt, nasty megalomaniacs who only exploit their population for their own gain.
The reality is that if the Palestinian problem was ever solved with peace the regimes of the middle east would tumble like dominoes as people realized that their own leaders are the source of their misery, not Israel. The leaders of these regimes obviously don't want that, and the easiest way to prevent it is to make absolutely sure that the refugees from 1948 and their descendants live in poverty and misery.
The main benefactor of a peace with the Palestinians would be Israel, and they desire nothing else. Sadly the Palestinian leaders have never wanted peace and every peace agreement they have ever signed they have subsequently abandoned, some quite immediately.
The uncomfortable fact remains that the current Palestinians were indeed living in Palestine (the original definition of it), and did have their land and their homes taken from them to form the Jewish state of Israel.
I learned this in school too. That is because my teachers were either clueless or leftist Palestinian lovers. It is still not, and has never been, true.
The state of Israel was created to provide autonomy for the Jewish population already living in the region, not for a new set of people moving in. The UN did this because the Arab population had been using Jews in particular but also Christians as target practice since the early 1930s. The UN knew that there was only one possible way to have some chance of security for the non-Muslim population in the region and that was through a two-state solution.
After this legal and only reasonable decision by the UN, the Arab nations attacked the legal country of Israel, and they lost. When countries lose wars they tend to lose a lot. A town that used to be called Danzig is now called Gdansk. The reason? The attacking Germans lost the war and the winners pushed them out of the area.
The allied nations occupied Germany after WWII. Naturally. They since left (except for the communist Soviet Union). Why? Well, because occupation is inevitably expensive and counter productive once the aggressor (in that case Germany) has been subdued. Do you think the allies would have ended the occupation if the German population had continued the war? Would the US and the UK have left Berlin if every single day a bus of school children was blown up by German terrorists in Washington, DC or a mall was flattened by a suicide bomber in London? Clearly not.
The Arabs attacked. They lost. They should have had the sense to stop the fighting. They never did and they have never shown any inclination to stop. Israel has the right to defend it self against such an aggressor, even when the aggression goes on for more than 60 years. If the loser aggressor, in this case the Arabs, wants the war to end, just stop it.
The Arabs lost the war and have never been able to understand that. They started it and they lost. Since then the Arab states have kept the Palestinians in refugee camps to provide nice recruits for their war against Israel. You see, with a constant war on Israel the population of many of the Arab nations forget that they are oppressed and abused by their own government and they do not rise up and overthrow them.
The leaders of the Arab nations want and need a conflict between the Israeli and the Palestinians. They won't survive without it. That is why they do everything they can (with some exceptions) to make sure the conflict continues. Part of that is denying the Palestinian population all rights in their new home-lands. Why are there no Palestinian "refugee camps" in Jordan?
The Palestinian problem is an Arab problem. It was created by the Arab nations when they invaded Israel. They need to fix it. That has to start with an effort to seek peace, something that has never happened. The closest "effort" was the Oslo accord, and that would have been good had it not been for the fact that Arafat, immediately after signing it, stated that he was not bound by it, that he didn't care about the content of it at all, and that the total destruction of Israel was still the only real goal of the Arab people.
As long as the Arab side treats every agreement as if it is just a stepping stone to the inevitable wiping Israel of the map they will never be able to have peace.
I think it would be better named the "not-that-much-better-than-the-old-bar,"
It has some features I like. For example, you can type in any part of the URL and it will be listed. I had a bunch of different projects on my webserver, all with the same base url, but with the final part being different. server/junk/stuff/holy_cow.html, server/junk/stuff/holy_shit.html and so on. If I typed in "cow" or "shit" in the address bar the appropriate URL would be suggested. I found that to be kinda useful, but I guess it is an edge case:-)
I'm truly amazed by how many people think that the right to free speech includes the right to an audience.
I don't see how this can be surprising, most people, including most/.ers, are idiots. They refuse to think. Most of them thinks that one opinion has as much value as another, whilst the reality is that most opinions people have are certifiable rubbish. Hell, we even have a President in the US who thinks that if he believes in something strongly enough it will be so, or even it is so, irrespective of reality.
As someone said, using an ad-blocker is exactly like going to the toilet, or to the kitchen for another beer, or turning to talk to your kids during a commercial break. I wonder if these idiots think that the mute button on my remote is as bad as ad-blocking software? I use my DVR to record most of what I watch, time-shifting is great. I wonder if these idiots thinks that I am behaving in a morally comprehensible manner when I fast-forward through the ads.
You are absolutely right, which is why this half-assed move from Apple surprises me a little bit. Well, perhaps not, when Apple does stuff they always do it half way.
As you point out, people are too lazy to type and read, so what is it with the bright and shiny LCD that they ship this with? Typical Apple Tax. They want all my money, but they give me stuff I don't need nor want. Dropping the keyboard is great, but why force me to buy a screen? I am not going to type on the keyboard, why do they think I would want to read the screen?
Release this thing without the superfluous screen, then I'll buy it. Price it somewhere between $4K and $5K and it will be at the top of my list. Create it with a magnesium chassis and a carbon fiber shell, and I'll even pay twice as much. Now that would be the ideal laptop. If they can get battery life to something decent, like 27 minutes, I would never have to buy a computer ever again.
That's a false dichotomy. Many Rails developers are really smart but they won't use Oracle for other reasons. The major roadblock with Oracle is not that it's the wrong tool, it's that it is not free (neither as in beer nor speech).
How is it a false dichotomy? Oracle is, by a rather significant margin, the chosen database in the enterprise world. This is where the money is generated. If Rails is not used in conjunction with enterprise database solutions, Rails isn't used for important stuff. And no, Wikipedia is not "important".
I'm simply stating the fact that nobody uses dbs that support clustering with Ruby
Again, this is a rather odd statement. Where do you get this information from? Are you seriously saying that nobody is using Rails on Oracle?
What I'm really advocating is that all the same problems that people encounter simply be standardized. This is just like how ActiveRecord standardized database access.
And I am pointing out that you don't do that by adding rubbish and irrelevant junk to the core framework but by using, or writing, application specific extensions. Adding specific photo-album (essentially) extensions to a generic framework is absurd and the Rails developers should not pollute the framework like that but concentrate on the core. There are more than enough people out there writing extensions, and your requests belongs in such extensions, not in the core framework.
When somebody tries to do something and he says it's hard, then it IS hard for that person.
There are typically two reasons for things being hard. One is that it is hard for anyone to do it, in other words, it is intrinsically hard. The other is that it is hard for a group of the population a lack of the skills required to do said "thing". You can't blame the "thing" for the users lack of skills. People thinks programming in Python is hard too, doesn't mean there is anything wrong with Python.
Please note - I am not saying you are such a person with a lack of skills, I am just pointing out that the fact that a lot of people find something to be hard has no bearing on whether it is in fact hard for an appropriately skilled person.
Seriously. Check it out.
I have and it is good stuff. Also, please note that I am not a Rails apologist, I am just addressing some areas where I disagree with you.
I have read the article in question, and it takes a specific "performance test" to task over bad methodology. I have not endorsed said methodology but referred to an article on the topic of performance that is more in depth.
If you have any information about the methodology applied in this article, please let me (and the author) know.
I also referred to this one, again not the one with the flawed methodology. If you feel there is anything wrong with either of these, please feel free to enlighten me.
this was the first time in a long time I "had heard"
Which just means that you are ignorant and have a desperate need to flaunt it.
since it was about THAT STATEMENT, and NOT about Java's actual performance!
Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. I took the "that's rich" part to actually mean that you commented on Java performance. I was not aware that you only had some masochistic need to announce that you were ignorant. I am absolutely sure that Julia Roberts also has never heard that Java has a certain level of performance, but I doubt she has a need to advertise this particular ignorance in various public fora. I would assume that Julia Roberts tend to speak of things she actually has knowledge off, most people do. When people are ignorant of a particular subject they tend to either try to educate them selves on it or just not participate in discussions about it.
I will hire a goddamned psychic!
You really shouldn't. They can't really read your mind. Honestly. They can't. Instead of doing that you should limit your commentary to discussion topics you in fact have information about.
Do NOT come barging into conversations I am having with others, change the goddamned subject
This is a public forum, not a messenger client. You are not participating in private conversations ever when you post in a public forum, you are shouting from mountain tops and inviting everybody to join in. If you don't understand the difference between talking to someone over the phone and posting in public discussion fora, I would recommend you stop the latter until you have acquired enough knowledge to understand the difference.
Not quite sure what you mean by this. GC or the fact that C++ uses less memory than Java.
I see a lot of "in the wild" C code that does really weird stuff so it can, supposedly, get a tiny speed/mem imporovement
Yes, one does. I have even written some since I was doing embedded work once and every byte counted and every cycle counted. This is called optimization and we do it using various types of tools. For Java there is not as much reason to create "weird" code to make it go a little faster since the VM can perform that kind of optimizations. In Java you can, given the ease of development over C/C++, spend time making algorithmic optimizations, which usually have significantly higher impact on performance.
about par with Python
Never got comfortable with the notion of having white-space be relevant when I develop software, so Python never did it for me. I'm a Ruby kind of person. My point was not which language was faster, just the notion that Java was under performing for the tasks here mentioned. Something that is plainly wrong. I know this from both benchmarks and practice with Java and web applications.
If you go back and read it again, you may see that my comment was perfectly honest and accurate.
How was it accurate? Java is the second highest performing programming language of the modern OO and equivalent languages. It's performance is some times slightly slower, some times slightly faster than C++. In reality, Java is very close to C++ in performance for all the most common programing tasks today. Your statement implied that Java was very far from high performance, which was 100% wrong.
So, being 100% wrong, what was it that was accurate about your statement?
Of course, you have no way of knowing exactly what I have heard;
I couldn't care less about what you have heard, and what you have heard is utterly irrelevant to whether Java is performant or not.
but neither do you have any real reason to doubt my statement.
If by "your statement" you refer to the implied statement about Java performance, then yes, I have many real reasons to doubt it, since it is wrong. Measurably wrong.
I agree that clustering would be better solved in the database... The number of Rails apps using Oracle as a backend are approaching 0%
That would imply that all Rails developers are idiots. If Oracle is the only DB where the DB supports clustering properly and someone needs clustering, he should use Oracle or he should find another business to work in since you are an idiot. You select the correct tool for the job.
Also, given that Oracle is, by a significant margin, the chosen database for critical enterprise stuff, if your 0% assertion is true, then Rails isn't used anywhere for important stuff.
It isn't easy to convert a large software project, constantly in flux, to support clustering
If clustering is supported by the DB, yes it is. That is why it belongs in the DB realm.
Say you build a nice wiki app. Later you decide that would fit in well with your project manager. How much work would it take to get it to work? Normally. A lot.
No, it would not. Not the way I develop apps. I develop in a way where what I do is re-usable. I don't see what Rails have to do with that.
Convention over configuration is fine. I like it. But that's not the magic I'm talking about....
All the automatic method generation (method missing), autoloading based on names, conversions from singular to plural. That's what I mean by magic.
What surprises me is that you don't seem to understand that the two paragraphs quoted above are self-contradictory to a degree. The "magic" you don't like is either a core part of Rails (so you don't like Rails) or it is part of Convention over Configuration. Honestly, since it is documented, and well understood, I can't see why you think it is "magic".
This problem happens to every developer in exactly the same way. To me, that is a prime candidate for moving the problem scope into the framework.
No, this does not mean that it is a prime candidate for inclusion in Rails. It may mean that it is a prime candidate for some sort of library/extension/gem, but it doesn't belong in Rails at all. What you are advocating is polluting Rails with all kinds of absurd, and non-relevant junk. A huge number of people do MP3 work in their Rails apps, you wouldn't seriously suggest that we should include MP3 manipulation in a ORM framework, would you?
Why solve the problem multiple times?
You should absolutely not solve the problem many times, that would be absurd. It would be equally absurd to include it in the ORM framework.
Sorry, the large number of people saying its hard to make Rails do what it's not designed specifically to do says otherwise.
I disagree with that conclusion. The number of people who is says something has no bearing on how difficult or easy that thing is, it is only an indication of somethings popularity. A large number of people thinks Java is slow, even though it has speed parity with C++ in a number of areas. A large number of people were raised and trained on PHP and then moved to Rails. Someone who learned software development on PHP is most likely permanently damaged and beyond hope for ever being able to develop real software. Same goes for people who have developed a lot in Basic, visual or no.
In this case, Rails has some ActiveCouch type plugins
I have long since moved to Ruby my self, and I did not at all comment about Java as a language. My comment was only directed at your rather misinformed "That's rich" statement about Java performance since that exposed a substantial gap in your knowledge.
am aware that Java 5 (aka 1.5.x) made some major speed improvements, but this is the first I have heard anybody claim that it "competes" with C++.
Well, I am glad that you say "first I have heard" since that explains it. You simply haven't been around that much to hear. Perhaps you do not work in the right industry. Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with Java at all. For one, Java is at 6, and it has been competitive for quite some time. As the benchmark here shows, java is very competitive with C++. This is for CPU intensive benchmarks. Once you add disk and database access into the mix, as you do in most applications, the speed difference between Java and C++ applications becomes negligible.
I think your opinion is highly colored by your prolonged lack of information about Java and benchmarks since Java performance parity with C++ for a large number of tasks was widely reported at least five or six years ago. Particularly the IBM Java VM gained a rep for being very fast, with subsequent inclusion of similar features in the Sun VM. You can read about it for example here.
Remember, a Java application can do something no (or most) C++ applications can not do, namely run-time performance tuning.
For a number of tasks C++ will probably always be faster than Java, but those tasks are fewer and further between every day, and for the tasks that so many people work on today, namely creating good web-based stuff, Java is probably the fastest language there is since C++ is not a widely used web-app development language.
So, given context, namely web-based applications, it is perfectly fine to use "high performance" about a Java solution since it is the best performer of them all. There are very few web-apps written in C++.
Maintaining custom patches for a foreign codebase is going to be painful
Well, the thing is, in Ruby it is not. Given the tools that Ruby gives, such as mixins, modifying the core of a framework in a maintainable manner is a lot easier. Now, if you go out and fix the framework in a non-Ruby manner, for example by altering the framework source in-place, you will have problems, but if you do, you need to re-take Ruby 101.
No, my language of choice is Ruby, which is generally slower than Java. But again... that doesn't make Java fast.
Speed is a relative thing in the computer world. Java today can in many cases compete with C++ in speed, and it immensely more maintainable with fewer resulting problems. So, yes, I would in fact say that Java is fast. Not compared to hand-written assembly that solves a limited problem, but in the league it plays, one that partly includes C++, Java is fast.
Have you written any Java code that wasn't fast? Perhaps it was you:-)
Most people who speak of "limitations" to their framework are people who expect the framework to do all their work for them: this is simply unrealistic.
Amen. Like the poster above who wants rails to include, in its core functionality, the ability to store images, automatically retrieve the image and a thumbnail of said image depending on the situation. This isn't stuff that belongs in an application server framework, but it does belong in an image manipulation framework and a DB driver (re-sizing images in one, storing stuff in the other).
I find that a lot of people who ask for special functions like this are just simply bad developers. Often self-taught through some horrible abomination like Visual Basic and/or PHP. Obviously not always:-)
Some comments to your ideas... I like a lot of what you say and I strongly disagree with some of them.
zero changes... to go from single database to a cluster of databases
Perhaps, or perhaps this isn't something that belongs in the application-server domain at all, but in the database driver domain. In other words, if you need a cluster of DBs, use a DB product that supports this seamlessly. I am not going to mention Oracle by name, but it would support what you are asking here I assume, depending on how the Rails/Oracle guys wrote the Ora driver for Rails. Never tried Rails with Oracle, but for all apps I have written lately, this is taken care of by the Ora driver.
Reusable code.
Depending on how you do Rails, this is fully supported. Unless of course I am misunderstanding what you are asking. There is nothing in Rails that prevents you from creating re-usable code. Honestly.
Built in scalable file system.
Sorry, disagree with this one too. This is not in the domain of Rails, but in extensions to Ruby and Rails. As such it is fully supported today.
No magic
Didn't know Rails did any magic. What does it do? Levitate your trains? Sry, just trying (probably unsuccessfully) to be funny. Honestly, duck and convention over configuration is not magic IMHO, but to some it may seem like it.
Custom field types for database
This one might be a misunderstanding on my part, but from what you seem to be saying in the rest of your point, you would like Rails to support things like "image" and "video" as fields in the DB and then use its own implementation for it (such as storing the actual image and video in the file system and pointers in the DB.
If this is what you mean I have to strongly disagree again, how data is stored physically is not and should not, be in the realm of Rails, that is a combination of an application issue (identifying an item as an image) and a database issue (storing the binary data in a BLOB field).
If you meant that Rails should support custom column-types in the DB, in other words, if the DB vendor adds "special" column types then Rails should support it, then I maybe agree. Not quite sure. Perhaps Rails should just stick with ANSI.
An image field type where you can change the image sizes
Absolutely not! This is an absurd request. This is so clearly an application level item that I have to admit to a certain amount of surprise that you actually ask for it. Including such items in Rails would utterly ruin the framework. Adding extensions to Rails that supports this or similar is perfectly fine, and you might want to give it a whirl, but including it in Rails as such would be wrong and insane.
In Rails, the solution is usually to memorize the option that allows you to do what you want.
Here we have to disagree of course since I think this is what Rails delivers, but in this we might just be different. I also think that vi is one of the most user-friendly code editors out there, so I might be a little different.
Multi-threading
Hey, at least we agree on something.
CouchDB
Yeah, why not, as a driver. Not sure if Rails could do it though, I am not familiar enough with how dependent Rails is on the SQL CRUD idea and to what degree CRUD can be applied to CouchDB. I am not familiar enough with CouchDB to say. If CouchDB is CRUD'dy, I don't see why a driver could not be added to Rails. It doesn't belong in the core however.
I'd be very surprised to see JavaFX ability overtake Flash in browsers any time in the next 3 years. In addition to that, and given the horrid (still) Java plugin performance in any browser I have ever tried, I would be shocked to see JavaFX overtake Flash as a client-side development tool ever.
Sun did a good job with Java, and I have used Java for commercial server-side development since the late 90's. The company I worked for sold and deployed our first major Java app in 1997. I am not a Java basher. Java was however never a decent client-side tool until Eclipse and SWT came around, and those aren't really possible to embed in web pages. JavaFX, too little and at least 6 years too late.
what other language could have done a better job in easily developping web pages for the past 10 years
Honestly, I am not too concerned with "hastily" doing anything at all. In my experience things done hastily is usually done badly. Are there better strategies for putting applications on the web than PHP. Absolutely, various Java technologies for one. Ruby (which has been available for that long, but not with Rails) is another.
The problem is that hastily done stuff usually ends up with a much longer life span than was intended when it was hastily put together, and in the long run the cost of ownership is significanly higher than would have been the case if it was built a little less hastily from the get-go.
I have seen a lot of what has hastily been put together with PHP and MySQL (for example) and it is usually put together by people who don't even know what normalized means. Friends of mine have twice walked away from lucurative contracts because they were not allowed to do the only sane thing, which wast throw out everything that was written and start from scratch.
Enabling "developers" with tools that encourage hastily throwing things together means that a lot of people who should never be allowed to write SQL are given tasks they are not qualified for.
Thing is, PHP is a pathetic insult to programming and a horrible way to develop anything sensible and manageable. On the other hand, VB is at least as bad, and in the hands of a lot of developers, significantly worse.
Both PHP and VB.net are examples on what happens when the mediocre (as in mediocre software developers and architects - and mediocre here is probably giving too much credit) gets too much work due to lack of reasonable alternatives. In a sane world VB would have been dead eons (in software time) ago and PHP would have been dismissed out of hand when it was released.
Slashdot Mirror
Pst. It isn't their old homeland.
Eh, actually it is. The Jews lived legally in the region, every bit as legally as the Arabs. The Zionist immigration didn't start until 1880, and it was a trickle. At the time the Jew:Arab ratio was about 1:3. In the 1920s there was a massive Arab immigration to the area due to the fact that the British were pouring tons of cash into it, particularly to build a new port at Haifa.
In 1935 the Jews and the Arabs who lived in the British occupied territory had an equal legal and moral right to live there. A tiny minority of Jews were mumbling about their "God Given" right to the area, but they were always a tiny minority.
So, yes, it was their homeland in the same way that the US is the homeland of the US citizens and the UK is the homeland of UK citizens. Legally. Morally. In any way you look at it.
When the Arabs, with both moral and logistical help from the likes of Eichmann, started killing off Jews in 1936, tensions started to rise, but the situation was brought under control by the British by 1939.
The Arab uprising in 1936, their target practice on Jews and the general hatred of anyone non-Muslim in the region in 1947 was the reason that the UN decided to go for a two-state solution. A solution that only divided the country between the people who actually lived there at the time.
Oh and the orriginal Zionists were terrorists that carved a chunk out of muslim land for themself
This is patently false, but I assume ignorance rather than malice. The original Zionists were not terrorists at all. They used money to purchase land, something that is typically legal in most countries. If you are thinking of Irgun and Hanagh they were much later, and they terrorized the British, not the Arabs. They only turned against the Arab population after the general strike in 1936 during which the Arab population started using Jews and Christians for target practice.
After the holocaust nobody could politically say anything bad about the jewish people.
The creation of the state of Israel had nothing to do with the Holocaust. Read the writings of the leader of the commission who actually advocated the two-state solution. A man who, until he met the Arabs of the region, was strongly in favor of a one-state solution.
The borders were more than shaky since its inception and have since that date ever increased in israels favour thanks to them being significantly richer than their neighbors
Again, wrong. Israels borders have increased due to military victories against attacking aggressors. This is not entirely right according to UN charters of war, but not at all without precedent. A huge portion of what is now Poland is actually Germany, and I don't see Germans shooting rockets at Warsaw. Oh, and far more Germans died, after the war when they were forced to march from their own homes back to the new German borders as defined by the allied, then has ever been killed by the Israelis.
Oh and as for expulsion, arabs have been expelled from israel more than a few times
The main "expulsions" of Arabs happened during the 1948 and 1968 wars. Some since. There is still a large minority Arab population in Israel, and even though they have complaints, most of them would rather live there than in any of their surrounding Muslim countries. Why is that do you think? Could it be that it is actually a lot nicer for an Arab to live in Israel than it is for him to live in any of the surrounding countries?
what they're doing in Gaza is both cruel and counterproductive
Sadly I have to disagree with you. What Israel is currently doing in Gaza is necessary and it will hopefully be productive in the long run. It was also getting urgent.
No Palestinian organization ever has signed a peace treatment with Israel in good faith. The Oslo accord were, according to Arafat, just a way to get some breathing room before again moving on with the task of eliminating the "Zionist state" and all within it. He said so from the moment he got back from Washington in every Arab news media. Sadly it hasn't been widely reported in Europe nor in the US. Perhaps the journalists are too dumb to hire Arabic translators, I don't know.
So, with no prospects of a peace treaty with any organization in power in the Palestinian territories, what is Israel to do? Well, they can try to wall them self off and protect themselves in that manner. Maybe peek out from over the wall every now and again to find out if the insane idiots on the other side has calmed down.
Problem was, Hamas was making themselves stronger. They were acquiring fairly advanced weaponry. Qassam rockets, OK, one can live with those, they are errant, fall down in any place and rarely cause any significant damage. After 60 years, Israel is getting used to that. Lately Hamas have been getting much more precise and longer range rockets from Iran however. This is not an acceptable situation for Israel. They would in the next few months acquire the ability to strike far more accurately into far more of Israel.
Israel had to attack now. Hamas left them no choice, which was what Hamas wanted. The only option for Israel is to wipe out the military wing of Hamas, and when I say wipe out I mean that quite literally, and then go in and take control over the area.
After wiping out Hamas Israel can do the smart thing and spend significantly on infrastructure and try to really help the Gazan population, or they can make the mistake they did before and be satisfied with just a military occupation.
A Gaza under Israeli control with Israeli control over the funds to re-build might work. Giving the Palestinians these funds is an exercise in futility. Fatah, which would be the most likely entity is massively corrupt on a scale we could not even begin to imagine. Fatah would utterly squander all the money and piss the Palestinian population off yet again. As they did before, leading to the election win for Hamas.
The simple reality is that there is no institution in the Palestinian territories that is mature enough to actually govern anything. Until such an entity springs into existence, and that would take decades of proper education and peace, the Israeli should govern instead. In doing so they should foster the growth of such an entity by making sure that Gaza and also the West Bank, became fully functional economic societies.
The fact that a successful operation in Gaza will virtually guarantee Livni the election results she wants, that is Livni on top, is just icing on the cake :-)
Israel responded by throwing out anyone inside its borders which seemed to be stabbing them in the back.
This isn't quite true. The Arab population living in "refugee camps" were generally not sent there by the Israeli, quite the contrary, in the lead-up to the 1948 war Golda Meir traveled all over trying to stop the Arabs from leaving. The Arab population (Palestinians as they call themselves today) fled the area because they were told to do so by the Arab military command leading up to the 1948 war. A handful were expelled from two cities between the Jewish area and Jerusalem to secure the transport of aid to the embattled Jewish population inside Jerusalem.
The refugee problem was created by the Arabs. It has consciously and cynically been maintained by most of the Arab countries ever since. The reason they do it is simple. With a population angry over the "Palestinian issue" nobody notices that a huge number of these states are run by corrupt, nasty megalomaniacs who only exploit their population for their own gain.
The reality is that if the Palestinian problem was ever solved with peace the regimes of the middle east would tumble like dominoes as people realized that their own leaders are the source of their misery, not Israel. The leaders of these regimes obviously don't want that, and the easiest way to prevent it is to make absolutely sure that the refugees from 1948 and their descendants live in poverty and misery.
The main benefactor of a peace with the Palestinians would be Israel, and they desire nothing else. Sadly the Palestinian leaders have never wanted peace and every peace agreement they have ever signed they have subsequently abandoned, some quite immediately.
The uncomfortable fact remains that the current Palestinians were indeed living in Palestine (the original definition of it), and did have their land and their homes taken from them to form the Jewish state of Israel.
I learned this in school too. That is because my teachers were either clueless or leftist Palestinian lovers. It is still not, and has never been, true.
The state of Israel was created to provide autonomy for the Jewish population already living in the region, not for a new set of people moving in. The UN did this because the Arab population had been using Jews in particular but also Christians as target practice since the early 1930s. The UN knew that there was only one possible way to have some chance of security for the non-Muslim population in the region and that was through a two-state solution.
After this legal and only reasonable decision by the UN, the Arab nations attacked the legal country of Israel, and they lost. When countries lose wars they tend to lose a lot. A town that used to be called Danzig is now called Gdansk. The reason? The attacking Germans lost the war and the winners pushed them out of the area.
The allied nations occupied Germany after WWII. Naturally. They since left (except for the communist Soviet Union). Why? Well, because occupation is inevitably expensive and counter productive once the aggressor (in that case Germany) has been subdued. Do you think the allies would have ended the occupation if the German population had continued the war? Would the US and the UK have left Berlin if every single day a bus of school children was blown up by German terrorists in Washington, DC or a mall was flattened by a suicide bomber in London? Clearly not.
The Arabs attacked. They lost. They should have had the sense to stop the fighting. They never did and they have never shown any inclination to stop. Israel has the right to defend it self against such an aggressor, even when the aggression goes on for more than 60 years. If the loser aggressor, in this case the Arabs, wants the war to end, just stop it.
The Arabs lost the war and have never been able to understand that. They started it and they lost. Since then the Arab states have kept the Palestinians in refugee camps to provide nice recruits for their war against Israel. You see, with a constant war on Israel the population of many of the Arab nations forget that they are oppressed and abused by their own government and they do not rise up and overthrow them.
The leaders of the Arab nations want and need a conflict between the Israeli and the Palestinians. They won't survive without it. That is why they do everything they can (with some exceptions) to make sure the conflict continues. Part of that is denying the Palestinian population all rights in their new home-lands. Why are there no Palestinian "refugee camps" in Jordan?
The Palestinian problem is an Arab problem. It was created by the Arab nations when they invaded Israel. They need to fix it. That has to start with an effort to seek peace, something that has never happened. The closest "effort" was the Oslo accord, and that would have been good had it not been for the fact that Arafat, immediately after signing it, stated that he was not bound by it, that he didn't care about the content of it at all, and that the total destruction of Israel was still the only real goal of the Arab people.
As long as the Arab side treats every agreement as if it is just a stepping stone to the inevitable wiping Israel of the map they will never be able to have peace.
some might be surprised to know that US soldiers are currently stationed in Egypt where they patrol that country's border with Gaza
What can I say? Absurd comes to mind. Rubbish is another word that fits the bill. Insane leaps to the forefront.
I think it would be better named the "not-that-much-better-than-the-old-bar,"
It has some features I like. For example, you can type in any part of the URL and it will be listed. I had a bunch of different projects on my webserver, all with the same base url, but with the final part being different. server/junk/stuff/holy_cow.html, server/junk/stuff/holy_shit.html and so on. If I typed in "cow" or "shit" in the address bar the appropriate URL would be suggested. I found that to be kinda useful, but I guess it is an edge case :-)
I'm truly amazed by how many people think that the right to free speech includes the right to an audience.
I don't see how this can be surprising, most people, including most /.ers, are idiots. They refuse to think. Most of them thinks that one opinion has as much value as another, whilst the reality is that most opinions people have are certifiable rubbish. Hell, we even have a President in the US who thinks that if he believes in something strongly enough it will be so, or even it is so, irrespective of reality.
As someone said, using an ad-blocker is exactly like going to the toilet, or to the kitchen for another beer, or turning to talk to your kids during a commercial break. I wonder if these idiots think that the mute button on my remote is as bad as ad-blocking software? I use my DVR to record most of what I watch, time-shifting is great. I wonder if these idiots thinks that I am behaving in a morally comprehensible manner when I fast-forward through the ads.
People are too lazy to type or read anyway
You are absolutely right, which is why this half-assed move from Apple surprises me a little bit. Well, perhaps not, when Apple does stuff they always do it half way.
As you point out, people are too lazy to type and read, so what is it with the bright and shiny LCD that they ship this with? Typical Apple Tax. They want all my money, but they give me stuff I don't need nor want. Dropping the keyboard is great, but why force me to buy a screen? I am not going to type on the keyboard, why do they think I would want to read the screen?
Release this thing without the superfluous screen, then I'll buy it. Price it somewhere between $4K and $5K and it will be at the top of my list. Create it with a magnesium chassis and a carbon fiber shell, and I'll even pay twice as much. Now that would be the ideal laptop. If they can get battery life to something decent, like 27 minutes, I would never have to buy a computer ever again.
That's a false dichotomy. Many Rails developers are really smart but they won't use Oracle for other reasons. The major roadblock with Oracle is not that it's the wrong tool, it's that it is not free (neither as in beer nor speech).
How is it a false dichotomy? Oracle is, by a rather significant margin, the chosen database in the enterprise world. This is where the money is generated. If Rails is not used in conjunction with enterprise database solutions, Rails isn't used for important stuff. And no, Wikipedia is not "important".
I'm simply stating the fact that nobody uses dbs that support clustering with Ruby
Again, this is a rather odd statement. Where do you get this information from? Are you seriously saying that nobody is using Rails on Oracle?
What I'm really advocating is that all the same problems that people encounter simply be standardized. This is just like how ActiveRecord standardized database access.
And I am pointing out that you don't do that by adding rubbish and irrelevant junk to the core framework but by using, or writing, application specific extensions. Adding specific photo-album (essentially) extensions to a generic framework is absurd and the Rails developers should not pollute the framework like that but concentrate on the core. There are more than enough people out there writing extensions, and your requests belongs in such extensions, not in the core framework.
When somebody tries to do something and he says it's hard, then it IS hard for that person.
There are typically two reasons for things being hard. One is that it is hard for anyone to do it, in other words, it is intrinsically hard. The other is that it is hard for a group of the population a lack of the skills required to do said "thing". You can't blame the "thing" for the users lack of skills. People thinks programming in Python is hard too, doesn't mean there is anything wrong with Python.
Please note - I am not saying you are such a person with a lack of skills, I am just pointing out that the fact that a lot of people find something to be hard has no bearing on whether it is in fact hard for an appropriately skilled person.
Seriously. Check it out.
I have and it is good stuff. Also, please note that I am not a Rails apologist, I am just addressing some areas where I disagree with you.
I have read the article in question, and it takes a specific "performance test" to task over bad methodology. I have not endorsed said methodology but referred to an article on the topic of performance that is more in depth.
If you have any information about the methodology applied in this article, please let me (and the author) know.
I also referred to this one, again not the one with the flawed methodology. If you feel there is anything wrong with either of these, please feel free to enlighten me.
this was the first time in a long time I "had heard"
Which just means that you are ignorant and have a desperate need to flaunt it.
since it was about THAT STATEMENT, and NOT about Java's actual performance!
Sorry, I misunderstood your comment. I took the "that's rich" part to actually mean that you commented on Java performance. I was not aware that you only had some masochistic need to announce that you were ignorant. I am absolutely sure that Julia Roberts also has never heard that Java has a certain level of performance, but I doubt she has a need to advertise this particular ignorance in various public fora. I would assume that Julia Roberts tend to speak of things she actually has knowledge off, most people do. When people are ignorant of a particular subject they tend to either try to educate them selves on it or just not participate in discussions about it.
I will hire a goddamned psychic!
You really shouldn't. They can't really read your mind. Honestly. They can't. Instead of doing that you should limit your commentary to discussion topics you in fact have information about.
Do NOT come barging into conversations I am having with others, change the goddamned subject
This is a public forum, not a messenger client. You are not participating in private conversations ever when you post in a public forum, you are shouting from mountain tops and inviting everybody to join in. If you don't understand the difference between talking to someone over the phone and posting in public discussion fora, I would recommend you stop the latter until you have acquired enough knowledge to understand the difference.
Sure, until you add the memory used back in
Not quite sure what you mean by this. GC or the fact that C++ uses less memory than Java.
I see a lot of "in the wild" C code that does really weird stuff so it can, supposedly, get a tiny speed/mem imporovement
Yes, one does. I have even written some since I was doing embedded work once and every byte counted and every cycle counted. This is called optimization and we do it using various types of tools. For Java there is not as much reason to create "weird" code to make it go a little faster since the VM can perform that kind of optimizations. In Java you can, given the ease of development over C/C++, spend time making algorithmic optimizations, which usually have significantly higher impact on performance.
about par with Python
Never got comfortable with the notion of having white-space be relevant when I develop software, so Python never did it for me. I'm a Ruby kind of person. My point was not which language was faster, just the notion that Java was under performing for the tasks here mentioned. Something that is plainly wrong. I know this from both benchmarks and practice with Java and web applications.
If you go back and read it again, you may see that my comment was perfectly honest and accurate.
How was it accurate? Java is the second highest performing programming language of the modern OO and equivalent languages. It's performance is some times slightly slower, some times slightly faster than C++. In reality, Java is very close to C++ in performance for all the most common programing tasks today. Your statement implied that Java was very far from high performance, which was 100% wrong.
So, being 100% wrong, what was it that was accurate about your statement?
Of course, you have no way of knowing exactly what I have heard;
I couldn't care less about what you have heard, and what you have heard is utterly irrelevant to whether Java is performant or not.
but neither do you have any real reason to doubt my statement.
If by "your statement" you refer to the implied statement about Java performance, then yes, I have many real reasons to doubt it, since it is wrong. Measurably wrong.
I agree that clustering would be better solved in the database ... The number of Rails apps using Oracle as a backend are approaching 0%
That would imply that all Rails developers are idiots. If Oracle is the only DB where the DB supports clustering properly and someone needs clustering, he should use Oracle or he should find another business to work in since you are an idiot. You select the correct tool for the job.
Also, given that Oracle is, by a significant margin, the chosen database for critical enterprise stuff, if your 0% assertion is true, then Rails isn't used anywhere for important stuff.
It isn't easy to convert a large software project, constantly in flux, to support clustering
If clustering is supported by the DB, yes it is. That is why it belongs in the DB realm.
Say you build a nice wiki app. Later you decide that would fit in well with your project manager. How much work would it take to get it to work? Normally. A lot.
No, it would not. Not the way I develop apps. I develop in a way where what I do is re-usable. I don't see what Rails have to do with that.
Convention over configuration is fine. I like it. But that's not the magic I'm talking about. ...
All the automatic method generation (method missing), autoloading based on names, conversions from singular to plural. That's what I mean by magic.
What surprises me is that you don't seem to understand that the two paragraphs quoted above are self-contradictory to a degree. The "magic" you don't like is either a core part of Rails (so you don't like Rails) or it is part of Convention over Configuration. Honestly, since it is documented, and well understood, I can't see why you think it is "magic".
This problem happens to every developer in exactly the same way. To me, that is a prime candidate for moving the problem scope into the framework.
No, this does not mean that it is a prime candidate for inclusion in Rails. It may mean that it is a prime candidate for some sort of library/extension/gem, but it doesn't belong in Rails at all. What you are advocating is polluting Rails with all kinds of absurd, and non-relevant junk. A huge number of people do MP3 work in their Rails apps, you wouldn't seriously suggest that we should include MP3 manipulation in a ORM framework, would you?
Why solve the problem multiple times?
You should absolutely not solve the problem many times, that would be absurd. It would be equally absurd to include it in the ORM framework.
Sorry, the large number of people saying its hard to make Rails do what it's not designed specifically to do says otherwise.
I disagree with that conclusion. The number of people who is says something has no bearing on how difficult or easy that thing is, it is only an indication of somethings popularity. A large number of people thinks Java is slow, even though it has speed parity with C++ in a number of areas. A large number of people were raised and trained on PHP and then moved to Rails. Someone who learned software development on PHP is most likely permanently damaged and beyond hope for ever being able to develop real software. Same goes for people who have developed a lot in Basic, visual or no.
In this case, Rails has some ActiveCouch type plugins
So you are fine then. Or?
I have long since moved to Ruby my self, and I did not at all comment about Java as a language. My comment was only directed at your rather misinformed "That's rich" statement about Java performance since that exposed a substantial gap in your knowledge.
am aware that Java 5 (aka 1.5.x) made some major speed improvements, but this is the first I have heard anybody claim that it "competes" with C++.
Well, I am glad that you say "first I have heard" since that explains it. You simply haven't been around that much to hear. Perhaps you do not work in the right industry. Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with Java at all. For one, Java is at 6, and it has been competitive for quite some time. As the benchmark here shows, java is very competitive with C++. This is for CPU intensive benchmarks. Once you add disk and database access into the mix, as you do in most applications, the speed difference between Java and C++ applications becomes negligible.
I think your opinion is highly colored by your prolonged lack of information about Java and benchmarks since Java performance parity with C++ for a large number of tasks was widely reported at least five or six years ago. Particularly the IBM Java VM gained a rep for being very fast, with subsequent inclusion of similar features in the Sun VM. You can read about it for example here.
Remember, a Java application can do something no (or most) C++ applications can not do, namely run-time performance tuning.
For a number of tasks C++ will probably always be faster than Java, but those tasks are fewer and further between every day, and for the tasks that so many people work on today, namely creating good web-based stuff, Java is probably the fastest language there is since C++ is not a widely used web-app development language.
So, given context, namely web-based applications, it is perfectly fine to use "high performance" about a Java solution since it is the best performer of them all. There are very few web-apps written in C++.
Maintaining custom patches for a foreign codebase is going to be painful
Well, the thing is, in Ruby it is not. Given the tools that Ruby gives, such as mixins, modifying the core of a framework in a maintainable manner is a lot easier. Now, if you go out and fix the framework in a non-Ruby manner, for example by altering the framework source in-place, you will have problems, but if you do, you need to re-take Ruby 101.
No, my language of choice is Ruby, which is generally slower than Java. But again... that doesn't make Java fast.
Speed is a relative thing in the computer world. Java today can in many cases compete with C++ in speed, and it immensely more maintainable with fewer resulting problems. So, yes, I would in fact say that Java is fast. Not compared to hand-written assembly that solves a limited problem, but in the league it plays, one that partly includes C++, Java is fast.
Have you written any Java code that wasn't fast? Perhaps it was you :-)
Most people who speak of "limitations" to their framework are people who expect the framework to do all their work for them: this is simply unrealistic.
Amen. Like the poster above who wants rails to include, in its core functionality, the ability to store images, automatically retrieve the image and a thumbnail of said image depending on the situation. This isn't stuff that belongs in an application server framework, but it does belong in an image manipulation framework and a DB driver (re-sizing images in one, storing stuff in the other).
I find that a lot of people who ask for special functions like this are just simply bad developers. Often self-taught through some horrible abomination like Visual Basic and/or PHP. Obviously not always :-)
Some comments to your ideas... I like a lot of what you say and I strongly disagree with some of them.
zero changes ... to go from single database to a cluster of databases
Perhaps, or perhaps this isn't something that belongs in the application-server domain at all, but in the database driver domain. In other words, if you need a cluster of DBs, use a DB product that supports this seamlessly. I am not going to mention Oracle by name, but it would support what you are asking here I assume, depending on how the Rails/Oracle guys wrote the Ora driver for Rails. Never tried Rails with Oracle, but for all apps I have written lately, this is taken care of by the Ora driver.
Reusable code.
Depending on how you do Rails, this is fully supported. Unless of course I am misunderstanding what you are asking. There is nothing in Rails that prevents you from creating re-usable code. Honestly.
Built in scalable file system.
Sorry, disagree with this one too. This is not in the domain of Rails, but in extensions to Ruby and Rails. As such it is fully supported today.
No magic
Didn't know Rails did any magic. What does it do? Levitate your trains? Sry, just trying (probably unsuccessfully) to be funny. Honestly, duck and convention over configuration is not magic IMHO, but to some it may seem like it.
Custom field types for database
This one might be a misunderstanding on my part, but from what you seem to be saying in the rest of your point, you would like Rails to support things like "image" and "video" as fields in the DB and then use its own implementation for it (such as storing the actual image and video in the file system and pointers in the DB.
If this is what you mean I have to strongly disagree again, how data is stored physically is not and should not, be in the realm of Rails, that is a combination of an application issue (identifying an item as an image) and a database issue (storing the binary data in a BLOB field).
If you meant that Rails should support custom column-types in the DB, in other words, if the DB vendor adds "special" column types then Rails should support it, then I maybe agree. Not quite sure. Perhaps Rails should just stick with ANSI.
An image field type where you can change the image sizes
Absolutely not! This is an absurd request. This is so clearly an application level item that I have to admit to a certain amount of surprise that you actually ask for it. Including such items in Rails would utterly ruin the framework. Adding extensions to Rails that supports this or similar is perfectly fine, and you might want to give it a whirl, but including it in Rails as such would be wrong and insane.
In Rails, the solution is usually to memorize the option that allows you to do what you want.
Here we have to disagree of course since I think this is what Rails delivers, but in this we might just be different. I also think that vi is one of the most user-friendly code editors out there, so I might be a little different.
Multi-threading
Hey, at least we agree on something.
CouchDB
Yeah, why not, as a driver. Not sure if Rails could do it though, I am not familiar enough with how dependent Rails is on the SQL CRUD idea and to what degree CRUD can be applied to CouchDB. I am not familiar enough with CouchDB to say. If CouchDB is CRUD'dy, I don't see why a driver could not be added to Rails. It doesn't belong in the core however.
I'd be very surprised to see JavaFX ability overtake Flash in browsers any time in the next 3 years. In addition to that, and given the horrid (still) Java plugin performance in any browser I have ever tried, I would be shocked to see JavaFX overtake Flash as a client-side development tool ever.
Sun did a good job with Java, and I have used Java for commercial server-side development since the late 90's. The company I worked for sold and deployed our first major Java app in 1997. I am not a Java basher. Java was however never a decent client-side tool until Eclipse and SWT came around, and those aren't really possible to embed in web pages. JavaFX, too little and at least 6 years too late.
Would have been if it hadn't been for the fact that that particularly group of people is firmly placed in the pockets of Microsoft.
Are usable SWF authoring tools even small-f free yet?
Flex is free and open source, so, yes, usable SWF authoring tools are free. Download Eclipse, download Flex. Voila, you are set.
what other language could have done a better job in easily developping web pages for the past 10 years
Honestly, I am not too concerned with "hastily" doing anything at all. In my experience things done hastily is usually done badly. Are there better strategies for putting applications on the web than PHP. Absolutely, various Java technologies for one. Ruby (which has been available for that long, but not with Rails) is another.
The problem is that hastily done stuff usually ends up with a much longer life span than was intended when it was hastily put together, and in the long run the cost of ownership is significanly higher than would have been the case if it was built a little less hastily from the get-go.
I have seen a lot of what has hastily been put together with PHP and MySQL (for example) and it is usually put together by people who don't even know what normalized means. Friends of mine have twice walked away from lucurative contracts because they were not allowed to do the only sane thing, which wast throw out everything that was written and start from scratch.
Enabling "developers" with tools that encourage hastily throwing things together means that a lot of people who should never be allowed to write SQL are given tasks they are not qualified for.
Thing is, PHP is a pathetic insult to programming and a horrible way to develop anything sensible and manageable. On the other hand, VB is at least as bad, and in the hands of a lot of developers, significantly worse.
Both PHP and VB.net are examples on what happens when the mediocre (as in mediocre software developers and architects - and mediocre here is probably giving too much credit) gets too much work due to lack of reasonable alternatives. In a sane world VB would have been dead eons (in software time) ago and PHP would have been dismissed out of hand when it was released.