As soon as I saw 'Akimbo' I thought of 'Jimbo Jones' the bully from The Simpsons, an awkward insecure obstacle. Only afterwards did I realise how pointless a venture this is for a business that doesn't have a stake in the attached advertising.
Look, if you're doling up something that people are interested in, you either have to be pivotal to the content (or you'll be seen as a leech), be paid for delivering the content (or you'll be seen as a leech), or included in the content itself (wherein you run the risk of being seen as a leeching advertiser). Most people I know have gotten to the stage where they know what they want, and can identify those entities that get in the way of what they want. Advertisers have mostly managed to place themselves between people and what they want, and are seen as an invasive entity and a stumbling block to a final goal, instead of providing that which people seek.
Sure there are genuinely interesting and funny advertisers out there, but by and large I think that most of my generation discards advertising as a reflex to past mistakes.
I'm sure there are some shortcuts I'm missing, but after being a win2k admin for years and now helping out my cousin with her new (used) powerboook there are a few things I've noticed that just slow me down.
1. Running applications.
Maybe I just live with too many utilities, but it's hardly realistic to load up the dock with 50+ shortcuts. The lack of a Windows-Key-R hotkey to bring up a little "run this command" dialog on the mac drives me insane sometimes. Continually going through the "Recent Applications" submenu or navigating through the slow as molasses Finder for programs just really puts me off. Am I missing something? Anyway, that brings me to:
2. File management.
I really, REALLY miss the left-side folder pane of explorer. Moving files around, importing files from flash cards or just navigation are seemingly discouraged by Finder, and I'm yet to figure out how to move files (i.e. copy and then delete, or on windows leftclick-drag-release-"move") between volumes. I was importing mp3s from an external drive to the mac, and the transfer would just die when it hit a file with an unsupported name (some unicode character). Instead of prompting to skip that file, Finder just aborted the copy without telling me the file name, and then when I tried to re-copy the mp3s back from the external drive there was no option to skip already-existing files! Since I couldn't do a move, the operation became extremely elongated. And then there's just the tedium of expanding and collapsing each little directory, creating and ever-longer-and-longer scrolling list of folders and subfolders that are just begging for a summarizing tree-list like explorer's.
Anyway, for some windows programs I miss on the mac, how about:
- the most important: Clockgen / A64Tweaker! (any mac overclocking tools??) - VirtualDubMod - Ghost - QuEnc - TCPView - foobar2000 - Media Player Classic (Videolan is an unstable beast at the best of times) - EncSpot - UltraISO - Daemon Tools - 7-Zip - Shareaza (what the hell is wrong with mac p2p apps anyway? they're crash-prone, all > 10 MB in size and with interfaces worse than kazaa. I just don't get it.)
Oh I agree, and the fact that they chose X/GTK for the device they were building shows a profound lack of experience programming low-powered devices. While some similar frameworks are bigger, X is *not small* by any stretch of the imagination, and the article the grandparent linked to is a perfect demonstration of its shortcomings in terms of resource usage.
I just cringe every time people pop up to defend X as being tight and frugal, when it's so monstrous compared to window managers of old with similar functionality.
Did you read the article linked to? The requirements for that device are ridiculously simple.
There's no touchscreen (although the SNES did have a mouse peripheral that worked quite well), just five push-buttons. That's the interface. Five (dual-state - on or off) buttons. That's it. No multitasking, no image manipulation (both are possible but limited on the SNES, but hey, it's a 3.5 MHz 16-bit processor with 128 KB of ram), and why the heck you think a handheld PDA needs network transparency is beyond me.
They're just putting up extremely simple applications, have over-engineered the software and have discovered that, gasp, it runs like a dog on the hardware budget they're aiming for. Five months of effort for that. This is how embedded projects go awry.
I've always had a fascination with storms, and now that I live at the beach I get to watch water-spouts, lightning and angry seas a couple times a week. But given the exotic atmosphere and storm systems on Venus, I could only imagine how breath-taking a full-color video could be from the ground. Wikipedia says that at ground level there's almost no wind at all, but the thick sulfuric acid / sulfur dioxide clouds are constantly churning at 300+ km/h. Imagine looking up to a sight like that.
I just think that'd be incredible. Until everything melted.
So a GUI for something as limited as an embedded device is using 2.9 MB, and that's somehow impressive? The article even says it took 5 engineer man-months to accomplish that feat, testifying to how large the originals are!
I'm sorry, but the Super Nintendo game "Final Fantasy III" contained some 60+ orchestral songs, digital instrument sound samples, 64-color graphics for hundreds of monsters, backgrounds and characters, huge maps, volumes of text, hundreds of cut-scenes and an animated menu/window/text display system.. in a 3.0 MB rom. Why should I be impressed by this 2.9 MB figure again? for a *freaking GUI*?! Back when I coded demos for the SNES in good old 65816, you could make incredible things happen in a few kilobytes of object code. See the Commodore 64 or Amiga or DOS demo scenes for similar displays of frugality.
If the images in that link are a demonstration of what that device is used for, the fact that it's wasting 2.9 MB to do so is frankly sad and pathetic. They even mention the specs, an ARM cpu equivalent to a 75 MHz pentium, and go on to complain about how long tasks take to perform!! What a mockery!
Sorry to sound so harsh, but that unit has more horsepower than a Super Nintendo, an Amiga, or heck a 486 of any description, and their GTK/X combination brings it to its knees to display a monochrome window with a bitmap!
Good to see you posting here - I'm very much looking forward to a 1.0 release of Django, if only so more people will have it as a hosting option. My experience with it was much more pleasant than Rails.
And I think you know exactly what kind of guy I am after that library linking point =) - yes, I do get very frustrated when libraries have poor modularization, and linking them for a handful of functions adds 2+ MB to your app (hello wxwidgets/qt). I suppose rapid development is the name of the game these days, an old hack with wild ideas about good cpu/memory usage is out of style.
Glorious isn't it, that first recoil of horror when you see someone's C++/Java baby you've been called on to maintain/patch, and as the seconds pass you begin to realise just what you're in for.
And cheers for finding something that gets the job done for you. Too many people seem to care about languages and other minutae these days, good design and planning takes a back seat.
Inexperience and ignorance. And it sounds as if it applies to you and to this situation. I don't see how you can rant against "bloated" technologies you never bothered to learn. Without that knowledge, you don't understand everything that's happening behind the scenes and, since that scares you, you stick with the subset of the developmentatl universe you do know, no matter how appropriate, or inappropriate, it may be to the problem at hand.
That's how I picked up PHP in the space of 2 hours and have nearly completed the project..
Look I'm not against frameworks, but first impressions stick. Rails just wasn't worth the gear shifting for now, and I'm still waiting for that killer maintainable extendable Rails app to appear and justify the investment.
I strongly suspect that once you've moved on to other victims, the next developer the guy hires will take one look at your carefully-crafted optimum solution, shudder, and then rewrite the whole thing.
Unless he recreates the database Rails will give him problems too. I found a bug that specifying acts_as_tree and calling a list of ancestors triggers an infinite loop when you have a node that references itself as the parent (root node) due to an absent error check. That was fun to track down. Not a problem if you craft everything around Rails's way of doing things, but after that, an ignored ticket on the bug, several other bugs reminiscent of a 1.0 release and little to no incentive, I found something that would get the job done quickly instead.
For a multi-person job I'd go ahead and learn whatever framework was mandated by the majority, be it Rails, WebOjects or UnCommon Web. For myself, I like getting jobs done quickly and cleanly, and PHP met that for this task.
Ultimately, I think we all code in what we're comfortable with. To many programmers, Rails fits their mind well because of the MVC pattern used, and in general the way Rails handles everything.
A friend of mine is self-employed creating web pages for local businesses. I pointed him towards Rails (how he hadn't heard of it I'll never know) and he couldn't be happier. Also, since I've pretty much abandoned it as a platform I won't be who he calls for support! =)
However, I still think custom frameworks are the root of all evil for anything but the smallest projects. Do you, a single developer, really have the guts to say that your framework is better than something that has been developed by a core team of 15 over about 2 years? Do you really think that your framework is that great, that you're willing to have to train someone else to use it, when you could just leverage the work of the community? Creating a custom framework is, in all but the most obscure cases, a supreme act of selfishness.
Horses for courses. Should I start my site with an enterprise java framework just in case it needs to scale to 2,000,000 concurrent users? What if 90% of the visitors will be speaking a language that $framework has terrible support for? What if my framework is so popular it gets much more attention from hackers creating automated attacks?
Look I'm not against frameworks, it's just that when I design a project I go into it with specific goals, and more often than not the available free frameworks to support it (be it a web page, video codec or cd image converter) either are slow, bloated, buggy or just suck to use.
Next think you know...you'll be rewriting everying. You, the uber code, know best! Heck, we can write it all in C! Just rewrite all the good stuff that you take for granted in PHP. Why use PHP's session handling when you can roll your own? Oh, right, there's a whole slew of security issues there and you're likely to fuck up some small detail and open up some nasty hole where one user can get to another's session. Etc, ad nauseam.
PHP's session handling isn't exactly a bastion of coding glory to hold up. Look I appreciate your point, it's just that there are way more crappy frameworks out there than good ones. Not that I'm saying Rails is crappy, it's just not there for me and my personal coding style. Other crappy frameworks of note include wxWidgets, SDL, Allegro, MFC, GTK, DirectShow.. well you get the idea. Crappy code is often subjective, but ultimately rolling one's own framework is a cost-benefit equation that'll come out differently for everyone. Once you involve multiple people in a coding exercise, that equation begins to quickly swing in favor of a pre-existing solution, often regardless of how crappy it happens to be.
What caliber web-devs are we talking about, where any sane persistence technique in a database-backed environment, or god-forbid a SQL query here and there, requires more than a trivial amount of time to comprehend? This isn't exactly challenging stuff as far as programming goes.
It still amazes me just how much code people write for web apps these days. Most of my app's size and dev-time have gone to HTML templates, most of the mental effort went into the database and associated triggers/functions, and practically all the scripts do is make SQL queries presentable.
One thing I like about ActiveRecord is that it is database agnostic. If I need to, I can move my app from MySQL to Postgres to Oracle with very little effort.
That's all well and good, for a subset of database functionality. ActiveRecord reminds me of wxWidgets - smoke and mirrors, bloat and lowest common denominator functionality. But don't get me wrong, for a great many jobs it's adequate and there for the taking.
The other thing I like is that it provides a clean separation between data storage and business logic.
That's really just a matter of the intelligence/discipline of the developer. Inexperience can mitigate the benefits of any technology, and believe me I've seen code to prove it.
He wants it ready to explode into a hugely popular money-making machine, so I'm at least planning for the possibility.
And if you've designed your site engine and presentation well, there's an astonishingly small difference between PHP querying a database and formatting a HTML template with the output, and C querying a database and formatting a HTML template with the output. Apart from speed of course.
It sounds like you come from a background where you mix business logic, business objects, and presentation into the same file. I suggest that you take a step back and re-examine your design choices. Controllers, modules, and views aren't exclusive to Rails; you'll find them wherever a goood, sane, well-designed code lives.
A background of incompetence? Funnily enough when I picked up PHP, your disaster scenario was what most people seem to do without thinking about it. In my case, the MVC components are, respectively, PostgreSQL, HTML templates and PHP.
If your original system was designed with MVC in mind, moving it to Rails should have been easy.
I think you'll find that most Rails developers hold that it's much easier, cleaner and safer to start a project with Rails in hand, rather than graft Rails onto a pre-existing database.
What if you forget a single function call at the beginning of one of those pages? Do you suddenly allow objects to be populated with rogue data? Rails has things like filters that make sure certain methods get executed before all actions in a given controller.
Error checking and testing suites aren't impossible for a C developer to comprehend, you know.
Has anyone else played with Rails and been turned off?
I've volunteered to create a recipe-wiki-site-thing for a friend, and coming from a background in C and SQL there was just too steep a curve to map a procedural train of thought and pre-planned SQL onto the Rails way of doing things. I already created the database schema, wrote all the SQL to get the information I want, have a lot of HTML written for the general template, and was looking at abandoning much of it for controllers, models, automagic foreign key relationships, automagic methods popping out of thin air.. I wanted more control I guess.
So I've done most of the site in PHP instead. Direct, to the point, fast enough (though I'm thinking about a rewrite in C for a pure CGI/FastCGI binary), a minimum of automagic hand-holding - just start each page with sanity checking, authorization, the SQL the page needs and nothing more, and then format the output. No wondering how many hundred methods have been created that I don't know about, what happens when a record is deleted/updated (I'll let the database handle null/ignore/cascade thankyou) or whatever else Rails is doing behind my back.
I'm a C guy - I don't like things being done that I don't explicitly ask for. I want init() functions. I want implicit declarations. Heck I don't even like C++ for fogging-over-functionality with inheritance, virtual functions and overloading.
Ranting aside, I can see how Rails would mesh with a lot of people. But it's definitely not for me, and I guess (hope) a few other nutjobs around here.
Er, wow dude. There's a lot of anger and confusion there..
As opposed to authorized programs, like the Sony backdoor, which used Microsoft-supplied methods to create the program to hide from the users.
Presumably, since drivers and services can take full control of a system, it will be much harder and perhaps require non-automatable intervention to install them. Kind of like OSX - "blah is trying to affect your system, you shouldn't allow it to." What, you think they'd throw up barriers to things like service registration, then create a huge backdoor for Sony / malware developers to use?
Great, the new OS is going to be bigger and bloated just from the OS, and now SuperFetch is going to suck up even more free memory with programs that I may or may not load, but that my computer thinks I'd like to be able to access quickly.
Er, how do you feel about Linux, which caches files even more aggressively than windows?
This is nothing but a good thing - that RAM is just sitting there, so it may as well be used! If windows has figured out that 99% of the time you're using 267 MB worth of exes and dlls (be they from windows, firefox or wherever) if it loads them into memory so they're already there for you, what could you possibly be losing? 267 MB of zeroes? You're that attached to zeroes?
Heck this is how booting should work - files should be tagged as being required for bootup (windows, drivers, shell extensions), a defrag run should put all those files next to each other on the drive, and then when booting up you just blast through a 100 MB read operation and bootups are all of a sudden 4 times as fast. Right now, boot times usually half if you go from a single drive to a dual-drive raid setup, because most of the boot sequence is the hard drive's head jumping all over the place.
Great. Now when your parents get the popup that some application wants to access the network, and are presented with all these options for "finer granularity of which applications can use network resources", they'll just turn them all on and go instead of actually learning the ins and outs of TCP security. That's much more secure.
Wow, what is that chip on your shoulder from? You're complaining that MS is making it possible to secure network access on a per-application and maybe per-protocol basis, without forcibly putting every user through a class on TCP/IP fundamentals?!
More, more, more, and more performance-sucking and hardware-gobbling "features". I don't know anyone outside of hardcore gamers that currently has a DX9-compliant, 128MB video card - my parents surely don't. I just last month bought one so that I could play Fable on my comp while I'm away from home for a few months. And I guess I better get that double-500G hard drive option in my new computer so that all my SafeDoc backups don't make all my disk space go the way of my free memory used by SuperFetch.
Wow. If the hardware's not there you get the XP shell. That people are used to. And what is this obsession with having free memory? Have you patched your machine so that when you exit Firefox, all cached exe/dll information is forcibly zeroed out, so that the next time you open Firefox you can sit and wait 5 seconds for every file to be read again, with some maniacal grin on your face? Again, *WHAT ARE YOU USING FREE MEMORY FOR*?! If something else happens that requires memory, old files that are cached in memory are forgotten and the performance penalty is around 0.0007%. Again I ask, WHAT is so magical about free memory if you don't use it!!
Just take some deep breaths and relax man, you're stressing out about a pre-release operating system. And no one should stress over that.
Perhaps it's different here in the south, but most people I meet have no desire whatsoever to dip their toes into the pool of mankind's knowledge - internet, library or otherwise. Just give people broadcast TV and a bar to drink at, and their mental faculties are either satisfied or squashed by their job.
And broadband aside, most people I know here don't even have dial-up. Those that do have it are almost all on cable, which I guess is unusual for the USA apparently.
I suppose that being an information junkie makes it hard to fathom a life without constantly absorbing something new. That's why I keep coming back to slashdot after all. The more I think about going internet-free for a while, the more I realise I'd be bored witless, and supplant the internet with an inferior replacement like the library, newspapers or whatever else is at hand.
I'm wondering why a thorough surveying of the valley with radar/sonar hasn't been performed. Or has it? The best reference for tomb-finding via radar was the no. 1 google hit for "radar valley kings", indicating that a rather large tomb was located thanks to ground-penetrating radar.
Is the technology itself just really underwhelming when it comes to below-ground imaging? I'd assume so, but then perhaps the valley itself is just too great an area to survey accurately.
My point wasn't about the GPL, it was that it should be no surprise that Motorola drags its feet when dealing with actual phone users, as the people giving Motorola money are not phone users but phone companies.
Sure they're legally obligated to do certain things, but if they actually gave a damn about people using the phones they'd have an official community, message board, mailing list, developer backing, *ANYTHING*.
Knowledge-hoarding and incompetence from a big company? It's likely the move to Linux was made to either save money or as retribution from a manager/VP that was displeased with the previous supplier.
Motorola's customers are NOT we end-users, but the phone companies that buy the phones and get people to sign up to contracts with them. Unless it's those companies kicking up a fuss, Motorola probably couldn't care less. Why should they? Motorola never sold a phone to an individual buyer, only to companies looking for features like locking the phone into a specific network.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, if you're doling up something that people are interested in, you either have to be pivotal to the content (or you'll be seen as a leech), be paid for delivering the content (or you'll be seen as a leech), or included in the content itself (wherein you run the risk of being seen as a leeching advertiser). Most people I know have gotten to the stage where they know what they want, and can identify those entities that get in the way of what they want. Advertisers have mostly managed to place themselves between people and what they want, and are seen as an invasive entity and a stumbling block to a final goal, instead of providing that which people seek.
Sure there are genuinely interesting and funny advertisers out there, but by and large I think that most of my generation discards advertising as a reflex to past mistakes.
I'm sure there are some shortcuts I'm missing, but after being a win2k admin for years and now helping out my cousin with her new (used) powerboook there are a few things I've noticed that just slow me down.
1. Running applications.
Maybe I just live with too many utilities, but it's hardly realistic to load up the dock with 50+ shortcuts. The lack of a Windows-Key-R hotkey to bring up a little "run this command" dialog on the mac drives me insane sometimes. Continually going through the "Recent Applications" submenu or navigating through the slow as molasses Finder for programs just really puts me off. Am I missing something? Anyway, that brings me to:
2. File management.
I really, REALLY miss the left-side folder pane of explorer. Moving files around, importing files from flash cards or just navigation are seemingly discouraged by Finder, and I'm yet to figure out how to move files (i.e. copy and then delete, or on windows leftclick-drag-release-"move") between volumes. I was importing mp3s from an external drive to the mac, and the transfer would just die when it hit a file with an unsupported name (some unicode character). Instead of prompting to skip that file, Finder just aborted the copy without telling me the file name, and then when I tried to re-copy the mp3s back from the external drive there was no option to skip already-existing files! Since I couldn't do a move, the operation became extremely elongated. And then there's just the tedium of expanding and collapsing each little directory, creating and ever-longer-and-longer scrolling list of folders and subfolders that are just begging for a summarizing tree-list like explorer's.
Anyway, for some windows programs I miss on the mac, how about:
- the most important: Clockgen / A64Tweaker! (any mac overclocking tools??)
- VirtualDubMod
- Ghost
- QuEnc
- TCPView
- foobar2000
- Media Player Classic (Videolan is an unstable beast at the best of times)
- EncSpot
- UltraISO
- Daemon Tools
- 7-Zip
- Shareaza (what the hell is wrong with mac p2p apps anyway? they're crash-prone, all > 10 MB in size and with interfaces worse than kazaa. I just don't get it.)
Oh I agree, and the fact that they chose X/GTK for the device they were building shows a profound lack of experience programming low-powered devices. While some similar frameworks are bigger, X is *not small* by any stretch of the imagination, and the article the grandparent linked to is a perfect demonstration of its shortcomings in terms of resource usage.
I just cringe every time people pop up to defend X as being tight and frugal, when it's so monstrous compared to window managers of old with similar functionality.
How sad that the Y-Windows was so poorly managed.
There's no touchscreen (although the SNES did have a mouse peripheral that worked quite well), just five push-buttons. That's the interface. Five (dual-state - on or off) buttons. That's it. No multitasking, no image manipulation (both are possible but limited on the SNES, but hey, it's a 3.5 MHz 16-bit processor with 128 KB of ram), and why the heck you think a handheld PDA needs network transparency is beyond me.
They're just putting up extremely simple applications, have over-engineered the software and have discovered that, gasp, it runs like a dog on the hardware budget they're aiming for. Five months of effort for that. This is how embedded projects go awry.
Now that's some good engineering!
I just think that'd be incredible. Until everything melted.
So a GUI for something as limited as an embedded device is using 2.9 MB, and that's somehow impressive? The article even says it took 5 engineer man-months to accomplish that feat, testifying to how large the originals are!
I'm sorry, but the Super Nintendo game "Final Fantasy III" contained some 60+ orchestral songs, digital instrument sound samples, 64-color graphics for hundreds of monsters, backgrounds and characters, huge maps, volumes of text, hundreds of cut-scenes and an animated menu/window/text display system.. in a 3.0 MB rom. Why should I be impressed by this 2.9 MB figure again? for a *freaking GUI*?! Back when I coded demos for the SNES in good old 65816, you could make incredible things happen in a few kilobytes of object code. See the Commodore 64 or Amiga or DOS demo scenes for similar displays of frugality.
If the images in that link are a demonstration of what that device is used for, the fact that it's wasting 2.9 MB to do so is frankly sad and pathetic. They even mention the specs, an ARM cpu equivalent to a 75 MHz pentium, and go on to complain about how long tasks take to perform!! What a mockery!
Sorry to sound so harsh, but that unit has more horsepower than a Super Nintendo, an Amiga, or heck a 486 of any description, and their GTK/X combination brings it to its knees to display a monochrome window with a bitmap!
It didn't do anything to IE 5.0 either. I never bothered to update IE on this w2k box, it seems most new vulnerabilities are 6.x-specific.
Doesn't look very tasty.
Good to see you posting here - I'm very much looking forward to a 1.0 release of Django, if only so more people will have it as a hosting option. My experience with it was much more pleasant than Rails.
And I think you know exactly what kind of guy I am after that library linking point =) - yes, I do get very frustrated when libraries have poor modularization, and linking them for a handful of functions adds 2+ MB to your app (hello wxwidgets/qt). I suppose rapid development is the name of the game these days, an old hack with wild ideas about good cpu/memory usage is out of style.
Ah yes, POOP =)
Glorious isn't it, that first recoil of horror when you see someone's C++/Java baby you've been called on to maintain/patch, and as the seconds pass you begin to realise just what you're in for.
And cheers for finding something that gets the job done for you. Too many people seem to care about languages and other minutae these days, good design and planning takes a back seat.
That's how I picked up PHP in the space of 2 hours and have nearly completed the project..
Look I'm not against frameworks, but first impressions stick. Rails just wasn't worth the gear shifting for now, and I'm still waiting for that killer maintainable extendable Rails app to appear and justify the investment.
I strongly suspect that once you've moved on to other victims, the next developer the guy hires will take one look at your carefully-crafted optimum solution, shudder, and then rewrite the whole thing.
Unless he recreates the database Rails will give him problems too. I found a bug that specifying acts_as_tree and calling a list of ancestors triggers an infinite loop when you have a node that references itself as the parent (root node) due to an absent error check. That was fun to track down. Not a problem if you craft everything around Rails's way of doing things, but after that, an ignored ticket on the bug, several other bugs reminiscent of a 1.0 release and little to no incentive, I found something that would get the job done quickly instead.
For a multi-person job I'd go ahead and learn whatever framework was mandated by the majority, be it Rails, WebOjects or UnCommon Web. For myself, I like getting jobs done quickly and cleanly, and PHP met that for this task.
A friend of mine is self-employed creating web pages for local businesses. I pointed him towards Rails (how he hadn't heard of it I'll never know) and he couldn't be happier. Also, since I've pretty much abandoned it as a platform I won't be who he calls for support! =)
However, I still think custom frameworks are the root of all evil for anything but the smallest projects. Do you, a single developer, really have the guts to say that your framework is better than something that has been developed by a core team of 15 over about 2 years? Do you really think that your framework is that great, that you're willing to have to train someone else to use it, when you could just leverage the work of the community? Creating a custom framework is, in all but the most obscure cases, a supreme act of selfishness.
Horses for courses. Should I start my site with an enterprise java framework just in case it needs to scale to 2,000,000 concurrent users? What if 90% of the visitors will be speaking a language that $framework has terrible support for? What if my framework is so popular it gets much more attention from hackers creating automated attacks?
Look I'm not against frameworks, it's just that when I design a project I go into it with specific goals, and more often than not the available free frameworks to support it (be it a web page, video codec or cd image converter) either are slow, bloated, buggy or just suck to use.
Next think you know...you'll be rewriting everying. You, the uber code, know best! Heck, we can write it all in C! Just rewrite all the good stuff that you take for granted in PHP. Why use PHP's session handling when you can roll your own? Oh, right, there's a whole slew of security issues there and you're likely to fuck up some small detail and open up some nasty hole where one user can get to another's session. Etc, ad nauseam.
PHP's session handling isn't exactly a bastion of coding glory to hold up. Look I appreciate your point, it's just that there are way more crappy frameworks out there than good ones. Not that I'm saying Rails is crappy, it's just not there for me and my personal coding style. Other crappy frameworks of note include wxWidgets, SDL, Allegro, MFC, GTK, DirectShow.. well you get the idea. Crappy code is often subjective, but ultimately rolling one's own framework is a cost-benefit equation that'll come out differently for everyone. Once you involve multiple people in a coding exercise, that equation begins to quickly swing in favor of a pre-existing solution, often regardless of how crappy it happens to be.
What caliber web-devs are we talking about, where any sane persistence technique in a database-backed environment, or god-forbid a SQL query here and there, requires more than a trivial amount of time to comprehend? This isn't exactly challenging stuff as far as programming goes. It still amazes me just how much code people write for web apps these days. Most of my app's size and dev-time have gone to HTML templates, most of the mental effort went into the database and associated triggers/functions, and practically all the scripts do is make SQL queries presentable.
That's all well and good, for a subset of database functionality. ActiveRecord reminds me of wxWidgets - smoke and mirrors, bloat and lowest common denominator functionality. But don't get me wrong, for a great many jobs it's adequate and there for the taking.
The other thing I like is that it provides a clean separation between data storage and business logic.
That's really just a matter of the intelligence/discipline of the developer. Inexperience can mitigate the benefits of any technology, and believe me I've seen code to prove it.
He wants it ready to explode into a hugely popular money-making machine, so I'm at least planning for the possibility.
And if you've designed your site engine and presentation well, there's an astonishingly small difference between PHP querying a database and formatting a HTML template with the output, and C querying a database and formatting a HTML template with the output. Apart from speed of course.
A background of incompetence? Funnily enough when I picked up PHP, your disaster scenario was what most people seem to do without thinking about it. In my case, the MVC components are, respectively, PostgreSQL, HTML templates and PHP.
If your original system was designed with MVC in mind, moving it to Rails should have been easy.
I think you'll find that most Rails developers hold that it's much easier, cleaner and safer to start a project with Rails in hand, rather than graft Rails onto a pre-existing database.
What if you forget a single function call at the beginning of one of those pages? Do you suddenly allow objects to be populated with rogue data? Rails has things like filters that make sure certain methods get executed before all actions in a given controller.
Error checking and testing suites aren't impossible for a C developer to comprehend, you know.
Try RadRails - it's the best Rails-specific IDE I found during my brief searching. I noticed a few bugs, but at least it's still being developed.
I've volunteered to create a recipe-wiki-site-thing for a friend, and coming from a background in C and SQL there was just too steep a curve to map a procedural train of thought and pre-planned SQL onto the Rails way of doing things. I already created the database schema, wrote all the SQL to get the information I want, have a lot of HTML written for the general template, and was looking at abandoning much of it for controllers, models, automagic foreign key relationships, automagic methods popping out of thin air.. I wanted more control I guess.
So I've done most of the site in PHP instead. Direct, to the point, fast enough (though I'm thinking about a rewrite in C for a pure CGI/FastCGI binary), a minimum of automagic hand-holding - just start each page with sanity checking, authorization, the SQL the page needs and nothing more, and then format the output. No wondering how many hundred methods have been created that I don't know about, what happens when a record is deleted/updated (I'll let the database handle null/ignore/cascade thankyou) or whatever else Rails is doing behind my back.
I'm a C guy - I don't like things being done that I don't explicitly ask for. I want init() functions. I want implicit declarations. Heck I don't even like C++ for fogging-over-functionality with inheritance, virtual functions and overloading.
Ranting aside, I can see how Rails would mesh with a lot of people. But it's definitely not for me, and I guess (hope) a few other nutjobs around here.
As opposed to authorized programs, like the Sony backdoor, which used Microsoft-supplied methods to create the program to hide from the users.
Presumably, since drivers and services can take full control of a system, it will be much harder and perhaps require non-automatable intervention to install them. Kind of like OSX - "blah is trying to affect your system, you shouldn't allow it to." What, you think they'd throw up barriers to things like service registration, then create a huge backdoor for Sony / malware developers to use?
Great, the new OS is going to be bigger and bloated just from the OS, and now SuperFetch is going to suck up even more free memory with programs that I may or may not load, but that my computer thinks I'd like to be able to access quickly.
Er, how do you feel about Linux, which caches files even more aggressively than windows?
This is nothing but a good thing - that RAM is just sitting there, so it may as well be used! If windows has figured out that 99% of the time you're using 267 MB worth of exes and dlls (be they from windows, firefox or wherever) if it loads them into memory so they're already there for you, what could you possibly be losing? 267 MB of zeroes? You're that attached to zeroes?
Heck this is how booting should work - files should be tagged as being required for bootup (windows, drivers, shell extensions), a defrag run should put all those files next to each other on the drive, and then when booting up you just blast through a 100 MB read operation and bootups are all of a sudden 4 times as fast. Right now, boot times usually half if you go from a single drive to a dual-drive raid setup, because most of the boot sequence is the hard drive's head jumping all over the place.
Great. Now when your parents get the popup that some application wants to access the network, and are presented with all these options for "finer granularity of which applications can use network resources", they'll just turn them all on and go instead of actually learning the ins and outs of TCP security. That's much more secure.
Wow, what is that chip on your shoulder from? You're complaining that MS is making it possible to secure network access on a per-application and maybe per-protocol basis, without forcibly putting every user through a class on TCP/IP fundamentals?!
More, more, more, and more performance-sucking and hardware-gobbling "features". I don't know anyone outside of hardcore gamers that currently has a DX9-compliant, 128MB video card - my parents surely don't. I just last month bought one so that I could play Fable on my comp while I'm away from home for a few months. And I guess I better get that double-500G hard drive option in my new computer so that all my SafeDoc backups don't make all my disk space go the way of my free memory used by SuperFetch.
Wow. If the hardware's not there you get the XP shell. That people are used to. And what is this obsession with having free memory? Have you patched your machine so that when you exit Firefox, all cached exe/dll information is forcibly zeroed out, so that the next time you open Firefox you can sit and wait 5 seconds for every file to be read again, with some maniacal grin on your face? Again, *WHAT ARE YOU USING FREE MEMORY FOR*?! If something else happens that requires memory, old files that are cached in memory are forgotten and the performance penalty is around 0.0007%. Again I ask, WHAT is so magical about free memory if you don't use it!!
Just take some deep breaths and relax man, you're stressing out about a pre-release operating system. And no one should stress over that.
Perhaps it's different here in the south, but most people I meet have no desire whatsoever to dip their toes into the pool of mankind's knowledge - internet, library or otherwise. Just give people broadcast TV and a bar to drink at, and their mental faculties are either satisfied or squashed by their job.
And broadband aside, most people I know here don't even have dial-up. Those that do have it are almost all on cable, which I guess is unusual for the USA apparently.
I suppose that being an information junkie makes it hard to fathom a life without constantly absorbing something new. That's why I keep coming back to slashdot after all. The more I think about going internet-free for a while, the more I realise I'd be bored witless, and supplant the internet with an inferior replacement like the library, newspapers or whatever else is at hand.
Is the technology itself just really underwhelming when it comes to below-ground imaging? I'd assume so, but then perhaps the valley itself is just too great an area to survey accurately.
Anyway.. I want more gold-filled tombs! Shiny!
My point wasn't about the GPL, it was that it should be no surprise that Motorola drags its feet when dealing with actual phone users, as the people giving Motorola money are not phone users but phone companies.
Sure they're legally obligated to do certain things, but if they actually gave a damn about people using the phones they'd have an official community, message board, mailing list, developer backing, *ANYTHING*.
Knowledge-hoarding and incompetence from a big company? It's likely the move to Linux was made to either save money or as retribution from a manager/VP that was displeased with the previous supplier.
Motorola's customers are NOT we end-users, but the phone companies that buy the phones and get people to sign up to contracts with them. Unless it's those companies kicking up a fuss, Motorola probably couldn't care less. Why should they? Motorola never sold a phone to an individual buyer, only to companies looking for features like locking the phone into a specific network.
It's odd, isn't it.
Fact: Many users have experience with Photoshop and the GIMP.
Fact: Most of those users find Photoshop's UI to be vastly superior, or at least the GIMP's UI to be vastly inferior.
Fact: Those in charge of the GIMP dismiss such experienced users in the field as feeble-minded ignoramuses.
My $1,000,000,000 prediction: this comment will be just as applicable 3 years from now.