This is why we need to go back to Eisenhower-era concrete road beds meant for B-52's to land on. I'm talking foot deep steel reinforced concrete baby. Grew up with those bad boys in my little rural town in Texas. Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north so I could be talking out of my backside, but these things appeared well-nigh indestructible.
Doesn't I-15 (or is it I-25?) get so much truck traffic that they built three parallel segments, and one is always constantly being rebuilt?
There are some areas where it's hard to buy alcohol or get served with an out-of-state ID. As much as I don't like the idea of "Real ID," I want something that allows me to buy alcohol without hassle when I travel.
IE was decent, and it was shipped with Windows. That is what killed Netscape. If people had a computer with just an OS, and had to choose a browser at the time, they almost invariably went with Netscape. It was the bundling of IE with Windows that killed off competitors.
The story of Netscape's failure is well-repeated here. They had a source code tree that regularly didn't compile, so their releases were made when their tree actually compiled.
The thing to remember is that the later versions of Netscape were really horrible. Do you remember when they released Netscape 6? I tried it, and was bloated garbage. A few months later, I realized that IE crashed significantly less then Netscape 4, so I switched.
Frankly, if later versions of Netscape had been a decent browser, they could have figured out how to stay in business.
You only have one life to live. I'd rather not spend mine stuck in traffic, which is why I'm quite glad my office is only 2 miles away from my apartment and an 8 minute bike/bus/cab ride.
The irony is that these tiny cars are probably best for tiny commutes.
The question remains, as Kotaku points out, whether the Wii's audience will persist after the other systems match its casual-gaming capabilities.
Its all about price and space. I bought a Wii because it's cheap & small; and I only use it about once a week. I don't see myself ever getting a PS3 or 360 unless they're very cheap; and even then the prospect of having another THING in my living room, hooked up to my TV, is somewhat discouraging.
I might not represent all casual gamers; but I don't want to spend lots of money to have lots of boxes hooked up to my TV that I hardly use. If you want to sell a game to me, you need to put it on hardware that's already in my living room.
Well that would be kind of dishonest, wouldn't it? Your average file-sharing culprit isn't an innocent old grandpa, but a young adult who downloads movies and music for his/her own use, full well knowing it's illicit.
The issue isn't a simple as that. You can't sue someone for stealing a pack of gum, because the value of the pack of gum isn't close to the statue of limitations. (Or whatever the minimum economic value is needed.) The court will laugh at anyone who tried to sue over a pack of gum, even if the claim was made in small claims court.
The RIAA is doing the equivalent of suing someone for stealing a pack of gum that they claim is worth $100. They're also claiming that it's not worth digging up video footage from their video cameras to prove that someone stole the $100 gum from their store.
More importantly, the indications are that he's fighting them on technicalities, not actual principles. So that'll cost him more in the end.
I think this essentially raises the bar for what's economical for the RIAA to go after. If they want to sue someone, they have to prove that they actually own the copyright, and that the material shared is the material copyrighted. This makes it difficult to sue someone for sharing files that have no economic value.
Yes, it's a technicality; however, the American court system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Without it, anyone could grab a list of IPs on a torrent, claim copyright, and then sue.
Slightly off-topic: Am I the only one who finds Google web search less and less useful? There's no way to really force literal search anymore. Everything I enter gets auto-"corrected". Plus signs, quotation marks or that misleading field "this exact wording or phrase" in Advanced Search used to help, but that stopped working a while ago. Everything is fuzzified now. Is there an alternative or some trick I haven't heard of?
Try bing. Seriously, it seems like it's going to give Google a run for its money.
I, on the other hand, am completely happy with Google.
The soldier can be sitting in a since comfy office complex in Kansas to perform combat duties, and go home to his wife and kids at night.
We're already there, but it's Nevada instead of Kansas. The air-force controls its un-manned drones from Nevada. (I think.) Anyway, it was on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago.
Ruby wasn't dumped by Twitter (and a ton of other developers and companies) because 'the UI part of the application essentially gets an insignificant amount of use'. It was dumped because they were using Ruby for a significant amount of BACKEND use. Have you not seen benchmark after benchmark after benchmark of comparison? It actually CAPS OUT!!! It has a plateau! While other spike and go up and down and scale with demand, Ruby plateau's and cannot accomplish more unless (as every Ruby develop explains) you throw more hardware at it. And again, it requires 2-3 times the number of machines (and with that extra sys admins and maintenance) to do in Ruby what you can do in any other language.
That's because they're using the Active Records design pattern. It's well-known that that design pattern doesn't scale. Have read the book on Ruby on Rails? The Active Records design pattern will choke if you have to handle a large volume of data because it sucks a lot of data in the database into Ruby objects before they can be manipulated.
Active Records is fine for rapid prototyping, and for handling cases where a small amount of data maps to a complicated data structure. Backend stuff, where large volumes of data need to be manipulated, doesn't work well with this kind of design pattern.
For example, I once worked in a C# project that used the Active Records design pattern that makes Ruby on Rails slow. I wrote a function that had to update a bunch of rows in a table; and when I tested it with the maximum number of rows that the requirements called for, it took about 20 minutes to run. I then bypassed the Active Records portion and wrote my own SQL Update statements, and the code ran in about a minute. (I had a 20x performance improvement because I knew the requirements and chose the correct design pattern.)
This is why I say it's all about knowing your requirements. Processing large volumes of data using Active Records in ANY language or framework, including Ruby on Rails, will be so slow that it's uneconomical to throw hardware at it.
But if you like a band enough to download 7GB of their work, why begrudge them a modest return for their work?
I pay high prices for new material; but I don't pay for recordings that were made 40 years ago and digitally remastered 15 years ago.
No one pays me for work that I did 5 years ago; let alone 1 year ago. Just because someone had a week or month of inspiration in a recording studio doesn't mean they are entitled to free income for the rest of their lives and their childrens' lives.
If an artist wants a nice retirement from a hit record, he or she needs to do what the rest of us do when we're young: Invest wisely and save for retirement. I have no interest in supporting an artist who blew all his royalties on coke & limos 15-25 years ago.
Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward.
The ability to move tabs into different windows is what got me hooked. The separate process thing is nice, but when I'm on my Macs, I really miss the ability to move tabs into different windows.
In conflicts where all the combat units are robotic, how do wars conclude? At first blood? I doubt very seriously that the prevailing army is going to stop at, "Check! Mate in 3!"
If anything, the amount of collateral damage will increase, and can be blamed on "equipment failure" with a dramatic shrug from the chain of command.
Well, hopefully they go better then the cold war. During the cold war we all lived in fear and then eventually increased the planet's background radiation. The problem with the cold war was that eventually the bombs got too big!
As long as our enemy is a civilized nation; then the intelligent people on both sides know that the "military" is just a distraction for those who are less enlightened.
This article is very easy to mis-interpret. Streaming isn't going to replace downloads; it's replacing terrestrial radio. The royalties are only being lowered for sites like Pandora; but "On-demand streaming services still have to pay the record labels about 1p for every track streamed."
How much longer till we can figure out how our brain "codes" things then exploit it for our own benefit? Just think about it, custom-made drugs to make it seem like you are flying, fighting a dragon, more epic than any video game imaginable, all while being perfectly controlled with little to no side effects. Or take a pill and have the entire library of congress memorized. I wonder how much longer this will take.
Uhm, LSD? The controversy started when Timothy Leary tried to prove his hypothesis that LSD can invoke a religions experience.
On a more serious note; there is a LOT of active research into psychoactive chemicals. There are over 200 known psychoactive chemicals, and the rate of discovery is increasing.
No, I'm referring to 2-5 million dollar projects that deal with industrial automation:
Large companies have applications that process large volumes of data but only have a small amount of users.
For these applications, all state is in the DB. Different parts of the application are written in different languages.
There are only a small amount of "users." These are highly specialized technicians.
Ruby on Rails can be considered because the UI part of the application essentially gets an insignificant amount of use.
Again, it all comes down to understanding your users, knowing your requirements, and picking the best technology for the job. This is something that all real software developers know.
Otherwise we are just building a throwaway app and the companies investment in that app is money lost since they (like Twitter) will just end up recoding in some other language.
One way to start a business is to hack together a prototype and keep hacking at it while you try to get investments. It's a method that I don't like, but it seemed to work for Twitter!
I have worked for alot of companies that have grown and need to have their architecture grow with them without hitting a brick wall. Thats the inherent problem with RUBY and the one they HAVE to solve before they achieve mass adoption within mid-to-enterprise. Otherwise it is just for mom-n-pop shops.
It's all about knowing your requirements and who's using your application.
In my case; I was working for the opposite of a mom-n-pop shop. I did one project for a major pharmaceutical company; and another for a major semiconductor company. In both projects; massive amounts of data were generated by heavy machinery; and processed in a batch manner using the most appropriate language.
The data was interpreted by a small amount of specialized people. We only needed to target about 5-20 users; although the way the applications were written, they could grow to be about 100 users. In these cases; if we were to make a web-based applications, we really wouldn't need to care about the same kind of scalability issues that public-facing web sites reach. We wouldn't need to worry about millions of users; instead, we would just need an environment that could handle queries that can return a couple thousand rows. This, as far as I know, is well within Ruby on Rails abilities.
Our biggest concerns were choosing an appropriate database; using development methodology that resulted in accurate code; and cost / time of development. Scaling to millions of concurrent users just wasn't going to happen!
Funny, isn't this what Twitter thought too before dumping RUBY entirely?
Ruby on Rails seems to be intended for rapid prototyping; and web applications that don't need to scale. Twitter is a poor use of Ruby on Rails, because it needs to handle many concurrent users.
In my career, I've worked on plenty of applications that only need to handle a few concurrent users. The data processing is so valuable that the UI only needs to be good enough to enable a few users to process terrabytes of data that come from heavy machinery. In these situations, Ruby on Rails is much more appropriate then finely-tuned ASP, C#, Java, C++, ect, ect, because the web server will never break a sweat.
On the other hand, if I had to write a web application that needed to scale to millions of users; I would never use RoR, except for a quick proof-of-concept prototype.
Then why the fuck is the Ruby community hyping it so much, and drawing nieve young developers in to a trap?
Ruby on Rails seems to be intended for rapid prototyping; and web applications that don't need to scale.
In my career, I've worked on plenty of applications that only need to handle a few concurrent users. The data processing is so valuable that the UI only needs to be good enough to enable a few users to process terrabytes of data that come from heavy machinery. In these situations, Ruby on Rails is much more appropriate then finely-tuned ASP, C#, Java, C++, ect, ect, because the web server will never break a sweat.
Slashdot Mirror
This is why we need to go back to Eisenhower-era concrete road beds meant for B-52's to land on. I'm talking foot deep steel reinforced concrete baby. Grew up with those bad boys in my little rural town in Texas. Of course we didn't have the freeze/thaw cycles people do farther north so I could be talking out of my backside, but these things appeared well-nigh indestructible.
Doesn't I-15 (or is it I-25?) get so much truck traffic that they built three parallel segments, and one is always constantly being rebuilt?
This is of course predicated on the idea that you even believe having a reliable ID card system is a 'good' thing...
The "problem" is that we have 50 different state IDs, and a bartender needs to be able to know how to spot fakes from out-of-state.
There are some areas where it's hard to buy alcohol or get served with an out-of-state ID. As much as I don't like the idea of "Real ID," I want something that allows me to buy alcohol without hassle when I travel.
When I worked at Intel I ran to jump into a company photo. A few years later, I was reading a tech web site and I found myself in an Intel ad!
The worst thing about the ad was that it's a horrible photo of me!
IE was decent, and it was shipped with Windows. That is what killed Netscape. If people had a computer with just an OS, and had to choose a browser at the time, they almost invariably went with Netscape. It was the bundling of IE with Windows that killed off competitors.
The story of Netscape's failure is well-repeated here. They had a source code tree that regularly didn't compile, so their releases were made when their tree actually compiled.
The thing to remember is that the later versions of Netscape were really horrible. Do you remember when they released Netscape 6? I tried it, and was bloated garbage. A few months later, I realized that IE crashed significantly less then Netscape 4, so I switched.
Frankly, if later versions of Netscape had been a decent browser, they could have figured out how to stay in business.
You only have one life to live. I'd rather not spend mine stuck in traffic, which is why I'm quite glad my office is only 2 miles away from my apartment and an 8 minute bike/bus/cab ride.
The irony is that these tiny cars are probably best for tiny commutes.
Using math books is cheating. The only REAL way to learn algebra or calculus is to re-invent it like people did hundreds of years ago!
The question remains, as Kotaku points out, whether the Wii's audience will persist after the other systems match its casual-gaming capabilities.
Its all about price and space. I bought a Wii because it's cheap & small; and I only use it about once a week. I don't see myself ever getting a PS3 or 360 unless they're very cheap; and even then the prospect of having another THING in my living room, hooked up to my TV, is somewhat discouraging.
I might not represent all casual gamers; but I don't want to spend lots of money to have lots of boxes hooked up to my TV that I hardly use. If you want to sell a game to me, you need to put it on hardware that's already in my living room.
Well that would be kind of dishonest, wouldn't it? Your average file-sharing culprit isn't an innocent old grandpa, but a young adult who downloads movies and music for his/her own use, full well knowing it's illicit.
The issue isn't a simple as that. You can't sue someone for stealing a pack of gum, because the value of the pack of gum isn't close to the statue of limitations. (Or whatever the minimum economic value is needed.) The court will laugh at anyone who tried to sue over a pack of gum, even if the claim was made in small claims court.
The RIAA is doing the equivalent of suing someone for stealing a pack of gum that they claim is worth $100. They're also claiming that it's not worth digging up video footage from their video cameras to prove that someone stole the $100 gum from their store.
Kinda silly to sue over petty crime, huh?
More importantly, the indications are that he's fighting them on technicalities, not actual principles. So that'll cost him more in the end.
I think this essentially raises the bar for what's economical for the RIAA to go after. If they want to sue someone, they have to prove that they actually own the copyright, and that the material shared is the material copyrighted. This makes it difficult to sue someone for sharing files that have no economic value.
Yes, it's a technicality; however, the American court system requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Without it, anyone could grab a list of IPs on a torrent, claim copyright, and then sue.
Slightly off-topic: Am I the only one who finds Google web search less and less useful? There's no way to really force literal search anymore. Everything I enter gets auto-"corrected". Plus signs, quotation marks or that misleading field "this exact wording or phrase" in Advanced Search used to help, but that stopped working a while ago. Everything is fuzzified now. Is there an alternative or some trick I haven't heard of?
Try bing. Seriously, it seems like it's going to give Google a run for its money.
I, on the other hand, am completely happy with Google.
This is going to create all new forms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorders. :(
Remote control sociopaths maybe?
Doubtful, it's too much like video games.
The soldier can be sitting in a since comfy office complex in Kansas to perform combat duties, and go home to his wife and kids at night.
We're already there, but it's Nevada instead of Kansas. The air-force controls its un-manned drones from Nevada. (I think.) Anyway, it was on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWG_mzTTzMc
Ruby wasn't dumped by Twitter (and a ton of other developers and companies) because 'the UI part of the application essentially gets an insignificant amount of use'. It was dumped because they were using Ruby for a significant amount of BACKEND use. Have you not seen benchmark after benchmark after benchmark of comparison? It actually CAPS OUT!!! It has a plateau! While other spike and go up and down and scale with demand, Ruby plateau's and cannot accomplish more unless (as every Ruby develop explains) you throw more hardware at it. And again, it requires 2-3 times the number of machines (and with that extra sys admins and maintenance) to do in Ruby what you can do in any other language.
That's because they're using the Active Records design pattern. It's well-known that that design pattern doesn't scale. Have read the book on Ruby on Rails? The Active Records design pattern will choke if you have to handle a large volume of data because it sucks a lot of data in the database into Ruby objects before they can be manipulated.
Active Records is fine for rapid prototyping, and for handling cases where a small amount of data maps to a complicated data structure. Backend stuff, where large volumes of data need to be manipulated, doesn't work well with this kind of design pattern.
For example, I once worked in a C# project that used the Active Records design pattern that makes Ruby on Rails slow. I wrote a function that had to update a bunch of rows in a table; and when I tested it with the maximum number of rows that the requirements called for, it took about 20 minutes to run. I then bypassed the Active Records portion and wrote my own SQL Update statements, and the code ran in about a minute. (I had a 20x performance improvement because I knew the requirements and chose the correct design pattern.)
This is why I say it's all about knowing your requirements. Processing large volumes of data using Active Records in ANY language or framework, including Ruby on Rails, will be so slow that it's uneconomical to throw hardware at it.
But if you like a band enough to download 7GB of their work, why begrudge them a modest return for their work?
I pay high prices for new material; but I don't pay for recordings that were made 40 years ago and digitally remastered 15 years ago.
No one pays me for work that I did 5 years ago; let alone 1 year ago. Just because someone had a week or month of inspiration in a recording studio doesn't mean they are entitled to free income for the rest of their lives and their childrens' lives.
If an artist wants a nice retirement from a hit record, he or she needs to do what the rest of us do when we're young: Invest wisely and save for retirement. I have no interest in supporting an artist who blew all his royalties on coke & limos 15-25 years ago.
Chrome is obviously not ready for real use on OS X or Linux yet, but it is an architectural leap forward.
The ability to move tabs into different windows is what got me hooked. The separate process thing is nice, but when I'm on my Macs, I really miss the ability to move tabs into different windows.
In conflicts where all the combat units are robotic, how do wars conclude? At first blood? I doubt very seriously that the prevailing army is going to stop at, "Check! Mate in 3!" If anything, the amount of collateral damage will increase, and can be blamed on "equipment failure" with a dramatic shrug from the chain of command.
Well, hopefully they go better then the cold war. During the cold war we all lived in fear and then eventually increased the planet's background radiation. The problem with the cold war was that eventually the bombs got too big!
As long as our enemy is a civilized nation; then the intelligent people on both sides know that the "military" is just a distraction for those who are less enlightened.
This article is very easy to mis-interpret. Streaming isn't going to replace downloads; it's replacing terrestrial radio. The royalties are only being lowered for sites like Pandora; but "On-demand streaming services still have to pay the record labels about 1p for every track streamed."
at what point does the US military stop looking like a human defense force and start looking looking like alien invaders from a robot planet?
Robot wars mean less human casualties. It's an important part of the path away from our animal instincts to fight each other.
How much longer till we can figure out how our brain "codes" things then exploit it for our own benefit? Just think about it, custom-made drugs to make it seem like you are flying, fighting a dragon, more epic than any video game imaginable, all while being perfectly controlled with little to no side effects. Or take a pill and have the entire library of congress memorized. I wonder how much longer this will take.
Uhm, LSD? The controversy started when Timothy Leary tried to prove his hypothesis that LSD can invoke a religions experience.
On a more serious note; there is a LOT of active research into psychoactive chemicals. There are over 200 known psychoactive chemicals, and the rate of discovery is increasing.
Yes. Exactly. Small mom-n-pop
No, I'm referring to 2-5 million dollar projects that deal with industrial automation:
Again, it all comes down to understanding your users, knowing your requirements, and picking the best technology for the job. This is something that all real software developers know.
Otherwise we are just building a throwaway app and the companies investment in that app is money lost since they (like Twitter) will just end up recoding in some other language.
One way to start a business is to hack together a prototype and keep hacking at it while you try to get investments. It's a method that I don't like, but it seemed to work for Twitter!
Put something on your page... Anything! My page is very basic; but occasionally I add a page that describes a project or expresses an opinion.
I have worked for alot of companies that have grown and need to have their architecture grow with them without hitting a brick wall. Thats the inherent problem with RUBY and the one they HAVE to solve before they achieve mass adoption within mid-to-enterprise. Otherwise it is just for mom-n-pop shops.
It's all about knowing your requirements and who's using your application.
In my case; I was working for the opposite of a mom-n-pop shop. I did one project for a major pharmaceutical company; and another for a major semiconductor company. In both projects; massive amounts of data were generated by heavy machinery; and processed in a batch manner using the most appropriate language.
The data was interpreted by a small amount of specialized people. We only needed to target about 5-20 users; although the way the applications were written, they could grow to be about 100 users. In these cases; if we were to make a web-based applications, we really wouldn't need to care about the same kind of scalability issues that public-facing web sites reach. We wouldn't need to worry about millions of users; instead, we would just need an environment that could handle queries that can return a couple thousand rows. This, as far as I know, is well within Ruby on Rails abilities.
Our biggest concerns were choosing an appropriate database; using development methodology that resulted in accurate code; and cost / time of development. Scaling to millions of concurrent users just wasn't going to happen!
Funny, isn't this what Twitter thought too before dumping RUBY entirely?
Ruby on Rails seems to be intended for rapid prototyping; and web applications that don't need to scale. Twitter is a poor use of Ruby on Rails, because it needs to handle many concurrent users.
In my career, I've worked on plenty of applications that only need to handle a few concurrent users. The data processing is so valuable that the UI only needs to be good enough to enable a few users to process terrabytes of data that come from heavy machinery. In these situations, Ruby on Rails is much more appropriate then finely-tuned ASP, C#, Java, C++, ect, ect, because the web server will never break a sweat.
On the other hand, if I had to write a web application that needed to scale to millions of users; I would never use RoR, except for a quick proof-of-concept prototype.
Then why the fuck is the Ruby community hyping it so much, and drawing nieve young developers in to a trap?
Ruby on Rails seems to be intended for rapid prototyping; and web applications that don't need to scale.
In my career, I've worked on plenty of applications that only need to handle a few concurrent users. The data processing is so valuable that the UI only needs to be good enough to enable a few users to process terrabytes of data that come from heavy machinery. In these situations, Ruby on Rails is much more appropriate then finely-tuned ASP, C#, Java, C++, ect, ect, because the web server will never break a sweat.