So far everything I've seen that was at all "special" about Ruby is available in just about every other language via helper classes (like Integer for ints in Java) and perhaps slightly less graceful structures like callbacks (just look at jQuery, for example.)
Usually the reason I've picked a language to do a job has had nothing to do about syntax. The three biggest factors have always been: what do I already know, what has the best performance, and what can be developed quickest? It's always a balance of those 3.
I'll never use Ruby until it's supported widely enough, matured enough, and provides me with some reason to bother learning its API.
Considering I'm already intimately familiar with C, Java, PHP, and SQL, I think hell freezing over is a safer bet. In my limited observation, most of the people who tout Ruby as the future have never extensively programmed in another language (except maybe a handful of people who coded in the much older languages similar to Ruby.)
I especially love it when somebody claims to write a web server in 10 lines of Ruby... and all it took was using a 10,000 line library and a however-large interpreter. I'd like to see that stand up to a slash-dotting. Puh-lease...
I was not suggesting everybody speak a different language... it's just as silly to attempt to pick just one also, even for a single programmer doing a project with any serious scope.
I actually use JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, MicrosoftSQL, CSS, and HTML on a regular basis and that pretty much covers all of my needs. C++ or C# follow up for a different set of responsibilities...
I woudln't dream of using Python, Ruby, or Java because they don't offer me anything I don't already have that I could possibly need.
My point is, why would I write my own sort routine when I can just tell a database engine to ORDER BY a given condition. Gotta use the right tools for the job.
I only posted because people seemed to be arguing over which language is best and I don't think it's possible to pick just one. Apples and oranges...
I tend to agree with you that personal preference is one of the biggest factors in the choice of a language... but it's the strengths and weaknesses inherent in any language (or more so the language's purpose) that also shapes this. I rarely use only one language/model anymore.
For instance, in my day to day life, I see a clear distinction as to when procedural/object oriented languages such as C, PHP, and Java should be used, and when a relational language like SQL should be used, and I rarely confuse those two classes of programming. Markup languages (though hardly programming languages) like HTML and CSS also have their essential and distinct roles. Were I forced to select only one, I'd probably quit programming!
Programming languages are just tools to get the job done. When was the last time you saw a carpenter with only a chisel?
Everybody's so quick to get into pissing matches.
(Forgive any flawed terminology, I was just speaking casually.)
You may not have negotiated with google, but the company/individual who is linking to google analytics on the page that you are viewing did.
Also, any site that people link to for external media really could be doing this. Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, you name it.
All the same, my hosts file has a lot of 127.0.0.1 entries in it too...
The internet is largely based on an ad-supported business model. Were enough people to block all of this stuff, we'd potentially be stuck paying hundreds of individual subscription fees.
If Hillary is going to argue that the stupid super delegates can win her the election (a technicality of the rules), then I say she can't pull in Michigan and Florida either, because based equally on a technicality of the rules, they were disqualified from the primaries.
I used to feel this way too, but it's just so ubiquitous nowadays. The internet is not dominated by only the megacorps, so who cares if it's a mom n' pop shop? They're usually better anyways than getting stuck in a hold queue in India.
"It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you."
Or it means you'd rather not have to manage 40 different email servers, and you've chosen one generic centralized account.
"It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question."
Except you probably clicked on the email address while browsing a website on that domain, or typed it in from a business card.
"It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly."
Well since you've got your tinfoil hat out, you should be aware that a few of the governments of the world have been reading all of our internet traffic already with even more dubious purposes. What, are you selling bomb parts? I know I know I know, I'm a huge privacy advocate, but this is kinda splitting hairs. Maybe if some perv at Google was rubbing one out to my emails, I'd be disturbed. It's just a computer that's doing the parsing for advertising purposes in their case. Have you ever used a credit card to buy something? Then you've already been living with this!
"It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use GMail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business."
Responsible people always take this into consideration when making any transaction with any business. I can honestly say I've been screwed over more by big business than the mom n' pops who actually still value their customers.
I understand your opinions and I'm sure they're shared by many... which is why self-hosting email will never go away... but it may just be a wise suggestion by DreamHost if a) their support is insufficient and b) enough of their customers don't really think it's worth the extra trouble.
I mean, this IS DreamHost we're talking about here. You're likely to only find mom n' pop shops there anyways.
True, they only said about smart phones... but at this pace, that will soon be all phones. I know it includes mine, and I only have one cell phone, so as far as I'm concerned, it already is all phones.
"You don't like it? Don't go to fucking Alton Towers! I wouldn't..."
I couldn't agree more. I'm in the USA, but any place that tells me I can't do such basic and, now, intrinsic things as carrying my cell phone, is the last place you will find me. Courthouses I believe prohibit camera phones (i.e. practically all cell phones), and the only time I'd ever go there is if I can't get out of jury duty.
Sure, we could all probably benefit from a simpler lifestyle, but who's a themepark to force that change on you... for half a day? Sounds like this should be left up to the family to decide and work out.
For example, if I could stand to make, say... a few hundred bucks by logging in with my cell phone during a 5 minute break at Disney... they can pry my phone from my cold dead hands, and my hypothetical family certainly could understand, or they could pay for their own damn Disney trip.
I think the real reason is so that when somebody dies on a rollercoaster, you won't see footage of it on YouTube and CNN iReport within 5 minutes.
Here's how P2P costs the peer on system resources:
There's a lot of CPU overhead involved in chunking and checksumming files. Checksumming uses crypto code which isn't cheap on the CPU. Serving up these file chunks costs disk read/write activity... and overall system bandwidth. If you're going to bother with P2P, you're probably going to be dealing with sizable files also, costing storage (unless you delete them and then what good are you to the P2P ambitions of the ISP?)
For any degree of efficiency, you need a high level of participation (i.e. lots of connections). This also means that seeding machines have to be on and online... many users may shut down at night. If forced to leave the computers on, they will consume electricity and generate heat.
There are usually maaaany simultaneous connections putting extra load on the TCP stack, which costs RAM, CPU, and bandwidth. All of this can be significant with enough connections!
If it is not significant, then it wouldn't be worth it to the ISPs to bother offloading it onto their customers!
This in total is all WELL ABOVE the overhead of a simple HTTP connection, which places virtually no burden on the client machines.
If you have ever seeded a popular torrent on a midrange system, you probably have felt the burden to which I was referring.
I am quite familiar with all of this technology including torrents and SETI@home... and I did not confuse them.
I'm not sure what you mean by "helping torrent software connect to other people who are also on their network."
You hit on the sort of thing that really irritates me.
P2P is handy when the people involved in it are willing participants. That is the case when using a free architecture, especially those implementing ratios and rewards/punishment, as we see in private torrent trackers.
Corporations see this setup and think they can capitalize on the buzzword by taking advantage of people who don't understand the implications.
While we're at it, why don't I hook up my garden hose to my neighbor's house and let him use my water. And he can tap into my power mains, too. I DON'T THINK SO.
I'll never use a service that exploits my paid resources without my consent just because it adds to some corporation's bottom line, and I hope everybody else adopts this view. Unless there's some overwhelming benefit to me.
If they want to use my CPU time, RAM, and pipe to further their cause, I'd expect them to either give me a big discount or supply me with additional resources in these three areas.
I suspect the market won't let it happen, unless they team up against the public, who will likely be asleep at the wheel anyways...
I haven't yet RTFA, but the worst "tech job" I've ever held was as an intern in high school, constantly changing tapes in a sixty degree mainframe room that sounded like a 747 taking off, for minimum wage.
Thank God I had lunch with the VP of IT one fateful day.
It supports column editing and all the fancy works you could need if you're not looking to get your hands dirty with programming.
You could also try storing your data as XML and using any of the readily available XML parsers in virtually every language on every platform; however, you can expect it to hog up lots of memory and be fairly slow, especially if you need DB-like functionality like sorting.
I enjoyed being in the world that WoW depicted, but I think South Park's parody where the kids determined they'd have to kill a few million sheep/pigs/wolves/whatever to reach the top level was about accurate for me.
If you're saying that the annoying repetitive grinding was saved for the end game in WoW, then I'm sure as hell glad I quit at level 63, because I couldn't imagine that game getting more repetitive and boring than playing basically alone always or in PUGs, 10 levels behind my friends (the reason I wanted to play in the first place) for a year straight.
I store lots of random data on my hard drives: I've got Windows installed.
Temp files, swap space, mp3s, images, executables... perhaps "random" wasn't the best choice of words, as a TrueCrypt partition wouldn't be "random" so much as it would appear as meaningless or indecipherable as trying to read a JPEG or any other non-plaintext file or unallocated partition in Notepad.
Furthermore, steganography is basically the practice of hiding data in plain sight. So even the data can be made to look like perfectly valid other files (like jpgs, mp3s, even html), where only indistinguishable anomalies inside the file are used to store values (such as the order of parameters inside of HTML tags.)
As far as the American Public should be concerned, there is no REASON for Customs to interrogate laptops, unless they're already doing DPI on all the internet traffic, and opening (and rooting through) all international freight, and if that's the case then we've already lost.
It's a waste of time and money. While they're busy making sure we're good Christian citizens, 10,000 illegal aliens will have entered this country.
I live an hour and a half drive from Philly, near Reading, PA, and we have Comcast cable modem or DSL from some local telephone company. Somehow the phone company has a monopoly on that even here... as we can't get Verizon or any other providers in our town or any other neighboring town (except maybe for long distance service, but it's still really going through the local company.) Could it be so that Verizon was not interested in our money?
I love paying Comcast $150/mo for service that they feel they can arbitrarily restrict or disconnect me from.
An hour and a half outside of Philly and no options, and policies that harm the consumer... that's pretty lame for what America was supposed to be like. In terms of suburban/rural population densities, I believe the mid-Atlantic region is noteworthy.
These runaway money-devouring companies are not to be trusted, and we should not expect them to improve their services except when they absolutely have to, to improve or protect their bottom line. Absent competition, there's certainly little pressure there.
I've seen forum voting screens with better security than Diebold's.
Whoa... I think I'm onto something here...
They could make everybody who wishes to participate in voting be required to have an identification chip implanted in them that would store cookies and have a static IP(v4) address! This plan is foolproof!/sarcasm!!!
Slashdot Mirror
So far everything I've seen that was at all "special" about Ruby is available in just about every other language via helper classes (like Integer for ints in Java) and perhaps slightly less graceful structures like callbacks (just look at jQuery, for example.)
Usually the reason I've picked a language to do a job has had nothing to do about syntax. The three biggest factors have always been: what do I already know, what has the best performance, and what can be developed quickest? It's always a balance of those 3.
I'll never use Ruby until it's supported widely enough, matured enough, and provides me with some reason to bother learning its API.
Considering I'm already intimately familiar with C, Java, PHP, and SQL, I think hell freezing over is a safer bet. In my limited observation, most of the people who tout Ruby as the future have never extensively programmed in another language (except maybe a handful of people who coded in the much older languages similar to Ruby.)
I especially love it when somebody claims to write a web server in 10 lines of Ruby... and all it took was using a 10,000 line library and a however-large interpreter. I'd like to see that stand up to a slash-dotting. Puh-lease...
I was not suggesting everybody speak a different language... it's just as silly to attempt to pick just one also, even for a single programmer doing a project with any serious scope.
I actually use JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, MicrosoftSQL, CSS, and HTML on a regular basis and that pretty much covers all of my needs. C++ or C# follow up for a different set of responsibilities...
I woudln't dream of using Python, Ruby, or Java because they don't offer me anything I don't already have that I could possibly need.
My point is, why would I write my own sort routine when I can just tell a database engine to ORDER BY a given condition. Gotta use the right tools for the job.
I only posted because people seemed to be arguing over which language is best and I don't think it's possible to pick just one. Apples and oranges...
Cheers.
I tend to agree with you that personal preference is one of the biggest factors in the choice of a language... but it's the strengths and weaknesses inherent in any language (or more so the language's purpose) that also shapes this. I rarely use only one language/model anymore.
For instance, in my day to day life, I see a clear distinction as to when procedural/object oriented languages such as C, PHP, and Java should be used, and when a relational language like SQL should be used, and I rarely confuse those two classes of programming. Markup languages (though hardly programming languages) like HTML and CSS also have their essential and distinct roles. Were I forced to select only one, I'd probably quit programming!
Programming languages are just tools to get the job done. When was the last time you saw a carpenter with only a chisel?
Everybody's so quick to get into pissing matches.
(Forgive any flawed terminology, I was just speaking casually.)
You may not have negotiated with google, but the company/individual who is linking to google analytics on the page that you are viewing did.
Also, any site that people link to for external media really could be doing this. Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, you name it.
All the same, my hosts file has a lot of 127.0.0.1 entries in it too...
The internet is largely based on an ad-supported business model. Were enough people to block all of this stuff, we'd potentially be stuck paying hundreds of individual subscription fees.
"special receptacle"
So basically they're peeing in Gatorade and Icy Tea bottles, and chucking them out the window trucker-style...!
There's already a free version of this called iMeem.
"I have truly been hungry all week since I got this."
;-)
You should go eat one of those McDonalds salads
(it's been mentioned enough times above...)
"Remember that in many cases, it isn't how much weight you lift or how fast you do something, but the number of repetitions."
...so that's why my beer drinking arm is disproportionately large...
I wonder if it comes with a nutritional guide, because it's fairly well accepted that fitness is not all about exercise.
"I played a round of Wii Yoga between each of my six Big Mac's, but it doesn't seem to be working...?"
Oh... it's working alright.
If Hillary is going to argue that the stupid super delegates can win her the election (a technicality of the rules), then I say she can't pull in Michigan and Florida either, because based equally on a technicality of the rules, they were disqualified from the primaries.
You can't have your primary cake and eat it too.
END OF STORY.
"For me, GMail equals unprofessional."
I used to feel this way too, but it's just so ubiquitous nowadays. The internet is not dominated by only the megacorps, so who cares if it's a mom n' pop shop? They're usually better anyways than getting stuck in a hold queue in India.
"It means you can't even afford to run your own mail server or have someone do it for you."
Or it means you'd rather not have to manage 40 different email servers, and you've chosen one generic centralized account.
"It means not knowing if the person I'm dealing with is really associated with the domain or the business in question."
Except you probably clicked on the email address while browsing a website on that domain, or typed it in from a business card.
"It means that my communications are being scanned by a third party, and that I should self-censor accordingly."
Well since you've got your tinfoil hat out, you should be aware that a few of the governments of the world have been reading all of our internet traffic already with even more dubious purposes. What, are you selling bomb parts? I know I know I know, I'm a huge privacy advocate, but this is kinda splitting hairs. Maybe if some perv at Google was rubbing one out to my emails, I'd be disturbed. It's just a computer that's doing the parsing for advertising purposes in their case. Have you ever used a credit card to buy something? Then you've already been living with this!
"It just doesn't reflect well on a person to use GMail for business, in my opinion, and would make me seriously question the credibility of the business."
Responsible people always take this into consideration when making any transaction with any business. I can honestly say I've been screwed over more by big business than the mom n' pops who actually still value their customers.
I understand your opinions and I'm sure they're shared by many... which is why self-hosting email will never go away... but it may just be a wise suggestion by DreamHost if a) their support is insufficient and b) enough of their customers don't really think it's worth the extra trouble.
I mean, this IS DreamHost we're talking about here. You're likely to only find mom n' pop shops there anyways.
True, they only said about smart phones... but at this pace, that will soon be all phones. I know it includes mine, and I only have one cell phone, so as far as I'm concerned, it already is all phones.
"You don't like it? Don't go to fucking Alton Towers! I wouldn't..."
I couldn't agree more. I'm in the USA, but any place that tells me I can't do such basic and, now, intrinsic things as carrying my cell phone, is the last place you will find me. Courthouses I believe prohibit camera phones (i.e. practically all cell phones), and the only time I'd ever go there is if I can't get out of jury duty.
Sure, we could all probably benefit from a simpler lifestyle, but who's a themepark to force that change on you... for half a day? Sounds like this should be left up to the family to decide and work out.
For example, if I could stand to make, say... a few hundred bucks by logging in with my cell phone during a 5 minute break at Disney... they can pry my phone from my cold dead hands, and my hypothetical family certainly could understand, or they could pay for their own damn Disney trip.
I think the real reason is so that when somebody dies on a rollercoaster, you won't see footage of it on YouTube and CNN iReport within 5 minutes.
Here's how P2P costs the peer on system resources:
There's a lot of CPU overhead involved in chunking and checksumming files. Checksumming uses crypto code which isn't cheap on the CPU. Serving up these file chunks costs disk read/write activity... and overall system bandwidth. If you're going to bother with P2P, you're probably going to be dealing with sizable files also, costing storage (unless you delete them and then what good are you to the P2P ambitions of the ISP?)
For any degree of efficiency, you need a high level of participation (i.e. lots of connections). This also means that seeding machines have to be on and online... many users may shut down at night. If forced to leave the computers on, they will consume electricity and generate heat.
There are usually maaaany simultaneous connections putting extra load on the TCP stack, which costs RAM, CPU, and bandwidth. All of this can be significant with enough connections!
If it is not significant, then it wouldn't be worth it to the ISPs to bother offloading it onto their customers!
This in total is all WELL ABOVE the overhead of a simple HTTP connection, which places virtually no burden on the client machines.
If you have ever seeded a popular torrent on a midrange system, you probably have felt the burden to which I was referring.
I am quite familiar with all of this technology including torrents and SETI@home... and I did not confuse them.
I'm not sure what you mean by "helping torrent software connect to other people who are also on their network."
Respectfully,
Andy
You hit on the sort of thing that really irritates me.
P2P is handy when the people involved in it are willing participants. That is the case when using a free architecture, especially those implementing ratios and rewards/punishment, as we see in private torrent trackers.
Corporations see this setup and think they can capitalize on the buzzword by taking advantage of people who don't understand the implications.
While we're at it, why don't I hook up my garden hose to my neighbor's house and let him use my water. And he can tap into my power mains, too. I DON'T THINK SO.
I'll never use a service that exploits my paid resources without my consent just because it adds to some corporation's bottom line, and I hope everybody else adopts this view. Unless there's some overwhelming benefit to me.
If they want to use my CPU time, RAM, and pipe to further their cause, I'd expect them to either give me a big discount or supply me with additional resources in these three areas.
I suspect the market won't let it happen, unless they team up against the public, who will likely be asleep at the wheel anyways...
It's because the word Ubuntu is so damn fun to say!
I haven't yet RTFA, but the worst "tech job" I've ever held was as an intern in high school, constantly changing tapes in a sixty degree mainframe room that sounded like a 747 taking off, for minimum wage.
Thank God I had lunch with the VP of IT one fateful day.
Outgrown Notepad?
You should try Notepad++.
It supports column editing and all the fancy works you could need if you're not looking to get your hands dirty with programming.
You could also try storing your data as XML and using any of the readily available XML parsers in virtually every language on every platform; however, you can expect it to hog up lots of memory and be fairly slow, especially if you need DB-like functionality like sorting.
I enjoyed being in the world that WoW depicted, but I think South Park's parody where the kids determined they'd have to kill a few million sheep /pigs/wolves/whatever to reach the top level was about accurate for me.
If you're saying that the annoying repetitive grinding was saved for the end game in WoW, then I'm sure as hell glad I quit at level 63, because I couldn't imagine that game getting more repetitive and boring than playing basically alone always or in PUGs, 10 levels behind my friends (the reason I wanted to play in the first place) for a year straight.
Good riddance, WoW! I'm glad I made the peon cry.
I got an idea... lets build a botnet so that China can hijack it and destroy our internets from the inside out.
/searches for secluded mountain property
I store lots of random data on my hard drives: I've got Windows installed.
Temp files, swap space, mp3s, images, executables... perhaps "random" wasn't the best choice of words, as a TrueCrypt partition wouldn't be "random" so much as it would appear as meaningless or indecipherable as trying to read a JPEG or any other non-plaintext file or unallocated partition in Notepad.
Furthermore, steganography is basically the practice of hiding data in plain sight. So even the data can be made to look like perfectly valid other files (like jpgs, mp3s, even html), where only indistinguishable anomalies inside the file are used to store values (such as the order of parameters inside of HTML tags.)
As far as the American Public should be concerned, there is no REASON for Customs to interrogate laptops, unless they're already doing DPI on all the internet traffic, and opening (and rooting through) all international freight, and if that's the case then we've already lost.
It's a waste of time and money. While they're busy making sure we're good Christian citizens, 10,000 illegal aliens will have entered this country.
I was able to play it just fine soon after it came out under nominal settings with a 3 year old PC sporting a GeForce FX 5900 Ultra.
I'm not sure what the fuss is about.
I'm going to start asking my users riddles to validate themselves.
"I am a news-for-nerds website whose domain name was intentionally selected to be confusing to laypeople. What am I?"
I live an hour and a half drive from Philly, near Reading, PA, and we have Comcast cable modem or DSL from some local telephone company. Somehow the phone company has a monopoly on that even here... as we can't get Verizon or any other providers in our town or any other neighboring town (except maybe for long distance service, but it's still really going through the local company.) Could it be so that Verizon was not interested in our money?
I love paying Comcast $150/mo for service that they feel they can arbitrarily restrict or disconnect me from.
An hour and a half outside of Philly and no options, and policies that harm the consumer... that's pretty lame for what America was supposed to be like. In terms of suburban/rural population densities, I believe the mid-Atlantic region is noteworthy.
These runaway money-devouring companies are not to be trusted, and we should not expect them to improve their services except when they absolutely have to, to improve or protect their bottom line. Absent competition, there's certainly little pressure there.
I've seen forum voting screens with better security than Diebold's.
/sarcasm!!!
Whoa... I think I'm onto something here...
They could make everybody who wishes to participate in voting be required to have an identification chip implanted in them that would store cookies and have a static IP(v4) address! This plan is foolproof!